I am here because I want to tell you about my own experience, and am worried that without sufficient understanding and sympathy for personal experience laws will be passed that are so rigid that they will cause more harm than the new LSD that they try to regulate. But with some sympathy, and if possible, kindness and understanding, it might be possible for all of us to get together and work out the riddle of LSD as it is approaching our society.
I hope that whatever prejudgment you may have of me or my bearded image you can suspend so that we can talk together as fellow beings in the same room of now, trying to come to some harmony and peacefulness between us. I am a little frightened to present myself, the fear of your rejection of me, the fear of not being tranquil enough to reassure you that we can talk together, make sense, and perhaps even like each other—enough to want not to offend, or speak in a way which is abrupt or hard to understand.
I am 40 years old now, a poet, this year with the status of Guggenheim Foundation fellow. I graduated from Columbia College, curiously enough, and had a practical career in market research before I went to writing full time. When I was 22 I had a crucial experience—what is called a visionary experience, or “esthetic” experience—without drugs—that deepened my life. William James’ classic American book Varieties of Religious Experience describes similar happenings to people’s consciousness. What happened to me amazed me—the whole universe seemed to wake up alive and full of intelligence and feeling. It was like a definite break in ordinary consciousness, lasted intermittently a week; then disappeared and left me vowing one thing—never to forget what I’d seen.
Now maybe that doesn’t seem important, surely it’s “subjective.” But remember we are not machines, impersonal “objective” figures. We are subject, person, most of all we are feeling—we are alive, and this aliveness that we all know in ourselves is just that feeling of individual, unique, sensitive person. And this nation was made to be an association of such persons, and our democracy was framed to be a social structure where maximum development of individual person was to be encouraged.
I am taking the word from our prophet, Walt Whitman. This is the tradition of the Founding Fathers, this is the true myth of America, this is the prophecy of our most loved thinkers—Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman. That each man is a great universe in himself; this is the great value of America that we call freedom.
Now in the twentieth century we have entered into a sort of science fiction space age: massive overpopulation on the planet, the possibility of planetary war and death, as in Buck Rogers, like a Biblical apocalypse, a network of electronic intercommunication which reaches and conditions our thoughts and feelings to each other, spaceships which leave earth, loss of our natural green surroundings in concrete cities filled with smoke, accelerating technology homogenizing our characters and experience. All this is inevitable, especially since presumably we have come to value material extensions of ourselves, and don’t want to give those up.
We all know and complain about the drawbacks; a feeling of being caught in a bureaucratic machine which is not built to serve some of our deepest personal feelings. A machine which closes down on our senses, reduces our language and thoughts to uniformity, reduces our sources of inspiration and fact to fewer and fewer channels—as TV does—and monopolizes our attention with secondhand imagery—packaged news, and we are having it packaged now, and entertainment hours a day—and doesn’t really satisfy our deeper needs for communication with each other—healthy personal adventure in environment where we have living contact with each other in the flesh, the human universe we are built to enjoy and grow in.
Maybe you already know about experiments with infant children’s absolute need for contact with living bodies. If babies are totally isolated from human touch, warmth, contact, caressing, physical love, various studies have shown that they turn idiot or die. They have no life to turn to, react to, relate to. Human contact is built into our nature as a material need as strong as food, it is not an esthetic desire, it is not a fancy idea, it is an absolute fact of our existence, we can’t survive without it. And this gives us an idea of what we all need, even all of us in this room grown up. We can’t treat each other only as objects, categories of citizens, role players, big names, small names, objects of research or legislation—we can’t treat each other as things lacking feeling, lacking sympathy. Our humanity would atrophy, cripple and die—want to die. Because life without feeling is just more “thing,” more inhuman universe. There is certainly one thing we can all agree on, we all want to feel good, we don’t want to feel bad basically.
What I am trying to do is articulate the common body of feeling that we all have together in this room, and I hope you will not reject my feelings of wanting mutual friendliness and communication here now—scared as my feelings are to make themselves known to you.
I had just begun to explain a vision that I once had, and immediately feared your dismissal of the idea of someone coming up in Congress and saying, “I had a vision 20 years ago,” something so personal and nonobjective I want to explain why that very personal thing has a place here now.
The LSD experience is also a personal experience that can be listened to with sympathy. Then we can make up our mind how to act on it, how far it feels all right to go along with it, how far it feels bad to go along. Please follow my presentation as long as it feels all right to you.
After having had a sort of vision, as I called it, I later took some peyote, the Indian cactus, in my house in Paterson, in the presence of my family. They didn’t know the changed state of mind I was in—I watched them with new eyes—a family argument became extraordinarily sad, it seemed that they were as lost, or isolated, as I was, from the depth of my strangeness, watching them. I found that speaking to them tenderly pleased them, and drew us closer. Most of the day I spent in the backyard watching the cherry tree in bloom, and writing down my observations of the blue sky as seen through changed eyes—that day the openness of the sky seemed oddly like what it was—a giant place in which I was on a planet. So this is an area of consciousness that psychedelic drugs bring to awareness.
Now, this kind of feeling is natural to us, but because of stereotypes of habit and business and overactivity and political anxiety we have been conditioned to put these feelings off. How deeply these feelings had been buried in me is measured by the fact that the first vision I had, and the peyote vision, felt so strange and familiar as if from another lifetime, that I thought they were eternal—like the myths of all religions, like the graceful appearance of divine presence, as if a god suddenly made himself in my old weekly New York universe. So that I used the word “vision” when it might be better to say I had come back to myself.
Where did I come back from? A world of thoughts, mental fantasies, schemes, words in my head, political or artistic concepts—mostly a world where language itself, or thoughts about reality, replaced my looking out on the actual place I was in, and the people there with me, with all our feelings together. A world where, for instance, you can look at death on television and not feel much or see much, only a familiar image like a movie.
I took peyote a few times again. It is nauseating and difficult for me to hold it down, and there is always a thrill of fear at returning to a larger, more detailed world than the normal mind—a world where I became conscious of being a brain and intestines and mysterious sensations called Allen Ginsberg, a lonely heart also, a world at war with itself, with unresolved conflict and fear leading to massacre between nations and neighboring races, a world which has police states, and my own nation engaged in war as well.
In 1955 I wrote a poem describing this, a text which is now taught in many universities—a central part of the poem called “Howl” was written while I was in a state of consciousness altered, or enlarged, if you will accept that, by peyote. I have the poem here and will leave it with the committee if it wishes.
The second part of the poem “Howl” was written under the influence of peyote in San Francisco.
In succeeding years I experimented with mescaline, not often, once in a while, once every few years. In 1959 I took LSD twice under controlled experimental circumstances at Stanford University. I wrote a single poem on each drug, while still high, trying to articulate the insights that appeared. I tried to keep track and make public communicable record of those moments—and continued in South America where I had the opportunity of living for a month and working with a curandero, that is an herb doctor, who used a psychedelic vine ayahuasca, the Latin name is banisteriopsis caapi, in weekly meetings with members of his community.
Use of this drug has been common for centuries all over the Amazon area, and appropriate traditions for institutionalizing the experience and integrating it into community life have been worked out so that there is minimum anxiety and little incidence of stress breakdown caused by sudden changes of feelings of the self. This is possible in some cultures, with the psychedelic “mind-manifesting,” drugs. Peaceful tribes, savage tribes, the headhunters, use it as well as the Chauma, a calm, peaceful, group.
One effect I experienced in Peru I would like to explain, for what it is worth in your consideration. From childhood I had been mainly shut off from relationships with women—possibly due to the fact that my own mother, was, from my early childhood on, in a state of great suffering, frightening to me, and had finally died in a mental hospital.
In a trance state I experienced in the curandero’s hut a very poignant memory of my mother’s self, and how much I had lost in my distance from her, and my distance from other later friendly girls—for I had denied most of my feeling to them, out of old fear. And this tearful knowledge that had come up while my mind was opened through the native vine’s effect did make some change—toward greater trust and closeness with all women thereafter. The human universe became more complete for me—my own feelings more complete—and that is a value which I hope you all understand and approve.
I also had had “trips”—sensations of fear, much like the feeling in nightmares—mainly the realization that one day I was going to die, and was not ready to give myself up. Later I traveled to India and sought out respectable yogis and holy men and brought my fears to them, and was reassured by their attitude of tenderness to the living community, and their attitude toward visions—“If you see something horrible, don’t cling to it; if you see something beautiful, don’t cling to it.” So said Dudjom Rinpoche a head of the Nyingmapa sect of Tibetan Buddhism, a celebrated group which practices intensive visionary meditation. “Your own heart is your teacher” one Swami, the famous Shivananda, advised.
I had not taken LSD for several years by now, and no longer wanted to pursue self-realization through drug means, but rather through trust in my own heart’s feelings. By 1965 I felt secure enough from death anxiety and last fall went to a secluded place on the Pacific Ocean coast to see what I would feel with LSD again.
I was sympathetic to the Berkeley Vietnam Day march students, who were preparing for their demonstrations at that time, and there was great anxiety in the air. There was a great deal of hostility, too—the nation was not as understanding or sympathetic to political dissent that season as it is now. We were all confused, the Oakland police, the marchers, the nation itself—many angry marchers blamed the President for the situation we were in in southeast Asia; I did, too.
The day I took LSD was the same day that President Johnson went into the operating room for his gall bladder illness. As I walked in the forest wondering what my feelings toward him were, and what I would have to say in Berkeley next week—the awesome place I was in impressed me with its old tree and ocean cliff majesty. Many tiny jeweled violet flowers along the path of a living brook that looked like Blake’s illustration for a canal in grassy Eden; hug Pacific watery shore.
I saw a friend dancing long haired before giant green waves, under cliffs of titanic nature that Wordsworth described in his poetry, and a great yellow sun veiled with mist hanging over the planet’s ocean horizon.
Armies at war on the other side of the planet. Berkeley’s Vietnam protesters sadly preparing manifestoes for our march toward Oakland police and Hell’s Angels, and the President in the valley of the shadow—himself experiencing what fear or grief?
I realized that more vile words for me would send out negative vibrations into the atmosphere—more hatred amassed against his poor flesh and soul on trial. So I knelt on the sand surrounded by masses of green kelp washed up by a storm, and prayed for President Johnson’s tranquil health. Certainly more public hostility would not help him or me or anyone come through to some less rigid and more flexible awareness of ourselves or Vietnam.
On the second Vietnam Day march that November the public image of a violent clash between students and Hell’s Angels escalated in everybody’s minds—like a hallucination. That is, the extremists among the marchers saw the Hell’s Angels as swastika brown shirts. Hell’s Angels mistook the Berkeley students for Communists, because that is what it said in some papers. The newspapers were excited and reported everybody readying for a massacre. Paranoia everywhere, some marchers thought the Oakland police would back the Angels.
Actually the majority of marchers appreciated the Hell’s Angels as romantic space-age cowboys. We got together for debate at San Jose College and the majority of students there in the cafeteria actually called for violence, voted aloud their hope that marchers’ blood would be spilled.
The Hell’s Angels chief diplomatically vowed not to begin violence and to obey police. But this wasn’t reported in the newspapers, and the violent image of the Angels had to live up to was resistance in case of violence. Two days before the march nobody knew what to expect.
At this point, Ken Kesey—a man whom you may have heard of as a major contemporary novelist—who lives near San Francisco and sympathized with both marchers and Angels, intervened. We all had a party at the Hell’s Angels house. Most everybody took some LSD, and we settled down to discussing the situation and listening to Joan Baez on the phonograph, and chanting Buddhist prayers.
We were all awed by the communication possible—everybody able to drop their habitual image for the night and feel more common unity than conflict. And the evening ended with understanding that nobody really wanted violence; and there was none on the day of the march. The LSD was not the whole story—there was desire for communion and fear of endless isolation—but LSD helped break down the fear barrier.
Now I would like to address myself to the social riddles proposed by LSD. If we want to discourage use of LSD for altering our attitudes, we will have to encourage such changes in our society that nobody will need it to break through to common sympathy. And now so many people have experienced some new sense of openness, and lessening of prejudice and hostility to new experience through LSD, that I think we may expect the new generation to push for an environment less rigid, mechanical, less dominated by cold war habits. A new kind of light has rayed through our society—despite all the anxiety it has caused—maybe these hearings are a manifestation of that slightly changed awareness. I would not have thought it possible to speak like this a year ago. That we are more open to hear each other is the new consciousness itself; reveal one’s vision to a congressional committee.
So I have spoken about myself and given you my direct experience of psychedelics under different conditions; in my family house, in formal research setting, in South American Indian traditional ceremonies, in solitude at the ocean. I accept the evidence of my own sense that, with psychedelics as catalysts, I have seen the world more deeply at specific times. And that has made me more peaceable.
Now I would like to offer some data to calm the anxiety that LSD is some awful mind-bending monster threat which must be kept under lock and key. There are three main ideas I would like to clarify for the committee:
1. There has been a journalistic panic exaggeration of LSD danger.
2. There is negligible danger to healthy people in trying LSD and comparatively little danger to most mentally sick people, according to what statistics we already have.
3. Research already has verified the appearance of religious or transcendental or serious blissful experience through psychedelics, and government officials would be wise to take this factor into account and treat LSD use with proper humanity and respect.
Footnote 1. The 1966 case that imprinted fear in most people’s minds was that of a 5-year-old Brooklyn girl who accidentally swallowed a sugar cube left in the icebox. First, here is a quote from a reliable, authoritative medical document saying flatly that nobody dies from LSD. Next a highly hysterical and inaccurate version of the story in the New York Post. Then a follow-up story 24 hours later which continued to exaggerate the terror and death fear. Last, a week later in the New York Telegram and Sun giving the actual facts—the little girl began to “behave normally again within hours.”
The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics, ed. Louis S. Goodman, MA, MD, (chairman, department of pharmacology, University Utah College of Medicine) and Alfred Gilman, Ph.D., (chairman, department of pharmacology, Einstein College of Medicine, New York) Macmillan Co., New York, third edition, 1965, page 207 Toxicity of LSD: “In no man, no deaths directly attributable to the drug are known. . . . “
That is a flat statement. That was the information available to everybody including the newspaper reporters at the time that this story was reported.
The New York Post of April 6, 1966, Wednesday, no byline:
Girl, 5, Eats LSD And Goes “Wild”
A 5-year-old Brooklyn girl, et cetera . . . people who have swallowed LSD went berserk. Some have killed—several deaths have been reported, sometimes because of the toxic effect of the drug and sometimes because of the hallucinations that lead to suicide.
New York Post, April 7, 1966, Thursday:
LSD Girl, 5, Clinging To Life
(By Ralph Blumenfield)
Five-year-old Donna Wingenroth fought for life today after swallowing an LSD-coated sugar cube she found in the family refrigerator. The blond little Brooklyn girl was reported still in “very critical” condition 18 hours after doctors pumped her stomach and treated her for convulsions at Kings County Hospital . . . said a Kings County Hospital aid, not a doctor . . . “Right now it is at the grave or serious state . . . very critical. Silent and in an apparent coma, her face pale and drawn. Glucose was being fed intravenously into her right arm and both wrists were tied to the crib-bars with gauze so she could not thrash about.”
New York World Telegram and Sun, April 14, 1966, Thursday:
LSD Girl Home, Condition Seems Normal
(By Lynn Minton)
. . . was released from Kings County Hospital in apparently normal condition . . . Donna began to behave normally again within hours after her arrival at Kings County, according to Morris Kelsky, assistant hospital administrator. Despite this she was placed on the critical list. She was kept under close observation by pediatricians and neurologists to test her reflexes and all her functions before she was released . . . Kelsky explained that cases of accidental poisoning of children are not rare at the hospital . . . Candy-flavored children’s aspirin is one of the biggest dangers, said Dr. Achs . . . “We have had several deaths a year in this community from children’s aspirin.”
I think that these quotations speak for themselves as to how all of us were imprinted with a death fear, and through the use of an inaccurate language in dealing with a deplorable situation that the girl had had LSD accidentally and was suffering from a sense of consciousness that needed care, tenderness, reassurance, understanding, not the hysteria with which it was treated.
The key thing with LSD is that a hostile environment precipitates psychosis. A friendly environment cuts down the anxiety and cuts down the psychosis. So we have now to deal with statistics on breakdown through the use of LSD, which is crucial, because in reading earlier statements to this committee, Mr. Tannenbaum’s statement, I come across language like this:
One of the most common recurrent reactions to LSD is the psychotic breakdown.
There is no evidence that all users of LSD become temporarily insane.
The reason I am quoting that is to put these generalizations in the language used here in relation to the actual statistical information that we do have so far.
One of the main causes of medical and legislative worry, (particularly in New York State where legislation was taken without any kind of hearings on the actual scientific or sociological implications of LSD or the actual facts of the situation) have been reports issued on Bellevue LSD “psychosis” via the New York County Medical Society’s report of May 5, 1966, and auxiliary papers detailing a few case histories in the New England Journal of Medicine.
New York County Medical Society report:
Seventy-five people in 12 months admitted to Bellevue with “acute psychoses induced by LSD.” Most “recovered within a week. Five remained in mental hospitals a longer time.”
I would like to comment on the presuppositions of the language used and on the statistics.
As some schools of psychiatry are aware, a “flip-out” (here termed acute psychosis) may be a basically positive experience if rightly handled. This means there is a breakthrough of new awareness, temporary social disorientation as a result, and an “up-leveled” reorientation to slightly richer awareness with more variable flexible social role-playing as a result. Some of the hospitalized may qualify for this description. I have spoken to a few of those who were in Bellevue and who did feel positive about the whole experience.
And laws witch-hunting use of LSD will have the inevitable result of increasing the number of marginal “psychoses” attributable to LSD. The social anxiety caused by illegalization will enter the environmental setting and influence LSD experimenters to greater traumatic disorientation than normal under LSD influence. The answer to marginal dangers of experimentation would be for Bellevue or some other place to serve its purpose as a temporary comfortable reassuring haven where people with LSD-consciousness anxiety could come to be protected and encouraged to healthy reintegration of their self-awareness, and not labeled “psychotic.”
There are no real figures on LSD taking, it might be anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 in 12 months in New York City according to Dr. Donald B. Louria of the New York Medical Society, probably a great deal more. Above figures average perhaps one breakdown in a thousand users; it is a speculative, uncontrolled survey by New York County Medical Society. The incidence of semipermanent breakdown may be lower than liquor-drinking, auto-driving, and marriage, much less war-making, or any business activity where a healthy amount of stress is encountered.
Footnote 2. Here are some more authoritative statements on LSD breakdown:
Cohen, Sidney, M.D.: The Beyond Within. Atheneum, New York, 1964, pages 210-211 says:
Major or prolonged psychological complications were almost never described in the group of experimental subjects who had been selected for their freedom from mental disturbances . . . When patients were given these drugs for therapeutic purposes, however, the untoward reactions were somewhat more frequent. Prolonged psychotic states occurred in 1 out of every 550 individuals. These breakdowns happened to individuals who were already emotionally ill: some had sustained schizophrenic breaks in the past.
Digest of Cohen’s giant survey in R.E.O. Masters and Jean Houston book, called Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, Holt, New York, 1966, note 23, page 319 says:
Cohen, S., “Lysergic Acid Diethylamide: Side Effects and Complications,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disorders, 130: 30, 1960. Cohen’s report is based on 5,000 LSD and mescaline subjects who received the drugs 25,000 times, LSD dosages. In other words, some of them have high dosages, that are mythologically reputed to be absolutely damaging, though they are not actually. Among experimental subjects there were no suicide attempts and psychotic reactions lasting longer than 48 hours were met with in only 0.8/1000 of the cases. In patients undergoing therapy the rates were, attempted suicide, 1.2/1000, completed suicide: 0.4/1000; psychotic reaction over 48 hours: 1.8/1000.
Then we have another statement which I saw in the New Republic magazine, May 14, 1966, by one who I presume is authoritative. He works for the investigational drug branch of the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Lescek Ochota, M.D., D.S.C.:
The suicide rate (in investigational group) has been reported as 0.1 percent, a remarkably low rate considering that LSD has been usually given to the rather severely ill patients including chronic alcoholics, neurotics, psychopaths, drug addicts, et cetera.
Even after reviewing 1,000 medical publications, surveying all of the literature and there is an immense mass of literature already accumulated, the author was unable to confirm reports that a psychosis can develop in a hitherto mentally healthy individual several months after his last LSD intake.
Questions then I propose to the committee for its thought and for research by the government: What is the suicide rate among the mentally ill who don’t try LSD? What is the suicide rate of the average population? Does LSD significantly affect these rates in fact?
Or may it possibly turn out, and I have no idea, this is something I think we could begin thinking about, is it possible that the suicide rate for mentally ill people who have taken LSD is lower than the suicide rates for mentally ill people who have not taken LSD?
Is it ecstasy or is it bunk, the reports of the LSD consciousness state? It plainly shows a lack of friendly commonsense for the head of an agency charged with responsibility for licensing experiments with LSD to dismiss reports of its startling religious, or if we want to use the word peak experience, or another word, transcendental, or another word, esthetic effects as “pure bunk.” I saw that in the New York Times yesterday, a government official whose work I respect incidentally, but who I feel has not read sufficiently the literature or spoken perhaps to people who have had experience with LSD said that he thought that reports of visionary or religious experience were pure bunk, and I believe that that was repeated before one of the congressional committees.
I repeat, I recommend that those responsible for legislation and administration consider the myriad documents that have accumulated since Havelock Ellis and William James researched in the last century.
Here follows a summary of recent surveys in the book by Masters and Houston, Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, which came out this year [1966]:
Taken altogether these findings must be regarded as remarkable in the five studies just cited between 32 and 75 percent of psychedelic subjects will report religious-type experiences if the setting is supportive, that means friendly, and in a setting providing religious stimuli, from 75 to 90 percent report experiences of a religious or even mystical nature.
The studies cited were—I have listed a series of very legitimate proper studies, one done for the Rand Corp.; one done by Timothy Leary. That may be questionable scientifically if anybody continues to insist on questioning Leary’s experience, which is considerable in the matter, but also there are studies that were printed in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, and a paper delivered at a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in St. Louis. I have got these listed for your reference.
Exhibit No. 76
Suggested Aspects of Creative Research on LSD
Informal conversations with two dozen MD’s who had done clinical experimental and exploratory work with LSD and other psychedelic chemicals have articulated the following suggestions for formal research. Some were characterized as logical research needs, others as likely areas for study according to classical traditions of normal intelligent scientific curiosity. The language here used to characterize these possible aspects of creative research is informal, the points made are not fixed points but suggestions for consideration.
(1) A giant voluntary study of all persons who have taken LSD, with no shadow of punitive anxiety attached to the research: scientific inquiry into the statistics, subjective reports of the experience, post-experience intelligence and psychological testings to be compared with pre-experience school testing data commonly available, comparative evaluations of statistics on “bad” trips and “good” trips, inquiry into the quality of the trip matched with circumstantial environment, detailed surveys of indifferent or “good” trips matching already heavily emphasized analyses of “bad” trips, etc. It is generally claimed that non-medical (and medical) usefulness of LSD is neither “proved” or “unproved”; statistics and data should therefore be gathered from the massive numbers of people who have experimented with LSD in the last decades.
(2) Enlarged systematic research on efficacy of LSD with dying patients.
(3) Enlarged systematic research on efficacy of LSD against alcoholism.
(4) Research on LSD effects on psychosomatic ills.
(5) Research on LSD influence on problems of obesity.
(6) Research on usefulness of LSD to break up depression states.
(7) Research on usefulness of LSD with autistic children.
(8) Research on usefulness of LSD against opiate addiction and other psychochemical addictions.
(9) Massive research on efficacy of LSD use with neurotics in psychotherapeutic situations (which research on the part of individual MD’s is now effectively forbidden).
(10) Research on efficacy or non-efficacy of LSD use with neurotics in non-psychotherapeutic situations.
(11) Research into classification of personality types, mental illnesses and other human characteristics in terms of LSD drug reactions.
(12) Research on LSD influence on problems of homosexuality in psychotherapeutic circumstances.
(13) Research on usefulness of LSD experience in preventing psychic crises leading to hospitalization. (i.e. how many who had been in hospitals took LSD and then did not go back to hospitals?)
(14) Depth evaluation of recorded LSD breakdown statistics by case to determine—
(a) Was total experience positive and creative or negative and destructive in actual context? and by hindsight?
(b) To what extent was hospitalization during or after LSD stress the “elegant” acting out of prior wish for psychotherapeutic help? (The word “elegant” here used was suggested by the head of a hospital in Long Island.)
(15) Research on statistics of “breakdown” where LSD is taken freely and legally compared to circumstances where its use is illegal: i.e. research on the imagery, sensations, and psychic effects caused by illegalization of LSD.
(16) Massive research on social conditions, tradition, ritual, terminology, effects, medical data, etc. of American Indians in their use of psychedelic cactus peyote; and projections of possibilities for adapting Indian traditional forms to other American subcultures. In other words, research into safe forms of social-institutional use of psychedelics.
(17) Research into chemistry, metabolic changes and subjective phenomenology of LSD experience as compared with experience of weightlessness, sensory deprivation, space-travel, dance, chanting, yoga, religious ritual practice, drowning visions, progressive relaxation, hypnosis, starvation states, Amerindian vision-questing, sleeplessness, and stroboscope stimulation of alpha-rhythms, etc.
(18) Research into the practicality or non-practicality, value or valueless-ness, of such Utopian LSD communities (aside from Amerindian) already come into being as available models for study: Neo-American Church, Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters Community, Dr. T. Leary’s Millbrook Research Center, and the mutual help communities already evolved informally in Midwest campuses, etc.
(19) Depth research and evaluation of commonly observed LSD effect of “impairment of socially learned behavior.” Is this due to changed motive, and is this change of motive creatively valid or not? Are we, in effect, in regulating LSD actually regulating value judgments? What are the consequences (as far as social scientists and psychotherapists can determine) of authoritative regulation of value-judgments?
(20) Comparative study and correlation of language and attitudes used by various social groups according to their roles in reacting to LSD experience directly and indirectly: Legislators, police, psychoanalysts with experimental experience, psychoanalysts without experimental experience, anthropologists, artists, newsmen, theologians, Marxists (re Dr. Jiri Roubichek’s language in Prague, “LSD inhibits conditioned reactions”), college administrators, FDA chiefs, Indians, culture morphologists, musicians, painters, cinéasts. Correlation would be useful in determining whether terminology used by different groups coincided in any respect, and in what respects differ, from categorization of the event under survey, namely the effect of LSD.
(21) Straight research and gathering of data in how to handle LSD panic, stress or crisis reaction: “We need research to know what to do when people come in sick, doctors need to be able to work with it to get experience—otherwise it’s hush hush like VD and public and professional ignorance spreads.” Unquote a lady doctor, head of a mid-town Manhattan hospital research section.
Thank you for listening to my paper, which has been very long.
Testimony given: June 14, 1966