LSD: A Trip to Where

[Music] [Music] this girl is on an lsd trip the music a song of praise to lsd a song of praise to acid [Music] [Applause] [Music] the hippies the flower people see lsd as an aid to self-knowledge a key to the closed doors of the mind perhaps a sacrament to the guard they seek the hippies use lsd as a vehicle unto themselves the results are disturbing to society but if nothing else the hippies seem to have found some sort of peace some refuge from a world which they reject not only do the hippies turn off the world they also scorn its warnings and laws against lsd they just do not believe those researchers who say lsd is dangerous but the society the hippie rejects cannot ignore the ever widening use of lsd by the non-hippie especially the college student across the nation college teachers like dr nathan back of the school of pharmacy at the state university of new york in buffalo sound a warning in view of the fact that we know very little as to how lsd works on the body both its physical effects as well as mental effects the increased use of lsd by our society should be viewed with great concern and alarm millbrook new york home and temple of the high priest of acid dr timothy leary the ex harvard professor who claims that perhaps three million americans have taken the acid trip the mystic who uses lsd to find god and may well be the first acid mata i asked tim leary if the acid experience has changed him well lsd has changed me religiously i was a uh smart aleck harvard professor bourbon drinking atheist intellectual before i took lsd now i'm god intoxicated has it changed me pers in my personality i don't think so and i want to make this clear lsd is no instant psychoanalysis it's not going to change your television personality it's not going to make you a better game player uh there are no guarantees here of any change in personality i don't think i've changed what lsd does it gives you more energy so i play out the timothy larry game on a broader canvas i've got more uh energy available to me i'm more turned on so more people listen to me but i think i still have the same old faults the same old selfishness the same old tendency to deceive myself see what's happening in the united states today as millions of people particularly young people are taking lsd they're just turning off they won't make war for you anymore they're a dropout generation they're talking about flower power they're forming as we have here in millbrook their own little religious cults you rock and roll bands most of them believe it or not are little religious cults and the songs they're singing are religious oriental mystic [Music] look out baby i say to the young kids form your own religion do what has always been done turn on tune in and drop out [Music] and turn on they do using the acid to blow their minds seeking within themselves there are 10 million different lsd trips there is a thin line between the good trip and the bad trip [Music] [Applause] [Music] and be forgiven [Music] now i need someone to take me by the hand and i need someone to make me understand [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] tripping oh it's a better world yeah [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you have to approach lsd with trembling and with fear and with love to use it for harmony and beauty what's going on united states today is a revolution in consciousness facilitated by these psychedelic chemicals i frankly don't think that the human being is ready for lsd as a matter of fact i don't think the human being is ready for fire but the trouble is lsd is here and we're going to do about it should we pass a law against fire and say only doctors can have fire should pass a law against lsd and say only doctors can take this trip to the divine process go out of their minds use this inner microscope of course we can because it's here and it's going to be used that's the problem that indeed is the problem but while the doctors admit that lsd may be useful in the treatment of alcoholism homosexuality and mental illness they warned that they know almost nothing about it dr sidney curran chief of psychiatric service at wadsworth hospital in los angeles has himself taken lsd i think that the juvenile random frivolous taking of lsd in a party setting without supervision is dangerous and is doing a good deal of harm some of the harm being the fact that we can't look at it studiously we certainly are now prevented from ever incorporating this into our culture because the feelings of the populace have been polarized into great aversion and law passing concerning lsd others uh still think that this is the answer i would say that it's somewhere in between and this is what i would like to implore that we try to look at the lsd scene as one of promise and potential but also one of possible danger and uh despair there is much evidence that the lifeblood of the lsd user can be changed that the chromosomes in the blood can be damaged by the acid and it is the chromosomes that carry genetic information from one generation to the next it is the chromosomes that determine whether the next generation conforms to our normality the lsd user tends to reject the warning or reply that the benefits of lsd outweigh its dangers lsd researchers like dr curt hershon chief of the division of medical genetics at mount sinai hospital new york have few doubts about lsd and chromosomal damage this cell has two broken chromosomes the one just below the middle of the cell has two breaks in it while the one just to the right of it has a single break these findings are rather similar to those that have been previously described by other doctors who have taken cells from normal individuals and cultured them in the presence of lsd in this case we have taken the cells from a patient who has been on lsd and added no further lsd to the culture findings like these have been described from patients who have received radiation who have had various viral diseases and who have leukemia and other cancers it is also known that such breaks when produced by radiation can be followed by an increased incidence of leukemia in the patients and other cancers as well as in the production of congenital malformations in the offspring of such patients as well as in their children's children at the children's hospital in buffalo new york there has been considerable research into the effects of lsd on the chromosomes dr mayman cohen is director of psychogenetics the danger or the potential danger to the lsd user not only to himself but to his offspring is real and until we have all of the answers in which will come only after much more extensive research it is advisable that lsd be put on the shelf as a very dangerous dangerous and noxious poison children born to lsd users if the egg or the sperm is damaged by the lsd may give rise to a whole host of genetic or congenital abnormalities at birth most of these chromosomal abnormalities are usually associated with mental retardation as well as other physical deformities perhaps the most widespread known of all of the chromosomal abnormalities is the [ __ ] child that has an extra chromosome it is possible that these individuals using lsd can cause chromosomal damage to their germ cells which will not be detected in themselves but will only be detected in the physical deformities of their offspring [Music] this is the heart of the lsd user's dilemma has he the right to play acid roulette with his children the probing into lsd continues associate professor of pharmacology at the albert einstein college of medicine new york dr murray javik experiments on monkeys we were interested in seeing what effect lsd would have on visual discrimination performance in monkeys and also on memory it's been shown by a number of investigators not only me that the drug does have very strange effects in animals under some circumstances it impairs performance and under others it actually improves performance but a great deal more work remains to be done before we can really understand what the drug does and how it is doing it dr javik wants to know how lsd affects the rhesus monkey he injects the drug into monkeys to find out whether he can duplicate man's lsd experience in the animal closest to man dr jarvik says that the lsd effects can be seen in the rhesus monkey yet lsd remains an enigma performance on a test of short-term memory was impaired by rather small doses of lsd in our monkeys we used what's known as a delayed alternation test and found that as little as five gamma that it's five millionths of a gram per kilogram was capable of impairing performance in these animals on the other hand other investigators have found that very low doses of lsd would improve performance in certain types of visual discrimination tests inability of an animal to discriminate flicker from steady light the most important thing that is still unexplained is the mechanism whereby this drug produces its effects despite a tremendous amount of research that's gone into this and there must be well over a thousand research papers on the effects of lsd we still don't know what the basic mechanism of action of this drug is in the brain this is bellevue psychiatric hospital new york more than 250 lsd users have been treated for mental disturbances in bellevue's wards yet the champions of lsd question the very definition of mental illness rationalizing that one man's psychotic is another man's mystic dr william frosh of bellevue's psychiatry department here at bellevue in the last two and a half years we've seen a fairly large number of admissions of patients who come into the hospital usually shortly after they've taken lysergic acid diethylamide lsd in the two and a half years we've seen an average of about 10 per month and this has been fairly consistent and so we've seen a total of approximately 250 patients in that time of the 10 a month who come in about two or three that is a quarter of them come in after their first trip with lsd after their first experience with the drug the others have had more experience another quarter have had up to five trips and the remainder come in after as many as two or three hundred trips on lsd about half of them come in with fairly acute psychiatric pictures and these are either the direct result of the drug for example somebody becomes slightly confused under the influence of the drug and they wander up fifth avenue against traffic and picked up by the police and then brought into the hospital occasionally patients under the direct influence of the drug may in response to unusual thoughts stimulated by it may think they can fly may try to go out of a window or may in some other way endanger themselves or others you know i took this stuff and i was terribly terribly frightened and i can't these people belong to a greenwich village group called encounter a group dedicated to reforming drug users they all know the dangers of lsd now for this investigation they recall the agony of recurrence of reliving the acid hallucination long after lsd has left the bloodstream i was laying in bed and i was trying to go to sleep and i opened my eyes and all of a sudden the window in the room disappeared and the room was just filled with bright lights and i was completely paranoid i was you know i didn't know what to do and i just laid there and shivered to me it seemed like it lasted for hours did you know what was happening i mean did you know it was a reference or what yeah i knew it was a recurrence i knew it was happening after you know when it happened i just opened my eyes and it just hit me how many recurrences like this have you had since that trip eight months ago i'd say about eight about eight yeah uh i had one i was at my girlfriend's apartment and i was sitting down watching television and the she has an antenna that sits on top of the tv and started to get up and danced around did you enjoy your news no i was completely frightened because i knew that i wasn't taking lsd and i wasn't getting high i've been getting high for quite a while i've had about i could think 10 recurrences but what bothered me was having them on the job because you know i i would be working and suddenly oh jesus you know and i would drop whatever i had this meant like graduates and syringes and surgeons tools crash on the floor i dropped them and i would have to go usually go run into the bathroom because i found like you know relieving myself would get my mind off all the social media that i have to start pulling my hair very hard the more you take the drugs the more you mess up your life the more you mess up your life the more you take drugs but i think through encounter people learn to cope and they find that without the drugs it is a much better world it's like playing with a shotgun and uh i personally i don't want to die that's why i stopped taking drugs stop taking lsd dr daniel casreal medical superintendent of a drug rehabilitation center on staten island new york they top is many things it is a non-profit corporation for the rehabilitation of addicts it is a therapeutic community run almost exclusively by ex-addicts who help themselves and others to get well here in daytop we have perhaps a half a dozen or a dozen people who have used lsd we treat them exactly the same as we treat the other type of chemical users the method of treatment is primarily a group interaction they made that whole scene down the village with you know peyote mescaline marijuana morning glory seeds and the whole rest of it but uh the whole scene is just that man because you know like i never had any friends really in school at all and down here it's easier you know what do you have to do to be hip you just gotta use as much as anybody else is using and you're accepted it's much easier to get accepted there you don't have to try hard you know you don't have to be a person you don't have to be yourself all you have to do is use a drug and say a couple of words you heard somebody else say like consciousness you've got a expansion excuse then you've got a really beautiful excuse well i'm using it to find out the inner meanings of life you know they said that you could see inside yourself and all things like that and i guess that's what they're really looking for they're trying to you know find out who they were through the use of a drug which i guess he really you know i'm sure you can't ever do yeah uh one of one of the fellows was telling me once that he had a friend that took a trip on that and he believed he actually believed i guess this is how it works on your mind that he actually believed that he could stop a car and this was in his neighborhood and he ran to find this car and that's you know like he got wasted you know and the fellow dead dr kazrail is outspoken about the dangers of lsd lsd is a very dangerous drug to me it is much more dangerous than heroin and certainly as lsd becomes more in vogue you'll see greater and greater problems with it i've been called upon to evaluate a boy who murdered well under the influence of lsd i've known people who committed suicide under the influence of lsd and i've known many who have become psychotic weeks and months after having used lsd and even for those who do not become psychotic those who have habituated themselves with the use of lsd seem to be changed and different they are emotionally flat to the observer even though introspectively they say they have tremendous feelings they don't seem to be able to relate emotionally to other human beings uh and what's even more frightening they don't seem to care to relate to other human beings richard lynch is an actor until june this year he was also an lsd user on june the 28th 1967 i had strolled into the park of central park and with a half a gallon of gasoline i set myself on fire under the influence of lsd i have had quite a few lsd experiences when i attempted my last trip i just finished a screen test with columbia motion pictures and my career was a flowering i was a prosperous promising young actor if you would ever tell me that i would go into cinder block and try to burn myself to death i would say that you were out of your mind if you've taken your last what you call your last lsd trip and you really want to be hit will dig it man be hip lay off it because it does affect the mind i'm a perfect example of what lsd can do to the human mind i'm tim knight during the course of filming this investigation into lsd i took my own acid trip it was important to do that important to get a fuller more meaningful understanding of the asset experience i was one of the lucky ones i came out of my trip apparently undamaged in fact i had a good trip i tried to recreate that trip on film that's what you saw in the dream sequence earlier you saw a young girl on her own trip but since it was impossible to reproduce her trip i substituted my own it was authentic you take a trip like that knowing the dangers for a reason you want to know what all the excitement is about you want to know what the acid trip is now i've taken the trip and i know what it does and i believe strongly i am convinced that the dangers of lasd far outweigh any benefits the scientists agree they agree that the acid trip the lsd trip is just not worth taking [Music] [Applause] so [Music] you