The LSD Story

The kick-off episode to the last DRAGNET series, with the inimitable Jack 'Joe Feiday' Webb, is the legendary 'blue-boy' episode. I'm not going to discuss the entire 4 years this incarnation of DRAGNET, just this episode.

And what a way to start!

This episode starts, with Joe and his newest partner Bill Gannon, respond to a call. And literally 'pick' Benjie'blue-boy' Carver's head (attached to his living body) out of the ground.

With a tight, single shot, 'blue-boy' gets right at it:

'Reality, man, reality! I can see the centre of the earth!'

And, with those immortal words (and more to follow) we're into the 60's man - tagging along with Sgt. Joe. And what a trip this will be.

This episode includes some of my - and, many others - favourite trippy moments, including the scene at the acid-eaters house; one girl's 'climbing' a stairs, another is snapping her fingers to that (invisible) bongo beat, and, the beatnik who has dialogue, is eating paint.

You cannot make this stuff up.

But, Jack can - and does he.

He trowels on the moralising, and, everything in Sgt. Joel's world IS black and white.

You're either a good upstanding citizen - meaning, a square, boring person, or, you're a freak, and will do anything to make him snarl. But, be certain of this: after Joe's given you his speeches, and his disgusted looks, he'll throw the book at you.

I love him. I miss him. And, he gave up Ms. Julie London for his jazz records.

Go figure.

I probably shouldn't have, in retrospect, but I have dosed acid more than any other user I've ever known, and I'm here to tell you that you don't get hyper or go crazy while under the influence of LSD, you don't say stupid things that make no sense (usually just the opposite--your intellect is streamlined), addiction is nonexistent, there are no lasting physical effects, and you certainly can't ingest so much that you die. (By the way, the wild result of acid taken on sugar cubes in the film HAIR was as silly and unresearched as this episode that was televised a decade before.) I don't recommend dropping acid, but if you do, make sure you have somebody with you who has also dropped acid but is sober, and be sure there's lots of drinkable water around--and don't forget to drink it. A big danger with using LSD is kidney failure, not, as believed in the 60s, jumping out of windows believing you can fly or burning your hands trying to pick flowers out of a gas burner on a stove. By the way, your sober "babysitter" (it's what they're called) is there to keep you from doing something dumb, like deciding you don't want to be in your body anymore and closing your eyes and giving up the ghost. It happened to me once, and my sober friend cried out and jolted me back into my body. Another time my girlfriend and I didn't have a babysitter, and she pulled a knife on me with intent to do me harm. That was after I had put the alarm clock in the microwave because, of course, that's where it was supposed to go.

Revived after its 1959 demise, "Dragnet" returned to television, in color and impressively contemporary, nearly eight years later. This archetypal police procedural, which began as a radio serial in 1949, became instantly recognizable--and in time extensively parodied--through its no-nonsense, deliberately deadpan and often colorless approach along with its four-note musical calling card that signaled "gotcha!" to countless perpetrators.

Jack Webb was the impetus and guiding force for "Dragnet." Having had a bit part in the excellent 1948 film noir "He Walked by Night," based on a true story, Webb was inspired by the police procedures depicted in the movie to create a half-hour show, based on actual case files, that traced the investigation and solution of an array of both felonies and misdemeanors. Launched as a midseason replacement for the sitcom "The Hero" in January 1966, "Dragnet 1967" opened with a story truly ripped from the headlines, "The LSD Story."

A rock-ribbed conservative, Webb, who served as the series' producer, director, occasional writer, and star Sergeant Joe Friday, had long spotlighted illegal drug abuse on "Dragnet," and although the show's depictions--and Webb's diatribes--would soon become strident, "The LSD Story" is comparatively subdued.

Granted, Friday and his partner Officer Bill Gannon soon encounter teenage acid tripper Benjie "Blue Boy" Carver (Michael Burns) with his head buried in the dirt after having chewed bark off a tree (seemingly predating Euell Gibbons), but Webb's script makes it clear that the scourge of LSD, a powerful psychedelic drug derived from ergotamine, has taken the Los Angeles Police Department by surprise as it doesn't know much about the drug, which along with marijuana epitomized the Sixties counterculture.

Accordingly, Blue Boy, despite his erratic behavior, is able to beat the rap with help from his parents (Eve Brent, Robert Knapp). But when other youths, including a pair of teenage girls (Shari Lee Bernath, Heather Menzies), begin freaking out after hooking down "number five capsules" containing LSD, the trail leads quickly to Blue Boy.

Depictions of the big bust suggest Webb's unfamiliarity with the burgeoning psychedelic scene; the party Friday and Gannon crash seems more like heroin junkies nodding out than the kinetic kaleidoscopes soon to become pop-culture staples in portrayals of the acid culture; moreover, at the climax, LSD is not the drug to blame for the inevitable tragedy.

Decades later, we have the luxury of knowing a fascinating secret about LSD, which "Dragnet 1967" had seized upon as a public menace to inaugurate its return to television. Webb and the general public could not have known this at the time of production, but LSD had been the centerpiece of MK-ULTRA, an extensive mind-control program conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1950s--a decade before the 1960s counterculture discovered LSD--to find either a "truth serum" or a debilitating agent as a weapon in the Cold War. CIA agents who, wittingly or not, had been dosed with acid were known as "enlightened operatives."

Indeed, one such witting CIA operative was Al Hubbard, whose LSD experiences were so enlightening that he became the drug's earliest large-scale advocate, known as "the Johnny Appleseed of LSD." He made psychiatrists aware of the drug; in turn, they prescribed it as a therapeutic agent ("The LSD Story" notes that acid was still legal) to high-profile patients such as actor Cary Grant. One such doctor was Timothy Leary, soon to become a notorious LSD proselytizer.

The CIA also used agencies such as the Veterans Administration to solicit volunteers for LSD experimentation. One such volunteer was writer Ken Kesey, whose experiences working at a VA hospital informed his novel "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," and whose LSD experiences at the hospital inspired his own proselytizing: Kesey hosted a series of "acid tests"--"The LSD Story" uses his line, "Can you pass the acid test?"--that also featured a rock band called the Warlocks; they later became famous as the Grateful Dead, the archetypal exponent of acid rock.

Again, we have the benefit of hindsight into circumstances unknown to the then-contemporary public at large, although had Joe Friday known of them, he might note sardonically that it was "your tax dollars at work" as, irony of ironies, the CIA was indirectly but ultimately responsible for introducing LSD to the unwashed masses. But we do view these "Dragnet" episodes retrospectively, with a fuller context informing the environment in which they were produced, and "The LSD Story" remains fascinating for its cautious establishment reaction to a (counter-) cultural phenomenon about to come on like a full-blown acid trip.

REVIEWER'S NOTE: What makes a review "helpful"? Every reader of course decides that for themselves. For me, a review is helpful if it explains why the reviewer liked or disliked the work or why they thought it was good or not good. Whether I agree with the reviewer's conclusion is irrelevant. "Helpful" reviews tell me how and why the reviewer came to their conclusion, not what that conclusion may be. Differences of opinion are inevitable. I don't need "confirmation bias" for my own conclusions. Do you?

Nearly eight years after the original TV version of "Dragnet" ended, that series was brought back in color and with the first ep that was broadcast (actual first filmed ep of the revival was a made-for-TV movie that aired a couple of years later) concerning the effects of a popular and then-legal drug called LSD. It seems Sgt. Joe Friday (Jack Webb) and his new partner Officer Bill Gannon (Harry Morgan) find a teen boy with his head in the ground and his face painted blue and yellow who initially only ID's himself as "Blue Boy". He also goes on various tangents that only make sense to him. While they can't put him behind bars, they can hold him in court even when his parents offer to take him home. Eventually, he does get off only to cause more trouble. I'll stop there and just say this was quite exciting as not all lines are delivered in that clipped-tone which was the norm for the series but there are some shouting during the climatic scenes. Quite an effective first ep of this revived series. Oh, and one of the teen girls in this ep was played by Heather Menzies who was one of the Von Trapp kids in The Sound of Music a couple of years back. She'd eventually marry future TV star Robert Urich.

This episode was the first Dragnet in color, appropriately. It is a cool little episode and a lot of fun. Just don't take it too seriously. Don't be all Friday about it and just go ahead and let your hair down and get groovy.