THE ART OF ACID – by Michelle Lhooq and Erik Davis

Hitting ya’ll with a rare double-punch this week! Following our last subscriber-exclusive post on the sickest LSD tabs ever made—which you should definitely peep if you haven’t yet—I caught up with one of my favorite galaxy brains in the psychedelic game, Erik Davis, for a more in-depth interview about all things acid. Further down we have links to my latest reporting on psychedelic news, a notable eco-rave coming up this weekend, and… streetwear-inspired fentanyl testing strips. Like and share if you’re feeling this, tagging @ravenewworldwide on IG so I can see it 😉 — Michelle

Last spring, I joined a colorful cast of acid heads shuffling into the indie music venue Zebulon in Los Angeles to hear stories of LSD heists, psychedelic cabals, and other countercultural lore. The occasion was the launch of Blotter—an illustrated book by countercultural scholar Erik Davis that charts the under-reported history of LSD blotter art. Blotters, in case you’re wondering, are highly-absorbent pieces of square paper that liquid acid is dropped on, and they are usually decorated with pop cultural iconography like flying saucers, cartoon characters, and other tongue-in-cheek or trippy images. The audience at the event did not disappoint: as I sat at the bar drinking Diet Cokes, an animated hippie sidled up and whispered RFK conspiracies in my ear. In the crowd, I spotted long-haired bikers in leather jackets covered in Grateful Dead pins, and at least one shirt that spelled out ERGOT in Greek letters. 

Then the lights darkened and Davis took the stage in front of flashing images of the most iconic acid blotters ever made. By the late 70s, blotter had become the dominant method for distributing LSD, he explained. While their designs are easily written off as a form of illicit branding, Davis makes the case that this “ephemeral and snackable” medium amounts to more than just underground commercialism; rather, he writes, they are “material manifestations of a visionary and irascible subculture whose potent iconography demand(s) to be preserved.” 

Blotter collects its material from a multitude of sources, including original interviews with (typically press-shy) LSD blotter-makers, as well as reports from the Drug Enforcement Agency, which ironically provide historically valuable and sometimes obsessive notes on which designs were showing up on the streets. Mostly, however, Blotter draws from the collection of Mark McCloud—a swashbuckling renegade who Davis met through the Bay Area psychedelic scene, and who has been collecting the world’s most beautiful and rarified acid blotters at his San Francisco museum, the Institute of Illegal Images. 

McCloud eventually got up on stage next to Davis, his knuckles covered in gold rings. While Davis has the vibe of an elfish professor, McCloud’s eyes had the mischievous twinkle of a psychedelic pirate who has spent years battling the authorities that tried several times to arrest him and confiscate his collection. Later, Davis told me this book, more than any other he’s written, was infused with a sort of love: McCloud obsession with blotter art, Davis’ fondness for LSD, as well as their friendship with each other. 

I recently caught up with Davis, who was chilling in Northern California’s dankest county, Mendocino. We discussed some of the the coolest, wildest, and most next-level blotters ever made—check them out here. Below is our extended interview, which gets deeper into this idea of acid blotters as a form of countercultural media—as well as strange tales of chemists praying over LSD crystals and other deep lysergic lore.

Michelle: Let’s start with this idea that acid is kind of a new technology that comes about in the early 70s. 

Erik: One of the motivations for the book was to grapple with the particular and peculiar nature of LSD. Even though many of our narratives of the counterculture derived from the 1960s, there’s still a weird way in which we haven’t really digested or reframed what that compound is. 

LSD emerged in the West immediately in and after World War II. A whole set of new technologies, from television to radar, emerged from the craziness and absolute horror of WWII. LSD is part of that mix. When it shows up, it comes on as very contemporary and looks like technology, psychiatric medicine, and media, rather than an ancient expression of the gods drawn from plants. MK Ultra also happened to latch onto LSD, as it did many other drugs, so it’s carrying so many different ghosts, some of them really disturbing. That partly characterizes why it’s such a weird and singular psychedelic. 

Acid has a lot of cultural baggage with a very fraught history within the counterculture. Is this book an attempt to situate it in a different way for our contemporary moment? 

A lot of people prefer plants with indigenous histories that don’t seem so tainted. I was talking with a younger person who said they stayed away from LSD because it was associated with mind control! So yeah, I did want to turn around the story about LSD. Psychedelics are like spirits—they have a quality of animation, but they’re not exactly alive. And the stories we tell about drugs help shape our experiences of them—they’re part of the set and setting. 

LSD has literally worn all these images on its skin—and those images don’t really work like a logo or a brand. LSD is more like a one-page comic book, except it’s really tiny. It is an anomalous form of print media that has a relationship to other media, like psychedelic poster art. The book doesn’t talk about the experiences of LSD that much. It offers a different perspective than “this person did this, and here’s Timothy Leary, and here’s the Grateful Dead.” Those people are off to the side, because the hero is the printed matter itself. 

I’m really glad you didn’t get too much into the phenomenology of LSD, because there’s nothing more boring than reading about someone’s trip! And it’s cool that you compare LSD to comic books, punk zines, and other forms of countercultural media. Is that why you call acid a “meta-media”? 

You can put LSD on a piece of blotter paper, but you can put it on a capsule, a pill, matchsticks, a Pez… you can put it on anything. In legal discourse, you call these carrier mediums. If you have, for example, a gram of crystal LSD in powder form, you can put it on blotter paper or pills, which have different weights. A lot of the time, someone was sentenced based on the weight of the carrier medium. Which is why mid-range and even low-level LSD dealers got screwed. 

The thing is, blotter images are totally superfluous in this calculation. You don’t need it. The medium is a blotter paper, and everything on there is like a meta-medium—a bonus, an overtone, a vector, a reference, a joke, a wink, a sign of belonging. So I’m using that term “meta-medium” in a playful way. 

In the book, you write about how these images go beyond just putting your logo on something. Do you think there’s something about the acid blotter that transcends, or maybe elides, straightforward commercialism? 

Obviously there’s a major commercial element, and people do make a lot of money off of acid, but it’s a very, very different trade than other drugs. It’s mostly carried out semi-independently of other drug trafficking, and it doesn’t involve a lot of big gangs. I’m not trying to overly romanticize it, but it has a different market logic. Another thing is, it doesn’t really work as a brand for very long, because brands are very consistent. It’s the same Advil I’ve looked at for 20 years. With acid blotters, if they become well-known, somebody can just copy them—there’s no intellectual property law. 

In fact, you’re in the realm of the copy. We’re going to replicate all these molecules, print multiple copies of the same image, soak them in LSD, and distribute them. So while we still might think about it in terms of branding, it has a different kind of logic than what we mean by brands or trademarks.

I learned a lot from this book. You have this really interesting story about how Nick Sand and Tim Scully (makers of Orange Sunshine, possibly the most famous batch of LSD ever made) put the same batch of acid on different colored tabs, and a lore grew on the streets that the different colors had different effects. But in fact, it was all the same LSD. I feel like this happens so often today, where people attribute specific attributes to certain blotters of acid, as if they were like different weed strains. 

This is the problem of the copy. Is the copy always the same? If you keep xeroxing it over and over again, it starts to change. If you get into the more esoteric issue, it’s like, what makes different batches of LSD different from one another? Some people are like, sorry, man, it’s just LSD. It’s a molecule, so you can make it more clean or less clean, and it might have stuff in it with psychoactive effects that affects the quality. But a lot of other people are going to be like, there’s something mysterious about what makes a batch of LSD particularly good. And then you get into the mystical side, where people like Owsley and Sand would sing songs and do prayers over the LSD crystals. They wanted to be fully present for this material transformation that would launch hundreds of thousands of people’s experiences. 

Yeah, this is where acid culture really converges with New Age woo-woo. But when it comes to that kind of magical thinking, I do actually buy the idea that the art on the blotter is part of set and setting, and that our mindsets can be shifted by the images we look at before tripping. 

Well, if I’m at a ritual, and I’m going to drink ayahuasca out of a styrofoam coffee cup versus a beautiful carved chalice with a dragon on it, that’s a different experience. It’s a way to go, OK, this medicine is entering into me now, through this portal, this vehicle, this expression, this ritual. Well, the same thing applies to the images on the blotter paper. So you’re right, this is a more concrete place where we see the magic of iconography operating as a kind of hint, flavor, perfume, or almost like a spell—because they have that kind of shift. 

The legality around acid is really severe, and that is part of why the acid trade is so secretive. At least in my reporting, I’ve found it so hard to access the higher levels of the acid supply chain. But you have some really amazing stories of blotter makers and other people near the top. How did you access these stories? 

Hats off to Mark McCloud. A lot of the material is based on stories, experiences, and personal contacts that Mark has had over the decades since he started to collect the blotters, and eventually becoming a blotter-maker himself in the 1990s. He had a decade of underground work that allowed him to meet many people, and he also collected some written interviews in his archive. 

So the stories in the book are pretty close to the horse’s mouth, and that’s part of what makes it lore. We also were able to interview some people directly who he knew, and therefore we could approach. Sometimes they said yes, other times they said get the hell away from me. But you need somebody who’s no longer doing it, and who’s at the edge of the blackmarket. They’re also going to be cagey about a lot of details. 

One advantage of this book is that I wasn’t talking about the manufacturing or upper-level distribution of acid, except in general terms. As you say, there’s a lot of obfuscation in the LSD world for very good reason: it’s been largely successful, with a few exceptions. Major LSD lab busts have been extremely rare for 70 years. But a lot of blotter-makers were quasi-independent, so they only made the blotter. Sometimes they laid it out, but oftentimes somebody else would take it and deal with it. So they were separate enough that some were happy to tell their tale. 

I caught a whiff of McCloud’s flavor at the book launch, but I’d love to hear more about what a character he is. 

This project came out of the fact that I had a friendship with Mark that went back to the early 2000s, when we met on the scene. In a lot of ways, of all the projects I’ve done, this was the one that was most about love, because it was about his love of LSD and my love of LSD, and it was also about our friendship. He’s one of my best friends.

I always just really enjoyed his combination of good humor, full of stories, doesn’t take himself seriously, has a pirate edge of raw intensity. He’s also a big character who knows everybody. So when I asked him to do this, he already trusted me. Trust is the singular value of this underground. It’s almost a real religious value, not in a negative sense, but in the sense that, inside of the criminal LSD underground, ratting on people is much worse than in our normie life, that kind of betrayal. Mark has a very high ethical standard, and he’s quite a gentleman, even though he’s a rascal. 

The other thing about him is that he has certain ways of telling stories where there’s layers of indirection. So you have to hang around a lot. I had to go over and over and over the same stories to crystallize history out of a raconteur’s lore, and that required a lot of patience. I learned early on not to smoke the weed.

Yeah, only smoke after the interview! 

I’ve started reporting on psychedelic news for DoubleBlind magazine as their newly-appointed Culture Editor! Here’s a smattering of some of my recent stories on the fascinating and often fucked-up happenings in contemporary psychedelic culture.

Climate collective Nocturnal Medicine is teaming up with underground rave crew Groovy Groovy to throw a major rave-ritual during Climate Week in New York City this weekend! In addition to sets by some of the best DJs in the game, other offerings include a “prayer room offering space for being with hope, grief, and love,” as well as a “spiritual service” from Earth activists Reverend Billy and The Stop Shopping Choir. I love this party, and highly recommend going. Tickets here.

Shoutout to Overdrive, a newly-launched company that’s trying to make harm reduction cool via streetwear-inspired aesthetics. They just sent me this bright orange pack containing five fentanyl test strips and other drug testing accoutrement, which retails for $12.99 on its website and on Amazon. According to the brand’s creative director, their packaging designs aim to look “native to party culture,” which I guess means that they look like cigarettes? I’m not sure how to feel about test strips getting co-opted into a form of lifestyle branding, but I also had a feeling this would happen back when I wrote about “Suck Dick Carry Narcan” for The Guardian back in 2021! Well, if it works, I’m with it!