Part of the changes within himself that Holmes recorded in his spiral notebook resulted from taking drugs. He was on numerous prescription medications and had told someone later interviewed by the New York Times in October 2012 that he’d experimented with hallucinogens, including LSD (in October 2014 CNN’s Ivan Watson reported that someone else who’d recently been violent, a nineteen-year-old rebel fighter named Kareem, fighting for the Islamic militant group ISIS, was given hallucinogenic drugs before going into battle so that he’d be indifferent to whether he lived or died).
In 1938, Dr. Albert Hofman had synthesized lysergic acid diethylamine—two thousand times stronger than any known psychoactive drug in the United States. Most of the LSD research carried out over the next three decades was funded by the federal government and undertaken within the Army Chemical Corps and the CIA’s Technical Services branch, in programs like “Project MK ULTRA.” Experiments were done on animals and humans until the substance was finally outlawed in 1968, but people had never stopped making and taking it on their own.
Holmes had read about Timothy Leary’s research into LSD and psilocybin in the 1960s. Leary had been an accomplished clinical psychologist at Harvard before the university dismissed him for his experiments with psychedelic drugs. Researchers today know far more about the brain than when Leary was doing hallucinogens, and Holmes had absorbed some of that knowledge in class. He knew, for example, that the frontal lobe continued developing well into one’s early twenties; it was still in a “plastic” state and not yet entirely formed. A recent National Institutes of Health study concluded that the part of the brain that limits risky behavior, like drinking and reckless driving, isn’t completely developed until age twenty-five. Young adults have extra synapses in the areas where risk assessment and decision making occur, and these synapses can impair one’s judgment.
Despite the enormous complexities of introducing artificial chemicals into the brain, Holmes was intrigued by what effects the drug might have on him. What could he learn from ingesting LSD that might be applicable or beneficial to his PhD work in neuroscience or even his future career? Would taking LSD give him insights his classmates didn’t have and an edge in the classroom?
For years, he’d had a penchant for exploring alternative states of consciousness—wanting to tamper with the past or to alter time or to create reality with just his thoughts, as a paraplegic could now do with a robotic hand by merely thinking about something. Could Holmes go into other mental states or know the actual sensation of psychiatric disorders through artificial means? Could he find out what it felt like to be partially insane or schizophrenic by taking a drug? Grad students talked a lot about schizophrenia and other mental illnesses in the classroom, but what if he could experience a semblance of the disorder for himself?
“Most psychotropic stimulants work by mimicking or activating neuro-chemical pathways in the brain,” says a CU professor of neuroscience, who like everyone else at the university had been placed under a gag order following the massacre. (He could only speak on the condition of anonymity and not about any of the specifics of the case.) “LSD can cross all the barriers in the mind and affect all of the chemistry. When this occurs, different circuits start to activate and to change. What’s been under control within the brain and the emotions is no longer controlled. It’s not true that there can’t be long-term effects from this, but every individual responds differently. When you give cocaine to rats, you see permanent effects in their brains.
“The frontal lobe is one emotional center of the brain. It allows you to control and suppress anti-social impulses and behaviors. When you change the chemistry in the frontal lobe, as drugs do, it can alter the personality. This is why doctors used to do frontal lobotomies and why they were so popular for a while. Change the frontal lobe and you really can change someone’s life.
“Some people in neuroscience programs have taken certain stimulants to learn more about them, but this has to be extremely well-controlled. Different drugs have very different effects on different people. There are cultures that use psychotropic drugs for ritualistic purposes, but they do so in a highly controlled environment. Without that, some people can get very sick on these drugs, and they can severely hallucinate, but other people are all right. We simply don’t know enough to make accurate predictions about the consequences of doing these things.
“You can be sure that people in neuroscience have done their own experiments with lots of different drugs, legal and illegal, but they have to be aware of the dangers. In our department, we talk about these substances, and some students want to explore them, but there’s no encouragement of this activity on the part of the faculty.
“It’s just a hypothesis that taking LSD or a derivative would simulate the effects of schizophrenia. Yet it wouldn’t shock me if these drugs are involved in this case. I have no idea what our students do when they leave the campus and go home in the evenings, but it would disappoint me if I felt they were doing this kind of experimentation by themselves. The brain is a fragile thing, especially when you’re young.
“If you take LSD or a combination of anti-depressants and anti-anxiety drugs, or a combination of all of these, you’re affecting multiple pathways in the brain. You can’t predict what will happen or what the effects will be. Just because you’re knowledgeable about how drugs work because you’re in a PhD program doesn’t mean that you’re wise about making decisions.
“If a physician had prescribed Holmes drugs for depression or anxiety, that individual wouldn’t really know what else he was taking, unless he told them, and that’s unlikely if he was using illegal substances. There are some very dangerous drugs out there.”
In the last week of August and the first week of September 2013, three young people in New York and Boston, along with a University of Virginia sophomore, all died from taking Molly (short for a pure “molecule” of Ecstasy, also known as MDMA). Then three more overdosed at a concert on the Boston waterfront. The authorities suspected that a single batch of the synthetic drug had caused these deaths, plus a dozen other overdoses that summer at a nightclub in the Boston suburb of Quincy. The University of Virginia victim, Mary “Shelley” Goldsmith, nineteen, an honors student and sorority member, had taken Molly at a rave concert earlier in the evening. Not just James Holmes, but his entire generation, was experimenting—or being experimented on—with a series of legal and illegal drugs whose immediate and long-term effects were unknown.
From a twenty-six-year-old male in south Texas:
People my age take a lot more drugs than you realize. We take a lot of prescription drugs, like Ritalin and Adderall, and a lot of recreational drugs, like pot and mushrooms and psychedelics. If you know something about expanding the mind, this can be a good experience. But if you don’t, it can be very risky. If you do enough of these drugs, you can get too isolated and to the point where you can only talk to people who’ve done the same drugs.