♪♪
When Sherry Marcy was diagnosed
with Stage III endometrial cancer,
her life changed overnight.
-I'd been an athlete all my life,
so to suddenly have cancer was shocking.
I think I looked up from the phone call and said to Nancy,
"I'm stunned."
-After Sherry's diagnosis, even prior to treatment,
it was just like this doom had descended on her
and then subsequently on us.
-It took away my whole identity.
I wasn't who I used to be,
and I wasn't the person that Nancy,
you know, formed a life with.
It felt like I sat on the couch and did nothing all day.
-Then Sherry read an article about a study
for cancer patients struggling with depression.
They were given an unusual treatment, psilocybin,
a chemical cousin of LSD with one important difference.
-It comes down to the spelling of psilocybin.
It's a hard word to spell,
but at least it's not spelled LSD,
which is a very strong word that people react to.
-♪♪
-That reaction can be traced back to the 1960s,
when LSD burst onto the scene.
-CBS News, without any flowers in its hair,
is in San Francisco because this city has gained the reputation
of being the hippie capital of the world.
-It was January of 1967, and thousands of young people
gathered in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park
to celebrate a counterculture based on peace, love,
and psychedelic drugs like LSD.
-It was political speakers.
It was countercultural speakers.
It was rock music, and, yes, the LSD flowed like wine.
-A psychologist who had taught at Harvard named Timothy Leary
praised the power of LSD,
an increasingly popular mind-altering drug.
-Turn on. Tune in. Drop out.
-Timothy Leary had an insight that if you changed yourself,
it would change the world and change the society.
-When people say, "What's the use of LSD?"
I translate that into, "What's the use of my head?"
And that's a fascinating problem.
Yeah. Suppose man can use more of his brain.
-People that took the drug felt
if everybody can have this experience,
the world will be a profoundly different place,
a much better place,
and within months, this drug, this sensibility,
this countercultural revolution, if you want to call it that,
attracted mass media from around the planet,
and that blew it up.
-♪♪
-The city of San Francisco has been warned
of a hippie invasion come summer
in numbers almost too staggering to comprehend.
-I think a lot of people intuited in the establishment
that LSD was a direct threat to industriousness.
-I mean, what, you want to drop out, not get a job, you know,
just go and live on the street in San Francisco?
I think this was seen as profoundly threatening
to the social order.
-The kids who take LSD aren't gonna fight your wars.
They're not going to join your corporations.
-Psychedelics are not growing, okay?
Psychedelics are dangerous.
-Former New York City Police Commissioner Howard Safir
was an undercover narcotics agent in the late 1960s.
-Back then, everybody thought LSD was for hippies
until suddenly kids who looked like they were straight
showed up in emergency rooms.
-There is a steady flow into San Francisco hospitals
of young people who have freaked out
and been picked up by the police in a state of desperate terror.
-I had seen people on the street who had no idea where they were.
I'd arrested people on LSD who were incredibly violent,
so it wasn't the peaceful, nonharmful, easy drug
that Timothy Leary professed it to be.
-There is nothing smart,
there is nothing grown-up or sophisticated
in taking an LSD trip at all.
They're just being complete fools.
-Headlines warned of additional dangers.
-Instant insanity.
-Chromosome damage.
-It may affect your unborn children.
-After Diane Linkletter
fell from a sixth-story window in 1969,
her father, TV personality Art Linkletter, blamed LSD.
-Anybody who has said anything
which would encourage my daughter to take LSD
was unwittingly a part of being her murderer.
-I think that raised public consciousness
probably as much as anything that happened in the '60s.
-President Nixon went to the Narcotics Bureau today
to sign a drug bill.
-In 1970, the Controlled Substances Act
made LSD a Schedule I drug,
the class of dangerous substances
with high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use.
But it turns out that until that point,
researchers had been testing
the medical use of LSD in the lab,
with some promising early results.
-It was all legal in those days,
nothing controversial about it at all.
-Bill Richards helped conduct scientific research
with LSD and other psychedelics
as a young researcher in the 1960s.
He says the early experiments in the 1950s were rudimentary.
-You'd simply be given the drug and see what happens.
-Do you find any difference
between one half of your body as opposed to the other half?
-Well, I have a sort of a wavering tendency.
I don't know which half is trying to get into
the other half, but somehow or other,
I seem to be going like that.
-Most people got mildly psychotic,
and the thought then was that
it might help us understand schizophrenia
or other severe forms of mental illness.
-The CIA investigated LSD as a potential truth serum,
and the Army tested the effect LSD might have
on soldiers in battle.
Some early test subjects had bad reactions,
and some scientists began to use LSD in a more controlled manner
as one step in an ongoing program of psychotherapy.
-There was a lot of excitement about the potential
of psychedelics in treating alcoholism,
and then we moved into working with terminal cancer patients,
treating anxiety and depression.
-Gosh, you've taken head-on
the biggest thing that's bothered you.
-The LSD experience was closely monitored and guided,
with music and eye shades
used to calm and reassure the patient.
-At the end, I felt a great weight had been taken off me.
-There was an incredible spirit of excitement,
international conferences,
papers published on LSD and psychotherapy.
-But as the 1960s progressed
and as people like Timothy Leary
spread LSD from the laboratory to the counterculture,
the drug's potential for therapy was overshadowed
by stories of its dangerous street use.
-I'm a pretty black-and-white guy.
There was never any thought in my mind
that there were positive uses for LSD.
I saw the results, and the results were not pretty.
-And after LSD was declared a Schedule I drug in 1970,
funding and support for psychedelic research dried up.
-There's really no other example that I can think of in science
where an entire area of research
was put on the deep freeze for decades.
-Today, the psychedelic glow of the 1960s has faded,
and recreational use of LSD, which is still illegal,
has fallen to low but steady levels.
But in the world of science, a new age is dawning again.
-Folks are studying a lot of things with psychedelics now.
-In recent years, several dozen academic studies
have investigated the use of psychedelic drugs and therapy
to treat problems ranging from addiction
to treatment-resistant depression and anxiety
in cancer patients.
Sherry Marcy took part in one of them.
-There was sort of a ceremony about taking the pill,
and then I was there for six hours reacting to the pill,
and I process by talking,
so something I really learned about myself then,
because every now and then, they would say,
"Now, why don't you stop talking and just feel?"
But what happened to me was that I ended up
getting totally reconnected, first to Nancy.
Nancy and I had a wonderful life together,
and it could go on, and I hadn't known that before,
and then also my kids, getting reconnected to them,
so there was this family dynamic that just reformed,
and that was just great.
-She was just lighter, immediately a difference.
And then we came home, and it persisted.
-Today, Sherry, who is now cancer-free,
says the psilocybin study helped her re-engage with life.
-It wasn't like it was psychedelic for me.
It just was me back.
I don't know how it did that exactly
except to broaden out, you know?
It's like you lift up your head and you take a good long look
and you start seeing things again.
-Brain-imaging studies have investigated
the impact of psychedelics.
They found that both LSD and psilocybin
foster connections between parts of the brain
that normally work independently.
-It's an exciting area in neuroscience right now.
More and more groups are jumping in,
and it's only just begun,
but people should really be aware
that there are potential dangers.
-Those dangers can range from a temporary bad reaction
to the triggering or worsening
of an underlying psychiatric condition,
so caution is a guiding principle in today's research.
But it turns out that not all of the claims
made about LSD in the 1960s were true.
Studies have found little evidence
that it damages chromosomes or causes birth defects,
and Diane Linkletter's autopsy
found no drugs in her system when she died.
On the other hand, Sherry Marcy says Timothy Leary
didn't get it right, either.
-I think the emphasis was wrong.
I mean, the "turn on" doesn't have to be emphasized at all.
The "drop out" is an absolute mistake,
but the "tune in" is crucial.
I tuned in -- tune into the world, to me,
to things I used to love,
to my relationships, to my family.
Tune in is what it's all about.