Acid Hype
eBook - ePub

Acid Hype

American News Media and the Psychedelic Experience

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Acid Hype

American News Media and the Psychedelic Experience

About this book

Now synonymous with Sixties counterculture, LSD actually entered the American consciousness via the mainstream. Time and Life, messengers of lumpen-American respectability, trumpeted its grand arrival in a postwar landscape scoured of alluring descriptions of drug use while lesser outlets piggybacked on their coverage with stories by turns sensationalized and glowing.

Acid Hype offers the untold tale of LSD's wild journey from Brylcreem and Ivory soap to incense and peppermints. As Stephen Siff shows, the early attention lavished on the drug by the news media glorified its use in treatments for mental illness but also its status as a mystical--yet legitimate--gateway to exploring the unconscious mind. Siff's history takes readers to the center of how popular media hyped psychedelic drugs in a constantly shifting legal and social environment, producing an intricate relationship between drugs and media experience that came to define contemporary pop culture. It also traces how the breathless coverage of LSD gave way to a textbook moral panic, transforming yesterday's refined seeker of truths into an acid casualty splayed out beyond the fringe of polite society.

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Yes, you can access Acid Hype by Stephen Siff in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Media Studies. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Half title
  3. Title
  4. Copyright
  5. Dedication
  6. Contents
  7. Acknowledgments
  8. Introduction: Midcentury Media’s Trip with LSD
  9. 1. Early Restrictions on Drug Speech, 1900–1956
  10. 2. Introducing LSD, 1953–1956
  11. 3. Creating a Psychedelic Past, 1954–1960
  12. 4. Research at the Intersection of Media and Medicine, 1957–1962
  13. 5. Luce, Leary, and LSD, 1963–1965
  14. 6. Moral Panic and Media Hype, 1966–1968
  15. Postscript: Psychedelic Media
  16. Notes
  17. Index