Acid Hype: American News Media and the Psychedelic Experience by Stephen Siff (review)

The psychedelic drug LSD has been remembered in the popular mind as well as in the scholarship as a controversial chemical that was consumed in the 1960s by young counterculturists looking to alter their brain chemistry to revamp American society. They were aided by a handful of elders like the ex-Harvard professors Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, who were equally impressed by the drug and promoted psychedelics as life-changing substances that would allow their fellow Americans to “drop out” of their mental conditioning and ultimately change the world for the better.

LSD, then, has been typically associated with deviance, utopianism, radicalism, and flamboyant bohemianism. Although some scholars have tempered this notion by focusing away from the turbulent sixties and examined its function as an adjunct in psychiatry, its discovery by such prominent intellectuals as Aldous Huxley, or its use in covert Central Intelligence Agency research programs earlier on, little has been written on its much broader cultural spreading. By focusing on the media coverage of psychedelic drugs from the mid-1950s onward, Stephen Siff sheds much light on a hitherto unexplored facet of psychedelia that significantly reshapes its historicization and firmly places it in the “long sixties” tradition that transcends the artificial barriers of the decade.

Several books have examined the role of the media in demonizing illicit drugs at various moments in history—from the Prohibition-era campaigns against cocaine and opiates, to the repudiation of crack, MDMA, or methamphetamine at the end of the twentieth century. But as Siff argues, LSD and psychedelics enjoyed a markedly different fate. The media depicted the psychedelic experience in mostly favorable terms by “taking readers or viewers on the mind-blowing experience of a psychedelic drug trip. To accomplish this, journalists pushed against formal constraints, introducing trick photographic effects, artistic renditions, literary flights of fancy, and extended narration of internal drug effects” (10). As a result, LSD reached millions of Americans “who had no connection to the obscure experimental drug and no natural inclination to seek information about it on their own” (11)—much to the dismay of several medical doctors who blamed the media for its distorted and overenthusiastic reporting that allowed the drug to trickle out of their laboratories. Only in the second part of the decade did the press begin to echo concerns about youthful and countercultural LSD use. After the 1960s, the LSD hype waned when psychedelics became targeted by the “war on drugs” and it was classified as a dangerous narcotic with no medical value whatsoever.

But why and how did LSD initially enjoy such a different treatment in the media? Arguably the book’s most significant contribution is the focus on the cultural context of the time when LSD made its dramatic appearance in the press. For almost half a century, drastic censorship discouraged the reporting of the effects of illicit drugs like cannabis, cocaine, or heroin. But in the early 1950s scientists claimed to have found a drug that showed promise for treating mental illness such as schizophrenia or alcoholism. Moreover, the publication of Huxley’s chemical musings (The Doors of Perception in 1954 and Heaven and Hell in 1956) vividly and eloquently described the psychedelic experience against a backdrop of harsh restrictions. Such a stellar endorsement of LSD and mescaline along with their great promise for psychiatry created a breach for the media: at last, here was the chance to depict the effects of vision-inducing drugs and entertain readers with fantastic explorations into the uncharted territories of the human mind. Without this new journalistic license, it is well worth wondering how the LSD story might have unfolded.

Siff also underscores the role Henri Luce, who tried LSD under medical supervision, played in the promotion of the psychedelic experience in the 1950s. The conservative owner...