"Does this passage strike anyone else as over stating LSD's impact?"
It's necessarily true, but it's not a stretch either. LSD was arguably the key driver behind the creation of the Internet, silicon valley, the environmental movement, the civil rights movement, etc. It was also the reason why psychiatry adopted the position that mental illnesses were caused by chemical imbalances in the brain.
"I think the social revolution of the 60s allowed LSD and the culture it created to flourish and not the other way round as seems to be being argued here."
So I think the key to understanding the 60s, the hippies, and LSD is the atomic bomb. Nick Sand and many of the other high level manufacturers and distributors of LSD were the children of high level figures in the manhattan project. Nick Sand's dad was one of the key chemists that developed the bomb. And supposedly the dad of one of the other key acid manufacturers was the co-pilot of the Enola Gray, one of the planes that dropped the atomic bomb on Japan.
Most of the energy (and bullshit) behind the counterculture in general was a reaction against atomic energy and the culture of the 50s. Clearly the angst would have been there without LSD, but I think that acid became sort of the banner that everyone rallied behind and that united everyone. This is especially true since it's such a prosocial drug; one of its main effects is that it basically makes you care more about other people. (And engage with and collaborate with them, as the case may be.)
Of course the reason it became such a part of the culture is that it fundamentally changed a lot of people, especially a lot of people who later went on to contribute enormous amounts to society, on a deeply personal level. You can already read a lot about this and you'll be able to read increasingly more about as that generation gets older and starts retiring and writing memoirs. In general the ways that any drug impacts culture are really subtle, but definitely there. IIRC Terence McKenna talks a bunch about it in this podcast: http://www.matrixmasters.net/salon/?p=153
For what it's worth, I also have a collection of a couple dozen or so links to people talking about psychedelics have changed their lives here:
Key word in your story: 'arguably', 'supposedly', 'I think'. You're telling a story, that may well be completely fictional. Not a shred of evidence for the key assertions is offered.
I have found this to be typical of stories touting the awesomeness of LSD. It's inferring causation from the most likely (in the absence of any evidence, coincidence is most likely) incidental fact that LSD also happened around then.
"Key word in your story: 'arguably', 'supposedly', 'I think'. You're telling a story, that may well be completely fictional. Not a shred of evidence for the key assertions is offered."
My understanding is that the relationship between LSD and the environmental movement and civil rights movement is discussed in Jay Stevens book Storming Heaven:
It's necessarily true, but it's not a stretch either. LSD was arguably the key driver behind the creation of the Internet, silicon valley, the environmental movement, the civil rights movement, etc. It was also the reason why psychiatry adopted the position that mental illnesses were caused by chemical imbalances in the brain.
"I think the social revolution of the 60s allowed LSD and the culture it created to flourish and not the other way round as seems to be being argued here."
So I think the key to understanding the 60s, the hippies, and LSD is the atomic bomb. Nick Sand and many of the other high level manufacturers and distributors of LSD were the children of high level figures in the manhattan project. Nick Sand's dad was one of the key chemists that developed the bomb. And supposedly the dad of one of the other key acid manufacturers was the co-pilot of the Enola Gray, one of the planes that dropped the atomic bomb on Japan.
Most of the energy (and bullshit) behind the counterculture in general was a reaction against atomic energy and the culture of the 50s. Clearly the angst would have been there without LSD, but I think that acid became sort of the banner that everyone rallied behind and that united everyone. This is especially true since it's such a prosocial drug; one of its main effects is that it basically makes you care more about other people. (And engage with and collaborate with them, as the case may be.)
Of course the reason it became such a part of the culture is that it fundamentally changed a lot of people, especially a lot of people who later went on to contribute enormous amounts to society, on a deeply personal level. You can already read a lot about this and you'll be able to read increasingly more about as that generation gets older and starts retiring and writing memoirs. In general the ways that any drug impacts culture are really subtle, but definitely there. IIRC Terence McKenna talks a bunch about it in this podcast: http://www.matrixmasters.net/salon/?p=153
For what it's worth, I also have a collection of a couple dozen or so links to people talking about psychedelics have changed their lives here:
http://bit.ly/qkvs3q