A Stupefying Story

This summer I found myself presenting my latest book at a dinner attended by the great and good of a section of London’s culture industry: editors of the cultural supplements of newspapers, directors of museums, publishers, and so on. I was asked when it was that my curiosity was sparked to study the things that I write about in the book in question, The Order of Time. I hesitated briefly before deciding to tell the truth. I talked about the experiences I had with LSD when I was a teenager. I thought that I was probably taking a risk, since the subject is still somewhat taboo. The reaction I got was unexpected. One after another during the course of the dinner, people came up to me, smiling, happy to tell me about … the psychedelic journeys that they had gone on, forty years ago.

I was reminded of this when reading Agnese Codignola’s fine book: LSD: From Albert Hofmann to Steve Jobs, from Timothy Leary to Robin Carhart-Harris, the Story of a Stupefying Substance. The title includes a pun: ‘Stupefying’ means ‘amazing, but also ‘psychedelic’. The four names in the title sum up the recent history of psychedelic substances. Albert Hofmann was the Swiss chemist who first synthesized LSD and experienced its effects. In 2007 a global consulting firm placed him first on a list of ‘living geniuses’, together with the inventor of the internet. Timothy Leary is the Harvard psychologist who promoted the use of psychedelics to ‘expand one’s mind’, becoming in the process one of the most noted and controversial figures of the counterculture of the sixties. Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, currently the richest company on the planet, embodies the strong influence that psychedelics had on the world of high technology in Silicon Valley. Jobs has said that ‘taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life’, a phrase that I could echo. Robin Carhart-Harris is a young English neuroscientist who works at Imperial College and who recently obtained important results on the effects of psychedelic drugs upon the brain – results with implications for their potential therapeutic use – causing something of a stir and a renewal of scientific interest in this strange substance.

These four figures represent different phases in the saga of the particular class of drugs to which LSD belongs: psychedelics, or hallucinogens, on account of the intense and lively visual hallucinations that they produce. To the same class of drugs belong mescaline, psilocybin and similar substances present in mushrooms, cacti and other plants used in the religious rituals of various traditional cultures.

Agnese Codignola’s book traces the arc of the impact of LSD on our culture. In the fifties the drug was promoted by celebrities. Cary Grant’s enthusiasm for it remains notorious, the mainstream and clean-cut actor having claimed that it cured his depression. In Italy the drug was publicized passionately by no less than the American ambassador to the country, Clare Boothe Luce. When my parents, worried about their teenage son the ‘drug addict’, sent me to a psychiatrist in Verona to see if the drug had ‘made me mad’, the first thing that the good doctor said to me was that he also ‘had tried LSD’. These were the years in which the Czech psychiatrist Stanislav Grof wrote that psychedelic substances ‘could be for psychiatry what the microscope was for biology and the telescope for astronomy’. Then, at the beginning of the seventies, the use of psychedelics spread through youth culture, provoking alarmed and extreme reactions. Psychedelic substances were soon everywhere made illegal. Timothy Leary was given a thirty-year prison sentence. Scientific research into these substances was completely blocked, everywhere in the world.

Today, fifty years later, we are beginning to talk about the subject again, and the scientific world has realized that the suppression of such drugs has been excessive. If they are used with caution, in an appropriate environment, they have no known negative effects, and they are not addictive.

Caution is necessary because the psychedelic experience is extremely intense, and the negative effects that have occurred have been linked to their use in ill-adapted environments by people with existing mental problems. A vast inquiry conducted in the United States as part of the National Survey on Drug Use and Health has shown no increase in psychiatric problems among those who have used psychedelic drugs, when compared to the mental health of non-users.

Unfortunately, there are still alarmist anecdotes circulating on the supposed danger of these substances. It is common to hear, for instance, of suicides following the ingestion of LSD. But serious research has shown that the percentage of suicides does not in fact grow with the use of these substances. To make deductions from single episodes of suicide, as is still commonly done, regrettably, even by people in positions of responsibility, is like saying that The Times is dangerous because it has been found in the coat pocket of a suicide.

It is estimated that some 23 million Americans have used psilocybin, and no one has found any correlation between this use and addiction or toxicity. Recent research published in the Lancet on the dangers of taking chemical substances, for the individual and society, placed LSD in the very lowest rank, significantly below alcohol, tobacco, cannabis and many other substances used widely, including regularly in medicines. No rigid prohibitions exist for use of these higher-ranked substances, let alone for their use in scientific research. Given the indications of the potential of psychedelic drugs for therapeutic use, for problems ranging from depression to addiction to really dangerous drugs such as heroin, a number of different voices have been raised to say that the time has come to lift the taboo, and to grant at least that freer scientific research should be allowed.

Robin Carhart-Harris is one of the few who has managed to gain permission to study these forbidden drugs in recent years. In 2016 he caused a stir by publishing observations on the brains of subjects under the influence of LSD, obtained using techniques for recording images of cerebral activity. What can be seen is an explosion of activity. Substances such as LSD apparently act on the chemical connections between the neurons of the brain, allowing the awakening of new links. Many of these, though not all, are temporary. One hypothesis put forward is that residual effects that allow the reorganization of the cerebral structure provide the ground for therapeutic effects. These effects seem to be achievable with low amounts of the drug, or even with single doses.

Among the few serious hypotheses actually considered to explain something about consciousness is the theory of so-called ‘integrated information’, of which the neuroscientist Giulio Tononi is one of the principal originators. The theory suggests a correlation between the quantity of consciousness and the amount of integration of a structure elaborating information. The data gathered by Robin Carhart-Harris would seem to indicate, from this point of view, an effective state of ‘augmented consciousness’ which echoes curiously with the psychedelic ideology of the seventies.

A compelling description of a ‘trip’ – as the mental journey induced by such drugs came to be called – can be found in Nigel Lasmoir-Gordon’s Life is Just … Cambridge 1962, a book that conveys the atmosphere of the dawn of a cultural revolution. But the most memorable literary description of the psychedelic experience is the classic one by Aldous Huxley in his novel The Island, in which a psychedelic drug called moksha is at the centre of a gentle, peaceable and wise culture on the island where he situates his Utopia.

A phrase frequently used to describe what happens during the intense and rich psychedelic experience is ‘dissolving of the ego’, or ‘loss of a sense of self’. A psychedelic ‘trip’ can last for eight to ten hours, and many people, such as Steve Jobs, recall this experience as life-altering. In traditional cultures that use psychedelic substances for religious rituals, and for many young people in the sixties and seventies, the experience has taken on a mystical and religious connotation. The reason why psychedelic substances are frightening, according to Carhart-Harris in an interview in the Independent, ‘is that they reveal aspects of the mind, and people are frightened of their own minds; they are frightened of the human condition’. I think the fear is due more to ignorance and prejudice.

If I was asked to try to sum up in a phrase what I think has stayed with me from those magical nights so many years ago, I would perhaps say that it was this: that the experience, for a number of hours, of a reality profoundly altered from our habitual perception of it, left me with a calm awareness of the prejudices of our rigid mental categories, and of the flexibility and potential depth of the inner world that our brain is capable of experiencing.

At that dinner in London, I became aware with increasing astonishment that my memory of such an experience was more widely shared than I had ever imagined. I don’t know whether the majority of British people of my generation had ‘acid trips’, as they were called. Or whether those who did ended up directing museums and editing the cultural pages of newspapers … What seems certain is that LSD has had a lasting influence on a part of my generation. Perhaps now, after more than forty years of silence, we can begin to talk about it.