Re-Creational Uses 13
Then there was the charge by Maimon Cohen and colleagues, which first appeared in 1967, that LSD produced chromosomal damage. It was widely felt that those persisting in this usage were just indulging their senses without any regard for their offspring. By now most early LSD researchers had beat a strategic retreat into allied, but nondrug, areas. And as a result, it took some time before it became clear that nobody could duplicate the original findings. The first reports, as it turned out, had been gravely defective -- sampling mentally ill patients who, while it was true that they had been given LSD, had also been given large amounts of chlorpromazine and chlordiazepoxide. Both of these drugs have now been established to be definite chromosome breakers. Nonetheless, this erroneous evaluation of LSD caused many people to give up using the drug.
Finally, in enumerating the factors causing the recession of the first LSD wave, it should be mentioned that by the beginning of the 1970s many of the goals enunciated with enthusiasm only a few years before had been only partially achieved. In the flush of those earlier vision-filled days of massive group-tripping, many failed to see how hard it would be to bring the hopes of that time into the physical plane and that this had to be done step by step.
Earlier there had been a feeling that by way of flower power and the so-called Children's Crusade of that time, a new human order would come to fruition before long. It is difficult now to believe the expectations and fervor that had developed by then. In the political realm, wherein many of these hopes lay, the defeat of "Clean Gene" McCarthy and the ascension of Nixon for two terms, the crushing of revolutionary forces in Czechoslovakia and in France, and other discouraging world events dashed the hopes and commitments of many. No doubt the breakup of the Beatles and the deaths of Hendrix, Joplin and Morrison all became socially disillusioning factors. The upshot was that during the early 1970s many former LSD users had come to reassess their posture and decided to maintain a considerably lower profile.
During this phase, much of the collective feeling went out of the LSD experience and those still using LSD began to have less frequent and more private trips. Many users from that earlier period, however, continued to carry a lot of that previous intellectual baggage with them.
Those entering the LSD subculture in the mid-1970s were for the most part quite young and without much in the way of an LSD background. Their activities much more resembled the scene of the early 1960s. They were much more inclined to use the drug recreationally, without any specific purpose in mind.
For the diehards and these new initiates, acid continued to flow through the 1970s, but with little now being given away. The major manufacturing efforts were producing computer acid (so called because it came on blotter paper the size of a dollar, in five rows of 20 hits each), Microdots (tiny yellow and purple spheres) and Windowpane (also named Clearlight, with the LSD embedded in one-quarter-inch squares of gelatin). Lots of other so-called blotters (e.g., Mr. Natural and Red Rose) came down the pike to satisfy late 1970s demands.
