Category Archives: Hippie Madness

Mad Scientist #18: Steven H. Pollock

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Steven Pollock - Photo by Linda Dear

Photo by Linda Dear

What do you do when you find a bluish lump of fungus previously unknown to science, growing in your petri dish? If you’re Steven Pollock, you eat it, call your friend, and tell him you’ve discovered the one thing that’s eluded men of obscurity for millennia. I am talking of course about the philosopher’s stone—key to the universe—elixir of life—the ultimate essence of all things. In suburban San Antonio of all places. But there’s one quality the Ancients forgot—it gets you really, really high.1 Continue reading →

Mad Scientist #15: Peter N. Witt

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Peter WittIn a study that would make even the most cool-headed scientist sweat like a tasty man at a cannibal convention, researchers from the University of Oklahoma pumped nearly 300mg of LSD into the body of a male asiatic elephant.1 Immediately following the dosage, equivalent to nearly 3000 human hits of acid, the creature suffered a massive seizure and died.1

This was not an isolated incident. Countless animals have been drugged with hallucinogens in the name of science. Everything from cats2 and rats3 to snails4 and goats have had their doors of perception unwittingly flung open in the quest to answer one of [stoned] man’s most basic questions: What are our pets like high?

Thanks to German pharmacologist Peter N. Witt, we’ve even drugged spiders. Continue reading →

Mad Scientist #6: Bart Huges

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On January 11th, 1965, at an art happening in Amsterdam’s Dam Square, failed med student turned New Age medical revolutionary Bart Huges slowly began to uncover his self-inflicted head wound. Though his audience was composed of some of the grooviest, most psychedelically-minded people in Europe, few could have been prepared for what lay beneath the thirty-two meters of day-glo surgical gauze: a gaping, pulsating hole boring directly into the outer layers of Huges’ brain! Continue reading →