Those older men and women exercising structural and moral
authority (Paterson, 1966), often called collectively the
Establishment, have been alarmed by psychedelics for rather less
than five years. Their attitude might be described in the terms
Aneurin Bevan used for an old man approaching a young bride:
"... fascinated, sluggish, and apprehensive." The
impetuous young, however, always at the heart of any
anti-establishment movement, rush in with all the rash ardor of
Romeo and Juliet. Medical men, though less worried about morals
or legality, are properly concerned with the health of the young
lovers, and have been debating, not without acrimony, whether the
entrancing psychedelic bride is a delicious and sexy houri or a
poxy doxy.
This fascination of older folk with psychedelics and the
climate attached to them becomes evident in the propaganda
devoted to them by many government agencies, professional
associations, and other interested people. While this has been
aimed ostensibly at discouraging the young from taking or
continuing to take these substances, the means employed seem
unlikely to achieve such an end. The cause of pornography has
frequently been well served by those whose strident warnings
abjured others from seeking what, until then, they had hardly
noticed. Public men have, quite unwittingly, by their ignorance,
evasion, and downright lies, egged on their children and
grandchildren to explore these experiences. It appears sometimes
as if they were trying to discredit themselves in the eyes of the
young. It may not be their intention, but it seems to be their
achievement.
Our connection with this intergenerational controversy began
about sixteen years ago, when one of us, after a troubled night,
was standing at a table stirring a glass of water in which
silvery white crystals were dissolving with an oily slick. Would
it be enough or too much? He was uneasy: he would be disappointed
if nothing happened, but what if the mescaline worked too well?
Suppose he poured half of the full glass into an adjacent flower
vase? He did not relish the possibility, however remote, of
finding a small, but discreditable niche in literary history as
the man who drove Aldous Huxley mad. His fears proved groundless.
Although the bitter chemical did not work as quickly as he had
expected, in due course it etched away the patina of conceptual
thinking.
Much has happened since that smogless May morning in
Hollywood. Neither Aldous Huxley nor he would have predicted that
The Doors of Perception (1954) was going to have such an
immense impact on an ever-increasing number of people. Those
substances, then known as hallucinogens or psychotomimetics, and
which he later called psychedelics (Osmond, 1957b), have, for
good or evil, become far more widely known and no longer the
concern merely of the specialist and scholar. They are part of
our vocabulary, a source of both vexation and inspiration.
Less than ten years after the senior author's spring visit to
Hollywood, Pandora's box was unexpectedly opened. Since then,
members of the Establishment have been sitting on the lid of the
empty box, unaware that this posture is both undignified and
futile. It is the fate of establishments to be taken by surprise
in spite of ample and repeated warnings. Once they have become
aware that something is amiss, they often act precipitately, with
little forethought or caution, and transform a minor
inconvenience or even possible benefits into catastrophe. There
was plenty of warning that psychedelics were apt to be of
interest to people and also to become more available so that this
long-standing human taste could be indulged more easily. It
required no gift of prophecy to recognize this, for history shows
that man has been an inveterate experimenter with chemicals,
usually derived from plants, that make him happier or livelier,
or alter his perceptions and awareness. In his sumptuous and
magnificent book Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality
(1969), for example, R. Gordon Wasson, the mycologist-scholar,
has shown convincingly that the Rig Veda, one of the
oldest and greatest of man's religious works, devoted about one
tenth of its collection of over one thousand psalms to
celebrating the plant god Soma. Wasson, with wonderful
persistence, caution, and intuition, makes a good case for soma
being the mushroom Amanita muscaria, or fly agaric, the
classic toadstool of the birch forests of the world. Psychedelics
are a very ancient and influential human interest.
What has the Establishment been doing about them? If one had
listened only to its members from a recent president on down, one
might have been convinced that psychedelics had no future at all
because of the development of ever-growing and increasingly
specialized law- enforcement agencies to remove the nuisance
permanently. In the past year or two, the tone has changed
somewhat, along with other overoptimistic estimates. On the other
hand, if one listened only to supporters of the psychedelic
movement, one might be led to suppose that an age was borning in
which from earliest childhood, and possibly the prenatal state,
we would all be exposed to the delights and virtues of wholly
beneficial substances. The facts do not support either of these
extreme positions, but extreme positions rarely depend on facts.
Long before the official Establishment had asked itself what sort
of problem it might be facing, legislation was being prepared,
bills hurriedly passed, statements of an alarming kind made, and
vigorous legal and police action taken. This was not admirable,
but it was no more admirable of the psychedelic movement to imply
that there were scarcely any dangers attendant on these
remarkable substances and that we should all hasten along the
road to the "joyous cosmology," taking anything anyone
offered, and trusting it would be enough, and not too much.
The Establishment's posture is not difficult to understand,
for it is that of all establishments everywhere when faced with
innovation. It consists in saying, "No, you don't. Father
(or Grandfather) knows best. Be good and do as you are told, for
if you don't, it will be the worse for you." Before planning
and passing legislation or developing new policing procedures, it
might seem prudent to assess the effectiveness of such actions,
and consider whether police activities might not have unintended
consequences as bad as or worse than the evils to be remedied.
This is especially true in the United States, where prohibition,
with all its admirable intentions, merely provided a golden
opportunity for gangsters to become multimillionaires and spread
the habit the legislation was intended to curb. The most likely
outcome of prohibition in the early twenties was that, since many
people did not feel that drinking alcohol was immoral, even
though it might have become illegal, the law would be widely
subverted. Criminals would then have an opportunity to provide
these disaffected citizens with their needs. The police would be
liable to be corrupted, the law itself brought into disrepute,
and because most people would come to feel that prohibition
itself is a farce, they would tend to consider that the law is a
racket, too. This is a high price to pay for an unattainable
social benefit.
Other legislation aimed at preventing people from taking
substances, such as psychedelics, that they want to take should
surely be examined in this context. As we have noted, this is an
interest that men have pursued for millennia with great
persistence and in a variety of ways, ranging from self-inflicted
tortures and austerities to taking dangerous substances. Drugs
are only one of many possible ways of achieving these
experiences, and are by no means the most objectionable from a
medical viewpoint. From earliest times, psychedelics have been
regarded as strange and sacred and have been part of many great
religious ceremonies. They are certainly as enduring and
interesting for mankind as alcohol, although, since the rise of
modern agriculture, alcohol has been probably easier to obtain.
On the other hand, cannabis has been used for many centuries. It
may not be a simple matter to head off people's interest in
psychedelics; it has not been easy to head off interest in
alcohol. Had it been possible to prevent people from making
alcoholic drinks, prohibition would have been feasible. As it
was, everyone could make his own fermented drink in the bathtub,
and before long, the well-meant laws to curb drinking had become
meaningless and socially harmful.
In 1966, the government did not seem to have considered these
early experiences much, and appeared to believe that by
preventing Sandoz from manufacturing and distributing LSD to
research workers, the problem would soon be resolved. Indeed, one
of us was told by an aide of the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy
that the ex-Attorney General of the United States was surprised
to learn "that preventing Sandoz from selling LSD (which, of
course, they were not doing, but giving it away only to
accredited researchers) would not resolve the problem. "Even
though Senator Kennedy was a young, active, and unusually
well-informed man, he was ignorant of this, although he quickly
acquired the necessary information. The elderly men who govern
most countries apparently failed to ask or have impressed upon
them the questions facing those who wish to control the use of
psychedelics.
During World War II, British and American intelligence
services briefed their generals by first giving an opinion as to
what was most likely to happen, followed by a statement of what
they considered the best possible outcome in the circumstances,
and finally, the worst possible construction. The general
officer, knowing the conclusion of his intelligence service,
could then make his own decision, basing it on optimism,
pessimism, or a middle way, as he saw fit. Suppose it had been
our task to advise statesmen on the future of psychedelic
substances, what would we have told them, assuming that we knew
that they were already more or less limited to a policy of
control? From this point of view, the best possible thing that
could happen would be for people to lose interest in psychedelics
once and for all, and for the sources of supply to dry up
forever. The worst that could happen for the Establishment would
be for supplies of psychedelics to become greater and easier to
make in a climate of sustained or increasing interest, thus
producing a situation resembling prohibition at its worst.
How would these two extreme estimates relate to the most
likely outcomes It would be surprising if an interest so long
sustained ever disappears completely. Indeed, our age is one in
which interest in these matters seems more likely to increase.
Today, at least in North America and Europe, there are larger
numbers of highly mobile young people, many of them fairly
well-to-do, than ever before in history. Most have been reared
with less severity than previous generations and have largely
escaped the terrible blows that death, illness, starvation, and
poverty frequently inflict on the young. They are sufficiently
uncowed by the world to be highly critical of how it is run, and
have the energy, time, and opportunity to express dissatisfaction
and explore new ways of improving matters. Their education has
taught them how to use libraries and other modern
information-retrieval systems. Many of them became interested in
psychedelics in the early sixties, and while this preoccupation
may fluctuate, it seems unlikely that it will disappear
completely. The interest of the Indians in drugs survived the
full force of the Spanish Inquisition, and it is unlikely that
even the severest legislators intend to emulate that mighty
institution in policing their children and grandchildren.
In addition, with regard to the control of the substances
themselves, more have been discovered and rediscovered during the
past decade and a half than in any similar period in history. It
seems likely that more will be found during the next ten years.
Some of these will be discovered in plants and others
synthesized. Every discovery makes it easier to suggest not only
new places in which to look for active substances, but also new
ways of making them. We predict that within the next twenty-five
years, and perhaps sooner, simple processes will be discovered by
which reasonably safe psychedelics can be made in any kitchen or
basement with materials available in stores, pharmacies, and
fields or gardens. Some believe the best way to avoid these
dangers would be to stop all research on psychedelics. In our
opinion, this would be objectionable, since these substances have
great interest for psychology and psychiatry and since there is,
as we have shown here, growing evidence of their therapeutic
usefulness. It would also not succeed in stopping the clandestine
experiments in the synthesis or use of these substances, for
forbidden fruits not only taste sweeter, but develop an esoteric
interest. Presumably this "occult" science, because it
would be "illegal," would not be published in official
scientific journals. A sort of underground science would develop,
which at least would be deplorable, and might be very dangerous.
In our imaginary briefings, the statesmen would be told that
the most likely outcome during the next decade would be that the
interest in these substances would be maintained, though it is
likely to fluctuate from year to year. Although a number of new
psychedelics will be discovered, there is no convincing evidence
that the era of "bathtub" psychedelics has yet arrived,
allowing them to be made in ease and safety at home. Should this
occur, the resulting situation will resemble that of prohibition.
Statesmen must surely ask themselves whether it is wise to
invent new crimes or inflate misdemeanors into matters of great
importance. The roster of criminal law is large; by adding new
laws that are difficult to enforce, respect for the law may be
decreased. Certain kinds of new laws may be expensive luxuries
that societies in the course of change simply cannot afford. We
believe that the interest in psychedelics will be maintained in
the foreseeable future. If police and similar agencies devote
much of their energy to controlling the substances, the overt
interest may become less conspicuous. Prosecuting people does not
necessarily change their opinions, but may invest forbidden
activity with glamour and make those undertaking it discreet. It
is said that crime has been increasing greatly in recent years,
and one wonders whether this is a propitious time to add a whole
new series of crimes to the burden of an already overladen police
and magistracy.
Already there are laws of such severity on the statute books
that judges, juries, and police often shy away from using them,
although, from time to time, unlucky people receive very harsh
punishment, which seems unfair both to them and to their
contemporaries. It seems unlikely that occasional severities will
do much to change the general picture. However, in politics as
elsewhere, men have rarely shown a sense of history or adequate
foresight, and the same legislators who promise a tough line
against psychedelics talk blithely about reducing the voting age
to eighteen. If these statements are sincere, and they plan to
continue their opposition to psychedelics when they have reduced
the voting age, one wonders whether we are not becoming tired of
politics.
In our opinion, the Establishment has behaved as
establishments usually do, bolstered with the authority they
possess by virtue of their social and political position. They
have not been any less admirable than members of the psychedelic
movement who claim that as a result of their experiences they
have a deeper knowledge of the human heart and a greater
understanding of the meaning of things. By their claims, their
actions must be judged by a higher standard than the actions of
the Establishment, which does not make such claims. If one asks
whether mind-expanding experiences have increased the ability of
members of the psychedelic movement to understand the views and
fears of their elders more compassionately than they feel they
themselves have been judged, we believe the verdict must be
"not proven." Aldous Huxley once urged a leading figure
in the psychedelic movement to remember that it is
"important to do good stealthily." His excellent advice
has not always been heeded. If indeed insights have been acquired
as a result of psychedelic experience, they should be used for
the general good rather than for personal ends.
In this controversy, medical men have tended to be ranged on
the side of the Establishment. This is understandable enough, for
they are frequently closely associated with it, and often among
its members. Unfortunately, they sometimes use their enormous
medical authority to justify prejudices deriving not from medical
knowledge, but from the social and moral climate in which they
happen to live. This has occurred repeatedly throughout history,
and the same error has been made by some of the most
distinguished medical men.
An excellent example of this is provided by the case of Henry
Maudsley, one of the most enlightened psychiatrists of his day,
and for whom a leading mental hospital in London is presently
named. In his fine paper "Masturbational Insanity," E.
H. Hare (1962) notes that Maudsley wrote, "In the life of
the chronic masturbator, nothing could be so reasonably desired
as the end of it, and the sooner he sinks to his degraded rest
the better for himself, and the better for the world, which is
well rid of him." Hare comments on this, ". . . the
besetting sin of the psychiatrist [is] a tendency to confuse the
rules of mental health with morality." Maudsley's views were
part of the conventional wisdom of his age. Even as late as 1892,
the Dictionary of Psychological Medicine described the effects of
masturbation as "moral and mental shipwreck, the whole
nature is deteriorated.... mental faculties become blunted....
The miserable wretch would commit suicide if he dared, but rarely
has the courage . . . and sinks into melancholic dementia."
Writing in 1911 on the treatment and prevention of this grievous
condition, Ivan Bloch stated, "In the treatment of
masturbation, the methods of the older physicians who appeared
before the child armed with great knives and scissors and
threatened a painful operation or even to cut off the genital
organs may often be used and often effect a radical cure."
Psychoanalysts, too, were involved in this nonsense. Ernest
Jones, the biographer of Freud, for instance, wrote in 1918 that
neurasthenia derived from excessive onanism and seminal emission
(Comfort, 1967).
Masturbation was of no interest to medicine until about 1720,
following the publication in 1710 of a book called Onania, or
the Heinous Sin of Self-Abuse, to tout a patent medicine.
Indeed, in 1644, masturbation was recommended as a remedy against
"the dangerous allurements of women." After the
publication of Onania, the negative view taken up by medical men
and educators became the source of some of the most harmful
iatrogenic miseries, exceeded only by the great
nineteenth-century pandemic of bleeding. Right up to the 1930S,
in both England and the United States, extraordinary garments, a
combination of straitjacket and chastity belt, were sold by
makers of surgical and medical instruments to curb "the
deadly vice of onanism."
What relevance has this to psychedelics? Medicine, in its
views, is in tune with the morality of the age in which it is
practiced, and indeed, has been more or less identified with
morality for millennia. Medical men have to choose a middle
course to avoid overidentifcation with the establishments of
their day. Medical men who went along with the Nazi race theories
are one dismal example of how current social values can destroy
medical ethics. In the case of masturbation, physical and
psychological injury was inflicted on at least six generations of
children and adults. Panic and terror spread among parents who
were urged to be ever alert to spot young masturbators. Children
became morbidly preoccupied with this attractive but deadly vice
which excited the grownups to such frenzy.
Perhaps we are about to indulge in yet another of these
medicomoral autos-da-fé. The sequence of events is easy to spot.
First, a few medical men associate themselves with a particular
moral viewpoint that they consider has some medical importance.
They soon find evidence, sometimes dubious, to confirm their
convictions. Using this evidence, they begin to suggest solving
the moral problem by medical means. In the psychedelic context,
users have been infringing on the contention of the medical
establishment that any pharmacological substances used on human
beings lie within its bailiwick. The psychological changes
resulting from drug use are those older folk frown upon and
sometimes find repugnant and frightening, in contrast with such
acceptable social tranquilizers as alcohol or barbiturates. There
is also the possibility that those who use psychedelics might be
injuring themselves or their offspring. The recent impassioned
discussions of the possible effects of LSD on chromosomes is
paralleled by similar discussions over masturbation. It was
stated with the utmost confidence that not only would the secret
vice result in the collapse and insanity of those who practiced
it, but should they be unfortunate enough to survive to
adulthood, their children would suffer for their sins. There was
no evidence for this, but it did not prevent men of the highest
integrity from stating that it was undoubtedly so.
There are real dangers associated with the psychedelic
substances known today. These dangers are of many kinds and call
for concern from medicine and its allied sciences. However,
before discussing these dangers and how they might be alleviated,
it may be well to remind those who urge medical men to make
public pronouncements to frighten and dismay the young that,
given the morality of medicine, its place in society, and the age
of the experienced medical man, the doctor is rarely the best
person for the task. He is liable to exaggerate such dangers as
exist and is apt to aid and abet extreme measures, in keeping
with the morality of the day, that may not alleviate the
sufferings of the victims of the immoral condition and may even
make it worse.
Psychedelics are liable to arouse moral indignation, because
emotions are always likely to be deeply stimulated when someone
else is indulging in new pleasures that may alter social values,
especially when the users are young and rash and often brash as
well. Medicine has a duty not to make this confusion and
uncertainty any worse. Physicians are not police. Their duty is
to inform the public as truthfully as they can, without excessive
bias, resounding moral statements, or validation of punitive
actions carried out as treatment. Medicine must avoid becoming a
precipitate partisan in complex moral and social issues such as
those posed by the modern advent of psychedelics.
After such perplexities, it is tempting to leave the solution
to the reader's ingenuity. Yet authors customarily give their
opinion and venture at least a few steps beyond the threshold of
their ivory tower. The uses and dangers attending these
substances must be discussed accurately and dispassionately. Men
like Dr. Stanley Yolles, Director of the National Institute of
Mental Health, do not seem convinced that "drug abuse,"
which includes the unauthorized use of a variety of psychedelics,
will be eliminated in the foreseeable future.
(1) If this is indeed so, strenuous
efforts must be made to reduce those dangers attendant on
clandestine use. We require a variety of social strategies rather
than freezing in a catatonic posture and boasting that this
immobility is firm resolution. The very brief banning of LSD-25
research in 1966 was a classic example of precipitate,
unintelligent action springing from high government levels. Since
then, some research has been restored to a limited degree, but
expansion has not been greatly encouraged, nor is an atmosphere
of panic and politicking conducive to clear thinking, planning,
and diligent, long-continued inquiry. Legitimate, rather than
amateur and bootleg, research is necessary; yet one of the most
gifted and distinguished researchers in the country was not able
to obtain permission to do this sort of work. Others, too, have
been discouraged by the sluggishness of the various bureaucracies
that must be consulted.
The muddled and ambiguous situation regarding the effect of
LSD-25 on chromosomes (2)
might call for restriction of research with this particular drug
to those people for whom such changes, if they do indeed occur,
would be of comparatively little importance. Other psychedelics,
which have never been implicated in this way, could be used more
widely. Subjects for LSD might include some of the several
million afflicted by severe and chronic alcoholism, patients
suffering from intractable pain in fatal illnesses (Kast, 1964a),
and older people still curious for new experience to enlarge
their understanding of themselves, others, and existence. While
not everyone might choose to die with his mind stimulated by LSD,
as did Aldous Huxley (Huxley, L. A., 1968), rather than dulled by
morphine, such matters call for careful consideration, for each
of us owes God a death. It is folly to restrict and hamper
research in all directions because it may be dangerous in some.
If damage to chromosomes should be proved, and this has not yet
been done, some substances may be less harmful than others, and
it may be possible to discover protective measures. As a number
of medicines in regular use are also suspect, and since some
virus diseases and certain radiations produce similar changes,
inquiries here would serve a wider purpose. Indeed, because of
the possibility of chromosome-damaging substances in various
medicines and foods, it would be prudent to inquire at once into
such protective substances. For instance, it has been shown (in
animals) that the teratogenic effect of thalidomide (Frank et
al., 1963) can be prevented by greatly increasing the intake of
niacin (vitamin B3). It is not known if this protective effect
extends to humans, but if it does, the thalidomide tragedy, in
which so many babies were deformed, might have been simply and
cheaply avoided.
Many years ago, Carl Jung (3) told one of us that by the middle years
of life, childhood experience had usually done its worst and
became of lessened importance as a source of intrapsychic
distress. Queen Elizabeth I put it to her godson, Sir John
Harrington, who invented the water closet, "When thou dost
feel creeping time at the gate, these fooleries will please thee
less." She also reflected, "The days of man's life are
plumed with the feathers of death." As the years pass by,
many men and women become more concerned with the purpose and
meaning of life, rather than with the drive to succeed in it.
This is an important area of inquiry for psychedelic research.
Just as important, and at present receiving just as little
attention, is our need to explore ways to help people prepare
themselves for the rapid, all-pervasive, social and technological
changes characteristic of our times. In terms of science and
technology, as compared with previous ages, many of us have lived
through the equivalent of centuries of change. This torrent of
change is itself anxiety provoking, for there are no structures
to handle the kinds of change that change the structures
themselves. Few moralists seem to have noticed yet that the
progress of medicine has made it harder for us to reflect upon
death and so savor life to the full. To come to terms with both
life and death, each must be measured with the cold eye of the
reflective mind; change must be faced.
Until about half a century ago, everyone everywhere was raised
in the ever-present shadow of death. The autobiographies,
biographies, and histories of forty years ago show that those
plumed feathers were never far away. Life and death were
inseparables, the subject of gossip and conversation. Many people
were preparing themselves for their own deaths all their lives,
for, unhampered by insurance statistics, they saw death as ever
present. Death seems to have become taboo today and has taken
that place of secrecy from which sex has just been freed. This
exchange of prisoners seems hardly worth while. It is usually
possible to abstain from sex, should one want to; death allows no
abstentions. As a Ghanaian truck driver put it, "Death takes
no bribes."
A generation has grown up in whose life death is an unfamiliar
and unnatural event, almost an affront. Their experience does not
countenance illness for which nothing can be done. But death has
only been postponed, not defeated, and has dominion over people
who have scarcely dared speak his name in polite company. Our
forebears linked holy living and holy dying, and considered the
two an art. In a society such as ours, which has become almost
idolatrous about living indefinitely, it is becoming bad taste to
discuss death. Our position is not unlike that in Victorian love
stories, in which the authors managed to write about love and
passion with few open references to sex7 although its absence
made its presence all the clearer.
Those concerned with the religious aspects of psychedelics
should make special efforts in this direction. Many members of
the Establishment are in their middle and later years, and there
is little doubt that they recognize that they "owe God a
death," in spite of the efforts of their physicians and
surgeons. Research into these matters should be pursued with
ardor, for while the risks are small, the rewards are likely to
be great. This still leaves the question of whether these
substances have ill effects on the young and whether such ill
effects can be much reduced, easily corrected, or completely
avoided. Since controlling the manufacture, distribution, and use
of psychedelics is still uncertain, although their containment
seems to be possible, at least for the moment, even this might
break down during the next few years, as we noted earlier.
If Victor Gioscia (1969) is correct, and there is an LSD
subculture, the dangers, particularly to those under thirty,
require very careful consideration. Leaving out chromosome
damage, perhaps the most dramatic misfortune is the development
of a schizophreniform illness. There is no doubt that this can
happen, though it is not clear how often it does. Certain myths
current among some young drug takers increase the danger. One of
the most unfortunate is that the appropriate remedy for a bad
trip is another one, frequently with a larger dose than that
which produced the first one. This notion is on a par with the
alcoholic slogan of having a hair, or even the tail, of "the
dog that bit you." The sensible response to a bad trip is
not to have another, but to seek competent advice and guidance
without delay. Some people, who are clearly developing
schizophrenia and have disturbances of perception (Hoffer and
Osmond, 1966a) combined with usually depressed mood changes, with
anxiety and sometimes thinking difficulties, take psychedelics
because they have heard, or hope, that they will help. The most
probable outcome is a severe and prolonged bad trip, or sometimes
the precipitation of a more-severe and acute illness. If these
dangers were more widely known and understood, many young people
would avoid trying to treat themselves by these desperate means
and avoid much unhappiness and distress.
A number of simple and effective ways of exploring and
measuring perceptual anomalies, including the HOD (Hoffer and
Osmond, 1961; Kelm, Hoffer, and Osmond, 1967) and EWI (El-Meligi,
l968a, 1968b; El-Meligi and Osmond, in press) tests already
exist. By means of these and similar instruments, and by
improving public knowledge about schizophrenia, it should be
possible to diagnose and treat it far earlier and more
successfully than usually happens today. Delaying treatment or
aggravating the condition with mixtures of impure and often
unknown chemicals in inept attempts at self-treatment only makes
things worse. However, by no means all, or even most, who sample
the bewildering array of often dubious substances said to be
psychedelic become gravely ill or likely to be so. Official
propaganda paints a uniformly gloomy picture, which paradoxically
increases rashness by its exaggeration. This same kind of
overstatement was used to discourage masturbation, sex, drinking,
dancing, smoking, using make-up, primping, and other disapproved
activities. The results have been unimpressive. However, even if
it were shown that there were few physiological objections to
young people taking pure and reliable psychedelics except for
those with a tendency to schizophrenia, it does not follow that
all controls should be removed.
Each one of us must learn his own culture before he can either
align himself with its values or object to them in a manner
likely to produce constructive change. In most cultures, the
attainment of this is symbolized by the accordance of certain
rights, such as the right to marry, hold property, vote, go to
war, receive the death penalty, and other positive and negative
awards withheld from children and those not sufficiently
acculturated. In some cultures, ceremonies take place to mark
entry into adult status, and ritual markings may also be applied
in order to indicate the status of the new adult. Psychedelics
taken before the stabilization of knowledge about cultural norms,
because of their capacity to alter perceptual constancy, might
result in a reduced capacity or wish to internalize the already
fluctuating and fragmenting values of our industrial society. The
Establishment, by its hasty and apparently not fully enforceable
ban on these substances, seems to have worsened matters by making
them symbolic of intergenerational differences.
Since the mistake has already been made, what can be done?
Societies that have sought and used psychedelic experience,
however achieved, have nearly always had some kind of initiation
ceremony, often of a religious kind, aimed at focusing expanded
experience in a way that will enhance the participant's
identification with and appreciation of his own society. In the
United States at present, only indigenous Indians are permitted a
religion employing psychedelics, and they have achieved this only
by much stubborn courage. Surely bona fide religious groups
interested in these matters who are prepared to conduct
themselves in a manner in keeping with safety and public decency,
should be encouraged and supported. They are likely to serve a
valuable social function in the future. Even the cynical who are
not wholly myopic can understand that banned and persecuted
religions frequently spread more quickly and become more
attractive in times of change. Persecution, even with the good
intention of preserving health, is liable to have unintended
consequences. In his morality Island, Aldous Huxley (1962)
discussed these matters and illustrated them with the learning,
perceptiveness, wit, and delicacy in which he had few rivals.
Mankind's interest in the psychedelic experience is unlikely
to lessen with increase in leisure. This gives us a greater
opportunity to be concerned not only with survival, but with the
quality of those human relationships that are the stuff of life.
Wasson (1969) shows in his great book that this is one of
mankind's oldest interests. In the years that lie ahead, new
drugs, although there will probably be many more of them, will
not, we think, be the focus of greatest interest. Already various
forms of hypnosis, learning-theory applications, and electronics
that evoke and reproduce these experiences are being explored.
Those young people who are alert to them and interested will
learn how to use them, and some may be doing so even now. If this
happens, the Establishment will have to decide whether it
disapproves of the chemicals producing the experience or the
experience itself. Very few of those dealing with these matters
legally, scientifically, or politically seem to have concerned
themselves with this critical issue. Medically, the non-drug
methods eliminate many of the current objections to the
psychedelic experience as a hazard to health. The social
problems, however, especially those of acculturation, would not
necessarily be greatly changed .
If such capacities, however induced, become widespread, their
impact is likely to resemble some massive mutation. Perhaps this
is necessary if we are to adapt to that new world that we are
building with such a strange mishmash of cunning, inspiration,
apprehension, and folly. The sociological, psychological,
political, and other consequences of psychedelic experience,
however induced, occurring in the majority or even a substantial
minority of a postindustrial population, is likely to affect most
of us far more than a few space jaunts for carefully selected
heroes and heroines. The record is merciless: practical men of
sound sense are nearly always wrong about the future, though
never lacking in certainty. While the winds of change strum to
gale force around us, they perform their ostrich acts and
proclaim that they have everything under control. But the gale
does not blow itself out because of their rhetoric, and to
survive, we need to set a course that carries us into the future.
Some years ago one of us wrote (Osmond, 1957a):
. . . these agents have a part to play in our survival as
a species, for that survival depends as much On our opinion
of our fellows and ourselves as on any other single thing.
The psychedelics help us to explore and fathom our own
nature.
We can perceive ourselves as the stampings of an automatic
socioeconomic process, as highly plastic and conditionable
animals, as congeries of instinctive strivings ending in loss
of sexual drive and death, as cybernetic gadgets, or even as
semantic conundrums. All of these concepts have their
supporters and they all have some degree of truth m them. We
may also be something more, "a part of the main," a
striving sliver of a creative process, a manifestation of
Brahma in Atman, an aspect of an infinite God immanent and
transcendent within and without us. These very different
valuings of the self and of other people's selves have all
been held sincerely by men and women. I expect that even what
seem the most extreme notions are held by some contributors
to these pages. Can one doubt that the views of the world
derived from such differing concepts are likely to differ
greatly, and that the courses of action determined by those
views will differ . . . ?
. . . I believe that the psychedelics provide a chance,
perhaps only a slender one, for homo faber, the cunning,
ruthless, foolhardy, pleasure-greedy toolmaker, to merge into
that other creature whose presence we have so rashly
presumed, homo sapiens, the wise, the understanding, the
compassionate, in whose fourfold vision art, politics,
science, and religion are one. Surely we must seize that
chance....
And so it stands today. [1970]. We predict, to use the Iron
Duke's phrase to Creevey, that it will be "a nice-run thing:
the nicest-run thing you ever saw...."
(1) Yolles, Stanley F. Speech quoted
in Hospital Tribune, Monday, June 16, 1969. (Back)
(2) Today (July 1969) reports of chromosome changes are
bewildering to those not experts in this field. The various
conflicting statements suggest that the science of studying
chromosomes requires an art as great as that needed to interpret
Rorschach inkblots. In that famous and often valuable test, the
non-expert must rely on his own estimate of the reliability of
the particular person who administered and reported on the test.
Great difficulties arise when men of good repute publish findings
that seem, at least to the naive, to be diametrically opposed and
irreconcilable. There is a danger that, because of reports in the
press based on earlier studies that suggested unequivocal damage
to chromosomes, some people who were frightened away by this
information will now decide that there is no danger whatever. It
may even be thought that this was another trick like that
deplorable episode in Pennsylvania, where it was reported with
considerable circumstantial detail that a number of young men had
gazed at the sun under the influence of LSD-25 and were
permanently blinded, suffering grave retinal damage. This proved
to be false. Thus are credibility crevasses created. (Back)
(3) Jung, C. Personal communication to H. Osmond. November
1955. (Back)
