LSD and State Power

Review of Acid Dialectics by Vincent Rado

LSD has played an outsized role in the cultural life of America and much of Europe. Some drugs, like penicillin, have arguably had a more profound impact on human existence, others have slipped routinely into our everyday lives such as ibuprofen. Yet symbolically, LSD plays an iconic role that has hardly been matched. It has stood for a great many things, to a great many people, not only for those who have undertaken experiences with the drug, but in the discourse of wider society itself.

When one begins to tease out the role of LSD in the social and cultural life of the past, one is confronted by a complex negotiation, a dialectic, through which the drug is used to articulate trajectories of thoughts, ideas and behaviours. Just as a psychedelic experience always remains partly hidden in our mind and body, so the LSD dialectic provides only a partial perspective on deeper political and historical trends, yet, if carefully approached, it may be very illuminating. In Acid Dialectics, author Vincent Rado attempts to reveal some of these trends.

By ‘acid dialectics’, note the plural, Rado refers to the multiplicity of dialogic frames that people have used to construct LSD discourse. There are four distinct, but necessarily overlapping, frames Rado explores (while also noting the existence of others): mystical experience, mind control weapon, revolutionary pharmacology, and neoliberal commodity.

It is Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, with its emphasis on ‘the experience of the dialectic’ itself, which Rado feels suitably addresses the question of LSD, and influences his own approach. This allows the author to range across evidence in history, literature, trip reports, and philosophy, which is to say he develops a multidisciplinary approach to dialectics that allows him to draw out the aforementioned frames, with special attention being placed on their political significances—especially in regard to the nature of power and the State.

Chapter 1 is concerned with ergot perennialism in mystical discourse—some of the root historical suppositions that also underpin the entheogen paradigm. He utilizes several trip reports, including Dr Frank Dudley Beane’s description of ergot and Albert Hofmann’s famous LSD trip in My Problem Child (1979). Moreover, he examines Hegel’s often overlooked take on the mystery cult, and neatly exposes some historical problems with the Eleusis-ergot hypothesis. He also problematizes the cult’s reliance on State power, secrecy on pain of death, and this underscores the book’s narrative arc.

That this myth promotes a connection between state power and drug use is key. Hofmann, who promoted the myth, ‘wanted humanity to move backward intellectually, back to superstition, myth, and religion, and he hoped psychedelic drug use would function as a mechanism to catalyze this.’ The anti-rationality that Rado accuses Hofmann of having is an interesting spin on the chemist’s later writings; how that sits within the context of his professional life as a chemist, however, is less clear. Nevertheless, the promotion of ergot perennialism seeds the idea of LSD as a tool of the State.

Shifting from mystical experience to mind control weapon, Rado uses this question of drugs and state power to segue, briefly via the Nazis, into the CIA’s experimentation with LSD, utilizing Plato, some Allen Ginsberg and the book Mindfuckers: A Source Book on the Rise of Acid Fascism (1972), edited by David Felton. This latter book provides the first instance of the term ‘acid fascism’, which for Rado ‘captures something real’. For him, that means describing the entwining of LSD and state power in acid discourse.

Yet the term itself, ‘acid fascism’, hardly seems immune to the dialectic. Mindfuckers is about several small cults and communes that emerged out of the psychedelic Sixties in the United States, such as the Lyman and Manson families. Leading on from the mystery cult thread of Eleusis, one can clearly see why the drugs/power nexus here demonstrates a thematic continuity for Rado, yet there are some points not clearly addressed that undermine this narrative in regard to State power.

Fascism is used by Felton in that sixties New Left sense to mean any authority over the individual (which can easily morph into ‘anything I don’t like’), rather than something resembling a political lineage from fascismo italiano. It is kind of a petty name-calling—not uncommon then, or now—that has a tendency to obscure the historical particulars. While the CIA certainly had a big hand in spreading LSD, communes and cults were hardly new in the American religious landscape. Fascism is surely more than a personality cult or Frankfurt School-inspired psychologizing—systemic rather than individual.

The objects of Felton’s analysis were counterculture; not State power. Therefore, to go from Mindfuckers to, ‘Acid fascism has many iterations today’ and calling out LSD chemist William Leonard Pickard for sitting on the board of a venture capital firm is a slightly disingenuous leap. Felton’s and Rado’s uses of ‘acid fascism’ are clearly different; one psychological and religious; the other Statist and economic. This reveals the term as not in fact capturing ‘something real’, but rather, its role as a convenient shorthand.

While Rado quotes liberally from the book’s introduction, he does not critically engage with its contents to any large degree. I would suggest that describing Mindfuckers’ role in the development of acid dialectics itself, as an active participant, would be both narratively useful and, theoretically-speaking, insightful. In short, it would be a better used as an object of analysis, rather than adopted as part of the theoretical framework developed in Acid Dialectics.

In Chapter 3, ‘Acid as Revolutionary Pharmacology’, Rado discusses Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley, and Mark Fisher. It begins by showing the relationship of the former two with the CIA, and moves to arguing that Leary and Huxley were more alike than is usually admitted in regard to authoritarianism. For Leary, he preached one thing, anti-authoritarianism, yet simultaneously had relations with the CIA. While Huxley, Rado says, never posed as an ‘anti-authoritarian’.

If one is familiar with Huxley’s lifetime of writings then this could perhaps be a hard soma pill to swallow. Rado rightly observes that, for Huxley, ‘oligarchy is simply taken as fact’. Consequentially, LSD is indeed not about overcoming power. It is, as I’ve suggested in Cobweb of Trips, a way of Huxley exploring and negotiating the relationship between a population and its elite. However, to believe that this ‘fact’ makes Huxley authoritarian himself is to profoundly misconstrue his position.

Huxley’s is a realist position. One would first need to demonstrate, as counterpoint, a functioning society that has not had an elite or oligarchy in some manner. Huxley believed, after a great deal of research, that such elites were a given. However, elites are not made equally, they are in fact more or less authoritarian, and populations have more or less ‘freedom’ as a result of the elite’s ability to govern—thus for Huxley, drugs, any drugs, were about a measure of this situation. In other words, they are a measure of power, rather than a power in and of themselves.

Now, I understand Rado here. As an anarchist, he equates any hierarchy with authoritarianism. Yet, it is difficult to follow this line of thinking about Huxley without tackling the aforementioned question of whether such a non-hierarchical society can or has ever existed in the first place. Without dealing with this point more explicitly, Rado risks falling foul of his own (very excellent) criticisms of Mark Fisher and his unfinished work on acid communism—a kind of pop utopianism that points only to vague ideas rather than the practical, the historical, the real.

Chapter 4, ‘Acid as Neoliberal Commodity’, is to my mind the strongest. It traces this notion from Frank Dudley Bean’s trip report, which was incredibly used as a kind of promotional material for the company Parke Davis in the nineteenth century, through the pharmaceutical development of LSD from ergot, to covering large corporate and oligarch interest in the drug and its influence on the emergence of Silicon Valley tech firms. It reminds us that whatever the LSD experience is, it is wedded in some degree to the markets in which the material circulates—‘acid liberalism’.

There is, however, some less convincing theory here too. It follows the ‘liberalism leads to fascism’ school of historical thought—which is based on universalizing interwar Germany into a historical rule that functions across cultures at all times. There is plenty with which to criticize whatever today’s ‘liberalism’ is on its own terms, without doing so on what one assumes it is turning into. When history, and the particular conditions that determine it, is reduced to a linear formula, the present is obscured not illuminated. It is, I suggest, a relic of nineteenth century historical determinism—and speaks more to a sorely outdated Hegelian view of history.

Acid Dialectics is, as the author’s Preface notes, part of an ‘ongoing project of mine which examines how power structures affect drug markets and the discourse about them.’ Using some excellent sources, Rado constructs a historical dialectic of acid—a narrative in which LSD discourse is shown to be often centred in Statist perspectives. It is indeed a valuable work on the nature of drugs and power, and one that I hope presupposes a more detailed historical analysis in the future. This is an area ripe for investigation, especially from an anarchist position, and Rado makes some fascinating steps into this realm here.