LSD is one of the strangest and most controversial substances known to science.
A dose smaller than a grain of salt precipitates a hazardous mental journey
into a universe of hallucination, intense emotion and, some believe, mystical revelation.
These remarkable effects were discovered by the Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman in 1943.
During the 50’s the LSD was used widely for research in psychiatric hospitals.
Than in the early 1960’s LSD leaked out of the laboratory.
With bizarre and unforeseen consequences the drug was consumed
by a generation of young people seeking spiritual transcendence
and an escape from the conventional world.
Introducing the American way of life on the threshold of the golden 60’s:
color, style, comfort, utility and convenience.
Recreation, fun – these are the ultimate desires of today,
tomorrow and the years ahead of these
Post-war economic growth and material prosperity in the West
did not satisfy the desires of everybody.
Many young people lacking secure belief
but living secure lives felt a spiritual dimension was lacking.
For them this bus came to symbolize psychedelic liberation.
LSD was a ticket to ride.
I believe with the advent of acid we discovered a new way to think.
And it had to do with piecing together new thoughts in your mind
that produced people like Bob Dylan and John Lennon and William S. Barrows.
They were using new images together in a way that jarred the mind
and produced images that were latent in our consciousness
but were not being brought about by reading Vanity Fair or Woman's Home Companion
Author and “grand prankster” Ken Kesey was a leading voice
in the 60’s chorus extolling the virtues of LSD.
With money from his first novel “One flew over the cuckoos nest”
Kesey and his friends bought a second-hand school-bus
painted it bright colors and loaded with LSD set off across America.
On a journey across the continent Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters
sensed a nation on the edge of a revolution.
To Kesey the strange discordant effects of LSD seemed perfectly in tune with a times.
I think that something happened in the early 60’s
that LSD was related to, music was related to.
There was new movement in cinema and in stage. And maybe…
that once a century something goes off like a century flower.
LSD was just perhaps the pollenin that fell off of it
but it didn’t make it happen it was part of it.
If the value of the LSD is that it expresses the… and brings ?
what was going on in a 60’s than I think that’s very strong argument against LSD.
Because what was going on in a 60’s is precisely
something that I think we now have to recover from.
At a time when many of his fellow students were embracing the psychedelic ideology
Roger Scruton, today professor of philosophy in a college, viewed it all with deep suspicion.
Very difficult to summarize the 60’s world, you will…
I think one could say very briefly ??? that it was the attempt
to have rights without duties, claims without responsibilities and pleasure without cost.
And the real cost of having any peaceful enjoyment of the world
is that one maintains institutions from makes a sacrifice in order to preserve one’s inheritance.
This was something that I think the people of the 60’s, the young people of the 60’s
were very reluctant to do. And LSD ministered to that reluctance, it told them
that even the most sublime experiences those of religion much people have thought
in the past came through considerable sacrifice and worship and surrender.
That experience too could be had on the cheap.
Millbrook, NY. Here in 1963 was established a group
who saw LSD as a sacrament of a new religion to change the world.
They were lead by Timothy Leary, the former Harvard psychology professor,
fired for giving LSD to his students.
Our aim, like the aims of any religious group, just beginning,
is to transform American society. I’m sure many of you viewers know,
America today is an insane asylum. The american people are completely hung up
on material acquisition, on power, on war making, its an insane asylum over here.
And it’s our goal to lift the spiritual level of the American people.
We gonna try to bring about a religious renaissance and a spiritual revolution.
Leary’s East-Coast Millbrook community had a reverential attitude to LSD
that contrasted sharply with the merry pranksters’ anarchic West-Coast style.
One day the two groups met.
We came through riotous and noisy, they are a more sedate group,
but there was no friction, between us in fact.
I think they even gave us piece of, Baba Ramdas famous suit
did you ever heard of that story?
He was bringing across a pint of LSD in a suitcase,
and it got broken in the airport, and suit soaked it up, so they chopped
the suit, and put it in a deep freeze, and for some years
whenever they wanted to get high they would cut off a little piece of the suit to eat.
The only legitimate source of LSD was a Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz
In 1963 Leary wrote to the firm, placing an order for a hundred grams of the drug.
Enough doses for 2 million people. The letter was addressed to Albert Hoffman
who’d stumble upon the strange effect of LSD in 1943
Already alarmed by non-medical abuse of his discovery
Hoffman advised Sandoz against supplying Leary.
I became aware that LSD put became a problem from France and to US.
And they wrote me that it had been used on the street
and that had already made lot of propaganda for use outside of the medical profession.
And I immediately realized that it could be dangerous because
the substance which has such deep effect must be used carefully.
You're introduced to LSD... Unless you've taken some other drug,
like for instance like marijuana or something well you know it's an altogether new thing!
and you actually can have, um, a religious experience, and it can be even more important
than reading the bible six times, or becoming pope or something like that, you know
At Millbrook children as young as nine were given LSD.
The drug was freely available and everyone joined in its ritualized consumption.
LSD was not illegal. Leary denied there were dangers and began of propaganda offensive.
The kids who take LSD aren’t gonna fight your wars…
middle class, middle age, whiskey drinking generals.
They not going to join your corporations…
middle class, middle age, whiskey drinking corporation presidents.
Enormous crowds come out to hear me lecture. Whenever I go to a college I always sold out.
It’s not because I’m that clever it because they gave me the good lines in the show
turn on, tune in, drop out.
Such an uncompromisingly antisocial attitude was not always characteristic of those
interested in the spiritual potential of LSD.
In the early 60’s a group of psychologists and theologians in Boston
conducted a remarkable and serious-minded investigation
into the religious implications of psychedelic drugs.
Hidden in the library of the Harvard Divinity School and kept for 2 decades
under lock and key here is a doctoral thesis describing a research project
unthinkable today: an experiment to discover the effect of psychedelic drugs
on the religious experience of student priests.
The project was the brain child of the late Walter Pahnke,
a Harvard theological scholar also qualified as a medical doctor.
The experiment took place in the Marsh Chapel of Boston University
on Good Friday 1962. Today two of the participants return there for the first time.
I must have been sitting down here. It was a kind of throne
Randal Laakko was one of twenty students studying for holy orders who volunteered.
Well we gathered that morning all probably an hour before actual service began upstairs.
And we were in groups of four… there were five groups of four
twenty people who were subjects.
And we were all handed an envelope that we were asked to open
and to consume the capsule that was inside.
Of course none of us knew who had the drug and who had the placebo.
And I don’t know how many minutes transpired before we all began,
I believe, feeling a reaction the placebo in fact was a form of stimulant
that would create a sensation. I think at that point I was very much
aware that something very unusual is beginning to happen to me.
A sound recording was made of the service which by good fortune still exists today.
He came to me with his eyes and asked for water.
But his eyes were ageless and deep as well-shafts.
They unroofed my brain with their profound grazing.
Robert Kirven also received the psychedelic drug.
For him the experience was initially unpleasant.
- I tried hard to concentrate and remember were I was.
Because ??? that. At the moment I couldn’t picture my family
or what I did outside this place. And then as I concentrated it occurred to me
that this was supposed to be an experiment. I remembered that it was to be an experiment
and/in mind expansion. Then I kind of went back
and thought ok lets see what expands.
And he said: Go about the world. Tell every one that you meet Man on The Cross.
Tell everybody…
There was a poem which I can’t recall in detail but it had to do with hearing a cry
and finding a man on a cross and not being able to help him down.
But receiving instructions to going to all the world and tell everyone you meet:
there is a man on a cross.
And I felt that I had to get out of there and go find somebody and tell him:
there is a man on a cross. But there were people in appeal
and I felt I couldn’t get out and that’s when
I felt a failure as though I wasn’t doing what I had to do
To determine if the volunteers' experiences were spiritually valid, Walter Pahnke
submitted their written accounts to a panel of theologians.
The experts score the report for authenticity and after careful
statistical analysis Panky concluded that the drug had induced
mystical states indistinguishable from traditional religious visions.
Many of the participants themselves agreed,
but could they be certain their experiences were genuine?
I don’t know if I can be sure, other than to know that it something that happened to me.
And, I realize that’s a very subjective appraisal of that, but
I don’t know what else I can go with.
I know that was deeply meaningful and moving to my life.
Impressive the psychedelic drugs may seem to individual
there are nonetheless many reasons for questioning the experience.
Whatever the actual intensity of the experience, to call it religious is not…
has nothing to do with how intense it is… is to interpret it ??? a meaning.
And when you administer to yourself a drug which you know is affecting you
by giving… producing a chemical transformation in the brain.
And you are deliver the engineering that.
It's strait difficult sincerely to interpret this is a visitation
of the divine spirit or is a revelation of a transcendental world.
It simply is an act of self deception to put that kind
of religious interpretation on out of thought.
But as the 60’s progressed mind expansion became a craze.
In Switzerland the directors of Sandoz began to hear of the wide spread
and uncontrolled abuse of their product. Aurelia Chialetty was responsible
for the production and distribution of LSD.
Like kind of an explosion. LSD suddenly was on the street
and was manufactured by a lot of people.
Because immediately when it had high market value.
I remember my first experience in NY in Greenwich Village
where I was handed over, aaa, so called cube –
a sugar cube with a few drops of an LSD solution on it.
It was handled for 5–6 dollars a piece, late perhaps for 10 dollars.
Well that was a value that 1 gram of LSD suddenly had a value
of few hundred thousand of of dollars.
And this element which changed dramatically
the whole situation was for the firm the moment to say:
now we have to stop it.
Sandoz withdrew the LSD from sale but it was already too late.
Black-market suppliers of the drug were everywhere including Britain.
If you haven’t heard of LSD – you will. It’s a safe bet that this drug will make headlines
in this country as it has for some years in America.
– How do you mean, perception? – Well you had it drunk.
– Has it done anything to you yet? – Oh, yeas, yes, yes, it's affecting me
– In what way?
– Colors have become quite a lot brighter. effect in the sky.
– What do you mean by that?
– Hm, well ?... Excuse me.... pink ....
The young of the educated middle classes
particularly were attracted by the instant liberation LSD seemed to offer.
Among them – Rosy Boycott, co-founder of the feminist magazine “Spare Rib”.
Incredible looking back to think how people… just took it like candy.
And in fact we were told it was candy, it had names that were like candy.
You know – sunshine and yellow, orange and everything that sounded like children's sweets.
And you tended to do it a bit I mean it became...
lots of people who would say do it every Saturday night –
it became part of their life. They might go to a job in the city
during the rest of the week in ???
which may call very normal, what we would call then a strait way of life.
And at weekend they would metaphorically let the head on.
– Now, is so far are these visual things the only effects you find?
– No
– What are the other effects?
It’s ... it's ... It’s round… It's was shape... Everything is colored, everything, you know is,
Ah it must be to do an orange… Not only orange… Oh... I haven’t seen color.
I live in a monochromatic world… I can’t use color… I can do everything…
The romantic view of psychedelic drugs as the road to personal
and social liberation was not shared by all.
Politically inclined members of the counter-culture soon discovered contradictions.
Certainly in my case the whole idea of having anything to do with the drug culture
ran up against a very big brick wall was when I started to get involved in feminism…
and, as I say, it didn’t work at all. The LSD was for the thinkers and it wasn’t for the doers.
And it was a real unreality in the drug culture, which was logically made up by the fact that
it was totally easy to get buy with very little money.
That you could be sort of hovering on the edge of a quite a twilight world in
that you went up against any such a breach of commas…
Any money definitely no never paying taxes or bothering by any things like that
which were The Real World.
That was the real strait world which you wanted to overthrow.
And yet of course you were living on it.
And that was the ultimate irony that it was that world.
And that huge consumer boom that we were all experiencing in America and in England.
That we're supporting that dream, say, lived in a place where you thought
“I’m really changing the world” but in fact you were escaping it.
LSD is a....far worse even than err.. heroine, I think
because of its action on certain people again.
And now we've had experience where people who have taken LSD
have gone in through plate-glass windows.
We have people who were inside, with LSD coming out through plate-glass windows.
So I don't know what direction these people are moving in.
By 1967 a strong public reaction against LSD had set in.
The medias and the government were busy pointing out the dangers.
Any stress in this rising face will trip this man into a bad trip.
He will have the same effect as the man who was given a material
and doesn't know he's getting it. He will be terrified.
He's not seeing pretty visions he's seeing monsters
he's loosing his mind and he feels it going.
He is intensely, extremely, terribly uncomfortable.
If he is alone, if it's possible for him, there's only one escape from this discomfort
a suicide...this man will kill himself.
Exaduration was commonplace as public debates about the dangers and value of LSD intensified.
Scores of books and hundreds of scientific articles appeared.
And for a while psychedelic drugs became a "cause celebre"
At the center of the storm was a distinguished psychiatrist Sidney Cohen
One of the US government's chief advisors on psychedelic drugs.
Well, LSD can do many adverse things the they are done
almost never under control in supervised conditions,
they happen when people take it casually and randomly.
And when this happens this is news. And news is what has given LSD its current reputation
Particular concern was caused by a widely publicized
but subsequently descredited report that LSD might damage chromosomes.
Lurid parrallels were drawn with ?celidimite Other dangers however were real enough
20 years on we may be able to assess the true risks of LSD.
A coordinator of the government funded “Standing Commitee On Drug Abuse”
is David Terner.
There's no no doubt that there are exadurations about LSD.
But there are very real risks which are increased when you got a “LYSID” manufacture.
The risks are around people having bad trips
that's they experience very unpleasant and very intense feelings.
That they have accidents because they believe
they can do things which they really can't do.
The happening cases people trying to fly out of windows
The happening instances of people
thinking they could cross the road or cross a railway track
because they didn't believe that what was coming towards them was a car or a train
and in those circumstances that's people risk damaging themselves
and damaging other people.
There are also risks for some people because
use of LSD can actually precipitate a mental breakdown
wich otherwise would not ??? And finally when you take LSD
it is a drug more than any other that I know
which is dependent upon your own expectations of it
and the setting that you're in when you take it
By 1968th a million of americans were estimated to have tried LSD.
Many found its mental effects overwhelming. The Bad Trip – an unpredictable
unpleasant reaction to LSD is a horrifying vortex of panic and fear
that can cause long term psychological damage
1 in 4 who tried LSD without supervision
encountered its darker side.
Ronald Baldoon, an actor, was one of them. Attracted by descriptions of visual distortion
and mystical revelation he took a large dose of LSD with a friend
initially the experience was as advertised...
It was a beautiful day, one of those rare days we happen to be in ? of all places
which, if anybody knows, is full of ammonites and ancient fossils.
now became a life which it hadn't been for millions of years
and you could look at any perspective of anything. You could do closeup
or you could look wide-angled.
And sure now you would see something different you haven't seen before -
a new green, a new blue, a new sun light, a new shape, it was all there and were possible
But then things went wrong. A normally manageable event
assumed terrifying proportions under the influence of the drug.
We went back to our campsite and we were greeted by this irate
woman whose farm it was who we somehow camped wrongly in her field
and it turned out the customs. And she called me
and then she started to shout at me and press me down.
I tried to be apologetic perhaps I've been even silly but she hated me
her eyes pass through me, she thought I was a slob,
she thought, possibly, that I was the real worst type of punk as
that could ever come down from London and camp in her feild.
She hated me and it really affected me bad. And I went back to where our camp was
and we tried to cook some bacon on our completely used-up calogas
And there to my horror were ten or twelve slices of dead pig.
I've never seen it like this before but there it was sliced up dead ??? pig
And I was horrified and shocked and And we got in a car and we tried back to London
And all the way back I was hunted by green monsters
celtic monsters, cartoon kind of monsters not real monsters.
Who were in my head but out of control and laughing at me
pointing their faces at me and going haaa-haaa-haaa-haaaa we've got you.
It put me off forever. I had this negative horrible feeling
that behind everything there was something horrible...
I didn't want that experience ever again.
As the 60s were on, more and more reports of people damaged by LSD
reached Albert Hofmann in Switzerland.
The substance that he once hoped might unlock the secrets of the mind
had become a monster.
I did not feel me guilty because it is not LSD which is... bad
it's just its use its misuse and the wrong use
which is bad and which caused all these problems. And therefore
people, many people told me - “Are you not feel errr... feeling guilty about
whole story which you have... created here? And I said no, it's really not...
and this must theee... in the ray... right way
use the proper the LSD not dangerous compound...
It is very very dangerous if used uncautiously
and without respecting its very very deep influence on the psyche
even on consciousness
But LSD was being used incautiously by very many people.
Legislation became inevitable.
Here I'll propose a drug control away to provide stricter penalties for those who traffic
an LSD and other dangerous drugs with our people
In 1968 president Johnson took stern measures.
The time has come to stop the sale of slavery to the young!
Laws were passed in America and around the world
banning LSD and determing it to have no medical value.
There's 27000 people a year killed here in alcohol-related deaths.
You don't see any big thing about alcohol being evil.
There's ... how many people smoking and dying of it.
How many of all of these and yet nobody's been killed.
Why is it that people think it's so evil,
what is it about it that is... scares people so deeply
Even the goddamn ..... what is it ?
Because they are afraid that there is more to reality
than they have confronted. That there are doors
that they are afraid to go in and they don't want us to go in
there either because if we go in, we might learn something
that they don't know. And that makes us a little out of their control.
Did the establishment proscribe LSD because it revealed to the young a truth better concealed
Lord William Deeds former M.P. – an editor of the Daily Telegraph -
sat on the committee that advised the British government to ban LSD
He denies metaphysical paranoia was involved.
We are talking on the 60s, when all this things were
? sought and thought and shared.
And exact the same arguments were ??? on the habbit??? of cannabis.
in the sence the illi.... it was part of an attack on youth culture.
That the middle-aged people drank and smoked
and young people of a ??? use LSD
and other.... all the different ??? the dangers to society
that their subjects respectively pose.
And in our mind then and in my mind now LSD posed an element of risk which exceeded
any other the indulgences which civilizations were taking on board.
It was never attack on young people, it was never a political measure -
it was ??? on medical advice.
As well as the medical dangers the committee in their report
considered and then dismissed the possible spiritual benefits of LSD
I find it very hard to accept, that LSD offers what we could seriously call
a religious or spiritual experience. It can offer a transcendental experience,
it can take you outside the sphere which you normally can think in,
or you live in. But to relate that directly to religious belief,
to religious revelation, if you like, should be taken with a pinch of salt.
Few deny the reality of the psychedelic vision but many doubt its worth.
Is there anything of value to be found in a hallucinatory
irrational realm of LSD intoxication ?
The common way we think about the nature of human mind
is that it is either sane or insane.
LSD hints to us that there is a... an area of the mind
which could be called “unsane” – beyond sanity,
and yet not insane. Think of a circle with a fine split in it
at one end is insanity, you go around the circle to sanity,
and on the other end of the circle close to insanity but
not insanity is “unsanity”.
This is perhaps where all the superlative effects of humanity come from.
Not only of art but of science. And it may be that we are...
we could approach it by a thoughtful wise study of LSD.
Today the suggestion that there may be a good side to LSD
could hardly be less fashionable.
The drug has an appalling public reputation. Epitomized by this image of a naked girl
deranged by LSD, which opened the recent TV dramatization
of the operation “Juli” police rades.
The romantic appeal drugs had in Aquarian age has gone.
It's been replaced by sorted association with criminal exploitation
and wasted lifes.
Some blame LSD for glamorising drug taking
paving the way for today's more deadly addictions.
Heroine...I don't know what all this fuss is about. I can handle it.
ok, so I do heroine a bit now. I can control it
I could stop if I wanted too.
This not how I become an addict I just do heroine
slight problem look... I've this thing under control...
just gonna touch a flinger-time??? Everyone thinks “I can control heroine”
until it starts to control them. I can give up tomorrow, good night.
We could make a distinction between heroine,
which is drug which creates physical dependence,
and LSD, which is drug which has no physical dependence.
And I don't believe you can make link
between the use of LSD in 1960th and 1970th
with the use of heroine and other drugs like that in the 1980th.
In the 1960th and 70th people were using drugs like LSD believing
that it was a means of gaining greater self-awareness,
greater insight into their own being.
In the 1980th people are using drugs like LSD as means
of escaping reality, of avoiding the unpleasantness of life.
Of couse, in a sense, it doesn't really matter what reasons
people have for using it. What does matter, is that LSD
is an extraordinaly powerful drug.
Whose effect we can't really control and we can't control
when we take it
It creates so many risks for both those
who use it and for society generaly
that I believe we've gotten no choice,
but to retain legal controls on its use.
Aldous Huksley, who's early experiments with mescaline
influenced popular interest in LSD, never lost faith in the value
of psychedelic drugs.
On the day he died from cancer in 1963
Huxley asked his second wife Lora to inject him with LSD.
That was the same day that the president Kennedy was assassinated.
And we were right here in this room, it was then a soon end...
and he was getting very weak and he said to me:
“Give me big-big peace of paper” and he wrote intermuscular
one under a miligram of LSD intermuscular
and I've filled the syringe with it and I gave it to him.
It was very quiet... And at certain point I said:
“If you hear me squeeze my hand”, and he did... very weakly...
Then I thought... I had an impression that may be it was neccessary
to give a second shot and I asked him and he has indicated
So.. I've given him second shot and that... well... then it was about 4–5 hours
there was absolutely no jolt, no agitation, nothing,
except this very very quiet... like a music that becomes less and less audible,
like... going.... fading away. There was no jolt when he died
it was just ... that .... his breath stopped, and there was a beautiful expression in the face
there was a very beautiful expression in the face.
When Huksley died in 1963,
LSD was already beginning its descent to denaturati
And the advocates of Albert Hofmann's discovery
were claiming for it the status of a religious sacrament.
I think that many of the intellectuals of the 60th were really – failed priests.
The're people who are looking for a priestly role in society,
and in another age they would perhaps would join the church
and subjected themselves to the discipline of the church.
But they of course didn't have the necessary transcendental belief,
or a necessary ability to sacrifice themselves.
So that they took up LSD... as a religion
in order to preach something to the multitude,
and they had to have something to offers to the multitude,
which in a consumer society means offering something quick, easy, and satisfying.
And I think that in that way LSD was extremely dangerous
in enhancing the ambitions of those people to preach
when they should've actually been staying silently in their studies
getting on with something respectable.
The most important what I gained from LSD experience was the inside
that, which commonly is believed to be the reality, is not something fixed,
but rather ambiguous. I experienced another reality under LSD,
and before I had always thought there is only one reality – a “true” reality
and... but then I... I realized there are the dimentions of reality...
subtitles performed by Rajaka Dharma Group
http://www.rajaka.net