Counterculture By the mid-1960s, the youth
countercultures in California, particularly in San Francisco, had widely adopted the use of hallucinogenic drugs, including LSD. The first major underground LSD factory was established by
Owsley Stanley. Around this time, the
Merry Pranksters, associated with novelist
Ken Kesey, organized the
Acid Tests, events in San Francisco involving LSD consumption, accompanied by light shows and improvised music. Their activities, including cross-country trips in a psychedelically-decorated bus and interactions with major figures of the beat movement, were later documented in
Tom Wolfe's
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968). In San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, the Psychedelic Shop was opened in January 1966 by brothers Ron and Jay Thelin to promote the safe use of LSD. This shop played a significant role in popularizing LSD in the area and establishing
Haight-Ashbury as the epicenter of the hippie counterculture. The Thelins also organized the
Love Pageant Rally in Golden Gate Park in October 1966, protesting against California's ban on LSD. A similar movement developed in London, led by British academic
Michael Hollingshead, who first tried LSD in America in 1961. After experiencing LSD and interacting with notable figures such as
Aldous Huxley,
Timothy Leary, and
Richard Alpert, Hollingshead played a key role in the famous LSD research at Millbrook before moving to New York City for his experiments. In 1965, he returned to the UK and founded the World Psychedelic Center in Chelsea, London.
Art and music Art Blotter art Blotter art is an art form printed on perforated sheets of absorbent
blotting paper infused with liquid LSD. The delivery method gained popularity following the banning of the
hallucinogen LSD in the late 1960s. The use of graphics on blotter sheets originated as an
underground art form in the early 1970s, sometimes to help identify the dose, maker, or batch of LSD.
LSD art noted similarities between paintings made under the influence of the drug and those made by schizophrenics. LSD art is any
art or visual displays inspired by
psychedelic experiences and
hallucinations known to follow the ingestion of LSD (also known colloquially as acid). Artists and scientists have been interested in the effect of LSD on drawing and painting since it first became available for legal use and general consumption.
Music newspaper
Helix, 1967. The influence of LSD in the realms of music and art became pronounced in the 1960s, especially through the Acid Tests and related events involving bands like the
Grateful Dead,
Jefferson Airplane, and
Big Brother and the Holding Company. San Francisco-based artists such as
Rick Griffin,
Victor Moscoso, and
Wes Wilson contributed to this movement through their psychedelic poster and album art.
The Grateful Dead, in particular, became central to the culture of "Deadheads", with their music heavily influenced by LSD. Psychedelic music of the 1960s often sought to replicate the LSD experience, incorporating exotic instrumentation, electric guitars with effects pedals, and elaborate studio techniques. Artists and bands utilized instruments like sitars and tablas, and employed studio effects such as backward tapes, panning, and phasing. Songs such as
John Prine's "Illegal Smile" and the Beatles' "
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" have been associated with LSD, although the latter's authors denied such claims. Contemporary artists influenced by LSD include
Keith Haring in the visual arts, various
electronic dance music creators, and the
jam band Phish. The 2018
Leo Butler play
All You Need is LSD is inspired by the author's interest in the history of LSD.
Legal status The
United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances of 1971 mandates that signing parties, including the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and most of Europe, prohibit LSD. Enforcement of these laws varies by country. The convention allows medical and scientific research with LSD.
Australia In
Australia, LSD is classified as a
Schedule 9 prohibited substance under the
Poisons Standard (February 2017), indicating it may be abused or misused and its manufacture, possession, sale, or use should be prohibited except for approved research purposes. In Western Australia, the Misuse of Drugs Act 1981 provides guidelines for possession and trafficking of substances like LSD.
Canada In
Canada, LSD is listed under
Schedule III of the
Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (CDSA). Unauthorized possession and trafficking of the substance can lead to significant legal penalties.
United Kingdom In the
United Kingdom, LSD is a
Class A drug under the
Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, making unauthorized possession and trafficking punishable by severe penalties. The Runciman Report and Transform Drug Policy Foundation have made recommendations and proposals regarding the legal regulation of LSD and other psychedelics.
United States In the
United States, LSD is classified as a
Schedule I controlled substance under the
Controlled Substances Act of 1970, making its manufacture, possession, and distribution illegal without a DEA license. The law considers LSD to have a high potential for abuse, no legitimate medical use, and to be unsafe even under medical supervision. The US Supreme Court case Neal v. United States (1995) clarified the sentencing guidelines related to LSD possession.
Oregon decriminalized personal possession of small amounts of drugs, including LSD, in February 2021, and
California has seen legislative efforts to decriminalize psychedelics.
Mexico Mexico decriminalized the possession of small amounts of drugs, including LSD, for personal use in 2009. The law specifies possession limits and establishes that possession is not a crime within designated quantities.
Czech Republic In the
Czech Republic, possession of "amount larger than small" of LSD is criminalized, while possession of smaller amounts is a misdemeanor. The definition of "amount larger than small" is determined by judicial practice and specific regulations.
Illicit supply chain Production An active dose of LSD is very minute, allowing a large number of doses to be synthesized from a comparatively small amount of raw material. Twenty-five kilograms of precursor
ergotamine tartrate can produce 5–6kg of pure crystalline LSD; this corresponds to around 50–60million doses at 100μg. Because the masses involved are so small, concealing and transporting illicit LSD is much easier than smuggling
cocaine,
cannabis, or other illegal drugs. Manufacturing LSD requires laboratory equipment and experience in the field of
organic chemistry. It takes two to three days to produce 30 to 100 grams of pure compound. It is believed that LSD is not usually produced in large quantities, but rather in a series of small batches. This technique minimizes the loss of precursor chemicals in case a step does not work as expected.
Forms LSD is produced in crystalline form and is then mixed with
excipients or redissolved for production in ingestible forms. Liquid solution is either distributed in small vials or, more commonly, sprayed onto or soaked into a distribution medium. Historically, LSD solutions were first sold on sugar cubes, but practical considerations forced a change to
tablet form. Appearing in 1968 as an orange tablet measuring about 6mm across, "Orange Sunshine" acid was the first largely available form of LSD after its possession was made illegal.
Tim Scully, a prominent chemist, made some of these tablets, but said that most "Sunshine" in the USA came by way of Ronald Stark, who imported approximately thirty-five million doses from Europe. Over some time, tablet dimensions, weight, shape and concentration of LSD evolved from large (4.5–8.1mm diameter), heavyweight (≥150μg), round, high concentration (90–350μg/tab) dose units to small (2.0–3.5mm diameter) lightweight (as low as 4.7μg/tab), variously shaped, lower concentration (12–85μg/tab, average range 30–40μg/tab) dose units. LSD tablet shapes have included cylinders, cones, stars, spacecraft, and heart shapes. The smallest tablets became known as "Microdots". After tablets came "computer acid" or "blotter paper LSD", typically made by dipping a preprinted sheet of
blotting paper into an LSD/water/alcohol solution. Authorities have encountered the drug in other forms—including powder or crystal, and capsule.
Blotters Blotter art designs printed on blotter paper can serve to identify dose strengths, different batches, or makers. On the other hand, blotters without art may be considered safer by some, since there is no guarantee that the
printer ink used in clandestine production is edible or non-toxic for long-term exposure, and it is also possible for unscrupulous dealers to mimic reputable blotter art designs in order to boost sales.
Distribution LSD manufacturers and traffickers in the United States can be categorized into two groups: A few large-scale producers, and an equally limited number of small, clandestine chemists, consisting of independent producers who, operating on a comparatively limited scale, can be found throughout the country. As a group, independent producers are of less concern to the
Drug Enforcement Administration than the large-scale groups because their product reaches only local markets. In the second half of the 20th century, dealers and chemists loosely associated with the
Grateful Dead like
Owsley Stanley,
Nicholas Sand, Karen Horning, Sarah Maltzer, "Dealer McDope", and
Leonard Pickard played an essential role in distributing LSD.
Mimics Since 2005, law enforcement in the United States and elsewhere has seized several chemicals and combinations of chemicals in blotter paper which were sold as LSD mimics, including
DOB, a mixture of
DOC and
DOI,
25I-NBOMe, and a mixture of
DOC and
DOB. Many mimics are toxic in comparatively small doses, or have extremely different safety profiles. Many street users of LSD are often under the impression that blotter paper which is actively hallucinogenic can only be LSD because that is the only chemical with low enough doses to fit on a small square of blotter paper. While it is true that LSD requires lower doses than most other hallucinogens, blotter paper is capable of absorbing a much larger amount of material. The DEA performed a
chromatographic analysis of blotter paper containing
2C-C which showed that the paper contained a much greater concentration of the active chemical than typical LSD doses, although the exact quantity was not determined. Blotter LSD mimics can have relatively small dose squares; a sample of blotter paper containing
DOC seized by
Concord, California police had dose markings approximately 6mm apart. Several deaths have been attributed to 25I-NBOMe.
Notable individuals Some notable individuals have commented publicly on their experiences with LSD. Some of these comments date from the era when it was legally available in the US and Europe for non-medical uses, and others pertain to
psychiatric treatment in the 1950s and 1960s. Still others describe experiences with illegal LSD, obtained for philosophic, artistic, therapeutic, spiritual, or recreational purposes. •
W. H. Auden, the poet, said, "I myself have taken mescaline once and L.S.D. once. Aside from a slight schizophrenic dissociation of the I from the Not-I, including my body, nothing happened at all." He also said, "LSD was a complete frost. … What it does seem to destroy is the power of communication. I have listened to tapes done by highly articulate people under LSD, for example, and they talk absolute drivel. They may have seen something interesting, but they certainly lose either the power or the wish to communicate." He also said, "Nothing much happened but I did get the distinct impression that some birds were trying to communicate with me." •
James Cameron, the Canadian filmmaker, has said he experimented with LSD during his college years. •
Daniel Ellsberg, an American peace activist, says he has had several hundred experiences with psychedelics. •
Richard Feynman, a notable physicist at
California Institute of Technology, tried LSD during his professorship at Caltech. Feynman largely sidestepped the issue when dictating his anecdotes; he mentions it in passing in the "O Americano, Outra Vez" section. •
Jerry Garcia stated in a July 3, 1989 interview for
Relix Magazine, in response to the question "Have your feelings about LSD changed over the years?," "They haven't changed much. My feelings about LSD are mixed. It's something that I both fear and that I love at the same time. I never take any psychedelic, have a psychedelic experience, without having that feeling of, "I don't know what's going to happen." In that sense, it's still fundamentally an enigma and a mystery." •
Bill Gates implied in an interview with
Playboy that he tried LSD during his youth. •
Aldous Huxley, author of
Brave New World, became a user of psychedelics after moving to
Hollywood. He was at the forefront of the counterculture's use of psychedelic drugs, which led to his 1954 work
The Doors of Perception. Dying from cancer, he asked his wife on 22 November 1963 to inject him with 100μg of LSD. He died later that day. •
Steve Jobs, co-founder and former CEO of
Apple Inc., said, "Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life." •
Ernst Jünger, German writer and philosopher, throughout his life had experimented with
drugs such as
ether,
cocaine, and
hashish; and later in life he used
mescaline and LSD. These experiments were recorded comprehensively in
Annäherungen (1970,
Approaches). The novel
Besuch auf Godenholm (1952,
Visit to Godenholm) is clearly influenced by his early experiments with mescaline and LSD. He met with LSD inventor
Albert Hofmann and they took LSD together several times. Hofmann's memoir
LSD, My Problem Child describes some of these meetings. • In a 2004 interview,
Paul McCartney said that
The Beatles' songs "
Day Tripper" and "
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" were inspired by LSD trips.
John Lennon,
George Harrison, and
Ringo Starr also used the drug, although McCartney cautioned that "it's easy to overestimate the influence of drugs on the Beatles' music." •
Michel Foucault had an LSD experience with Simeon Wade in
Death Valley and later wrote "it was the greatest experience of his life, and that it profoundly changed his life and his work." According to Wade, as soon as he came back to Paris, Foucault scrapped the second History of Sexuality's manuscript, and totally rethought the whole project. •
Kary Mullis is reported to credit LSD with helping him develop
DNA amplification technology, for which he received the
Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993. •
Carlo Rovelli, an Italian
theoretical physicist and writer, has credited his use of LSD with sparking his interest in theoretical physics. •
Oliver Sacks, a
neurologist famous for writing best-selling case histories about his patients' disorders and unusual experiences, talks about his own experiences with LSD and other perception altering chemicals, in his book,
Hallucinations. •
Alexander Shulgin, American chemist, told Albert Hofmann that he preferred LSD to
2C-B. •
Matt Stone and
Trey Parker, creators of the TV series
South Park, claimed to have shown up at the
72nd Academy Awards, at which they were nominated for Best Original Song, under the influence of LSD. ==Research==