Did Anti-Drug Propaganda Help Bring About a Psychedelic Renaissance?

By Ryan Grim, Wiley Press. Posted July 20, 2009.

Beginning in the late eighties, children of the most highly educated parents took the lead in acid use. In 1975, kids with uneducated parents used hallucinogens at precisely the same rate as kids of highly educated parents—and both groups used it less than children with moderately educated parents. By 1990, the kids of the highly educated were more than twice as likely to trip.

Meanwhile, kids in the Northeast cracked 13 percent for hallucinogen use in 1996 and 1997 and nearly hit 12 percent for acid in those years—the highest of any subgroup for both categories. Numbers for the West for these years are high, too, with a peak of 8.8 percent LSD use in 1996. Whatever their parents’ educational background, kids who said they wouldn’t be going to college or would be going for fewer than four years dropped acid at a significantly higher rate than others.

Acid’s sixties-era distribution network was there to meet the demand. The Grateful Dead, long known to be something of a psychedelics delivery service, had continued to tour throughout the eighties and dropped a top-ten comeback album, In the Dark, in 1987. The year before, Skeletons from the Closet: The Best of Grateful Dead, which had been released in 1974, earned Platinum certification by finally reaching one million copies sold. The nineties, though, saw sales really take off. In the Dark went double-Platinum in 1995, and the neophyte-friendly Skeletons hit double-Platinum in 1994 and triple-Platinum just six months later, in early 1995. The cultural comeback the Dead made was in evidence following that year’s drug-related death of front man Jerry Garcia, which played out on the cover of Newsweek and was memorialized with congressional speeches. LSD use among high-school and college students peaked at the same time.

College campuses in the early to mid-nineties were dominated by tie-dyes, some of which came from Dead shows, where hard-core fans set up not only T-shirt booths, but also a drug bazaar known simply as the Lot. There, youngsters all over the country could get a night of mind-blowing psychic exploration for as little as five dollars—and often for free. The Dead had company on the road, too. New England–founded jam band Phish and its southern counterpart, Widespread Panic, grew in popularity during the period. So did gatherings such as the Furthur Festival, which featured projects by various members of the Dead and replicated the Lot scene.

Psychedelia, despite the loss of Jerry Garcia, was on the rise.

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Ryan Grim is the senior congressional correspondent for the Huffington Post and can be reached at ryan@huffingtonpost.com. He is author of "This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America (Wiley, 2009).

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