Word: wasson
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Osmond was close to Aldous Huxley, the novelist and fellow psychedelic enthusiast, and in the mid-'50s the two men met with a vice president from J.P. Morgan & Co., Gordon Wasson, who - in the racial and stilted language of the day - called himself and a photographer friend "the first white men in recorded history to eat the divine mushrooms." He meant psychedelic mushrooms, which Wasson had found in an Indian village in Mexico...
...Wasson and his buddy's mushroom trip might have been lost to history, but he was so enraptured by the experience that on his return to New York, he kept talking about it to friends. As Jay Stevens recalls in his 1987 book Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, one day during lunch at the Century Club, an editor at Time Inc. (the parent company of TIME) overheard Wasson's tale of adventure. The editor commissioned a first-person narrative for Life...
...Reading the resulting piece - which Life published in its May 13, 1957, issue (one that is not online, unfortunately) - is hilarious today. Wasson describes his hallucinations at great length, in reverent terms: "The visions were not blurred or uncertain. They were sharply focused. I felt that I was now seeing plain, whereas ordinary vision gives us an imperfect view; I was seeing the archetypes, the Platonic ideas, that underlie the imperfect images of everyday life." This is druggie talk - febrile and largely meaningless. That it was printed in Life magazine - the most influential publication of the day - without irony shows...
...After Wasson's article was published, many people sought out mushrooms and the other big hallucinogen of the day, LSD. (In 1958, Time Inc. cofounder Henry Luce and his wife Clare Booth Luce dropped acid with a psychiatrist. Henry Luce conducted an imaginary symphony during his trip, according to Storming Heaven.) The most important person to discover drugs through the Life piece was Timothy Leary himself. Leary had never used drugs, but a friend recommended the article to him, and Leary eventually traveled to Mexico to take mushrooms. Within a few years, he had launched his crusade for America...
While collapsibles still make up less than 1% of the U.S. market, sales have more than tripled in the past three years, and they are moving from a cultish niche item to a legitimate product category. "The increase in popularity is almost a problem for my business," says Wasson, who sells and rides only the British-made Brompton, a hand-built brand that weighs as little as 24 lbs. and costs from $600 to $1,110, depending on the model...