Acid Hype: American News Media and the Psychedelic Experience

by Stephen Siff

Now synonymous with Sixties counterculture, LSD actually entered the American consciousness via the mainstream. Time and Life , messengers of lumpen-American respectability, trumpeted its grand arrival in a postwar landscape scoured of alluring descriptions of drug use while lesser outlets piggybacked on their coverage with stories by turns sensationalized and glowing. Acid Hype offers the untold tale of LSD's wild journey from Brylcreem and Ivory soap to incense and peppermints. As Stephen Siff shows, the early attention lavished on the drug by the news media glorified its use in treatments for mental illness but also its status as a mystical--yet legitimate--gateway to exploring the unconscious mind. Siff's history takes readers to the center of how popular media hyped psychedelic drugs in a constantly shifting legal and social environment, producing an intricate relationship between drugs and media experience that came to define contemporary pop culture. It also traces how the breathless coverage of LSD gave way to a textbook moral panic, transforming yesterday's refined seeker of truths into an acid casualty splayed out beyond the fringe of polite society.

Genres: Drugs

264 pages, Hardcover

First published April 14, 2015

Reviews

[Max · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lot of information! It was often hard to keep names straight in my head. The information was easy to understand and interesting.

[Em · Rating 3 out of 5]

A really thorough exploration of the history of LSD and its depictions in US newspapers, magazines, television shows, film and radio. It also looks more widely at how illegal drug use was represented in the media in the early-to-mid 20th century.

It's not much fun to read as a book (as opposed to referring to it for research/reference material) because most of the text merely lists the ways that LSD has been represented, for example:

In 1963, Esquire magazine had enraged Leary by mocking his salesmanlike pitch when reporting on his dismissal from Harvard. In September 1966, Esquire (1966 circulation 924,000) included an article about a young man’s visit to a mental hospital to grasp the ramifications of going too far out with LSD in a package about “How Our Red-Blooded Campus Heroes Are Beating the Draft.” Two years later, the magazine (1968 circulation 1.1 million) published a first-person account by Leary of a trip with the poet Allen Ginsberg in 1960 and their subsequent decision to “turn on the world.”

I was really interested to learn how much influence Harry J. Anslinger and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics had in the 1930s. For example:

While offering journalists and lawmakers tales of depraved drug addicts and swashbuckling narcotics agents, Anslinger worked ceaselessly behind the scenes to squelch dissenting views. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics “had an iron clamp” on addiction research and “had essentially driven out physicians for thirty years or more,” according to Dr. Vincent Dole, a pioneer in methadone maintenance treatment for heroin addiction.The bureau also used its influence against research into alternative drug-control policies.

A very useful book if you want to learn more about how drugs were portrayed in the US media.

[Craig Werner · Rating 2 out of 5]

Overview of the way the mass media covered LSD from its introduction via a combination of scientific and literary-intellectual interest in the 1950s through its moment in the sun (courtesy of Henry Booth Luce and Timothy Leary) to the moral panic which accompanied its outlawing in the late 1960s. Siff presents a great deal of information from mainstream media sources--Time, Life, Look, The Saturday Evening Post--and a smattering from the underground press and less prominent periodicals. That makes Acid Hype useful as a source of information. But Siff never really makes up his mind how the coverage relates to the actual significance of LSD. At times, he sounds like he agrees with the writers who declared LSD a threat and a menace, but he also acknowledges that the hue and cry about acid causing birth defects and chromosome damage turned out to be baseless. While acknowledging the importance of literary intellectuals (Aldous Huxley, Allen Ginsberg) to the interest in LSD, he sounds fairly dismissive of their claims to mystical insights. It's true that the claims don't stand up to double-blind scientific studies, but that doesn't diminish the reality of subjective experience. It's a kind of category error: yes, the science surrounding the claims linking LSD to transcendence was at the very best dubious, but if Leary hadn't framed the discussion in those terms, it's not that they would have mattered.