LSD : Lettvin vs Leary (reel 2)

[Applause] when Dr Timothy liry the high priest of the league for Spiritual Discovery finished speaking Dr Jerome lein took the floor Dr lein was senior psychiatrist at the mantina state hospital in Illinois he is now professor of communications physiology in the Departments of biology and elect electrical engineering at MIT he also lectures in the humanities Department Dr lein who has three teenage children is known at MIT as a man students can talk to now Tim your argument is exceedingly seductive and in the main I must admit that I find the Press of middleaged and middle class enormously powerful here in Cambridge irritating is all hell the horrid part is that I too sit in front of TV sets feel myself slumping pay the taxes but the problem is whether the naval really replaces TV I mean you sitting in front of your Naval you sitting in front FR of your naor strike strike me as being in a sense very little better off in this first let's put it this way no surprises are likely to come about and you aren't even beguiled by good commercials nevertheless I think that we must take your thesis extremely seriously and I will not do you the dishonor of either attacking you on scientific grounds because the question as is very obvious is not scientific but moral therefore for this reason I would like to confine my remarks strictly to the turn that damn thing [Applause] off I would like to confine my remarks strictly to the ES ological questions involved by that I mean simply questions of what constitute good and evil but I feel somehow or another that this man is in the hands of the devil that is to say he is in a private hell of a curious and somewhat sartrean devising that is having made his pack with the devil this is what he asked for and that's what he gets for I I suspect that in making these packs very much like monkey paw packs that what we get we get literally and what we lose we lose rather much of to look at this man sitting there with the smile this superal smile ecstatic smile I feel sick I don't feel that I want to trade I feel sick for it and I ask of you how many would trade he assures you he is in the utmost ecstasy when you can get to him otherwise he's in that ecstasy why would not any of you trade let us take another trade that has been offered in the past you and I live through the period of lobotes you walk into the office I don't like my mama they lift your eyelid up you know slash slash and you go out it doesn't matter you see you have traded for it doesn't matter a hunk of brain after all brain tissue as he tells you you're losing so much of it what's a little bit more know do it really matter no here you tra it how many of you would take a lobotomy given the guarantee that they act you don't care you come in saying I don't want to care everything is bothering the hell out of me everything is bothering the hell out of me I want to stop caring I want to be happy and so he takes you know bang bang is this a trade you would make why not no wait a minute this is strictly a rhetorical question I'm asking the question of myself for I found Tim's presentation extremely compelling sha if you'll excuse me of those adornments I think you ought to change them they're not beautiful they're symmetrical but not pretty at any rate I find Tim thesis terribly compelling and for this reason I feel that I have to answer it for myself you see you are selling off the noetic functions you're selling off exactly those functions which have set you aside critically in every possible way you're abrogating you're dissolving these henceforth suspended judgment for a while you take your Martini at 5:00 you come home you don't want to remember what what sort of a damn fool you were during the day you don't want to to remember you know being pushed down by this guy the compromise you made that was against your grain you see all of these things you've got to forget them you cop out with the martini but with the reassurance that when the alcohol wears off you are possibly back to a state where judgment miraculously has been restored this is the same incidentally with marijuana and as an aside Tim let me agree with you I can conceive of no more immoral thing than has been done by the government in the wholesale Banning of drugs for I suspect that since the time of melon this is like the heurst papers trying to abolish pornography the more there is of it around the more they thrive [Applause] there's a fundamentally there's a fundamentally monstrous thing about forbidding rather than reasoning people out if you have a thesis you advance a thesis there's a counter thesis one argues one does not go with force of the kind that the government has done spurring the crime rate as it has been done by the morphine addicts Etc and I feel very violently about this because I used to take care of an addict Ward when I was back in Mino as I say I'm perfectly willing to admit with you that the government has done a monstrous thing in forbidding many of many of the drugs that are around the forbidding of marijuana I believe is pure nonsense in the light of the lag Guardia report it is however the law of the land and therefore I cannot advise people in conscience to break the law of the land for the very simple reason that I'm not permitted to all right but when it comes to LSD to Silo cyb to all of these other drugs that you have been handing out that you have been talking about at this point sir I look upon you as a tool of the devil and I look upon you as a fundamentally vicious tool of the devil and I will explain to you why in general when one takes something like a drink a martini or a drink of wine or gets drunk with one's friends in the evening and wakes up the next day with a hangover there is a reassurance the miraculous reissuance somehow or another of judgment to yourself question with LSD and with cybin with masculine do we have this reassurance you have said sure it's Russian Roulette sure it's dangerous but let us look specifically at the danger and I'm not going to talk neurologically because it would only be gobbled deal what is the fundamental danger let us say that one person out of 50 will have a reaction like this he will take a dose he will take a trip and three days later he takes a return trip and a week later he takes a return trip not having taken any more drugs how is it possible for anybody on observing this to say to any person you take one chance in a 100 the return trips they're for free what is a return trip let me ask you if there is no cause how come the return trip the flipping in suddenly and the flipping out suddenly suddenly the colors whirl about suddenly smells have color suddenly colors have sounds and then you're back in the normal world and what does this smell like clinically Tim what does this smell like to you you as a clinician what is this if you saw a patient who complained of this what is it that he would have Tim what would you diagnose him as Visionary Mystic yeah [Applause] [ __ ] you would diagnose him as a temporal lobe epileptic with an aura and you know that goddamn well where else he looks this way at me those of you who are well don't tell me what I know if you read the description of the aura either in Penfield and Erikson's book called epilepsy in cerebral localization written many years ago or if you'll get hold of an exceedingly Charming book by McDonald kitley called the parietal lobe where he discusses also these things or if you will simply read DVI Which is far simpler for most of you you'll get a notion of what this Aura is and you can become addicted to an aura when a man comes to me and says I haven't had had a shot I haven't had any LSD for three months but I still flip in and flip out as a clinician what do I think about what do I worry about and what I worry about here specifically is that he has a functional lesion this sounds a joke to you functional lesion because I can't show it by cutting him open but a functional leion because clinically it goes along with other things that have turned out to be like tumors like scars like hits on the head and things of the sort very well this is one thing temporal lobe very weird stuff about the temporal lobe and I will not go into it I will simply remark that it is that particular portion of the brain that is affected in half the axe murderers that we have in this country has it ever Ur to you why is it you read about a guy coming home and he knocks off his wife his three kids you know and at the at the station he stands there and says I don't remember you know every aha you know really I'm need you know but let me assure you half of these things are in fact temporal lobe syndrome what are called psychomotor seizures what this fellow had who shot in Texas at the campus shot the various people this is roughly the sort of seizure he had in his case they found a tumor what about LSD what about syo cyon I know a set of physicists who took a while ago in group because they're curious people all physicists are curious people that is I mean they're not curious to look at they [Applause] are they took in a group of about five or six of them they took some Silo cbin on the recipe gotten from the telephone number here in Cambridge that you're supposed to call to get that recipe and having taken it they got violently sick the first day and every one of them for three months thereafter was incapable of doing any theoretical work on all behavioral accounts the same but clearly Aber barent in their higher critical functions as Tim said but with a hangover of this a hangover that lasts not an hour or two hours but several days several months let us give it only several days let's be conservative a hangover for a few days something happens and your judgment by which you weigh things goes down you're now in the position of regenerating this by taking say one trip every 3 days one trip every 4 days and you pay for the vision of yourself by the loss of judgment you play for getting out by the loss of judgment you pay for whatever Visions you get by this loss in judgment and the loss in judgment that stats and states now you might say how do I know this have I ever taken it huh no and I haven't taken it for a rather simple reason the price seems to be a little bit big a little steep to pay I'm giving the devil my judgment my soul my intellect all of the things I've worked for for this kick like a nyphomaniac not like an erotic person but like a nyphomaniac does anybody here Envy the nyphomaniac after all there she is having orgasm after organs wonderful all day long without a stop beautiful terrific and anybody Envy her does anybody Envy why because you didn't envy that guy who was sitting in the state hospital either the kick is cheap the Ecstasy is cheap and you are settling for a second rate permanent second rate World by the complete abrogation of the intellect in the old days if it wasn't done by lobotomy it was done by psychoanalysis now it's done by drugs I can find in myself no joy in such an Outlook [Applause] now I share the basic concerns that we've listened to tonight I don't know whether LSD is a devil's toy as a matter of fact I spend many hours a week many many hours in the last few years thinking about you know it's St C that be is the worst thing that could ever come on and uh that uh maybe the Insidious thing is that as I take it as I have over 400 times uh I've lost discriminating ability and maybe I may feel better and better as I'm lying in the gutter with my uh uh nose Brewing but I'm too brain damaged or too um um uh dazed to realize the several years ago uh I began uh myself urging other people taking LD to keep a checklist an objective checklist as to where you are uh not in television game terms uh about whether your grades are higher or lower and that sort of thing but where you are basically in terms of your two billion year old status on this planet now each one of you would have a different check mine had to do with how much time I spending out of Dooors as opposed to indoors how much much percent of time I spending with children as opposed to game playing with adults am I making more money or less I'm making less I think that's good uh and so forth but I still don't know and I'm still have an open mind on this question as to whether I am a spokesman for uh I wouldn't say the devil but for a dangerous uh and diabolical situation however I just want to underline one difference that I see here and it is a philosophic difference it is uh a clear difference and it's an ancient difference uh we've heard a great deal of Praise about the noetic function of the mind uh do you want to keep your mind well if you want to keep your mind and that judgmental function stay away from LSD stay away from Rel experience because when you take LSD you realize that what you call your mind is about 20 years old or at best two or 3 hundred years old and that the experience that I've been talking about is uh much more ancient uh and much uh liberating experience I want everyone to be warned don't take this trip unless you know you're playing around a blind roulette game with the most precious thing you have your 30 billion cell nervous system read the labels read dusi read the New England Journal read our journals read the ancient stories of Mystics and Visionaries and when you've read the whole thing then forget the books and talk to people who have the experience and then look yourself in the mirror and you decide yourself uh because the only control of LD is selfcontrol the color films shown during Dr Larry's presentation were excerpts from the Psychedelic experience produced by Jee mayo and Alan Willis music by Ravi Shankar and report from milbrook produced by Jonas mechas [Music] [Music] this is NE the national educational television network [Music]