LSD in Ford's Coffee?

April 29, 2008 7:11 PM

Did someone actually try to spike Gerald Ford's coffee with LSD?

I was just reading though a selection of letters by Lazlo Toth (mentioned on the blue), and he sent one to Gerald Ford with this in it:

"Dear Mr. Vice President Ford, I just read in the paper where someone tried to put LSD in your coffee in Chicago. Are you okay?"

Is this referring to an actual news story that came out at the time?

He also brings up LSD in Chicago Mayor Daley's minestrone, which sounds like a joke.

Note: the letter is dated May 16, 1974.

Thanks.

posted by fingo to Grab Bag (3 answers total)

Best answer: I've never heard the story with Ford, but there's a famous story Grace Slick tells about getting invited to the White House for a Finch College alumni tea and planning with Abbie Hoffman to put LSD in Nixon's tea:

Okay, tell me about trying to slip Richard Nixon acid at the White House.

See, Trish Nixon’s daughter went to Finch College, and it was so small that she invited all of the alumni to a tea at the White House. But my name when I went there was Grace Wing, that doesn’t mean anything right? Now, Grace Slick meant something. So I get an invitation to the White House and I call up Abbie Hoffman and say [Sing-songy] “Guess what I have….I’ve got an invitation to the White House.” So I put 600 mics of acid under a long fingernail I had for cocaine, and we go and we’re standing in line, and the security guard comes up to me and says, “I’m sorry you can’t go in. You’re a security risk.” And I go, “What?!” And he says, “You’re on the FBI list.” And I go, “What?!?!” And I found out that the members of Jefferson Airplane were on a list because of “suspect lyrics.” They didn’t know why I was a security threat, but they were right.

See, I learned all about formal teas at Finch College. You have two urns at either end of a long table and you stand—you don’t sit—and since I’m an entertainer, I gesture a lot, and I was gonna gesture across Nixon’s tea and in about a half an hour, he would’ve been out of his mind and nobody would’ve known why.

Toth might have been riffing on that.
posted by mediareport at 7:25 PM on April 29, 2008 [7 favorites]

Here is a video(YouTube) about the Grace Slick story. Includes an interview with Mrs. Slick herself.
posted by Funky Claude at 7:47 PM on April 29, 2008

Best answer: The day before, May 15, the Oakland Tribune ran this story (this is all I could get from NewspaperArchive):

LSD Found At Site of FORD SPEECH
CHICAGO (AP) The hallucinatory drug LSD was found in a COFFEE um brewing backstage at a theater where Vice President Gerald R. FORD spoke last week, authorities said today. But they said that FORD had no COFFEE while he was at....

LA Times ran the same story on May 16, 1974.

So, literally within 24 hours the Toth letter goes out.

The speech, by the way, was at Eastern Illinois University^ on May 10.
posted by dhartung at 12:11 AM on April 30, 2008 [1 favorite]