Re-Creational Uses 6
In 1960, John Beresford, a pediatrician, wrote to Sandoz on a sheet of New York Hospital letterhead and for $285 received back a gram of LSD (4,000 substantial doses) with which he intended to study effects on amoebas and to use it as a control drug for a series of bone marrow experiments. The amoeba experiments were never carried out, because Beresford and an English friend, Michael Hollingshead, soon tried this drug themselves. When the effects had worn off, their opinion -- as recalled by Beresford -- was that they should either throw the whole batch into New York's East River or spread it around.
The long-range consequence was that Beresford's batch of LSD eventually provided psychoactive material that was used in what became America's first LSD centers. Beresford, Jean Houston and Michael Corner opened the earliest of these centers in Manhattan and called it the Agora Scientific Trust. There they studied LSD's effects on so-called "normals." Although the book that mainly described this work -- The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience by Masters and Houston -- did discuss some therapeutic applications, most attention was focused on what governmental agencies would now refer to as recreational usage.
Beresford and Hollingshead split the Sandoz gram, and not long after Hollingshead moved into Timothy Leary's house near Harvard. Leary, who was involved in psilocybin studies at the time, was put off by Hollingshead's urgings that he try LSD. Leary apparently considered it to be "unnatural," unlike psilocybin and mescaline. But then one afternoon Hollingshead convinced jazz musician Maynard Ferguson and his wife Flo to give it a try, and Flo soon was having such a remarkable experience that Leary decided that he would sample it too. Hollingshead bounded up the stairs to get the mayonnaise jar in which his LSD was cut with sugar, and ladled out a heaping teaspoonful to Leary.
Richard Alpert, who later became known as Ram Dass, recalled what happened by saying that Leary "didn't talk for five days." As a result, Alpert told everyone who was interested "not to touch the stuff -- we had just lost Timothy." But when Leary finally came down, Alpert remembers him as having just said, "Wow!" Alpert was definitely impressed. This then led to an LSD center and to tremendous further impetus for re-creational use of LSD.
The third major center for LSD studies also opened early in the 1960s in Palo Alto, California. Myron Stolaroff, the main figure behind this one, first became acquainted with this molecule by way of Gerald Heard, who in the mid-1950s had spoken about LSD in ways Stolaroff considered almost unbelievable. Stolaroff recalled one evening when he visited Heard and expressed his resistance to the idea of actually taking LSD: "In fact, I was disappointed since I thought Gerald was our outstanding modern mystic. I said, 'Why Gerald, I thought you went to all these places anyway -- why do you take this stuff?' And he said, 'Oh, but it just opens the doors in so many ways to so many vast dimensions.' At this time, such was very hard for me to visualize -- because I felt that for Gerald the doors ordinarily were wide open, that there couldn't be any more doors. But his enthusiasm was obvious.
Before long Stolaroff was having his first LSD experience in the Vancouver, British Columbia apartment of Al Hubbard, one of the legendary Johnny Appleseeds of LSD. Hubbard had carried LSD around in a pouch on a circuit in the late 1950s that involved deliveries to quite a number of psychotherapists in the Los Angeles area. Earlier, he had bought 4,000 bottles of Sandoz LSD.
