"Her grieving father, TV and radio host Art Linkletter, told the press, 'She was murdered by the people who manufacture and sell LSD.'
The newspapers ran wild with Linkletter’s take: 'LSD KILLED DIANE.' Later, when news of her clean toxicology report made the rounds, Linkletter blamed the jump on an '“acid flashback.' President Richard Nixon — in the midst of launching his War on Drugs — invited Linkletter to the White House. Nixon knew that a story like this could galvanize the anti-drug movement more than any fact or figure could....
It was the perfect moment for a book like 'Go Ask Alice.'... The fact that the author was anonymous only heightened the buzz. 'Alice' could be anyone, even your daughter.
The media ran with it — everyone from The New York Times to the Library Journal presented the book as a verified teenager’s diary. A million copies sold nearly overnight. Avon Books published the paperback and two years later, in 1973, ABC aired a TV adaptation of the book. That, too, was a supersonic hit, with nearly a third of all US households viewing it...."
People believe what they want to believe. Too good to check! I wanted to see how embarrassing the NYT coverage of this ridiculous book was. Here, from 1973:
"Diary of a Schoolgirl En Route to Death." It's a review of the ABC TV movie.
Based on the “real diary” of a 15‐year‐old drug pusher, “Go Ask Alice” was adapted by Ellen Violett from the book of the same title....
The scare quotes suggest that the NYT was onto to the fakery but...
Permission to publish the diary, with names, dates and places changed for protection, was given by the parents after their daughter was found dead of a drug overdose....
... I guess not!
The title is, of course, taken from the drug culture anthem composed by Grace Slick and successfully recorded by the Jefferson Airplane. The song had Alice in Drugland popping pills to encounter her rabbits 10 feet tail....
What drug is the editor on? Quite aside from the need for an apostrophe in "rabbits," there's nothing in the Jefferson Airplane song about a rabbit's tail and the only thing that's 10 feet tall is Alice herself.
The total effect of the film is as unusual as its structure. Several crucial and disturbing points are conveyed about the youthful drug culture, and perhaps they are all the more disturbing in the slick context of the film's treatment....
Slick! Don't use "slick" as an adjective right after you've been talking about Grace Slick.
The book's blunt street language was rigorously deleted and, except for a couple of vague and indirect allusions, references to various forms of sexual promiscuity were cut....
"Various forms"... I know from the NY Post: "'Another day, another blow job,' reads one entry." Ha ha ha. Straight from the mouth of "a suburban housewife." Makes perfect sense.
[T]he film is considerably less complex than the book. The author of the book careens wildly from one enthusiasm to another. The period away from home is a confusing swirl of contradictions, barely touched in the film....
Apparently, you can write a chaotic mess of a book and get credit for complexity when the point of comparison is a cheesy TV movie.
The parents are reduced to convenient soap‐opera cues. And a couple of the others provide “star turns.” Andy Griffith is on hand briefly as the sensitive‐tough priest....
A star turn by Andy Griffith as a priest?! Now, it sounds as trippy as men on a chessboard getting up and telling you where to go and the White Knight talking backwards.
So let's read this 2021 article in The Guardian, "Grace Slick and Jack Casady of Jefferson Airplane: how we made White Rabbit." Grace Slick addresses the decades-old question whether this was supposed to be a pro-drug (as the NYT assumed) or an anti-drug song. She says:
All fairytales that are read to little girls feature a Prince Charming who comes and saves them. But Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland did not. Alice was on her own, and she was in a very strange place, but she kept on going and she followed her curiosity – that’s the White Rabbit.
A lot of women could have taken a message from that story about how you can push your own agenda.
The 1960s resembled Wonderland for me. Like Alice, I met all kinds of strange characters, but I was comfortable with it....
In the 60s, the drugs were not ones like heroin and alcohol that you take to blot out a terrible life, but psychedelics: marijuana, LSD and shroomies. Psychedelic drugs showed you that there are alternative realities. You open up to things that are unusual and different, and, in realising that there are alternative ways of looking at things, you become more accepting of things around you.
The line in the song “feed your head” is both about reading and psychedelics. I was talking about feeding your head by paying attention: read some books, pay attention....
Jack Casady — the bass guitarist — said:
It’s difficult to explain how innocent the beginning of discovering drugs was before people got so dependent on them, or their life changed, or they made really poor life decisions. The song explores the simplest form: the idea of taking psychedelic drugs to open you up and make you more receptive.
Everybody took some psychedelics but we rarely played on them, not like the Grateful Dead guys did. When I did it got a little too weird for me – my bass would turn into a tree log and grow vines and I’d say, “I gotta move on here.”...
