Upon learning that I grew up in Austin, Texas, he quickly tells me it’s the birthplace of psychedelic rock. McCloud is a longtime San Franciscan who says he’s “always been an artist” but that his "main hobby has always been the collecting and cataloging of LSD on paper.” He is a veritable trove of trivia. ” It's a little like saying you read Playboy for the articles, but McCloud says his gratitude towards “the Sunshine” (the acid he dropped that night was called "Orange Sunshine") is partly why he’s collected blotters all these years. A lot of people think they would have died when they had an accident. It would have just been a death experience without the LSD, for sure,” he says. “I was on LSD when I had my death-rebirth experience. He was tripping at the time, and says it saved his life. On December 9, 1971-he rattles off the date in a way that suggests it’s indelibly etched into to his brain-he fell out of a window. One thing that “happened” to McCloud was a near-fatal accident. These icons often appear hundreds of times on a single blotter, so when the sheet is perforated into individual hits, each tab features the same little decal-a calling card for the dealer who sold it. There’s some predictable new age iconography (like dolphins and zodiac caricatures) and some equally predictable goofiness (think pre-Emoji smiley faces and Mickey Mouse in his sorcerer's apprentice garb).
Scan the Institute's collection-a fraction of which is published on its website, Blotter Barn-and you’ll find a wide-ranging spectrum of art that McCloud’s been collecting since the 1970s. McCloud calls his house the Institute of Illegal Images. He collects these SIM-card-sized artifacts because, weirdly enough, they’re tiny works of art. He doesn't collect these tabs to sell them. What is clear is that because each sheet, or "blotter," can be perforated into hundreds of little acid-imbued tabs, this guy, Mark McCloud, has amassed several million hits of LSD over the years. Just how many more isn't clear, because no one's done an inventory since the feds last tried to bust him 13 years ago. There’s a guy in San Francisco who has more than 33,000 sheets of LSD in his house.
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