favourite year of the 20th Century

[KeithPratt]

'89 for me too. Stone Roses, leaving school, 808 state's "Pacific State" and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

[sensi]

89 for me...year my first born arrived...a perfect end to the decade I changed the most in.

[Jimbo]

1968. Dropped acid and smoked pot like crazy. From where did all those drugs suddenly appear?

[The Prof]

1968. Dropped acid and smoked pot like crazy. From where did all those drugs suddenly appear?

The man. And the man works for the government.

[Insouciant Western People]

None of those particularly stands out for me, but I'll go with 1989.

Lots of interesting stuff in the news that year, as a couple of people have already mentioned.

Personally, I was about a year into the serious obsession with music which continues to this day, and it seemed like I was discovering great new bands and lps at the rate of several a week.

In May of that year I turned 16 and left school, which improved the quality of my life immeasurably as all of a sudden I no longer had to spend several hours a day cooped up in a small room with a bunch of people whose main interest in life seemed to be wanting to beat me up.

I worked over the summer in Whitley Bay Library, which I really enjoyed not only because I got to spend a lot of time around books, but also because I had unlimited access to their music collection which I freely pillaged and ripped off on to numerous C90s.

And I started my A Levels in English, History and Sociology, which were ace.

AND. I finally started to meet girls who dressed in black and tie-dye, dyed their hair outlandish colours, and listened to great music. And wonder of wonders, some of them actually seemed to like me.

So yeah, a good year.

[Polishgirl]

None of the above.

The 20th Century is the new 19th Century.

[Phil T]

In May of that year I turned 16 and left school, which improved the quality of my life immeasurably as all of a sudden I no longer had to spend several hours a day cooped up in a small room with a bunch of people whose main interest in life seemed to be wanting to beat me up.

Been there, done that, worn the T-shirt, but a good 16 years before you.

[naughty boy]

Blimey!

[Jimbo]

1968. Dropped acid and smoked pot like crazy. From where did all those drugs suddenly appear?

The man. And the man works for the government.

Right on. If the CIA was selling cocaine in the 80s why not acid in the 60s? The money was just as green.

[Rayge]

1948 produced the NHS and me.

[clive gash]

I can’t help but think that Jez Hunt chose the wrong thing to destroy

[Robert]

1968. Dropped acid and smoked pot like crazy. From where did all those drugs suddenly appear?

The man. And the man works for the government.

Right on. If the CIA was selling cocaine in the 80s why not acid in the 60s? The money was just as green.

Well, they ( further) developed LSD and left it to their staff to freely distribute it.

[Rayge]

I can’t help but think that Jez Hunt chose the wrong thing to destroy

Why, you....

[clive gash]

Tough on Piano Magic, tough on the causes of Piano Magic.

[Diamond Dog]

1962.

I was born in 1962.

[Goat Boy]

68 is the most interesting to me. Year of the barricades and all that.

I was too young to appreciate the significance of 1989.

1997 had New Labour getting elected which certainly felt like something positive at the time and it was the first time I'd voted. The year itself wasn't a positive one for me though as I dropped out of uni and was struggling personally.

[Jimbo]

The man. And the man works for the government.

Right on. If the CIA was selling cocaine in the 80s why not acid in the 60s? The money was just as green.

Well, they ( further) developed LSD and left it to their staff to freely distribute it.

And while I had heard of sugar cubes and blotter, the stuff we got - and there seemingly was plenty - had a distinct manufactured look to it. Tiny, neat, tapered orange pills. Not hippie-ish. $3.00 a trip. That's the stuff we took at Woodstock.

[KeithPratt]

From Erowid

"An unopened, brown-glass vial of 1951 Sandoz LSD-25 (Delysid) was contributed to a gathering in celebration of Albert Hofmann's 100th birthday. The vial had been in the possession of a single person for the last 30+ years, stored casually, mostly in darkness. When opened, the powder was a very light brown-sugar to salmon color. One chemist described the fluffy, clumpy, sparkly crystalline powder as looking like "crushed needles". It was weighed and dissolved into four-ounce liquid doses containing between 100 and 110 micrograms each (± 10%)."

Storage & Degradation

Although the vial was completely sealed, without cracks, one of the major questions was whether there would be significant loss of potency by degradation as a result of the 55 years that had passed since it was manufactured. After trying it, the predominant opinion among the more than 70 participants and observers was that there was no detectable loss in potency.

This was the clearest result from the reported experiment: air-tight brown glass appears to be a very effective long-term storage method for LSD. After 55 years, stored at varying room temperatures, the LSD seemed to be fully potent.

[The Modernist]

The man. And the man works for the government.

Right on. If the CIA was selling cocaine in the 80s why not acid in the 60s? The money was just as green.

Well, they ( further) developed LSD and left it to their staff to freely distribute it.

The early history of LSD is fascinating, but I tend to think it was something that got out of control quite quickly, beyond CIA's control.
The various conspiracy theories on this are quite interesting, but ultimately I don't buy the idea that the counterculture was somehow created by US intelligence. Quite the opposite - the establishment wanted to crush the hippie movement.

[The Modernist]

And while I had heard of sugar cubes and blotter, the stuff we got - and there seemingly was plenty - had a distinct manufactured look to it. Tiny, neat, tapered orange pills. Not hippie-ish. $3.00 a trip. That's the stuff we took at Woodstock.

Once the chemical compound was known it wasn't that hard to manufacture -anyone with a university level education in chemistry could probably do it.