From Pot to Psychedelics 1968

the following program is from net the national educational television network [Music] the national educational television network presents Regional report a program of facts and comments by net reporters throughout the country today's subject from parts to psychedelics now here is the national editor of regional report Paul Niven good evening the pot and psychedelic cult whatever else it may be is new and different unlike the nihilist beatnix of a few years back today's LSD callists say that they are turned on not turned off and if they talk of dropping out they do so because they reject Square society and claim they can build a better one the Psychedelic people are not in the historic pattern of dope addiction their drugs are so-called head drugs ranging from such natural substances as marijuana and hashish to LSD and other artificial concoctions these head drugs are not physically addictive as are such body drugs as opium heroin and alcohol an LSD Enthusiast will invade against liquor as fervently as a 19th century Temperance crusader but some doctors and scientists claim that pot and LSD not only can lead to addictive drugs but can be dangerous in themselves in the next hour we'll hear many sides of the controversy from eight American cities first the city which has been identified with so many new movements and is now the preeminent home of the hippies San Francisco bless your dirty heart [Music] s obligations [Music] [Music] Hallelujah [Music] in California marijuana arrests among juveniles were up 140 last year 25 000 adults were arrested for taking illegal drugs despite stricter enforcement more rigid laws and more rigid attitudes on the part of the Court the use of drugs in California is increasing both on and off the campus in the past seven years marijuana arrests have increased by 248 percent dangerous drug arrests including LSD are up 84 why more people are using drugs LSD marijuana tobacco and alcohol tobacco causes cancer alcohol taken to excess damages the brain and kidneys they are legal marijuana and LSD are not I am Mel wax KQED in San Francisco here in San Francisco and in nearby Berkeley in fraternity and sorority houses marijuana is used both by conforming students and by student Rebels it is used by hippies in the hate Ashbury District it is smoked in cigarettes pipes Turkish hookahs it is sprinkled on salads used as seasoning and soup and mixed in chocolate chip cookies even in the imposing Victorian homes of Pacific Heights [Music] yeah well there's a physiological effect and it's a psychological effect it seems to speed up their blood count the pupil of the eye becomes dilated for the white of the eye becomes bloodshot the person then becomes intoxicated their moods or their feelings are exaggerated people that use marijuana have a tendency to be gregarious and they do it in the company of each other Matthew O'Connor is a former undercover narcotics agent who is now in charge of the San Francisco office of the California state Bureau of Narcotics important mood of the gay atmosphere of the party seems to exist if they have had any feeling at all toward non-conformity it will manifest itself under the influence of the drug so that if the group or if the individual feels a tendency to be promiscuous in sex any reservations that they had about it are dropped while under the influence of the drug this is particularly true in the case of marijuana this is a kilo brick of marijuana it's two and two tenths pounds and we were paying 225 dollars in 1965 per kilo this is a portion of Aquila now we're paying eighty dollars a kilo in 1967. I can't see anything wrong with it now I know it's not physically harmful and I never put the dog down the drug I couldn't call it a drug it's just the weed because people call it a weed there was a large Supply and it's the old situation of supply and demand these are marijuana cigarettes they're frequently referred to as joints reefers sticks are you stealing my red fire they smoke it in a pipe and they also drink it as a tea they wash the seeds and the stems and some of the marijuana material and wine and then consume the wine with the view that the alcohol adds gin no it's not in June wash the cannabino all the Cannabis resin from the leaves and simply drink the wine for the same effect mixing your media marijuana is not a narcotic it's basic effects are roughly comparable to the effects of average doses of alcohol the reasons why so many people young people are turning to these drugs are in part the same reasons why so many people of the older generation turn to drugs to escape to find relaxation with alcohol nicotine sedative stimulants tranquilizers to relieve boredom and monotony Ford has been director of the center for special problems of the San Francisco Department of Public Health a reaction to the hypocrisy that they find in the older generation and in the American value structure a feeling of alienation or disaffiliation from the broader society and curiosity about the effects of drugs often magical expectations that they will do something wonderful for them we need to look at the roots of these problems trying to understand why so many people in our society cannot exist without using drugs or feel that they can't the spread of marijuana has now convinced me that on first convictions they should serve some time in the county jail and then be placed on probation Francis McCarty is a superior court judge in San Francisco county from the ones I have seen they are not from broken homes or deprived families or poverty families they're from good families from stable families the last group but one of them was the son of a university professor they're seeking something that they cannot find what it is I don't know basically it is a medical problem as to the users I'm not talking about sellers rather than a penal one and I think these people are sick and I think these people should be treated compassionately and at the same time made to realize that these offenses that is marijuana and odd narcotics are felonies [Music] a good time my criticism is that the penalties after the first offense are horrendous and far too severe the penalties are greatest for a second and third use of matters of this kind than rape and murder and other felonies let me give you an example it's possible given two misdemeanor convictions of possession of a marijuana cigarette in the past when it was a misdemeanor for a person for the possession of one codeine pill without a prescription to serve 15 years in the state prison the adult Authority cannot parole him and the court cannot Grant probation now when you figure the average second-degree murderer serves five years and nine months it doesn't seem to be a proper thing as far as our laws are concerned I would think that we should do away with all penalties regarding marijuana Jerome H skolnick is a sociologist of law who teaches at the University of California and does research at the center for the study of Law and Society he is the author of Justice without trial I think that one of the most serious problems in our criminal law is the attempt to control things that people do on a voluntary basis as a general matter and this is especially true with respect to marijuana it's as much of a failure as as the attempt to control prohibition to uh to control the use of Beverage alcohol prohibition-wise uh as far as our medical uh policy is concerned I would say that the medical people in general uh well that they vary but let's take the best of them they have tried to be objective and their objectivity has curiously enough I think uh led to a kind of falsification of uh the nature of marijuana use uh they would they might describe the effects of marijuana use for example in such terms as uh adrenal activity or pulse rate or heart rate well look at it this way suppose you had somebody who had never played a game of tennis and he was asked what the effects of playing tennis were well one way you could describe them is to say that after you played tennis there's mocked adrenal activity that's heightened pulse rate this facial flushing there's sweating sometimes it's followed by dizziness and nausea and sometimes even people die that is to say you could paint a horrible clinical portrait or a tennis game which would not be false you see in the specific terms in which it's written but it would be terribly misleading and I think that much the same thing uh has been done with respect to uh the use of marijuana for example this is a liquid LSD lysergic acid diethylamide it has rather a blue cast to it this is placed in either sugar cubes or tablets or capsules these were seized here locally in the Bay Area is a piece of candy we assume that the LSD was put in liquid solution and drops were placed on a portion of the candy so that an individual would have pieces of candy in his pocket or sugar tablets and the LSD would only be on one side and not discernible to the cursory examination by anybody including a police officer there's a big difference between being inside and outside trips are sort of sufficient unto themselves when you're outside I mean you're sort of isolated on one hand and you're part of something else which is all together different you're part of all the whole thing that's around you foreign particular design picking up patterns in everything picking up patterns in nature just the Vegas sense of being part of something that it's a whole lot larger than one person or a whole body of people and I've taken and I've had nothing but beautiful things and I'm much happier now and much fairer and I love everybody oh it's been a beautiful experience the past year since I first tried LSD so it's opened my mind to accepting the different people and turn on to the different drugs and uh I haven't seen any harm in any of them I've given each one of them you know a little bit of my time and uh it's so it's so easy to just love everybody none of these mind-altering drugs has a uniform consistent effect on people whether you're talking about alcohol or LSD or marijuana therefore the drug itself would not make people more loving more friendly or for that matter more aggressive or anti-social what happens is the drug interacts with the personality or character structure the person taking the drug and the social setting or context in which it's taken and it's this combination of things that we Loosely call the drug effect so depending on the already existing attitudes and values of the person taking the drug it could have many different effects some people would become let's say more loving others would become less loving some would have a possibly beneficial experience others would have a possibly harmful experience I would assume that LSD like many other biotics or chemicals will have many very fine and efficacious uses for the benefit of mankind I would say that that's probably a certainty but it is as dangerous more so than Dynamite or a nuclear bomb and it shouldn't be used except under the closest supervision of the most competent authorities research is what is needed here [Music] foreign [Music] ly here as elsewhere there is disagreement both on the dangers and possible benefits of marijuana LSD and Other Drugs there is disagreement about how to cope with them whether they are legal medical or social problems or even whether they are problems all agree that the use of drugs is increasing in all segments of society but particularly among the young and among the students much more must be known about the effect of these drugs on the body and on the mind it has become virtually impossible in recent months to pick up a paper in New York and not find a story about kids using drugs there are two reasons for this nothing makes a better headline than a story about a pot raid on campus and secondly there is a simple undeniable fact that more young people are experimenting with drugs than ever before this is Terence nuts reporting for wndt I'm standing on Saint Mark's Place in Greenwich Village and so far as the drug scene is concerned this is where the action is obviously a devoted pothead can get his marijuana or his LSD if that's his hang up almost anywhere in the metropolitan area but nowhere is it easier than in this immediate neighborhood [Music] thank you [Music] this is where much of the traffic and soft drums and by that I mean marijuana hashish peptools or the hallucinogens originate it spreads out from here throughout the greater New York area and since its audience is predominantly Young frequently Finds Its way to college campuses as a result the use of soft drugs has become a major cause of alarm among college officials the police of two universities Cornell and Fairley Dickinson went so far as the plant spies among the students to rat on the switched on classmates in the minds of many this was going too far but few people question the fact that the use of soft drugs including the potent LSD has reached unprecedented proportions a number of doctors in New York are looking into the physiological effects of LSD among them is Kirk hirschhorn a geneticist at Mount Sinai School of Medicine the research derived from some findings by Dr mayman Cohen from the Department of pediatrics at the State University of Buffalo with a geneticist there who decided to add some LSD to cultures of human peripheral blood white cells lymphocytes which one can make divide in culture when he added LSD in doses that are equivalent to those that float around in the blood after one takes the usual dose of LSD he found that there was a high percentage of chromosome breaks and rearrangements and what have you discovered so far we know that other agents which cause similar breaks and rearrangements such as x-rays certain types of viruses and certain types of chemicals all of which are associated either in man or in experimental animals with the production of Leukemia and other tumors that these agents are capable of producing such breaking rearrangements we therefore have to follow these patients for some years to see whether the production of breaks and rearrangements in them will also cause an increase of Leukemia and other tumors this is one of the potential dangers of such damage another problem is that we do not know whether these same breaks and rearrangements occur in the cells of these patients which produce the sperm and the egg from which their future Offspring will be formed if such damage occurs in these cells as well then there is a possibility number one of great damage to the child great enough in some cases to produce an early abortion perhaps less Grace than other instances in which case the child may be born with congenital malformations including mental retardation and in even some cases where the rearrangements of the chromosomes are balanced in such a way that the child that is born looks apparently normal but itself has a potential danger of producing abnormal children [Music] foreign [Music] this is Karen Smith reporting from wndt in New York drug cult the movement has much in common with religion and it has in Dr Timothy Leary a colorful and articulate evangelist he was interviewed in Houston by Carl brazile of station kuht Dr Leary how do you evaluate your influence on the increase in the use of hallucinogenic drugs by college students well I want to make it clear that I didn't invent LSD uh God made LSD The evolutionary process LST has been used in its platform for thousands of years uh nor have I been a uh Pusher or a uh advocate of LSD I've been in the position of a prophet who's been pointing out to a fellow man that this was going to happen seven six five years ago uh Sarah Wilson Harvard went down to Washington we told the FDA Hey listen there's going to be an LSD boom it can't be stopped it's going to be used it's going to take over you better be ready for it then out of the important position is Cassandra who when the hurricane occurs is blamed for it far from telling people they should take LSD my message to young people is uh since you're going to take it anyway uh be careful when you take it take it for the right reasons take it in the sense of seriousness and take it uh well prepared and don't take it unless you know what you're getting into under your feelings along these lines include other drugs as well as LSD marijuana heroin as well uh there are two types of drugs they're the down drugs the narcotic uh drugs that put you in a stupor of which heroin the opiate derivatives and alcohol are the prime offenders and of course the tranquilizers and barbiturates also take you down then there is a large uh armamentarian of up drugs of up experiences of which marijuana is the mildest going through masculine peyote LSD but I must point out the LSD is already uh somewhat old hat there are now uh currently available in certain American cities uh and in certain chemical laboratories drugs more powerful which last longer than LSD this is just the beginning of a scientific and psychological breakthrough which can't be stopped by law don't you feel that it's uh it's wrong to encourage the use of these illegal drugs by college students so this is in effect isn't it encouraging the breaking of a law well I never tell anyone what to do with their body because what we're talking about here is the first and last frontier Freedom my body now who touches my body or what touches my body or what goes into my body that's the last and first Frontier of my uh my Divinity and I have to say to Caesar as a religious spokesman has done for the last few thousand years Caesar I Render unto you what belongs to you out there in the highways and the byways and the weapons and your Banks but I reserve my right to do within my own body what uh feels right to me there can be no laws about what goes on inside a person's body and I'm engaged in several court cases right now uh testing the constitutionality of these laws which tell you what you can put in your body the marijuana allows it clearly against the Constitution against the ancient traditions of mankind the laws against LSD will not stand up what you can do you can put labels on the package and we're all in favor of the FDA and the federal government putting labels on the package if I want to kill myself quickly with a cyanide or slowly with cigarettes fine let this government tell me that let the government put on the marijuana package the scientific evidence about marijuana let the government put on the booze bottle what booze does for you uh if they want to be concerned with public health but they cannot pass laws and maintain laws which govern what people are going to do particularly something pleasant and something Regulatory and something education like LSD why is there why are 10 million Americans smoking marijuana today I mean these are not criminals they're not dope fiends matter of fact they come from your best colleges and uh they're your most effective people the latest statistic is that 70 of the freshman class at Harvard of marijuana now that's my old alma mater and I don't want to boast but uh that's the sign of the times you just can't stop the intelligent thoughtful people to do something that feels good and right to them one final question Dr Leary how would you explain or how do you explain the rather unconventional attire that you have on at this time unconventional my dear Carl this is the most Orthodox uh attire that imagine where what you're wearing a tie and that funny suit is uh that's a fad that's only been around for uh 20 or 30 years uh I'm wearing the ancient guards of my profession which is uh Prophet which is part-time would-be holy man uh I'm the Orthodox person you know as Alan Watts says there's nothing as far out as a square just look at the way he acts and dresses in Washington we talked with some of the people who administer and enforce the laws which Dr Leary dislikes these government officials say they are worried about the drug Vogue this is John Davenport a station WETA Washington D.C and true bureaucratic fashion the problem of drug abuse as seen from here is handled by two agencies the Food and Drug Administration and the federal narcotics Bureau the narcotics Bureau enforces laws against possession of marijuana and the so-called hard drugs such as heroin the Food and Drug Administration concerns itself with LSD and the so-called dangerous drugs such as pep pills and goofballs Food and Drug implies that it has a more enlightened approach concentrating on public education about drug abuse and enforcing the laws against the illegal supplier and manufacturer FDA claims it's not out to make a criminal of the user its administrator is Dr James Goddard the first medical doctor to head that organization our job is to really do three things first of all we want to provide good information an educational program secondly we need to carry out research why do people wish to withdraw understanding that might give us a better basis upon which we could build a good educational activity and third is the enforcement and there as I said we are interested in seeking out the illegal sources of supply and bringing them to justice rather than the individual users Patrick O'Carroll Veteran Federal narcotics agent says the stories on how the federal narcotics Bureau operates are sometimes untrue well I think this is the most important aspect of any discussion on marijuana there does seem to be a great amount of misinformation or inaccurate statements in regard to marijuana and we in the Bureau of Narcotics or we in the enforcement Community have been accused of telling horror stories about marijuana that are not true now I think it's important to point out because this is where the misinformation and where the inaccuracies begin that there is nothing inherent in a marijuana cigarette that will cause a person to begin using heroin and injecting himself with a needle it isn't the marijuana as such that causes this transition at least this has never been documented uh what does cause it is this involvement in the drug culture or the subculture of a person and he begins with marijuana which is quite easy to take and to smoke it's something that he's done before and once it becomes involved with this drug culture his whole life changes our overall impression from this survey is one not so much of blacks and whites as of various Shades of Gray it may be anomalous that marijuana which is illegal is less harmful than alcohol or tobacco which are not illegal the recent report of the president's crime commission is surprisingly open-minded on the subject even Dr Leary would agree that LSD presents more serious problems the pot smoker is a pleasure Seeker but the LSD user professes higher motives ranging from The Liberation of the individual to the Salvation of the world at the same time a bad trip can be disastrous several recent studies now have tentatively linked LSD with genetic damage and Leukemia the whole subject is so new that research has scarcely begun the Psychedelic people claim that theirs is the real world that the straight or Square world is unreal be that as it may and For Better or For Worse the evidence is overwhelming that in terms of the number of people involved especially young people the Psychedelic world is growing and growing rapidly good evening [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] -e-t the national educational television network