The band’s concerts were (and still are) big acid scenes. Others are less subtle, like the sheet emblazoned with the Grateful Dead’s skull-and-lightning bolt logo. Bill appeared on a blotter, McCloud says, it signified that the sheet came from a certain chemist named Bill. Bill, the clay figurine from Saturday Night Live-were actually subtle clues when Mr. Many designs-like the sheets imprinted with Mr. This was especially helpful at the time, when people would mail sheets of LSD around the world simply by slipping them into record sleeves. McCloud surmises that most blotter art was created so manufacturers, dealers, and consumers could identify the origins of the acid. The drug-documenting site Erowid says it’s led to “an array of creative and stunning designs,” so much so that “it is likely that a few of the blotter designs shown have never been dipped and were created purely as art.” Erowid has its own digital gallery of LSD blotter art, and some of the visual tropes from the Institute of Illegal Images can be found there as well. Blotter art is a relatively new, and still underground, art form. It’s a new word, and the word hasn’t been with us very long.”Īnyway. And the first novel that had the word was. “ The Psychedelic Sounds of The 13th Floor Elevators, who I just saw play on Halloween. “The first record to have the word 'psychedelic' on the album was The 13th Floor Elevators, from Austin,” he says. Upon learning that I grew up in Austin, Texas, he quickly tells me it’s the birthplace of psychedelic rock. McCloud is a longtime San Franciscan who says he’s “always been an artist” but that his 'main hobby has always been the collecting and cataloging of LSD on paper.” He is a veritable trove of trivia. ” It's a little like saying you read Playboy for the articles, but McCloud says his gratitude towards “the Sunshine” (the acid he dropped that night was called 'Orange Sunshine') is partly why he’s collected blotters all these years. A lot of people think they would have died when they had an accident. It would have just been a death experience without the LSD, for sure,” he says. “I was on LSD when I had my death-rebirth experience. He was tripping at the time, and says it saved his life. On December 9, 1971-he rattles off the date in a way that suggests it’s indelibly etched into to his brain-he fell out of a window. One thing that “happened” to McCloud was a near-fatal accident. These icons often appear hundreds of times on a single blotter, so when the sheet is perforated into individual hits, each tab features the same little decal-a calling card for the dealer who sold it. There’s some predictable new age iconography (like dolphins and zodiac caricatures) and some equally predictable goofiness (think pre-Emoji smiley faces and Mickey Mouse in his sorcerer's apprentice garb). Scan the Institute's collection-a fraction of which is published on its website, Blotter Barn-and you’ll find a wide-ranging spectrum of art that McCloud’s been collecting since the 1970s.

McCloud calls his house the Institute of Illegal Images. He collects these SIM-card-sized artifacts because, weirdly enough, they’re tiny works of art. He doesn't collect these tabs to sell them. What is clear is that because each sheet, or 'blotter,' can be perforated into hundreds of little acid-imbued tabs, this guy, Mark McCloud, has amassed several million hits of LSD over the years. Just how many more isn't clear, because no one's done an inventory since the feds last tried to bust him 13 years ago. There’s a guy in San Francisco who has more than 33,000 sheets of LSD in his house.

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