Sax down in Mexico (much to the annoyance of William Burroughs, who objected that it excessively smoked up the room). Oh, it is true that Jack smoked a lot of pot, particularly while writing Dr. When it comes to explaining how the Beats caused us to see beyond what Allen Ginsberg called вЂњthe clouds of literal consciousnessвЂќ that shrouded the Fifties, we must again note that many of those most centrally involved-such as Jack Kerouac-themselves вЂњturned onвЂќ relatively infrequently. Pot became as essential to the Beat movement as poetry, Zen Buddhism, espresso coffeehouses and pounding on a bongo. Weed perforce remained an underground sacrament until the beatniks began lo turn on. Meanwhile, an anti-marijuana scare campaign carried on by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics effectively stemmed the pot tide. But for the most part, it remained an activity of the lower-class black and Chicano subcultures, jazz musicians, Bohemian artists and other assorted members of the creative professions.

(De Tours first noticed he was affected when he discovered himself fencing with a banana.) Recreational usage in the United States, however, didnвЂ™t really catch on until the Twenties, when Mexican laborers and blacks brought it up along the Mississippi from Louisiana and into Harlem and other parts of the country. Members were administered cannabis indica in the form of a potent greenish jam, and many published extravagant praises of their vision-filled trips. Gautier was something of a dandy in France in the 1840s, and he founded Le Club des Haschischins. Its earliest use as a recreational drug coincided with its introduction into Western medicine-since Joseph Moreau de Tours, who acquired it in Algeria and saw its medical possibilities, also brought it to the attention of the poet ThГ©ophile Gautier. It was heartily recommended in the earliest book of Chinese herbal medicine, which had influenced much of the East by the time of our earliest documentations, and, as tradition has it, was carried to the West by Hasan-i-Sabbah (вЂњthe Old Man of the MountainвЂќ) in about 1090 A.D. Marijuana use, of course, extends back into prehistory. Though dramatic, the trip was hardly the first time that psychedelics had influenced civilizationвЂ™s collective psyche.

HofmannвЂ™s second trip, on April 19 of that year, confirmed that LSD-25 had been the precipitating psychoactive agent three days earlier. By comparison, mescaline must be taken in amounts of 3,000 to 4,000 times the weight to produce a turn-on of a similar scope. If the substance can be seen with the naked eye, it is a very large dose. The agent involved, LSD-25, turned out to be such a potent psychedelic that it had to be weighed out in millionths of a gram. By accident, Hofmann absorbed a minute quantity of the chemical through his skin. On April 16, 1943, the chemist Albert Hofmann, who had concocted a new molecule five years earlier while searching for a uterine constrictor, decided to test it again on birds, who had previously displayed no reaction. The scene was the New Products Laboratory of Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Basel, Switzerland, in a building now dwarfed by the massive Sandoz tower that dominates the skyline. All took the magical mystery tour and returned to pick up their friends. Crumb actors like Robert Mitchum, James Coburn, Cary Grant, Peter Fonda and David Carradine scientists like Stanislav Grof, John Lilly, Claudio Naranjo and Albert Hofmann media moguls Walt Disney and Henry Luce top political figures John and Robert Kennedy. There were artists and writers like Aldous Huxley, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Salvador Dali and R. And during the Forties and Fifties, as acid and grass slowly spread from among an enlightened few to the electrified many, the genealogy of turn-ons began to read like a WhoвЂ™s Who in the scientific, political and cultural worlds. Marijuana, too, is a sort of friendship ambassador from the vegetable kingdom, telling us to declare peace on the world. LSD creates in its takers a sort of instant messianism, an urge to turn on friends, relatives, acquaintances and perfect strangers. From the October, 1977 issue of High Times comes Peter StaffordвЂ™s and Bruce EisnerвЂ™s survey of psychedelic drug pioneers.

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