Martin A. Lee

The subtitle of this book says "The complete social history of LSD: the CIA, the sixties, and beyond." In a nutshell, this is an entirely accurate summary. Lee and Shlain trace the strange journey of LSD from an experimental military chemical, to a psychiatric wonderdrug, to a driving forces of the 60s counter-culture, and possibly its demise. This book is more journalistic than academic, but it is deeply sourced and informed. The authors are pro-psychedelic but fully recognize the limits of show more chemical enlightenment, and how the flashbulb cosmic glow of LSD inspired a revolution that blossomed in the headlines but failed to hold the streets. The 60s were a trip, but all trips end. Especially those helped along by agent provocateurs of the CIA and FBI.

At least we can still dream of better world, some times. show less

An excellent, well-researched look at the US Government's attempts to curb the use of marijuana. Very upsetting in that Lee shows how the war on this particular drug has been guided more by concerns over controlling certain populations (African Americans, Mexicans, 'Hippies', etc) than by science. How many people who could have been helped through the medicinal use of marijuana/THC have suffered because of politics? Smoke Signals is a very important book that I hope leads to greater sanity show more with regard to local, state and federal drug policy in the future. show less

What a journey! That’s my feeling after having read this book. Published in 1984, here and there some aspects of it accuse its age and time of publication, taking for granted assumptions that were only possible in the eighties. But this is not to be taken as a flaw, for no one can truly think outside of its own time, and the authors (the whole bunch) are no exception. It’s just a quirk of the book, something that now happens to be there (when it was published it was probably not much of show more an issue).

As for the story itself, what a crazy trip that was! In a way it’s like LSD’s history is in itself as psychedelic as the substance itself. From Albert Hofmann’s bicycle ride home till the 60’s out of this world social upheavels, LSD seemed as if always bound to take its users to unknown and untold extremes, defying any atempt to a rational characterization of the whole ride.

In this sense, this book is an awesome journey onto that now much unknown succession of events that had so much influence on the world that we are still living today. Plus, by being written at a not too distant timeframe from those happenings, it still carries very tangible echoes of those times and expectations, and by this being much more alive than if it was researched and published today. It’s still dealing with [some] living characters, they’re still household names (Hofmann, Leary, Ginsberg, as many others), and their stories and influences are still very much alive in everyone’s imagination. It’s still beating with the beats of those now much more distant and, in a sense, more critically understood and much less revered times.

For all that, for being like a time capsule that takes you back to the heydays of some very weird and hectic (in a psychedelic sense) times, and for being so entertaining (as far as a history book goes), this is definitely worth a reading. And if you happen to wonder how people could be so naive, and oftentimes so out of touch with the real world, this book also offers you, in an implicit lesson on how our times will be perceived and understood for by the generations to come. Maybe that’s LSD’s way, as a history, of still providing its outside the box unique perspective. show less

The history of LSD is full of fascinating characters and episodes, and this book covers it very well. It gives an accessible, comprehensive and well-researched overview of the culture surrounding acid from its discovery and early studies in the 1950s to the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s. It's an enlightening read, and a very fun one – Tim Leary's life, for instance, is much more interesting than I'd have thought. It's just a shame that the book is nearly thirty years old, and thus show more does not cover recent developments in drug culture. show less