This is a glass of water
colorless, tasteless.
It contains 100 gamma of LSD-25.
One tenth of a milligram.
The equivalent of one six hundredth of a grain.
An ounce of this material will make a 150,000 of such doses.
Let us observe the effect some three hours later.
Well, tell me.
I just couldn't, I couldn't possibly tell you.
It's here, can't you feel it?
This whole room.
Everything is in color
and I can feel the air
I can see it... I can see all the molecules.
I'm part of it... can't you see it?
I'm trying
Oh it's just like you are released
or you are free, or...
I don't know I can tell you...
I wish I could talk in technicolor or...
or let you see...
...can you....
did you say you can see it?
no I can't quite see it, tell me about it
It's...
I can't tell you about it.
If you can't see it then you'll just never know it.
I feel sorry for you
It's almost impossible of course, as all the patients fail to describe it.
You can only say it isn't it isn't it isn't...
trying to tell people what it is.
Well I mean there are the colors and the beauties, the designs
the beautiful ways things appear.
People themselves, dull people - that I thought dull,
appear fascinating, interesting, mysterious, wonderful.
But that's only the beginning.
Suddenly you notice
that there aren't these separations,
that we are not on a separate islands shouting across to somebody else
and trying to hear what they're saying and misunderstanding them.
You know, you use the word yourself:
"Empathy"
This thing is flowing underneath, we are parts of a single continent;
It meets underneath the water,
and with that goes such delight,
the sober certainty of waking bliss.
One of the questions was could psychedelics be used for non-mystical problem solving,
for scientific, hard-nosed, data-rich stuff.
And the answers that we had at that time was nobody had any idea.
So we took senior scientists
and said to them we will give you a Psychedelic session
and the price of admission is a problem that you have been working on for at least three months
and are frustrated about, and matters to you a lot.
Their problems ranged from abstract scientific equations
to practical architecture and furniture-designs.
We gave them the psychedelic, we gave them some hours to just relax and be with themselves
and then we got them up and said it's time to work on your problems, and they dove in.
I took a trip through architectural history
and visited and saw various cities and places.
Each subject claimed that with focus and guidance.
LSD allowed them to approach their problem with a fresh perspective.
Or in-stealth them with the freedom to explore ideas more openly.
the result...
Patents issued, products built, theories extended and improved, papers published,
and more importantly
for many weeks there-after, according to the scientists, their overall level of creativity was up.
Bio-geneticist Dr.Kary mullis had won the nobel prize for inventing PCR
a revolutionary technique for multiplying tiny amounts of DNA
for use in genetic research;
A creative breakthrough he claims came from Psychedelic drug use.
I don't do experiments often
what if I had not taken LSD ever
would I have still invented PCR?
I don't know, I doubt it. I seriously doubt it.
It's not that psychedelics manufacture wonderment
or they can automatically make us more imaginative beings
but what psychedelics do is pull us so radically out of our comfort-zones
they decondition our thinking;
They thrust us out of everything we thought we knew about the world
in order to see things things as if for the first time and form new synaptic connections.
They change our context.
That's why people take psychedelics and they say "take a trip"
"take a trip" well look at the physical equivalent of that
Taking a trip means physically go somewhere you've never been before where no one knows your name
see the world differently
and jump into a new culture
I think it has to do with
forcing yourself to gain different perspectives and how you see reality.
You know reality is made of language.
and, so how you map your reality really matters; the words you used to map you reality.
and so i think that what psychedelics do is, I think they are tools
that's what I think
which is very different from just fully advocating their use.
I think that they are tools, they need to be treated with respect.
In 1965 the US government began shutting down
scientific studies across the country.
Fadiman's was one of them.
In the middle of our seventh session
around literally noon,
a certified letter arrived from the federal government.
We opened it and it said as of the moment of reading this letter
your research is terminated.
The research is over.
I held this letter and I looked around the room knowing that in the other room
we had four scientists
in the midst of a Psychedelic session with major problems on their minds
and i said to the group
Within five years the US government classified it as a schedule one drug
declaring that it had no medical value.
Research hit a brick wall and stopped.
and so that was the last research for about forty years.
As many as you know, I'm a great fan
and spokesman for Psilocybin,
for the Mushrooms.
The mushrooms that i am so stoked on
were discovered in 1953 by Gordon and Valentina Wasson, in Wattala
discovered in 53
made absolutely schedule one illegal in 1966.
13 years
was the window
in which western civilization had to study this compound and figure out what it was for.
and they were just
beginning to focus upon it when it was made illegal
LSD discovered and 1937,
not brought into the scientific literature until 1948,
not generally available even in the laboratory until 1950,
made totally illegal in 1966.
16 year window.
Think about the fact that when LSD was was legal
psychiatrists, professional researchers, were consistently reporting
cures of chronic alcoholism
with one 500gamma dose
one dose;like a fifty percent cure rate without recidivism
for chronic alcoholism.
spectacular findings were being reported.
When LSD swept through the scientific community
for pharmacologist, psychotherapists, psychiatrists
it had the same kind of excitement and feeling of breakthrough
that the splitting of the atom had for the Physics community in the late thirties.
we've had ... a mind programming excise called The War On Drugs for the last forty years
which has been designed to create an internal enemy in our societies
and convince people that there are these evil wicked groups who are doing these terrible sinful things
smoking these doing this and that
and there is a very dark image has been created around it
and people get very upset, irrationally, about this whole issue.
and actually what's being forgotten in all of this
and for me it's become... I regard it as an extremely important issue
is that when the state sends us to prison
for essentially exploring our own consciousness
This is a grotesque abuse of human rights.
it's a fundamental wrong
If I as an adult, am not sovereign over my own consciousness, then I'm absolutely not sovereign over anything
I can't claim any kind of freedom at all.
And what has happened over the last forty-fifty years under the disguise of the War On Drugs
is that we have been persuaded to hand over the keys of our consciousness to the state.
The most precious, the most intimate, the most sapien part of ourselves
the state now has the keys
and further more
they have persuaded us that that's in our interest.
This is a very dangerous situation.
One of the things that always freaks me out is
the people's inability to even consider that there is a difference between a Psychedelic experience on drugs
and a drug that's going to ruin your life.
They are not even interested in considering that possiblity.
It's like the same thing, it's like someone resisting...
Definitely, and again, let's remember,
that funded with our money, our tax-payer's money,
there has been forty years of programming; more than forty years on this subject
to make us all develop a kind of aversion, fear, hatred, horror of drugs.