Ken Kesey's Acid Quest

Brooke Gladstone (0:05)

Happy New Year. This is an On the Media podcast extra, just in time for your first hangover of 2020 Whether it's fueled by alcohol or just the thought of the year ahead, we thought we'd bring you a segment celebrating a rebellion against the norm and a way to test boundaries. We first aired this a couple of years ago in time for April 19th, an odd holiday known as Bicycle Day, commemorating the moment in 1943 when Swiss scientist Albert Hofmann rode his bike home from work, after dosing himself with his lab concoction, Lysergic Acid Dielethamide or LSD. Hofmann is who launched us into an exploration of the moment when an evangelist of acid would emerge from a Menlo Park hospital lab, and plow through the nation's gray flannel culture in a candy-colored bus. I speak of course of Ken Kesey, the enigmatic author behind One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and the driving force in Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, his seminal work in new journalism. We ponder how acid shaped Kesey and denormalized American conformity with River Donaghey, a filmmaker and writer based in Brooklyn.

River Donaghey (1:23)

Kesey's story really starts in the late 50s when he was a graduate student at Stanford's creative writing program. Up until that point, Kesey was this all-American farm boy. He was a college jock, married his high school sweetheart. He had a very wholesome childhood. But when he got to Stanford, he needed money to support his new family. So he got this job basically being a guinea pig for clinical drug trials in a nearby hospital.

Brooke Gladstone (1:47)

The drug trials at Menlo Park Veterans Hospital were marketed as research for treating mental illness. But we know today that they were part of Project MKUltra, the CIA's mind control study. Kesey was given a few different drugs, an early antidepressant called IT290, a vomit-inducing antibiotic called Ditrim.

River Donaghey (2:11)

One of the pills was LSD.

Brooke Gladstone (2:12)

So how did he feel on LSD?

River Donaghey (2:15)

Well, you got to put yourself in Kesey's shoes at that point. It's the end of the 50s. It's like Mad Men era. It's this like suburbs and housewives and like dad with the briefcase and the suit going off to work. It was a very like repressed time. There's a very narrow window of what was socially appropriate. And LSD cracked Kesey's brain open to all these new possibilities and new perspectives and new ways of viewing the world.

Brooke Gladstone (2:38)

We actually have some audio from one of Kesey's first experiences with LSD in the Menlo Park Hospital. This was in 1959 or 60

Ken Kesey (2:49)

Yeah. How are you feeling right now? You seem to feel there's still some effect of the drug? I am.

River Donaghey (2:56)

Yeah. He's in this little white box, this tiny little room in the hospital's mental ward. And he's sitting there taking this LSD and periodically orderlies and nurses are coming in and out taking blood samples and urine samples. It was not really the ideal place to have an acid trip.

Ken Kesey (3:14)

It's quarter to one and I'm high out of my mind. Such a good drug in that I suddenly I'm filled with this great loving and understanding of people. Nobody's going to get high on this and go out and rape somebody. They might go out and take a little girl by the hand and give her a bottle of flowers, but that would be all. So, I say public support has to get behind it. We need a huge missionary, we might need a messiah.

Brooke Gladstone (3:46)

We need a huge missionary, we need a messiah.

River Donaghey (3:50)

Yeah, I think Kesey really had the spiritual awakening. I think he saw that there was a path to go down, that all these structures that he had sort of accepted as reality weren't really reality and there were all these different options out there and that he had the ability to go explore and sort of figure out where he fit within those.

Brooke Gladstone (4:10)

He found himself catalyzed creatively by those sessions in Menlo Park.

River Donaghey (4:15)

In doing these drug tests and in experiencing LSD, Kesey had an idea, naturally, I'll go get a job at the mental hospital as a night watchman and sneak some of that acid out for my friends back at home. Also, as a night watchman, have a lot of time to sit and write.

And that's where late one night high on psychedelics, he has this vision of one institution patient called Chief Broom, this like hulking Native American man. And he just starts writing and he writes five pages, six pages of this book that ends up becoming One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.