THE TRUTH ABOUT ACID CASUALTIES:
Bankruptcy is not the only thing that proceeds gradually, and then suddenly. While Syd Barrett may have appeared fine in an interview in May 1967, his teetering mental state would change drastically by the summer. Locking himself in his bedroom for days, the formerly placid frontman of Pink Floyd became crudely violent, on one occasion smashing a mandolin over a girlfriend’s head. “This angelic boy became this… moody, impossible to work with, violent man,” said his friend David Gale. Initially, Barrett’s antics were exoticised as the floridities of a ‘mad artist’. While testimonies vary, many blamed, at least in part, his excessive use of LSD.
Barrett is the main case study of the “acid casualty”: the archetypal subject who, after a few too many trips, is said to endure a mental collapse from which they may never return. His story is frequently shared as a parable in online forums such as Reddit, which is a recruitment pool for psychedelic studies. And while attitudes around psychedelics have softened in recent years, this meme still lurks subtly within the public consciousness. One doesn’t have to ask too many baby boomers before someone shares a story, perhaps of a friend from school or university, who got lost ashore on the other side.
The first recorded reference I could find was in 1974, from Changes magazine. A passage spurns the “unique contemporary type: that kind of burnt-out acid casualty who ends every sentence with ‘Man’”. Amid the Nixonian disappointments of the Seventies, the acid casualty was a way to culturally dismiss the psychedelic ruptures of the Sixties. No longer an agent for spiritual awakening or a wonder treatment, LSD was cast as a trigger for madness and a tool for mind control. Many casualties were reported in the press: Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac, Roky Erickson of the 13th Floor Elevators, Arthur Lee of Love, and Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys, who suggests his LSD experiments “f*cked with his brain”.
Another near-acid casualty was John Lennon. As Ian MacDonald wrote in his 2005 book Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties:
Leaving aside the desirability of a world peopled by passive adherents of ‘the cosmic giggle’ (and passing over the tenuous link between meaninglessness and peacefulness), there is, contrary to Leary’s assurances, no guarantee of predictable results from LSD, which is capable of inducing anything from suicidal self-negation to paranoid megalomania. All that is certain is that if you exhort people to sacrifice their sense of self to a drug, the chances of disaster are high. Accordingly, as the use of LSD spread under Leary’s influence, a trail of ‘acid casualties’ followed in its wake – individuals who had left their identity in some uncharted zone of inner space and were now incapable of functioning in the supposedly illusory real world. Among those thus permanently disabled over the next few years were some of the most sensitive and talented people in pop. John Lennon nearly became one of them.
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According to those who knew him around this time, his LSD intake was so enormous that he was almost permanently tripping.
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By late 1967 — the period of ‘Across the Universe’ — Lennon had come so close to erasing his identity with LSD that The Beatles’ publicist Derek Taylor had to risk a powerful therapeutic ‘trip’ with him in which he went through the group’s songs pointing out to their dazed author which ones he’d written and how good they were. Yet, while Lennon’s love for Ono helped him escape the debilitating clutches of acid, it was a fragile détente and, within a year, wounded by hostile media coverage, the couple were experimenting not merely with artistic conventions but with heroin.
There were so many acid casualties by the time that I was a teenager, that it was obvious that was not a drug to be experimented with. Unfortunately, far too many people in the 1960s learned that the hard way, and many never recovered.
