An article about Cary Grant's fondness of LSD

Kliph Nesteroff wrote a long article for WFMU's blog about Cary Grants' LSD experiences.

Cary Grant was the first mainstream celebrity to espouse the virtues of psychedelic drugs. Whereas novelist Aldous Huxley's famous 1954 treatise The Doors of Perception recounted his remarkable experiences with mescaline, Huxley was hardly mainstream - a darling of intellectual circles to be sure, but a far cry from a matinee idol. Grant was one of the biggest stars Hollywood had to offer when he jumped headlong into Huxley's Heaven and Hell. His endorsement of subconscious exploration, arguably, created more interest in LSD than Dr. Timothy Leary who was largely preaching to the converted. Grant on the other hand was the fantasy of countless Midwestern women. He convinced wholesome movie starlets like Esther Williams and Dyan Cannon to blow their minds. When Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping interviewed him, the topic of conversation wasn't Cary's favorite recipe or "the problem with youth today." Instead, Cary Grant was telling happy homemakers that LSD was the greatest thing in the world.

Destination Subconscious: Cary Grant and LSD

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

More at Boing Boing

Ants and Stars: Bruce Sterling and Jasmina Tesanovic visit the Sardinia Radio Telescope in Italy

The Snowden Principle

alphagirl

It’s really tragic that drugs like LSD, psilocybin, MDMA and marijuana are categorized as Schedule 1, when so many people could benefit from them in so many ways.
- Manooshi
  
  @#4: It’s Big Pharma (along with the out-dated, mis-informed, colonized minds on behalf of drug enforcement officers) that want to keep psychedelics inappropriately categorized as “Class 1″ drugs, or whatever the fuck the category is called – despite the positive benefits they’ve been proven to have in being helpful tools for couples’ therapy, PTSD, and cancer patients, etc.
Anonymous

And here’s a LA Weekly article from 1998:

http://www.laweekly.com/1998-07-09/news/the-trip/
yer_maw

Absolute rubbish. It was sandoz that invented it, therefore novrtis would be selling it to this day if it wasnt for the timothy leary idiotic brand of shamanism.
- android
  
  rubbish? certainly not. When a corporation invents something that could make many of their bread-winning products stop selling as well, might they not work to have it suppressed or outlawed? Or at least acquiesce and/or remain silent while other forces work to those ends. Seems quite plausible to me. Corporations, by definition, are driven by the profit motive, not by any desire to make better or more useful products. LSD was banned, in my opinion, for reasons similar to those that got the children’s book “Ferdinand” banned — the potential to open minds to “subversive” ideas. Timothy Leary wasn’t to blame.
- Ambiguity
  
  Absolute rubbish. It was sandoz that invented it, therefore novrtis would be selling it to this day if it wasnt for the timothy leary idiotic brand of shamanism.
  
  I disagree, strongly. If Tim Leary hadn’t existed, we would have invented him.
  
  Do you really think that there had been no Leary that LSD would be an accepted drug to this day? You think that culture really plays no role in these things? Do you think that if it hadn’t been for Leary’s butterfly-wings beating over New England, the whole drug-war hurricane never would have gotten going, or do you think the drug war would have just magically not included psychedelics?
  
  Leary was an influential guy, and I’m sure he influenced the timing of what took place, but if he hadn’t been on the scene, another Leary would have come along eventually. It’s not like he stood apart from the culture he came from: he was actually a pretty accurate representative of it.
Enormo

Michael Jackson was in LSD, Flesh of the Devil?”
Greatmiddlewest

Vice ran a similar article in December 2007. Good stuff!

http://www.viceland.com/int/v14n12/htdocs/cary_grant_lsd.php
Tristan Eldtritch

“I learned many things in the quiet of that room … I learned that everything is or becomes its own opposite … You know, we are all unconsciously holding our anus. In one LSD dream … I imagined myself as a giant penis launching off from earth like a spaceship.” – Cary Grant.

Thats pretty damn funny!
Anonymous

Just a quick clarification here: Nesteroff may not have the history correct. Through the psilocybin experience Leary found psychedelics and exposed them to the scientific community. If it wasn’t for the, however brief, scientific analysis; there wouldn’t be any significant exploration into the drug by anyone of value. The drug would have ended up with heroin status if misused and experimented on by the unprepared minds and exploited like MDMA. And a clarification on yer_mar’s comment but Sandoz was the pharmaceutical company Dr. Hoffman worked for when he invented the product. The company itself was the holder of the patent on the synthetic. Have a good one y’all and feel free to research my statement, God knows I had to.
Anonymous

Please make Kliph Nesteroff a guest blogger. His knowledge of arcane show biz is legendary here in Vancouver.
sing it, baby

As the head himself said, “everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant.”
Anonymous

Heh. Slightly off-topic but the recent scandals on mephadrone indicate, to me at least, the stupidity of ‘banning’ drugs. The only reason mephadrone exists is because the tried and tested alternatives (Exctasy) is illegal.

And as for LSD being illegal, that’s just the stupidest thing ever. Legalise all drugs, make them safe for consumption, take them out of the hands of the criminals. Old news, I know but had to be said.