Concluding Remarks

of an underground acid chemist...

What has been the net result of our illegal efforts? There have been quite a few LSD chemists working in hideaway labs over the decades, all of whom firmly believed (and still believe)¹ in the overall benefits of a general availability of psychedelics. We all have continuously heard back from friends, and friends of friends, that our product provided positive, astonishing and sometimes life-changing experiences for a great many. Considering the number of doses collectively produced, there should be millions of us who credit one or more psychedelic experiences with having shown us some of the secrets about life and the universe. The secrets, of course, are things hidden in plain view, the reality that only augmented salience detection has a possibility of revealing.

But what of the negative aspects of psychedelic use? Freak-outs, flashbacks, psychotic episodes, chromosome damage, cancer, Charles Manson events... Careful evaluation by those capable of such have shown that most of the negative reporting has been the propaganda so enthusiastically issued by moral entrepreneurs, and magnified by media outlets interested in selling infotainment and garnering high-paying advertising. And where we can see disturbing events or personal difficulties with psychedelic experience it should now be obvious that the total non-specificity of what a psychedelic drug “causes” shows the innate and true source of the difficulties, and that the negative propaganda itself has often been the cause of the negative event or experience. To be a little flippant, the more the media insists that people tend to jump out of tenth-floor windows under LSD, the more likely that it might actually happen once in a while. There seems to be only one confirmed case of LSD-induced window-jumping before the propaganda mill got into full operation, and that was of Frank Olsen, and it seems now from what has been revealed in the book² that he did not jump but was pushed. Before the period of mindless propaganda starting in the mid-1960s, all serious observers had noted the remarkable safety of psychedelics, even when used outside of the research programs.

So has all this psychedelic voyaging produced a better world? Aside from the personal enlightenment of the millions of individuals what do we have as a long term benefit? True, for a time we grew in strength, pressured for social advances, sometimes with success, even through the thick and thin of the assassinations, student shootings and imprisonments, the dirty tricks and spying by Hoover’s FBI... Then the Vietnam War ended, we were naïve to think it due to our resistance. Nevertheless we youngsters wanted to follow our bliss and largely dispersed, thinking some sort of victory had been achieved.

Hardly. It was during this period that the seeds of the neoliberal, neoconservative movement began their morbid germination. It seemed as if the old moneyed interests, the war profiteers, the old guard Power Elite, had declared the end of “peace and love” and began agitating for the return of normality, “war and hate.” And, just look around, they have succeeded mightily. A dark suspicion indeed, but perhaps the Sixties actually stimulated the rise of neoconservatism. And now our main hope is that the tool that helped us to awaken might come in handy in awakening them from their moral coma. Well, stranger things have happened.

Peter Webster

MAY 1, 2026

The Kosmos.

1. See for example the recent documentary film The Sunshine Makers.

2. A Terrible Mistake