LSD, JFK, CIA?

[Doug Millison]

What's LSD doing in COL49 in the first place?  
Here's a bit that might shed some light, or stimulate further discussion:

"One might begin by asking why drugs acquired such cultural significance in
the 1960s and 1970s at all. In my view this was because there already
existed a well-established cultural tradition that of aesthetic Modernism
(ca 1900/1910 - ?) - which was searching for what one might term alternate
realities: there also existed a well-established language to express this
search and its results. The basic gesture implicit in both was an indictment
of the limitations of "normal" (conventionally guaranteed) reality, a denial
of the legitimacy of modes of perception that constitute it, and a resulting
desire to subvert or corrode them. The syntheticization of drugs fell on
this fertile ground, and the slang expression "acid" must have had its added
symbolic attractiveness.

"The term "the establishment" pervasively denotes the opponent in the
resulting conflicts over sociocultural legitimation and over the proper ways
of dealing with areas of alterity such as the dream, the drug, and madness.
If traditional western civilization had, by and large, established hard
solutions, policing all three areas through marginalization and/or
suppression - with the dream being designated as not real, drugs being
banned, and madness put away - aesthetic modernists, listening well to Freud
and Jung, tended to centralize the dream as an approach to the real, to
experiment with drugs, and to explore madness. As a secular movement, it
could not give these phenomena the full religious sanction they have in many
Native American cultures, for example, but it did at least designate them as
spiritual or spiritually relevant, and opposed them to the prevalent
materialism of "the establishment". (Freedman, quoting William James,
reminds us of the coincidental emergence of the modernist concern with
alternative realities and the scientific exploration of those outskirts of
the mind where religious and drug-induced experiences take place.)

"The 1960s were heirs to this tradition and developed a specific variant of
it. Their dominant mode and mood were the same transgressions of boundaries
that characterizes the twentieth century's other avant-gardist innovations,
which attempt to come to terms with the ever-accelerating process of
modernization. (pages 122-123).

"The search for alternative realities has traditionally been thoroughly
ambivalent, both constructive and destructive, permitted and forbidden,
sacred and criminal, and confronting the human with the abyss and the summit
- the problem being the inseparability of the two. It is always associated
with a sense of crisis, which demarcates experientially the borders between
these opposed elements and their transgression, as well as the interface
between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the known and the unknown. This is
so because alterity is viewed as power-full, full of power. The same
ambivalent tremendum that modern texts, both fictional and poetic, attempt
to recreate in what has variously been called a moment of being or an
epiphany appears when supposedly "in the days of Early Man his whole world
was shot through with religious feeling and the unseen powers held him in
thrall. Our sacred 'mushroom' must have been wondrous indeed, evoking awe
and adoration, fear, yes, even terror". (pages 123-124).

excerpt from:
50 Years of LSD: Current Status and Perspectives of Hallucinogens.
Pletscher, A., and Ladewig, D. (1994). (Editors).
New York: Parthenon.
ISBN: 1-85070-569-0
http://www.csp.org/chrestomathy/50_years.html