LSD in New York: Research, Recreation and Radicalism
American History Hit
History Hit
4.5 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 10 July 2023
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's a Friday evening and we're walking in New York City in Greenwich Village, fall |
| 0:07.0 | 1965. The streets are cool and jazz lots up from basement bars. In coffee houses it's folk banjos and guitars. |
| 0:18.2 | At the intersection of Bleaker and McDougal, a newsstand hawks the latest edition of the village voice and a new alternative rag |
| 0:25.4 | Evo the East Village other everywhere there's pop-up galleries with art that assaults the |
| 0:30.8 | senses but we're not down here for the culture. Well, maybe the counterculture kind. |
| 0:36.0 | We're here to meet with a friend, a guy who knows a guy, someone who worked at the Sandos Plant in Jersey, |
| 0:42.0 | with something he wants you to try, a drug that, according |
| 0:45.8 | 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 |
| 1:02.4 | Lysergic Acid Diathlon-Mai. Don Wildman here and we're very glad you're there. |
| 1:02.8 | Lysergic acid diathlonide, 25, aka LSD, is certainly one of the more famous creations |
| 1:09.9 | of humankind and probably one of its least understood. |
| 1:13.1 | Which is ironic given LSD's notorious fame, and the rather profound experiences good and bad, it has delivered |
| 1:20.3 | upon its users for nearly a century. |
| 1:22.8 | From its accidental discovery in a Swiss laboratory in the 1930s to its starring role in |
| 1:27.9 | 1967 at San Francisco's Summer of Love to President Richard Nixon finally declaring it public enemy number one. |
| 1:35.5 | This pharmacological phenomenon has been on a crazy trip of its own in the public sphere. |
| 1:40.7 | But in recent years it has resurfaced, not as a scary flashback, but to the contrary as part of a new and |
| 1:47.1 | evolving hallucinogenic consciousness in the wider Western world. |
| 1:51.3 | Turn on, tune in, and drop out? |
| 1:53.0 | Hardly. |
| 1:54.0 | In this new age of now, L.S.D, while perhaps not the star at once was, is right in the wings |
| 1:59.8 | ready for its next act. |
... |
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