High Art: why do LSD sheets have designs on them?
LSD has a reputation for being “the thinking man’s drug.”
Whether that reputation is justified or not is kind of beside the point; it’s a miracle that any drug at all can have that reputation. Booze is for your divorced uncle. Weed is for students and those who never moved past their Bob Marley phase. Mushrooms are for toothless hippies waking up in a bin on Camden Lock, and cocaine is for dickheads whose only goal in life is to find ways of being an even bigger dickhead.
The harder stuff isn’t even worth joking about; they’re used by people in desperate need of help long before they take up the pipe or the needle, but LSD stands apart.
Taking tabs isn’t a sign that you’re chemically dependent on outside stimulus to generate serotonin (though you absolutely are); it’s a sign that you’re an intellect. You’re a cosmic traveller, seeking answers beyond the realm of human perception, getting in touch with yourself in a way that we three-dimensional thinkers can’t even dream of.
Yeah, yeah, good for you. There totally isn’t any difference between you, Darren, a 22-year-old from Surrey who won’t shut up about his 2.2 in philosophy from Bristol and the other great minds who’ve dabbled in lysergic acid diethylamide. Folks like Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley and The Beatles. It’s totally the whole “glimpses beyond the veil of reality” that drew you to LSD, and not how cool it feels to lie down on your kitchen floor for seven hours convinced you’re a city.
Besides, all that ignores the actual best part of LSD. The fact that it’s the one drug that doubles as a little comic!
Why did LSD start getting printed on?
That’s right, LSD is the one drug that’s just as pleasing to look at as it is to take.
Since the drug is essentially pressed onto a piece of blotting paper, it makes sense that people started printing designs onto it in order for their brand of acid to stand out over everyone else’s. However, that’s not actually the reason the practice started; it was actually something a lot more cunning than came after the drug had already come to prominence.
LSD first started capturing the culture’s attention in the hippie scenes of the mid-1960s. Of course, as is the case pretty much every time a drug reaches the mainstream, the law came after it hard, cracking down on the use, manufacture and distribution of LSD anywhere it could. This caused anyone who was still in the business to need to get creative, which is exactly what happened. A number of dealers realised that if they could pass off the drug as nothing more than paper, they could ship it right under customs’ noses.
Thus, many dealers started printing designs on their LSD supplies, and shipped sheets of it the size and shape of vinyl records. This way, if any nosy customs officers came a’ looking, they’d look for all the world like album inserts on their way to a packing plant. This worked like an absolute charm, so much so that the practice made its way into the drug’s very culture, dealers on smaller scales beginning to put their own designs on their LSD for the sake of marketing it and, in some cases, as a strange form of artistic expression.
That’s how you get people like Mark McCloud, who has a vast collection of acid sheets dating back to the 1960s. The drug itself has long since broken down, meaning that he collects them simply for what they are, wonderful pieces of (literal) psychedelic art!