Recreational Uses 9
Recreational LSD use until then had been almost entirely secretive and private. One of the few exceptions was the rock and light shows put on by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, which featured a punch containing LSD that those attending could drink of as they liked. Kesey had earlier been introduced to the drug by the U.S. Army at Stanford.
Then, on October 16, 1966, California actually did ban LSD. This event occasioned the first of what later came to be known as human be-ins or just plain be-ins, when several thousand people observed the day on both coasts. This was an act of defiance, signaling intent to continue use, and many took LSD as part of this protest. What resulted, among other things, was a good deal of publicity about the colorfulness and gentleness of those who had come out. This led to an even larger gathering in January 1967 in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.
There, on a beautiful, sunny day, LSD was distributed freely among the crowd and an estimated 10,000 people turned on. Leary, Ginsberg, Lenore Kandel (who was being prosecuted at the time for issuing a volume of love poems) and the poet-playwright Michael McClure praised the psychedelics to the accompaniment of local bands formed largely of LSD users, including the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company and the Jefferson Airplane. By the time that vibrant day was over, most of those attending were convinced that San Francisco was soon about to experience a "summer of love."
In the past an emphasis had been placed on the need to prepare oneself for an LSD session. In many of the studies already commented on, the subjects were encouraged to write out an autobiographical account weeks in advance and also submitted to various psychological tests. Frequently they brought photos considered to be especially meaningful for them to the session. And often they spent some of the time under the drug's influence blindfolded and listening to preselected music on stereo headphones. But now, after the visions and joy of those two initial experiments with mass-scale ingestions of LSD, came a much more casual attitude toward LSD use. All over the nation there sprouted gatherings of the tribe, in which thousands would take the drug together and be programed by young minstrels whose music was designed to enhance the trip. Participants were encouraged to freak freely, and for the most part were left alone to do so by civil authorities.
How to describe what followed next?! Previously, LSD had been taken cautiously, but now prudence was jettisoned and many hundreds of thousands took the drug rather freely in doses that earlier would have been considered reckless. Until now, those involved with LSD may have numbered a million, but use spread in what seemed like a chain reaction. And whereas before emphasis had been largely in psychological terms, concerns suddenly widened.
When Bernard Roseman took LSD for the first time, his immediate feeling was how much of this could he take? That thought, no doubt, occurred to many who had been engaged before 1967. But until this time the idea of deliberately swallowing multiple doses had been approached rather timidly, although some individuals had experimented with this concept either by accident or design.
