Overview
Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, better known as LSD (for its original German abbreviation) or "acid", is a substance first synthesized by chemist Albert Hofmann in 1938, though its specific effects were not observed until 1943. Like other psychedelics (such as psilocybin mushrooms, mescaline, etc), it is highly psychoactive and produces a number of effects in subjects when ingested, including but not limited to euphoria, altered thinking patterns, and distorted vision.
Throughout the 1960s, legislation against LSD became increasingly common, culminating in its federal classification as a "Schedule I" controlled substance in the United States in 1970. It became further illegalized by the United Nations Convention of Psychotropic Substances of 1971.
The experimentation (both formal and informal) documented between its synthesis and its comprehensive banning has since been succeeded by LSD use being far less common than even the use of cannabis (another Schedule I substance, albeit legalized to different extents in different states).
LSD as a Pharmacological Medium
Discussing LSD as a medium demands a conversation about what we mean by "medium" both popularly and within media studies, as LSD presents unique conceptual challenges. Therefore, contextualizing how we even conceive of "media" is useful for moving forward.
As of this writing, a presidential election cycle is approaching its peak and—within this popular context—"the media" typically means something as narrow as "television news" or, slightly more broadly, "the press". Outside of this cycle, "media" would likely be known as the most overtly cultural communication technologies: television, print, film, radio, etc.
Moving broader yet, we also have what we could call the "McLuhan revolution" in media conceptualization: not only considering aforementioned technologies themselves (rather than just as transparent carriers of "content") but indeed all technologies as media that—in Marshall McLuhan's words—"[shape and control] the scale and form of human association and action" (Understanding Media, Kindle Location 171). In other (more famous and aphoristic) words: "the medium is the message".
Still, Understanding Media—arguably McLuhan's most significant work—limits itself to the analysis of coarsely understood media: the printing press, television, houses, clothing, photography, and the like. This is the scale at which media analysis tends to operate: if not mass media then typically electro/mechanical or otherwise immediately tangible technologies.
Pharmacological media like LSD (which operates on the scale of micrograms rather than tons) are a far less common subject for media scholars and, while the reasons why may be varied, there is no question that such media at least complicate many of the typical questions we could ask of a medium, which would be discouraging for characterizing any psychoactive substance (food, drug, or otherwise) in typical terms. For instance, when looking at McLuhan's assertion that "the 'content' of any medium is always another medium" (Understanding Media, Kindle Location 160), it is easy to trace—as McLuhan does—the "content" of the telegraph to print (whose content is the written word, whose content is speech), but what is the "content" of LSD?
(Dis)content
McLuhan's evolutionary tree for the telegraph ultimately finds a foundational bedrock in speech, whose content he describes as "an actual process of thought, which is in itself nonverbal". This is why McLuhan advocated for seeing technology (almost in proto-Harawayan cyborg terms) as "extensions of man", as—taking the telegraph as an example—it would appear that every medium's content is ultimately—through variable layers of intervention—unalienably tied to our embodied mental and/or physical experience as humans.
But how do we characterize a medium like LSD (and its content) when it is so intimately and subjectively internalized within our bodies?
The question must first be answered negatively, and in a few ways.
First, it may be tempting to take a look at the ways in which LSD appears in situ and mistake media whose content is LSD for the LSD medium itself. For instance, LSD is typically stored and communicated on blotter paper (though sometimes it appears in liquid form, gel tab form, etc). This blotter paper sometimes has art on it but it also may be completely blank. Neither the paper nor anything visible on the paper can be considered LSD, though. We should not confuse the blotter paper medium with the LSD medium.
While relevant, we must also not confuse the myriad applications of LSD with the medium itself. Whether used by the CIA (via Project MKUltra), or any number of countercultural figures, these disparate uses of LSD must have some commonality unified by the LSD itself (much like how, for McLuhan, "Whether the [electric] light is being used for brain surgery or night baseball is a matter of indifference"). While these social phenomena certainly provide clues as to the content of LSD, the rock band The Grateful Dead (or, prototypically, their similarly LSD-experienced fans) are no more the content of LSD than is the common use of the band's "dancing bear" logo as blotter art.
To further disqualify one approach or another, LSD severely disturbs and may even disprove the overall legitimacy of the "cold gaze" of media scholars such as Wolfgang Ernst. Influenced by but contrasting with McLuhan, such a gaze takes every effort to account for media in ways entirely (and artificially) removed from human experience. When considering the "schematic" of LSD, it is clear that examining a medium—especially LSD—through that lens has a unnecessarily and unfortunately limited scope. There is no responsible way of taking a Kittlerian approach to LSD, which would be eschewing "so-called humans" and mocking the primacy of the body, a primacy that is unquestionable when considering pharmacological media like LSD.
The great irony is that a Kittlerian methodology, with all of its transparent engineer worship/envy, would not be able to adequately account for a material that is so unambiguously engineered. LSD, unlike many other psychedelics (psilocybin mushrooms, for example), must be synthesized and is not a naturally-occurring substance. It is no less engineered than a steam engine, machine gun, typewriter, television, or microprocessor. Indeed, when speaking of The Grateful Dead and their links to LSD, their sound engineer Owsley Stanley was also the chemical engineer responsible for a major source of LSD during its peak in the 1960s.
But only looking at the molecular structure of LSD doesn't tell us enough about it. Other kinds of questions are necessary, but the inadequacies of the aforementioned approaches does not mean that LSD is not a medium worth of consideration as such.
McLuhan and Leary: Electricity, Egoism, and Education
While Understanding Media does not focus on pharmacological media, McLuhan has voiced an opinion on LSD, in the March 1969 issue of Playboy. While he is likely too optimistic about the effects of electr(on)ic media, the core of his observation is as follows:
LSD is a way of miming the invisible electronic world; it releases a person from acquired verbal and visual habits and reactions, and gives the potential of instant and total involvement, both all-at-onceness and all-at-oneness, which are the basic needs of people translated by electric extensions of their central nervous systems out of the old rational, sequential value system. The attraction to hallucinogenic drugs is a means of achieving empathy with our penetrating electric environment, an environment that in itself is a drugless inner trip.
It should be noted that McLuhan never took LSD, describing himself as "an observer in these matters, not a participant". While many a medium can be accurately characterized with a non-participatory distance, the intensely subjective effects of LSD must be accounted for with finer resolution than McLuhan can provide as a spectator.
In the same interview, McLuhan gives a name we can refer to for a more personal account of LSD's effects:
...when I got off the plane at Toronto Airport, two customs guards pulled me into a little room and started going over my luggage. “Do you know Timothy Leary?” one asked. I replied I did and that seemed to wrap it up for him. “All right,” he said. “Where’s the stuff? We know you told somebody you’d gone to Vancouver to pick up some LL.D.” After a laborious dialog, I persuaded him that an LL.D. has nothing to do with consciousness expansion — just the opposite, in fact — and I was released. Of course, in light of the present educational crisis, I’m not sure there isn’t something to be said for making possession of an LL.D. a felony.
Timothy Leary is likely to be history's most visible and controversial LSD advocate. By his own description, "About a third of what I've said is just flat-out bullshit... About a third of what I've said is just dead wrong. But a third of what I've said have been home runs. So I'm batting .333, which puts me in the Hall of Fame" (quoted in The Harvard Psychedelic Club by Don Lattin, Page 126).
By many accounts, Leary's metaphorical batting average decreased over time, but an instructive work he co-authored with Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert (known now as Ram Dass) in 1964 (fairly early in Leary's career) may provide the key to what LSD does, as a medium in McLuhan's sense. This book is called The Psychedelic Experience and it adapts insights from the TIbetan Book of the Dead to psychedelic experiences. In Tibetan Buddhism, the Book of the Dead is primarily meant to guide the recently deceased through the liminal state between one life and the next. Similarly, The Psychedelic Experience is meant to guide LSD users through the ego death produced by LSD.
This loss of ego is primarily LSD's "content", as it is central to but not wholly exclusive to LSD. It can be achieved through other psychedelics as well as non-pharmacological means like meditation and sensory deprivation.
In Understanding Media, McLuhan writes that "it is only too typical that the 'content' of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium" (Kindle Location 173). The Psychedelic Experience characterizes pharmacological, psychedelic media and attempts to keep the user of LSD and similar media from being bound to the blinkered condition McLuhan describes.
However, the electronic world McLuhan imagined and compared to the LSD trip is not one of ego death. The intensely personalized, biographical, password-protected, capitalistic society that is both in and of our electronic media-ecological situation is one that constantly reinforces egoism. As many strikeouts and foul balls as Leary may have committed, McLuhan certainly does not bat 1.000 in his quasi-utopian vision of electronic media. There was (and is) potential for such an implementation of electronic media, but McLuhan underestimated the extent to which the media in question could produce a proverbial "bad trip", especially without more education from those like the authors of The Psychedelic Experience (whose guidance certainly did not reach all users of LSD any more than McLuhan's guidance has reached all users of other media).
Conclusion
To continue the baseball metaphor, it is the case that McLuhan swung his bat way too early on certain topics, like the coming culture of electronic media. However, his tying of media's qualities to human experience and inextricably embodied effects is indispensable. This is especially true for pharmacological media like LSD, and while Leary's advocacy and the decision of others to ingest LSD may be questionable, the experiences they relate are vital for understanding LSD as a medium and cannot be substituted with an overemphasis on mechanical/molecular structure or, to speak of the human body's mechanics, biology. Without appealing to the kind of mysticism or spirituality ostensibly engendered by LSD use, it can be argued that even the characterization of LSD provided by Leary and others undermines the atomistic hyper-materialism of Kittler and others.
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