ACID

I took a trip to find what life good news [Music] it's so funny it's really funny you can't put a trip down on film I mean colors do look pretty but there's so much more the lysergic acid diethylamide l s d it is colorless tasteless odorless one of a whole family of aloose legends both natural and synthetic that includes STP peyote mescaline psilocybin LSD is the most powerful of all known as acid a single ounce is capable of producing 300,000 so-called trips characterized by hallucinations illusions distortions of perception and thinking that's LSD that's acid millions of words have been written and spoken about it laws have been passed against it calfs have sprung up around individuals using it have experienced hope suffering tragedy but for all the controversy what is known today about LSD is fragmented not altogether in the next few minutes we will be exploring these fragments a complex mixture of superstition medical research personal experiences a history that began yesterday in 1951 a small provincial village in southern France named st. Esprit was stricken by a strange malady overnight residents of all ages hundreds of them awakened to sharp pains high fevers mass insomnia and incredible hallucinations one man spent the hours of day and night endlessly counting the pains in his window another compulsively wrote the same words over and over small girls saw Tigers in a room and blood dripping from the ceiling all complained of severe burning sensations more than 300 cases had been counted for the plague was identified as Saint Anthony's fire a poisoning produced by her got a fungus that grew on rye which later was milled and baked into bread a direct relationship between Saint Anthony's fire and lsd-25 has never been clearly established to this day but those initial reports from situs pre excited the attention of the young scientists who 15 years before had first synthesized LSD from a got on accidentally ingesting a tiny amount of the drug the discoverer dr. Albert Hofmann had experienced a markedly similar to those now occurring in the tiny village I noted with dismay that my environment was undergoing progressive change I had the greatest difficulty in expressing myself by visual fields flavored I was overcome by a fear that I was going crazy let first LSD induced psychosis set off a flurry of laboratory testing we're studying the effects of hallucinogenic drugs both LSD and mescaline on behavior of rats now we're giving you the LSD we're gonna see its effects on a behavior that our ultimate goal is our understanding of why they do certain things to human behavior there seems to be an interaction between the effects of the drug and stress which fits in while we know about the effects of hallucinogenic drugs in respect of good and bad trips can you give a large dose of either mescaline or LSD one of the things that you notice it produces catatonic behavior like this animal had a large dose of LSD and you can see how relaxed they just swing them around the difference between a rat without any hallucinogenic one of the main things you put them in a very bizarre posture and it just stays there which is not true for a normal animal Gary fights and struggles this animal just stays there they call us catatonia catatonia is often observed in Skeets afrien exacerbations as small amounts of LSD provokes similar reactions in normals it began to be speculated that in certain individuals their bodies were generating either this chemical or one much like it and that the presence of it was creating schizophrenia after several years of research we have found out that there were definitely more differences than similarities between the LSD reaction and schizophrenia dr. stanislav grof born and raised in czechoslovakia today heads up research at maryland psychiatric research center Selenia our present opinion about LSD is that LSD is something like an amplifier or catalyst which just manifests the unconscious processes in the brain we began our LSD research in the early 1960s and it began as a very unusual program a program to research the influence of these unusual psychedelic drugs on normal people how did these drugs influence the psyche the unconscious what did it tell us about the inner space of normal people dr. Jean Houston with her husband dr. Robert masters directs New York City's foundation for mind research they were among the first to use LSD as a means of probing psychic depths and in this simulated case she shows how the drug worked as a tool for mental research and of course research acquired a great deal of preparation and control all of our subjects were first medically screened and they were psychiatric ice cream because we were dealing with what is termed normals we discovered that there were seem to be four major death levels of the psyche which emerged over the course of the eight or ten or 14 hours of the LSD [Music] felis t is very unusual and that under carefully controlled scientific research circles it can tell us an enormous or not about the mind and about using the mind more creatively without drugs LSD can also under these black market or illegal circumstances make people extremely impressionable so that if they are in a circumstances which is negative or fearful they may sustain that fear or that negativism for months or even years to come this was a bad trip how many times have you tripped all together how many of those times were bad trips New York City police now bring young people on bad trips to Bellevue Hospital where dr. William frosh is associate medical director of the psychiatric division here's somebody who's had a previous good trip he went into this trip thinking that this would also be a good one it was music he wanted to listen to the setting with Central Park but somehow something went wrong he is still somewhat under the influence of the drug his responses seemed to be somewhat slow I guess the answer just priorities I had the unfortunate thing is that we are not able often to predict in advance who will have a bad trip win this is what we call a bad trip because it has much more fear we had before there's an interaction between the stress of the electric shock and the drug well people have these bear trips they're disturbed behavior is very much closer to what's seen schizophrenia it's only the good trips which are very dissimilar from schizophrenia that is primarily visual perceptual distortions rather than paranoia and delusions which you do get with bad trips this young man has just taken street acid it will take effect in approximately one hour even though this will not be a bad trip experienced users question the goodness of any drug that turns one who takes part in life into a mere sightseer and getting all kind of really nice things with the leaves it's kind of melting together you know melting together and then coming apart and vibrating but it's all moving that's what's incredible how many trips have you had I don't know somewhere between 20 and 30 I guess any bombers yeah I had a bummer in New York once well yeah New York's a bummer but it was even more of a bummer because it was out on the streets of New York you know I was lost for a while and that was the bad part he lost in New York all by myself the circumstance is what made it bad being in the city being alone it was horrifying it was terrifying oh wow I just followed him right home before they are there's the whole bunch of them mommy and daddy and all the kids and the cousins and the relatives everybody dinner just little things like just yeah a group of people hovered over you know an anthill just watching the ants carry around it what have been going back into your childhood - I think when you're stoned you can get hung up and like stare at a piece of dirt for a day when I was jumping acid one time I was doing that I was staring at a piece of dirt and a little baby came up to me and was staring at this piece of dirt in the same way and I realized that was really crazy I mean it was alright for a baby but for a 20 year old it was crazy I stopped dropping us that I really got tired of just tripping around and grinning well let me tell you about the first time I took I said I had been a pretty fused and lost in my life at the time I really didn't know what I wanted to do or who I was really I had ideas and I had feelings but I really didn't have a clear picture of what I wanted out of life and I had a friend from out of town who was into all the drugs at the time and at that time acid had just come out he gave me a sugar cube and my reaction was I don't want to take it I'm afraid he reassured me that it would be all right and I took it you know I figured what the hell it was a simple sigh just figured what the hell I've gotta find a new way of living I gotta find a new way of life I gotta find a new [Music] young people today we are identified with music festivals young people in every age have had their own unique thing to identify where but there's something about the current thing a generates fear in parents and occupies the weekends of young doctors like Sid schnell I guess our experience has shown that there is a fairly large number of bad drug trips at these festivals and so we have usually a separate tent set up which we call the trip tent when the person comes in with this type of problem the only way you can make contact is physically by hugging them holding their hand and trying to make them feel the presence of your body and by holding a person you give them a certain reality the feeling of someone near them someone who's helping them we don't like to give any sort of drug to the people who are having a bad trip this seems to lead to an increased frequency of flashbacks and it reinforces the concept of taking drugs to solve whatever problem there is LSD is not manufactured by any company United States nor is mescaline or the other hallucinogenics so the stuff that is available is a very poor quality this is why we asked the kids who come into the tent what they took how much of it when they took it in if they have a sample this is Street acid picked up at the music festival we've just seen most of these samples are probably not pure dr. Wolfgang Vogel is a biochemist in his laboratory he isolates and identifies chemicals and Street acid chemicals we expect chemicals that sometimes surprise us these spots are caused by minor tranquilizer these down here are probably spots caused by strychnine there is some feeling amongst that by taking LSD with strychnine in it that they get a faster high and a better high and sometimes contains more strychnine than LSD I don't know if they were tripping or not but they were showing a great mess from the strychnine LSD was first considered a dangerous drug and made illegal in 1965 it's so easy to get acid you can get it anywhere where there's a little chemistry lab there's somebody making acid the penalty for sale and possession is a felony which makes the person liable to imprisonment or more than a year usually get it from a friend or people deal it if you're paying more than like two dollars you get a handing of a dose of LSD from one individual to another is a delivery or a gift and even that that simple act constitutes sale under the law with these black market situations catch-as-catch-can this bathtub gin LSD it's one of the most dangerous things that has happened in 20th century particularly for young people because young people their egos are not together that they're they're not they're not too as a self and what can happen as LSP can act as a deep lowing agent rather like humpty-dumpty and when they come out of the session they're not apt to be put together in the same way and they may have actually lost part of their basic psychological cohesiveness the whole lifestyle is one of a fantasy world simple very very childlike and there's just this happy fantasy you know smiling almost moronic kind of existence like when I was living in haight-ashbury and everybody was taking acid well everybody thought they loved each other and they talked about it but nobody was really close to anybody else I feel like I'm I have to do something you know and you don't really want to have to do anything you know just wanted trip well what I found was that you really do lose your ego by the time I finish taking acid I don't think I had any ego left I know I was really ready to kill myself because there was nothing left there was just no sense with myself left at all and the kids who are taking acid who talked about love and involvement oh I love you and I'm just loving life and and I love you man and I dig you and it's so easy to sit and say I love but it's another thing to get up and do something that involves your life your energy your feelings one of the things that happens with acid is one detail becomes very important there was a stone wall that had moss on it so when I painted it I just covered it with green and I did the same thing with as many colors out there that I could see and the end result is that the painting is an extremely colorful painting and that it basically works and when I look at it it really makes me feel like I'm on acid many people claim LSD enhances creativity I see an artist's performs better under the influence of the drug this is not necessarily so I have never really found a control study concerning the effect of LSD on creativity but I have given it to many artists they usually didn't have too much success in the session because in spite of the fact that they had variant experiences LSD at the same time seemed to impair their motor coordination and they were not able to express what they were seeing this way so for example in the experiment here was a friend of mine from Prague poor feeling er well after I took the drug I believe it was orally in the beginning was perfectly natural for me to draw and then after 20 or 30 minutes the drug started taking of effect on me and everybody was trying to encourage me to draw look at me what do you think I look like draw a picture of my face how do you see me now I tried to draw so I picked it up Flowmaster pencil and and suddenly it felt so thick as if I were holding up a log in my hand and with that you just can't draw anything so I threw it away and I gave up so our usual experience was that the artists were not able to perform very well while they were under the influence of LSD on the other hand quite a few of the artists were able to remember what they have experienced in the session and use it as a source of inspiration for the canvases they painted after they had the experience frequently persons taking LSD under controlled conditions reported a new ecstatic sense of unity with all of life religious symbols seem to come from nowhere it was found that LSD relieves some terminal cancer patients of pain depression and anxiety with this discovery it was decided to try LSD along with extensive psychotherapy in the treatment of alcoholics for the past 7 years we've been treating persons who suffer from alcohol abuse here at the Topeka VA hospital with the drug lsd-25 dr. David Dean as assistant director of a federally approved LSD therapy program patients are physically and mentally screen before admission LSD is administered twice over a twenty six day period this is the second and largest dose for these patients what you'll see here is real the setting is extremely important the more home-like or informal the setting the greater opportunity the individual has of really discovering himself of coming to know who he really is I don't know what you know how to explain this but I actually saw it it actually scared me at first was the body of me slowly dissolving the skin that all the meat would go completely from under my skin I couldn't see any blood finally only the skin was hanging on the bone and I was lying as a skeleton but completely conscious of my heart beating and being and still like I had a mind just relax that was the earlier part of the experience and then later was this triumphant March that I had just feeling of being on this white charger was a sword up in the air you know and the crowds were roaring I guess the music in the background I wasn't even conscious of the music when I could actually hear the crowd and the noise of the triumphal march like the Romans just to come back from battle I don't know it gave me a big big feeling inside you know the first thing that I said it was the first time that I ever really felt free to actually let myself go and just do the things that I want to do and I did experience a time there where it seemed as if if all these people that I had been or tried to be we're just leaving my body miss period was sitting beside me I don't know if I was taking or what but she just put her hand on my arm and it seemed like all the tension and everything in my body just went flow through my body and went to the point where she touches my hair and his went into her hair of the 1,200 individuals who have completed the treatment program now somewhat over 50 percent have remained abstinent for at least two years or beyond I certainly don't feel like now that I would drink it seems trivial just didn't seem necessary we know what alcohol does to the body the liver the brain we know that LSD helps to curb certain cases of alcohol abuse but what else do we know about this admittedly powerful drug well a great deal has been done with Studies on Alice fear and the result is probably we do not know what LSD does how it produces its effects on the mind we really do not know does Alastair really produce chromosomal damage chromosomes contain genes which pass on hereditary traits from parent to offspring that's Alice T really produce malformations does Alice T have some effects on the body which we are not even aware of yet we don't know and I think this really is at the moment the risk and the biggest danger in using LSD we are not able often to predict in advance whether or not an individual at a particular moment in life is going to have a bad trip or a good trip there is no fear there's no paranoia so bad as a psychedelic paranoia because under usual ordinary paranoia or fear you can get out and you can run like the dickens you have someplace to go but in the psychedelic paranoia you are locked up in the under in your own skin you are fighting to the death of your own existence because this dream world that you're living in is real to you at the time and I can't see these these kids that take it out in the street turn wherever they take it I'd be afraid to be scared to death - in order to take it that way the honesty's like atomic energy it has enormous potential 'ti for good or evil and you don't really want to have to do anything you just want to trip it really drains your energy I was so loving one acid but when I stopped taking acid or when I was down I wasn't bothering anymore the whole lifestyle is one of a fantasy world it's very very childlike almost like a moronic smiling kind of existence so we have something that it's a Pandora's box it has tremendous potential for good if used wisely like atomic energy or it can provide for a whole Holocaust of mental Hiroshima I took a trip to find myself [Music] and I so long [Music] ah [Music] [Music] [Music]