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Acid: a new secret history of LSD
David Black
London:Vision
Paperbacks, 20001, £9.99
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This a revised edition of the book which was reviewed
in Lobster 35. I'm not sure how new it is. I no longer have the
original edition but this seems pretty similar to it. What is new is some
material on the activities of Steve Abrams, one of the co-founders of SOMA, who
had been an unwitting part of the CIA's MKUltra programme while a post-grad
student at Oxford; and the section on the mysterious Ronald Stark, LSD
entrepreneur and apparent American intelligence asset, has been elaborated.
Most importantly, all the technical foul-ups which marred the first edition
have gone. Vision were really crap when they first started out (they completely
wrecked my Prawn Cocktail Party, for example, scrambling the footnotes
to four of the chapters; in those days Vision skipped the proof copy stage).
This, however, is decently produced and a 'clean' read. The story of the drug
culture of the sixties and seventies is important and entertaining; and while
it still leaves all the loose ends loose - was the whole thing a CIA social
experiment which ran amok? - this is the best account we have to date.
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