It’s kind of a silly question. No matter how the vote goes we won’t know the answer. Because the only person who knows the answer is dead.
Despite what you see on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” you cannot get an answer to a factual question by conducting a poll.
Even if John conceived and wrote the song, even if for some reason his brain was so addled by drugs that he couldn’t detect the glaringly obvious LSD relationship yet somehow he could still compose and perform some of the most popular and endeared music of all time, someone would have mentioned it to him.
It’s an opinion poll. Which I created because it became a debate in the other thread. Yes, we’ll never know for sure how much drug influence actually inspired the song, even if we were to bring Lennon back in a seance. Few members of rock bands are reliable narrators of their own history from that era.
After throwing his son the bone of being the inspiration for the song, there was no way Lennon could back out of the story without hurting his son’s feelings. Especially after Paul had famously recorded a song inspired by Julian (“Hey Jude”.)
Next maybe we could do Puff the Magic Dragon, which was totally never about smoking pot or the boy who grew out of it.
There’s one word of that song that makes sense as a marijuana reference, and every single other word that doesn’t.
All i want is the truth. Just gimme some truth.
Pi can’t be the result of the division of any two ‘rational’ numbers (which can be). And that’s the truth.
There was a widespread belief that The Move’s 1966 hit* song “Night of Fear” referenced a bad LSD trip. Sample lyrics:
Image on your bedroom wall
Shadows marching in the hall
Just about to flip your mind
Just about to trip your mind
Just about to flip your mind
Just about to trip your mind
The green and purple lights affect your sight
Your mother cannot comfort you tonight
Your brain calls out for help that’s never there
The silent night has turned to a night of fear
Druggy references in this and other songs by Roy Wood were denied by drummer Bev Bevan, who claimed they were based on fairy tales from Roy’s childhood.
Well alrighty then. 
*in the UK.
*rhyming “there” and “fear” suggests a certain amount of neuronal distortion, whether drug-enabled or not.
Oh, and this song has absolutely nothing to do with drugs. It’s about medical research.
These are also my thoughts. Not everything is about something specific, sometimes things are just fun.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, rather than a spade a spade. (I’m not sure if that made sense)
Lennon was a huge fan of Lewis Carroll, who was one of the biggest influences on his “psychedelic” era. Edward Lear was another.
Both Carroll and Lear created their “trippy” art long before tripping was a thing. I mean, there are some people who think they “must have” eaten some blue mushrooms, but it’s highly unlikely either was into anything stronger than a nice cup of tea.
Creative people create. I’ve been around plenty of drugged out people in my life, and I’ve never seen one create anything that approaches greatness. It’s usually mindless burble, if anything.
A highly talented creative person on psychedelic drugs might use the experience to fuel their creativity, but the drugs - any drugs - do not lead to creativity. Quite the opposite in my experience.
So, no. Lennon created the song in question (and all the rest of his oeuvre) because he was a hugely talented artist, not because he took LSD.
Lennon was full of shit.
I don’t agree with you about LitSwD not being about LSD, but I do agree that drug use does not lead to increased creativity. In 1968 when the Beatles swore off drugs and went to the TM retreat in India, it was one of the most productive periods for their songwriting.
So, let us look at the idea that LitSwD was secretly written to be about LSD. So, Lennon writes that song, forges a drawing by his kid, then lies about it for 13 years, taking the secret to his grave- because- he wanted to fool his fans? Even tho other songs were admittedly about drugs in the same album, and the Beatles made no big secret out of LSD use.
Here is what Paul said, per wiki- Paul McCartney remembered of the song’s composition, “We did the whole thing like an Alice in Wonderland idea, being in a boat on the river … Every so often it broke off and you saw Lucy in the sky with diamonds all over the sky. This Lucy was God, the Big Figure, the White Rabbit.”[10] He later recalled helping Lennon finish the song at Lennon’s Kenwood home, specifically claiming he contributed the “newspaper taxis” and “cellophane flowers” lyrics.[8][12] Lennon’s 1968 interview with Rolling Stone magazine confirmed McCartney’s contribution.[13]
When you write a song and you mean it one way, and someone comes up and says something about it that you didn’t think of – you can’t deny it. Like “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” people came up and said, cunningly, “Right, I get it. L-S-D,” and it was when [news]papers were talking about LSD, but we never thought about it.[10]
The claim that Paul said it was about LSD comes from In a 2004 interview with Uncut magazine, McCartney confirmed it was “pretty obvious” drugs did influence some of the group’s compositions at that time, including “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, though he tempered this statement by adding, “[I]t’s easy to overestimate the influence of drugs on the Beatles’ music.”[28]
So, Paul saying drugs did influence the album is different than Paul saying “Yeah, Lucy was about LSD”.
OK, DrDeth, you convinced me-- the song with the most psychedelic lyrics on the Beatles’ most psychedelic album, that just happens to have the initials LSD prominently appearing in the title, written during a time period when they were known to be experimenting with LSD, has absolutely nothing to do with LSD-- because Lennon said so.
Sure, the song is only about Alice in Wonderland, since Lennon was such a big Lewis Carroll fan. Just like the Jefferson Airplane song of the same year, White Rabbit, was also only about Alice in Wonderland and had nothing whatsoever to do with drugs.
Within You Without You is on the same album and is pretty psychedelic, too. Magical Mystery Tour is just as psychedelic, maybe more so.
Anyway, I think it was just the drawing.
I don’t think anyone here is saying that Lucy had zero influence from Lennon’s use of LSD, just that it wasn’t the only influence, or the most important one.
What I’m saying, and I think what others here have also said, is that the “LSD” initials were a coincidence, not a deliberate reference.
The Beatles made deliberate references to many things, including drugs, and also including people reading meanings into literal nonsense lyrics in Beatles songs.
The Beatles never hid any meanings in a way that “clever” fans were supposed to be able to figure out. Their lyrics, and rock lyrics in general, are not coded word puzzles. In as much as there was ever any real meaning, it was obvious, not hidden. And the rare exceptions, like “Got to get you into my life” being a love song about weed, were still not meant to be worked out by sufficiently aware fans, it was just a personal meaning that, if Macca had never mentioned it, would still be unknown to anyone.
Lennon’s lyrics, especially during his psychedelic era, were literally nonsense in the same way that Edward Lear’s verse was nonsense. Not having any meaning other than the sound of the words and the feeling they create in the listener. Impressionistic word salad. Never a puzzle to be figured out rationally.
You make a reasoned, cogent argument. And you may be right, the song may have just the merest slight influence from Lennon’s use of LSD, and the initials are just a coincidence. I remain skeptical, but we’ll never know for sure.
Happy Dopeaversary, @RitterSport !
Thanks!