Did the CIA's Experiments With Psychedelic Drugs Unwittingly Create the Grateful Dead?

The title is a long question, but the answer is pretty much yes, although I would use the word “inspire” or “lead to” instead of “create.” The connection between the CIA and the Grateful Dead falls squarely on the shoulders of Ken Kesey. That’s author Ken Kesey, who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and was later the subject of Tom Wolfe’s nonfiction book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Kesey had volunteered to be a subject in the CIA’s drug experiments in 1959, where he learned about LSD. He was impressed enough to organize a series of parties to share LSD with  others, and opening the events, called Acid Tests, to the public. LSD wasn’t outlawed until 1966. Jerry Garcia and the band that eventually became known as The Grateful Dead played at some of those parties in 1965, where full participation was expected.

For Garcia, the ability of the Acid Tests to stop the world for a while and then remind you that it was still spinning was one of its key lessons. The Acid Tests, he says in Signpost, were “our first exposure to formlessness. Formlessness and chaos lead to new forms. And new order. Closer to, probably, what the real order is. When you break down the old orders and the old forms and leave them broken and shattered, you suddenly find yourself a new space with new form and new order which are more like the way it is. More like the flow.”
To put Garcia’s formulation in terms a contemporary Silicon Valley venture capitalist might understand, LSD was a disruptive technology, except that instead of upending mere transactions such as hailing a cab or renting a hotel room, the things being disrupted were the basic conventions of society, which is why mainstream America was, and remains, so terrified of the drug.

Looking back from 50 years later, it’s hard to determine the date the band began using the name The Grateful Dead, but a chronology of their participation in the Acid Tests tries to nail it down at Collectors Weekly. And aren’t you glad it turned out the way it did: the group that used the name The Warlocks at the time also considered the names Vanilla Plumbago and Mythical Ethical Icicle Tricycle.