5
The Beatles Were Turned On To LSD After Being Dosed By Some Dentist
The Beatles were all about love -- the love of life, the love of people, and most notably, the love of tripping balls on LSD. One of the most enduring mysteries in all of popular culture is how these lads, an angelic boy band who set the world aflame with nary a swear word or swaggering hip, wound up like this.
Oh, that's easy. They got hooked at, of all things, a classy dinner party held by one of their non-musical friends.
Back in 1965, John Lennon and George Harrison, along with their wives, were finishing up at a dinner party held by a mutual dentist friend when he offered them a last-minute cup of coffee. Being polite partygoers, the four partook ... only to be informed that the sugar cubes they'd used had been soaked in LSD. (They should have known something was off when a dentist kept insisting on giving them sugar.) Lennon was furious and yelled, "How dare you fucking do this to us?" at their host. This was the early years for LSD culture, remember. The only thing everyone knew about the drug was that it turned people into crazy, violent assholes -- something John Lennon would know nothing about.
Panic-stricken, the foursome left the party and decided to head somewhere safe and relaxing: a London nightclub. They didn't make it past the elevator before they started screaming about an imaginary fire. After the nightmare-vision stage finished up, the gang settled down into a blissful peace. As Harrison described it, "I had such an overwhelming feeling of well-being, that there was a God, and I could see him in every blade of grass. It was like gaining hundreds of years of experience in 12 hours." Meanwhile, Lennon observed that "George's house seemed to be just like a big submarine." He didn't mention the color, but you can take a guess.
United ArtistsClearly, George got the better-quality stuff.
After the LSD wore off, George and John decided that Paul and Ringo had to get in on the act, not only because they wanted to see Ringo shit himself in terror as a train sporting a human face bore down on him (an experience he would later immortalize in his work on Thomas The Tank Engine), but also because they didn't think they could relate to those two anymore, the narc-y plebs. The band eventually downed some gear together and went on to make musical history, as well as give everyone false expectations about how productive you can be while stoned.
4
Jean-Paul Sartre Had Some Bad Mescaline And Spent Years Hallucinating About Sea Life
As we all know, Jean-Paul Sartre was a highly influential philosopher, playwright, novelist, political activist, biographer, and literary critic, and it's a coincidence that we're listing those in the same order as Wikipedia. But before he became he man we know and love and, again, definitely know, he was an average student at Paris's Ecole Normale Superieure -- "average" in that he loved himself some drugs. One day he decided to try taking mescaline under the paper-thin guise of wanting to study his own mental processes, but he wound up taking too high a dose, which caused him to suffer terrifying hallucinations of ... um, sea creatures.