None of this comes as news to San Francisco fixture Mark McCloud. “Scientists are rediscovering what many see as the substances’ astonishing therapeutic potential.” Psilocybin, MDMA, and LSD “have been steadily making their way back into the lab,” notes Scientific American. “Once dismissed as the dangerous dalliances of the counterculture,” writes Nature, psychedelic drugs are “gaining mainstream acceptance” in clinical treatment. But it has since returned with newfound respectability. government, repressing what the government had itself helped bring into being. Whatever uses it might have had in psychiatric settings - and there were many known at the time - LSD was made illegal in 1968 by the U.S. Not long afterward, Grateful Dead soundman Owsley “Bear” Stanley synthesized “the purest form of LSD ever to hit the street,” writes Rolling Stone, and became the country’s biggest supplier, the “king of acid.” Kesey administered the drug in “Acid Tests” to find out who could handle it (and who couldn’t) after he stole the substance from Army doctors, who themselves administered it as part of the CIA’s MKUltra experiments. Not only did this serve to identify a brand of acid, but by using Blotter Paper, which weighed far less than other mediums, it kept drug dealers who got busted from getting as much mandatory time.When Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters kicked off Haight-Ashbury’s counterculture in the 1960s, LSD was the key ingredient in their potent mix of drugs, the Hell’s Angels, the Beat poets, and their local band The Warlocks (soon to become The Grateful Dead). The logo could have been professionally printed or have been a rubber stamped image. Shortly after, iconic images began to make their way onto the Blotter Paper, which allowed dealers to put their own logo on the acid they were selling. In the early 1970s Blotter Acid began to make an appearance on the streets of San Francisco. The foremost Blotter Art historian, Mark McCloud, suggests that after Owsely Stanley’s pill press was busted, that Blotter Acid began to make its way on to the streets, replacing the pills as the standardized medium. The first blotter sheets were simply white sheets perforated into hits, soon after that, coloured paper was used and the designs began to become more elaborate, many times reflecting the signs of the time. Therefore a drug dealer busted with one dose of acid on a sugar cube that weighed 1 gram would get the same sentence as a dealer caught with 1 gram of LSD crystal, which would represent about 10,000 doses of LSD! It didn’t take a genius to figure out that a new, lightweight, medium for distributing LSD was needed. These laws placed mandatory sentences on drug offenders based on the weight of the substances with which they were caught. Sometime after LSD became illegal, mandatory minimum sentencing was set into place. As a bonus, the dealers would get a kick out of the buzz created by their “brand” of acid. This also served as a form of a validation of authenticity, proving that the dealers were not selling fake LSD. The chemists would make the pills a certain shape or colour as to set them apart from others, especially if they were packaging particularly potent dosages. Dealers began to want their batch of LSD to be recognizable from the others, so they began to invent ways to trademark their acid. It was also sold on anything from sugar cubes to animal crackers. In the 1960s, when LSD was legal, it was distributed in large pills, sometimes called barrels because of their shape. Five Examples of LSD “Blotter Art” from the collection of Mark McCloud
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