The mythopoetic features of tripping, as an aesthetic, pervade our experience of a drug both prior to, and long after, its effects are felt. It is cultural and exists beyond ourselves for we are simply its manifestation—a mushroom to its mycelial network. Trippers, with very rare exceptions, are explosions within the mythopoetic narrative; they are of the story, not its progenitors, and in this respect, the stories (myth) and the artefacts (poetry) of psychedelia exist in a loopy aesthetic continuum mediated in part through experience. LSD blotter is one filament in this process.
‘Bodies of drugs matter’ writes Erik Davis in Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium (2024). Take, for example, the legendary LSD chemist Augustus Owsley Stanley III who, with co-conspirators Melissa Cargill and Tim Scully, produced a large batch of pure acid, then distributed it in five separately coloured tablets. Although the same chemical substance underpinned them all, each acquired their own charact…