Favorite Stories 3
Michael McCloud has more than a hundred embossed and framed sheets of acid in his San Francisco livingroom. There are a couple more hundred sheets in a drawer. These are all said to be inactive due to exposure to sunlight, yet friends would occasionally call him up and say he was crazy to do this. More than in a few instances these callers would be on the phone about a week later, saying, "Man, have I got a sheet for you!" At least three exhibits have taken place -- in Texas, New York and California -- and the only sheet a snatch was attempted on occurred shortly after a mother explained to her daughter what she, the mother, had tripped on some years earlier.
I went with eight other people out to Greenwood Lake in New Jersey once, all of us with the intention of turning on this black cop who had expressed an interest in taking LSD. To show our confidence, all of us took fairly heavy doses of LSD out there in the woods -- all except the black cop. We all had a great, uninterfered-with time.
When I asked John Beresford, who received the grandest gram of Sandoz LSD I've ever heard of ("Lot H-00047") while working as a pediatrician, what he thought about the effects of LSD upon children conceived or born under its influence, he responded, "They're always better."
The first wave of psychedelic history occurred between prehistory and the 19th century, largely due to delirients like the Daturas and Amanita muscaria in Europe and more-closely-psychedelic substances in the New World. The second wave could be said to have started in the late 1880s with the German investigation, isolation and synthesis of mescaline. Much investigation followed up until the 1930s, when this then petered out. Had LSD-25 not come along, psychedelic states would likely not have reached the millions of minds they eventually did.
What is involved in psychedelic transformation is merely a change in point of view, a fulcrum- shifting. The half-empty glass and the half-full glass are the same thing. A "vision," however, may make certain things possible that otherwise would be impossible. What then is required are step-by-step modifications to manifest a vision into its reality.
Uncle Albert actually concocted LSD-25 for the first known time in this planet's history during 1938. Animal tests of this 25th in a series of lysergic acid amide investigations demonstrated nothing of any apparent interest. The rule at Sandoz was that once a compound or new analog had been investigated and thought not worthy of further inquiry, it would not be ever looked at again.
Five years later, however (we're now talking almost 60 years ago) "Uncle Albert" had what he called "a peculiar presentiment" that LSD-25 was worthy of re-examination. I once asked him about this, and he remarked that what had attracted him was the beauty of the molecular structure. "It's like being in love with a woman," I think was how he put it. "If you love her, you work with her."
The early work with alcoholics, headed largely by Osmond and Hoffer, should not go unremarked upon.
Abram Hoffer had this to say when he published statistics relating to more than 90 hardcore alcoholics who had been treated in the Canadian LSD program:
"When pschedelic therapy is given to alcoholics using methods described in the literature about one-third will remain sober after the therapy is completed, and one-third will be benefitted.
"If schizophrenics and malvarians [those showing a particularly purplish component of urine] are excluded from LSD therapy the results should be better by about 30 percent.
"There are no published papers using psychedelic therapy which show it does not help about 50 percent of the treated group.
"Our conclusion after 13 years of research is that properly used LSD therapy can convert a large number of alcoholics into sober members of society.
"Even more important is the fact that this can be done very quickly and therefore very economically. Whereas with standard therapy one bed might be used to treat about 4-6 patients per year, with LSD one can easily treat up to 36 patients per bed per year."
