Here’s a piece I wrote for Afterpartychat.com on how acid is coming back into play for scientific experimentation. Naturally, I had to take a look at early experimenters–like the sadly tormented, surprisingly intrepid Cary Grant:
What year is it again? If you said 1969, that might be because of the recent news that the first medically controlled experiment with LSD in more than 40 years was performed. The findings? That acid helped reduce anxiety in terminally ill patients.
Admittedly there were only 12 people in the Switzerland-based trial group but of those 12, the eight who were given full doses of acid noted a 20% improvement in terms of their anxiety and this improvement continued over the year following. Among the four who received the placebo drug, however, anxiety rose.
Of course there’s a history of dropping acid under a doctor’s observation. After Albert Hoffman’s inadvertent invention of LSD in 1938, it became all the rage for the intelligentsia to ride the paisley highway under a psychiatrist’s care. Hollywood followed, most famously in the person of Cary Grant, who felt acid therapy benefitted him. Of course, Grant seemed successfully to have left his childhood behind him along with the name Archie Leach–but he couldn’t forget the poverty, the mother who’d been placed in an asylum, the father who’d claimed she was dead. In a shockingly frank interview in the late 1950s, Grant said that the drug “was like being born for the first time. I imagined all the blood and urine and I emerged with the flush of birth.” Man, I wish Hitch had filmed that scene.
In the same decade Aldous Huxley, an early proponent of the drug and author of The Doors of Perception, noted that acid experiments had fallen into the hands of money-grubbing doctors (“Really, I have seldom met people of lower sensitivity, more vulgar mind!”) who were hawking LSD therapy at $100 a shot. Around that time, the CIA also started carrying on their own little experiments: putting acid in baguettes in a French mind control experiment (seriously—Googl “le pain maudit”) and England’s MI6 also secretly fed servicemen the stuff in an attempt to find a truth drug.
But then once LSD went mainstream and the vulgar, un-chaperoned herd started gulping down the stuff for pleasure and insight (sometimes to dangerous consequences, though more often to deplorable fashion choices), it was criminalized in 1968.
I don’t know what to think about this new Swiss experiment except to say that haven’t all addicts thought, “Hmm…if I were dying, would I use again? Would I use all the stuff I never tried?” Such musings can, in that blithely self-destructive way, be a comfortable escape hatch from all those sober feelings.
And acid, well—it’s always been thought to be different somehow from the drugs that just let people escape uncomfortable feelings. As Oscar Levant, Golden Hollywood’s tortured soul and one of the first people to talk publicly about his drug addiction, commented to a friend about acid, people “take it for exactly the opposite reason you and I take stuff…trying to find out about things. You and I are trying to obliterate them.”
With SSRI’s now dully quotidian, it’s worth considering whether or not such experiments become get a little more mainstream again. What if the medical requirements for a full-blown legal acid trip were downgraded from terminal illness to crippling fears—then to simple anxiety or just stress about SAT’s or Tuesday nights? If you think that would never happen, just know that in the last few years, Harvard and the University of California have received permission from the FDA to experiment with LSD once again, after Harvard discovered that LSD helps patients with cluster headaches. Say, how long before the folks at Advil want to get in on that action? And what about those microdosing?
I’d microdose with Cary. I wouldn’t even mind if he did that flush of birth thing.
Dana Dunbaugh Burnell 