LSD & the Velvet Revolution

[Steelhead]

The following passage, from Andrei Codrescu's introduction to Martin Lee
and Bruce Shlain's remarkable book Acid Dreams: the complete social history
of LSD, has a quirky kind of relevance to Pynchon:

"In June 1967 the Candyman burst through the door of my pad on Avenue C on
New York's Lower East Side. He always burst through the door because that
was his style. He could barely contain himself. He dropped his mirrored
Peruvian bag on the kitchen table and exclaimed: "Just for you! Czech
acid!" The Candyman always had some new kind of acid. That month I had
already sampled Window Pane and Sunshine. I didn't know if my system could
handle another extended flight to the far reaches. But this Czech acid
*was* different. For one thing, it revealed to me that the entire molecular
and submolecular structure of the universe was in fact composed of tiny
sickles and hammers. Billions and billions of tiny sickles and hammers
shimmered in the beauteous symmetry of the material world. I always thought
of the particular "commie trip" as a rather private experience brought
about by my having been born and raised in Communist Romania, where sickles
and hammers were ubiquitous and unavoidable.

"I did not doubt what I had seen, but I did doubt whether there was such a
thing as Czech acid for the simple reason that Czechoslovakia, like
Romania, was a monochromatic world. It seemed clear that if acid had
existed in Eastern Europe it would have brought about the collapse of
communism there, just as it was bringing about the downfall of a certain
kind of dour-faced, simple-minded America. And at that time it didn't look
like communism was anywhere near collapse. Well, I was wrong. Reading this
extraordinary, superbly researched, suspenseful history of LSD, I find, on
page 115, that: "In September 1965 Michael Hollingshed returned to his
native London armed with copies of the updated Book of the Dead and five
thousand doses of LSD (which he procured from Czech government laboratories
in Prague.") And communism did collapse, though not right then, and acid
*did* have quite a bit to do with it.  Charter 77, the Czech human rights
organization, was founded by Vaclav Havel in defense of the Plastic People
of the Universe, a psychedelic band inspired by the Velvet Underground.
Havel himself was in New York in 1968, listening to the Velvets and
dreaming, no doubt, of a way out of Cold War ideology."