Edgar Broughton and Sidney Cohen: two sides of the same tab.....I passed the 1960s in the pleasant but generally unremarkable Home Counties market town of Aylesbury, England. An unexpected gift was bestowed on the place in 1969, however, when it began to play host to a rock music club named Friars. The club quickly gained a reputation for its discerning eye in spotting good quality bands in their infancy. Some, such as Mott the Hoople, went on to commercial success; others found fame elusive, yet were equally good.
One fairly regular fixture at Friars was the Edgar Broughton Band, and I saw them several times. They put on a solid set, but two songs always stood out. One was 'Out, Demons, Out', a kind of public exorcism of the evil that surrounded us all. The other was 'Dropout Boogie/Apache'. Edgar Broughton was, to one impressionable sixteen-year old at least, hairy, scary, and very hip, the very epitome of everything that my parents' generation had so lamentably failed to be. We would all watch, wide-eyed and slack-jawed, as His Royal Hairiness scowled, growled, and magically intoned those fateful words: 'What do you want, what do you want/ They think they know what it's all about/ Turn on, tune in, drop out, drop out/ I told you once, I told you twice'. From that moment on, the die was cast, my fate sealed: I didn't stand a chance.
Turn on, tune in, drop out: Timothy Leary's clarion call to the mass of disenchanted visionary youth that terrorised a generation. For those with any sympathies for psychedelic culture in its many guises, the third in the triad of exhortations always proved the most problematic. Ray Manzarek, keyboard player in the Doors, says that, instead of urging people to turn on, tune in, and drop out, Leary should have been urging them to turn on, tune in, take over. Elsewhere, Paradigm Shift TV exhorts us to turn on, tune in, and transcend. Sidney Cohen, an early LSD researcher and therapist, bemoaned the effect of Leary's ravings: 'Cohen had warned that Tim was skimming the cream of a generation and leading them down a blind alley. While the Best and the Brightest were grooving on the cosmic, the second-rate and the venal were appropriating the traditional slots of power' ('Storming Heaven' by Jay Stevens, Epilogue). As an Oxford graduate who went on to help form a cosmically-grooving commune then teach Buddhist meditation, I take Dr Cohen's charges very personally.....
Once the 1960s were out of the way, it was difficult to find anybody (with any social credibility at least) who would give much support to Tim Leary's apparent crusade for social revolution spearheaded by psychedelics. Terence McKenna, a leading light for the next generation, was at pains to criticise the excesses of the '60s, pointing to the use of psychedelic substances by a pioneering dedicated few, rather than widespread ingestion by the psychedelicised masses. And more recently still, Rick Doblin of MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) has bemoaned what he calls the backlash that took place against psychedelics as a result of their reckless use in the 1960s. This backlash has meant that research into their value in psychotherapy (as psychological aids for the terminally ill, for example, or for those suffering from post-traumatic stress) has been curtailed or, in most cases, brought to a grinding halt.
These pronouncements echo a debate amongst protagonists of psychedelics in the early years: whether they should be available to all, or whether access should be reserved for those who mystic-cum-author Aldous Huxley referred to as 'the Brightest and Best'. This was Huxley's more cautious approach: provide LSD for the philosophers, politicians, artists and academics - those mainly responsible for shaping and influencing society at large.
For the record, it is worth noting that the advocacy of indiscriminate distribution of LSD sometimes accredited to Leary is a caricature and/or distortion pumped up by the popular media. Leary was in equal measure visionary genius and unashamed opportunist/personal publicist, and he said many different, often contradictory, things at different times. In his more sober moments, however, he called for careful and responsible use of psychedelics, as sacred substances, to be taken in a conducive environment by those who were psychologically prepared. He claimed that, had the US authorities listened to him and established clinics/temples where people could use psychedelics in the company of experienced guides, much of the negative fallout could have been avoided. If it is to be associated with any one figure of the era, the more casual use of LSD could possibly be linked with Ken Kesey and his busload of tripping Merry Pranksters.
The idea of restricting access to psychedelics to 'the Brightest and Best' is all very well. Except that it is unworkable and terribly naive. Who decides? Cui bono? What's the basis on which 'the Brightest and Best' are selected? The critique peppered liberally throughout the posts on Pale Green Vortex - of Control System dynamics, dominator culture values, and the insight that all this is a construct of consciousness - makes it abundantly clear that there is no benign Ubermensch who is likely to look favourably upon drawing up a list of the deserving few on whom the privilege of psychedelic experience is to be bestowed. There is something that rankles about Rick Doblin's continued lament about the backlash against psychedelics as if, had Timothy Leary not been around, the research and the therapy could have quietly continued unabated. Despite the stupid and ill-judged things that Leary said over the years, the disturbing truth remains that enormous numbers of people found their lives enriched by following something of the course he outlined. More fundamentally, there is the very nature of the vistas opened up by LSD and other psychedelics. While sometimes described as 'non-specific amplifiers', they have tended to turn people away from a life dedicated to 9-to-5 and a blind belief in the diktats of dominator culture. The potential that they embody is inherently threatening to the status quo. This is the unspoken agenda in the 'War on Psychedelic Drugs' that sees Casey Hardison serving twenty years for producing psychedelic drugs (for comparison, Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments and War Production to the Third Reich 1942 - 45 received the same length of sentence at the Nuremberg Trials). So I think Rick Doblin is mistaken in pointing the finger solely at the 1960s for the collapse of official research into psychedelics. Point one finger, yes; but look at the effects of the substances as well. Access to the multidimensional nature of our being is the greatest danger of all to the continued reign of dominator culture. If Rick thinks that the Control System will eventually smile upon research, provided it conforms to the standards of modern science and is conducted by folk with PhDs, I hope he is correct. I rather doubt it will come to pass, however.
By the same token, Sidney Cohen's (and Ray Manzarek's) objections are fatally flawed. It is not a case of slotting envisioned beings into the places of power, thereby producing a benign government. The ego-softened consciousness does not want to - is not able to - function within an apparatus constructed by dominator cultures over millennia. It needs to find other ways of working, to create different forms of social organisation that reflect its own experience of reality.
I suspect that, at root, the collapse of the psychedelic-fuelled counterculture of the '60s and early '70s was tied in with the lack of a mythology connecting it to a sacred past. It imagined itself as something new, unprecedented, an evolutionary leap. Better to envisage the rejection of dominator culture as part of a greater tradition extending into deepest prehistory. It is not a case of creating something new, out of thin air, but one of reconnecting with humanity's true, but almost lost, heritage. It is here that Terence McKenna made one of his greatest contributions, through his work on what he terms the 'Archaic Revival'. The modern western counterculture - to the extent that we can talk of such a thing - senses its heritage stretching back to pre-Christian times: to the Minoans, the Gnostics as expounded so elegantly by John Lash, the partnership cultures of Catal Huyuk and beyond. Now the tree does not simply show off flowers of great beauty: it boasts a sturdy trunk and hardy roots that penetrate to the deepest strata of an enriching subsoil.
It is not a question of limiting use of psychedelic substances to therapists, medical researchers, or any other 'Brightest and Best'. Indigenous cultures regard their psychedelic, or entheogenic, plants as sacred, and their sacredness is not normally reserved for an elite. It is a matter of ensuring the substances are accorded the respect and seriousness they warrant; handing out acid like sweeties at free festivals in the '60s and '70s wasn't a very clever idea. Timothy Leary had likened tripping to being an aeroplane pilot, where training and a licence are required. For more sense on the subject than anything Control System emissaries such as politicians have ever said, take a peek at the section on psychedelics in Transform's document 'After the War on Drugs: Blueprint for Regulation' (available online). Introduce an element of rationality to the subject and it's not so hard to get your head round at all......
