Word: lsd
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Aldous Huxley, in his more badly philosophical article, conjectures that under LSD the "deeper self decides which kind of experience will be most advantageous...
What Leary calls the "nongame intuitive insight outlook" is more frankly described by Huston Smith (head of the MIT philosophy department) as religious experience. No less than five of the book's contributors call on William James' Varieties of Religious Experience for a precedent to LSD visions. One writer reports that most LSD subjects receive a "common vision of immortality." They, presumably, have seen through the mortality game. Although both Leary and Huxley insist that LSD is only a means of educating oneself for the normal conscious state, neither really explains why it wouldn't be nicer to spend...
Investigators have noted a close analogy between LSD symptoms and symptoms of psychosis. One psychiatrist suggests the possibility of producing and studying "model psychoses" with LSD. Hopeful research with neurotics indicates that cures result both from the disorienting experience of the drug and increased susceptibility to suggestion from the therapist. On the negative side, certain subjects, especially in unsympathetic surroundings, experience terror and suicidal urges under LSD. Psychotic symptoms have also increased in some subjects...
...each other. Sanford M. Unger's is the most informative; the others can be ignored. The most frightening kind of experimental fooling-around mentioned in the book is Eric Kast's work in Chicago. Kast decided to send 128 doomed cancer patients into hopped-up oblivion by giving them LSD without warning or previous instruction. He then calmly graphed the depression and "fear and panic" reactions, hallucinations and morbid fears of death...
...effects of LSD do suggest some chemical causations in mental diseases. No one has much idea what physiological mechanism causes the LSD experience. This seems to be the most important area of research, but it receives less emphasis, at least in this book, than does shot-in-the-dark administration of the drug...