fAVORITE sTORIES 2
Tommy Chong once said, 'People have been giving this stuff to me for years, and I don't know what it is . . ."
LSD has added many words, now well-known, to our language. Lester Grinspoon and James Bakalar in their Psychedelics Reconsidered long ago offered a list of expressions derived from such experiences:
turned on, straight, freak, freaked out, stoned, tripping, tripped out, spaced out, far out, flower power, ego trip, hit, into, mike, plastic (meaning "rigid"), going with the flow, laying a trip on someone, game-playing, mind-blowing, mind games, bringdown, energy, centering, acid, acidhead, good trip, bum trip, horror show, drop a cap or tab, karma, samsara, mantra, groovy, rapping, crash, downer, flash, scene, vibes, great white light, doing your thing, going through changes, uptight, getting into spaces, wiped out, where it's at, high, ball, zap, rush,
and so on . . . .
After interviewing Myron Stolaroff, who supervised fascinating and productive mescaline and LSD studies evoking creative responses to long-sought technical solutions, I asked him if he had anything further to say. His response was, "If you want to know the truth more than anything else in the world, then you're going to find the truth leaping out all around you. But if you don't want to know the truth, then there are millions of ways to goof off and deceive yourself.
"There are all kinds of things to explore under psychedelics -- fascinating imagery, relationships, the sensory, etc. But if you want to know the truth, it is just utterly fantastic. It requires, however, much honesty -- since self-deception is so easy. But I don't see how anything can compare to discovering one's true nature and the magnificence of this marvelous universe we are a part of, and the incomprehensible love that awaits the one who is willing to allow his own heart to melt."
Humphry Osmond, who gave us the word "psychedelic" and turned Aldous Huxley on to mescaline, resulting in the report Doors of Perception, once remarked about the idea that the psychedelics would encourage people to search for experiences about which they had previously only heard occasionally. "It makes a terrific difference if you meet someone who has had an unusual experience -- or if you have such an experience yourself -- than if you've only heard of it. And here in the United States, it's now quite difficult to have not met at least someone who has tried LSD. It's now got built into the psychic chromosomes, one might say, where it can't be got out apparently. Not apart from the almost total destruction of the literature.'
When I asked Albert Hofmann for an estimate of how many LSD molecules pass the blood-brain barrier in an average dose, say 100 mcg., he started off with Avogadro's number (6.04 x 10 to the 23rd, the number of molecules in a mole) and felt that the figure was about 10 to the 17th. More conventionally, this might be thought of as a hundred times a billion times a billion. The structure of LSD, with a four-ringed skeletal complex, requires all of these molecules going through such a transformation. What a marvelous event!
After 20 years of extensive studies of LSD, the Sandoz summary of all this work -- before the hippies ever heard of it! -- was over 5" thick. Yet it is fair to say that even today, we have hardly any idea of how it produces these extraordinary CNS effects.
Art Kleps, Chief Boohoo of the Neo-American Church, was once asked, "What are the side-effects of LSD?" His rejoinder was, "There are nothing but side-effects!"
The areas of major importance to us must be of LSD's effects upon a) creativity, b) spirituality, and c) psychotherapy. In regard to a), Frank Barron, while a Research Psychologist at the University of California Institute of Personality Assessment, compared more than 5,000 productive and creative individuals with others in their field who had similar I.Q. but limited productivity. "The thing that was important was something that might be called a cosmological commitment. It was a powerful motive to create meaning and to leave a testament of the meaning which that individual found in the world, and in himself in relation to the world. This motive emerged in many ways, but we came across it over and over again when we compared highly creative individuals with those of equal ability. The intense motivation having to do with this making of meaning -- or finding meaning and communicating it in one form or another -- was the most important difference between our criterion and control groups . . .
"I think that as a result of the psychedelic experience there's a heightened sense of the drama of life, including its brevity, and a realization both of the importance of one's individual life and of the fact that a sacred task has been given to the individual in the development of the self."
LSD is what I do consider a semi-synthetic. It happens to be 50 times stronger, by weight, than the so-far-known lysergic acid amides appearing in nature, particularly of morning glory and baby Hawaiian woodrose species. This means that LSD is about 4,000 times as potent, by weight, as mescaline. Recent animal studies indicate greater potency for newly-discovered analogs.
