the Acid Test parties were real and had a lot of impact at the time! many say foolish, in hindsight.. there was a sense of urgency among certain people about it that was a combination of factors.
There's a telling anecdote in the book about one of the first parties where there were two coolers of Kool-Aid, one plain and one with LSD in it. The organizers weren't malicious, they put them out and made an announcement like "this one is for lions and tigers, this other one is for kittens" hint hint right? No one could hear it over the music and the whole thing became a shit show. Definitely their hearts were in the right place but they were also a bunch of amateurs
No. That's the entire point. As the other poster said, Owsley was the first large scale producer of LSD. Obvious risk of what? Up until then, the risks you're talking about didn't even exist, let alone being common knowledge.
I read that book as well and it was pretty clear they wanted people to take it without exactly knowing what they were getting into; at least, it escalated to that point. They being Ken Kesey and his group more so than the Dead. One of the core bus riders eventually quit because he saw it as non consensual dosing. That was my takeaway anyway - there is a good amount of ambiguity in the way the book is written.
Sigh. I know one of the children of one of the people who was in the Ken Kesey group. I don't know what to hope about whether my friend's parent knew or didn't know that they were being dosed.
Are you talking about the party-goers or the organizers. The attendees did not have a good idea of what they were getting into. The organizers were comically amateur-ish.
