"LSD is one of the strangest and most controversial substances known to science." "A dose smaller than a grain of salt precipitates a hazardous mental journey into a universe of hallucination, intense emotion and, some believe, mystical revelation." "These remarkable effects were discovered by the Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman in 1943." "During the 50's, LSD was used widely for research in psychiatric hospitals." "Then in the early 1960's, LSD leaked out of the laboratory." "With bizarre and unforeseen consequences, the drug was consumed by a generation of young people seeking spiritual transcendence, and an escape from the conventional world." "Introducing the American way of life on the threshold of the golden 60's:" "color, style, comfort, utility and convenience." "Recreation, fun... these are the ultimate desires of today, tomorrow and the years ahead of us..." "Post-war economic growth and material prosperity in the West did not satisfy the desires of everybody." "Many young people lacking secure belief but living secure lives felt a spiritual dimension was lacking." "For them this bus came to symbolize psychedelic liberation." "LSD was a ticket to ride." "I believe with the advent of acid we discovered a new way to think." "And it had to do with piecing together new thoughts in your mind that produced people like Bob Dylan and John Lennon and William S. Burroughs." "They were using new images together in a way that jarred the mind, and produced images that were latent in our consciousness, but were not being brought about by reading Vanity Fair or Woman's Home Companion." "Author and "grand prankster" Ken Kesey was a leading voice in the 60's chorus extolling the virtues of LSD." "With money from his first novel "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"" "Kesey and his friends bought a second hand school bus, painted it bright colors, and loaded with LSD set off across America." "On their journey across the continent Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters sensed a nation on the edge of a revolution." "To Kesey the strange discordant effects of LSD seemed perfectly in tune with the times." "I think that something happened in the early 60's that LSD was related to, music was related to." "There was new movement in cinema and in stage." "And maybe... that once a century something goes off like a century flower." "LSD was just perhaps the pollen that fell off of it, but it didn't make it happen it was part of it." "If the value of the LSD is that it expresses the... and brings to fruition what was going on in the 60's then I think that's very strong argument against LSD." "Because what was going on in a 60's is precisely something that I think we now have to recover from." "At a time when many of his fellow students were embracing the psychedelic ideology" "Roger Scruton, today professor of philosophy at Burbank College, viewed it all with deep suspicion." "Very difficult to summarize the 60's world view, but I think one could say very briefly in a nutshell that it was the attempt to have rights without duties, claims without responsibilities and pleasure without cost." "And the real cost of having any peaceful enjoyment of the world is that one maintains institutions... makes a sacrifice in order to preserve one's inheritance." "This was something that I think the people of the 60's, the young people of the 60's were very reluctant to do." "And LSD ministered to that reluctance." "It told them that even the most sublime experiences those of religion which people had thought in the past came through considerable sacrifice and worship and surrender." "That that experience too could be had on the cheap." "Millbrook, New York state." "Here in 1963 was established a group who saw LSD as a sacrament of a new religion to change the world." "They were lead by Timothy Leary, a former Harvard psychology professor, fired for giving LSD to his students." "Our aim, like the aims of any religious group, just beginning, is to transform American society." "I'm sure many of your viewers know, that America today is an insane asylum." "The American people are completely hung up on material acquisition, on power, on war making, its an insane asylum over here." "And it's our goal to lift the spiritual level of the American people." "We're gonna try to bring about a religious renaissance and a spiritual revolution." "Leary's East coast Millbrook community had a reverential attitude to LSD that contrasted sharply with the Merry Pranksters' anarchic West coast style." "One day the two groups met." "We came through riotous and noisy, they are a more sedate group, but there was no friction, between us in fact." "I think they even gave us piece of, Baba Ramdas', Dick Albert's, famous suit did you ever heard of that story?" "He was bringing across a pint of LSD in a suitcase, and it got broken in the airport, and his suit soaked it up, so they took the suit, and put it in a deep freeze, and for some years" "whenever they wanted to get high they would cut off a little piece of the suit to eat." "The only legitimate source of LSD was a Swiss pharmaceutical company, Sandoz" "In 1963, Leary wrote to the firm, placing an order for a hundred grams of the drug." "Enough doses for 2 million people." "The letter was addressed to Albert Hoffman who'd stumbled upon the strange effect of LSD in 1943." "Already alarmed by non-medical abuse of his discovery," "Hoffman advised Sandoz against supplying Leary." "I became aware that LSD put became a problem from France and to United States." "And they wrote me that it had been used on the street, and they had make a lot of propaganda for use outside of the medical profession." "And I immediately realized that it could be dangerous because the substance which has such deep effect must be used carefully." "You're introduced to LSD..." "Unless you've taken some other drug, like for instance like marijuana or something, well you know it's an altogether new thing!" "And you actually can have a religious experience, and it can be even more important than reading the bible six times, or becoming a pope or something like that, you know." "At Millbrook children as young as nine were given LSD." "The drug was freely available and everyone joined in its ritualized consumption." "LSD was not illegal." "Leary denied there were dangers and began a propaganda offensive." "The kids who take LSD aren't gonna fight your wars... middle class, middle age, whiskey drinking generals." "They're not going to join your corporations... middle class, middle age, whiskey drinking corporation presidents." "Enormous crowds come out to hear me lecture." "Whenever I go to a college it's always sold out." "It's not because I'm that clever it's because they gave me the good lines in the show:" "turn on, tune in, drop out." "Such an uncompromisingly antisocial attitude was not always characteristic of those interested in the spiritual potential of LSD." "In the early 60's, a group of psychologists and theologians in Boston conducted a remarkable and serious minded investigation into the religious implications of psychedelic drugs." "Hidden in the library of the Harvard Divinity School and kept for two decades under lock and key is a doctoral thesis describing a research project unthinkable today: an experiment to discover the effect of psychedelic drugs on the religious experience of student priests." "The project was the brain child of the late Walter Pahnke, a Harvard theological scholar also qualified as a medical doctor." "The experiment took place in the Marsh Chapel of Boston University on Good Friday, 1962." "Today two of the participants return there for the first time." "I must have been sitting down here." "I was at this end of the room, and I would look over this way." "Randal Laakko was one of twenty students studying for holy orders who volunteered." "Well we gathered that morning, oh, probably an hour before actual service began upstairs." "And we were in groups of four..." "there were five groups of four, twenty people who were subjects." "And we were all handed an envelope that we were asked to open and to consume the capsule that was inside." "Of course none of us knew who had the drug and who had the placebo." "And I don't know how many minutes transpired before we all began," "I believe, feeling a reaction the placebo in fact was a form of stimulant that would create a sensation." "I think at that point I was very much aware that something very unusual was beginning to happen to me." "A sound recording was made of the service which by good fortune still exists today." "He came to me with his eyes and asked for water." "But his eyes were ageless and deep as well-shafts." "They unroofed my brain with their profound gazing." "Robert Kirven also received the psychedelic drug." "For him the experience was initially unpleasant." "I tried hard to concentrate and remember where I was." "Because it dawned on me that at the moment I couldn't picture my family, or what I did outside this place." "And then as I concentrated it occurred to me that this was supposed to be an experiment." "I remembered that it was to be an experiment in mind expansion." "Then I kind of went back and thought OK lets see what expands." "And he said, "Go about the world." "Tell every one that you meet..."" "Man on the cross... there's a man..." "Tell everybody..." "There was a poem which I can't recall in detail but it had to do with hearing a cry and finding a man on a cross and not being able to help him down." "But receiving instructions to go in to all the world and tell everyone you meet," ""There's a man on the cross."" "And I felt that I had to get out of there and go find somebody and tell him," ""There is a man on the cross." But there were people in the pew, and I felt I couldn't get out and that's when" "I felt a failure as though I wasn't doing what I had to do." "To determine if the volunteers' experiences were spiritually valid, Walter Pahnke submitted their written accounts to a panel of theologians." "The experts scored the report for authenticity and after careful statistical analysis Pahnke concluded that the drug had induced mystical states indistinguishable from traditional religious visions." "Many of the participants themselves agreed, but could they be certain their experiences were genuine?" "I don't know if I can be sure, other than to know that it's something that happened to me." "And, I realize that's a very subjective appraisal of that, but" "I don't know what else I can go with." "I know that was deeply meaningful and moving to my life." "Impressive as psychedelic drugs may seem to the individual there are nonetheless many reasons for questioning the experience." "Whatever the actual intensity of the experience, to call it religious is not... has nothing to do with its intensity..." "it's to interpret it as having a certain meaning." "And when you administer to yourself a drug which you know is affecting you by giving... producing a chemical transformation in the brain." "And you are deliberately engineering that." "It's very difficult sincerely to interpret this is a visitation of the divine spirit or as a revelation of a transcendental world." "It simply is an act of self deception to put that kind of religious interpretation on that type of thought." "But as the 60's progressed mind expansion became a craze." "In Switzerland the directors of Sandoz began to hear of the wide spread and uncontrolled abuse of their product." "Aurelia Chialetty was responsible for the production and distribution of LSD." "Like kind of an explosion." "LSD suddenly was on the street and was manufactured by a lot of people." "Because immediately when it had a high market value." "I remember my first experience in New York in Greenwich Village where I was handed over, uh, so called cube, a sugar cube with a few drops of an LSD solution on it." "It was handled for five, six dollar a piece, late perhaps for ten dollars." "Well that was a value that one gram of LSD suddenly had a value of few hundred thousand of of dollars." "And this element which changed dramatically the whole situation was for the firm the moment to say," ""Now we have to stop it."" "Sandoz withdrew their LSD from sale but it was already too late." "Black market supplies of the drug were everywhere including Britain." "If you haven't heard of LSD – you will." "It's a safe bet that this drug will make headlines in this country as it has for some years in America." "– How do you mean, perception?" "– Well you've had a drug." "– Has it done anything to you yet?" "– Oh, yes, yes, it's affecting me." "– In what way?" "– Colors have become quite a lot brighter." "I'm getting a slight paisley effect in the sky." "– What do you mean by that?" "– Hm, well... all of it's falling... pink..." "The young of the educated middle classes particularly were attracted by the instant liberation LSD seemed to offer." "Among them, Rosy Boycott, co-founder of the feminist magazine "Spare Rib"." "Incredible looking back to think how people... just took it like candy." "And in fact we were told it was candy, it had names that were like candy." "You know – sunshine and yellow, orange and everything that sounded like children's sweets." "And you tended to do it a bit I mean it became... lots of people who would say do it every Saturday night." "It became part of their life." "They might go to a job in the city during the rest of the week and adopt a, what may call very normal, what we would call then a straight way of life." "And at weekend they would metaphorically let their hair down." "– Now, is so far are these visual things the only effects you find?" "– No." "– What other effects?" "It's all to do with color... it's all to do with round... with shape..." "Everything is colored, everything, you know is," "Ah it must be to do with orange..." "Not only with orange..." "Oh..." "I haven't seen color." "I live in a monochromatic world..." "I can't use color..." "I can do everything..." "The romantic view of psychedelic drugs as the road to personal and social liberation was not shared by all." "Politically inclined members of the counter-culture soon discovered contradictions." "Certainly in my case the whole idea of having anything to do with the drug culture ran up against a very big brick wall was when I started to get involved in feminism... and, as I say, it didn't work at all." "The..." "LSD was for the thinkers and it wasn't for the doers." "And there was a real unreality in the drug culture, which was largely made up by the fact that it was actually jolly easy to get by with very little money." "That you could be sort of hovering on the edge of a quite a twilight world in that you weren't up against any sort of a breach of commerce earning money." "Definitely no, never paying taxes or bothering by any things like that which were the real world." "That was the real straight world which you wanted to overthrow." "And yet of course you were living on it." "And that was the ultimate irony that it was that world." "And that huge consumer boom that we were all experiencing in America and in England." "That was supporting that dream." "So you lived in a place where you thought" ""I'm really changing the world" but in fact you were escaping the world." "LSD is a....far worse even than err.. heroine, I think because of its action on certain people again." "And now we've had experience where people who have taken LSD have gone in through plate-glass windows." "We have people who were inside, with LSD coming out through plate-glass windows." "So I don't know what direction these people are moving in." "By 1967, a strong public reaction against LSD had set in." "The media and the government were busy pointing out the dangers." "Any stress in this rising phase will trip this man into a bad trip." "He will have the same effect as the man who was given a material and doesn't know he's getting it." "He will be terrified." "He's not seeing pretty visions;" "he's seeing monsters." "He's losing his mind, and he feels it going." "He is intensely, extremely, terribly uncomfortable." "If he is alone, if it's possible for him, there's only one escape from this discomfort." "That's suicide... this man will kill himself." "Exaggeration was commonplace as public debate about the dangers and value of LSD intensified." "Scores of books and hundreds of scientific articles appeared." "And for a while psychedelic drugs became a cause célèbre." "At the center of the storm was the distinguished psychiatrist Sidney Cohen, one of the US government's chief advisors on psychedelic drugs." "Well, LSD can do many adverse things... thee... they are done almost never under control in supervised conditions." "They happen when people take it casually and randomly." "And when this happens this is news." "And news is what has given LSD its current reputation." "Particular concern was caused by a widely publicized though subsequently descredited report that LSD might damage chromosomes." "Lurid parallels were drawn with Thalidomide." "Other dangers however were real enough." "Twenty years on we are better able to assess the true risks of LSD." "A coordinator of the government funded "Standing Commitee On Drug Abuse"" "is David Terner." "There's no no doubt that there are exaggerations about LSD." "But there are very real risks which are increased when you got illicit manufacture." "The risks are around people having bad trips, that they experience very unpleasant and very intense feelings." "That they have accidents, because they believe they can do things which they really can't do." "There have been cases of people trying to fly out of windows" "There have been instances of people thinking they could cross the road or cross a railway track because they didn't believe that what was coming towards them was a car or a train and it's in those circumstances that people risk damaging themselves" "and damaging other people." "There are also risks for some people because use of LSD can actually precipitate a mental breakdown wich otherwise would not have occurred." "And finally when you take LSD, it is a drug more than any other that I know which is dependent upon your own expectations of it and the setting that you're in when you take it." "By 1968, a million young americans were estimated to have tried LSD." "Many found its mental effects overwhelming." "The "bad trip", an unpredictable unpleasant reaction to LSD, is a horrifying vortex of panic and fear that can cause long term psychological damage." "One in four who tried LSD without supervision encountered its darker side." "Roland Baldoon, an actor, was one of them." "Attracted by descriptions of visual distortion and mystical revelation he took a large dose of LSD with a friend." "Initially, the experience was as advertised." "It was a beautiful day, one of those rare days in Britain, and we happen to be in Lyme Regis of all places." "Which, if anybody knows, is full of ammonites and ancient fossils." "And they became alive which they hadn't been for millions of years, and you could look at any perspective of anything." "You could look closeup or you could look wide-angled." "And sure enough you would see something different that you hadn't seen before." "A new green, a new blue, a new sun light, a new shape, it was all there and all possible." "But then things went wrong." "A normally manageable event assumed terrifying proportions under the influence of the drug." "We went back to our campsite and we were greeted by this irate woman whose farm it was who we'd somehow camped wrongly in her field and had turned all her customers away." "And she called me over and she started to shout at me and dress me down." "I tried to be apologetic perhaps I've been even silly with her but she hated me her eyes pierced through me, she thought I was a slob, she thought, possibly, that I was the real worst type of punk as they were like to call" "that could ever come down from London and camp in her feild." "She hated me and it really affected me badly." "And I went back to where our camp was and we had tried to cook some bacon on our completely used-up Calor gas." "And there to my horror were ten or twelve slices of dead pig." "I'd never seen it like this before, but there it was sliced up, dead, lethargic pig." "And I was totally horrified and shocked and numbed." "And we got in the car and we drove back to London" "And all the way back I was haunted by green monsters celtic monsters, cartoon kind of monsters not real monsters." "Who were in my head but out of control and laughing at me pointing their faces at me and going haaa-haaa-haaa-haaaa we've got you." "It put me off forever." "I had this negative horrible feeling that behind everything there was something horrible..." "I didn't want that experience ever again." "As the 60's wore on, more and more reports of people damaged by LSD reached Albert Hofmann in Switzerland." "The substance that he once hoped might unlock the secrets of the mind had become a monster." "I did not feel me guilty because it is not LSD which is... bad it's just its use its misuse and the wrong use which is bad and which caused all these problems." "And therefore people, many people told me - "Are you not feel errr... feeling guilty about whole story which you have... created here?" "And I said no, really not... and this must the..." "in the ray... right way use the proper the LSD not dangerous compound..." "It is very very dangerous if used uncautiously and without respecting its very very deep influence on the psyche, even on consciousness." "But LSD was being used incautiously by very many people." "Legislation became inevitable." "This year I will propose a drug control act to provide stricter penalties for those who traffic in LSD and other dangerous drugs with our people." "In 1968, president Johnson took stern measures." "The time has come to stop the sale of slavery to the young!" "Laws were passed in America and around the world banning LSD and declaring it to have no medical value." "There's 27,000 people a year killed here in alcohol related deaths." "You don't see any big thing about alcohol being evil." "There's... how many people smoking and dying of it." "How many of all of these and yet nobody's been killed." "Why is it that people think it's so evil, what is it about it that is..." "scares people so deeply." "Even the guy that invented it." "What is it?" "Because they are afraid that there is more to reality than they have confronted." "That there are doors that they are afraid to go in and they don't want us to go in there either because if we go in, we might learn something that they don't know." "And that makes us a little out of their control." "Did the establishment proscribe LSD because it revealed to the young a truth better concealed?" "Lord William Deeds former M.P., an editor of the Daily Telegraph, sat on the committee that advised the British government to ban LSD." "He denies metaphysical paranoia was involved." "We are talking about the 60's, when all this things were felt and thought and shared." "And exactly the same arguments were advanced on this habit of cannabis." "In the sence the illi.... it was part of an attack on youth culture." "That the middle-aged people drank and smoked and young people were forbidden to use LSD and other... well the different of course is the dangers to society that their subjects respectively pose." "And in our mind then and in my mind now LSD posed an element of risk which exceeded any other the indulgences which civilizations were taking on board." "It was no attack on young people, it was no a political measure." "It was founded on medical advice." "As well as the medical dangers, the committee in their report considered and then dismissed the possible spiritual benefits of LSD." "I find it very hard to accept, that LSD offers what we could seriously call a religious or a spiritual experience." "It can offer a transcendental experience." "It can take you outside the sphere which you normally can think in, or you live in." "But to relate that directly to religious belief, to religious revelation, if you like, should be taken with a pinch of salt." "Few deny the reality of the psychedelic vision but many doubt its worth." "Is there anything of value to be found in a hallucinatory irrational realm of LSD intoxication?" "The common way we think about the nature of the human mind is that it is either sane or insane." "LSD hints to us that there is a... an area of the mind which could be called "unsane" – beyond sanity, and yet not insane." "Think of a circle with a fine split in it at one end is insanity, you go around the circle to sanity, and on the other end of the circle close to insanity but not insanity is "unsanity"." "This is perhaps where all the superlative effects of humanity come from." "Not only of art, but of science." "And it may be that we are... we could approach it by a thoughtful... wise study of LSD." "Today the suggestion that there may be a good side to LSD could hardly be less fashionable." "The drug has an appalling public reputation." "Epitomized by this image of a naked girl deranged by LSD, which opened a recent TV dramatization of the operation "Julie" police raids." "The romantic appeal drugs held in the Aquarian age has gone." "It's been replaced by sordid associations with criminal exploitation and wasted lives." "Some blame LSD for glamorising drug taking paving the way for today's more deadly addictions." "Heroine..." "I don't know what all this fuss is about." "I can handle it." "OK, so I do heroine a bit now." "I can control it." "I could stop, if I wanted too." "This not how I become an addict." "I just do heroine." "Slight problem..." "Look..." "I've got this thing under control..." "Just got a touch of flu today." "Everyone thinks they can control heroine, until it starts to control them." "I could give up tomorrow, couldn't I?" "We got to make a distinction between heroine, which is drug which creates physical dependence, and LSD, which is drug which has no physical dependence." "And I don't believe you can make a link between the use of LSD in 1960's and 1970's with the use of heroine and other drugs like that in the 1980's." "In the 1960's and 70's, people were using drugs like LSD... believing that it was a means of gaining greater self-awareness, greater insight into their own being." "In the 1980's people are using drugs like LSD as a means of escaping reality, of avoiding the unpleasantness of life." "Of course, in a sense, it doesn't really matter what reasons people have for using it." "What does matter, is that LSD is an extraordinarily powerful drug, whose effects we can't really control, and we can't control when we take it." "It creates so many risks for both those who use it and for society generally that I believe we've got no choice, but to retain legal controls on its use." "Aldous Huksley, who's early experiments with mescaline influenced popular interest in LSD, never lost faith in the value of psychedelic drugs." "On the day he died from cancer in 1963," "Huxley asked his second wife Lora to inject him with LSD." "That was the same day that the president Kennedy was assassinated." "And we were right here in this room, it was then a soon end... and he was getting very weak and he said to me," ""Give me big big piece of paper" and he wrote, "intermuscular one hundred milligram of LSD intermuscular"" "and I filled the syringe with it and I gave it to him." "It was very quiet..." "And at certain point I said," ""If you hear me squeeze my hand", and he did... very weakly..." "Then I thought..." "I had impression that maybe it was neccessary to give a second shot and I asked him and he indicated." "So..." "I gave a second shot and that... well... then it was about four or five hours where there was absolutely no jolt, no agitation, nothing, except this very very quiet..." "like a music that becomes less and less audible, like... going.... fading away." "There was no jolt when he died it was just... that.... his breath stopped, and there was a beautiful expression in the face there was a very beautiful expression in the face." "When Huksley died in 1963," "LSD was already beginning its descent into notoriety." "And the advocates of Albert Hofmann's discovery were claiming for it the status of a religious sacrament." "I think that many of the intellectuals of the 60's were really failed priests." "They're people who are looking for a priestly role in society, and in another age they would perhaps have joined the church and subjected themselves to the discipline of the church." "But they of course didn't have the necessary transcendental belief, or a necessary ability to sacrifice themselves." "So that they took up LSD, as a religion, in order to preach something to the multitude, and they had to have something to offers to the multitude, which in a consumer society means offering something quick, easy, and satisfying." "And I think that in that way LSD was extremely dangerous in enhancing the ambitions of those people to preach when they should've actually been staying silently in their studies getting on with something respectable." "The most important what I gained from LSD experience was the insight that, which commonly is believed to be the reality, is not something fixed, but rather ambiguous." "I experienced another reality under LSD, and before I had always thought there is only one reality – a true reality, and... but then I..." "I realized there are other dimensions of reality..."