LSD MUSEUM OR INSTITUTE OF ILLEGAL IMAGES?

An Archive, of Sorts, of the 1960s Psychedelic Experience Made Visual
Preserves an Era

Seated around an ash-stained coffee table below a glowing chandelier
in Mark McCloud's dusky parlor on a rainy Saturday morning in October,
four friends passed around a joint, trying to define in simple terms
the three-story Victorian on 20th Street.

"It's an archival museum of psychedelic art. Our friend here is the
curator," proffered Arthur Round, an older man cross-legged in a
wicker chair. The parlor is plastered with approximately 350 pieces of
framed blotter art and guarded from prying eyes by heavy black
curtains, making the space feel like a vault or secret subterranean
headquarters.

Dubbed the "LSD Museum" by some of his fans, McCloud's collection
includes more than 33,000 sheets and individual tabs of blotter paper
imprinted with pop culture images and used to transmit doses of LSD.
He calls it the "Institute of Illegal Images."

Until Nov. 25, dozens of the pieces, as well as some digitally
enhanced reprints, are on display at Ever Gold Gallery in the Tenderloin.

McCloud's mission is to preserve a "skeletal" remnant of San
Francisco's drug-induced 1960s legacy, "so maybe our children can
better understand us," he said. Collectors in the business consider
him the bearer of the world's largest cache of psychedelic blotter art
and its foremost historic authority an institution unto himself.

"His collection has got to be the most extensive in the world. He's
followed it from the beginning," said Phil Cushway, owner of ArtRock,
one of the primordial concert poster outlets, in SOMA. Cushway
occasionally sells blotter art for McCloud. "What he does, he does
seriously."

McCloud is 56 years old with dark greasy hair and a rakish grin. He
pads around his weathered Victorian on 20th Street wearing a black
faux-leather fedora, loose-fitting cotton pants and slip-on footwear.
Reading glasses and a house key dangle from his neck. His T-shirt
reads "LSD underwater tours. Dive into your sub-conscious."

McCloud said he's intent on protecting the meaning of acid rooted in
the user's experience largely to counterbalance the stigmatization of
the drug by government officials.

The problem, he's decided, is that bureaucrats haven't tried the trip.
Billed "Tranquilizers for a Drug Enforcement Agency gone rogue,"
McCloud's current exhibition is a proud middle finger at the federales
whose promise of life behind bars he escaped twice. In 1992 and again
in 2001, agents arrested McCloud on charges of conspiring to
distribute LSD. The breadth of his collection spawned suspicions that
he was a drug kingpin.

In the latter case, federal agents descended on his Mission home and
seized several hundred framed sheets from McCloud's living room, only
to find some had never been spiked with acid. Others that may have
been had since been chemically neutralized. Juries in Texas and
Missouri where drug busts turned up blotter that agents linked to
McCloud acquitted him both times.

"I was terrified," recalled Cushway, who testified at the second trial
as to the artistic significance of McCloud's collection. "[The jurors]
were not very sympathetic."

The indexed evidence from the trial decorates McCloud's parlor, and
some of it was selected for the show at Ever Gold. The DEA marked each
confiscated piece with masking tape and a number. Some of the sheets,
the ones measuring 8.5 by 11 inches, contain 1,000 tabs or more.

In the 60s, conventional wisdom denoted the bar for achieving clinical
insanity at 200 hits of LSD, according to McCloud and Rounds. Ask them
how many they've taken in about 40 years and they'll tell you less
than that amount.

In the same moralistic manner many San Franciscans pontificate on the
health benefits of marijuana, McCloud and his friends tout the merits
of acid.

"We'd take it for a common cold in the 60s," Round said. "If I have
any regrets it's not doing drugs enough."

What else will it cure? Anxiety, depression and "marital problems,"
Rounds said.

It's been good to McCloud for a long time.

Born and raised in Argentina, McCloud began experimenting with
psychedelics during adolescence while attending Webb School for
Gentlemen, a boarding school in Claremont, Calif.

But it wasn't until five days after his 18th birthday Dec. 9, 1971,
to be precise as a freshman pre-med student at University of Santa
Clara that McCloud experienced "death and rebirth." It came in a sugar
pill laced with a potent type of LSD called "Orange Sunshine." McCloud
reflects fondly on that day as a "rapture experience."

"My reason for being here became clear after that ... to come speak to
you about all these people who are doing all this unnecessary
suffering for a war on drugs."

McCloud switched focus from medicine to art, and after college studied
Renaissance art in Paris before settling in San Francisco. He put a
down payment on his Mission home in 1983 using money from a National
Endowment for the Arts grant. He served as vice chairman of the Artist
Board at San Francisco Art Institute from 1977 until 1987, the year of
his first blotter art show.

McCloud got serious about collecting blotter in the early 1980s, and
started framing and hanging the works instead of sticking them in the
cold, dark freezer, where they were likely to get eaten on impulse.

"I realized, 'This is a good way to save them,' 'cause you can't
swallow the frames," he said.

By stockpiling the sheets, McCloud is essentially positioning himself
as a force the mainstream art community will have to acknowledge one
day, Cushway said.

"It is not recognized as [folk art] now," he said. "But eventually it
will be."

The bulk of the collection remains tucked away, out of reach from
harmful ultraviolet light and the government.

"You think I'm kidding but they're coming again," said McCloud,
referring to the feds. "This is where the fire stopped in 1906. These
are the first three homes to survive the fire. This is where the fire
will stop again."

What fire?

"The senseless fire of throwing everyone in jail for seeking
consciousness."