Jay Stevens likes to think of himself as a mere chronicler of our recent social history–just the facts, ma’am, you understand. But in this Augustan Age of the new morality, when John Tower is barred from the cabinet for drinking and Judge Douglas Ginsburg’s hopes for a seat on the Supreme Court go up in a haze of marijuana smoke, the author of a book that purports to be a history of LSD in America is more likely to be viewed as a foul-smelling partisan than a neutral scholar.
It is a story that begins with LSD’s accidental discovery in 1943 by Albert Hoffman, a chemist for the Swiss drug company Sandoz, while Hoffman was searching for a migraine-headache cure. Hoffman accidentally ingested the drug and reported seeing “an uninterrupted stream of fantastic images of extraordinary plasticity and vividness and accompanied by an intense kaleidoscopic play of colors.” A few days later Hoffman took LSD on purpose and within an hour was riding his bicycle homeward through “a street painted by Salvador Dali, a funhouse roller coaster where the buildings yawned and rippled.” Sandoz tested LSD on various animals and then humans, concluding that while the drug certainly produced bizarre behaviors, it did not seem to be physically harmful. Under the trade name Delysid, LSD was offered to “select researchers,” beginning in 1947, and arrived in the United States in 1949.
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“If you look at them, they seem to be contradictory. One was, you could use it to sort of mimic madness in the laboratory setting, which was very exciting for a lot of people who wanted to find out what madness really was, because if you gave people LSD in the early years they did a lot of things that seemed quite crazy. These were the ‘lab madness’ guys. They would hire mainly college kids, because most of them worked at universities, and they would give them this drug and shine lights in their eyes, have them run through questionnaires, and give them all sorts of bizarre tests. Naturally the people would appear crazy. They were not happy to have those lights shined in their eyes, or they’d say, ‘Those questionnaires are stupid!’
Huxley, the highly intelligent British author of Brave New World, The Perennial Philosophy, and other visionary books, was searching for something–a spiritual discipline, a philosophy, a set of ideas–that would catapult man into the next evolutionary phase of existence by unlocking the untapped potential in his brain, something that Huxley and other intellectuals felt was necessary, particularly in the atomic age, to avoid global cataclysm. After sampling numerous religious experiences and listening to a host of gurus and philosophers, Huxley happened upon an article in an obscure scientific journal that was written by two Canadian researchers who had run some experiments with mescaline, a hallucinogenic drug extracted from the peyote plant, which had been used in religious ceremonies by certain Native American tribes for many years. Huxley thought he might have found what he was looking for, and immediately wrote to the researchers and arranged to take mescaline with one of them–Dr. Humphrey Osmond, who later coined the term psychedelic–at Huxley’s Los Angeles home in 1953.
“If Huxley was English, Leary was Irish,” Stevens says. “Leary differed on how you might accelerate the evolution of the species. He started out as a scientist. Aldous was much more interested in the mystical possibilities of LSD, and he used to say things like ‘LSD favors the prepared mind.’ He thought that you shouldn’t take it until you were in your mid-30s, and maybe you would take it once a year or something like that. Leary became more and more infatuated with it, and it seemed to him that you shouldn’t just reserve it for the elite of the world, but everybody should have the right to take it, to experience ‘the uncensored cortex,’ as he would put it, to experience the full range of one’s consciousness.
“Even during the war [the Office of Strategic Services] was testing things on people, mostly marijuana on mobsters and soldiers and so on,” Stevens says. “After the war, like most intelligence agencies, they were involved in looking for a mind-control drug. Richard Condon wrote the book The Manchurian Candidate about a brainwashed guy who comes to kill the president, so that in a sense has given the title to the whole search. In the CIA [created in 1947 to supersede the OSS] it was known as MK-ULTRA, but essentially they were looking for something that would create either permanent personality change, a way they could totally unlock a person’s personality and empty the contents out on the table, or for things that would bend you to their will. They were looking at weapons. The mind was an obvious place to look for weapons–mind weapons–and the CIA as a matter of course investigated all avenues.
“You look [into the scientific literature] and you realize the delight they had that they’d finally found a key into the unconscious, and the growing nervousness that what they were finding there more and more was their archenemy, the classic mystical experience,” says the author. “What did it mean when you could give 250 micrograms to a dentist off the street in Hoboken and have him write down his experience word for word, and have that description [accord] with Jakob Bohme, or any of the great mystics? Yeah, they were very nervous, they were very scared. In ’66, Time asked the question, ‘Is God Dead?’ And you could have gone to the Haight-Ashbury and had a lot of kids that a couple of years earlier were playing baseball and reading Batman comics saying, ‘No, God isn’t dead, I talked to him yesterday, with LSD.’ Certainly the psychedelic movement is the acorn, and/or the dirty little secret, that the New Age has grown from. Scratch any of the New Age gurus, follow their background far enough, and eight times out of ten it’ll end with a psychedelic experience back in the 50s or 60s.”
