History, 35-65

The First LSD Experiences, 35 Early Distribution of LSD, 38 A Decade of Clinical Use, 40 A Decade and a Half of Covert Use, 45 The Big Wave Hits, 49 LSD Becomes Illegal, 58 Ebb and Resurgence, 62

Chemistry, 66-68

Resemblances and Differences Between LSD and Other Substances, 66

Other Psychoactive Lysergic Acid Derivatives, 66

Physical Effects, 68-74

Distribution of LSD Throughout the Body, 69

Measurable Effects on the Brain, 70 Effects upon Chromsomes, 72 LSD and Physical Health, 72 Pain Reduction, 74

Mental Effects, 74-89

General Effects, 76 Dosage Considerations, 78 Therapy and Everyday

Problems, 78 Creative Stimulus, 83 Religious Considerations, 86

Botanical Sources of Lysergic Acid Amides, 89-99

Rye and Other Grasses, 89 Morning Glories, 95 Hawaiian Woodroses, 98

Forms and Preparations, 99-101

CHAPTER ONE

The LSD Family (the archetype)

April 79, 1943: Preparation of an 0.05% aqueous solution of d-lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate.

4:20 P.M.: 0.05 a (0.25 mg LSD) [250 micrograms] ingested orally. The solution is tasteless.

4:50 P.M.: no trace of any effect.

5:00 P.M.: slight dizziness, unrest, difficulty in concentration, visual disturbances, marked desire to laugh ....

—Albert Hofmann

HISTORY

Of all substances that excite the visionary powers of the mind, LSD is the most potent. It belongs to a class of substances that can be divided into two groups. One group occurs naturally, in the fungus ergot and in members of the woodrose and morning glory families. The other group is produced semi-synthetically, the most important member being LSD, Both groups exhibit a four-ring crystalline chemical structure. Unlike most of the psycho-active molecules dealt with in this book, which are called amines, these LSD-type compounds are all amides.

In a curious circle of coincidence, knowledge about the psychoactivity of the natural group came along only after the synthesis of LSD by Dr. Albert Hofmann. He wrote the lab notes quoted at the beginning of this section, Unlike most chemists, who even today work mainly with synthetics, Hofmann was drawn toward study of natural substances at the end of the 1920s. Under the supervision of Dr. Arthur Stoll, who isolated the first ergot alkaloid in a pure chemical form, Hofmann later synthesized a number of ergot analogues (closely related compounds) at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Basel, Switzerland.

The First LSD Experiences

Hofmann's laboratory syntheses of ergot analogues resulted in the construction of many new lysergic acid derivatives. Several turned out to be useful in medicine—especially in obstetrics, geriatrics and the treatment of migraine headaches. The twenty-fifth compound in the series his team produced—lab coded LSD-25—was expected on the basis of its molecular

35

56 The LSD Family

structure to be a circulatory and respiratory stimulant. Tested on experimental animals in 1938, it made them restless and caused them to display strong "uterine-constricting" effects. These results were not of sufficient interest to the Sandoz staff; further testing ceased.

In the spring of 1943, Hofmann received "a peculiar presentiment." He felt that LSD-25 might possess properties other than those observed m Sandoz' initial investigation. He therefore set about resynthesizing this substance, intending to resubmit it to Sandoz' pharmacological department for further examination. That was "in a way uncommon," he wrote in his

first Observations of LSD's Effects 37

autobiography, "for experimental substances were as a rule definitely stricken from the research program, if they were once found uninteresting from the pharmacological aspect."

In the course of recrystallizing "only a few centigrams" (hundredths of a gram) for analysis, a strange thing happened to Dr. Hofmann.

1 suddenly became strangely inebriated The external world became changed as in a dream. Objects appeared to gain in relief; they assumed unusual dimensions; and colors became more glowing. Even self-percept ion and the sense of time were changed. When the eyes were closed, there surged upon me an uninterrupted stream of fantastic images of extraordinary plasticity and vividness and accompanied by an intense, kaleidoscope-like play of colors. After about two hours, the not unpleasant inebriation, which had been experienced whilst I was fully conscious, disappeared.

Hofmann's was the first human experience of LSD, an accident that would never have occurred under careful laboratory conditions. "It was possible thai a drop had fallen on my fingers and had been absorbed by the skin." One drop.

The most powerful psychedelic agent known at that time was mescaline. To receive a psychedelic effect, the average human body has to absorb a third of a gram or more of mescaline. However, LSD is about four thousand times as strong as mescaline. A drop on his skin was enough—perhaps 20-50 micrograms (millionths of a gram, abbreviated meg.)—to give Hofmann a light trip lasting noticeably for two hours. If LSD were only a thousand times as strong as mescaline, Hofmann would probably not have felt its mental effects.

But he did notice. Three days later he resolved to apply methodical analysis to his accidental discovery.

A cautious man, Hofmann started by ingesting a quarter of a milligram (250 meg.), intending to increase the dosage as necessary to complete a full description of the effects of the drug. That at least was his intention.

Forty minutes after administration of the conservative first dose, less than fifty words along in his efforts to record observations, came a far more powerful reaction: the first intentional human experience of LSD. Hofmann was unable to continue his description in the lab notebook as "the last words could only be written with great difficulty":

1 asked my laboratory assistant to accompany me home as 1 believed that my condition would be a repetition of the disturbance of the previous Friday. While we were still cycling home, however, it became clear that the symptoms were much stronger than the first time. I had great difficulty in speaking coherently, my field of vision swayed before me, and objects appeared distorted like the images incurved mirrors. I had the impression of being unable to move from the spot, although my assistant told me afterwards that we had cycled at a good pace ....

Expecting another short, "not unpleasant inebriation," Hofmann found

38 The LSD Family

the extremely small quantity he had ingested "to be a substantial overdose," causing a profound disruption of ordinary perception.

The faces of those present appeared like grotesque colored masks; strung agitation alternating with paresis; the head, body and extremities sometimes cold and numb; a metallic taste on the tongue; throat dry and shriveled; a feeling of suffocation; confusion alternating with a clear appreciation of the situation.

I lost all control of time; space and time became more and more disorganized and I was overcome with fears that I was going crazy. The worst pan of it was that I was clearly aware of my condition though I was incapable of stopping it. Occasionally I felt as being outside my body. I thought I had died. My "Ego" was suspended somewhere in space and I saw my body lying dead on the sofa. I observed and registered clearly that my "alter ego" was moving around the room, moaning.

A doctor arrived after Hofmann reached "the height of the crisis" and found a somewhat weak pulse but normal circulation. Six hours after he began the test of d-lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate for mental effects, Hofmann's condition "improved definitely," though

the perceptual distortions were still present. Everything seemed to undulate and their proportions were distorted like the reflections on a choppy water surface. Everything was changing with unpleasant, predominantly poisonous green and blue color tones. With closed eyes multihued, metamorphosizing fantastic images overwhelmed me. Especially noteworthy was the fact that sounds were transposed into visual sensations so that from every tone or noise a comparable colored picture was evoked, changing in form and color kaleidoscopically.

Fearing he had poisoned himself with a substance he himself had made, Hofmann was particularly concerned that he hadn't made a proper "leave-taking" from his wife and family, who had traveled earlier that morning to nearby Lucerne. After a night of frightening visions, he felt relieved the next morning and curiously rejuvenated.

What I found further surprising about LSD was its ability to produce such a far-reaching, powerful, inebriated condition without leaving a hangover. Completely to the contrary, on the day after the LSD experiment I felt myself to be in excellent physical and mental condition ....

A sensation of well-being and renewed life flowed through me. Breakfast tasted delicious and was an extraordinary pleasure. When I later walked out into the garden, in which the sun shown now after a spring rain, everything glistened and sparkled in a fresh light. The world was as if newly created. All my senses vibrated in a condition of highest sensitivity that persisted for the entire day .... It also appeared to me to be of great significance that I could remember the experience of LSD inebriation in every detail.

Early Distribution of LSD

With this eye-opening, frightening experience, Hofmann entered a world largely unknown to Westerners but Ions familiar to tribal users of

Psychedelic Age Catalyzed 39

sacred, mind-altering plants. LSD was something genuinely new in two important ways. First was the extreme potency of this compound—which figures out at 100,000-300,000 substantial doses to the ounce. Second, LSD was the first psychedelic that does not occur in nature. Mescaline had been synthesized after analysis of peyote, but it was the same drug as in the plant. LSD never existed before Dr. Hofmann synthesized it.

When his superior, Arthur Stoll, read the report, he telephoned immediately to ask, "Are you certain that you have made no mistake in the weighing? Is the stated dose really correct?" Professor Ernst Rothlin, director of the pharmacology department at Sandoz, and two of his colleagues then repeated the experiment using only a third of what Hofmann had tried. Even with this reduction, the effects were "extremely impressive and fantastic." As Hofmann has put it since, "All doubts in the statements of my report were eliminated."

Subsequent studies were carried out by Werner Stoll, the son of Arthur Stoll, involving forty-nine administrations to twenty-two people at the University of Zurich. In 1947, he published the first article on LSD's mental effects in the pages of the Swiss Archives of Neurology. This was followed in 1949 by his second communique on LSD to this journal, entitled "A New Hallucinatory Agent, Active in Very Small Amounts." Two further studies on clinical experiences with LSD were issued that same year.

Six years after Hofmann's discovery, LSD made its way to the United States. It was taken to Los Angeles by Nicholas Bercel, a psychiatrist now specializing in the electroencephalograph (EEG), who had been handed some casually by Werner Stoll with a request that he try it. LSD was requested and received through the mail at Boston's Psychopathic Hospital, where it was first given to Dr. Robert Hyde, the Assistant Director. After swallowing 100 meg., he became paranoiac but claimed that there was no effect and that the hospital had been cheated. He even insisted on making his hospital rounds. An associate commenting later said, "That was not Dr. Hyde's normal behavior; he is a very pleasant man."

The psychiatrists A.K. Busch and W.C Johnson also sent for LSD, looking for "a good delirient" for use in therapy. They thought LSD "might shake up things," as Busch later remarked. By August 1950, they were discussing the drug's role as a possible aid in psychotherapy in an American journal. Diseases of the Nervous System;

We believe that L.S.D.-25 is a drug which induces a controllable toxic state within the nervous system, that reactivates anxiety and fear with apparently just enough euphoria to permit recall of the provoking experiences. It does this without the sluggishness or speech difficulties so frequently encountered during I.S.T. [Insulin Shock Therapy] and following E.C.T. [Efectro-convulsive Therapy].

On the basis of the preliminary investigation, L.S.D -25 may offer a means for more readily gaining access to the chronically withdrawn patients. It may also serve as a tool for shortening psychotherapy. We hope further investigation justifies our present impression.

40 The LSD Family

The history of LSD until 1966, when curbs were placed upon further experimentation, can be seen in microcosm in Dr. Hofmann's first two experiences of the drug: initially there was keen interest and optimism; as the power of LSD came to be understood, there was panic. On the basis of Hofmann's light first experience, Sandoz hoped that it might be marketed generally, like barbiturates and tranquilizers. Sandoz thus distributed LSD at cost to many investigators, trying to find a standard use for it.

Sandoz was understandably nervous about some of the wilder aspects of Hofmann's second trip, such as the "out of the body" experience, not to mention other aspects which Hofmann has since described as deeply religious. Nevertheless, the people at Sandoz saw a potential for the drug as a "psychotomimetic" or "schizogen." In the literature distributed with LSD, Sandoz recommended it as an agent for producing a "model schizophrenia" that could be used by psychiatrists and psychologists to explore their patients' states of mind. Sandoz urged that this new substance be tried in only minimal amounts. The earliest studies used miniscule dosages of 20-50 megs.

Thanks to the successes of Freudian and Jungian psychology and to discoveries about mood alteration, researchers in many fields were poised to make a frontal assault on the disordered mind and regarded LSD as very promising. On the basis of an analogy with malaria and yellow fever, it was thought that duplicating psychosis or schizophrenia using LSD for an eight-or ten-hour period might well produce insights leading to an eventual cure.

Little of this work panned out as hoped, since there are significant differences between the LSD state and the various psychoses, in which hallucinations, for instance, are usually auditory rather than visual. The analogy was wrong, but it launched LSD into a new decade.

A Decade of Clinical Use

At the start of the 1950s there were only handfuls of papers discussing LSD; by the end of that decade more than five hundred had appeared. This output is a good measure of how fascinated psychotherapists were with the many possibilities LSD opened up. Recently it has come to light that much of this work was encouraged and supported by the CIA and later by Army, Air Force and Navy intelligence. In effect, these agencies triggered an explosion of interest in and use of LSD during the 1960s. In the meantime, more and more research scientists entered this new field, fascinated by its possibilities.

In 1953, Dr. Ronald Sandison established the first LSD clinic open to the public at a small mental hospital in England. Before long, additional centers sprang up in Germany, Italy, France, Holland, Czechoslovakia, several Scandinavian countries, Canada and the U.S. Nearly all used low dosages in a variety of therapeutic approaches. Slowly they changed the image of this "psychosis-mimicking" drug.

Samples of LSD along with a batch of Sandoz tranquilizers scheduled for study were sent in 1954 to the Psychiatric Research Institute in Prague,

Diffusion to Psychiatrists 4;

Czechoslovakia. The package was opened by a medical student, Stanislav Grof, who was intrigued by the informational leaflet's description of LSD as an agent capable of producing a temporary "model psychosis." Grof tried the LSD in conjunction with a strong flashing light.

We were doing all kinds of experiments. My preceptor, who gave me LSD, was interested in the EEC among other things, and also in something that's called "driving the brainwaves"—which you can do either using a stroboscopic light or an acoustic input. And then you study whether the corresponding brainwaves would pick up the frequencies that you are feeding into the system.

So when I was "peaking" on LSD, a nurse would come and say, "It's EEG time." She would take me to this little cell. I would lie down and she would take my regular EEG tracing.

And then came the time to "drive my brainwaves." And so she brought the strobe light which we were using, asked me to close my eyes, put the thing above my head—and turned it on.

And this incredible blast of white light came. And the next thing that I knew was that my consciousness was leaving my body. Then I lost the clinic. Then I lost Prague. Then I lost the planet. Then I had a feeling of existing in a totally disembodied stare and literally becoming the universe—experiencing it. There was "big bang," there were sort of "white holes," "black holes."

While this was happening, the nurse very carefully was following the instructions—and started at about three cycles, took it up to sixty and back and forth, and put it carefully in the middle of the "alpha" range, and then the "theta" range and "delta" range, and then ended the experiment.

And then I somehow found my body again—and ended up very impressed. So what I did, I joined a group of people who had access to psychedelic substances.

Dr. Grof went on to manage LSD observations on human subjects at the Psychiatric Research Institute in Prague and later did similar work at Spring Grove Mental Hospital near Baltimore. Eventually observing more than 3,500 sessions, he introduced views about the LSD experience quite different from those appearing in the early literature. On the basis of his research, he came to believe that psychiatric concepts were inadequate, and he saw the LSD-induced "psychotomimetic" reaction as potentially healing— when, for example, a disruptive experience was allowed to continue to resolution.

In Los Angeles, Dr. Nicholas Bercel was active in "psychophysiologial investigations," publishing articles about LSD in scientific journals and introducing this drug to research and medical scientists.

In 1954, Dr. Oscar Janiger, who had been interested in LSD since reading Stoll's first account, was given a chance to try the drug at a mountain retreat: "From that moment on my mind didn't stop for one minute." He wrote Sandoz requesting LSD for a "naturalistic study" and received a "materials grant" (an ample supply).

Janiger set about his study in 1955. His third subject was an artist who

42 The LSD Family

claimed the experience was the equivalent of "four years in art school" and entreated Janiger to give it to other artists. Janiger wasn't expecting this development, but he eventually gave in and started a subproject in which one hundred artists drew a Kachina doll before, during and after LSD ingestion. By the end of his investigations in 1962,Janiger had given several thousand administrations of LSD to 875 individuals, many from the creative community in Los Angeles, as well as "plumbers, carpenters, and housewives— whatever that means—and people from different educational and ethnic-backgrounds."

Another important figure during the 1950s was the enigmatic, flamboyant Al Hubbard, who bought 4,000 vials of Sandoz LSD and became an early "Johnny Appleseed," repeating a circuit across Canada, down the West Coast, to LA. and back. He gave LSD to many luminaries, including Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard, and helped establish a long-running LSD clinic in Vancouver, B.C While most LSD investigators at this time were very cautious, Hubbard saw value in using what were thought to be "massive doses," a practice that became common during the 1960s.

Toward the end of the 1950s, Dr. Sidney Cohen, a psychiatrist affiliated with the Veterans Hospital at UCLA, procured large supplies of this novel drug. He became interested when he heard that this substance was a "superior delirient." After self-experimentation, he told his colleagues that although LSD was not a "true delirient," it was worth intensive study. An account of Cohen's first trip can be found in his The Beyond Within (p. 106), which he wrote but attributed to an anonymous doctor.

As Janiger recalls, it was from Cohen's group that social (non-experimental) use of LSD might conceivably have arisen in the United States:

These people had first taken it experimentally, because that was the only way it was given at all. Then it was just a short step for people who had taken it to say, "Let's try it [again]" and to make up some circumstance which would justify it. At the beginning, nobody would dare say, "Let's just take it." ....

So in somebody's home there would be six or eight people, and they would take the drug. I was at one or two of those, and Huxley would be there, and Heard, and you would meet this strata of people. It was here that you met those people who were a mixture of the investigators, plus those people who were some of their subjects—who had shown a special affinity toward or interest in the drug.

Other distribution routes to the general population were developing. From about 1957, a leak sprang up at Sandoz' Hanover, New Jersey plant. Chester Anderson, author of The Butterfly Kid and several other books about this period, says that large amounts of LSD and psilocybin with the Sandoz label were being conveyed into "beatnik" Greenwich Village and being taken by musicians, theater people and many others living Bohemian lifestyles.

A fair amount of peyote had also become available as interest in Psychedelics spread. Many people had read Aldous Huxley's Doors of

44 The LSD Family

Perception, in which he describes mystical feelings evoked by mescaline sulfate, and R. Gordon Wasson's Life magazine account of the discovery of "sacred mushrooms" and their ceremonial use in Mexico. The newcomers attracted to LSD were not looking for a psychotic-type experience, nor were they interested in basic research. However, they also weren't taking it just for fun or to get high. The drug had acquired a mystical aura. Although it was used less solemnly and with less forethought than before, its use incorporated overtones of spiritual or artistic value. Many were using it to enhance creative behavior.

In Palo Alto, California, LSD was being studied both at the Veterans Administration Hospital and at Stanford University. At Stanford, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson—who had been introduced to LSD by Dr. Harold Abramson, one of LSD's pioneers—arranged in 1959 for the poet Allen Ginsberg to take it as part of a research program that was secretly sponsored by the military. The novelist Ken Kesey also received LSD in Palo Alto, using his experiences as the basis for his One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Kesey's further adventures with LSD are celebrated in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. From Palo Alto LSD began seeping into San Francisco.

Abbie Hoffman, whose first LSD was supplied by the Army, relates how interest in the drug burgeoned along the West Coast toward the end of the 1950's:

Aldous Huxley had told me about LSD back in 1957. And I tried to get it in 1959. I stood in line in a clinic in San Francisco, after Herb Caen had run an announcement in his column in the Chronicle that if anybody wanted to take a new experimental drug called LSD-25, he would be paid $150 for his effort. Jesus, that emptied Berkeley! 1 got up about six in the morning, but 1 was about 1,500 in line ... so I didn't get it until 1965.

With the closing of the decade of clinical use came perhaps the most important discovery since Dr. Hofmann first synthesized LSD. Late in the summer of 1959, Hofmann received a parcel of seeds from a researcher he had made contact with while investigating the sacred Mexican fungi. The seeds were of what was then called Rivea corymbosa, otherwise known as ololiuqui, a Mexican morning glory. In the summer of I960, Hofmann isolated the active principles and identified them chemically. They were ergot alkaloids. "From the phytochemical point of view," commented Hofmann when disclosing these results, "this finding was unexpected and of particular interest, because lysergic acid alkaloids, which had hitherto been found only in lower fungi in the genus Claviceps, were now, for the first time, indicated for the higher plants, in the phanerogamic family Convol-vulaceae" First synthesized in a laboratory, LSD was now found to have a counterpart in nature.

Military and CIA Interest 4$

A Decade and a Half of Covert Use

The CIA became aware of LSD in the very early 1950s. That l/100,000ths of an ounce could derange an individual for eight to ten hours was a matter of great concern to people there. They sought to find out more about its potential than could be gleaned from a few journal articles. They wanted to know how it could be used as a weapon, 3nd whether it would work as a truth serum. Learning about "psychotomimetics" such as LSD became still more important to the CIA in 1951 when military intelligence reported, erroneously, that Sandoz had sent fifty million doses to the Soviets.

In 1953, a military operative in Switzerland indicated that Sandoz wanted to sell 10 kilograms—22 pounds, or about 100 million doses—on the open market. A secret coordinating committee that included CIA and Pentagon officials recommended unanimously that the CIA should buy it all for just over a quarter million dollars in order to keep it "out of the hands of the Russians or other possible buyers." CIA chief Allen Dulles approved, and soon two Agency representatives were sent to Sandoz to negotiate.

46 The LSD Family

As ii turned out, their informant had mistaken a milligram for a kilogram, miscalculating by a factor of a million. The president of Sandoz told the visitors that all production until then amounted to less than 40 grams— under 1 !/2 ounces. The ergot used by Sandoz as a starting material had taken many years to find. As a result, it seemed likely that the world supply of LSD would always remain small.

Nonetheless the Swiss company indicated a willingness to step up its efforts and produce as much LSD as the CIA wished. It further agreed to keep the CIA informed about all future production as well as requests for purchases coming in from other parts of the world.

The CIA established a research team in the Chemical Division of its Technical Services staff. Richard Helms, then heading Clandestine Services, recommended the project in early April, 1953; a week and a half later— almost exactly a decade after Hofmann's first trip—Allen Dulles approved. The project was dubbed "MKULTRA" (superseding "Project ARTICHOKE," mentioned in the Psilocybian Mushrooms chapter) and given an initial budget of $300,000. The goal: "to investigate whether and how it was possible to modify an individual's behavior by covert means." Heading the group of about half a dozen was a protege" of Helms, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who was authorized to draw on the Agency's account.

This group was interested in determining the effects of LSD and other drugs in diverse situations. Unlike Sandoz, which was seeking therapeutic applications, the CIA was providing grants through front organizations to encourage any research. Gottlieb and his associates soon became sponsors of LSD studies conducted at a number of prestigious institutions: Boston Psychopathic Hospital, Mount Sinai Hospital and Columbia University, the Addiction Research Center of the National Institute of Mental Health, the University of Oklahoma and the University of Rochester. "Suddenly there was a huge new market for grants in academica," wrote John Marks in his The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate" currently the best description of these activities. Academics collaborating with die CIA in LSD investigations— some wittingly, many unwittingly—issued a multitude of articles in the scientific literature. These reports hardly reveal what a few of the "witting" were trying to find out for the CIA.

An outstanding example is Dr. Harold Abramson, a New York immunologist who apparently delighted in administering the drug to intellectuals—one instance being Frank Fremont-Smith, who later chaired one of the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation conferences that brought together early LSD researchers. Abramson wrote prominently about LSD in scientific publications, mainly about such things as the effect of the drug on Siamese fighting fish (they float at an angle with their noses nearly out of the water, and their color darkens) and the use of low dosages in aiding psycho-therapeutic "transference." It wasn't publicly known until the late 1970s that the CIA furnished him with $85,000 in 1953 to provide—as Gottlieb

MKULTRA and CIA Safehouses 47

put it—"operationally pertinent materials along the following lines: a. Disturbance of Memory; b. Discrediting by Aberrant Behavior, c. Alteration of Sex Patterns; d. Eliciting of Information; e. Suggestibility; f. Creation of Dependence." Abramson kept in touch with many who had begun to investigate clinical uses of LSD, reporting his findings and theirs to the CIA.

Gottlieb hired Abramson and others and funded academics as a relatively inexpensive way to acquire a broad range of information about LSD and similar substances when used in more or less ordinary settings. The CIA also wanted information on how LSD could be used for its own special ends, information that professors were hardly likely to provide. Only a month after its establishment, the Gottlieb group set up a safehouse in Greenwich Village where people could be observed after they had been given the drug without "informed awareness." The person in charge was George White, a New York narcotics agent who had carried out experiments with Cannabis derivatives in search of a truth serum for the OSS (a forerunner of the CIA). The CIA paid the rent and provided White with money to hire prostitutes. Their job was to see whether individuals could be led under the influence of LSD to disclose closely-held secrets.

Desiring control of LSD as a policy objective, the CIA was worried about its dependency on a foreign supplier. In 1953, the Gottlieb group therefore approached Eli Lilly & Co., which had already been working on a process for fully synthesizing LSD. The next year Lilly's chemists made a breakthrough, manufacturing small amounts of LSD from chemicals rather than ergot. An Agency memo to Allen Dulles proclaimed that the government could now buy LSD in "tonnage quantities."

Each member of the Gottlieb group took LSD several times and even dosed each other during the summer of 1953. Scarcely half a year after the establishment of MKULTRA came an unexpected blow that threatened to end all the goings-on. One of their university sources had told Gottlieb's group that LSD might be dangerous in some cases, mentioning a Swiss doctor who had become depressed after she took the drug and who was rumored to have committed suicide. Gottlieb had furthermore been warned twice by his superiors not to turn on outsiders. He was to see first-hand how traumatic uninformed administration could be.

The Technical Services branch of the CIA, which funded the Gottlieb group, was also paying $200,000 a year to scientists with the Army Chemical Corps at Fort Detrick for investigations relating to chemical warfare. In November 1953, Gottlieb's staff gathered with their Army associates for a three-day brainstorming retreat at an isolated lodge in the Maryland woods. During the second evening Gottlieb passed around a glass of Cointreau which—unknown to the others—he had spiked with LSD. All but two tried the Cointreau. Among those who partook from Gottlieb's glass was Dr. Frank Olson, a specialist in airborne delivery of chemical weapons, who came to believe that he had revealed important secrets during his subsequent

48 The LSD Family

LSD trip. He became depressed and was sent, accompanied by Gottlieb's assistant, to see Dr. Harold Abramson. Reluctantly, Olson agreed to enter a mental hospital. The night before commitment, he died after crashing through a window on the tenth floor of the New York Statler-Hilton Hotel.

Any CIA involvement with LSD was quickly covered up, only coming to light in 1976 —twenty-one years later—as a result of the Rockefeller Commission's review of illegal CIA domestic activities. In 1977, Olson's family was invited to the White House for an apology, and Congress passed a bill to pay Mrs. Olson and her three children $750,000 in compensation.

Gottlieb was reprimanded by his superiors. For a short while his supply of LSD was taken from him. CIA outposts in Manila and Atsugi, Japan were told not to use the LSD that had been shipped to them.

Richard Helms persisted in advocating that the "dirty tricks" branch of the CIA continue to experiment with LSD, and soon Gottlieb resumed distributing the drug. George White, promoted to Regional Narcotics Chief, moved his safehouse operation to San Francisco two years later, where he continued dosing people until 1966.

Military intelligence in each branch of the armed services also heard about LSD, and they were fascinated. By the mid-1950s, they too were funding LSD studies. This secret CIA and military involvement is carefully documented by John Marks (1979). The Chemical Warfare Service at the Army's Edgewood Arsenal stockpiled enormous quantities of LSD and other psychoactive compounds, synthesizing known Psychedelics like LSD and others that may still be unknown to the outside world. For example, MDM (see Chapter Five), which has only recently been recognized as a psychedelic agent, is identical to Edgewood's "EA [Experimental Agent]-1475."

Army spokesmen began talking publicly about large-scale use of LSD in war. In contrast to the emphasis on individualized administration favored by the CIA, Army officials were showing Congressmen and the press films of soldiers who were unable to march in formation after being dosed with LSD in their morning coffee. LSD was advocated as a way to conduct "humane warfare" against an enemy. Dr. Albert Hofmann later revealed that the Army was contacting him "every two years or so" to request Sandoz' active participation in its efforts. The requests were denied.

The Army engaged in covert "field operations" overseas. A notorious example is the torture of James Thornwell, a black American soldier in France, who was suspected of having stolen classified documents in 1961. We will probably never know the full story on at least nine others, referred to as "foreign nationals," who were subjected to die Army's LSD interrogation project, "Operation THIRD CHANCE."

Thornwell, then twenty-two, was first exposed to extreme stress, which included beatings, solitary confinement, denial of water, food and sanitary facilities and steady verbal abuse. After six weeks, he was given LSD without his knowledge. The interrogators threatened "to extend [his

Army Uses, and a "Magic Gram" 49

shattered) state indefinitely," according to an Army document dug up later, "even to a permanent condition of insanity." In the late 1970s, Thornwell sued the U.S. government for 510 million; the U.S. House of Representatives approved a compromise settlement of $650,000 in 1980.

The Big Wave Hits

Just after the election of John Kennedy to the presidency, a pediatrician of English extraction working in New York City wrote Sandoz on New York Hospital letterhead requesting a gram of LSD. A package came by return mail to Dr. John Beresford, with a bill for $285 (the approximate cost of manufacture at the time). Beresford had tried other Psychedelics, was impressed by the mind/body questions they posed, and was eager to test this new product. Results were clear. He therefore gave part of his gram—over time — to a few associates, including an acquaintance known as Michael Hollingshead.

Hollingshead is important to this chronicle because he managed before long to give some of this gram to Donovan, Paul McCartney, Keith Richard, Paul Krassner, Frank Barron, Houston Smith, Paul Lee, Richard Katz, Pete La Roca, Charlie Mingus, Saul Steinberg, Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, Ralph Metzner, Alan Watts and many others who contributed to the coming international awareness of LSD. "There is some possibility," wrote Hollingshead later, "that my friends and I have illuminated more people than anyone else in history," His memoir bears the publisher's title, The Man Who Turned On the World.

With his part of gram "H-00047," Beresford, with Jean Houston and Michael Corner, opened an LSD foundation in Manhattan in 1962, the Agora Scientific Trust. The impressive, valuable work carried out there is

50 The LSD Family

described in Robert Masters and Jean Houston's book entitled The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience.

That same year Myron Stolaroff and associates established another important LSD study center, the International Foundation for Advanced Study in Menlo Park. This institution was set up to examine the effects of LSD and mescaline upon carefully selected subjects. The results from several hundred administrations were significant, especially in regard to "learning-enhancement" and "creativity."

By 1962, the number of people who knew about LSD had increased geometrically. Some were enthusiastic about trying the drug but had no access to LSD psychotherapists, the original "gate-keepers." In response to the demand for LSD, the first generation of "acid chemists" arose.

A notable early effort was a batch of 62,000 tablets of questionable content synthesized in 1962 by Bernard Roseman and Bernard Copely. These tabs figured in the first "LSD bust," when Food and Drug Administration agents charged the two with "smuggling" (manufacturing of LSD was then perfectly legal).

Stanley Owsley entered the trade after having been frustrated in his efforts to obtain pure LSD. His trademarks—"White Lightning," "Purple Haze"—and others such as "Batman," "Purple Double-Domes" and "Midnight Hour"—were associated with "tabs" of high quality. An enormous amount of this production was given away, yet Owsley became perhaps the first LSD millionaire. When he was captured in 1967, 200 fresh grams—a million substantial doses—were confiscated.

The first big wave of popular interest was gathering momentum. In 1962, the Gamblers issued the first record including a song about LSD. Many folk musicians were getting "cerebrally electrified." Talk of LSD spread beyond Bohemian and university circles; even Henry Luce, publisher of Time and Life magazines, and his wife tried the drug. Luce, wandering out into his garden in Arizona, heard a symphony in his head that impressed him greatly because he had previously considered himself tone-deaf. He also acquired affectionate feelings for the cacti there. This may not sound like much, but he claimed it was important personally because he previously "had hated them."

To centerstage came Dr. Timothy Leary.

Already engaged in psilocybin research at Harvard, Leary was one of those who partook of "Lot No. H-00047." He took a tablespoon and a half from Hollingshead's mayonnaise jar of LSD cut with sugar-icing—and didn't talk for five days. Richard Alpert, his close associate, "told everybody not to touch the stuff—we had just lost Timothy." When Leary came back, Alpert remembers him as saying, "Wow!"

Leary's LSD experience, coming after more than a hundred psilocybin trips, changed his life. '1 have never recovered from that shattering ontological confrontation," he wrote later. "From the date of this session it was inevitable that we would leave Harvard.,.." The break was not long in

Popular Interest Grows $]

coming. "LSD is more important than Harvard," proclaimed Leary in 1962. Before Timothy Leary, the academics had never quite come clean about their experimenting with LSD. Leary alone emphasized publicly that the drug was "ecstatic," "sensual" and "fun." "It gives you levity and altitude," was his explanation once, "where you see the implausibilities and you see the incongruities and the ridiculousness of what you had taken so seriously before." He gave the media a clear and emotionally charged image to transmit. Before long Leary's name was tied inextricably to the compound now known simply as "LSD."

Leary and associates tried in many ways to train people in the use of this drug, which they saw as a key to the "new age." Even before leaving Harvard, they established an off-campus organization known as IFIF (the International Federation for Internal Freedom) and laid plans for an experiential LSD center on the beach at Zihuatanejo, Mexico. When they advertised this opportunity the next summer, IFIF received more than 1,500 applications. Leary requested 100 grams of LSD, about a million doses, and 25 kilograms of psilocybin, about 2Vi million doses, from Sandoz, and sent a

52 The LSD Family

check for $10,000 as a deposit. Sandoz returned the check when Leary couldn't provide proper import licenses. The Mexican center lasted only a short while, because of hyped media attention after an American whom they wouldn't allow to participate caused trouble and after an unrelated murder in the vicinity. Leary and his colleagues tried to set up an experiential center on the Caribbean island of Dominica but their visas were canceled the day the main group arrived.

Finding haven at last on a 2,500-acre estate in Millbrook, N.Y., they announced formation of the Castalia Foundation. Here they began turning on many influential people as well as conducting advertised "nondrug workshops" in consciousness change. They started their Psychedelic Review in the summer of 1963 and traveled around the United States lecturing about LSD. They pioneered in the presentation of "light shows." Leary eventually set up a religion—the Z^ague for Spiritual Discovery. This was not intended as a mass organization, but was limited to a hundred people centered around the Millbrook estate who were dedicated to showing others how they themselves could "help recreate every man as God and every woman as Goddess." Leary emphasized that it would "not repeat the injunction classically used by religious prophets: Follow me, sign up in my flock. It

imposes no dogmas except one: Live out your own highest vision."

The Monterey, California Pop Festival of 1963 (four years before the

film Monterey Pop) marked a new relationship between LSD and music.

New Lifestyles 53

Many there took LSD to celebrate and enhance their appreciation of this festival. Musicians and artists soon began wide-scale experimentation with ways to perform that would complement, direct and heighten the effects of LSD, or present a "flash" of the experience for the uninitiated. Within a year, the Beatles were singing to everyone, 'Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream/This is not dying" (words taken directly from The Psychedelic Experience, a book issued by Leary and associates).

By the middle of the 1960s, an important shift in avant-garde energies took place in San Francisco that was to reverberate powerfully throughout the Western world. This shift involved a geographical move of only a few miles—from North Beach to a vicinity near the crossing of Haight Street and Ashbury Avenue (close to Golden Gate Park). Here LSD users banded together, soon signaling the dawning of the new age.

North Beach had served for years as home ground for beatnik activities and had become a center for cultural ferment in America. The beats generally favored stark contrasts of black and white, in their dress and in their thinking. They emphasized the role of the Artist and the Bohemian, celebrated blacks as culture heroes, and were politically active against the Bomb. Their style found expression in after-hours poetry and jazz in coffeehouses. Their taste in drugs inclined to pot, speed and heroin.

The Haight-Ashbury community, catalyzed by LSD, wore the colors of a rainbow and was not emphatically male dominated. It celebrated not the agonies and triumphs of the Individual Artist but rather was "into" communal living and a new "Bay Area" style of musk and dancing. Its approach was softer. If it emulated anyone, it was the tribal American Indian.

By 1966, Haight-Ashbury was rife with new energies provided by LSD-using musical groups such as the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company and Country Joe and the Fish; by artists such as Mouse, who with his colleagues re-established the powerful appeal once accorded posters; and by the Diggers, who gave away food and clothing. That year, the brothers Ron and Jay Thelin opened the nation's first "headshop" and helped launch the first "psychedelic newspaper," The San Francisco Oracle.

Similar but less conspicuous developments took place in East Greenwich Village at about the same time—and half a year later the new style was evident in the low-rent centers of most large U.S. cities. The participants were mainly whites in their teens to thirties, the "baby boom" sons and daughters of people who were secure financially.

An LSD or "flower-child" lifestyle was further encouraged through other "Be-ins," rock music performed with light shows, dozens of psychedelic newspapers and communal living. This proselytizing occurred throughout the U.S. and to a lesser extent in Western Europe, radiating especially from London, Hamburg and Amsterdam.

54 The LSD Family

The movement was proclaimed at the time as a second Renaissance. Seen in retrospect, it was at the very least life-altering for millions. Some three or four years of social experimentation, touched off by mass use of LSD, can be credited with having sparked a host of liberation movements. This period changed American attitudes toward work, toward the police and the military, and toward such groups as women and gays. It began our now -established concern with consciousness-raising and personal growth.

Artifacts reflecting the creative ferment during this time are best displayed in Psychedelic Art with commentary by Robert Masters, Jean

56 The LSD Family

Houston and Stanley Krippner. Lester Grinspoon and James Bakalar from Harvard have compiled a list of LSD's contributions—largely missing before then—to our popular language:

turned on, straight, freak, freaked out, stoned, tripping, tripped out, spaced out, far out, flower power, ego trip, hit, into, mike, plastic [meaning "rigid"],

The First Cresting 57

going with the flow, laying [a] trip on someone, game-playing, mind-blowing, mind games, bringdown, energy, centering, acid, acidhead, good trip, bum trip, horror show, drop a cap or tab. karma, samsara, mantra,groovy, rapping, crash, downer, flash, scene, vibes, great white light, doing your thing, going through changes, uptight, getting into spaces, wiped out, where it's at, high, ball, zap, rush, and so on ....

The big LSD wave crested during "the summer of love," 1967. "Wearing flowers in their hair," several hundred thousand people came to San Francisco. "Gonzo journalist" Hunter Thompson recalls the atmospherics of this period:

San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run ... but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world ... You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning .... Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.

5S The LSD Family

LSD Becomes Illegal

With the LSD wave came a wave of establishment panic. The federal ban on LSD and related drugs was the first bill proposed by President Johnson in 1967.

A clash between traditional American mores and the values adopted by users of Hofmann's crystal had been on its way ever since Harvard University sent Dick Alpert and Leary packing over the issue. The media hurried the conflict to its moment of crisis: for a while it seemed there wasn't a nationally distributed magazine that didn't have an LSD article, usually sensational. Time was the first to jump in with a series of articles appearing in late 1965 and early 1966 in its Psychiatry section. These articles railed against LSD with dire warnings about hordes of "acid heads," some of whom were taking "walloping overdoses." Time declared that the "disease" was striking everywhere: "By best estimates, 10,000 students in the University of California system have tried LSD (though not all have suffered detectable ill effects). No one can guess how many more self-styled 'acid heads' there are among oddball cult groups___" (March 11, 1966).

Dr. Huston Smith of M.I.T. wasn't far from the mark when he told an LSD conference in 1966 that the confusion about this drug was so great and our knowledge about it so small "that there is no hope of telling the truth about it at (his point." All efforts to arrive at a deliberate and informed evaluation of the drug were swept aside by the headlines of that year:

• On March 26th, Timothy Leary was arrested in Laredo after less than half an ounce of marijuana was found on his daughter. The sentence was thirty years. Leary was suddenly transformed into the LSD movement's first martyr.

• On April 6th, a five-year-old girl in Brooklyn swallowed a sugar cube impregnated with LSD that her uncle had left in the family refrigerator. She was rushed to the hospital where her stomach was pumped. She got the scare of her life through this procedure, and remained on the critical list for two days. Published reports of her being examined later indicated that she made a full recovery.

• On April 11th, Stephen Kessler, a thirty-year-old ex-medical student was charged with the murder of his mother-in-law, having stabbed her 105 times. When taken in, he muttered, "What happened? Man, I've been flying for three days on LSD. Did I kill my wife? Did I rape anybody?" At the Brooklyn police station, he kept insisting, "I'm high, I'm really high, "and when asked if he were "high" on drugs, he replied, "Only on LSD" (New York Times and New York Herald-Tribune, April 12, 1966).

• On April 16th, G. Gordon Liddy, then assistant prosecuting attorney in Dutchess County, N.Y., broke into national prominence by leading a raid on Leary's Millbrook estate, where, at a cost of J60 per weekend, nondrug techniques were being used to teach people how to get "high." Liddy since has said that he liked Leary from the moment he first set eyes on him at 2 am, but that he was "acting under orders." A small amount of marijuana was found in the

Panic and Hysteria in Response 59

room of a visiting journalist, and Rosemary Woodruff, who was to become Leary's wife, was held in jail fora month for refusing to testify before a grand jury about activities on the estate.

The headlines prompted an appetite for still more coverage. Special interviews with district attorneys, college presidents, narcotics agents, doctors, biochemists and others who might be considered authorities appeared, creating an atmosphere of national emergency.

The chairman of the New York County Medical Society's Subcommittee on Narcotics Addiction said that LSD was "more dangerous than heroin," The FDA and Federal Narcotics Bureau launched new 'drug education" programs. Three Senate subcommittees investigated LSD use. Bills that made possession of LSD and other psychedelic drugs a felony were introduced into state legislatures throughout the nation. New York State Assembly Speaker Anthony J. Travia, pushing legislation that called for a minimum sentence of seven years, declared that he would, defer public hearings on the law until after it passed because "the problem is so urgent."

Walter Winchell issued an item reading, "Warning to LSD Users: You may go blind."

Bill Trent, writing in the Canadian Evening Telegram about an architect's serious and successful attempt to solve a design problem by taking LSD, titled his story "The Demented World of Kyo Izumi."

The mass-market Confidential Flash asserted in a full-page cover headline, "LSD KILLS SEX DRIVE FOREVER." The Police Gazette reprinted a report from The journal of the American Medical Association with a new title: "LSD and Sex Madness."

In one of the Senate LSD hearings, Senator Robert Kennedy repeatedly asked why the studies conducted by the National Institute of Mental Health, which had been so valuable a month earlier, "no longer were considered so?" It was a question almost nobody wanted to hear or have answered. In short order, existing programs were drastically cut back. Before long, there were new, tighter regulations. Any investigator who had ever experienced the drug personally was now forbidden to conduct LSD research of any kind whatsoever.

And yet, as the Consumers Union's book on Licit and Illicit Drugs notes, "by shutting off the relative trickle of Sandoz LSD into informal channels, Congress and the Food and Drug Administration had unwittingly opened the sluices to a veritable LSD flood. By 1970 it was estimated that between 1,000,000 and 2,000,000 Americans had taken an LSD trip." The Consumers Union noted further that driving the drug and its users underground augmented certain of its hazards, listing them under the following headings:

1. Increased expectations of adverse effects.

2. Unknown dosages.

3. Contamination.

6o The LSD Family

4 Adulteration.

5. Mistaken attribution.

6. Side effects of law enforcement.

7. Lack of supervision.

8. Mishandling of panic reactions.

9. Misinterpretation of reactions.

10. Flashbacks.

11. Preexisting pathology.

12. Unwitting use.

For a more careful accounting of "LSD casualties," see "Adverse Effects and Their Treatment," pp. 157-191 in Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered.

In 1967, Dr. Maimon Cohen, a geneticist from Buffalo, N.Y., made an announcement that significantly prejudiced the public's view of LSD. Returning from a visit to the Haight-Ashbury area, Cohen decided to examine chromosomes from a fifty-seven-year-old man who had been given LSD on four occasions during a fifteen-year hospitalization. The patient was found to have more chromosomal breaks than usual. Dr. Cohen also spilled LSD into a test rube containing human cells and observed damage to the chromosomes. Later it was pointed out that similar results could be achieved with the same amount of milk and that Cohen's patient had received regular treatments of Librium and Thorazine, now proven chromosome-breakers.

Chromosome Scares 61

Nonetheless, on the basis of his examination of a single patient and his cell-spilling experiment, Cohen published his conclusions in Science. By evening, the charge that LSD could break chromosomes was in all the nation's media. Shortly thereafter, two doctors in Portland, Oregon reported chat they had found an excess of chromosomal breaks in users of street acid. The chart they provided revealed that extra breakage occurred only among users of acid who were also users of amphetamine, which has since been established as a chromosome-breaker. Once again the papers had a field day. A full-page ad for a McCall's article on LSD featured a baby broken into parts. Ironically, the article itself cast doubts on the charge of chromosome damage.

Retractions of mistaken opinions and findings about the use and effects of LSD are quiet and very rare, and so it was in regard to the chromosome charge. Even though studies conducted by the National Institute of Mental Health and others disproved the allegation, even though Timothy Leary's chromosomes were examined and showed no abnormal breakage, even though other drugs have now clearly been established to be chromosome-breakers while LSD has not, the media took little if any notice of the new evidence _^

"Timothy Leary, much to our surprise, showed, in 200 cells, only two with chromosome aberrations, one in each cell. This finding is about as spectacular as must be the amount of LSD that he probably has taken in the past 8 years. I am at a loss to understand or explain this negative finding. —Hermann Lisco, M.D., Cancer Research Institute,

New England Deaconess Hospital, Boston, Mass.

62 The LSD Family

As a footnote it should be pointed out that at the trial of Stephen Kessler (the "MAD LSD SLAYER" of the April headlines) it was learned that he had taken LSD five times in minimal doses (10-50 megs.) between the summer of 1964 and March 1966 (a month before the murder of his mother-in-law). Other drugs may have been influential in the slaying;

The defendant made no mention of having taken LSD just before the killing of Mrs. Cooper, but said that on April 8, a Saturday, "I felt funny, I had an indescribable feeling and took one-and-a-half grains of pentabarbital" and could recall nothing more until after the murder, the following Monday .. .

—N.Y. Times, October 10, 1967

Both doctors . . told the |ury of eleven men and one woman that Kessler had told them he had drunk three quarts of lab alcohol, cut with water, and taken more sleeping pills on the days in question ....

—N.Y. Post, October 18, 1967

Ebb and Resurgence

In 1977, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) issued a National Survey on Drug Abuse based on a sampling of 4,594 people. The report estimated that about ten million Americans (6 percent of the population over the age of twelve) had by then used a strong psychedelic, mostly LSD, with somewhat over a million falling into the category of "regular users."

The peak years were from 1965 to 1968, followed by a substantial decline in LSD use. Many were frightened by the chromosome-damage charge or by experience with adulterated or badly made LSD. Others were put off by the overwhelming nature of "high-dose tripping" or by its illegal status, fearing that the need to act furtively would interfere with and badly taint the LSD experience. Large numbers of previous users turned to meditation to get high.

Some of the leading underground chemists had been arrested. The LSD available was generally weaker and less pure, though there were exceptions—tabs known as "Mighty Quinn," "Blue Cheer," "Pink Swirls" and the red, white and blue "Peace Sign." Appearing in 1968, "Sunshine" acid (an orange tablet less than a quarter of an inch across) was the first large operation after LSD possession was made illegal. Tim Scully, a prominent second-generation chemist, made some but said that most "Sunshine" came by way of Ronald Stark, who brought approximately thirty-five million doses over from Europe,

LSD use seems to have reached its lowest ebb in the early 1970s and manufacturing shrank to a small scale. Those seeking LSD could find pink, blue and purple "microdots" but very little else.

Then came "computer acid" (one hundred dots in rows of twenty by five on a sheet of blotter paper the size of a dollar bill), which was of pretty good quality and very convenient for distribution. At about the same time arrived "Windowpane" (also known as "Clearlight"), which contained ISO

Less flamboyant Reacquaintance 6}

inside a thin gelatin square a quarter of an inch across. Both showed improvement in potency and purity, giving impetus to the flowing in of another LSD wave.

By the end of the 1970s, it was evident that a general reassessment of the earlier, massive LSD experimentation had taken place and that a less flamboyant reacquaintance with LSD had begun. The quality of the products soon available, coming from many different sources, was no longer so seriously in question. Of great importance to this resurgence of interest was the widespread home-production of psychedelic mushrooms. LSD came back into limited public discourse as a sidelight in conferences on the effects of psycho-active mushrooms.

Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, very few people actually experienced sacred mushrooms. The bulk of mushrooms examined at testing facilities during this period were shown to be almost entirely non-psycho-active, and many had LSD or PCP added (usually in small amounts). In 1976, successful methods for growing the Stropharia (often called Psilocybe) cubensis mushroom species were published with clearly identifying photographs. Nearly a quarter million of these instruction books and booklets were sold over the next few years, allowing great numbers of people to experience—or re-experience—psychedelic effects from a natural source.

Many who feared synthetic products because of the uncertainties of quality and identification were willing to give natural Psychedelics a try. They had been used for millenia, and nothing had been charged against them in terms of chromosomal or other damage. Thanks to the gentle psychoagents m the Stropharia cubensis mushroom species, many people discovered or renewed an interest in LSD.

Several convenings of "psychedelic activists" were initiated by Weston La Barre and especially R- Gordon Wasson, and their call for a re-examination of mushrooms was generalized gradually to other Psychedelics, including LSD. In 1977, Dr. Albert Hofmann and his wife Anita flew to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State for a Mushroom Conference. Wasson, Hofmann. Carl Ruck and Danny Staples presented evidence that the famous Eleusinian mysteries were catalyzed by lysergic acid amides extracted from grasses on the nearby Rarian Plain. Their thesis has since been published as The Road to Eleusis.

Similar gatherings occurred in Santa Cruz (October 1977), in San Francisco (September 1978), in Los Angeles (January 1979), in Santa Cruz (July 1981) and in Santa Barbara (March 1982).

Another generation of young LSD chemists seems to have taken over from those who were active in the 1960s. At the time of this writing (mid-1982), acid is widely available in myriad forms. Almost all current products contain considerably less LSD than Owsley once thought proper but appear to be good quality. Though available in crystalline or liquid form, most LSD is still distributed on blotter paper, which is convenient but exposes the drug to almost the greatest possible oxidation and damage- from light.

64 The LSD Family

Recent blotters range in appearance from graph paper (containing fifty times fifty, or twenty-five hundred, "hits") to fancy color imprints on separated half-inch squares. These are often intricately designed, featuring a four-color Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer's Apprentice in Fantasia, Rosi-crucian symbols, a phoenix, a dragon or an Eye of Horus. Some users of LSD object to the more flippant symbols—Plutos or Snoopys; they argue that such designs in combination with the usually low dosages encourage an LSD experience that is little more than recreational.

LSD has recently appeared in a hardened gel in the shape of a tiny pyramid. This is convenient for distribution, yet the hardened surface reduces potential for oxidation. Tablets with LSD spread throughout offer a similar advantage in stability over blotters, one example being the "Om" tab. An appropriate direction in the packaging of LSD would be to emphasize known dosage and purity, as was the case with the original Sandoz ampules which contained one milligram per milliliter of water in a resealable glass container. That kind of quantitative and qualitative care has not appeared

as yet.

The course of LSD history over the past few years has been influenced by the establishment of several publications and institutions, including High Times and similar magazines, the Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library in San Francisco, NORML (the National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws), PharmChem in Palo Alto and other drug-testing facilities and the tradition of annual Rainbow Gatherings in various parts of the U.S. Also

Recent Developments 65

notable are books from Stanislav Grof, Albert Hofmann, Carlos Castaneda, Timothy Leary and many others.

Dosage is down, causing less potential for panic, along with less spectacular results. The number of people interested seems on the rise. Charlie Haas summed up a decade's change in his "Notes on the Acid Renaissance" for New West magazine (August 13, 1979):

LSD—the scariest and most tantalizing thing you can buy without a prescription, the white hope for instant psychotherapy that became a CIA toy and a bazooka in the Bohemian arsenal, the portable Lourdes that oiled the transition of American youth from Elvis to Elvish and made all those honor students start dressing funny and printing up those unreadable purple-and-aqua posters—thai LSD—is as nationally popular now as it was ten years ago, despite the fact that the same media which then could speak of nothing else are now virtually silent on the subject. Among people who swallow it or sell it, or who monitor its use from the vantage point of drug-abuse counseling, there is some sporting disagreement as to whether acid has been enjoying a renaissance for about two years or never went away in the first place, with the former view in the majority. But there is a consensus on at least two points: The bad trips and mental casualties that made such hot copy in the '60s seem to have diminished radically, and the volume of acid changing hands suggests that there are actually more users now than there were a decade ago ....

66 The LSD Family

CHEMISTRY

Resemblances and Differences Between LSD and Other Substances

LSD-25 is a crystalline molecule that shares, along with many other Psychedelics, a two-ring "indole" nucleus—composed of one atom of nitrogen, eight of carbon and seven of hydrogen—in its chemical structure {a drawing of indole appears on page 262). This basic structure is common to the short-acting tryptamines, ibogaine, psilocybin, harmaline and other Psychedelics, and it bears considerable resemblance to the chemical structure of serotonin and dopamine, neurotransmitters that carry electrical impulses across synapses in the brain. Mescaline and MDA-like compounds contain only one of these rings. Nitrous oxide (N2O) and the THCs in marijuana have considerably different chemical structures.

On top of the indolic nucleus, there are two additional rings in the structure of the LSD molecule. These are typical of the LSD family of chemicals: to synthesize LSD and its analogues, one has to obtain the preformed lysergic acid "skeleton" first and then manipulate its chemistry through quite difficult processes. Such is not the case with the one- and two-ring psychedelic compounds, which can be synthesized more readily and altered to a much greater extent.

Lysergic acid, usually appearing as a metabolic product of the fungus Claviceps purpurea (growing on rye or barley), has an unusual chemical structure with what might be considered two asymmetric centers. Dependence of pharmacological action on the asymmetry of such compounds has been widely observed. Researchers have shown that psychedelic agents such as LSD interact with serotonin in synapses throughout the brain. Related drugs that are not psychedelic almost always lack such action.

Other Psycboactive Lysergic Acid Derivatives

Through the systematic production undertaken by Sandoz, a great many lysergic acid derivatives have been created and studied. Originally produced for medicinal purposes, these derivatives were re-examined after discovery of LSD's psychoactive effects. Some are psychically inactive, while others have varying psychoactive potentials. The most powerful is LSD-25. Among the many known lysergic acid amides, a slight change in the four-ring structure has considerable consequences in terms of psychic effects. For example, LSD-25 turns a beam of polarized light clockwise (this is represented by the d for dextro at the beginning of its chemical name). The l or "levo-rotary" form, its mirror image, turns such a beam counterclockwise and has virtually no psychoactive effect.

Comparing the structure of LSD-25 to that of the two most active ingredients in related botanicals—the baby Hawaiian woodrose and certain morning glories to be discussed at the end of this chapter—you'll see that these sources of LSD-like effects have different chemical structures.

Chemical Structures 67

LA-111 and isoergine, which were synthesized in the laboratory before they were known to occur in nature, are significant members of the LSD family. Others have such names as MLD-41, ALD-52, OMI.-632, LAF.-32, BOL-148, MLA-74, ALA-10, LPD-824, LSM-775, DAM-57, LME, LMP, LAMP and LEP. Of these, the acetylated (ALD-52) and methylated (MLD-41) analogues are the next most potent to LSD, possibly because they are quickly converted to LSD upon ingestion. Four others have about a third of LSD's strength, four about a tenth, with the others being much milder.

ALD-52 is the LSD analogue that's been most often represented as acid on the psychedelic market in the last few years ("Sunshine" was allegedly ALD-52, though this has been disputed). It has slightly over 90 percent of LSD's potency and is transformed into LSD-25 upon contact with water. The resulting trip is generally said to be smoother than one with LSD-25,

68 The LSD Family

BOL-148 is of special interest because it played a considerable role in psychedelic history. BOL-148 differs from LSD-25 by a single bromine atom, which renders it inactive in terms of mental function. Yet it is capable of producing more ami-serotonin activity than LSD, and it also produces some cross-tolerance with LSD. This compound seems to contradict the simple model that the effects of Psychedelics are mediated by serotonin.

The fact that it blocks, or is cross-tolerant, with LSD was one reason for the spread of interest in LSD as a psychotomimetic: the theory was that if psychosis had a chemical cause, and a similarly cross-tolerant substance could be found, then it would nullify psychosis just as BOL-148 nullifies the psycho-activity of LSD-25.

It is still possible that serotonin and dopamine have something to do with LSD's effects, but after almost four decades of investigation of this compound, there's still no clear and accepted explanation for LSD's action. Speculating on the mystery surrounding the psychoactive agent he discovered, Albert Hofmann wrote:

It is perhaps no coincidence but of deeper biological significance that of the four possible isomers of LSD, only one, which corresponds to natural lysergic acid, causes pronounced mental effects. Evidently the menial functions of the human organism, like its bodily functions, are particularly sensitive to those substances which possess the same configurations as naturally occurring compounds of the vegetable kingdom.

LSD is generally considered cross-tolerant with mescaline but not with psilocybin—meaning that use of LSD a day before taking mescaline will reduce the impact of the mescaline (less tolerance develops if the order of the compounds is reversed). It is well established that LSD is cross-tolerant with itself—self-limiting, in the sense that if a second dose is taken a day later the effects will be considerably diminished. This tolerance endures significantly for three days and does not fully dissipate for a week. Abram Hoffer has remarked that LSD is its own greatest enemy. This feature acts as a control on human abuse of this drug.

PHYSICAL EFFECTS

LSD can be swallowed, taken on the tongue (producing perhaps the most rapid effects), or absorbed through the skin (particularly with DMSO). It has been ingested in the form of eye-drops and baked in cookies or cake frosting. It has been ingested by almost every means except smoking. LSD taken by mouth has effects almost as rapidly as by intramuscular injection.

Anywhere from twenty minutes to an hour after being swallowed, this chemical—-which often produces an immediate "metallic taste"—may cause one or a few of the following physical sensations: slight chill, dilation of the pupils, vague physical unease concentrated in the muscles or throat, tenseness, queasy stomach, tingling in the extremities, drowsiness. When a novice is asked, "How do you feel?" the answer is likely to be "I don't know" or' Different," If asked about feeling all right, the experiencer will probably not be very sure.

physical Mysteries 69

The physical sensations which accompany LSD are usually minor. Often they cannot accurately be likened to sensations ever felt before. As time passes, such physical effects usually disappear. In a few instances, however, they persist throughout much of the experience.

The effect of a particular dosage varies greatly from person to person. Body weight is certainly a factor, but time of day, use of other drugs, mental set and physical setting all play important roles. Generally, 100-250 meg. is considered a good initial dose, and this can be adjusted at the time of the next session to suit the individual.

Another consideration is the extent of other drug usage. Chronic alcoholics and heavy narcotics users who are on maintenance doses usually need about twice the ordinary amount of LSD to arrive at comparable effects. (Narcotics users who have been free of opiates for less than a year are often hypersensitive, and their dosage must be adjusted with great care. Pretreat-ment with a minor tranquilizer may be indicated.)

Distribution of LSD throughout the Body

LSD is a very curious chemical. When given by injection, it disappears rapidly from the blood. It can be observed when tagged with Carbon 1-1 in all the tissues, particularly the liver, spleen, kidneys and adrenal glands. The concentration found in the brain is lower than in any. other organ—being only about 0.01 percent of the administered dose. Sidney Cohen, in The Beyond Within (p. 380), has estimated that an average dose results in only some 3,700,000 molecules of LSD (about 2/100ths of a microgram) crossing the blood-brain barrier to interact with the billions of cells that make up the average-size brain—"and then for only a very few minutes."

LSD is highly active when administered orally, absorbed through mucous membranes or through the skin, and is almost completely absorbed by the gastrointestinal tract. Concentrations in the organs reach peak values after only ten to fifteen minutes; then they decrease very rapidly. Anexcep-tion to this rapid decrease has been observed in studies with mice, which show activity in the small intestine increasing over a period of a few hours. Some 80 percent of injested LSD is excreted via the liver, bile system and intestinal tract, with only about 8 percent appearing in urine. After two hours, only 1 to 10 percent is still present in the form of unchanged LSD; the rest consists of water-soluble metabolites—such as 2-oxo-2,3-dihydro-LSD— which do not possess any LSD-type influence on the central nervous system.

Psychic effects of LSD reach their peak about one to three hours following ingestion, when much of the substance has disappeared from the body's major organs, including the brain, though measurable amounts persist in the blood and brain for about eight hours.

It is not at all uncommon to find users experiencing alarming symptoms or sensations, especially during the early phases—the impression of giving birth, melting into the floor, being born, and so on. A few feel that their heart has stopped beating or that their lungs aren't operating regularly any more. These symptoms should also be taken as a sign of altered perception.

70 The LSD Family

No one is on record, for instance, as ever having suffered an LSD-provoked heart attack. However odd it may seem at the time, the body carries on without problems.

For those concerned about immediate medical hazards in ingesting LSD, short references might be in order, just for the record: Abram Hoffer has estimated, on the basis of animal studies, that the half-lethal human dose— meaning half would die (a standard measure for drugs)—would be about 14,000 meg. But one person who took 40 mg. (40,000 meg.) survived. In the only case of death reportedly caused by overdose (journal of the Kentucky Medical Association 75:172-173), the quantity of LSD in the blood indicated that 320 mg. (320,000 meg.) had been injected intravenously. Those concerned about this might also look up "Coma, Hypertension, and Bleeding Associated with Massive LSD Overdose: A Report of Eight Cases," by J.C Klock, U. Boerner and CE. Becker in Clinical Toxicology, Vol. 8, No. 2,1975. Large amounts were taken on the assumption that the LSD was cocaine; no one died.

Worries about whether the body under ordinary amounts of LSD will operate all right are only mental illusions. Whatever the mental effects induced by this drug, a physician might notice only:

A slight increase in blood pressure

A slight increase in pulse rate

An increase in salivation, and in lactation in women

A slight rise in temperature

Dilation of the pupils

Pupil dilation occurs more markedly as a result of oral administration than from injection. (Dr. Grof thought pupil dilation the only invariable effect of LSD for quite a while, but then observed an instance in which this oscillated with "pinning.") LSD doesn't affect respiration, though anticipation of such an effect may, on a few occasions, cause small alterations.

Measurable Effects on the Brain

LSD produces slight changes in the EEG, usually with decreased amplitude and increased frequency of brainwaves. Generally, there is a decrease in the alpha rhythm—though, in some cases, there is an increase. Many chemical changes occur in the brain—most of them in the midbrain, which regulates awareness and modulates emotional responsiveness. Recent attention has focused on substantial concentrations found in the brain-stern and in the dopamine receptor system, both responsible for more complex experiences. Hoffer and Osmond's The Hallucinogens discusses quite a number of reactions that can be seen regularly when LSD affects the mind's functions. No one really knows, however, which of these alterations are most important, because all occur simultaneously, Much of the metabolizing of LSD takes place in the liver, where peyote also lodges. Perhaps it's as the Egyptians used to think: that the liver is "the seat of the soul."

Brain Activity 71

As suggested above, our understanding of how LSD works physiologically and neurologically is still rudimentary, at best speculative. By the beginning of the 1970s, the most intensively examined hypothesis dealing with this interface of mind and body—regarding the displacement of serotonin at the synapses—came to be regarded as a "red herring." Other theories, such as those emphasizing specific "receptor sites," have not really been verified.

Brimblecombe and Pinder summarize the controversies in their Hallucinogenic Agents (1975):

. . most of the evidence which has emerged since 1966 lends support to the mode of action of LSD proposed that year by Freedman and Aghajanian, that is that interactions with the 5-HT [serotonin] receptor are the primary action of the drug and that the observed changes in metabolism of brain amines are secondary phenomena. Other biochemical changes attributed to die action of hallucinogens, particularly LSD, such as the effects on brain pseudocholinesterase levels (Thompson, Tickner, and Webster, 1955), are so contradictory that they appear to offer little insight into the mode of action of the drugs (Giar-man and Freedman, 1965; Hoffer and Osmund, 1967; Brown, 1972; see Chapter 4). Nevertheless, a large number of questions remain unanswered. It is stilt not clear whether LSD is acting as an agonist or as an antagonist, neither is it clear whether the drug has direct or indirect presynaptic actions, and, most important of all. the ways in which the drug-receptor interaction and the biochemical changes are translated into neurological and behavioural phenomena are very uncertain.

One discovery that may seem particularly relevant is the "complete reversal of amplitude lateraliry," described by Goldstein, Stolzfus and associates in 1972 after they made chronograms of the electrical activity of left and right occipital EEGs of right-handed volunteers before and after administration of several Psychedelics. They found a "progressive narrowing of inter-hemispheric EEG amplitude differences with eventually complete reversal (to the right) of their relationships." In simpler language,data processing in the brain's cerebral cortex was preferentially shifted under the influence of LSD from the more analytical left hemisphere to the visuo-spatial right hemisphere. This seems an economic and fairly satisfactory explanation of how a psychedelic like LSD increases the "scope" of the mind, brings artistic, creative, rhythmic and problem-solving abilities to the fore and evokes phenomena that Freud referred Co as manifestations of "the unconscious."

One often hears that much of the brain is usually dormant. Depending on dosage, LSD may increase mental power perhaps by activating the visuo-spatial centers. In this sense, LSD and other Psychedelics could be considered deliberate and unconscious agents of the right lobe. For a full discussion of the implications of this theory, consult Roland Fischer's "Cartography of Inner Space" in the Drug Abuse Council, Inc.'s 1975 book entitled Altered States of Consciousness.

72 The LSD Family

Effects upon Chromosomes

It has now been well established that the pore LSD molecule doesn't affect chromosomes at all. This is evident from repeated tests made before and after administration of up to 2,000 mcg. quantities. A summary of the first sixty-eight studies and case reports—the bulk conducted by NIMH— can be found in Science magazine (April 30, 1971). The article concludes that "pure LSD ingested in moderate doses does not damage chromosomes in vivo, does not cause detectable genetic damage, and is not a teratogen or carcinogen in man."

LSD and Physical Health

The preceding sections give some idea of how the body reacts during the ten to twelve hours of the LSD experience. In some cases, there are also long-lasting physical effects that should be mentioned. Many doctors have reported, often with pleased surprise, that their patients have achieved spontaneous relief from organic ailments after using LSD. Dr. T.T. Peck, Jr., for instance, at the Josiah Macy, Jr. Conference on LSD, remarked:

In treating patients for various and sundry psychological complaints, we found that some would come back a week or two later and say, "The headache is gone." We asked, "What headache?" They replied, "Oh, the headache I've had for 10 or 15 years."

Medical Value 73

A substantial number of cases entered in medical records have now established LSD as a competent agent in the cure of such physical ailments as arthritis, partial paralysis, migraine headaches, hysterical deafness, skin rashes, and so on.

Dr. Peck reported on his study of 216 mentally disturbed patients who were given LSD. Forty-six of these patients suffered also from some physical illness—including various forms of arthritis, asthmas that did not respond to hypnosis, migraine headaches and lasting rashes. Thirty-one of the forty-six made an "excellent" recovery from their symptoms, while five others found marked relief. Other doctors who have treated similar problems with LSD have found that such stubborn conditions can often be eradicated in the course of a few sessions. In their book on the use of LSD in the treatment of neurosis, Drs. Ling and Buckman list five case histories of successful migraine cures—all of which had previously been considered hopeless. They also give a full-length account of LSD's use in treating a severe case of psoriasis, with impressive photographs showing the patient before and after treatment (again, the condition had previously been adjudged hopeless). S. Kurornaru and co-workers in Japan have shown that this multi-functional substance can be used with good results even in the treatment of phantom limb pain.

74 The LSD Family

Pain Reduction

The must enraptured "acid heads" are aware that I5D is not—and never can be—a panacea, a solution to all of this planet's problems. This most powerful psychoactive compound hasn't been demonstrated to keep us from aging or to reverse the course of fatal diseases. However, it does without doubt offer important benefits for people confronted with terminal illness. This is an area in which research, particularly at the Veterans Hospital in LA., the Menninger Clinic in Topeka and Spring Grove Hospital near Baltimore, has impressed skeptics.

Aldous Huxley deserves special credit as the inspiration for this research, because he wrote about its possibilities in his last novel, Inland He took LSD on his deathbed. The medical world became aware of LSD's ability to change the perceptions of death in the mid-1960s when the American Medical Association published a report on fifty dying patients who had been given the drug in a Chicago hospital. In this preliminary study conducted by a noted psychiatrist, Dr. Eric Kast, LSD was shown to be more effective as an analgesic or pain reliever than any of the frequently used morphine derivatives;

In . .50 patients, most with advanced canter and some with gangrene, LSD relieved pain for considerably longer periods than such powerful drugs as meperidine and dihydro-morphinone. .. On the average, freedom from pain lasted two hours with 100 mg. meperidine. three hours with 2 mg. dihydro-morphinone and 92 hours with 100 mcg. LSD [italics added].

To the amazement of observers, terminal patients given LSD changed in their attitudes from depression, apathy and anguish to sensitivity, poignancy and deep feeling for people. They movingly expressed gratitude for life itself. LSD seemed to enable many to face death with equanimity.

Instead of denial or fright, these patients generally experienced a feeling of being "at one with the universe" and looked upon dying as merely another event in eternal existence. "It was a common experience," wrote Dr. Kast, "for the patient to remark casually on his deadly disease and then comment on the beauty of a certain sensory impression." Such desirable emotional balance lasted long after LSD's pain-killing action wore off, for up to two weeks in some cases. Later studies have confirmed how impressive the short but profound impact of LSD can be for the dying.

MENTAL EFFECTS

A few pages can only hint at the range and variety that LSD has caused. Here are a couple of greatly condensed paragraphs attempting definition.

The paragraph on the left is taken from The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience by Robert Masters and Jean Houston; the one on the right is part of the definition of LSD-25 in Robert R. Lingeman's revised and updated edition of Drugs From A to Z. These summaries, distilled from many descriptions of the drug's mental effects, are comprehensive and yet incomplete in conveying the quality of the LSD experience.

Variety of Effects 75

Even the briefest summation of the psychological effects would have to include the following: Changes in visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, gustatory, and kinesthetic perception; changes in experiencing time and space; changes in the rate and content of thought; body image changes; hallucinations; vivid images— eidetic images—seen with [he-eyes closed; greatly heightened awareness of color; abrupt and frequent mood and affect changes; heightened suggestibility; enhanced recall or memory; de-personalization and ego dissolution; dual, multiple, and fragmentized consciousness; seeming awareness of internal organs and processes of the body, upsurge of unconscious materials; enhanced awareness of linguistic nuances; increased sensitivity to non-verbal cues; sense of capacity to communicate much better by nonverbal means, sometimes including the telepathic; feelings of empathy; regression and "primitivization"; apparently heightened capacity for concentration; magnification of character traits and psychodynamic processes; an apparent nakedness of psychodynamic processes that makes evident the interaction of ideation, emotion, and perception with one another and with inferred unconscious processes; concern with philosophical, cosmologital, and religious questions; and, in general, apprehension of a world that has slipped the chains of normal categorical ordering, leading to an intensified interest in self and world and also to a range of responses moving from extremes of anxiety to extremes of pleasure ...

The drugs subjective effects are spectacular if taken in large doses. They are similar to those produced by other hallucinogenic drugs but on a grander scale (if a large dose is taken) and include stimulation of the centra! and autonomic nervous systems; changes in mood (sometimes euphoric and megalomaniac, sometimes fearful, panicky, and anxiety-ridden); a sense of threat to the ego; an intensification of colors so that they seem brighter; intensification of the other senses so that inaudible sounds become magnified or food tastes better or normally unnoticed aspects of things (such as the pores in concrete) become strikingly vivid; merging of senses (synesthesia) so that sounds are seen as color patterns; a wave-like sense of time so that seconds seem like an eternity; distortions in the perception of space so that surrounding objects seem fluid and shifting; a sense of de-personalization, of being simultaneously both within and without oneself; a closely related feeling of merger (dissolving) with the external world and a loss of personality; a perception of ordinary things as if seen for the first time unstructured by perceptual "sets"; hallucinations of flowers, snakes, animals, other people, etc., which subjects usually know to be hallucinations though they are powerless to stop them; a sense of closeness to, or merger with, other persons in the room as if barriers between individuals had been dissolved; enhanced sensuousness and sexual stimulation (the drug is neither an aphrodisiac nor an anaphro-disiac, but its overpowering mental effects tend to make it

76 The LSD Family

General Effects

If the experience is all it is said to be, how tan anyone go "through this kind of thing without turning into a terrorized blob of babbling jelly?" Art Kleps might have just finished reading either of the above descriptions when he asked this question.

The state is difficult to describe because it is akin to mystical experience, which is ... ineffable!

"How to describe it!" exclaimed Henri Michaux, the French poet and painter, speaking of this psychedelic experience. "It would require a picturesque style which I do not possess, made up of surprises, of nonsense, of sudden flashes, of bounds and rebounds, an unstable style, tobogganing and prankish."

However, I must now turn around and add that in many ways LSD can also be viewed as a relaxant, as a means to mental calm and to centering. It frequently puts the user in a serene state of mind, at ease. Many users describe it as bringing on the feeling, perhaps for the first time, that they are ... home.

If that sounds like a contradiction, so be it. The states of consciousness brought about are often paradoxical. This might be expected from a catalyst that channels the brain from a dualistic to a unitary way of looking at things.

Here's what Allen Ginsberg had to say when Playboy magazine asked what LSD does:

'What does a trip feel like? A creeping sensation comes over your body, a change in the planetary nature of your mammal eyeballs and hearing orifices. Then comes realization that you're a spirit inhabiting a vast animal body containing giant apertures, holes, circulatory systems, interior canals and mysterious back alleys of the mind. Any one of these back alleys can be explored for a long, long way, like going back into recollections of childhood or going forward into the future, imagining all sorts of changes in the body, in the mind or in the world outside, inventing imaginary universes or recalling ones that existed, like Egypt.

Then you realize that all these exist in your mind simultaneously. Slowly you approach the mysterious feeling that if all these histories and universes exist in your mind at the same time, then what about this one you're "really" in—or/A»»i you are? Does that also exist only in your mind? Then comes a realization that it does exist only in your mind; the mind created it. Then you begin to wonder, Who is this mind? At the height of the acid experience, you realise that your mind's the same mind that's always existed in all people at all times in all places; This is the Great Mini—the very mind men call God. Then comes a fascinating suspicion: Is this mind what they call God or what they used to call the Devil? Here's where a bum trip may begin— if you decide it's .1 demonic Creator. You get hung up wondering whether he should exist or not.

To get off that train of thought: You might open your eyes and see you're sitting on a sofa in a living room with green plants flowering on the mantelpiece. Outside the window, wind is moving through the street in all of its forms—people walking under windy trees—all in one rhythm. And the more you observe the synchronous, animal, sentient details around you, the more you realize that everything is alive You become aware that there's a plant

Paradoxical Nature of Awareness 77

with giant cellular leaves hanging over the fireplace, like a huge unnoticed creature, and you might feel a sudden, sympathetic and intimate relationship with that poor big leaf, wondering: What kind of an experience of bending and falling down over the fireplace has that stalk-blossom been having for several weeks now? And you realize that everything alive is experiencing on its own level a suchness existence as enormous to it as your existence is to you. Suddenly you get sympathetic, and feel a deaf brotherly-sisterly relationship to all these selves. And humorous, for your own life experiences are no more or less absurd or weird than the life experience of that plant; you realize that you and plant are both here together in this strange existence where trees in the sunroom are blossoming and pawing toward the sky. Finally you find out that if you play them music, they grow better.

So, the widening area of consciousness on acid consists in your becoming aware of what's going on inside your own head cosmos—all those corridors leading into dreams, memories, fantasies—and also what's happening outside you. But if you go deep enough inside, you may find yourself confronted with the final problem: Is this all a dream-nature? Great ancient question: What if this existence we're in? Who are we? Then can come what Timothy Leary terms the "clear light" experience or, as they call it in South America, "looking into the eyes of the Veiled Lady"—looking to see who it is, doing or being all this. What's the self-nature of it all? This is the part of the acid experience that's supposed to be indescribable, and I'm not sure I've had the proper experience to describe it.

Dosage Considerations

The action of LSD is difficult to classify because it isn't specific, like aspirin or Miltown. More confusing, it also has variable effects at different dosages. Dosses estimated by weight result in widely fluctuating reactions in different animals, Furthermore, within a given species there may be idiosyncratic responses—even when subjects are all of the same age, weight and sex. Dosage can be one of the most important determining factors.

Most users are affected by dosages above about 20 meg. Amounts just above this produce effects somewhat like a long-lasting "hash high"; Hof-mann's initial trip is a fair example. From about 75 meg. up to about 125 meg., the amount usually taken, LSD can emphasize internal phenomena, although it is frequently used at this level for interpersonal matters, problem-solving or for the enhancement of sensations (for example, at a rock concert). A heavy dose—on the order of 200-250 meg.—produces a predominantly interior, revelatory experience. Higher doses tend to intensify the trip rather than lengthen it; above 400-500 meg., there seems to be a "saturation point," beyond which increases make little difference.

Therapy and Everyday Problems

From the beginning of its history, LSD has been used as an aid to psychotherapy. The first report in the literature, which stressed low oral dosages (20-30 meg.), gave an account of how the compound was administered to sixteen normal subjects and to six schizophrenics.

Until the time research with LSD was dramatically curbed in 1966 more than 40,000 mental patients had received it in dosages running from 20 meg. to upwards of 2,500 meg. It was administered privately in some instances, and in others it was given to whole hospital wards. Some people received only one dose; others had as many as 120. In most instances, LSD was used in small amounts as an adjunct to psychotherapy. Other patients took it as a one-time, high-dosage treatment.

Many early investigators screened out psychotics and schizophrenics, but some did not and often claimed surprising success with such cases. Patients usually received this treatment from only one therapist, but several researchers came to believe that better results could be obtained when the compound was given by several persons.

Among many varied techniques, hypnotism was sometimes used in conjunction with LSD. Other people installed nurses as "parent surrogates" for their patients. Still others encouraged their patients to "act out" aggressions during the LSD session, giving them objects to tear up or hit. Some therapists depended primarily upon symbolic interpretation of familiar objects and universal insignia. Others concentrated on dream materials. Some used only LSD; some combined it with Ritalin, Librium, Dramamine or amphetamine. Others added one or another of the mind-altering drugs, such as CZ-74 (a psilocin derivative).

Almost from the beginning, psychiatrists and psychologists realized that many effects of this drug had implications relevant to personal growth. R.A. Sandison was one of the earliest practitioners to recognize the potentials of LSD:

There are good reasons for believing that the LSD experience is a manifestation of the psychic unconscious, and that its material can be used in psychotherapy in the same way that dreams, phantasies and paintings can be used by the psychoanalysts.

A characteristic of the LSD experience particularly fascinating to Freudian analysts has been its power to cause the patient to regress to early traumas, which could then be relieved. This chemical is still used as an aid in "transference." Dr. Gordon Johnsen, of Modum Bads Nervesantorium in Norway elaborates:

If we get sexual perverts, for example, we may question what kind of treatment to give them; we want to find out a little more about them. We could use three or four weeks finding out, but we shorten that and say we will try if we can find out more with one or two LSD sessions. We use small doses then. We find that the symptoms are clearer; they are willing to speak more openly to us; we can get a clearer picture of the diagnosis. We have used it in that way-to save time.

By the time of the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation conference on LSD at the end of the 1950s, it had become clear that this semi-synthetic drug seemed to affirm the concepts of most of the psychological "schools." The Freudians were using LSD to abreact their patients and to explore Oedipal and other notions. The Jungians found that this drug manifested mandalas and rebirth experiences in their patients. A fascinating account of an extended Freudian treatment appears in My Self and I, written by the Kirlian researcher and para-psychologist Thelma Moss (under the name Constance Newland). Dr. Donald Blair, an English consulting psychiatrist, summed up his view of LSD's results:

People who have had psychotherapy or psychoanalysis for some time, as much as eight years, and haven't gotten anywhere, do so with the drug; it does break resistance .... You get neurotic patients who have been to numerous therapists, analysts, and they don't get better. Then they come to one of us who are using LSD and thanks to the effect of the drug, they do get better.

Experimentation with large, "single-shot" LSD doses began in the late 1950s. A great many therapists using this approach started to see in their patients what Sherwood, Stolaroff and Harman later termed "the stage of immediate perception":

... he comes to experience himself in a totally new way and finds thai the age-old question "who am 1?" does have a significant answer. He experiences himself as a far greater being than he had ever imagined, with his conscious self a far smaller fraction of the whole than he had realized. Furthermore, he

80 The LSD Family

sees that his own self is by no means so separate from other selves and the universe about him as he might have thought. Nor is the existence of this newly experienced self so intimately related to his corporeal existence.

These realizations, while not new to mankind, and possibly not new to the subject in the intellectual sense, are very new in an experiential sense. That is, they are new in the sense that makes for altered behavior. The individual sees clearly that some of his actions are not in line with his new knowledge and chat changes are obviously called for.

Records kept of alcoholic recovery rates following ingestion of LSD constitute the firmest quantitative data so far on the effects of this substance They are especially impressive when one considers that independent studies using different methods achieved substantially identical results. In most instances, the patients were chosen from the worst cases that could be found. (Some studies using different procedures have not been as successful.)

Abram Hoffer had this to say when he published statistics relating to more than 800 hardcore alcoholics who had been treated in the Canadian LSD program:

When psychedelic therapy is given to alcoholics using methods described in the literature about one-third will remain sober after the therapy is completed, and one-third will be benefitted. If schizophrenics and malvarians [those showing a particularly purplish component of urine] are excluded from LSD therapy the results should be better by about 30 percent. There are no published papers using psychedelic therapy which show it does not help about 50 per cent of the treated group ....

Our conclusion after 1} years of research is that properly used LSD therapy can convert a large number of alcoholics into sober members of society . . . Even more important is the fact that this can be done very quickly and therefore very economically. Whereas with standard therapy one bed might be used to treat about 4 to 6 patients per year, with LSD one can easily treat up to 36 patients per bed per year.

The majority of LSD therapists had agreed just before being denied access to LSD that this drug is superior to other forms of treatment in its effect on the whole range of neuroses and disorders that ordinarily respond to psychoanalysis. Typical reports indicate that even with severe problems only 10 to 15 percent of patients failed to achieve any improvement. When Hollywood Hospital in Vancouver, B.C., Canada, followed up eighty-nine patients for an average of fifty-five months, it found that 55 percent had a total remission of their problem, 54 percent were improved and 11 percent were unchanged. At the University of Gottingen's Psychiatric Hospital, Dr Hanscarl Leuner's results, independently rated, showed 76 percent of the patients with character neuroses, depressive reactions, anxiety, phobias or conversion-hysteria were "greatly improved" or "recovered." In an evaluation of his work at Marborough Day Hospital in London, Dr. Ling states: An analysis of 43 patients treated privately ... shows that 34 are completely

well and serially well-adjusted. Six are improved, one abandoned treatment.

"Immediate Perception"/Alcoholic Recovery 81

one had to leave for Africa before treatment was finished, and one failed to respond satisfactorily, so treatment was abandoned.

So far, most of the successful reports on the treatment of mental patients with LSD deal with neurotic patients who have been motivated to get well. There seems to be tacit agreement among therapists that LSD is not effective in dealing with psychoses. Practitioners who have undertaken LSD treatment of schizophrenics have been regarded as brave or reckless. (Schizophrenia is a term so vague that even the American Psychological Association has eliminated it from their list of disorders.)

LSD does not work very well with patients whose mental derangements are seriously advanced. It may precipitate a worsening of the condition. Nevertheless, a large body of evidence indicates that those who have administered LSD in such cases have often obtained positive reactions that are worthy of broader consideration.

Dr. Fred F. Langner used LSD effectively with a number of severely disturbed persons, mainly "schizophrenics." After he used LSD in over 2,000 patient sessions, he concluded that pseudo-neurotics and paranoid schizophrenics do not respond favorably and may, in fact, suffer clinical setbacks. However, he observed that schizoid personalities, whose egos are not text brittle, may through LSD have their first experience with "feeling." One of his patients said, "I know now that I never knew what people were talking about when they talked about feelings till I took LSD. I didn't know till toward the end of my second year in therapy that feelings could be good as well as bad."

LSD has been described by Aldous Huxley as a means of insight into the "Other World." As an instrument of therapy, it has brought many back Into contact with reality. Here is another paradox, another example of the unifying action of LSD. Consider a comment by Norma McDonald,a recovered schizophrenic:

One of the most encouraging things which has happened to me in recent years was the discovery that 1 could talk to normal people who had had the experience of taking mescaline or lysergic acid, and they would accept the things I told them about my adventures in mind without asking stupid questions or withdrawing into a safe smug world of disbelief. Schizophrenia is a lonely illness and friends are of great importance. I have needed true friends to help me to believe in myself when I doubted my own mind, to encourage me with their praise, jolt me out of unrealistic ideas with their honesty and teach me by their example how to work and play. The discovery of LSD-25 by those who work in the field of psychiatry has widened my circle of friends.

The best accounts of "acid therapy" in English are Stanislav Grofs LSD Psychotherapy (1980) and Milan Hausner and Erna Segal's The Highway to Mental Health: LSD Psychotherapy (1979). The latter details Hausner's use of LSD as an adjunct to psychotherapy for more than twenty years in Czechoslovakia. In reviewing this volume, John C Rhead, who participated in LSD experiments as a doctor at Spring Grove Hospital, wholeheartedly welcomed it "as an encouraging sign that good work with Psychedelics is still go-

82 The LSD family

ing on somewhere in the world," Pointing to its "constant theme.. .of corrective/healing experience emerging from the patient's own subconscious," Rhead added these comments:

The fundamental belief in the capacity of the human psyche to be self-healing under the proper circumstances is but one of the many striking parallels between Dr. Hausner's conclusions and those of the group at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center — Many passages of Dr. Hausner's book sound very much like the things that my colleagues/friends in Maryland and I have thought, said and/or written ....

Examples of these similarities are found in the following areas: the critical importance of interpersonal trust in conducting successful psychotherapy with Psychedelics, the use of music, the importance of having the therapist/ guide experience LSD as part of an ethically adequate training to do this type of work, the unique value of artistic product ions by the patient for both assessment of functioning as well as integration of emerging subconscious material, the presentation during die LSD session of significant objects from the patient's life (e.g., photographs) in order to stimulate associations and fresh insights and perspectives, the need to include the concepts of many diverse schools of psychotherapeutic thought in order to understand and utilize LSD, the importance of working through and integrating the experiences that emerge during LSD sessions and the fundamental value or reality of the mystic or peak experiences that frequently occur ....

I believe that these similarities are the result of two groups of relatively blind but curious and well-intentioned investigators independently having taken the time to grope rather thoroughly over the entire elephant. As is commonly noted in the literature of comparative religion, there really does appear to be only one elephant.

Even though a decade and a half has passed since the panic of the mid-1960s, federal regulations and hospital "Human Rights" committees continue to block requests to use Psychedelics on humans. They are afraid of negative publicity and lawsuits. When Walter Houston Clark inserted a questionnaire addressed to research professionals in Behavior Today and the Newsletter of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, nearly all who replied stated that they would like to do psychedelic research.

Of the first hundred people who responded to Clark's request, half had been associated at one time with controlled drug studies. Asked why they weren't engaged in such work any more, eighty-one mentioned governmental red tape, sixty cited other bureaucratic obstruction, seventy-eight wrote that they weren't able to secure clearance and fifty-three indicated lack of funding as "large reasons." Asked to rate the promise of Psychedelics in the mental health area, "assuming opportunity for controlled experimentation," none called it negative, one thought it might be neutral, seven perceived it as meager, fifteen felt it was moderate, thirty-four considered it high and thirty-six believed that investigation of Psychedelics held out "breakthrough" possibilities (another seven didn't answer this question).

"Breakthrough" Possibilities 83

"Do I feel any patients are being denied an experience of significant value as a result of non-acceptance of LSD as a therapeutic tool;1" Dr. Langner asks. "Yes, I do."

Creative Stimulus

A large number of testimonials indicates that LSD can dissolve creative blockage. Many examples are presented in Robert Masters and Jean Houston's Psychedelic Art and in Ralph Metzner's The Ecstatic Adventure, which contains full reports from participants in the Menlo Park creativity studies (including two architects and an engineer-physicist who was working on a model for a "photon"). A general presentation of that creativity research can be found in Charles Tutt's Altered States of Consciousness. In the Fall 1980 Humanistic Psychology Institute Review, Stanley Krippner summarized the findings of nine major studies in this area.

A notable early example was architect Kyoshi Izumi's design of a psychiatric hospital in Canada. He was given LSD by Humphry Osmond before he made several visits to traditionally designed mental institutions in order to evaluate the effects of their design upon people in altered states of consciousness. Izumi found that tiles on walls glistened eerily and recessed closets yawned like huge, dark caverns. He noticed that raised hospital beds were too high for patients to sit on and still touch the floor with their feet and a sense of time was lost because of the lack of clocks and calendars. Worst of all were the long corridors. (Osmond called the thousands of square feet of polished tiles in these institutions "illusion-producing machines par excellence, and very expensive ones at that. If your perception is a little unstable, you may see your dear old father peering out at you from the walls .. . .")

These insights, which were made clear through his use of LSD, resulted in Izumi's design for "the ideal mental hospital," which was commended for outstanding architectural advancement by the Joint Information Service of the American Psychiatric Association. The first hospital on his plan was built in Yorkton, Saskatchewan and was imitated soon after in Haverford, Pennsylvania. The prototype has been reproduced several times since, mainly in Canada. Bonnie Golightly and I summarized distinguishing features:

The Yorkton hospital consists of small, cottage-like clusters of rooms, thirty to a unit, joined together by underground passageways — There are many windows, low and unbarred, eliminating the old, dismal barnlike aspect of mental hospitals. The walls are painted in pleasant, flat colors, and each patient has his own room in one or another of the clusters, rather than a bed in an austere, nearly bare ward. The beds are low to the floor, and the rooms are furnished with regard to making it easier to define the floor as a mere floor, not a pit. Also, the furniture is comfortable and not unlike that with which the patient is familiar at home. The closet problem has been solved by installing large, movable cabinets which the patient can clearly see possess both a back and a front. Clocks and calendars abound, while floor tiles are sparingly used. The emphasis throughout puts patient needs foremost, without sacrificing utility.

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In 1955, Berlin, Guthrie, Weider, Goodell and Wolff reported on four prominent graphic artists who made paintings during an LSD experience. A panel of art critics judged the paintings as having greater value than the artists' usual work—noting that use of color was more vivid and lines were bolder, though the technical execution was somewhat poorer. Similar results were reported by Frank Barren in his Creativity and Psychological Health and by Oscar Janiger, who gave LSD to a hundred artists and had them draw an Indian Kachina doll before, during and after their experience (July-August 1959 issue of The California Clinician).

By way of contrast, studies made with volunteers who were not particularly interested in LSD's creative potential reflected no significant changes in creativity. William McGlothlin, Sidney Cohen and others, and then the team of Zegans, Pollard and Brown, reported these findings in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases (1964) and in i\\e Archives of General Psychiatry (1967) respectively. Six months after three 200-mcg. LSD sessions, the McGlothlin team found only one major distinction: 62 percent of their subjects reported "a greater appreciation of music." An increase in the number of records bought, time spent in museums and number of musical events attended was also significantly greater than for two control groups, who were given either 25 meg. of LSD or 20 mg. of amphetamine per session. Gohen wrote in 1965: "All that can be said at this time about the effect of LSD on the creative process is that a strong subjective feeling of creativeness accompanies many of the experiences." The Zegans group concluded that "the administration of LSD-25 to a relatively unselected group of people, for the purpose of enhancing their creative ability, is not likely to be successful."

On the other hand, the Institute for Psychedelic Research at San Francisco State College, headed by Fadiman, Harman, McKim, Mogar and Stol-aroff, came to remarkably positive findings when they gave LSD and mescaline to professionals who were faced with technical problems that they had been unable to solve. Hypothesizing that "through carefully structured regimen, a learning experience with lingering creative increases could result," this group administered Psychedelics to twenty-two volunteers. By the time of their report in November 1965, six had already seen concrete benefits in their work. At this point, the Institute's access to Psychedelics was terminated. Comments made by some of the people taking part in this project indicate something of the way LSD affected their thinking:

Looking at the same problem with (psychedelic) materials, I was able to consider it in a much more basic way, because I could form and keep in mind a much broader picture.

I had great visual (mental) perceptibility; I could imagine what was wanted, needed, or not possible with almost no effort.

Ideas came up with a speed that was breathtaking.

I dismissed the original idea entirely, and started to approach the graphic problem in a radically different way That was when things began to happen. All kinds of different possibilities came to mind.

Die in Technical Problem-Solving 8.5

Diminished fear of making mistakes or being embarrassed.

I was impressed with the intensity of concentration, the forcefulness and exuberance with which I could proceed toward the problem.

In what seemed like 10 minutes, 1 had completed the problem, having what I considered (and still consider) a classic solution.

. .. brought about almost total recall of a course that I had had in thermodynamics, something that I had never given any thought about in years.

In 1969, Stanley Krippner surveyed 180 professional artists reported to have had at least one psychedelic experience (eighteen, as it turned out, had never taken a psychoactive chemical). These included "two award-winning film-makers, a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry, a recipient of Ford, Fulbright, and Rockefeller study grants in painting, several college faculty members, and numerous musicians, actors, and writers," mainly from the New York area but with a significant proportion from around the world.

When asked how psychedelic experiences influenced their art, none said his or her work had suffered, "although some admitted that their friends might disagree with this judgment." Five stated that their psychedelic experiences had not influenced their work one way or the other, but most were enthusiastic about the effects. The painter Arlene Sklar-Weinstein, who had gone through only one LSD experience is representative: "It opened thousands of doors for me and dramatically changed the content, intent, and style of my work."

Of the 180 artists surveyed, 114 said that their psychedelic experiences had affected the content of their work; they mainly cited their use of eidetic, or closed-eyes, imagery as a source of subject matter. Fully 131 responded that there had been "a noticeable improvement in their artistic technique," most often mentioning a greater ability to use colors. In addition, 142 attributed a change in creative approach to the Psychedelics. Many indicated that dormant interests in art and music had been activated by psychedelic sessions.

LSD has helped to end writer's block. Ling and Buckman's The Use of LSD and Ritalin in the Treatment of Neurosis cites the example of a "well-known European writer" whose major work, translated into twelve languages, was written subsequent to LSD usage. Previously, he had had a "burning desire" to write but had been unable to finish a single manuscript. Under the influence of LSD, he was confronted with a sudden awareness that he could die. "With this horror of death realized, I started to experience a most fantastic happiness with the realization that after all I do not have to die now." It freed him as an artist: he no longer felt he was writing "with my neck under the guillotine."

I am no longer afraid of putting one letter after the other to say what I want and this is linked with an enormous number of things, such as speech less ness and inarticulateness. The feeling of being dumb, not being able to express myself, was probably one of my most unpleasant inner feelings ....

I [now] seem capable of expressing what many people would love to express but for which they cannot find the words. 1 did nut find the words before because I tried to avoid saying the essential things.

S6 The LSD family

Krippner quotes the Dutch writer Ronny van den Eerenbeemt as having responded similarly:

When very young, I started writing stones and poems. The older I got, the more I had a feeling of not being able to find something really worthwhile to write about. My psychedelic experiences taught me that what I used to do was no more than scratch the surface of life. After having seen and felt the center of life, through the Psychedelics, I now think I do have something worthwhile to write about.

At the conclusion of his survey of the effects from LSD and similar Psychedelics, Krippner writes:

Little scientific research has been undertaken with psychedelic drugs since advances in information theory, brain physiology, and the study of consciousness . . . have revolutionized our understanding of those areas. This increase in knowledge and theoretical sophistication affords science a unique opportunity to study the creative act. Creativity has been a perpetual enigma; now, at last, it may be prepared to divulge its secrets.

A final point about the creative process: it does not seem to have too much to do with conventional I.Q., as measured by existing tests. Frank Barton, while a Research Psychologist at the University of California Institute of Personality Assessment, compared more than 5,000 productive and creative individuals with others in their field who had similar I.Q. but limited productivity:

The thing that was important was something that might be called a cos-mological commitment. It was a powerful motive to create meaning and to leave a testament of the meaning which that individual found in the world, and in himself in relation to the world. This motive emerged in many ways, but we came across it over and over again when we compared highly creative individuals with those of equal intellectual ability as measured by I.Q. tests, but of less actual creative ability. The intense motivation having to do with this making of meaning—or finding meaning and communicating it in one form or another—was the most important difference between our criterion and control groups ....

I think that as a result of the psychedelic experience there's a heightened sense of the drama of life, including its brevity, and a realization both of the importance of one's individual life and of the fact that a sacred task has been given to the individual in the development of the self.

Religious Considerations

At the core, LSD enables the users to transcend ordinary reality and feel religious effects. Aldous Huxley described the experience with a term from Catholic theology, "gratuitous grace." He wrote Father Thomas Merton about similarities perceived by one user to spontaneous mystical experience:

A friend of mine, saved from alcoholism, during the last fatal phase of the disease, by a spontaneous theophany, which changed his life as completely as St.

Contrived Religious Experience 87

Paul's was changed by his theophany on the road to Damascus, has taken lysergic acid two or three times and affirms that his experience under the drug is identical with the spontaneous experience which changed his life—the only difference being that the spontaneous experience did not last so long as the chemically induced one.

Alan Watts, philosopher and Zen master, had a bad first impression, characterizing his LSD experience as "mysticism with water wings." During two later experiments conducted by associates of the Langley-Porter Clinic in San Francisco, he quickly changed his mind:

I was amazed and somewhat embarrassed to find myself going through states of consciousness that corresponded precisely with every description of major mystical experiences that I had ever read. Furthermore, they exceeded both in depth and in a peculiar quality of unexpectedness the three "natural and spontaneous" experiences of this kind that had happened to me in previous years.

The religious aspect of LSD ingestion registered strongly among the group at Harvard running the Psilocybin Research Project. Shortly after the project had begun, Michael Hollingshead showed up with a jar filled with LSD; it was given to third-year Ph.D. students in behaviorism. Hollingshead reflected in 1981 on that small class of students and their instructors:

Al Cohen—he runs the Meher Baba group He got his Ph.D. in behaviorism.

Alpert already had his Ph.D. He's a Hindu saint.

Leary already had his Ph.D. He became the "High Priest."

Ralph Metzner—he got his Ph.D. He is now running healing work and wholistic therapeutic groups in San Francisco and Berkeley, the total opposite of behaviorism. Ralph accepts that within each person there's a spiritual entity which can be moved if it's once awakened and allowed not only to see but also to be.

Gunther Weil is now the director of the- Media Center of the University of Massachusetts, but he's also been running the Gurdjieff group in Boston. He is closely identified with the Gurdjieffian work. He has put out records, he has tried to create art movies, he's lectured on the acculturation of the psychedelic experience.

Al Alschuler—well, he's still at Harvard in the School of Education as far as I know. He has moved away from strict behaviorism into creative educational techniques, but through the system.

Paul Lee—who, when I first met him, wasn't one of the students. He was Paul Tillich's right-hand man. And he had a very profound experience. He's now teaching herbs in Santa Cruz.

Rolf von Eckartsberg—he's in Philadelphia, running the Open House System, where certain houses art always open to ex-prison inmates.

Hollingshead concludes that for these people LSD was instrumental in realization of the importance of their religious nature:

To use Aldous Huxley's expression, "the doors of perception" were opened, and they saw inside the house—this house of many mansions which is also

88 The LSD Family

the Self. And then the doors closed at midnight and they were back in the old humdrum again—but vouch saved a glimpse of the other. And then, bit by bit, they began to discover Eastern writings, the Tao Te Ching, the I Ching, the Vedas, the Upanishads, Sufi masters, various forms of music that are designed for people who are in the house to dance. And they began to move off into different areas, which accounts for why they are where they are now.

Houston Smith, Professor of Philosophy at MIT, similarly described this most important aspect of Psychedelics (based mainly on his observation of effects from LSD):

. . . given the right set and setting, the drugs can induce religious experiences indistinguishable from ones that occur spontaneously. Nor need set and setting be exceptional. Trie way die statistics are currently running, it looks as if from one-fourth to one-third of the general population will have religious experiences if they take the drugs under naturalistic conditions, meaning by this conditions in which the researcher supports the subject but doesn't try to influence the direction his experience will take. Among subjects who have strong religious inclinations to begin with, the proportion of those having religious experiences jumps to three-quarters. If they take them in settings which are religious too, the ratio soars to nine out of ten.

Dr. Smith has given a useful definition of "a religious experience," calling it an experience that elicits from the experiencer a centered response, a response from the core of his or her being.

As his being includes thoughts, feelings, and will ... a religious experience triggers in the experiencer a triple movement: of the mind in belief, of the emotions in awe, and of the will in obedience. A religious experience is awesome, convinces the experiencer that its noetic disclosures are true, and lays upon him obligations he acknowledges as binding.

In various LSD studies, episodes of a religious nature have often been manifested even when the intent of the study had nothing to do with religious consciousness. "Cure for dipsomania," William James once said, "is religio-mania," a proposition confirmed in the LSD alcoholism studies.

For the 206 psychedelic sessions guided or observed by Masters and Houston—112 with LSD—the statistical breakdown on the following page (rounded to the nearest percentage) indicates the type and frequency of religious images that arose among their subjects.

The Masters and Houston report on mystical experiences is especially interesting because they have taken pains to be more exacting than most in terms of religious criteria. In their The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, they certify only one subject reaching the profoundest depth and only six as attaining the "introvertive mystical" experience. About the latter, they comment:

It is of interest to observe that those few subjects who attain to this level of mystical apprehension have in the course of their lives either actively sought the mystical experience in meditation and other spiritual disciplines or have

Emergence of Religious Impulses 89

| RELIGIOUS IMAGERY | N = 206 subjects Percent |
| Religious imagery of some kind: Religious architecture, temples and churches: Religious sculpture, painting, stained glass windows: Religious symbols: cross, yin yang, Star of David, etc.: Mandalas: Religious figures: Christ. Buddha, Saints, godly figures, William Blake-type figures: Devils, demons: Angels: Miraculous and numinous visions, pillars of light, burning bushes, Cod in the whirlwind: Cosmological imagery: galaxies, heavenly bodies, creation of the universe, of the solar system, of the earth (experienced as religious) ; Religious Rituals Scenes of contemporary Christian, Jewish or Muslim Rites: Contemporary Oriental rites: Ancient Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Mesopotamian and similar rites: Primitive rites: | 96 91 43 34 26 58 49 7 60 14 8 10 67 31 |

for many years demonstrated a considerable interest in integral levels of consciousness. It should also be noted that all of these subjects were over forty years of age, were of superior intelligence, and were well-ad justed and creative personalities.

When the historical scarcity of mysticism is kept in mind, these limited claims by Masters and Houston are all the more impressive. They may yet substantiate the comment from Ram Dass" guru that religion would come to America by way of a pill.

A number of commentators—notably the sociologist Richard Bunce and the psychiatrist Norman Zinberg—have recently argued that LSD's effects are essentially in line with "recreational drug use." However, most of these observers became interested in this compound in the 1970s, when the usual dosage had dropped to 50 to 100 meg., far below dosages taken in the 1960s, which frequently exceeded 250 meg. Dosage is a primary factor in the emergence of religious impulses. Lesser amounts generally have lesser effects, although small doses on occasion have induced psychically powerful results. If "recreation" is the user's only aim, LSD is riskier than most other drugs: the soul may manifest itself anyway.

BOTANICAL SOURCES OF LYSERGIC ACID AMIDES AND THEIR HISTORIES AND EFFECTS Rye and Other Grasses

The lysergic acid used for the synthesis of LSD was originally obtained from a rye-attacking fungus called Claviceps purpurea. The sclerotium, or

90 The LSD Family

fruiting body, of this filamentous fungus is known as ergot and contains the "skeleton" for making the psychoactive molecule. Many times during the Middle Ages, and on other occasions up until the first quarter of this century, it was baked inadvertently into bread. Those who ate it felt the terrifying, sometimes deadly, consequences of ergot poisoning, which appeared in gangrenous and convulsive forms and was often called "St. Anthony's fire." People thus affected often experienced ecstasies, but frequently they went into "St. Virus' dance." Sometimes bodily extremities blackened and fell off. Thousands died.

Raven, Evert and Curtis in their Biology of Plants note that in one such epidemic in 994 A.D., "more than 40,000 died. In 1722, ergotism struck down the calvary of Czar Peter the Great on the eve of battle for the conquest of Turkey, and thus changed the course of history." When it was realized in the seventeenth century that ergot-infected rye baked into bread was the cause of these outbreaks, they became less frequent and less extensive. The last ergot epidemic occurred in southern Russia during 1926-1927. (A popular book and many writers have erroneously described a mass poisoning in 1951 in the southern French city of Pont-St. Esprit as the result of ergotism. Thirty people felt that they were being pursued by demons and snakes, and five died. The cause, however, was actually an organic mercury compound that had been used to disinfect seeds.)

At least thirty alkaloids appear in different kinds of ergot, varying in strength and chemical arrangements with the host medium, the weather and other local circumstances. The most common are "peptide alkaloids" of an ergotamine-ergotoxine grouping (not soluble in water) and these have been responsible for the two forms of ergotism. The other alkaloids are lysergic acid amides (which are water soluble), the most important being ergine (d-lysergic acid amide) and ergonovine (d-lysergic acid- 1-2-propanolamide). The latter was isolated independently by four groups of researchers in the 1930s and thus was variously known as ergometrine, ergobasin, ergotocinc-or ergostetrine.

These distinctions of botanical chemistry are important to this story because of a challenging question R. Gordon Wasson posed to Albert Hof-mann in July 1975: "whether Early Man in ancient Greece could have hit on a method to isolate an hallucinogen from ergot that would have given him an experience comparable to LSD or psilocybin?"

Hofmann's response a year later was yes, such effects could have occurred with ergot grown on wheat or barley (rye wasn't known in ancient Greece), and an even "easier way would have been to use the ergot growing on the common wild grass Paspalum." On April l, 1976,Hofmann confirmed such a possibility when he took an oral dose of 2 mg. of ergonovine maleate, equivalent to about 1.5 mg. of the ergonovine base, which is about six times the normal dose used in medicine for postparrum hemorrhaging. He found that this dose produced mild psychedelic activity that lasted more than five hours.

Ergotism/'Possible Ergonovine Use at Eleusis 97

Evidence marshalled for this thesis by Wasson, Hofmann and the Greek scholar Carl A.P. Ruck, along with a new translation of the "Homeric Hymn to Demeter," appears in their The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of

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the Mysteries (1978). They demonstrate that the potion used for more than 2,000 years in these annual "mysteries" (mysterious to the uninitiated because the penalty for revealing the ceremony was death) involved water infusions of infected barley and the sclerotium of Claviceps paspali growing on the wild grass Paspalum distichum, which flourished throughout the area and particularly on the Rarian plain. The complex historical reconstruction of these events, in the words of Jonathan Ott, "for the first time places the sacred mushroom [of ergot] in our own cultural past,"

2,000 Years of These "Mysteries" 93

Hofmann wrote in his autobiography, "The cultural-historical meaning of the Eleusinian Mysteries, their influence on European intellectual history, can scarcely be overestimated. Here suffering humankind found a cure for its rational, objective, cleft intellect, in a mystical totality experience, that let it believe in immortality, in an ever-lasting existence."

Up to three thousand people annually were initiated "in a perfect way" for two millenia, until the suppression of these rites under Christianity in the fourth century A.D. Anyone who could speak Greek and who hadn't committed murder could present themselves once for this initiation. Half a year of preparatory rituals began in the spring, culminating in September in a procession lasting several days from Athens to the temple at Eleusis. The ceremony occurred at night; ancient writers hint that important things were seen—in a room "totally unsuited for theatrical performances" (as Ruck described the temple). Among those initiated were Aristotle, Sophocles, Plato, Aeschylus, Cicero, Pindar and possibly even Homer, plus many Roman emperors (such as Hadrian and Marcus Arelius).

Aristides the Rhetor in the second century A,D. called the experience "new, astonishing, inaccessible to rational cognition." The "Homeric Hymn to Demeter," which tells us most about what occurred, states "Blissful is he among men on Earth who has beheld that! He who has not been initiated into the holy Mysteries, who has had no part therein, remains a corpse in

94 The LSD Family

gloomy darkness." Pindar remarked "Blissful is he who after having beheld this enters on the way beneath the Earth. He knows the end of life as well as its divinely granted beginning." Cicero said of Eleusis: "Not only have we received the reason there, that we may live in joy, but also, besides, that we may die with better hope." Aristotle revealed only that these Mysteries were an experience rather than something learned.

The Road to Eleusis appeared in 1978; so far as I know, nobody since then has tried an aqueous solution of ergot, which is understandable, given the history of ergotism. On the other hand, Paspalum distichum, as described by Hofmann, contains "only alkaloids that are hallucinogenic and which could even have been used directly in powder form."

In the January-June 1979 issue of the journal of Psychedelic Drugs, Jeremy Bigwood, Jonathan Ott, Catherine Thompson and Patricia Neely report on their attempt to replicate Hofmann's finding in three experiments with ergonovine maleate, each time in one pastoral setting. They were following up Wasson and Ruck, who tried the same amount as Hofmann but "did not experience distinct entheogenic effects."

With Thompson acting as a guide, three of them took 3 mg. of ergonovine maleate, which appeared as a slightly phosphorescent bluish solution in water. Fifteen minutes later they felt like lying down and looking at the sky; then there were "very rnild visual alterations, characterized by perception of an 'alive' quality in inanimate objects." Most of this effect passed within an hour; walking along the beach, they experienced mild leg cramps. Bigwood saw eidetic imagery before going to bed, and the three "slept easily.,. awakening refreshed in the morning."

The three experimenters were "convinced that ergonovine was psycho-active, but only J.B. was persuaded the drug was entheogenic." They decided to try it again two weeks later in an increased dosage of 5 mg.,but Neely took only 3.75 mg. "Again, we experienced lassitude and leg cramps, more pronounced than in the earlier experiment." The psychic effects were more intense than previously, particularly eidetic imagery. "Now it was clear to all of us that ergonovine was entheogenic.... The entheogenic effects, however, were very mild, while the somatic effects were quite strong. We had none of the euphoria characteristic of LSD and psilocybin experiences."

To determine if higher consciousness alteration was possible, they tried larger oral doses of ergonovine maleate a week later. This time, Neely took a dose of 7.5 mg. and the others took 10 mg.:

One of us (J.O.) described "flashes in periphery, ringing in ears, inner restlessness" 40 minutes after ingestion, and later noted "mild hallucinosis, cramps in legs" [and] felt the cramping in the legs as painful and debilitating. The psychic effects did not increase with the same magnitude as the somatic effects.... For what seemed like hours, we lay on our backs atop a small pumphouse, watching fluffy cumulus clouds pass silently above us. The effects were still quite intense six hours after ingestion. One of us experienced abundant

Testing Ergonovine 95

eidetic imagery, rapidly -changing, colorful geometric patterns, undulating, never still. We all had a slight hangover the following morning.

Morning Glories

When the Conquistadores subdued the Aztecs, early chroniclers recorded that the Indians made religious and medicinal use of peyote, another psychoactive plant named tlttliltztn, and a small lentil-like seed called ololiuqui. The third, alleged to have been used also for purposes of divination, came from a vine known in the N^huatl language as coaxihuitl (or "snakeplant").

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When he published some botanical notes by the Spanish physician Hernandez, Ximenez stated in 1615 in regard to oloiiucfui: "It matters little that this plant be here described or that Spaniards be made acquainted with it." He expressed the generally negative Spanish attitude- Hernandez and others had described the plant, indicating that it was held in great veneration, and illustrations—as in the Florentine Codex—suggested that it was a member of the familiar bindweed or morning glory family (Convolvulaceae), but knowledge of this species and its seed was lost to all but a few Zapotec, Chinan-tec, Mazatec and Mixtec tribes, dwelling mostly in Oaxaca in southern Mexico for more than four centuries.

The ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes sent samples of a cultivated Mexican morning glory to Hofmann in 1959, when it was still called Rivea corymbosa. He had seen it employed in divination by a Zapotec shaman in Oaxaca. Corymbosa is now considered one of five Turbina species—the only one appearing in the Americas. Though there are more than 500 species of Convolvulaceae widely scattered around the globe, they seem to have been used for their psychoactive properties only by tribes in the New World.

In 1960, Hofmann analyzed the constituents of these seeds and declared that Riven {Turbinal corymbosa contained ergot alkaloids. This information was hard for the scientific world to accept because: (a) previous chemical analysis, recommended in 1955 by Humphry Osmond after self-experimentation with morning glory seeds, had shown no psychoactive principles, and (b) until that time ergot alkaloids had been found only in the rye fungus Claviceps purpurea, which belonged in an entirely unrelated wing of the plant kingdom. "Chemotaxonomically," said Schultes, commenting on the unexpected discovery of lysergic acid amides in morning glories, "such an occurrence would be highly unlikely." Hence, many researchers suspected that spores from fungi already in Hofmann's lab had somehow invaded the tissues of the morning glories examined. Later, however, chemical analyses substantiated Hofmann's claim.

The principle agent in this plant was found to be d-lysergic acid amide, which had already been synthesized and was known as both ergine and LA-111. Other alkaloids of lesser importance found to be psychoactively influential in Turbina corymbosa were d-isolysergic acid amide (isoergine), chanoclavine, elymoclavine and lysergol.

In I960, Don Thoma's MacDougall reported that seeds of Ipomoea violacea were used as sacraments by certain Zapotecs, sometimes in conjunction with ololiuqui and sometimes not. These morning glory seeds, called badoh negro, come from the same botanical family—but are jet black rather than brown and are long and angular rather than round. When analyzed, the badoh negro seeds were found to have the same mentally-affecting amides as Turbina (Rivea) corymbosa, except that ergometrine—a strong uterotonic— showed up in place of lysergol.

Some people believe that badoh negro is the seed the early Spanish

Lysergic Acid Amides in Morning Glories 97

records referred to as tlttliltzin (the Ndhuatl word for "black," slightly altered by a reverential suffix). These seeds turned out to be stronger in psychoactivity than ololiuqui. The total alkaloid content of the Rivea (Turbina) is 0.012 percent, while that of Ipomoea is about 0.06 percent. American varieties of Ipomoea vtolacea containing d-lysergic acid amides are: Heavenly Blue, Pearly Gates, Flying Saucers, Blue Star, Summer Skies and Wedding Bells.' If you compare LSD-25 and the main ingredient of ololiuqui—the first and second drawing on page 67—you'll see that the only difference is substitution of two hydrogens in the amide group for two ethyl radicals This slight change in the molecule makes LSD 50 to 100 times more active than

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the central ingredient in morning glories. The First Book of Sacraments of the Church of the Tree of Life compares the experiential differences between the seeds and LSD:

The effect of these alkaloids in combination is similar to LSD and other hallucinogens, but more tranquil. Some people experience nausea during the first hour. Large doses are not recommended. After the major effects have worn off one usually feels very soft and relaxed ....

It is not advisable for people with a history of hepatitis, jaundice, or other serious liver disease to take [these) lysergic acid amides. Because several of the alkaloids in this family of sacraments have powerful uterus-stimulating properties we recommend that they not be taken by pregnant women.

Hawaiian Woodroses

Chemical investigations have confirmed the appearance of ergot alkaloids in other Convolvulacnae (bindweed or morning glory) species, notably in the Argyreia genus (in at least eleven species), the large Hawaiian wood-rose and in Stictocardia tilafolia (which contains six amides of lysergic acid in its seed).

Of these plants, the one that has been most used as a psychedelic is the baby Hawaiian woodrose. This actually isn't a rose, but rather a woody climbing vine or liana with silvery foliage and violet flowers. When dried, the leaves turn tan on the outside and a light, warm saddle brown on the inside. The pod has the color of caramel. This beautiful arrangement has resulted in its use in floral displays and corsages. Native to India, it is now cultivated throughout the world's tropical regions.

Otto Degener in his monumental Flora Hawaiiensis in the 1950s described the baby Hawaiian woodrose as thriving in the Islands in drier regions at lower elevations, flowering during August and early September and then becoming "a prolific seeder, the ground under a large vine often being crowded with erect, bud-covered seedlings." According to William Emboden, this has been used as an inebriant by poorer Hawaiians. It has been only occasionally taken by those in the American drug subculture, though advertised in High Times. At art fairs in California, a mixture of five of these baby seeds ground up together with ginseng, damiana, gotu kola and bee pollen and pressed into a date has been sold under the name "Utopian Bliss Balls."

Lysergic acid amides are quite concentrated in the seeds of this ornamental, much more so than in psychedelic morning glories. Four to six seeds (the contents of one or two pods) are the equivalent of 100 to 150 Ipomoea morning glory seeds and will produce a full-blown experience. The result is generally more tranquil than what is induced by LSD. While LSD is perceived by most users as having stimulant effects, to which a few people are particularly sensitive, the botanical sources have more of a slowing or depressant effect. Some users complain that they have had a hangover, which

"Utopian Bliss Balls" 99

has been characterized by Emboden as possibly involving "nausea, constipation, vertigo, blurred vision and physical inertia." More often, however, these seeds have invigorated their users, leaving them feeling as though they had been on vacation afterwards.

Lysergic acid amides including chanoclavine, ergine, isoergine and ergonovine are present in the psychoactive Argyreia species—speciosa. acuta, bernesis, capitata, osyremis, wallichii, splendens, bainanensis, obtusi-folia and pseudorubicunda, mainly concentrated in the seeds. The larger Hawaiian woodrose (Merremia tuberosa) also produces such amides, but like the others is not nearly as potent as the baby Hawaiian woodrose. A recent thesis at Harvard illustrates the interest so far: it lists more than 250 references to Argyreta nervosa.

FORMS AND PREPARATIONS

The plant sources of lysergic acid amides contain not just one psycho-active molecule but several: variations in effect are possible due to growing seasons and other environmental influences on the chemistry of the plant. Again, I should mention that in the American varieties of psychedelic Ipomoea there is a uterotonic effect—hence these should not be used by

200 The LSD Family

pregnant women. It's a good idea to check as well to see if the seed company has added anything toxic to the seeds. This should be indicated on the package. In the case of the proper Ipomoea morning glories, each seed is the equivalent of about 1 meg. LSD; the usual dose lies between 100 and 200 seeds. Many early investigators failed to get any reactions at all. The reason in almost every instance was found to be that they had failed to grind the seeds first. The seeds should be ground to a flour before use; it's also a good idea to soak them in water—the psychoactive components are soluble— and then to strain the liquid through cheesecloth. The amides of value are in the liquid, which is ready for consumption.

As for the baby Hawaiian woodrose, the dose usually taken is four to eight seeds, although some users advise that no more than two or three should probably be taken the first time. With Hawaiian woodroses or morning glories, high dosages are not advisable—beyond a certain level, experience so far has shown a tendency for limbs to get bluish. (From reports I've seen, it's not clear whether the seeds had been dissolved and the amides strained out before ingestion.)

Albert Hofmann has remarked that when he produced ALD-52, it had to be kept in solution and cold because it was quite unstable. Most of the other analogues have been tried by only a few people in research studies and have never appeared on the black market. A methylated form that products LSD-type effects lasting only four to six hours has recently been distributed in Europe.

LSD appears in crystalline, liquid and many other forms. As a crystal, a substantial dose can barely be seen by the naked eye. Usually, it is dissolved in ethyl alcohol or another solvent and then dropped onto a carrier, usually blotter paper.

When Sandoz distributed LSD, it delivered it in sealed vials or in bottles of calibrated dosage from which precise amounts could be removed by syringe. Such quantitative, not to mention qualitative, care hasn't appeared yet in the black market. More than a few users have discovered considerable differences in the dosage of blotters on the same sheet of paper. Some acid is strong enough to provide four trips from a single tab or blotter, while in other instances the amounts are in the range of 25 to 50 meg. per blotter. Ergot was the starting material used until the early 1960s. At the beginning of that decade, the Farmitalia Company of Milan, Italy developed a method for growing this fungus in vats on Claviceps paspall. It offered this for sale at $10,000 per kilogram until well past the mid-1960s, when such work was suspended.

In The Psychedelic Reader, Gary Fisher described dosage levels for psychotherapeutic sessions as being quite high (generally over 250 meg.) He also touches on the use of other drugs in conjunction with LSD, particularly small amounts of amphetamine and psilocybin as initial pretreatment.

Checking Purity 1QI

LSD deteriorates slowly over time, oxidizing into iso-LSD. In about a decade, potency decreases by about half. Some writers have exaggerated the deterioration involved. It does, however, disintegrate rapidly in the presence of light, oxygen and moisture.

Determining the purity of an "acid" sample is not easy for most users. In the first appendix to this book, some of the techniques are detailed; Bruce Eisner discussed many of the relevant issues in the January 1977 High Times in an article entitled "LSD Purity: Cleanliness is Next to Godheadliness." Analyses of LSD quality can, however, be obtained by sending a sample to PharmChem, 3925 Bohannon Dr., Menlo Park, CA 94025, along with $15 and a random five digit and single letter code. Mark the outside of the envelope "Hand Cancel" and then call (415) 328-6200 two or three days after you suspect they have received it for results.

PharmChem's analyses are based on thin-layer and gas chromatography. It had been criticized for not taking into much account some of the possible by-products, such as "lumi-LSD," that may be present, but it currently checks for 350 psychoactive compounds and a large number of impurities. Until 1976, this and other testing stations were allowed to make quantitative assays, but this has now been curtailed by federal regulations except for those having the proper licenses- "It doesn't make sense for LSD users not to be able to know what they are using," Jeremy Bigwood comments about the current situation, "even if the state believes it to be illegal at the time."