poledriver
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Jul 21, 2005
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LSD blotter art – How illegal drug distribution turned into art
Can illegal drug distribution turn into an artform? Can collecting art get you in jail? And how did a system for labeling illegal substances turned into a way of preserving psychedelic culture’s history and a thriving collector’s’ market? And where can you learn about all that? Answers and a glimpse into almost 50 years of LSD art inside.
Albert Hofmann (11 January 1906 – 29 April 2008) was a Swiss scientist who was the first person to synthesize, ingest, and learn of the psychedelic effects of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), a drug that came to be synonymous with the 50s and 60s beatnik and hippy generations in The USA and worldwide. LSD was legal in the beginning including in The USA until it became illegal in California on October 6, 1966, and other states and countries soon followed.
While it was legal LSD was distributed mostly in liquid form and as pills, capsules, or sometimes dropped onto sugar cubes. It was available for purchase from Sandoz laboratories in Switzerland, where Hofmann worked and many medical applications were under research.
LSD blotter art – The illegal distribution
After the US government made LSD illegal people continued to use LSD, but it was manufactured and distributed through underground illegal channels. A popular way of distributing LSD was called “blotter”. It involved saturating absorbent blotting paper with liquid LSD. Later the papers were perforated along the lines of a grid so that doses could be torn apart easily, and small symbolic pictures were added to the paper to provide clues as to the origin of the LSD that paper contained. Not surprisingly, considering the substance it was used to distribute, the symbolic pictures gradually became creative and amazing designs, later gaining independent existence any many designs have never been used to actually distribute LSD.
COnt -
https://trancentral.tv/2016/08/lsd-blotter-art/
Can illegal drug distribution turn into an artform? Can collecting art get you in jail? And how did a system for labeling illegal substances turned into a way of preserving psychedelic culture’s history and a thriving collector’s’ market? And where can you learn about all that? Answers and a glimpse into almost 50 years of LSD art inside.
Albert Hofmann (11 January 1906 – 29 April 2008) was a Swiss scientist who was the first person to synthesize, ingest, and learn of the psychedelic effects of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), a drug that came to be synonymous with the 50s and 60s beatnik and hippy generations in The USA and worldwide. LSD was legal in the beginning including in The USA until it became illegal in California on October 6, 1966, and other states and countries soon followed.
While it was legal LSD was distributed mostly in liquid form and as pills, capsules, or sometimes dropped onto sugar cubes. It was available for purchase from Sandoz laboratories in Switzerland, where Hofmann worked and many medical applications were under research.
LSD blotter art – The illegal distribution
After the US government made LSD illegal people continued to use LSD, but it was manufactured and distributed through underground illegal channels. A popular way of distributing LSD was called “blotter”. It involved saturating absorbent blotting paper with liquid LSD. Later the papers were perforated along the lines of a grid so that doses could be torn apart easily, and small symbolic pictures were added to the paper to provide clues as to the origin of the LSD that paper contained. Not surprisingly, considering the substance it was used to distribute, the symbolic pictures gradually became creative and amazing designs, later gaining independent existence any many designs have never been used to actually distribute LSD.
COnt -
https://trancentral.tv/2016/08/lsd-blotter-art/
