For Brilliant Color: Packaging the First LSD Blotter

Eric Ghost's cleverly disguised LSD packaging mirrored the 1960s counterculture's psychedelic vision. Ghost first took LSD in the Lower East Side around 1965, after a peripatetic life of military service, armed robbery, and prison. Other examples include "Window pane," "Clearlist," and some of the first printed LSD blotters, which featured electric light bulbs. Ghost's stealth packaging contained a novel and significant development in LSD distribution: the first mechanically produced examples of blotter paper dosed with drops of LSD. Liquid LSD had been placed on actual blotting paper and other paper products before, but these transfers would occur one drop at a time, using a pipette or eye-dropper. Rather than hippie mysticism or revolutionary cant, Ghost's text presents LSD as a scientific product of a modern research lab run by a pharmaceutical corporation. Ghost's text reminds us that the 1960s research community had already explored many clinical applications of LSD - for alcoholism, pain and anxiety among cancer patients, psychological repression, and even the challenges of autism. At the same time, the mention of LSD as a possible "Cure" for homosexuality - something that was explored earlier in the 1960s by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, who later embraced his gay identity - reminds us of the distortion inherent in such research agendas, as well as LSD's darker legacy as an agent of behavioral modification.