Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Major Medical Breakthroughs in the Twentieth Century (41 page)

The psychiatric use of LSD remained sporadic until late in 1954, when Thorazine revitalized interest in hallucinogens. For both psycho-pharmacologic research and psychotherapy, LSD required a dependable antidote, and Thorazine became the drug of choice.

Two terms for such psychoactive drugs were introduced. “Psychedelic,” derived from the Greek and meaning “mind-manifesting,” became engraved in the public consciousness. The preferred scientific term is “hallucinogen,” and the effect of such drugs has been eloquently described by Albert Hofmann:

Hallucinogens distinguish themselves from all other psychoactive substances through their extremely profound effects upon the human psyche. They bring about radical psychological changes which are associated with altered experiences of space and time, the most basic categories of human existence. Even the consciousness of one's own corporeality and one's own self may be changed dramatically. Hallucinogens take us to another world, to a type of dream world which is nevertheless experienced as completely real, as even more intense and consequently in some ways more real than the ordinary world of everyday reality. At the same time, if the dosage is not too high, consciousness and memory are retained completely. This is a key distinction between these substances and the opiates and other intoxicants, whose effects are associated with an obscuration of consciousness.
⁶

LSD, replacing mescaline as the leading hallucinogenic drug in psychiatry, was used in various doses to study its effects on creative expression and perception of normal persons or to induce in them “model psychoses” with the goal of revealing what causes schizophrenia. The term
psychotomimetic
(mimicking a psychosis) was adopted for the latter purpose.

Sidney Cohen, a psychiatrist at the Los Angeles Veterans Administration Hospital, tried LSD on himself and subsequently described the results in a series of patients in
The Beyond Within.
⁷
LSD is an immensely powerful psychochemical, one ounce of which would provide a psychedelic experience for 300,000 adults. That the whole brain is involved is clear. One of the most impressive experiences of the drug's influence is synesthesia—the response by one of the senses to a stimulus ordinarily responded to by another of the senses. Albert Hofmann had perceived sound as color. Others were able to taste colors or smell sounds. Some who took the drug felt that they gained striking “insightfulness into themselves, an awareness of their place in the environment, and a sense of order in life.” Cohen recognized, however, that such therapeutic benefits might be short-lived, with a full return of the patient's original crippling neuroses.

In California, the use of small doses of LSD in psychotherapy spread across several private clinics and veterans, state, and county hospitals in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The publicized description of the value of LSD by the film star Cary Grant, who took the drug
more than sixty times after a long period of depression and felt that he had been reborn, was taken as a ringing endorsement at least by the Hollywood community.

With the intensification of sensory perception, an observer could understandably raise questions: Was cognition impaired or was insight deepened? How “real” is the spiritual/mystical/religious effect? Is this what mystics and saints have experienced? Is this a supranormal or abnormal response? The claim of many patients that they had experienced “a higher power,” or “ultimate reality,” raised provocative questions. What of the distinction actress Lily Tomlin makes: “When we talk to God, we're praying. When God talks to us, we're schizophrenic”?

Many of the clinical researchers were themselves taking the drug. The conventional therapeutic community was aghast at what was seen as unprofessionalism, if not outright chicanery. Charges of “bad science” abounded.

According to Dr. Timothy Leary, a onetime Harvard psychologist who became the counterculture's leading guru, LSD would transform America into a spiritual utopia. Leary was the Pied Piper promoting LSD to the pop culture of the 1960s, and his slogan was “Tune in, turn on, drop out.” Appealing to people in their late teens and twenties at a time of great social upheavals—anti–Vietnam War protests, the Free Speech movement, civil rights demonstrations—Leary promised an “ecstasy of revelation.” This recreational drug would recreate. To its adherents, the ordinary became extraordinary.

LSD
AND THE
CIA

The potential use of new mind-control drugs did not escape the attention of the Central Intelligence Agency. Sidney Gottlieb, the director of the agency's chemical division from 1953 to 1972, has gone down in history as the chemist who brought LSD to the CIA in the name of national security. Gottlieb, a slight man with short gray hair and a clubfoot, was a sorcerer-scientist. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, under his direction, the agency gave mind-altering drugs to hundreds of unsuspecting Americans—mental patients, prisoners,
drug addicts, prostitutes—to explore the possibilities of developing a truth serum and of controlling human consciousness. With the Cold War raging, the agency was fearful that the Soviet Union would use LSD as a chemical weapon to disorient enemy forces or that China would employ techniques of brainwashing.

Most of the experiments were administered by various psychology researchers throughout the country through an insidious operation called MKULTRA, funded through front foundations, often in clear violation of human rights.
⁸
In one case, a mental patient in Lexington, Kentucky, was dosed with LSD continuously for 174 days. Other experiments involved CIA employees, military personnel, and college students who either had limited knowledge or were totally unwitting about the tests. At least one participant, an army scientist, thinking he had lost his mind, committed suicide by jumping out of a New York hotel window. Others suffered psychological damage after participating in the project. Some subjects were not told what had been done to them until some twenty years later. Some soldiers sued the CIA, and the case went as far as the U.S. Supreme Court, which rejected their claims on the grounds that soldiers can't sue for injuries that “arise out of or are in the course of activity incident to service.”

A Nice “Trip” from Langley, Virginia

As detailed in
Who Goes First?
by Lawrence K. Altman, self-experimentation is a noble tradition in the history of medicine. Many researchers feel ethically bound to initiate human experiments on themselves with a new drug or procedure. After Albert Hofmann stumbled on and confirmed the hallucinogenic effects of LSD by taking it himself, he did not ever take it again. Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA man who directed the program to give LSD to thousands of unsuspecting people, on the other hand, took it hundreds of times.

When Sandoz in Basel balked at continuing to provide large quantities of LSD for military purposes, the CIA pressured the Eli Lilly
Company of Indianapolis to synthesize the compound, in disregard of international patent accords. In the words of John Marks, author of
The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate,”
the definitive book on the experiments, Gottlieb “never did what he did for inhumane reasons. He thought he was doing exactly what was needed. And in the context of the time, who would argue?”
⁹

By 1972, shortly before he retired, Gottlieb declared the experiments useless. On orders from Richard Helms, the CIA director, the agency in 1973 deliberately destroyed most of the MKULTRA records, according to Gottlieb, because of a “burgeoning paper problem.” After he left the CIA, Gottlieb ran a leper hospital in India and, in his later years, cared for dying patients in a hospice in Virginia, while defending himself against lawsuits from survivors of his secret tests.

The Beatles’ song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” was obviously a lyrical tribute to an LSD trip. However, LSD in unstable personalities resulted in disturbing conditions, described by new terminology: “freaked” (an anxious or panicked state), “bad trip” (a fully psychotic reaction), and “flashback” (recurrence of symptoms a few days or weeks after the initial drug experience).

In June 1963, as established by congressional law, the FDA took control over all investigational drugs, requiring the submission of research projects to the National Institute of Mental Health for its approval. A 1965 report in the
New England Journal of Medicine
called attention to waves of highly disturbed LSD-users showing up in emergency rooms and requiring hospitalization. It urged an end to all LSD research, stating that “there is no published evidence that further experimentation is likely to yield invaluable data.” A year later, America was in the midst of an LSD epidemic. By October 1966, possession of LSD was illegal. In 1970 the Nixon administration secured passage of the Controlled Substances Act, introducing the concept of scheduling, whereby the government establishes a limited range of categories for different levels of drugs (narcotics being one) with corresponding requirements for prescriptions and use. LSD and mescaline were categorized along with narcotics as Schedule I drugs, defined as having no medical use and with a high potential for misuse. However, a lucrative drug operation continued illicitly into the 1970s with laboratories
chemically converting other, legal ergot compounds into LSD. Little wonder that Albert Hofmann called LSD “my problem child.”
¹⁰

As Jay Stevens, author of
Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream,
the definitive work on the political and social history of the drug, put it: “To discover, in the recesses of the mind, something that felt a lot like God, was not a situation that either organized science or organized religion wished to contemplate.”
¹¹

Bewitching or Just Tripping?

Ergot is a fungus that sometimes infects rye and other cereals. It produces alkaloids that when ingested often cause neurological disturbances. They may also result in narrowing of the blood vessels, which sometimes leads to gangrene of the extremities.

Ergotism was the cause of terrible suffering in Europe, particularly during the Middle Ages. In an epidemic of ergotism in Aquitaine in the year 994, as many as 40,000 people are said to have died, most of them peasants. (The affluent were spared because they ate white wheat bread, whereas peasants ate rye and other dark breads.) Another decimated Paris in 1418, killing 50,000 people in one month.
¹²
The symptoms—terrifying hallucinations accompanied by twitching and convulsive contractions (St. Vitus's dance) and a “holy fire” afflicting the extremities with agonizing burning sensations and gangrene—were horrific. In severe cases, the tissues became dry and black, and the mummified limbs broke off without loss of blood. People assumed these were retributions for their sins.

Prayers were offered to St. Anthony, the patron saint with protective powers against fire, infection, and epilepsy. The Order of St. Anthony was founded in 1093, and Antonine monasteries in France became the focus of pilgrimages by sufferers of what came to be known as St. Anthony's Fire. Their hospitals hung the detached limbs above their entrance portals, and it was said that victims could retrieve them at the Last Judgment. The relief that followed visits to the shrine of St. Anthony in the Dauphiné, containing
his relics brought back by Crusaders from the Holy Land, was probably real, since the sufferers received a diet free of contaminated grain during their journey to the shrine.
¹³

It was not until 1670 that ergot was proved to be the cause of the epidemics that had raged for centuries. Oddly enough, the ergot baked in bread dough forms LSD. The action of other fungi may also produce LSD in the natural ergot. The historian Mary Matossian has correlated, over seven centuries, the consumption of rye bread and climatic conditions favorable to the growth of the ergot mold in Europe and America with periods of sporadic outbursts of bizarre behavior and the symptoms of bewitchment.
¹⁴
Her arguments are persuasive.

It now appears likely that the alleged bewitchings that occurred in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 were caused by a relatively mild outbreak of ergotism. From available meteorological records for 1691, the early rains and a warm spring followed by a hot, humid summer formed a weather pattern conducive to the growth of ergot mold on the local rye. In contrast, a drought in 1692 was accompanied by an abrupt cessation of the “epidemic of bewitchings.” These Salem “witches”—nineteen were hanged, one was pressed to death with stones, and two died in prison—like some of the earlier French sufferers of ergot poisoning, were probably just high on acid.

T
HERAPEUTIC
U
SES OF
H
ALLUCINOGENS

After 1970 LSD research came to a virtual standstill for three decades. The stages LSD had gone through generated a profoundly nihilistic attitude among scientists and clinicians. Heralded initially as a scientific tool for unlocking the unconscious, viewed by converts such as Aldous Huxley as a force that could push mankind up the evolutionary ladder, propagated by Timothy Leary and others as leading to a spiritual utopia, then embraced for widespread recreational abuse, LSD use culminated in a mindless cultural revolt with mystical underpinnings.
Psychedelic research was grievously injured by this unwarranted messianism.

Nevertheless, by the turn of the century, researchers in several countries were once again beginning to explore potential therapeutic uses for hallucinogens. Several factors conspired to encourage the trend. Modern psychiatry had come to routinely use psychotropic drugs, which are known to affect the same brain neurotransmitters as do hallucinogens. Hallucinogens enhance the brain's serotonin system, which may be useful in the treatment of phobias, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorders, and substance abuse. Furthermore, techniques to evaluate brain function, neurochemistry, and response to drugs have become more sophisticated.