Today in Labor History Today in Labor History April 15, 1943: Albert Hoffman, inventor of LSD, tested his first dose and went for a bike ride. This day is now celebrated as Bicycle Day. “... Little by little I could begin to enjoy the unprecedented colors and plays of shapes that persisted behind my closed eyes. Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me, alternating, variegated, opening and then closing themselves in circles and spirals, exploding in colored fountains, rearranging and hybridizing themselves in constant flux ...” And from that date forward, working class people could finally afford to go on a trip.
Sandoz originally marketed the drug as Delysid and sold it in 100 microgram doses. From the late 1940s, through the early 1960s, the drug was legal and numerous psychologists and researchers began experimenting with it as a form of therapy. Many were willing participants in the CIA’s UKUltra mind control experiments, in which LSD was given to people without their consent or knowledge. Cary Grant was a frequent and enthusiastic user. As early as the late 1940s, anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson became enthusiastic about its potential to unleash a new era of peace and expanded consciousness. The founder of Alcoholic Anonymous was also an early user and said that it was far more effective at treating alcoholism than any other treatment he knew of. Research John Lily, along with Gregory Bateson, began dosing dolphins in the early 1960s, in experiments connected with the U.S. military, in an attempt to learn to communicate with the animals and deploy them as weapons in the cold war.
Hoffman later went on to isolate psilicyben, the active hallucinogenic ingredient in mushrooms, which he also enjoyed experimenting with.
Today in Labor History March 25, 1957: U.S. Customs seized copies of Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl" on obscenity grounds. Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and City Lights manager, Shigeyoshi Murao, were arrested on obscenity charges for publishing and distributing the poem. Howl was inspired, in part, by a terrifying peyote vision Ginsberg had in which the façade of the Sir Francis Drake Hotel, in San Francisco, appeared as the monstrous face of a child-eating demon. The obscenity charges stemmed from homophobic responses to his explicit references to homosexuality. Ginsberg’s first experience with LSD, as well as Kerouac’s and Burroughs’s, was with acid provided by the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, one-time husband of and long-time collaborator with Margaret Mead.