First synthesised in 1938 however not tasted till 1943, acid is actually a creature of the postwar period. As such, it enters the human world alongside an explosion in client promoting, the speedy improvement of digital and digital media, new polymers, and a number of more and more cybernetic approaches to the social challenges of management and communication.
For a lot of of its early fans, acid was like a cosmic transistor radio. Because the historian and curator Lars Bang Larsen writes: ‘Hallucinogenic medication have been usually understood as new media within the counterculture: solely machinic and cybernetic ideas appeared adequate to handle vibrations, intensities, micro-speeds, and different challenges to human notion that happen on the journey.’ LSD appeared to, as Timothy Leary recommended in 1966, ‘tune’ the dials of notion, altering the ratios of the senses, ‘turning on’ their associational pathways and gradients of depth.
The actor and creator Peter Coyote, who was a member of the visionary Diggers collective within the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco throughout the Sixties, wrote that ingesting LSD ‘modified all the pieces, dissolved the boundaries of self, and positioned you at some unlocatable level within the midst of a brand new world, huge past imagining, stripped of language, the place new expertise of communication have been required … [because] all the pieces communicated in its personal method.’
Equally, Marshall McLuhan, the pop media prophet of the period, instructed Playboy that LSD mimes the ‘all-at-onceness and all-at-oneness’ of the brand new digital media setting. All this set the stage for a type of technical mysticism that pervaded LSD tradition within the late twentieth century, one which framed the drug and its bodily manifestations with a luminous sense of immediacy. Alan Watts, commenting on the query of how usually to take LSD, turned to a different media metaphor, arguing that once you get the message, you grasp up the telephone. However what if the medium is the message?
Of course, the first medium is the LSD molecule itself, referred to as LSD-25, the twenty fifth variation of lysergic acid synthesised by the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann in 1938. However in contrast to macroscopic medication resembling hashish, LSD is so small and so highly effective that its consumption nearly all the time requires an inert housing – water, tablets, sugar cubes, bits of string or items of paper – that transports the drug from producer to tripper. Within the legislation, this automobile is described because the ‘provider medium’, an object impregnated with medication that may be offered, seized, introduced as proof, and dissolved into the hearts, minds and guts of shoppers.
If you print photos onto a paper provider medium, you might be including one other layer of mediation to an already crazy transmission. Therefore, a meta-medium, a liminal style of print tradition that dissolves the boundaries between a postage stamp, a ticket, a bubble-gum card and the communion host. This makes what is named blotter a central if barely recognised artefact of psychedelic print tradition, alongside rock posters and underground newspapers and comix, however with the additional ouroboric weirdness that it’s designed to be ingested, to disappear. Blotter is essentially the most ephemeral of all psychedelic ephemera. It’s produced to be eaten, to blur the divide between object and topic, dissolving materials indicators and molecules right into a phenomenological upsurge of sensory, poetic and cognitive immediacy. It is usually a medium whose story is tied to LSD’s religious decline within the twentieth century.
Throughout the blotter age, the standard of the molecule additionally improved considerably
The early historical past of LSD has usually been framed inside the underground as a type of Edenic narrative. The primary crystal variations of lysergic acid signify nearly divine substances, praised for his or her purity, which then change into debased by unhealthy chemistry, venal commodification, and the wayward drift of druggy hedonism – a narrative that itself stands in for the dissipation of the revolutionary energies of the Sixties into the compromises of the Nineteen Seventies and past. Of their e book Acid Goals (1985), Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain give us this view, outlining a decline they declare was already properly underway by the late Sixties:
So many individuals have been getting excessive that the identification of drug use with the sharper types of cultural and political deviance weakened significantly. As an alternative of being weapons in a generational battle, marijuana and LSD usually served as pleasure props, accoutrements of the nice life that included water beds, tape decks, golden roach clips, and a number of leisure gadgets. Excessive-school children have been popping tabs of acid each weekend as in the event that they have been gum-drops. And far of the LSD was like sweet – stuffed with components and impurities. The bodily contamination of avenue acid symbolised what was occurring all through the tradition.
This narrative arc is essential to remember as we unfold the story of blotter. Although LSD was generally handed round within the Sixties on precise blotting paper, sheets of perforated (‘perfed’) and printed LSD paper don’t come to dominate the acid commerce till the late Nineteen Seventies, reaching a protracted golden age within the Eighties and ’90s. As such, the rise of blotter mirrors, mediates and challenges the mythopoetic story of LSD’s religious decline. For at the same time as LSD misplaced the millennialist cost of the Sixties, it continued to foster religious discovery, social critique, tribal bonds and aesthetic enrichment. Throughout the blotter age, the standard of the molecule additionally improved considerably, its white sculptured crystals generally reaching and possibly surpassing the purity ranges of yore. Lots of the individuals who produced and offered this materials remained idealists, or no less than pragmatic idealists, with a style for lovely craft and an outlaw humour mirrored within the design of many blotters, which generally poked enjoyable on the scene and paradoxically riffed on the truth that the paper sacraments additionally served as ‘industrial tokens’.
In these later years, many older LSD customers continued to see blotter as a debased medium that bruised and degraded the holy molecule. The reality is that, correctly cared for and stored from mild and air, humble blotters can maintain their punch for fairly a while. This persistent efficiency additionally offers us a symbolic key for understanding the medium. Blotter hits are indicators not of decline however of canny transformation, as idealism offers method to subversion, militancy to mutation, counterculture to subculture. Mediating the profane as a lot because the sacred, blotter turned the central automobile of LSD’s personal bizarre drift by way of the post-hippie period.
As far as we all know, LSD’s visionary prowess first emerges in human historical past as a product of commercial semi-synthesis – an extractive capitalist equipment that, relying in your characterisation of recent science, suggests on the very least a colonialist exploitation of the natural world as a lot as a crafted continuity with it. That is essential: if LSD represents a type of magic, it’s a magic of the trendy West, in all its horror and promethean glory. For all its alchemical resonance, it sprouts from the forehead of commercial chemistry, an business based on synthetic dyes and petroleum merchandise, and it enlists shrinks and spies as a few of its earliest shamans.
In 1938, because the now acquainted story goes, the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann was working for the Sandoz company, a pharmaceutical producer, experimenting with varied modifications of lysergic acid. This was the precursor molecule for quite a few naturally occurring alkaloids of the ergot fungus, a few of which had already proved fairly worthwhile for his employer. LSD-25 was solely the twenty fifth in a collection of molecules he crafted, and nothing a lot got here of the hassle. 5 years later, and following what he later described as a ‘peculiar presentiment’, Hofmann determined to resynthesise that distinctive materials. As he neared the top of the method, he felt humorous and went residence, having fun with a stream of closed-eye visuals.
Returning to work the next Monday, 19 April, Hofmann determined to deliberately take a look at the LSD-25 on himself to root out the weirdness of the earlier week. Understanding the potential toxicity of ergot-related compounds, he confirmed nice warning in limiting his preliminary dose to 250 micrograms (μg) – 750 μg shy of a single milligram (mg). Hofmann knew that the overwhelming majority of medication and toxins are energetic at a a lot increased variety of milligrams per kilogram of physique weight. For instance, the usual dose of MDMA, no less than in line with the lay therapist Ann Shulgin and her husband, the chemist Alexander ‘Sasha’ Shulgin, and their therapist pals, is round 125 mg; over-the-counter ibuprofen capsules begin at 100 mg; and potassium cyanide will get deadly round 100 mg, which is 400 instances better than the dose of LSD Hofmann took. However even that smidgin was sufficient to ship the nice physician on a weird bicycle experience as he headed residence early with an assistant, an occasion now commemorated each 19 April as Bicycle Day.
LSD, like all psychoactive medication, is formed and inflected by the varieties it takes on this planet earlier than it’s ingested
Acid’s capability to punch above its molecular weight would have a major affect on the fabric historical past of the compound in addition to the provider media that shuttled it around the globe and into the our bodies of human beings. Due to its nearly homeopathic efficiency, LSD has been distributed on and in an unusually numerous and inventive vary of media, together with blotter’s tiny paper doses – although they’re not often fabricated from precise blotting paper. That is an uncommon provider medium for medication, to say the least. A single sq. of sometimes sized blotter gives far too little floor space to soak up the quantity of fabric required for many medication to sufficiently tweak the nervous system. On this sense, acid shapes its personal distinctive media.
The fabric manifestations of LSD’s provider media are hardly incidental to the drug’s which means and import. Even when it’s destined to dissolve and successfully disappear into human our bodies, LSD, like all psychoactive medication, is formed and inflected by the varieties it takes on this planet earlier than it’s ingested. A bud of hashish shouldn’t be a block of cannabis shouldn’t be a piece of shatter shouldn’t be an Otterspace Watermelon Delta 8 gummy with 25 mg of THC. These variations transcend strategies of ingestion and metabolic dynamics; they converse to the kinds of meanings and performances that stage and body the act of consuming issues within the first place. In different phrases, the tangible materiality of psychoactive medication – as financial, cultural and bodily objects – is inevitably compounded with the results themselves. The our bodies of medication matter.
Roland Barthes makes an analogous level about meals. Whereas we are able to subdivide and analyse the issues we eat in chemical or dietary phrases, meals ‘can also be, and on the identical time, a system of communication, a physique of photos, a protocol of usages, conditions, and behavior.’ Meals – this particular cannelloni, or paratha, or burrito – is inextricably embedded in matrixes of sophistication, ecology, historical past, cultural id and social life – and, within the trendy world, of promoting and way of life as properly. As Barthes places it: ‘Meals sums up and transmits a state of affairs; it constitutes an data; it signifies.’ Psychoactive medication, a cousin of meals, aren’t any completely different right here. Their varieties and histories inform, transmit and signify even earlier than you’re taking them.
Acid’s technical genesis as a purified and terribly potent compound, in addition to its lack of style, color and odour, powerfully formed the molecule’s materials manifestations. LSD is actually too potent to eat within the ‘uncooked’ or unmixed type of a crystal powder (although loads of people have accomplished so over the many years). When Sandoz started advertising and marketing LSD to psychiatrists beneath the commerce identify Delysid, they distributed the molecule in two main varieties: jars of sugar-coated tablets that contained 25 μg every, and 1 millilitre ampoules of distilled water containing 100 μg every, which could possibly be swallowed or injected. Sandoz additionally distributed amber glass containers that held 25 mg (25,000 μg) of pure powder, although these weren’t, in fact, supposed for direct consumption. Later industrial sources for LSD, together with corporations resembling Eli Lilly in america and Spofa in Czechoslovakia, produced comparable codecs.
The first resolution to the issues posed by LSD powder, as you may think, is water. An enormous quantity of LSD has been circulated over the many years in liquid type by pharmaceutical corporations, main underground producers and low-level sellers and shoppers, who would possibly buy a number of hundred low-concentration drops in a small opaque vial or ‘Slim Jim’. Issues get extra fascinating when that liquid later impregnates an additional provider medium, whose plastic potentialities started to flower even earlier than the molecule was rendered illicit. In 1960, the British researcher Michael Hollingshead – who known as himself, with some cause, the ‘man who turned on the world’ – obtained his arms on a gram of Sandoz powder. He combined it with distilled water and confectioner’s sugar right into a gelatinous paste he then transferred to a mayonnaise jar – the identical container that served up Leary’s first harrowing dose. Just a few years later, when Leary and crew returned to the US from Zihuatanejo, Mexico, a stash of liquid LSD spilled in Richard Alpert’s suitcase, which meant that a number of the pioneering psychonauts on the legendary Millbrook property in upstate New York obtained excessive by sucking on Alpert’s underwear.
Essentially the most signature vernacular provider for LSD liquid within the first years of the acid growth was the sugar dice. In his autobiography The Highway of Extra (1998), the British wild man and Leary crony Brian Barritt describes dosing Tate & Lyle sugar cubes with an eye-dropper stuffed with the acid he had bought from the sensible junkie author Alexander Trocchi. ‘I didn’t know that it could possibly be absorbed by way of my pores till Mr Dice started jiggling about and appearing identical to he was stoned out of his thoughts.’ Mr Dice was the Tate & Lyle brand, a cartoon sugar dice with arms and toes, whose visionary dance by way of Barritt’s sensorium reminds us that LSD not solely unveiled modes of consciousness past quotidian modernity however might animate that banal industrial panorama into one thing mutant and goofy.
As soon as the tabs hit the road, the colors took on completely different phenomenological associations
The primary well-known ‘manufacturers’ of underground acid have been produced by the sensible and eccentric Augustus Owsley Stanley III, the scion of an illustrious Kentucky household who moved to the San Francisco Bay Space following a stint within the US Air Drive. In late 1964, after determining easy methods to make methamphetamine, Owsley began engaged on LSD with Melissa Cargill, a chemistry whiz on the College of California, Berkeley, who could be liable for their breakthrough methodology. We don’t know a lot about Cargill as a result of Owsley performed the impresario, incomes a repute for his finicky obsession with chemical purity. Certainly, Owsley’s crystal was reputed to be cleaner than the model made by Sandoz.
Owsley began distributing his acid, usually without spending a dime, within the spring of 1965. He sifted his powder into gelatine capsules or handed it on as ‘Mom’s Milk’, a liquid that was tinted blue in order that distributors might monitor which sugar cubes that they had dosed. These strategies have been imprecise, and with a fabric as potent as LSD, cautious dosage was key. Publicity to mild, which degrades the molecule, was additionally a difficulty, as was the convenience of counterfeiting capsules. Whereas residing in Los Angeles with the underground LSD chemist Tim Scully and the Grateful Lifeless, Owsley pursued better high quality management, and to that finish customary 4,000 or so of the primary LSD tablets. Utilizing a easy machine to triturate the fabric, totally mixing it with binders, he then made a paste and unfold it on Bakelite sheets to press evenly into tablets. Owsley determined to dye his tabs a purplish blue with a view to confuse the drug exams then utilized by the police, which turned contraband purple if LSD was current. These notoriously highly effective tabs, whose 250 μg have been chosen in honour of Hofmann’s preliminary dose, have been usually offered as Blue Cheer, which additionally occurred to be the identify of a preferred detergent on the time – making Blue Cheer the primary instance of an underground LSD preparation that took form in a parodic funhouse mirror held as much as mainstream commodity tradition. It might not be the final.
Maybe Owsley’s most insightful contribution to the historical past of LSD’s materials packaging, nonetheless, was a little bit unintentional experiment in social psychology he carried out in 1966. Together with Scully and Cargill, Owsley whipped up a 10-gram batch of pure crystalline LSD powder and divided it into 5 equal piles, which have been then dyed completely different colors earlier than being buffed with lactose and calcium phosphate to make the powder appropriate for tableting. As soon as the tabs hit the road, the place they have been usually known as ‘barrels’, the colors started to tackle completely different phenomenological associations, although the LSD was all demonstrably the identical materials. The purple ones have been, towards sort, alleged to be mellow, the greens speedy, and the blues mix of the 2. Based on Scully, one of many colors was even alleged to be significantly ‘religious’.
It’s not possible to know if the freaks on the road actually skilled this vary of reactions, however given what we learn about LSD, to not point out the psychology of manufacturers and placebos, it actually stands to cause. Based on a widely known fMRI study carried out at Houston’s Baylor School of Medication in 2004, contributors given a squirt of nameless cola confirmed exercise in numerous mind areas (significantly the hippocampus and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) when the model identify for the sugar water was introduced; nonetheless, this shift registered with Coke however not Pepsi, suggesting a transparent neural correlation to model energy. Issues develop much more curious with placebos. Quite a few research have proven that the relative effectiveness of placebo capsules varies relying on their color and form, elements which are in fact taken into consideration within the design and advertising and marketing of pharmaceutical preparations.
Acid cranks these priming elements as much as 11. Within the phrases of the Czech-born psychiatrist Stanislav Grof, who oversaw extra LSD periods than another psychiatrist, LSD is, in distinction to typical medication, a ‘nonspecific amplifier’ relatively than a mechanistic agent. And what usually will get amplified, in line with Grof, is the psyche, which is extremely delicate to expectations, cultural narratives and exterior options. This sensitivity undergirds the well-known psychedelic precept of ‘set and setting’, which, because the drug historian Ido Hartogsohn explains, divides the nonpharmacological brokers of drug expertise into ‘set (persona, preparation, expectation and intention of the individual having the expertise) and setting (the bodily, social and cultural setting during which the expertise takes place).’ Even earlier than Leary made this phrase a psychedelic mantra, psychedelic researchers recognised that the mindset of the tripper, coupled with particular options and qualities of the journey room, performed an usually important function within the expertise.
The essential level right here is that blotter, like all provider media, instantly contributes to the set and setting. Given this psychic sensitivity to materials and symbolic circumstances, the bodily packaging of LSD will impress itself to a point upon the roiling incorporeal slipstream of the journey. Fats blue LSD tablets or plain sugar cubes or orange-coloured blotters will not be ‘the identical’ drug, even when their dosages and supply materials are similar. The printed photos of blotter add an entire different dimension of priming by way of their sometimes-potent indicators. With acid, once more, the medium actually is the message.
The most probably candidate for the primary printed blotter, Mr Pure is one among quite a few LSD sheets that appeared within the Nineteen Seventies and ’80s that includes R Crumb’s humorous, free-thinking guru character. The Midwest Analysis Institute’s Drug Atlas consists of an instance seized in July 1971 – an orange four-way, costing $2.50 – that reveals the disreputable saint pointing to the sky (recognized considerably confusingly within the Blotter Index as ‘Mr Pure #2’). ‘Bought as LSD,’ the Atlas reads; ‘reportedly offers expertise.’
Although they might have been circulating within the UK for the reason that Sixties, blotters formally appeared there by no less than 1974, when the Freek Press on the Windsor Free Fest reported the presence of orange and white sheets. A yr later, one other blotter, this one ‘marked with a strawberry’ and ‘weak or robust relying on the power of your head’, was devoured on the Watchfield Free Pageant. For essentially the most half, nonetheless, blotter in these earlier years, whether or not within the US or the UK, not often included any ‘marks’ in any respect. However quickly, blotters can be lined in art work, a psychedelic echo of recent artwork’s mutation from excessive abstraction to pop.
One of the vital celebrated blotters of the period featured Mickey Mouse in his Fantasia guise because the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. These sharply designed four-colour sheets got here perfed into 100 items, every that includes their very own budding rodent wizard. This was charming sufficient, however if you happen to purchased a gram, you’d get a purple lacquered field that was additionally affixed with a picture of Mickey, now surrounded by 17 gold stars. Inside lay a bundle of 40 sheets wrapped in a container of gold foil affixed with one other picture of the mouse, this time accompanied by the phrase ‘Sandoz’ – alerting the discerning purchaser that the batch was most probably created from LSD synthesised by the unique Swiss sorcerers.
Blotters are nice to deal with: potent graphic fetishes that function the mild crispness of a skinny matzah
Blotter was and is reasonable, not often exceeding $2.50 successful or so, which meant that it really provided much less of a markup per unit that both tablets or gels. What disposed distributors to blotter was quantity, ease of manufacturing and concealment, and velocity of dissemination. Sheets are straightforward to move, straightforward to mail, and simple to cover. When the infamous pranksters within the Tibetan Ukrainian Mountain Troupe descended on British festivals within the Eighties, they smuggled in sheets of acid-impregnated inexperienced cartridge paper that, as a result of it resembled gasket paper, was stashed in toolboxes and laminated on-site with illustrated fascia introduced in individually. On the manufacturing facet, blotter provided a number of benefits over tableting. Printing, and particularly silk screening, used far much less arcane and suspicious know-how, and since the sheets have been dipped after the very fact – ‘asynchronously’, we might say immediately – blotter makers might keep a long way from the patently felony manufacturing and distribution of the molecule itself. Blotters additionally weighed significantly lower than tablets, although one of the crucial widespread causes given for blotter’s ascent – the passage of so-called provider weight legal guidelines within the Eighties – doesn’t actually maintain water.
Illustrated blotter can also be enjoyable. Whether or not circulated on the dimensions of a number of sheets, generally known as ‘pages’, or as hits or ‘10-strips’ swapped in a car parking zone, blotters are nice to deal with: potent graphic fetishes that function the mild crispness of a skinny matzah. Like chocolate bars with their grid of grooves, blotter asks to be fondled, torn and crumbled, nibbled. However like cash or stamps or present flyers, it additionally has the texture of ephemera you would possibly wish to maintain onto for some time. As an important however underrecognised vector of underground print tradition, illustrated blotter not solely guarantees particular person transport, however affirms participation in a marginal and collective demimonde that was and is sustained partly by way of an ongoing publishing effort, one which depends on print’s capability to construct fanciful various worlds with mechanically reproduced indicators. When Mr Pure waltzed throughout the primary printed blotter, he provided the ironic cartoon promise that the acid revelation simply retains on truckin’, a promise you can take part in by consuming the underground comix panel relatively than simply trying at it.
Each actually and figuratively, blotter serves as an avatar of LSD-25 (although it bears repeating that immediately’s black-market blotter is usually dosed with different psychoactive molecules). This makes blotter a very fascinating lens by way of which to view immediately’s much-hyped ‘psychedelic renaissance’. Over latest many years, an ideal storm of medical researchers, psychotherapists, enterprise capitalists, journalists, wellness entrepreneurs and decriminalisation activists has radically remodeled the medical, cultural and even authorized profile of psychedelics within the US. This course of is inconceivable with out the historic catalyst of LSD, which is much and away essentially the most influential psychedelic in trendy postwar historical past, and one that continues to be extensively accessible and extensively consumed. However LSD has been largely marginalised within the modern discourse across the promise of psychedelics, a course of that’s mirrored within the unusual and even uncanny standing of blotter artwork.
There stays one thing suspect about blotter, a stain that’s each a blessing and a curse. Because the blotter producer Matthew Rick, who began promoting sheets as non-dipped ‘artwork’ collectables at festivals in 1998, places it: ‘[B]lotter is the final underground artwork type that’s going to remain underground, merely since you’re creating one thing that appears like and capabilities like a felony.’ In different phrases, blotter is ontologically illicit; it’s, as Rick says, ‘drug paraphernalia by its very existence’. So at the same time as blotter continues to stoke and replicate client and collector need within the twenty first century, there’s something irredeemably tainted about it, as if the perforations that outline the shape puncture no matter cultural legitimacy it’d acquire. ‘Popular culture can take the sting off of something ultimately, however you possibly can’t take the sting off of these items,’ says Rick. ‘It doesn’t matter how far down the rabbit gap you go. Disney is simply not going to make a blotter version.’
This piece is from Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium (2024) by Erik Davis, printed by MIT Press.
