On The Media

The faintly whimsical, nostalgic tone of your interview about the chemist Albert Hoffman, who discovered LSD, set off powerful emotions in me. Your interview got me thinking about the countless scars that hallucinogenic drug use left on millions of children of the “counterculture,” of whom I was one.

As a lifelong Beatles fan, I yield to no one in acknowledging the power of the dreamy aesthetic that drives “Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds.” I note, however, that you played the song as a period piece, and spoke with what seemed to me to be wistful nostalgia for the ethos of the time. That is common in media glances back to the 1960s, and it always hurts. In this context, and for this story, you might have mentioned that the song’s primary author, John Lennon, very nearly erased his identity with massive doses of LSD in the year of “Lucy’s” composition, entered a period of profound depression, and eventually moved on to a life-threatening heroin addiction, from which he escaped in the early 1970s. This escape was due, at least in part, to ample financial resources and a personal support network the vast majority of his fans lacked.

I have to say I feel compassion for Mr. Toropov, am quite aware of the power of the drug to traumatize, and cannot deny his anecdote about Lennon but I would hasten to add that I am perfectly aware of people of my generation (I'm 57) who took liberal amounts of LSD and many other drugs in the '60s and '70s who have perfectly happy lives with respectable jobs, some of local or national prominence.

I do not recommend drug use but know from observation that LSD did not seriously destroy the lives of anywhere near the majority of my contemporaries who used it then. They got over it.

Poor John didn't have the chance, but it sure sounded as if he was on his way with Double Fantasy.