LSD, JFK, CIA?

[Doug Millison]

This thread started with a discussion of Oedipa as suburban housewife, and
what the characteristics Pynchon has gifted her with might mean in a
discussion of COL49.  How to read that she's attended a Tupperware party --
plastic plays a big role in Pynchon's work? That she's a Young Republican --
given P's trashing of Republicans, Nixon, and Reagan in GR and Vineland?
That's she's married to a dj who's helping to pump commercial rock and roll
out to the youth audience and profoundly alienated from his work? That she
has a psychiatrist who's trying to get her to take LSD? LSD comes back in GR
and Vineland.  

Where Pynchon got his information about LSD is largely irrelevant to reading
COL49, isn't it?  He may have had friends in the East and West coast
artistic community that in the early '60s was experiementing with LSD,
thanks to people like Tim Leary and Alan Ginsberg who were turning on their
friends. Or, maybe somebody told him about scientific research into LSD, or
maybe he happened upon a reference to it serendipitously in his library
research.  He certainly wasn't getting his information from the mass media,
which largely ignored LSD as a subject of consistent coverage until after
COL49 was published.  By the mid-60s, some scientists had published papers
about their LSD research, there had been a few conferences, it wasn't secret
(except for the CIA and military research, of course) -- but it wasn't
common knowledge outside that restricted circle, LSD was in no way a
household word, and it's still not.

Perhaps Paul and Malign were pals with housewives who were taking LSD back
in the early 60s, and if so that puts them in a very select group, along
with Pynchon, obviously.  They've yet to come up with anything that
demonstrates that more than a relative handful of people in the U.S. (a
fraction of a percent, at a most generous estimate) ever heard of LSD at
that time, and I doubt they will, they make a rather different contribution
to our discussion here.  Nor have they addressed the question of what it
might mean in our discussion of COL49 that Pynchon makes LSD a prominent
element therein, and I doubt they'll do that either.