Credit: Dangerous Minds / Jerry Bauer

So, fun fact, LSD wasn’t huge among counter-cultural spaces in the 1960s; it was huge in general.

There was something of a push for its legality at the time, much in the same way that the 2010s saw a push for legal marijuana. Many great thinkers of the time were singing its praises, not just in the world of art and philosophy, but in science as well.

Not only were Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary vocal supporters of the drug, but James Watson and Frances Crick, the men who discovered the double helix structure of DNA, freely admitted they did so while under the influence of LSD.

The Beatles weren’t introduced to the drug by a dealer or a guru or any other bastion of counter-culture thinking, but by Paul McCartney’s dentist. All this to say that had the 1960s gone slightly differently, a push to legalise LSD might have gotten a lot more traction than you’d expect. That’s not to say that everyone and their mother were taking trips, but far more people than you’d expect were. You’d expect a mind like Michel Foucault’s to be a prime candidate for expanding as well.

After all, he was as radical a thinker as anyone mentioned previously, if not more so. A man whose desire to critique authority went far beyond a career and into the realm of a calling. In his personal life, the man wasn’t a puritan either. His descent into the Parisian gay scene of the 1950s saw him take pretty much anything on offer, with whoever offered it. So it’s quite something that Foucault was one of the few people who spent the whole 1960s not touching LSD.

Though that would change very soon afterwards.

How was Michel Foucault introduced to LSD?

Up until 1975, Foucault’s opportunities to sample the famed hallucinogenic had been few and far between and on every occasion, he’d turned those opportunities down. Not necessarily because of any stance against it, but more that he just hadn’t felt like it when it came up. That was until he came into the orbit of Simeon Wade, an American historian at the Claremont Graduate School. Foucault was not yet the worldwide name he would become, but Wade was already a fan of his and planned to lure him to California.

Wade’s plan was simple: lure Foucault to the States and then somehow get him to take LSD.

He had all the tools to get him there, namely money and hot men (even Michel Foucault really wasn’t all that complicated). Then, he assumed once the second part of the plan was put into place, he’d essentially create an intellectual God. He said that, in his words, it would “produce an intellectual power approaching the wonders of science fiction”.

The first part of the plan worked. Foucault made the trip to California, and while he did go through with the second part of the plan, letting Wade lead him out into the desert and taking LSD, it at first seems like it didn’t quite have the desired effect. The great thinker appeared grim and uncomfortable, at least at first. He got more comfortable with time, and eventually, Wade put the cherry on top. He’d taken some portable speakers with him and, under the cover of darkness, played Stockhausen’s Songs of Youth.

This was the kicker, it seemed, the moment where everything seemed to click for Foucault, saying in his imitable manner, “The sky has exploded, and the stars are raining down on me. I know this is not true, but it is the truth.” A few days later, Foucault was asked how his trip to Death Valley was by a student he was giving a guest lecture to, to which his reply was short, but very telling.

He responded, “It was the greatest experience of my life.”

Better late than never, eh, Michel?