chaotopia

  If you’re interested in the history of psychedelics you’ll probably have read Lee and Shlain’s Acid Dreams and Stevens’ Storming Heaven for the American experience, and Andy Roberts’ Albion Dreaming and Acid Drops for the UK history, but I bet you’ve not read much about acid in South America. Or China, or Pakistan, or Israel.  In this collection we get a massive broadening of history.  I heard about the book via UK's excellent acid historian Andy Roberts, who told me my name was in it, in an article about acid and anarchism in the 1970s. This was something I wrote in 2015 for a local history website about the Broomhall area of Sheffield, where I lived in the early 1970s. For six months I was a member of a commune, in a 3-bedroom terraced house, with people who were active in the UK anarchist scene. Many of whom were keen on LSD, which we had a plentiful supply of.  So I had to buy the book. It was a very odd feeling to re-read quotes from my article in which ou...

This novel starts out with the protagonist having a very hard time. He is skint and mentally ill. He gets a new psychiatrist who is involved in radical experimentation with psychedelic medicines. Some of which will be familiar, and others not. The story engages with one of the biggest issues in psychedelic healing, or any kind of mental therapy - to what society are we returning these ‘healed’ people, and how much of their distress was down to what is happening in the world, the shitstorm of the Neoliberal Empire? And further, might a 'healee' actually be a person who has something other people do not? Might the healing be ‘just’ a side-effect, not the most important part of the transformation? If healing is the icing on the cake, what is the cake?  Another issue in the tale is the old dream, simply articulated in the lines of Country Joe and the Fish’s classic track ‘Bass Strings’, that if we only took enough acid often enough, we’d never come down. It did seem like this was r...