Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD (12 page)

That LSD can be used to heal as well as maim underscores an essential point: non-drug factors play an important role in determining the subject’s response. LSD has no standard effects that are purely pharmacological in nature; the enormous range of experiences produced by the chemical stems from differences in (i) the character structure and attitudinal predispositions (or “set”) of the subject, and (2) the immediate situation (or “setting”). If LSD is given in a relaxed and supportive environment and the subject is coached beforehand, the experience can be intensely gratifying. As Dr. Janiger put it, “LSD favors the prepared mind.”

For the unprepared mind, however, LSD can be a nightmare. When the drug is administered in a sterile laboratory under fluorescent lights by white-coated physicians who attach electrodes and nonchalantly warn the subject that he will go crazy for a while, the odds favor a psychotomimetic reaction, or “bummer.”

This became apparent to poet Allen Ginsberg when he took LSD for the first time at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, in 1959. Ginsberg was already familiar with psychedelic substances, having experimented with peyote on a number of occasions. As yet, however, there was no underground supply of LSD, and it was virtually impossible for layfolk to procure samples of the drug. Thus he was pleased when Gregory Bateson,
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the anthropologist, put him in touch with a team of doctors in Palo Alto. Ginsberg had no way of knowing that one of the researchers associated with the institute, Dr. Charles Savage, had conducted hallucinogenic drug experiments for the US Navy in the early 1950s.

The experiment was conducted in a small room full of medical
equipment and EEG machines, with no outer windows. Ginsberg was advised that he could listen to whatever music he wanted, so he chose Wagner’s
Tristan and Isolde
and a recording of Gertrude Stein. “For some reason,” he recalled, “I thought you were supposed to lie down like in a hospital on a psychiatrist’s couch and let something slowly engulf you, which is what happened. I lay down and something slowly engulfed me.” As he started getting high, Ginsberg was put through a series of psychological tests—word association, Rorschach inkblots, arithmetic problems—which struck him as quite absurd at the time. “What difference does it make?” he kept asking the attendants. While they measured his psychological responses, the poet—having read Huxley—was waiting for God to show up inside his brain.

When it came time for the EEG tests, Ginsberg proposed a rather unusual experiment that had been suggested by his friend William S. Burroughs. He wanted to see what would happen if he looked at a stroboscope blinking in synchronization with his alpha rhythms while he was high on acid. The doctors connected the flicker machine to the EEG apparatus so that the alpha waves emanating from his brain set off the strobe effect. “It was like watching my own inner organism,” said Ginsberg. “There was no distinction between inner and outer. Suddenly I got this uncanny sense that I was really no different than all of this mechanical machinery around me. I began thinking that if I let this go on, something awful would happen. I would be absorbed into the electrical network grid of the entire nation. Then I began feeling a slight crackling along the hemispheres of my skull. I felt my soul being sucked out through the light into the wall socket and going out.”

Ginsberg had had enough. He asked the doctors to turn the flicker machine off, but the “high anxiety” lingered. The clinical atmosphere of the laboratory made it hard for him to relax. As the trip wore on, he got deeper and deeper into a tangle: “I had the impression that I was an insignificant speck on a giant spider web, and that the spider was slowly coming to get me, and that the spider was God or the Devil—I wasn’t sure—but I was the victim. I thought I was trapped in a giant web or network of forces beyond my control that were perhaps experimenting with me or were perhaps from another planet or were from some super-government or cosmic military or science-fiction Big Brother.”

Ginsberg spent the evening at the home of Dr. Joe Adams, the man who supervised the experiment. He retired to his room and tried to describe his first acid trip. While still high, he composed the poem “Lysergic Acid,” which begins with the following incantation:

It is a multiple million eyed monster

it is hidden in all its elephants and selves

it hummeth in the electric typewriter

it is electricity connected to itself, if it hath wires

it is a vast Spiderweb

and I am on the last millionth infinite tentacle of the spiderweb, a worrier

lost, separated, a worm, a thought, a self . . .

I alien Ginsberg a separate consciousness

I who want to be God . . .

It might appear that such ordeals amounted to a ravaging of the soul rather than its redemption. But Ginsberg thought otherwise. He and the other poets and artists associated with the beat generation sampled a veritable pharmacopoeia of different drugs in various dosages and combinations, and publicly extolled their virtues. They too viewed psychedelics as “truth drugs,” but unlike the CIA they were not attempting to control someone else’s mind. Rather, they used these substances to assert their creative autonomy. Most of all, the beats wanted to speak the truth about their lives. While the CIA prowled around in secret and hoarded information, the beats were open and candid about their chemically illumined voyages. Intoxicated states were the keystone of beat literature, and they chronicled their insights in poetry and prose. Occasionally they tripped together in small groups and later compared notes on how best to approach a psychedelic session. The beats were mapping uncharted zones of the human psyche, an effort Ginsberg likened to “being part of a cosmic conspiracy. . . to resurrect a lost art or a lost knowledge or a lost consciousness.”

The beats’ drug shamanism was bound up with romantic excess. In the midst of the spiritual blackout of the Cold War they searched for a “final fix” that would afford the vision of all visions. Their affinity for psychedelics reflected as much a desire to escape from a world they found unbearable as to tap the hidden realms of the
psyche. Drugs were instrumental in catalyzing their rebellion against the overwhelming conformity of American culture. The beats had nothing but contempt for the strictures of a society anally fixated on success, cleanliness, and material possession. Whatever the mainstream tried to conceal, denigrate, or otherwise purge from experience, the beats flaunted. Their hunger for new sensations led them to seek transcendence through jazz, marijuana, Buddhist meditation, and the frenetic pace of the hip lifestyle.

It was the beats who railed most forcefully against the ghostly reserve of the 1950s. They understood that the problem was largely social in nature, but it was so extreme that the only sensible response was to become antisocial, to retreat into small groups or cabals of like-minded individuals and pursue radical options outside the cultural norm. The beats were pitchmen for another kind of consciousness. They encouraged the youth of America to take their first groping steps toward a psychological freedom from convention that opened the door to all manner of chemical experimentation. The beats bequeathed an inquisitive attitude, a precocious “set” for approaching the drug experience. As cultural expatriates they linked psychedelics to a tiny groundswell of nonconformity that would grow into a mass rebellion during the next decade.

Psychosis or Gnosis?

Therapeutic studies in the 1950s opened up new areas of investigation for a growing number of young psychiatrists. A particularly promising avenue of inquiry involved using LSD as a tool to explore the creative attributes of the mind. Dr. Oscar Janiger (the first person in the US to conduct a clinical investigation of DMT, or dimethyl-tryptamine, an extremely powerful short-acting psychedelic) noted that many of his patients reported vivid aesthetic perceptions frequently leading to a greater appreciation of the arts. One of his subjects claimed that a single acid trip was equal to “four years in art school” and urged Janiger to give the drug to other artists. This led to an experiment in which one hundred painters drew pictures before, during, and after an LSD experience. Everyone who participated considered their post-LSD creations personally more meaningful. Impressed by these results, Janiger proceeded to administer the psychedelic to various writers, actors, musicians, and filmmakers,
including such notables as Anaïs Nin, André Previn, Jack Nicholson, James Coburn, Ivan Tors, and the great stand-up comedian Lord Buckley.
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While some interesting and highly original works of art have been produced during the acid high, the creative effects of LSD cannot be measured solely in terms of immediate artistic output. Even more important is the enlargement of vision, the acute awareness of vaster potentials that persists long after the drug has worn off. Janiger’s subjects frequently commented on the affinity between the drug-induced state and “what they felt might be an essential matrix from which the imaginative process derives.” Author William Burroughs, who experimented with hallucinogens on his own, agreed with this assessment: “Under the influence of mescaline I have had the experience of seeing a painting for the first time, and I found later that I could see the painting without using the drug. The same insights into music or the exposure to a powerful consciousness-expanding drug often conveys a permanent increase in the range of experience. Mescaline transports the user to unexplored psychic areas, and he can often find the way back without a chemical guide.”

The suggestion that LSD might enhance creativity was vigorously disputed by certain studies purporting to measure the impairment of normal mental functioning during the drugged state. The discrepancy between these studies and the personal testimony of the artists themselves underscored the shortcomings of the scientific
modus operandi
, which relied primarily on performance and aptitude tests and the like. In the end such tests yielded a morass of nebulous and contradictory data that shed little light on the psychological action of psychedelic agents. Dr. Osmond spoke for a growing number of researchers when he wrote, “Our preoccupation with behavior, because it is measurable, has led us to assume that what can be measured must be valuable and vice versa. . . . An emphasis on the measurable and the reductive has resulted in the limitation of interest by psychiatrists to aspects of experience that fit in with this concept.” According to Osmond, the most important features of the LSD experience—the overwhelming beauty, the awe
and wonder, the existential challenge, the creative and therapeutic insights—would inevitably elude the scientist who viewed them merely as “epiphenomena of ‘objective’ happenings.”

The so-called objectivist approach was inherently flawed not only because it sought to quantify creative experience but also because it ignored the input of the observer, which always influenced the results of an LSD experiment. An acid high was a state of heightened suggestibility and acute sensitivity to environmental cues. The subject’s response was therefore largely influenced by the expectations of the person administering the drug. If the scientist viewed the LSD experience as essentially “psychotic,” he unwittingly contributed to this type of response, both through implicit suggestion and because he was not equipped to assist the subject in interpreting the altered state of consciousness. Under these circumstances a paranoid response with serious long-range repercussions was not uncommon. Such results, in turn, led to overgeneralization, to the point where the drug was defined as a stress-inducing agent.

The notion that LSD could be used to
treat
psychological problems seemed downright absurd to certain scientists in light of the drug’s long-standing identification with the
simulation
of mental illness. Those who operated within the psychotomimetic framework did not recognize that extrapharmacological variables—inadequate preparation, negative expectations, poorly managed sessions—were responsible for the adverse effects mistakenly attributed to the specific action of the drug. (According to the model psychosis scenario, there was really nothing to manage; just dose them and take the reaction.) They were appalled to learn that some psychotherapists were actually taking LSD with their patients. This was strictly taboo to the behaviorist, who refused to experiment on himself on the grounds that it would impair his ability to remain completely objective.

The chasm between the two schools of thought was not due to a communications breakdown or a lack of familiarity with the drug. The different methodologies were rooted in conflicting ideological frameworks. Behaviorism was still anchored in the materialist world view formalized by Newton,- the “psychedelic” evidence was congruent with the revolutionary implications of relativity theory and quantum mechanics. The belief in scientific objectivity had been shaken in 1927 when physicist Werner Heisenberg enunciated the “uncertainty principle,” which held that in subatomic physics the
observer inevitably influenced the movement of the particles being observed. LSD research and many other types of studies suggested that an uncertainty principle of sorts was operative in psychology as well, in that the results were conditioned by the investigator’s preconceptions. The “pure” observer was an illusion, and those who thought they could conduct an experiment without “contaminating” the results were deceiving themselves.

Aldous Huxley felt that the “scientific” approach was utterly hopeless. “Those idiots want to be Pavlovians,” he said, “[but] Pavlov never saw an animal in its natural state, only under duress. The ‘scientific’ LSD boys do the same with their subjects. No wonder they report psychotics.” The practitioners of psychedelic therapy, on the other hand, were cognizant of the complex interaction between set and setting, and they worked to facilitate insight and personal growth.