How perforated squares of trippy blotter paper allowed outlaw chemists and wizard-alchemists to dose the world with LSD
is an author, award-winning journalist, sometimes podcaster, and popular speaker based in San Francisco, US. His books include Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica (2010), High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the 70s (2019) and Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium (2024).
First synthesised in 1938 but not tasted until 1943, acid is essentially a creature of the postwar era. As such, it enters the human world alongside an explosion in consumer advertising, the rapid development of electronic and digital media, new polymers, and a host of increasingly cybernetic approaches to the social challenges of control and communication.
For many of its early enthusiasts, acid was like a cosmic transistor radio. As the historian and curator Lars Bang Larsen writes: ‘Hallucinogenic drugs were often understood as new media in the counterculture: only machinic and cybernetic concepts seemed sufficient to address vibrations, intensities, micro-speeds, and other challenges to human perception that occur on the trip.’ LSD seemed to, as Timothy Leary suggested in 1966, ‘tune’ the dials of perception, altering the ratios of the senses, ‘turning on’ their associational pathways and gradients of intensity.
The actor and author Peter Coyote, who was a member of the visionary Diggers collective in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco during the 1960s, wrote that ingesting LSD ‘changed everything, dissolved the boundaries of self, and placed you at some unlocatable point in the midst of a new world, vast beyond imagining, stripped of language, where new skills of communication were required … [because] everything communicated in its own way.’
