Sixty-nine years ago today, Albert Hoffman, the Swiss scientist who discovered LSD, took his first trip.

After some time, with my eyes closed, I began to enjoy this wonderful play of colors and forms, which it really was a pleasure to observe. Then I went to sleep and the next day I was fine. I felt quite fresh, like a newborn.

Through my LSD experience and my new picture of reality, I became aware of the wonder of creation, the magnificence of nature and of the animal and plant kingdom. I became very sensitive to what will happen to all this and all of us.” Albert Hoffman.

Connie Littlefield’s engaging documentary Hoffman’s Potion features interviews with many pioneering cosmonauts including Hoffman, Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Stanislav Grof and Ralph Metzner. It is a reminder that LSD is a compound that needs to be rescued from the dustbin of history and further researched.

Having had the good fortune of taking Sandoz pharmaceutical acid when it was still legal, I can testify to its deeply spiritual and life-changing properties. Truly a wonder drug that deserves to be respected not rejected.

I think that the possibility to have psychedelic experience is inborn. These psychedelics - very similar compounds are in our brain; of all the compounds which you find in the plant kingdom only the psychedelics are so closely related chemically to these brain factors, which we already have. We speak about the paradise of childhood. When I had this vision and beautiful experience as a child, this is no wonder, because we have these compounds already in our brain.” Albert Hoffman

Take the trip:
 

 
Thank you Mirgun

 
This is the kind of anti-drug propaganda that seems to have been created by people while they were high.

Is this supposed to steer people away from smoking dope? Really? Surfing monkeys?

Excuse me while I go get stoned.

Update: I just received a message from Greg Collins who created this public service announcement. I’m going to share his story not only for for history’s sake, but because it’s fucking funny!

I’m one of the creators of that surfing monkey spot you threw up on Dangerous Minds this afternoon. Thanks for doing that.

That spot actually dates back to 1999. A buddy of mine and his wife totally smoked out one night. The next morning, they woke up on the sofa, their ribs and stomach muscles were hurting. They didn’t remember much of anything, other than laughing their asses off.

About a week later, a UPS guy knocked on their door, bearing some boxes from QVC. While they were all gassed out, they bought a Star Trek collector’s plate, a Chi-Wash-Wa home car washing system and a Michael Jordan in-flight pewter statuette. All in all, about $400. That must’ve been some great weed.

When they told me the story, I thought that’d make an awesome commercial, but all of that was too much to put into a :30 spot. We needed to drill it down to one item for simplicity and comedy’s sake. My buddy Greg hit on the idea of something really ridiculous like a surfing monkey coin bank. We shot the spot for like $300 and sold it through to the Partnership For A Drug-Free America. It ran in 1999-2000, and, to this day, remains one of their most beloved and recalled commercials.

Thx again for featuring it. Really made my day!

Best/Greg Collins

Greg, you’re a genius. Thanks.
 

 
Redditor user862 uploaded this hilarious photo of an orange tabby named Genovese who is apparently really, really enjoying her springtime catnip.

Via reddit

 
Hippie-exploitation paperbacks bring a smile to my face for a number of reasons:

1. Rarely do the hippies on the book covers look under 30. They look like illustrations from stagmags of swingin’ suburbanites.
2. Hippies are doped up and super-horny 24/7. Watch out!
3. Hippies buy their fashions from the “youth in revolt” section of the Sears catalog.
4. When they’re not covering their bodies in goofy slogans and day-glow butterflies, hippies are busy raping and pillaging and at least one in every rampaging gang looks like Frank Zappa.
 

 
More sex-happy hippies after the jump…

 
A 94-year-old Mexican woman was arrested while trying to cross the border at Nogales, Arizona, allegedly with over 10.5 pounds of marijuana strapped to her torso and legs.

I hope they didn’t take her to jail. This isn’t exactly the kind of thing that a 94-year-old just up and decides to do on their own!

Read the rest: Reefer madness: Nogales woman, 94, faces grass-smuggling charge

Via Arbroath

 
While the 1987 BBC documentary The Confessions Of Robert Crumb lacks the intensity and insight of Terry Zwigoff’s masterful Crumb it is still an invaluable introduction to one of the world’s most fascinating and enigmatic artists. Fans of Crumb will find it short on revelations but initiates should be charmed.

Love him or loathe him, there is no denying that Crumb was way ahead of his time when it came to toppling sacred cows and shattering taboos. Discovering his comix as a teenager in the late Sixties was one of those formative events that fucked me up for life…in a good way.

 
A truly fantastic idea by San Francisco agency Pereira & O’Dell to promote Snoop Dogg’s Kingsize Slim Rolling Papers: Rolling Words. Rolling Words is a book made entirely out of hemp where each page is a rolling paper with Snoop Dogg’s lyrics and witticisms written on them (in non-toxic ink of course). Also, the spine of the book has a match striking surface so you can smoke up on the run.

Folks attending Coachella this year will get to sample Snoop’s creation.

Via The Dieline and Nerdcore

Photo: Bob Oliver

BBC news program Week In, Week Out covers the the heroin problem in Wales. Your host: John Cale.

The director of the documentary, Nick Skinner, talks about making the film with Cale:

The world I explored with John Cale was much darker. In the rundown post-industrial towns of South Wales, and the backstreets of Cardiff and Swansea, we came in contact with a the dark side of drug use. Teenagers shooting up because their mates do it, because there’s nothing else to do, because they are blocking out the pain of an abusive past. Adults trapped in a downward spiral of drugs, crime, prison and more drugs.

Heroin, Wales And Me.
 

 
DM pal Mark MacLachlan passed on this oddment, Distant Drummer: Flowers of Darkness, an anti-drug film from the 1970s, which has a rather interesting pedigree, as Mark explained:

It’s 40 year old documentary on the growth of opium into heroin and how you stop it… It’s narrated by Paul Newman and directed by Glasgow writer Bill Templeton.

Templeton’s centenary is next year and nobody appears to be aware of how important a writer he was, particularly during the golden era of US television, when he penned programmes like Robin Hood, The Untouchables, 1984, Sword of Freedom, The Desilu Hour etcetera.

In his film work he wrote additional dialogue for Graham Greene’s The Fallen Idol directed by Carol Reed. All round a pretty incredible forgotten talent, whom Walt Disney fired after discovering a bottle of whisky at his desk. Inevitably he died back in Glasgow from the booze…

This was Templeton’s last film, and was originally part of a trilogy made for NBC, with Newman, Robert Mitchum and Rod Steiger narrating the different sections. It starts off even-handedly enough (nature has generously provided humanity with the means to get high) but soon falls into an anti-drug stance. However, it does give consideration to treatment and rehabilitation, rather than imprisonment, and contrasts the change in laws from 1956 to 1966. This is one for those with an interest in media and drug culture, or with a liking for quirky public service films.
 

 
With thanks to Mark MacLachlan
 

 
Here’s the trailer for the newly restored Yellow Submarine.

The digital clean-up of the film’s photochemical elements was lovingly done entirely by hand, frame by frame. Having seen the world premiere of the restored version at this year’s SXSW, I can attest to its eye-searing intensity and lysergic beauty. While the story obviously remains the same, rather thin with a script comprised of surreal non sequiturs and bad puns, the overall experience of watching the film in a pristine digital format overwhelms the narrative with colors and artwork so you rich you can practically taste it. And the stereo soundtrack sounded wonderful.

Coming out on Blu-Ray and DVD on May 29 with 5.1 surround sound. Expect to be astonished.
 

 
Mod Odyssey is a groovy short documentary on the creation of Yellow Submarine. Enjoy.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds: The Beatles’ classic 1968 animated feature film, ‘Yellow Submarine,’ has been restored