Word: lsd
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...LSD cultists say that sessions should be carefully prepared, under the guidance of an experienced "leader." Leary calls this "perhaps the most exciting and inspiring role in society. A leader is a liberator, one who provides illumination, one who frees men from their lifelong internal bondage...
Such rhapsodizing is pure, pretentious guff to most of the psychiatrists and psychologists who have worked with LSD, psilocybin and mescaline; they consider it the kind of happy talk that exerts a strong appeal on just the sort of unstable people most likely to be injured by the drugs. Under the influence of LSD, nonswimmers think they can swim, and others think they can fly. One young man tried to stop a car on Los Angeles' Wilshire Boulevard and was hit and killed. A magazine salesman became convinced that he was the Messiah. A college dropout committed suicide...
Chicago Psychiatrist Dr. Marvin Ziporyn, who has administered LSD to some 50 patients since 1960-besides taking it himself, along with his attorney wife-sees LSD's laying bare of the personality in purely diagnostic terms. "LSD is, if you like, a psychiatric X ray," he says. "With LSD you have no greater vision of the universe than you did before. It no more expands your consciousness than an X ray expands your lungs when you see them on the screen. All you do is get a better look...
Some researchers, while sneering along with Dr. Ziporyn at the view of LSD as instant mysticism, feel that the psychedelic drugs may eventually do more than merely give the psychiatrist a better look. There is evidence that it may be effective in rehabilitating alcoholics and narcotics addicts. Several doctors, among them Eric Kast of the Chicago Medical School, have reported LSD useful in relieving both the pain and anxiety of dying patients. Kast theorizes that the dissolution of anticipation, the concentration on the present moment, which may be beneficial to the dying, is also what appeals to some...
...responsible authority favors use of LSD without close scientific supervision. On the other hand, no responsible authority wants to stop research into the potentially vast possibilities of LSD and other "mind drugs." New substances are already forecast, notably a "smart pill," derived from RNA, to speed up the learning process; this has given rise to the slightly uneasy crack that in a few years "people won't ask you what books you're reading, but what drugs you're taking." Some of the drugs may be bubbling even now in the retorts of Dr. Hofmann...