University of Virginia Library's Psychedelic Sixties Page

Covers the Influence, Literature, Experimentation and Unrest of the radical psychedelic 1960s. An interesting smattering of stuff.

The Psychedelic Sixties

Literary Tradition and Social Change

Special Collections Department, Univeristy of Virginia

• Influence

Mission Accomplished!

Opium production surged 61% this year in Afghanistan, the United Nations reported.

Cannabis Chassidis: Recreational Messianism vs. Medicinal Rationality; The problem and virtues of organized religion and other drugs

When	This Sunday Oct 2nd 4 pm – 6 pm Pacific Time
Where	Last Word Books (map)

“Years ago, I came to Jerusalem,
just out of high school,
looking for an authentic religious tradition
for how to smoke marijuana
...rightly, helpfully, more effectively
and more meaningfully.
What I found additionally and instead
was a living culture, wrestling with the mystery
of how to incorporate the exctatic; and the
mystery of the causes for it's repression,
along with alot of brilliant guidance and terrible truths
about the nature of religion, law, idealism and drugs.”

Cannabis Chassidis: The Ancient and Emerging Torah of Drugs (A memoir) details the question and it's exploration: How could it be that something as inherent to modern life as Marijuana, something with a rich history of human usage, has no tradition in Torah, a guidance system that I was raised to understand as encompassing everything good that one should know? There are answers for what IS there in the tradition, rich allusions to herbs and smokes used in different capacitities, and the more interesting answers and questions are about what there isn't in the tradition, and why.

And along the way, the spectrum of an experience of living mystical subculture is explored, and the romantic idealization and redemptive potential of both Psychedelia and Religion are touched and felt deeply, in the context of outstanding communities and individuals who have experienced the glories and the failures of both.
Yoseph Leib travels and studies throughout Jerusalem, New York, and Rainbow Country U.S.A, in search of guidance about how Cannabis and psychedelics have and have not been used in both ancient and emerging Hassidic traditions, and what the way we have related to our desires for medicines, gods, and intoxicants can teach us about how we relate to ourselves, our community, and our G-d. The glorious problem of how what we can learn can set us free, in all kinds of ways.

2000 bookshops have been closed since 2005... :(

via http://www.sheppardsconfidential.com/

Should Kids Be Taught Safe Drug Use in Schools?

Food for thought: is “abstinence only” education as flawed in regard to drugs as it is in regards to sex? (I recommend re-appropriating the slogan “Stop, Drop, and Roll” for drug education.) This comes on the heels of NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s commendable decision to mandate sex ed in the city’s public school system. Via AlterNet:

I applaud the Mayor’s campaign to teach sex education in school. While many parents may hope that their teenagers won’t be sexually active, the reality is that most teenagers will have sex and it is important that they are educated about the risks.

The same principles and goals of sex education should be applied to drug education. While many schools already provide honest sex education that acknowledges the reality that some teens will have sex, our nation’s drug education programs treat abstinence as the sole measure of success and the only acceptable teaching option. This simplistic and unrealistic “education” does not acknowledge the reality that 75% of teens will try alcohol and 50% will try marijuana before they graduate. Instead of giving our teens honest information about drugs, we have police go into schools give them reefer madness...

Read More...

The believing we do something when we do nothing is the first illusion of tobacco. --Emerson

Drunken Poetry Will Be Happening This Monday Night, @ Last Word @ 8:30 PM

Bring all your dead drunk poets and friends.

Amazon.com and New Zealand Government Attempting to Censor Uncle Fester's Secrets of Methamphetamine Manufacture! And Other Reasons to Boycott Amazon

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I Took LSD w/ Groucho Marx

from the 1960's recollections of writer/activist Paul Krassner

I've taken LSD in all kinds of unusual situations:
when I testified at the Chicago Conspiracy Trial;
on the Johnny Carson show - Orson Bean was guest host
I was also sort of a guide for Groucho Marx once.

while I was researching the Manson case I took acid with a few women in the family including Squeaky Fromme and Sandra Good. It was a kind of participatory journalism....Otto Preminger made a movie called Skidoo. It was pro-acid propaganda thinly disguised as a comedy adventure.And the part of God was played by Groucho Marx.

Recently Tim Leary cheerfully admitted to me: "I was fooled by Otto Preminger. He was much hipper than I was." ... Anyway, Ram Dass kept seeking illumination and having his feet kissed by strangers, while I stayed at home and got a call from Groucho Marx.
He was going to be in an Otto Preminger film called Skidoo, and it was pretty much advocating LSD, and he had never tried it but was not only curious but also felt a responsibility to his audience not to steer them wrong so could I get him some pure stuff and would I care to accompany him on the trip?
.... I did not play hard to get.

The acid with which Ram Dass- in his final moments as Dick Alpert failed to get his guru higher was the same acid that I had the honor of taking with Groucho Marx. As I left the bank vault that week, I was breathing slowly and deeply so that I would not laugh my ass off in the lobby.

We ingested those little white tabs one afternoon at the home of an actress in Beverly Hills.

Groucho was interested in the social background of the drug. There were two items that particularly tickled his fancy.

One was about the day acid was outlawed. Hippies were standing around the streets waiting for the exact appointed minute to strike so they could all publicly swallow their LSD the exact second it became illegal. The other was how the tour bus would pass through Haight-Ashbury and passengers would try to take snapshots of the local alien creatures, who in turn would hold mirrors up to the bus windows so that the tourists would see themselves focusing their cameras.

I told Groucho about the first thing I ever sold to the old Steve Allen show. It was a sketch called "Unsung Heroes of Television. " Among the heroes was the individual whose sole job it was to listen intently the whole half hour for somebody to say the secret word on "You Bet your Life and then to drop that decoy duck when the word was said. He told me about one of his favorite contestants "a gentleman with white hair, on in years but a chipper fellow. I inquired as to what he did to retain his sunny disposition. "Well, I'll tell you, Groucho," he says "every morning I get up and I make a choice to be happy that day."

We had long periods of silence and of listening to music. I was accustomed to playing rock 'n' roll while tripping, but the record collection here was all classical and Broadway show albums. After we heard the Bach "Cantata No. 7 Groucho said, "I may be Jewish, but I was seeing the most beautiful visions of Gothic cathedrals. Do you think Bach knew he was doing that?

There was a point when our conversation somehow got into a negative space. Groucho was equally bitter about institutions such as marriage ("like quicksand") and individuals such as Lyndon Johnson ("potato-head") Eventually, I asked, "What gives you hope? Groucho thought for a moment .... . Then he said just one word out loud: "People."

After a while, he started chuckling to himself. I hesitated to interrupt his revelry. Finally he spoke: "I'm really getting quite a kick out of this notion of playing God like a dirty old man in Skidoo. You wanna know why? Do you realize that irreverence and reverence are the same thing?" "Always?" "If they're not, then it's a misuse of your power to make people laugh" And right after he said that, his eyes began to tear.

When he came back from peeing, he said, "Everybody is waiting for miracles to happen. The human body is a goddam miracle." He mentioned, "I had a little crush on Marilyn Monroe when we were making Love Happy - I remember I got a hard-on just talking to her on the set." During a little snack: "I never thought eating a fig would be the biggest thrill of my life." He held and smelled a cigar for a long time but never smoked it.

"Everybody has their own Laurel and Hardy," he mused. "A miniature Laurel and Hardy, one on each shoulder. Your little Oliver Hardy bawls you out-he says, 'Well, this is a fine mess you've gotten us into.' And your little Stan Laurel gets all weepy -"Oh, Ollie, I couldn't help it, I'm sorry, I did the best I could. . . ' "

The year after that, I was heavy into my Manson investigation. During the acid trip with three of his family members Squeaky Fromme, Sandra Good and Brenda McCann I got an even more awesome compliment. Sandy Good had once seen me perform at The Committee in San Francisco. Now she was saying to me, "When people used to ask me what Charlie was like, I would compare him to Lenny Bruce and Paul Krassner." My heart thumped rather strangely.

Sandy had been a civil-rights activist. But Charlie Manson stepped on her eyeglasses, threw away her birth control pills, remolded her personality and transformed her value system. So now she was parroting Charlie's racism and asking me to tell John Lennon that he should get rid of Yoko Ono and "marry his own kind." I've never met Charlie Manson, although I've corresponded with him. But I have heard a tape of his rap, and he definitely used humor as a tool for evil.

For the first time I understood in my guts what Groucho Marx had meant about misusing the power to make people laugh. After our acid trip, I had only a couple of contacts with Groucho.

The first concerned a rumor that he had said "I think the only hope this country has is Nixon's assassination.
I wanted to verify whether he had actually said that. "I deny everything", he joked, then admitting he had indeed said it over a luncheon interview with a now defunct magazine, Flash. "Uh, sorry, Mr. Marx, you're under arrest for threatening the life of the president. I can't tell you how much I enjoyed A Night at the Opera. Here, now, if you'll just slip into these plastic handcuffs...."

Think of this as a piece of combat history. To fully understand the context in which this battle for the will has been taking place, you need only retrace the chronological profile of G. Gordon Liddy from his role as a Poughkeepsie district attorney who raided the Millbrook mansion where LSD was an experimental sacrament to his function as a CIA operative who offered to assassinate Jack Anderson on behalf of the Nixon administration. Had Liddy been given the go ahead, columnist Anderson wouldn't have been around to embarrass the Carter administration into not invading Iran, and we might be in the middle of World War III at this very moment.

I had assigned Robert Anton Wilson to investigate the game being played at Millbrook. In my capacity as standup comic and drug virgin, I had been poking fun at all the highs I'd never tried. Wilson came back and presented me with our cover story, "Timothy Leary and His Psychological H-Bomb." After it was published Leary called to invite me for a weekend at Millbrook. Working with him were Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert. Somehow, despite all the accoutrements of Eastern religion, the scene was quite American. Even this top level of the psychedelic hierarchy consisted of a Catholic, a Protestant and a Jew.

Yet they were performing a cosmic task, this trio of Ph.D. dropouts, helping to spread the expansion of consciousness in the middle of a sadomasochistic empire whose perpetuation depended upon the mass contraction of consciousness. Originally, the CIA had intended to use LSD as one more means of manipulating the population. That scenario backfired. A generation who trusted their friends more than their government deprogrammed themselves from the society that had shaped them, and then reprogrammed themselves , into an infinite variety of incarnations. The think tanks had not formulated a contingency plan for this counterculture that was refusing to be brainwashed into becoming consumer and military zombies. This -mutation!-would certainly have to be discredited.

LSD influenced music, painting, spirituality and the stock market. Tim Leary let me listen in on a call from a Wall Street broker thanking him for turning him onto acid because it had given him the courage to sell short.

JONATHAN OTT’S HOME & BELONGINGS DESTROYED IN A FIRE

A tragic fire by arson has burned our dear friend Jonathan Ott’s lovely home to the ground. He was lecturing in Spain at the time and he is personally safe, but homeless and shaken. This is a tremendous loss, and Jonathan could use your help right now. He must relocate.

In his own words:

"[My] home was completely burned, destroying everything that was most important: laboratory, hydroelectric system, custom-built and -designed electric motorcycle and, for the crowning touch, [the arsonist] tried to burn [my] library, one of the best private collections on ethnomedicine that exist[s]. Signed, personal copies of some of Albert Hofmann’s books were even used as fuel to ignite expensive laboratory equipment! While the humidity of the cloud-forest saved the books, the house was rendered uninhabitable and without power; the laboratory unusable.

“It is the attempted book-burning which most outrages me and, I think, will outrage others.

“For that reason, I am dedicating my full attention first to saving the books—I now have 53 boxes banded and stashed, and there will be perhaps 100 to 125 in total. This is hard and dirty work, but I can see light at the end of the tunnel.

“So I am fucked in a major way and the rest of this year will be devoted to moving to Colombia and starting over there. I go to Colombia to lecture in May and hope to have library and lab packed up by then. I have to start over again for the 4th time, but will land on my feet and in 2 years’ time be better off than before.

How often have we heard Jonathan referred to as the leading authority on entheogens (a word he jointly coined)? His writings are considered the gold standard of accuracy. And those of us who know him personally have experienced his endless generosity, wit, and talent. He is one of the legends in our midst to whom we owe so much. Now is our chance to pay him back in his hour of need. Here is what we can do...

Jonathan is currently homeless but staying with neighbor friends. Each of our efforts, however small, when combined will make a huge difference for our esteemed friend and colleague Jonathan. He needs financial help for shipping expenses and various relocation costs right now. Take a moment to send him a message and some support. Please forward this request to your contacts and post on sympathetic web sites. [Get PDF Flyer (English & Spanish).]

Please visit the original article if you are interested in donating to Ott's noble cause.

Denver Bookstore Cannot Be Forced to Name Buyer of Drug Manufacturing Books, Court Says

This is from 4.12.2002, but I thought it was cool and would compliment our Loompanics Collection. Of course, the original offense occurred prior to good 'ole Nine double one, so The U.S.A. P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act (did you know that's an acronym?) has kicked in with officious anti-terror. Just another reason for booksellers and librarians to destroy their records on a regular basis if you ask me. Or flat out refuse to fork them over to the F.B.I. Here's an interesting little update on that sort of shite.

One of the country's most prominent independent bookstores, the Tattered Cover in Denver, has scored a victory in a case pitting First Amendment freedoms against drug war law enforcement imperatives. In a Monday ruling, the Colorado Supreme Court held that police erred when they attempted to force the Tattered Cover to reveal the name of the person who ordered two books on drug manufacture found at the scene of a raided drug laboratory.

In the unanimous ruling, Colorado's highest court held that both the First Amendment and the Colorado constitution "protect an individual's right to purchase books anonymously, free from government interference." The ruling overturned a state appeals court decision that ordered the bookstore to comply with a police search warrant seeking the name of the book purchaser.

The case originated with a raid on a suburban Denver trailer home by the North Metro Drug Task Force in March 2000. Agents found a meth lab. Outside the trailer, agents also found a mailing envelope and invoice for the two books in question, "Advanced Techniques of Clandestine Psychedelic and Amphetamine Manufacture" by Uncle Fester and "The Construction and Operation of Clandestine Drug Labs" by Jack B. Nimble, both published by Loompanics Unlimited, a Port Townsend, WA, publisher. But the invoice contained only the trailer's address, not the name of the book buyer. Police obtained a search warrant to force the Tattered Cover to reveal the name of the book buyer, but when bookstore owner Joyce Meskins refused to comply, authorities agreed not to serve the warrant until the courts had a chance to decide the issue.

Now, the state's ultimate court has decided, and booksellers' groups and civil libertarians are claiming a victory for privacy. "We think this is a very, very important decision because it is the strongest opinion on the issue of protecting customer privacy in bookstores that has come down so far," said Chris Finan, president of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, which provided financial support and wrote an amicus brief in the case.

"I think the decision will be upheld as the decision to go to when other courts confront this issue," Tattered Cover attorney Dan Recht told the Denver Post.

The case is the first of its kind to be decided by a state supreme court. Because the decision is based at least in part on provisions of the Colorado constitution, it cannot be threatened by federal court rulings.

Meskins told the New York Times the case had been demanding, but was worth the effort. "Two years is a long time to be working on this," said Meskins. "There is an implied understanding when an individual goes into a library or a bookstore with respect to the privacy of their reading material," she said.

The court agreed. "We hold that the city has failed to demonstrate that its need for this evidence is sufficiently compelling to outweigh the harmful effects of the search warrant," the court held. The ruling also referred repeatedly to the "chilling effect" of search warrants issued without prior hearings.

"Bookstores are places where a citizen can explore ideas, receive information, and discover the myriad perspectives on every topic imaginable," wrote the court. "When a person buys a book at a bookstore, he engages in activity protected by the First Amendment because he is exercising his right to read and receive ideas and information."

"Hooray," said Michael Hoy, owner of Loompanics. "I couldn't be happier with the court's ruling. If you allow that sort of thing to go on, then nobody will feel secure," he told DRCNet. "This is just another example of trying to use the war on drugs to erode our rights. If a cop can't make a case without subpoenaing a bookstore, then he doesn't have a case."

Uncle Fester and Jack B. Nimble were not available for comment.

Thanks www.stopthedrugwar.org!

Extensive Collection of William S. Burroughs Book Covers

This site has an EXTENSIVE collection of covers to William S. Burroughs from around the world.

thanks to Klintron

Don't Go Bust: A turncoat narc offers tips on how to move your weed

He looks like a good cop. He's got the 'stache, the short-cropped hair, the pushed-out chest and the shiny badge. He sounds like a good cop too; drawled and official. He's got a TV reporter's microphone in his face and a brick of marijuana in his hand, and he's answering questions—not in the "I just accidentally Tasered an old lady" kind of way, but with a grin of accomplishment. The total bust was in the neighborhood of 275 pounds.

This is the old Barry Cooper. Top cop. Total prick. He claims more than 300 felony drug arrests during his eight years as an officer in Gladewater, Big Sandy and Odessa, and a former supervisor says he was damn good at his job, even if he doesn't agree with Cooper's latest get-rich idea.

The video cuts to a decade later, a few months ago. "That was me, Barry Cooper," he says, "top narcotics officer." His hair is longer. That 'stache is now a full-on goatee. The top cop has become a dude. "I'm going to show you places that I never found marijuana hidden." He talks with his hands, like a mellowed-out P.T. Barnum. "I'm going to teach you exactly how narcotic-detector dogs are trained, and I'm going to answer that age-old question: Do coffee grounds really work?"

It's quite the pitch: Former drug warrior sees the light, goes to the dark side and makes a video, Never Get Busted Again, with shady tips on how to fool the fuzz. Stoners rejoice. The new beginning of the end of prohibition is near...Read More...

Thanks Ben from: