Harper Simon breaks down Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, who sparked America's first psychedelic culture in California. Kesey volunteered for CIA LSD experiments, then stole a supply and distributed it to friends, launching the countercultural movement that followed.
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is really the story of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, which is sort of his inner circle of friends. In a way, they're the pioneers of the first American cultural scene that was experimenting with psychedelics in California. I believe Ken Kesey was somehow enlisted, or he volunteered to be a part of some kind of government-sponsored —The CIA specifically, right? Correct. Yes, the CIA, they thought, "Oh, this could be used in combat operations. Maybe they would be able to use it to confuse the enemy or mind control people," whatever. They didn't know what they had on their hands really or what could be done. But Ken Kesey then was one of these early people who was experimented on. I mean, he volunteered. And I am not sure, but I feel like he then absconded with a lot of LSD, perhaps from the experiment. He had such a positive experience in this sterile government-controlled environment that he sort of took LSD outside of that, and he went— he went rogue with it, essentially, and began to seed it throughout his friend group.
