Credit: Dangerous Minds / Hank Kranzler

Real talk, would drugs be as big a thing if it weren’t for drug culture?

If this sounds a little like Abraham Simpson talking about how things that are “with it” seem weird and scary to him, this is because drugs are a hobby I’ve never partaken in. I don’t mean to sound like a cop about all this. I have no issue with them or people who partake; it’s just not for me. Honestly, I just sound like a cop about most things. When it comes to drugs, though, I do have to wonder whether people are really in it for the high or for the community that comes with it.

To be clear, I’m aware that’s how humanity reacts to things it likes. If we find something that makes the good chemicals in our brain go woosh, then we spread the word about it in order to do the thing we were put on this world to do: make connections with other humans. It can be music, films, rock climbing, knitting, you name it, we want to share the experiences that make us feel alive with others. Drugs are just another part of that, with some slightly higher stakes to it.

These days, drug culture may seem a bit naff. A bunch of burnouts sat in a squat staring at the ceiling or laughing at an oddly patterned sock for 12 hours, turning around and telling you that you’re trapped in “the system” because you’ve got better things to do than join them. However, the dawn of drug culture was a genuine counterculture. A number of incredibly brave people are risking everything to stand up for something that could change the world for the better.

In America, one of the forefathers of acid culture and drug culture as a whole was Ken Kesey.

How did Ken Kesey create drug culture?

Kesey had an enviable career as a writer. Not content with being the genius behind One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the absolute king released the novel when he was all of 27 years old. A fact that I’m not at all jealous about…honest.

However, the novel was inspired by his time spent volunteering at Menlo Park Veterans Hospital, an experience which saw him unwittingly used as a guinea pig by the CIA, experimenting on him by analysing the effect of hallucinogenic drugs on him.

Now, let’s be real here, that sounds terrifying. Being essentially tricked into having your mind altered by your government for the sake of developing new methods of psychological warfare sounds like the plot of a horror film. Yet the way that Kesey wrote about his first experiences on the drug that would later become known as LSD couldn’t be further from that. In fact, they sound truly blissful, and one can absolutely understand why he’d spend so much time proselytising about it later in life.

Of his first LSD trips, he wrote, “We were beautiful, naked and helpless and sensitive as a snake after skinning, but far more human than the shining knightmare that had stood creaking in previous parade rest. We were alive, and life was us.”

Fittingly, what he did next was remove himself from any involvement with the US government. Taking the experiences he’d had as a direct result of working with the CIA and using them for pretty much the exact opposite reason.

Gathering his friends together and having fun on a psychedelic journey of personal discovery. If that’s not worth building a culture around, I don’t know what is.