Happy New Year. This is an on-the-media podcast extra, just in time for your first hangover of 2020.

Whether it's fueled by alcohol or just the thought of the year ahead, we thought we'd bring you a segment celebrating a rebellion against the norm and a way to test

boundaries. We first aired this a couple of years ago in time for April 19th, an odd holiday

known as Bicycle Day, commemorating the moment in 1943 when Swiss scientist Albert Hoffman

rode his bike home from work after dosing himself with his lab

concoction, lysurgic acid dialethamide, or LSD. Hoffman is who launched us into an

exploration of the moment when an evangelist of acid would emerge from a Menlo Park hospital lab and plow through the nation's

gray flannel culture in a candy-colored bus. I speak, of course, of Ken Kesey, the enigmatic author

behind One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and the driving force in Tom Wolfe's electric

Kool-Colade Asset test, his seminal work in new journalism.

We ponder how acid-shaped Keezy and denormalized American conformity with River Donahey,

a filmmaker and writer based in Brooklyn.

Keezy's story really starts in the late 50s when he was a graduate student at Stanford's creative writing program.

Up until that point, Kesey was sort of this all-American farm boy. He was a college jock, married his high school sweetheart. He had a very wholesome childhood. But when he got to Stanford, he needed money to support his new family. So he got this job basically being a guinea pig for clinical drug trials in a nearby

hospital. The drug trials at Menlo Park Veterans Hospital were marketed as research for treating

mental illness, but we know today that they were part of Project MK Ultra, the CIA's mind

control study. Keezy was given a few different drugs, an early

antidepressant called IT290, a vomit-inducing antibiotic called Ditrim. And one of the pills was LSD.

And so how did he feel on LSD? Well, I mean, you got to put yourself in Kese's shoes at that point, right?

It's the end of the 50s.

It's like Mad Men era.

It's this like suburbs and housewives and like dad with the briefcase and the suit going off to work.

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