Storming Heaven: LSD and The American Dream by Jay Stevens recounts the history of LSD and the counterculture of the 1960s. The book highlights the role that LSD played in many pivotal moments in (counter) cultural history.
Publisher Summary
“Storming Heaven is a riveting history of LSD and its influence on American culture. Jay Stevens uses the “curious molecule” known as LSD as a kind of tracer bullet, illuminating one of postwar America’s most improbable shadow-histories. His prodigiously researched narrative moves from Aldous Huxley’s earnest attempts to “open the doors of perception” to Timothy Leary’s surreal experiments at Millbrook; from the CIA’s purchase of millions of doses to the thousands of flower children who turned on and burned out in Haight-Ashbury. Along the way, this brilliant, novelistic work of cultural history unites such figures as Allen Ginsberg, Cary Grant, G. Gordon Liddy, and Charles Manson. Storming Heaven irrefutably demonstrates LSD’s pivotal role in the countercultural upheavals that shook America in the 1960s and changed the country forever.“
Summary Review
“Drop acid and change yourself, change yourself and then change the world.“
Book One: The Door in the Wall
Chapter 1 – A Bike Ride in Basel
The first chapter recounts the early history of LSD and psychedelic drugs from 1855 to 1949. It describes the following events:
- 1855, Von Bibra’s Die Narkotischen Genusmiffeel untie der Mensch is published, a work that identified seventeen different mind-altering plants
- 1886 Lewin and Heffter do mescal
- 1869 Weir Mitchell describes how a trip didn’t lead to new insights (but only the perceived feelings of mental acuity)
- 1897 Havelock Ellis describes a trip done by a painter friend of his:
- “At one point Ellis offered the tormented fellow a biscuit. But when he touched it, the doughy lump burst into flame, tiny blue flames igniting his trousers and leaping instantly up one side of the body. And when he finally popped the biscuit into his mouth, it cast a light that was bluer than the blue of Capri’s Blue Grotto, or so he told the bemused Ellis.”
- 1944, April 19, the infamous Albert Hofmann bike ride (and relatively bad trip)
- See LSD: My Problem Child for more on Hofmann and his legacy
- 1947 Werner Stoll was the first to posit that at low dosages “LSD seemed to facilitate the psychotherapeutic process by allowing repressed material to pass easily into consciousness.”
- 1947 Sandoz (under Albert Hofmann) sell LSD under the tradename Delysid
- 1949 LSD finds its way to the US
- See more on the historic timeline in this Wikipedia article
Chapter 2 – The Cinderella Science
IQ and personality tests (made popular in the army) are reasoned to be the cause of many of the leading theories and flavors of psychology in the following decades. Psychoanalysis and behaviorism were the two leading theories of the post-war era.
Psychoanalysis, with some in the field arguing that everyone was crazy (or at least could be), then exploded.
“The numbers tell the rest of the story. In 1940 there were barely three thousand psychiatrists; a decade later, seven thousand five hundred. In 1951 the American Psychological Association counted eight thousand five hundred members, a twelvefold increase since 1940; by 1956 membership would surpass fifteen thousand. And the money curve was even more robust: by 1964 that modest $4.2 million will have jumped fortyfold to $176 million.”
There was money to be made in the ‘mind drugs’. Thorazine was the first major tranquillizer that originated from that time (1954).
Then a study was conducted to see if psychotherapy worked. A group of treated patients was compared to those still on a waiting list. About 1/3rd improved, stayed the same, or got better. The results were the same in both groups. One of the investigators of that study, Timothy Leary.
Chapter 3 – Laboratory Madness
Robert Hyde was probably one of the first people to take LSD in the United States. It was described as psychosis-like or schizophrenia-like (as it would be for quite some time). But it was also pointed out that it was different for different people. What could be said is that some part of your cognition would be changed, would be abnormal.
Arthur Kleps described the experience in these infamous words:
“If I were to give you an IQ test and during the administration one of the walls of the room opened up, giving you a vision of the blazing glories of the central galactic suns, and at the same time your childhood began to unreel before your inner eye like a three-dimension color movie, you would not do well on the intelligence test.”
The rest of the chapter deals with the classification and description of LSD’s effects. The term psychotomimetic was used to describe it as a mimicker of madness.
At the end of the chapter, we meet Humphry Osmond and John Smythies. They developed theories around the M factor and adrenochrome. The former of the two had to leave Canada because of internal politics in his hospital and met with Aldous Huxley in May 1953.
Chapter 4 – Intuition and Intellect
- History of Aldous Huxley, (nearly) blind, smart, cold
- p32/4
- Osmond, Doors of Perception
this page is a work in progress.