In 2002 Concepta Film finished a film called "Hofmann's Potion: The Early Years of LSD". Written and directed by Connie Littlefield and Produced by Kent Martin for the National Film Board of Canada. The documentary delves into the little known early history of the world's most notorious psychedelic.

Long before Timothy Leary urged a generation to "turn on, tune in and drop out," lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, was being used by researchers trying to understand the human mind. This documentary is a fascinating look at the story of "acid" before it hit the streets.

Featuring interviews with many LSD pioneers, Hofmann's Potion is much more than a simple chronicle of the drug's early days. With thoughtful interviews, beautiful music and stunning cinematography, it is an invitation to look at LSD, and our world, with a more open, compassionate mind.


The film features interviews with the following people :

• Albert Hofmann
• Myron Stolaroff
• Stanislav Grof
• Humphrey Osmond
• Abram Hoffer
• Duncan Blewett
• Ralph Metzner
• Ram Dass
• Laura Archera Huxley

Reference : Conceptafilm ~ Hofmann's Potion


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Timothy Francis Leary was born is Springfield, Massachusetts in 1920. He attended West Point in the early '40s (where he didn't exactly fit in) and then served in the military during WWII. He earned his PhD in psychology from U.C. Berkeley and taught there briefly but moved to Harvard after his first wife's death. He first took psilocybin mushrooms in 1960 during a trip to Mexico. When he returned to Harvard he began the Harvard Psilocybin Project, studying the effects of psilocybin on humans. As part of the project he, along with Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner, gave psilocybin to a series of volunteers including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and Arthur Koestler, among others.

In 1962 Leary was introduced to LSD for the first time by Michael Hollingshead. He had what he later described as "the most shattering experience of his life". Leary became a spokesman for LSD and the psychedelic movement, encouraging people to "turn on, tune in, and drop out". In 1963, he and Richard Alpert were fired from their positions at Harvard after which they both lived at Millbrook for a time. At Milbrook they continued to work with psychedelics both therapeutically and recreationally...with the occasional help of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Abbie Hoffman and Aldous Huxley.


In 1965, while crossing into the U.S. from Mexico, Leary's daughter was caught with marijuana. Leary took responsibility, was convicted of marijuana possession under the Marijuana Tax Act and sentenced to 30 years in prison. He appealed the case based on the argument that the Marijuana Tax Act required self-incrimination in order to comply with it, and therefore was unconstitutional. In 1969, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed with him, declaring the Marijuana Tax Act unconstitutional and overturning his conviction.

In 1970, Leary was convicted once again of marijuana possession and sentenced to 10 years in prison. He escaped from the minimum security prison and fled with his wife to Algeria and then Switzerland. In 1973 he was arrested by DEA agents in Afghanistan and returned to prison in California. He served three years before being parolled 1976.

Leary became interested in virtual reality and cyberculture and spent the last twenty years of his life writing and lecturing. He worked with a group of friends to document his own process of dying from prostate cancer. He died quietly in his own bed, surrounded by friends, and on Feb 9 1997, a portion of Leary's cremated remains were launched into space.

Timothy Leary 's life experiences and the psychedelic 60s have a lot we can learn from ... a good opportunity to evolve from the 5 sensory to the multisensory as we journey through the shamanic visions of the golden age ... we are co-creating here, now ...




References :

• www.Leary.com
• Erowid : Timothy Leary
• www.TimothyLeary.us

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The onscreen version of Tom Wolfe's literary cult hit 'The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test' is primed to hit theaters by 2010. When published in 1968, the book shattered cultural perceptions of the peaceful, passive hippie zeitgeist by introducing the Merry Pranksters, author Ken Kesey's roving gonzo army of LSD-fueled pioneers who tripped about the country, mixing it up with rowdy Oregonians, Bay Area hippies, Hollywood rockers, Hell's Angels and a flurry of left-handed characters that launched the psychedelic movement into mainstream America and ushered in the Grateful Dead.

Over the years, footage and audio of the Oregon-based Merry Pranksters have surfaced, but was little more than ragged, disjointed documentation of the group tripping and weirding out. Except for Neal Cassady's endless speed-jacked rap, there was little narrative. Now, director Gus Van Sant, an Oregon native, is hemming the book's adaptation to the big screen with Milk and Big Love writer Dustin Lance Black. Milk's director of photography Harris Savides is also committed to the film.

Here's a short 42 minute documentary on the LSD driven Psychedelic Revolution of the 60's titled Electric Kool-Aid ...

Watch LSD Documentary in Entertainment | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

After several false starts, the project is coming together. "These seeds have been in the wind for a long time," says Ken Babbs, Kesey's best friend and fellow Merry Prankster. "I talked to Gus. And I was happy he was making the movie. Back in the 1970s, Kesey and Gus were friends and Ken told him if anyone ever made the film he wanted Gus to do it."

Van Sant originally pictured the late Heath Ledger for the Kesey role, but now has two marquee names in mind: Woody Harrelson and Jack Black, which might make the film more of comedy than a zany drug jag. Carolyn Garcia (a.k.a. Mountain Girl), a Prankster and former wife of Jerry Garcia, said Harrelson visited Kesey shortly before he died. "They went out into the field and had a pretty good mind meld," Garcia says. "I just know he could play the role." Garcia mentioned Black might be a fit for "The Mad Chemist," the infamous LSD impresario Owsley "Bear" Stanley, who launched an untold number of minds into outer space and was an artist and early sound engineer for the Dead (he's credited with revolutionizing live stereo sound). Black's camp had no comment. And who will play Caroline Garcia? She suggests Scarlett Johansson. Maybe Maura Tierney. "Well, I'm 5'10", so she would have to be tall. I mean, I ride a Harley Davidson."

Lynn Nesbit, Wolfe's literary agent, said the writer will not likely be involved or play a major character in the film. Instead the focus will be on Kesey and his acid-guzzling band of Merry Pranksters. She added Wolfe left the twisted tales years ago and never looked back, "But I should call him before he reads about this in the papers."

And then there's the music. Should it reflect the actual Prankster playlist, it will be an outstanding soundtrack.

Kesey's crew took earnings from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest to fund their legendary Acid Tests, where they hired a relatively unknown band called the Warlocks (later named the Grateful Dead). But at the time of the bus trips, Babbs says they played Ray Charles and John Coltrane: "But mainly we did our own music, which was a form of communication without words." Garcia says there was also plenty of Bob Dylan, early Beatles, Miles Davis, lots of Motown and Pete Seeger. "We also played kids' music," she says. "That and classical music like Beethoven, Wagner, Strauss. Some John Phillips."

Being in the wheelhouse during the early heady days of the Merry Pranksters and the Grateful Dead, Garcia has strong feelings about LSD, the book and those Halcyon days. "This is a very valuable substance and appeared on the planet at the same time as the atomic bomb," she says. "We called it inner space. I'll do it now time to time, but I never took it lightly. When LSD came into my life I realized there was another way. Now, I'm about bringing LSD out into the front."

There are still questions about how the film will bring the book to life — similar dilemmas plagued another chemical classic, Hunter S. Thompson's Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas. Can certain aspects of the book be translated, or will third-party observations and interior monologue flow naturally through the storyline? Bear says "a very large CGI budget" could do the trick. "I think I, along with a design crew of my choosing, can work it out."

Now that the movie is closer to becoming a reality, both Owsley and Garcia are reexamining their relationship to Wolfe's text. "If you ask the people [Wolfe] spoke with they will tell you he wrote what they told him, and that may be true as to the words said — much of which was designed to prank him," Bear says. "The book however is more than the results of his interviews. The real tragedy was that they did not manage to dose him, a common practice of the era."

When Wolfe spoke with Rolling Stone's Mark Binelli for one of our 40th anniversary issues in 2007, he described his Kool-Aid reporting process: "One day Kesey said to me, 'Why don't you put the notebook and the pen away and just be here, and then write about it.' The idea was, join in, take some acid, have a few trips, and then write about it. I didn't say anything. The next day I arrived with my notebook and ball-point pen. He didn't say anything, but that was the answer."

"The movie is long overdue," Garcia says. "On the surface, the book ain't bad. But Wolfe didn't dig into the darker, weirder corners. As a film it will reflect the party. But hopefully it will get the meaning of it all."

~ JOHN CLARKE JR.

Source : Rolling Stone


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