Advertising co-opted psychedelic rhetoric after LSD’s criminalization

Evidence

Many were the hopes that would be chewed up and spit out again, Timothy Leary’s among them. By the early 1970s, his dream of a religious awakening under the influence of psychedelics lay in ruins when he was imprisoned on drug charges following the criminalization of LSD. And so by that point, the main public exponents of his ideas—albeit in modified form—were companies like Pepsi, Pond’s, and the makers of the grapefruit beverage Squirt, whose slogan was “Turn on to flavor, tune in to sparkle, and drop out of the cola rut.” — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 595

Categorization

• CANDY: The Squirt slogan — ‘Turn on to flavor, tune in to sparkle, and drop out of the cola rut’ — is a perfect elevator-conversation absurdity.
• ADDENDUM: Directly parallels how moral panics over immodesty get commodified — advertising absorbing and profiting from rebellious rhetoric suits that same pipeline of dissent into commerce.
• XREF: connects to: 1960s psychedelic drug culture prefigured the neoliberal plastic self — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 420