American History Hit - LSD in New York: Research, Recreation and Radicalism

Episode Date: July 10, 2023

Why should we associate LSD and its psychedelic effects with New York as much as we associate it with San Francisco? What use did the CIA think that this drug could be to them? And how did LSD impact the culture of New York City?Don is joined by Christian Elcock, author of Psychedelic New York: A History of LSD in the City to find out about New York's time as a hub of LSD production, research and consumption.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Siobhan Dale. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, James Holland, Mary Beard and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORY. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up at historyhit.com/subscribeYou can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. It's a Friday evening and we're walking in New York City. In Greenwich Village, fall, 1965.

The streets are cool and jazz lots up from basement bars. In coffee houses, it's folk banjos and guitars. At the intersection of Bleaker and McDougal, a newsstand hawks the latest edition of the village voice. And a new alternative rag, Evo, the East Village Other. Everywhere, there's pop-up galleries with art, that assaults the senses. But we're not down here for the culture. Well, maybe the counterculture kind. We're here to meet with a friend, a guy who knows a guy, someone who worked at the Sandos plant in Jersey, with something he wants you to try, a drug that, according to your friend, is bound to blow your mind.

Hi, everybody, welcome to American history hit. Don Wildman here, and we're very glad you're there. Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, 25, aka LSD, is certainly one of the more famous creation. of humankind, and probably one of its least understood, which is ironic given LSD's notorious fame and the rather profound experiences, good and bad, it has delivered upon its users for nearly a century. From its accidental discovery in a Swiss laboratory in the 1930s, to its starring role in 1967 at San Francisco's Summer of Love, to President Richard Nixon finally declaring it public enemy number one. This pharmacological phenomenon has been on a crazy trip of its own in the public sphere. But in recent years, it has resurfaced, not as a scary flashback,

but to the contrary, as part of a new and evolving hallucinogenic consciousness in the wider Western world. Turn on, tune in and drop out? Hardly. In this new age of now, LSD, while perhaps not the star it once was, is right in the wings ready for its next act, opening doors to enhanced levels of consciousness otherwise unattainable for mankind, or so the stories tell us. Chris Elcott is is an award-winning historian living in Lyon, France, and has authored a new book entitled Psychedelic New York, a history of LSD in the city, published in 2023 by McGill-Queen's University Press. Hey, Chris, great to have you on the show.

Great to be here, Don. Thanks for having me. Well, you're welcome. In the introduction of your book, you point out that LSD and the psychedelic movement of the 60s is generally associated with San Francisco. But you make the claim that where LSD was concerned, New York was the place to be. How so?

Yeah. So this is actually something that I somewhat belatedly realized, the more I kept researching on New York, how important a site it had been and one that had, you could say, attracted comparatively less attention than the San Francisco Bay Area. One of the reasons I think why San Francisco continues to be perceived today as the undisputed cyclic hotspot of the 1960s is, I think, due to media coverage, which I think played an important part. You mentioned the Summer of Love in your introduction, and the Summer of Love certainly drew, many of the American young who were looking to make the Hayd Ashbury scene, which by then was well covered in the media. Added to that, you have also the famous acid test and trips festivals, organised by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, which of course were the object of a very widely read book by Tom Wolfe, which, as it turns out, is quite inaccurate from a

historic perspective, but that's a different matter altogether. And so naturally, when you look back at the 1960s and you look back at all the documentaries that were made on the era because so much was happening obviously all around to the country, almost invariably when you get to the counterculture chapter, well, the narrative switches to the West Coast and to the human being and the summer of love and the Hayd Ashbury scene and Ken Kese and his merry pranksters. However, looking at what's going on on the other side of the country, on the East Coast, you look at New York. You look at New York. And usually the way that New York is analyzed in conjunction with this psychedelic culture of the 1960s is by pointing to its genesis in the beat phenomenon. So people like Alan Ginsberg and Jack Kerwack

and then the so-called beatnikism, right? So mostly young Americans from the suburbs arriving with their drums and their beret and bashing it out on Washington Square Park. And then the narrative then typically switches back to the West Coast. So it's Initially, I chose New York because I wanted to do something different that had not really been touched upon in the scholarship and that would move away from the West Coast. And the more I researched it, well, you could make the claim that it's where it all started. Yeah, I mean, it's all about the media, of course, in this world we live in. And it was really getting rolling back then. I mean, as far as the media, you know, making its hay on where the story was getting the most eyeballs, really.

And California in those days was a real happening place. It was on the rise. It starts with the beach boys and all that surface stuff. but it really catches fire in the late 60s. So in a way, it's just wherever the story is going is where we're going to hear it because that's where the media goes. But you're right to turn the stone over on where it all really begins, New York. I think it's helpful, if I may, to do a quick review on the origins of LSD.

For anyone who doesn't understand this stuff, bear with me here, I'll just give you a brief history. In the 1920s, Switzerland, a pharmaceutical researcher named Albert Hoffman and his team at a place called Sandoz Laboratories, are investigating ergot, the grain fungus, known for centuries to induce psychoactive experiences. I mean, it happened in the Middle Ages, basically through grain that had been stored improperly or too long had grown this fungus and people would eat it and they'd have these crazy experiences. So people were well aware of ergot. So Hoffman and others are attempting to synthesize treatments for vascular disorders and hypertension. In the midst of this work, they identify what's known as lysurgic acid as the common linchpin to all the ergot compounds they're experimenting

with, a central element. 1938, they synthesize LSD 25. It was a 25th attempt to get this so they could re-synthesize and make a drug out of it as a possible treatment for Parkinson's, as I understand. And this is all legit science, you know? But then famously, five years later, April 16th, 1943, Hoffman mistakenly doses himself and has one trippy bicycle ride home from work that day. And a few days later, he intentionally takes another dose and thus is born the LSD movement. How'd I do there? Is that about right? Yeah, yeah,

definitely. So there's, you know, that story has been. Oh, it's a mythology now. Right, right. I was going to say it's almost a myth. It's like the starting point of acid culture. And certainly back in the day, because he has good publicity for LSD and Albert Hoffman. He lived to be 102, right? Wow. You know, that's pretty good, right? And you had people going over trying to visit all. almost like pilgrims trying to visit him in Switzerland. And he was just like, well, you know, I'm just this random scientist. I'm not your god or anything. There was a cult following, certainly, and that story can be seen as the founding moment. How does LSD-25 move from its infancy in that lab to becoming a widespread American phenomenon and specific to your book in New York City? LSD arrived in 1950 in the US. So if you do the math, it's only a few years after Hoffman's epic bike ride. And it arrives initially in Boston, courtesy of a psychiatrist Viennese descent, I believe, named Max Rinkle. And Rinkle happens to be funded by the CIA, because this is where actually the very first part of our story in the United States begins. It's a story of COVID war. for the CIA and the army looking for a weapon that could incapacitate an entire population or

the ultimate truth serum. So they are actively funding this research. And I'm going to immediately connect this with New York. It's that around the same time, another Manhattan-based scientist called Paul Hoke begins research of his own. And he is also funded by the CIA. So it basically, the history of LSD in the US begins in 1950 on the East Coast and thanks to the CIA. And around the same time, poke and wrinkle put forth this hypothesis after testing LSD, which is that LSD has the ability to recreate in a temporary and controlled fashion the symptoms associated with psychosis and the psychotic mind. And hence the name psychotomimetic, which mimics psychosis. And that is the beginning of LSD research. And at the same time, there's also research into mescaline, which has an even

longer story dating back to the 1910s in New York City. And so gradually, these research teams in New York and in other parts of the country, they've got all these volunteers testing the drug, they'll gathering data. And initially, it remains this kind of secretive thing, right? They've tried this amazing journaling. And Ken Kese is one of the famous converts to LSD who tried LSD over in California as part of a CIA experiment as well. So initially, LSD is very secretive, but its existence starts to spread my word of mouth, and particularly in New York City in Greenwich Village. Yeah, it's important to think about the hotbed of psychoanalysis, you know, that New York was in those days, thanks to those European immigrants and the general consciousness of that sort of thing.

Everybody was getting psychoanalyzed. It was a joke in the Woody Allen movies and so forth. But that was a big deal for that 20-year period, as was the closing of mental hospitals. You know, the state is giving up its role in this. There's a rise of pharmaceuticals. It's a whole thing that really hasn't gotten a lot. of attention in everyday America as really how things shifted at this time. And so LSD is in the midst of all of that as this at first possible miracle drug that's going to give us a ticket into the subconscious, that which is so difficult to find in the psychoanalytical world, suddenly there's this magic drug that can just take you right there. That's one of the first aspects of

this interest, isn't it? Yeah, certainly. So pretty quickly, in fact, in New York, I'd say around the mid-1950s, psychoanalysts start to take notice of this drug because they see. it as a way of accelerating the process. Typically, psychanalysis requires years. The therapist has to very patiently collect biographical material and then try to put it all together and point to the gist of the problem. And what LSD seemed to do back then is just cut straight through those layers and layers and layers of subconsciousness to go right to the root of the problem, which could have been, for instance, repressed a childhood trauma, for example. And so even in this respect, obviously, research teams and psychiatrists all around the country and all around North

American, all around the world, for that matter, investigating the therapeutic power of LSD and psychedelics. But this strong psychological framework, here you really have New York's imprint on these treatment models. And so you have research institutes, then you have therapists like Gene Houston, who was once advised to Hillary Clinton, had this really illustrious career as almost a footnote of her brilliant career. She was one of the pioneers of LSD-based analysis and all this at a very young age. So in the book, you'll find descriptions of her therapeutic protocol, encouraging people to interact with objects in order to release symbolic material based on, she was coming at it from a Jungian perspective, and then interpreting her patients and the clients' reactions in order to gain therapeutic renewal.

It doesn't hurt that Sandos builds its own lab right across the river. New Jersey, right? Yeah. You can say that. So in fact, unfortunately, this is something that I wish I could have dug a little deeper about this because actually in the early 50s, the LSD that based on the little evidence that I found, the LSD that was being supplied to research teams all across the country was actually coming from Manhattan, right? Even before then Sandoz set up this plant in New Jersey. But it's true that by then, let's say, a sufficient, I think, number of people were hearing about LSD. And certainly the Greenwich Village crowd

who had been experimenting with a number of psychoactive substances for almost, you could say, over half a century. That new drug certainly caught their attention. And so you have probably first, based on what I gathered, the first known LSD dealer was this guy named Chuck Vick who would get the LSD from Sandals in New Jersey and then distribute it, not just to the Greenwich Village crowd, by the way,

but to a number of people, very, very different backgrounds. We're already talking 1957. Was it a completely legal drug back then? I mean, in terms of it being prescribed. I mean, maybe it wasn't available over the counter, but I mean, was it already being regulated and sold as such? I mean, the FDA exists at that point. No, regulation will have to wait until the early 1960s

following the thalidomide scandal of the early 60s. And so it had, so actually the first steps to regulate LSD. And this is, by the way, the topic, a fascinating book by Matthew Orum. His book is called, I think, the Childs of Psychedelic Therapy, I think, which is an excellent book, by the way, it's meticulously researched. And the main argument of his book is that it's not the negative publicity of non-medical use of the latter part of the decade that caused its regulation and then its prohibition. In fact, regulation started much earlier with the 1962 Kiforv and Paris drug amendments. And what those amendments changed fundamentally for LSD researchers,

is that the test subjects now had to go through randomized clinical trials. It was the birth of the modern clinical trials. And so they had a company like Sandus who wanted their drug marketed because back then LSD was still an experimental drug. It was not regulated. So if they wanted to be able to freely sell it over the counter all across the country, it would have to go through regulation. And for that, researchers after the 1962 drug amendment,

were required to prove that these new drugs were both safe and had efficacy. Now, the problem is, how do you show that a drug like LSD directly leads to therapeutic improvement because it's as much the power of the drug as the power of the therapist and the setting within which the drug is taken? So after those amendments, slowly but surely, we see research teams, they move on to different areas because research is becoming too complicated, and they're also struggling to secure funding. So by the end of the 1960s, there's only a few research teams working with LSD, and the most famous one would have been in Maryland, and this is, again, very well documented in the book

by Matthew Orham that I just mentioned. But in New York, actually, it carried on well into the 1970s. So there were fundamental changes in the structure of the clinical trials. There was much more red tape coming from the FDA, but even after LSD became a Schedule One Drug in 1970, some researchers in New York were carrying on their investigations legally. So I think this story shows just how long and important medical research into LSD was in New York City. I'll be back with more from American History Hit after the short break. I'm Tristan Hughes, host of the ancients from History Hit, where twice a week, every week, we delve into our ancient past. I'm joined by leading experts, academics and authors who share incredible stories from our

distant history and shine a light on some of antiquity's great questions. Was the Oracle of Delphi really able to see into the future? What can be discovered from lost civilizations? And was King Arthur actually real? You can expect all of this and more from the ancients on history hit wherever you get your podcasts. We have to bring up the name Timothy Leary. I'm He leaves Harvard in the early 60s and takes up residence with a family of people at Millbrook, which is north of the city, north of New York City. And there he begins at headquarters for research. But New Yorkers were already prime for this prior to this arrival.

I mean, all these psychoactive experimenters with peyote, psilocybin. How does Leary stir the pot differently, so to speak? What does he do that brings such interest to him? There's two things I would like to underline about Timothy Leary, which is common knowledge. but I think that we tend to forget about when we bring up the topic. So, as you know, Liru continues to be an incredibly divisive figure. I'm certainly not charitable towards him in my book. But the two things that we should do well to remember about him was that he was a boozer, right?

So he was this psychedelic prophet, this high priest, this acid guru, the number one name associated well as then. And yet, at the end of the day, his choice drug was alcohol. And so that's something that I think we should remember. The other thing that we should remember is that he had this very strong appetite for women and extramarital affairs and that his first wife committed suicide because of this. So you put two and two together, right? And it's hard, I think, for us to imagine what those events did and this lifestyle did to him

when you start superimposing layers and layers of psychedelic experiences. And it's also, now a known fact, thanks to. to one of his biographies that Leary was a classic megalomaniac, right? And this, I think we see time and again. There's a lot of people who were greatly damaged because of him, and he could be very self-serving and very self-aggrandizing. And in some cases, he would sacrifice others for his personal benefit. So that is something that would be the first part of my answer.

What happens with Leary is in 1960, he has this amazing life-changing experience to the Saibin, right, as he's vacationing in Mexico. And I think for the reasons that I just enumerated, it just has this absolutely tremendous experience on him. And almost immediately he realized he thinks, okay, everybody's got to take this. I'm simplifying things a little bit. But basically, it's just so, such an overwhelming experience that he feels the need to share it with just about anyone who will listen to him. The story really is that he, you know, has offered this chance to be on this amazing estate that's an hour north. of the city. So that was undeniable. But your book is what I find interesting that he would be aware of the

fact that there was already this subculture of people who were willing and interested in what he wanted to do with this and carry on the research that he was unable to do at Harvard. Whether it was an ego thing or not, landing in the New York area was an alternative that always surprised me. You know, I just didn't think of it that way. But that's what your book points out that there was plenty of that happening in the city and he would have been well aware of it. Right. Well, there's one thing that's quite puzzling is that, okay, it's 1960, 1961, there's research in TRLSD in several parts of the city. It's been going on for quite a few years now. And hardly anything indicates that he tried to connect with those scientific circles. Oh, interesting. However, what he very

quickly realizes, so his first door into the New York Psychoic Drug Subcultures through Alan Ginsburg, But what's interesting is that Ginsburg, who's been a bohemian and a beat for more than a decade now, he then turns his attention to the black jazz scene and gives first psilocybin to some of the jazz greats of the time. What is interesting is that Leary, who is an academic, right, he's very well regarded, by the way, because he did have a very stellar reputation before his involvement with LSD, who was regarded as an extremely promising psychologist. He very quickly makes inroads into the New York upper class. And through Maynard Ferguson, who was a white trumpeter, right, and then he starts to connect

with the New York wealthy, with theatre producers, and, of course, with the Hitchcock family, right, who are ears to the Mellon family. And that's his ticket to the Milbrook estate and to a life of communal experimentation, you could say. Peggy Hitchcock, I think, had already been involved with him up in the Boston area after he'd been kicked off the campus or at least left. But yeah, it's all very interesting and it boils up. 1968, the U.S. government declares LSD illegal. 1970, there's the Controlled Substances Act. How does this classification affect the use of LSD in New York? Does it increase it? Does it drive its production underground? How does this work out?

So around that time, one of the reasons why we would not necessarily have seen much evidence for LSDs, SD use is that the city is wrestling with amphetamines and heroin. By 1970, there's this peak heroin use, an absolutely gigantic wave of heroin. So that naturally in the media, and if you were going out there to look for interviewees, I think most people would remember that. Nevertheless, you do see the beginning of a new scene in Central Park. And almost certainly because by then a lot of acid users are tired of experimenting on the streets, right? New York City in the latter part of the 60s is pretty grim place to be. It precedes the fiscal crisis of the early 70s and where the city was on the brink of default, right? So those were hard times. And so there's also a politically charged

climate towards the end of the 1960s, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, of course. And just generally, the streets, there's this feeling of anger. And tension. So all this to say that there's two things happen towards the end of the decade. You see a lot of New Yorkers who had been experimenting leave the city. Some of them moved to upstate New York just because they need some fresher after all this experiment in this dense, sprawling metropolis, right? Those who stayed in the city or a new generation of acid heads realize that green spaces like Central Park offer far more positive settings than, say, the East Village right back then. Of course, Of course, the East Village has changed massively since 1960s, but there was a lot of violence around that tie in the East Village.

I grew up in the New York area as a young guy. And, I mean, it's a really interesting lens through which to look at the city, the drug abuse. You know, there's all these defined eras. You know, you go from heroin and then LSD, a little bit of that. But then you're quickly into the 80s and to crack, you know, cocaine and all this stuff. And each era has this impact on the city vis-a-vis homelessness and, you know, crime and so forth. really interesting way to look at how the city sort of, it's a roller coaster ride through drugs, really. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And another thing that's, you know, important to remember is that for

almost a century, New York was the home of major pharmaceutical companies. Exactly. It's a business. Right, right. Exactly. So still Pfizer down there at 42nd Street. Right. Let's talk about the decline in LSD against that backdrop, the 70s America. It's a really interesting juxtaposition. The Illegalization of psychedelics paints it all with this criminal brush. You know, how ironic you've gone from this great hopeful ticket into the subconscious. You know, this maybe we're going to solve the inner workings of mankind's mind to now it's just Alice in the White Rabbit. You know, it's all that. It's just going to fry your brain, they're telling us.

No longer can doctors prescribe it. All research comes to a halt. At the same time, inevitably, there's this distribution of illegally produced drugs, which is dangerous and unregulated. It's crazy how they try to tamp it down. only to create a much bigger problem. And yet you see LSD surviving the decades. Yeah, exactly. And so people are using it for a number of reasons.

I think that one of the, I would say the most substantial change is that there's people start to move away from, this is going to change the world. That was more inherent to the 1960s. And people start to move away from this notion. And so it kind of moves a little closer to what you could call classic recreational drug use, you could say. And yet you have a new generation of psychedelic artists like Alex Gray, you know, who basically made a career out of their experimentation with LSD and then attempting to externalize their visions, their cyclic visions into meaningful art. And at the same time,

you see new compounds like your DET or MDMA. And of course, there's also important research into Ibergain, which promises to put an end to addiction, right? All this is running parallel to the continuous use of LSD and psilocybin. But it became a convenient fall guy, really, for the fact that New York was on the decline in so many other ways. I mean, you have white flight all the way across America. All the tax bases of the cities are just dropping. New York is no exception. And so these neighborhoods that are on the decline and deteriorating also happen to be places where, because it's cheap to live there,

there's a lot of drug dens and so forth. So it becomes this sort of excuse, you know, because of drugs, New York is deteriorating, when in fact it was driven by real. estate and economics and all that sort of thing at the same time, right? Yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. And yet, you know, if you look at it from today's perspective, you see that the whole thing is coming back full circle, right? Of course. Yeah, exactly. I find it fascinating. You brought up also something really interesting that's so relevant to everyday society, you know, at the same time as people are sort of drifting away from LSD in the early 70s, income the spiritualists, you know,

the yogis and this whole sort of new age phenomenon that we still see on. you know, every street corner in America, the crystal shops and all the rest of it, that's that whole manifestation of how do we do this without drugs idea of the late 70s into the 80s? Crack was more of a uptown kind of thing in Harlem and so forth and unfortunately so. But the aging class of these yuppies and so forth are embracing the spiritualist movement and finding yoga and so forth, which is still with us. Yeah, I think it really boils down to the nature of the Scycle Lake experience, right, which is that it opens so many doors.

and depending on your age, depending on a number of circumstances, it can just take you into so many directions. And so I think that by the late 60s, you know, there's all the political activism going on a lot of frustration, a lot of radicalisation of political movements. And I think for some people, it just gets a bit much, right? So they're looking for people like Randas who promises them to graduate from LSD or a number of other yogis. You know, follow me and you can continue to get high without drugs. Yeah. These movements have long-lasting influence in the city and elsewhere, of course.

It's just another way of looking at this whole cultural evolution that this country has been under, and certainly New York, is a great staging ground for it all, where you have this whole sort of meism, this increased individuality promoted by the media, number one, promoted by corporate America, number two. I mean, how am I going to improve myself, better myself? It happens across the spectrum, of course. This is not all LSD and hallucinogenetics. It's this whole movement that really, I mean, I can speak just for myself.

It bookends my entire life. This whole baby boom generation goes through this experience. And LSD was one of those big ticket items that sort of said, hey, you can find a whole new you in all of this. And then that whole mentality was adopted by other and commercialized by other avenues in America. It's very fascinating. So who was Nina Graboy? Yeah.

I'm glad you mentioned Nina Gervoy, who's central character in the United States. my book and somebody who had an amazing life. So Nina Gropoy arrives with her husband, Michelle. They've narrowly escaped Nazi Germany and they're settling in New York City. One day, her husband has this brilliant idea or business and before they know it, they've got this thriving, waterproof, coating business to put on the children's clothing items. And it's a hit, right? And next thing they know, they're employing dozens of people. They've got this workshop downtown and And soon thereafter, they pay an architect to commission beautiful multi-room house on Long Island. So at this point, you know, they're almost the embodiment of the American dream.

You know, you're right from Europe and you work hard and you've got this brilliant idea. And next thing you know, you're making boatload of money. However, it's 1950s. And very soon after Nina Gravoy starts to get thoroughly depressed by her new lifestyle, she realizes that her husband is not really the man she was hoping for, and that her life is basically about organizing, you know, entertaining their new Long Island guests. She realizes, I forget, who coined the phrase, I think the problem with no name, I think, something like that, which referred to the sort of climate of anxiety of the time, and particularly for several middle-class

women who longed for something a bit more meaningful than just conspicuous consumerism. and organizing these parties and socializing. And so as part of her quest for Enlightenment, so she does this the reversed way to the kids who joined the gurus, right? She starts by looking at alternative spirituality, what back then would have been considered alternative. So astrology, hypnosis, she joins the Paras Psychology Foundation, which by then was also investigating LSD and psychedelics.

And then she discovers Buddhism, Hinduism, And one day she hears about psychedelics. And she thinks, ah, could this be what I've been looking for? So she's on this. She describes this in her really fascinating autobiography. So she's on this quest to find something more meaningful than life in the suburbs. And eventually she gets involved with Timothy Leary, although at first she finds him a bit suspicious. And occasionally, you know, they have their uneasy moments.

But by and large, it's a quite productive and successful friendship. And so throughout her writing, is you discover this sort of dark side of Leary's personality and his appetite for booze and to manipulate people. And so by the mid-1960s, she's become close enough to Leary that he offers her to direct the headquarters for his newly founded religious organization, the League for Spiritual Discovery, right? I see. And here it's important to pay attention to the context because by then Leary has been arrested for possession of marijuana at the Texas-Mexico border. and so in order to appeal, he claims that he's a practicing Hindu, and as a Hindu, he should be legally allowed to use Mary Watan as a sacraments.

And so what changes almost overnight, you could say, is that whenever Leary appears in public thereafter, he's constantly promoting LSD as a sacrament as something that can bridge humans with the divine. And so he's got this organization in Greenwich Village, and Nina Graboi is in charge of it. And so it becomes a flagship for the local counterculture, but also for all the seekers. You've got a lot of kids who've had their minds opened up by the experience. And so they're looking to read, to have access to information. So it's an information center. It's a place they have meditation sessions. It's also a place where occasionally parents drop by.

They're looking for counseling, right? And they've caught their kids smoking pot. And so Nina Grapoi is much older. So they see her as a bridge between both worlds. She's also an art figure, right? And this is a really interesting evolution of New York where the psychedelic movement is actually absorbed into the art field, which makes sense because of its traditional role in modern art.

This is a capital of modern art in the world. And so this is yet another movement that is embraced. And indeed, it is completely embraced and thus commercialized and thus becomes part of the advertising world as well. You know, all these practitioners and seekers, as you call them, are all getting older as they go. And so all these elements are used to eventually sell products just like the rest of it. And thank you, Peter Max, for making it an absolutely cool thing to look at. You know, I remember the posters and the black light posters and all that stuff. It's so fascinating how

it's all sort of being reconsidered. As LSD is, along with psilocybin and all the rest, these days, because of this Michael Pollan's book and so forth, this whole resurgence of interest, utilizing hallucinogens in a different sort of way. It's not the gigantic ticket into the doors of perception of Aldous Huxley anymore. It's more of a microdosing kind of idea. It's more of a small, less is more experience where you get a chance to sort of open your sensory perceptions a little bit more. How much is New York playing a role in this new era of hallucinogenic my book is history. So it's set in the past and I have to confess that I don't know a whole lot about contemporary psychedelic New York. Okay. Well, you can join me in Central Park. We're dropping some

I mean, no, I'm kidding. Right, brilliant. I'll try and turn up for the weekend. What I would say, sort of to go back to what you were saying just minutes ago about, it's less this revolutionary drug and this drug that promises to change the world and what have you. So you mentioned microdosing and how microdosing is such a big thing in the tech industry. But I believe also in Wall Street, you may know, this thing and I do, yeah. So it points to what you could call a kind of normalization of psych electric

reviews. But you saw that way earlier in the 1960s. And that's one of the more surprising things that I discovered as I was researching for the book, which is that an incredibly broad range of New Yorkers that were experimenting in the mid-50s right into the 1960s. And just to move away from this stereotypical white middle class male youth, I should add. There was just no single profile, right? And certainly when you look at the professional backgrounds of some of those users, there was just, you know, everybody seemed to be doing it, including people working on Wall Street and real estate.

In Gordon Watson, of course, was a banker at J.P. Morgan, and he is the name associated with the Western popularization of psilocybin. And so I think back then, New Yorkers from very different backgrounds were experimenting for very different reasons, not just in psychoanalysis or as spiritual seekers or to become psychedelic artist, but just to try something different. So I think we're probably seeing some of this today, but I'd be sort of stepping out of my boundaries, I could say. Contrary to the Nixon era and all of that, you know, it's going to destroy our youth and so forth, LSD did not do any of that. And as far as the city of New York goes, and the much bigger problem is cost of living and how to pay for an apartment

in that town. Right. It's going to be in the end of the thing that sinks that city. It's an interesting reconsideration. It's a fundamental reconsideration of the whole idea of LSD in this country. And we thank you for being on the show. The book is called Psychedelic New York, a history of LSD in the city. We all know what city we're talking about in New York. Thank you, Chris Elcott for this book and for being on the show. Really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. I hope you enjoyed it. Please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'll see you next time. This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sound.