LSD / Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg's tape of a December 1965 conversation with the psychologist Joe K. Adams, with Peter Orlovsky present. Adams describes the months-long manic episode that followed an LSD session in 1960 and his involuntary hospitalization, and talks about figures in Bay Area psychedelic research such as Charles Savage and Karl Bowman.

The poet Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) testified on June 14, 1966, before the special Senate Judiciary subcommittee holding hearings on narcotic rehabilitation and LSD on college campuses, with Quentin N. Burdick (1908–1992) presiding. He read a long prepared statement describing his visionary experience of 1948 and his use of peyote, mescaline, LSD, and ayahuasca, then argued from newspaper coverage and the medical literature that LSD's dangers had been exaggerated and that research should be expanded. The record hosts the full printed text, pp. 487–509, including his questioning by Burdick and Jacob K. Javits (1904–1986), his list of proposed research topics (Exhibit No. 76), and the references he put into the record.

A conversation among Leary, Ginsberg, Snyder, and Watts, taped aboard Watts's houseboat and published in San Francisco Oracle no. 7 (February 1967). Hosted here is the opening run of the conversation, in which the four debate dropping out of mainstream society versus working within it, and trace the psychedelic movement's lineage back through earlier utopian and religious dissent. The full conversation continues on to LSD, utopian withdrawal, and post-drop-out economics.