a neuropsychiatrist, contacted Sandoz and received a supply.
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| Re-Creational | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| USES | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| of LSD | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Right from the beginning, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) was ingested for nonmedical reasons and produced an experience that was re-creational in nature. Since that day of April 19, 1943, when Albert Hofmann "determined to probe the situation," this molecule was confined to research labs at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Basel, Switzerland, until the late 1940s. There it was given to six schizophrenics on 20 occasions (which might be viewed as medical use) and to 16 normal subjects on 19 occasions (more likely, re-creational use). Although investigative dosages of only 20 to 30 micrograms were used after Hofmann's trip, these 22 people constituted the entire first sampling of impressions on how this new substance might be applied. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| In 1947, Werner Stoll, the son of Hofmann's lab partner, communicated the first account of LSD's effects -- based on this collective experience -- in the pages of the Swiss Archives of Neurology. Then in 1949, he reported further about this drug in the same journal in an article titled "A New Hallucinatory Agent, Active in Very Small Amounts." Before the year was out, two more studies were published and the drug made its way across the Atlantic to the United States. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| It came to the West Coast in a definitely nonmedical fashion via the Los Angeles psychiatrist Nick Bercel, a Hungarian. Bercel had been visiting Stoll in Switzerland, who, before they parted, told him something to the effect that "I think there are a few thing we have developed you ought to try." As Bercel recalls it, Stoll reached into his waistcoat pocket and handed him a couple of vials without much more ado. Bercel did try it once he returned home, thereby probably becoming the first person in the U.S. ever to take LSD. Bercel played an important part in the spread of this substance in the Los Angeles area in the early 1950s and was among the first to publish his findings. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| At about the same time as this casual encounter between Stoll and Bercel, Otto Kauders from Vienna spoke at Boston Psychopathic Hospital -- a mental health center affiliated with Harvard Medical School -- and described how LSD had temporarily made Hofmann crazy. This caught the attention of those present and, as the research director has commented, "We were very interested in anything that could make someone schizophrenic." Soon Max Rinkel, a neuropsychiatrist, contacted Sandoz and received a supply. |
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| 9 / 10 / 11 / 12 / 13 / 14 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The first to test out this batch was Robert Hyde, of Boston Hospital's Psychopathic staff, who swallowed 100 mcg. in water. The observing group had hoped that through the production of a temporary mental breakdown they might come to understand more about disorders of the mind. But Hyde felt little in the way of effects and actually insisted on making his ordinary hospital rounds. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Hyde's experience, even though it produced little in the way of medical results, nonetheless has a kind of delicious irony about it, because, as Rinkel later remarked, he became quite paranoid and insisted that they had not given him anything and also that Sandoz had cheated them by sending plain water. "That was not Dr. Hyde's normal behavior," was how Rinkel described this session, which must have been reminiscent to many of those present of an outstanding Robert Louis Stevenson theme, because "he is a very pleasant man." Hyde, it might be noted, later became a consultant about LSD for the CIA. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||