Word: hallucinogen
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Another clue to schizophrenia, says Dr. Seymour Kety, chief of the psychiatric research laboratories at Massachusetts General Hospital, lies in the discovery of an enzyme in the brains of both animals and man that can convert normal brain chemicals like tryptamine to dimethyltryptamine, a well-known hallucinogen. Kety and other scientists speculate that in schizophrenics such a process may be out of control...
...what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called "cheap grace," personal fulfillment, or the illusion of it, with no trial, no pain. Garry Wills rightly castigates the Jesus freaks as resorting to Jesus as the safest kind of high: "an experience, not a demand; an escape, not a task. He was an hallucinogen approved for private use by the Food and Drug Administration." Like some of their counter-culture predecessors, these new Jesus people repeatedly tell themselves how happy they are now. As Wills notes, Jesus, who is said to have wept over cities and been "sorrowful unto death," was obviously no Jesus freak...
Grass, hash, and limited quantities of acid rarely produce bad aftereffects, Pope has found; the drugs that worry him the most are speed and depressants. A number of young people described to him "a sequence beginning with marijuana, then a rise to a plateau of hallucinogen use, followed by... a retreat to opiates, barbiturates, and alcohol." Pope thinks that because of the older generation's heavy use of downs, "depressant use may inspire less guilt or anxiety in youths than does marijuana or the hallucinogens...
Strung Out. Most physicians agree that the only physical effect of marijuana smoking is temporary impairment of visual and muscular coordination. As for mental effects, a few psychiatrists regard marijuana as a mild hallucinogen or mild psychedelic, but they are virtually unanimous in insisting that they have never seen a severe illness (psychosis) brought on by marijuana-in sharp contrast with the frequency of such breakdowns among people on LSD. Dr. Duke Fisher, of the U.C.L.A. Neuropsychiatric Institute, says: "When normal people take marijuana, there's no adverse reaction. When pre-psychotic people take it, there...
There is no doubt that LSD can have severe and harmful effects on the minds of those who take it. Last week not LSD but the fear of the potent hallucinogen caused such severe disturbance in the mind of a respected state official that he was involved in a weird deception...