Текст книги "LSD — My Problem Child"

Автор книги: Albert Gofmann

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The reintegration of convicts into society, the production of mystico-religious experiences in theologians and members of the clergy, and the furtherance of creativity in artists and writers with the help of LSD and psilocybin were tested with scientific methodology. Even persons like Aldous Huxley, Arthur Koestler, and Allen Ginsberg participated in these investigations. Particular consideration was given to the question, to what degree mental preparation and expectation of the subjects, along with the external milieu of the experiment, are able to influence the course and character of states of psychedelic inebriation.

In January 1963, Dr. Leary sent me a detailed report of these studies, in which he enthusiastically imparted the positive results obtained and gave expression to his beliefs in the advantages and very promising possibilities of such use of these active compounds.

At the same time, the Sandoz firm received an inquiry about the supply of 100g LSD and 25 kg psilocybin, signed by Dr. Timothy Leary, from the Harvard University Department of Social Relations. The requirement for such an enormous quantity (the stated amounts correspond to 1 million doses of LSD and 2.5 million doses of psilocybin) was based on the planned extension of investigations to tissue, organ, and animal studies. We made the supply of these substances contingent upon the production of an import license on behalf of the U.S. health authorities. Immediately we received the order for the stated quantities of LSD and psilocybin, along with a check for $10,000 as deposit but without the required import license. Dr. Leary signed for this order, but no longer as lecturer at Harvard University, rather as president of an organization he had recently founded, the International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF). Because, in addition, our inquiry to the appropriate dean of Harvard University had shown that the university authorities did not approve of the continuation of the research project by Leary and Alpert, we canceled our offer upon return of the deposit.

Shortly thereafter, Leary and Alpert were discharged from the teaching staff of Harvard– University because the investigations, at first conducted in an academic milieu, had lost their scientific character. The experiments had turned into LSD parties.

The LSD trip—LSD as a ticket to an adventurous journey into new worlds of mental and physical experience—became the latest exciting fashion among academic youth, spreading rapidly from Harvard to other universities. Leary's doctrine—that LSD not only served to find the divine and to discover the self, but indeed was the most potent aphrodisiac yet discovered—surely contributed quite decisively to the rapid propagation of LSD consumption among the younger generation. Later, in an interview with the monthly magazine Playboy, Leary said that the intensification of sexual experience and the potentiation of sexual ecstasy by LSD was one of the chief reasons for the LSD

boom.

After his expulsion from Harvard University, Leary was completely transformed from a psychology lecturer pursuing research, into the messiah of the psychedelic movement.

He and his friends of the IFIF founded a psychedelic research center in lovely, scenic surroundings in Zihuatanejo, Mexico. I received a personal invitation from Dr. Leary to participate in a top-level planning session on psychedelic drugs, scheduled to take place there in August 1963. I would gladly have accepted this grand invitation, in which I was offered reimbursement for travel expenses and free lodging, in order to learn from personal observation the methods, operation, and the entire atmosphere of such a psychedelic research center, about which contradictory, to some extent very remarkable, reports were then circulating. Unfortunately, professional obligations kept me at that moment from flying to Mexico to get a picture at first hand of the controversial enterprise. The Zihuatanejo Research Center did not last long. Leary and his adherents were expelled from the country by the Mexican government. Leary, however, who had now become not only the messiah but also the martyr of the psychedelic movement, soon received help from the young New York millionaire William Hitchcock, who made a manorial house on his large estate in Millbrook, New York, available to Leary as new home and headquarters. Millbrook was also the home of another foundation for the psychedelic, transcendental way of life, the Castalia Foundation.

On a trip to India in 1965 Leary was converted to Hinduism. In the following year he founded a religious community, the League for Spiritual Discovery, whose initials give the abbreviation "LSD."

Leary's proclamation to youth, condensed in his famous slogan "Turn on, tune in, drop out !", became a central dogma of the hippie movement. Leary is one of the founding fathers of the hippie cult. The last of these three precepts, "drop out," was the challenge to escape from bourgeois life, to turn one's back on society, to give up school, studies, and employment, and to dedicate oneself wholly to the true inner universe, the study of one's own nervous system, after one has turned on with LSD. This challenge above all went beyond the psychological and religious domain to assume social and political significance. It is therefore understandable that Leary not only became the enfant terrible of the university and among his academic colleagues in psychology and psychiatry, but also earned the wrath of the political authorities. He was, therefore, placed under surveillance, followed, and ultimately locked in prison. The high sentences—ten years'

imprisonment each for convictions in Texas and California concerning possession of LSD and marijuana, and conviction (later overturned) with a sentence of thirty years'

imprisonment for marijuana smuggling—show that the punishment of these offenses was only a pretext: the real aim was to put under lock and key the seducer and instigator of youth, who could not otherwise be prosecuted. On the night of 13-14 September 1970, Leary managed to escape from the California prison in San Luis Obispo. On a detour from Algeria, where he made contact with Eldridge Cleaver, a leader of the Black Panther movement living there in exile, Leary came to Switzerland and there petitioned for political asylum.

Meeting with Timothy Leary

Dr. Leary lived with his wife, Rosemary, in the resort town Villars-sur-Ollon in western Switzerland. Through the intercession of Dr. Mastronardi, Dr. Leary's lawyer, contact was established between us. On 3 September 1971, I met Dr. Leary in the railway station snack bar in Lausanne. The greeting was cordial, a symbol of our fateful relationship through LSD. Leary was medium-sized, slender, resiliently active, his brown face surrounded with slightly curly hair mixed with gray, youthful, with bright, laughing eyes. This gave Leary somewhat the mark of a tennis champion rather than that of a former Harvard lecturer. We traveled by automobile to Buchillons, where in the arbor of the restaurant A la Grande Forêt, over a meal of fish and a glass of white wine, the dialogue between the father and the apostle of LSD finally began.

I voiced my regret that the investigations with LSD and psilocybin at Harvard University, which had begun promisingly, had degenerated to such an extent that their continuance in an academic milieu became impossible.

My most serious remonstrance to Leary, however, concerned the propagation of LSD

use among juveniles. Leary did not attempt to refute my opinions about the particular dangers of LSD for youth. He maintained, however, that I was unjustified in reproaching him for the seduction of immature persons to drug consumption, because teenagers in the United States, with regard to information and life experience, were comparable to adult Europeans. Maturity, with satiation and intellectual stagnation, would be reached very early in the United States. For that reason, he deemed the LSD experience significant, useful, and enriching, even for people still very young in years.

In this conversation, I further objected to the great publicity that Leary sought for his LSD and psilocybin investigations, since he had invited reporters from daily papers and magazines to his experiments and had mobilized radio and television. Emphasis was thereby placed on publicity rather than on objective information. Leary defended this publicity program because he felt it had been his fateful historic role to make LSD known worldwide. The overwhelmingly positive effects of such dissemination, above all among America's younger generation, would make any trifling injuries, any regrettable accidents as a result of improper use of LSD, unimportant in comparison, a small price to pay.

During this conversation, I ascertained that one did Leary an injustice by indiscriminately describing him as a drug apostle. He made a sharp distinction between psychedelic drugs—LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, hashish—of whose salutary effects he was persuaded, and the addicting narcotics morphine, heroin, etc., against whose use he repeatedly cautioned.

My impression of Dr. Leary in this personal meeting was that of a charming personage, convinced of his mission, who defended his opinions with humor yet uncompromisingly; a man who truly soared high in the clouds pervaded by beliefs in the wondrous effects of psychedelic drugs and the optimism resulting therefrom, and thus a man who tended to underrate or completely overlook practical difficulties, unpleasant facts, and dangers.

Leary also showed carelessness regarding charges and dangers that concerned his own person, as his further path in life emphatically showed.

During his Swiss sojourn, I met Leary by chance once more, in February 1972, in Basel, on the occasion of a visit by Michael Horowitz, curator of the Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library in San Francisco, a library specializing in drug literature. We traveled together to my house in the country near Burg, where we resumed our conversation of the previous September. Leary appeared fidgety and detached, probably owing to a momentary indisposition, so that our discussions were less productive this time. That was my last meeting with Dr. Leary.

He left Switzerland at the end of the year, having separated from his wife, Rosemary, now accompanied by his new friend Joanna Harcourt-Smith. After a short stay in Austria, where he assisted in a documentary film about heroin, Leary and friend traveled to Afghanistan. At the airport in Kabul he was apprehended by agents of the American secret service and brought back to the San Luis Obispo prison in California.

After nothing had been heard from Leary for a long time, his name again appeared in the daily papers in summer 1975 with the announcement of a parole and early release from prison. But he was not set free until early in 1976. I learned from his friends that he was now occupied with psychological problems of space travel and with the exploration of cosmic relationships between the human nervous system and interstellar space—that is, with problems whose study would bring him no further difficulties on the part of governmental authorities.

Travels in the Universe of the Soul

Thus the Islamic scholar Dr. Rudolf Gelpke entitled his accounts of self-experiments with LSD and psilocybin, which appeared in the publication Antaios, for January 1962, and this title could also be used for the following descriptions of LSD experiments. LSD

trips and the space flights of the astronauts are comparable in many respects. Both enterprises require very careful preparations, as far as measures for safety as well as objectives are concerned, in order to minimize dangers and to derive the most valuable results possible. The astronauts cannot remain in space nor the LSD experimenters in transcendental spheres, they have to return to earth and everyday reality, where the newly acquired experiences must be evaluated.

The following reports were selected in order to demonstrate how varied the experiences of LSD inebriation can be. The particular motivation for undertaking the experiments was also decisive in their selection. Without exception, this selection involves only reports by persons who have tried LSD not simply out of curiosity or as a sophisticated pleasure drug, but who rather experimented with it in the quest for expanded possibilities of experience of the inner and outer world; who attempted, with the help of this drug key, to unlock new "doors of perception" (William Blake); or, to continue with the comparison chosen by Rudolf Gelpke, who employed LSD to surmount the force of gravity of space and time in the accustomed world view, in order to arrive thereby at new outlooks and understandings in the "universe of the soul."

The first two of the following research records are taken from the previously cited report by Rudolf Gelpke in Antaios.

Dance of the Spirits in the Wind

(0.075 mg LSD on 23 June 1961, 13:00 hours)

After I had ingested this dose, which could be considered average, I conversed very animatedly with a professional colleague until approximately 14:00 hours. Following this, I proceeded alone to the Werthmüller bookstore where the drug now began to act most unmistakably. I discerned, above all, that the subjects of the books in which I rummaged peacefully in the back of the shop were indifferent to me, whereas random details of my surroundings suddenly stood out strongly, and somehow appeared to be

"meaningful." . . . Then, after some ten minutes, I was discovered by a married couple known to me, and had to let myself become involved in a conversation with them that, I admit, was by no means pleasant to me, though not really painful either. I listened to the conversation (even to myself) " as from far away. " The things that were discussed (the conversation dealt with Persian stories that I had translated) "belonged to another world": a world about which I could indeed express myself (I had, after all, recently still inhabited it myself and remembered the "rules of the game"!), but to which I no longer possessed any emotional connection. My interest in it was obliterated—only I did not dare to let myself observe that.

After I managed to dismiss myself, I strolled farther through the city to the marketplace. I had no "visions," saw and heard everything as usual, and yet everything was also altered in an indescribable way; "imperceptible glassy walls" everywhere. With every step that I took, I became more and more like an automaton. It especially struck me that I seemed to lose control over my facial musculature—I was convinced that my face was grown stiff, completely expressionless, empty, slack and mask-like. The only reason I could still walk and put myself in motion, was because I remembered that, and how I had "earlier" gone and moved myself. But the farther back the recollection went, the more uncertain I became. I remember that my own hands somehow were in my way: I put them in my pockets, let them dangle, entwined them behind my back . . . as some burdensome objects, which must be dragged around with us and which no one knows quite how to stow away. I had the same reaction concerning my whole body. I no longer knew why it was there, and where I should go with it. All sense for decisions of that kind had been lost . They could only be reconstructed laboriously, taking a detour through memories from the past. It took a struggle of this kind to enable me to cover the short distance from the marketplace to my home, which I reached at about 15:10.

In no way had I had the feeling of being inebriated. What I experienced was rather a gradual mental extinction. It was not at all frightening; but I can imagine that in the transition to certain mental disturbances – naturally dispersed over a greater interval—a very similar process happens: as long as the recollection of the former individual existence in the human world is still present, the patient who has become unconnected can still (to some extent) find his way about in the world: later, however, when the memories fade and ultimately die out, he completely loses this ability.

Shortly after I had entered my room, the "glassy stupor" gave way. I sat down, with a view out of a window, and was at once enraptured: the window was opened wide, the diaphanous gossamer curtains, on the other hand, were drawn, and now a mild wind from the outside played with these veils and with the silhouettes of potted plants and leafy tendrils on the sill behind, which the sunlight delineated on the curtains breathing in the breeze. This spectacle captivated me completely. I "sank" into it, saw only this gentle and incessant waving and rocking of the plant shadows in the sun and the wind. I knew what

"it" was, but I sought after the name for it, after the formula, after the "magic word" that I knew and already I had it: Totentanz, the dance of the dead.... This was what the wind and the light were showing me on the screen of gossamer. Was it frightening? Was I afraid? Perhaps—at first. But then a great cheerfulness infiltrated me, and I heard the music of silence, and even my soul danced with the redeemed shadows to the whistle of the wind. Yes, I understood: this is the curtain, and this curtain itself IS the secret, the

"ultimate" that it concealed. Why, therefore, tear it up? He who does that only tears up himself. Because "there behind," behind the curtain, is "nothing.". . .

Polyp from the Deep

(0.150 mg LSD on 15 April 1961, 9:15 hours)

Beginning of the effect already after about 30 minutes with strong inner agitation, trembling hands, skin chills, taste of metal on the palate.

10:00: The environment of the room transforms itself into phosphorescent waves, running hither from the feet even through my body. The skin—and above all the toes—is as electrically charged; a still constantly growing excitement hinders all clear thoughts....

10:20: I lack the words to describe my current condition. It is as if an "other" complete stranger were seizing possession of me bit by bit. Have greatest trouble writing ("inhibited" or "uninhibited"?—I don't know!).

This sinister process of an advancing self-estrangement aroused in me the feeling of powerlessness, of being helplessly delivered up. Around 10:30, through closed eyes I saw innumerable, self-intertwining threads on a red background. A sky as heavy as lead appeared to press down on everything; I felt my ego compressed in itself, and I felt like a withered dwarf.... Shortly before 13:00 I escaped the more and more oppressing atmosphere of the company in the studio, in which we only hindered one another reciprocally from unfolding completely into the inebriation. I sat down in a small, empty room, on the floor, with my back to the wall, and saw through the only window on the narrow frontage opposite me a bit of gray– white cloudy sky. This, like the whole environment in general, appeared to be hopelessly normal at this moment. I was dejected, and my self seemed so repulsive and hateful to me that I had not dared (and on this day even had actually repeatedly desperately avoided) to look in a mirror or in the face of another person. I very much wished this inebriation were finally finished, but it still had my body totally in its possession. I imagined that I perceived, deep within its stubborn oppressive weight, how it held my limbs surrounded with a hundred polyp arms—yes, I actually experienced this in a mysterious rhythm; electrified contacts, as of a real, indeed imperceptible, but sinister omnipresent being, which I addressed with a loud voice, reviled, bid, and challenged to open combat. "It is only the projection of evil in your self," another voice assured me. "It is your soul monster!" This perception was like a flashing sword. It passed through me with redeeming sharpness. The polyp arms fell away from me—as if cut through—and simultaneously the hitherto dull and gloomy gray-white of the sky behind the open window suddenly scintillated like sunlit water. As I stared at it so enchanted, it changed (for me!) to real water: a subterranean spring overran me, which had ruptured there all at once and now boiled up toward me, wanted to become a storm, a lake, an ocean, with millions and millions of drops—and on all of these drops, on every single one of them, the light danced.... As the room, window, and sky came back into my consciousness (it was 13:25 hours), the inebriation was certainly not at an end—not yet—but its rearguard, which passed by me during the ensuing two hours, very much resembled the rainbow that follows the storm.

Both the estrangement from the environment and the estrangement from the individual body, experienced in both of the preceding experiments described by Gelpke—as well as the feeling of an alien being, a demon, seizing possession of oneself—are features of LSD inebriation that, in spite of all the other diversity and variability of the experience, are cited in most research reports. I have already described the possession by the LSD

demon as an uncanny experience in my first planned self-experiment. Anxiety and terror then affected me especially strongly, because at that time I had no way of knowing that the demon would again release his victim.

The adventures described in the following report, by a painter, belong to a completely different type of LSD experience. This artist visited me in order to obtain my opinion about how the experience under LSD should be understood and interpreted. He feared that the profound transformation of his personal life, which had resulted from his experiment with LSD, could rest on a mere delusion. My explanation—that LSD, as a biochemical agent, only triggered his visions but had not created them and that these visions rather originated from his own soul—gave him confidence in the meaning of his transformation.

LSD Experience of a Painter

. . . Therefore I traveled with Eva to a solitary mountain valley. Up there in nature, I thought it would be particularly beautiful with Eva. Eva was young and attractive.

Twenty years older than she, I was already in the middle of life. Despite the sorrowful consequences that I had experienced previously, as a result of erotic escapades, despite the pain and the disappointments that I inflicted on those who loved me and had believed in me, I was drawn again with irresistible power to this adventure, to Eva, to her youth. I was under the spell of this girl. Our affair indeed was only beginning, but I felt this seductive power more strongly than ever before. I knew that I could no longer resist. For the second time in my life I was again ready to desert my family, to give up my position, to break all bridges. I wanted to hurl myself uninhibitedly into this lustful inebriation with Eva. She was life, youth. Over again it cried out in me, again and again to drain the cup of lust and life until the last drop, until death and perdition. Let the Devil fetch me later on! I had indeed long ago done away with God and the Devil. They were for me only human inventions, which came to be utilized by a skeptical, unscrupulous minority, in order to suppress and exploit a believing, naive majority. I wanted to have nothing to do with this mendacious social moral. To enjoy, at all costs, I wished to enjoy et après nous le deluge. "What is wife to me, what is child to me—let them go begging, if they are hungry." I also perceived the institution of marriage as a social lie. The marriage of my parents and marriages of my acquaintances seemed to confirm that sufficiently for me.

Couples remained together because it was more convenient; they were accustomed to it, and "yes, if it weren't for the children . . ." Under the pretense of a good marriage, each tormented the other emotionally, to the point of rashes and stomach ulcers, or each went his own way. Everything in me rebelled against the thought of having to love only one and the same woman a life long. I frankly perceived that as repugnant and unnatural.

Thus stood my inner disposition on that portentous summer evening at the mountain lake.

At seven o'clock in the evening both of us took a moderately strong dose of LSD, some 0.1 milligrams. Then we strolled along about the lake and then sat on the bank. We threw stones in the water and watched the forming wave circles. We felt a slight inner restlessness. Around eight o'clock we entered the hotel lounge and ordered tea and sandwiches. Some guests still sat there, telling jokes and laughing loudly. They winked at us. Their eyes sparkled strangely. We felt strange and distant and had the feeling that they would notice something in us. Outside it slowly became dark. We decided only reluctantly to go to our hotel room. A street without lights led along the black lake to the distant guest house. As I switched on the light, the granite staircase, leading from the shore road to the house, appeared to flame up from step to step. Eva quivered all at once, frightened. "Hellish" went through my mind, and all of a sudden horror passed through my limbs, and I knew: now it's going to turn out badly. From afar, from the village, a clock struck nine.

Scarcely were we in our room, when Eva threw herself on the bed and looked at me with wide eyes. It was not in the least possible to think of love. I sat down on the edge of the bed and held both of Eva's hands. Then came the terror. We sank into a deep, indescribable horror, which neither of us understood.

"Look in my eyes, look at me," I implored Eva, yet again and again her gaze was averted from me, and then she cried out loud in terror and trembled all over her body.

There was no way out. Outside was only gloomy night and the deep, black lake. In the public house all the lights were extinguished; the people had probably gone to sleep.

What would they have said if they could see us now? Possibly they would summon the police, and then everything would become still much worse. A drug scandal—intolerable agonizing thoughts.

We could no longer move from the spot. We sat there surrounded by four wooden walls whose board joints shone infernally. It became more unbearable all the time.

Suddenly the door was opened and "something dreadful" entered. Eva cried out wildly and hid herself under the bed covers. Once again a cry. The horror under the covers was yet worse. "Look straight in my eyes!" I called to her, but she rolled her eyes back and forth as though out of her mind. She is becoming insane, I realized. In desperation I seized her by the hair so that she could no longer turn her face away from me. I saw dreadful fear in her eyes. Everything around us was hostile and threatening, as if everything wanted to attack us in the next moment. You must protect Eva, you must bring her through until morning, then the effects will discontinue, I said to myself. Then again, however, I plunged into nameless horror. There was no more time or reason; it seemed as if this condition would never end.

The objects in the room were animated to caricatures; everything on all sides sneered scornfully. I saw Eva's yellow-black striped shoes, which I had found so stimulating, appearing as two large, evil wasps crawling on the floor. The water piping above the washbasin changed to a dragon head, whose eyes, the two water taps, observed me malevolently. My first name, George, came into my mind, and all at once I felt like Knight George, who must fight for Eva.

Eva's cries tore me from these thoughts. Bathed in perspiration and trembling, she fastened herself to me. "I am thirsty," she moaned. With great effort, without releasing Eva's hand, I succeeded in getting a glass of water for her. But the water seemed slimy and viscous, was poisonous, and we could not quench our thirst with it. The two night-table lamps glowed with a strange brightness, in an infernal light. The clock struck twelve.

This is hell, I thought. There is indeed no Devil and no demons, and yet they were perceptible in us, filled up the room, and tormented us with unimaginable terror.

Imagination, or not? Hallucinations, projections?—insignificant questions when confronted with the reality of fear that was fixed in our bodies and shook us: the fear alone, it existed. Some passages from Huxley's book The Doors of Perception came to me and brought me brief comfort. I looked at Eva, at this whimpering, horrified being in her torment, and felt great remorse and pity. She had become strange to me; I scarcely recognized her any longer. She wore a fine golden chain around her neck with the medallion of the Virgin Mary. It was a gift from her younger brother. I noticed how a benevolent, comforting radiation, which was connected with pure love, emanated from this necklace. But then the terror broke loose again, as if to our final destruction. I needed my whole strength to constrain Eva. Loudly I heard the electrical meter ticking weirdly outside of the door, as if it wanted to make a most important, evil, devastating announcement to me in the next moment. Disdain, derision, and malignity again whispered out of all nooks and crevices. There, in the midst of this agony, I perceived the ringing of cowbells from afar as a wonderful, promising music. Yet soon it became silent again, and renewed fear and dread once again set in. As a drowning man hopes for a rescuing plank, so I wished that the cows would yet again want to draw near the house.

But everything remained quiet, and only the threatening tick and hum of the current meter buzzed round us like an invisible, malevolent insect.

Morning finally dawned. With great relief I noticed how the chinks in the window shutters lit up. Now I could leave Eva to herself; she had quieted down. Exhausted, she closed her eyes and fell asleep. Shocked and deeply sad, I still sat on the edge of the bed.

Gone was my pride and self– assurance; all that remained of me was a small heap of misery. I examined myself in the mirror and started: I had become ten years older in the course of the night. Downcast, I stared at the light of the night-table lamp with the hideous shade of intertwined plastic cords. All at once the light seemed to become brighter, and in the plastic cords it began to sparkle and to twinkle; it glowed like diamonds and gems of all colors, and an overwhelming feeling of happiness welled up in me. All at once, lamp, room, and Eva disappeared, and I found myself in a wonderful, fantastic landscape. It was comparable to the interior of an immense Gothic church nave, with infinitely many columns and Gothic arches. These consisted, however, not of stone, but rather of crystal. Bluish, yellowish, milky, and clearly transparent crystal columns surrounded me like trees in an open forest. Their points and arches became lost in dizzying heights. A bright light appeared before my inner eye, and a wonderful, gentle voice spoke to me out of the light. I did not hear it with my external ear, but rather perceived it, as if it were clear thoughts that arise in one.