Reading this book made me think that the phrase "drinking the Kool-Aid" originated from San Francisco parties in the late 1960s. The Urban Dictionary thinks differently. I wonder if Jim Jones came up with the idea for lacing Kool-Aid with poison on his own or whether he borrowed it from the Merry Pranksters.
This book is about recreational drug use (LSD, psilocybin, IT-290, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mescaline, dexedrine, benzedrine, DMT) in the 1960s and I picked it up mostly because I am a Tom Wolfe fan. I struggled through the first parts with sequences like:
It was a fantasy world already, this electro-pastel world of Mom&Dad&Baddy&Sis in the suburbs. There they go, in the family car, a white Pontiac Bonneville sedan -- the family car! -- a huge crasy god-awful-powerful fantasy creature to begin with, 327 horsepower, shaped like twenty-seven night of lubricious luxury brougham seduction -- you're already there, in Fantasyland, so why not move off your smug-harbor quilty-bed dead center and cut loose -- go ahead an say it -- Shazam! -- juice it up to what it's already aching to be: 327,000 horsepower, a whole superhighway long and soaring, screaming on toward ... Edge City, and ultimate fantasies, current and future ... Bill Batson said Shazam! and turned into Captain Marvel.Being on vacation in the desert Southwest with libraries and bookstores scarce I pushed through to the end.
The source of the drugs was Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Part of that book was written under the influence of peyote and LSD. Kesey recognized much of what he wrote under the influence as junk, but some was "true vision, a little of what you could see if you opened the doors of perception". Kesey's introduction to psychedelic (renamed from "psychodelic" to remove the association with psychosis and mental illness) was accidental: the Veterans Hospital in Menlo Park was paying $75 to those who would volunteer to receive psychomimetic drugs and undergo observation. Tom Wolfe's claim-to-fame is bringing the investigative reporter's tenacity to the "non-fiction novel"; much of the material came from interviews with Kesey, who describes those first LSD trips as fantasies where he entered a "moment in his life and kn[ew] exactly what is happening to his senses now, at this moment, and with each new discovery it is as if he has entered into all of it himself, is one with it, the movie white desert of the ceiling becomes something rich, personal, his, beautiful beyond description". The researchers were laboring with their own fantasies, namely, that they were doing research. Sure, they were measuring heart rate and body temperature but the subjects were learning that much of our minds are shut and these drugs can open them. Little children have difficulty separating reality from fantasy as they have meager experience with reality (magic, for example, doesn't work on children less than five; disappearing from one side of the stage and re-appearing on the other seems just as possible as anything else to them). The researchers' use of terms like "dissociative phenomena" is the layperson's use of the term Higgs Boson particle, which is not a particle but rather a field. If you do not have the mathematically-inclined mind to understand what a particle field is (and I do not) then a Scientific American article provides little help. How could these researchers grasp what the "subjects" were experiencing if what they were experiencing amounted to entering a mind that was a combination of toddler and adult?
Kesey was popular, and not just because he was a supplier, and not just because he supplied for free, and not just because he was well-built and handsome. He comes across as a really nice guy, wanting to open minds and help everyone get along. He was married with three young children and probably as involved in family life as at least some fathers in the 1960s. Word of Kesey spread and various young people appeared, wanting to try LSD. Kesey eventually moved to La Honda, California and invited his new-found friends to join him. The group named themselves the Pranksters, or Merry Pranksters, for the harmless jokes they enjoyed playing, while high, on sober people. They occupied themselves, high or sober with two main pursuits. One was "the bus", a 1939 International Harvester school bus that they painted and re-painted in Day-Glo colors. The second was music and sound and video systems -- they positioned microphones and amplifiers all over the La Honda property and the bus. Most played instruments of some kind, few played well, but being high on LSD meant the enjoyment came from the feedback of the sound systems and the enhancement of the hallucinations rather than melodies and harmonies. Neal Cassady and the Pranksters drove that bus across the country. Wolfe does not use the word "miracle", but I will, to describe the lack of fatalities or even serious injuries.
Around the same time (former) Harvard professor Timothy Leary was experimenting with LSD, too. He would retreat to his house in the Hudson River valley, hand out LSD to students and consume some himself, and record the results. He received harsh criticism and hunkered down; when the "bus" rolled up his driveway he refused to visit with the Pranksters: the Day-Glo bus with the Day-Glo dressed people and reverberating sound-system brought attention he certainly did not need.
There was also marijuana, which was illegal in California. LSD was not, having only been recently invented and only a two or three dozen people knew of its existence. Kesey was busted for possession and sentenced to six months on a work farm, plus probation. He was caught again; a second conviction for possession earned the offender a five-year sentence, plus he violated his probation. Rather than face trial he fled to Mexico.
Around this time the Pranksters (and others) started organizing "Trips Festivals": renting a large hall in San Francisco or Los Angeles, inviting the public, collecting entrance fees, hooking up sound systems and strobe lights, and offering LSD, sometimes in the form of Kool-Aid in a punch bowl.
Kesey returns to the United States, grants an interview, says he will remain in the U.S. as salt-in-the-wound for Mr. Hoover (J. Edgar). The FBI nabs him and now he is up for three felonies: two marijuana possession charges and one for flight. Kesey still had funds from his Cuckoo novel, movie and play and continued to retain top-flight representation. Plus, he publicly forswore the continued use of drugs, stating during his time in Mexico the "enlightenment" movement had gone nowhere, proof that the drugs are not a sufficient and probably not a necessary condition. His lawyers (remarkably) obtained bail on the unlawful flight charge, secured by Kesey's friend's properties, even though he is a proven flight risk. The government seemingly calculated that either or both were true: 1) Kesey's new stance on drugs was genuine, 2) he would be discredited if he skipped bail and caused his friends to lose their homes. The FBI drops the flight charge and a local California judge grants bails on the marijuana charges, stating that the matter is an ordinary drug case and of no great importance.
Kesey lived up to his promise and publicly encouraged the discontinuation of LSD, earning many Haight-Ashbury enemies in the process. The last two public events Kesey participated in were LSD-free ... the Pranksters played their instruments (poorly) ... Kesey sang (poorly) ... and no one enjoyed it.
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