The only real issue (there have been a number of debates about this in the Usenet drug newsgroups), so it matters to some of us. The main issue is whether the title was an acrostic for LSD. The evidence seems clear to me no. As for the song being inspired by LSD, since John was using lots of it at the time, arguably all of his songs then are inspired by LSD.
As for the lyrics, as I have used my fair share of LSD, and read numerous experience reports written by other users. Hallucinations just usually aren’t as vivid and explicit as in that song. The lyrics to me seem to be more inspired by the writings of Lewis Carrol than LSD use.
And then there’s the rumour that the Hawkwind album In Search of Space was recorded while the entire band was doing acid.
On the flip side, I don’t do drugs harder than absinthe, but I will attest that being in some form of altered state of consciousness does in fact make the Hawkwind experience even better.
The evidence against this new interpretation and in favour of what Lennon said is rather overwhelming. The picture Lennon claims the song was based on did in fact exist, and you can find scans of it on the Web. There was at least one eyewitness present when Julian Lennon presented the drawing to his father. The motif is certainly typical Beatles material - they wrote and recorded songs about any number of mundane and playful things - and is keeping with Lennon’s personal oevre, which drew lyrics ideas from any random object that struck his fancy, and Lennon really loved his son besides.
And perhaps most importantly, Lennon insisted at every opportunity that the picture inspired the song, and it was not in his nature to be coy about that sort of thing, or anything for that matter. As a matter of fact, he didn’t know when to shut up. If the song was about drugs he’d have screamed it from the rooftops.
Given that McCartney is only now changing his story, I am inclined to say that unless he can provide objective evidence disproving the well-documented and logical story everyone, including himself, repeated almost from the day the album was released, the song’s about a kid’s drawing.
This is a good instance of how drugs can help the creative process. Coleridge said the vision of the poem (not the poem fully formed) came to him in a dream under medication. Study of Coleridgiana indicates the medication was an anodyne of laudanum if I remember correctly, which would have been prepared using opium and alcohol.
Coleridge started hitting the laudanum at least as far back as an undergraduate, and we know he was addicted by 1800; since Kubla Khan was written a couple years before then, it is quite acceptable to take Coleridge at his word when he says that the poem came to him in a drug dream. It is quite possible he wrote the poem all at once, was interrupted by the now famous and goddamned visitor from Porlock, and subsequently edited his draft (perhaps trying to recapture the vision).
If drugs didn’t play a major role in this poem, I wonder why he would have bothered to publish that introductory note. At any rate, while it’s clear that the form of artists suffers under the influence of drugs, their inspiration, imagination, and creativity certainly do appear to be enhanced.
However: didn’t Jimi hendrix place tabs of LSD under his tradmark headband during concerts, crafting an invisible rudimentary delivery mechanism? That would account for his frenzied fits on stage, how skillful was his live music? And what about The Doors, weren’t they (or at least Jim Morrison) high for a large part of the band’s career?
The main issue is whether the title was an acrostic for LSD. The evidence seems clear to me no. As for the song being inspired by LSD, since John was using lots of it at the time, arguably all of his songs then are inspired by LSD.