Sex, drugs and fasting: how detox pioneer Daniel Reid started his lifelong career with an LSD trip
- Daniel Reid got into Chinese culture after an LSD trip in 1969, and spent the next 50 years in Asia, where he influenced the detox and fasting trends
In the autumn of 1969, Daniel Reid was a long-haired, freewheeling undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, living in “a ramshackle house […] with eight hardcore hippies, none of whom were students”, according to Reid’s 2018 memoir, Shots From the Hip: Sex, Drugs and the Tao.
Reid was in his senior year but still undecided on a major. Then one morning he ingested what he calls a “macro-mega-dose” of LSD and wandered into a lecture on Chinese culture.
“The guy starts talking about China for an hour and a half. And it’s unbelievable! It’s like, I knew all this stuff! I had that feeling that this is so familiar,” Reid tells me, describing this uncanny experience of his American youth, more than half a century later, at a Chinese tea table in his sun-filled living room in Chiang Mai, northern Thailand.
From that psychedelic déjà vu, Reid went on to a career of more than 50 years in Asia, authoring at least 35 books and establishing himself as an expat literary guru on Eastern philosophy, herbal medicine and holistic health.
His greatest influence, however, may have been as an ideologue for a nascent “health and wellness revolution” that began to coalesce in the 1990s around hippie camps on the Gulf of Thailand, where passions for healthful living and spiritual harmony have developed into a giant industry of multimillion-dollar detox resorts.
Reid’s first major book, The Tao of Health, Sex and Longevity, published in 1989, has sold an estimated 350,000 to 400,000 copies and has been translated into eight languages, including Chinese.
