Back Again

[sidecross]

How Stanislav Grof Helped Launch the Dawn of a New Psychedelic Research Era

By Alexander Zaitchik, AlterNet

Next week, the brightest lights of the psychedelic cognoscenti will gather in San Jose, California. Leaving swirls of tracer visions in their wakes, they will converge from around the world at an incongruously bland Holiday Inn, 50 miles south of the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood that once served as the pulsing capital of Psychedelistan. Once assembled, several hundred turned-on and tuned-in doctors, psychologists, artists and laypeople will participate in the annual conference of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). For four days, they will explore -- through workshops and lectures, nothing more -- the widening gamut of clinical inquiry into the uses of the psychedelic experience, a global resurgence of which has led to hopeful talk of a “psychedelic revival.”

After decades of psychedelic deep freeze, such talk is finally more than just wishful thinking. A skim of the conference agenda offers a tantalizing glimpse into the newly bubbling world of clinical psychedelic research. UCLA Medical professor Charles Grob will speak about his work using psilocybin to treat anxiety in late-stage cancer patients. Psychologist Allan Ajaya will share findings from his research in LSD-assisted myofascial pain therapy. Other speakers will address possible psychedelic-based cures for alcoholism, addiction, depression, migraines,= and post-traumatic stress disorder. Each will represent a different corner in a promising field newly awakened. From North America to the Middle East, recent years have seen a rising interest into the medicinal possibilities of MDMA, LSD, DMT, and other drugs now shaking off decades of government-imposed clinical hibernation.


Since 1986, MAPS has been agitating for this overdue renaissance, spearheading and publicizing efforts to legalize and de-stigmatize research involving schedule-1 drugs designed to induce non-ordinary states of consciousness. As the outfit’s slogan has it, “We put the M.D. back in MDMA.” It is a testament to the organization’s work that this year’s conference, "Psychedelic Science in the 21st Century,” not only features a multinational cast of active researchers, but also caters to an increasingly interested public: tickets for many of the workshops sold out a month in advance.



For most Americans, the only familiar name on the MAPS 2010 speakers list is the Oprah-approved, integrative-health brand name, Dr. Andrew Weil. But Weil hardly enjoys rock-star status at conferences dedicated to the present state and future of pioneering psychedelic research. As detailed in Don Lattin’s new book, The Harvard Psychedelic Club, Weil’s main historical contribution to the field was negative and came nearly 50 years ago: As an undergraduate snitch, it was Weil’s articles for the Crimson that got Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (aka Ram Dass) thrown out of Harvard, thus putting the kibosh on the university’s psilocybin project.


One of the most significant figures attending the conference in San Jose is a man largely unknown to the general public. Years before Leary made headlines for his Ivy League adventures, and years before Ken Kesey held the first acid parties in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, a young doctor named Stanislav Grof was conducting rigorous clinical experiments involving LSD in the most unlikely of places: a government lab in the capital of communist Czechoslovkia. It was there, at Prague’s Psychiatric Research Institute in the 1950s, that Grof began more than half-a-century of pioneering research into non-ordinary states of consciousness. While he is frequently marginalized in, if not completely left out of, popular psychedelic histories, it is not for any lack of contribution to the field. “If I am the father of LSD,” Albert Hoffman once said, “Stan Grof is the godfather.”



With psychedelic research poised for a mainstream resurgence, the time seems right to begin giving the godfather his due.



* *

Stanislav Grof was a young medical student at Prague’s Charles University when he caught a life-changing break. It was 1955, and one of his professors, Docent Roubicek, had ordered a batch of LSD-25 from the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz, where Albert Hoffman first synthesized the compound in 1943. Roubicek had read Hoffman’s accounts of the LSD experience and was curious to test it out himself and on his students and patients. When he asked for volunteers, Grof raised his hand.



The subsequent experience assured Grof’s place in history by making him the first person to enjoy what might be called a modern trip, in which the psychedelic state is matched with electronic effects of the kind that have defined the experience for generations of recreational acidheads, from Merry Pranksters to Fillmore hippies to lollipop-sucking ravers.

Roubicek’s experiment involved placing Grof in a dark room, administering a large dose of LSD (around 250 millionths of a gram) and turning on a stroboscopic white light oscillating at various, often frenetic, frequencies. Needless to say, no similar entertainment, if that is the word, was otherwise available in 1950s Czechoslovakia, or anywhere else, for that matter. The experience set the course for Grof’s lifework.

“This combination [of the light and the drug],” Grof later said, “evoked in me a powerful mystical experience that radically changed my personal and professional life. Research of the heuristic, therapeutic, transformative, and evolutionary potential of non-ordinary states of consciousness became my profession, vocation, and personal passion.”

In medical school during the second half of the '50s, Grof underwent dozens of LSD sessions and became one of a handful of turned-on young people in the communist world. Upon his graduation in 1960, Grof began full-time clinical work when he was fortuitously assigned to Prague’s Psychiatric Research Institute, which included a newly launched Psychedelic Research Center. Among his new colleagues was a young doctor named Milos Vojtechovsky, with whom Grof had conducted his earliest experiments as a medical student. In 1958, the duo employed Benactyzin, high doses of which are hallucinogenic, as a way to induce the psychotic state associated with acute alcohol withdrawal. In 1959, they wrote an LSD-related study of the brain’s serotonergic system, titled, “Serotonin and Its Significance for Psychiatry.” As professional colleagues in the early 1960s, Grof and Vojtechovsky would co-publish nearly two dozen pioneering papers on clinical experiments employing LSD and other psychedelics, including a three-part study on LSD’s clinical history, biochemistry and pharmacology.

Until 1961, this research involved Sandoz-supplied LSD. But Grof saw no reason why Czech scientists shouldn’t be producing a native supply. Fatefully situated approximately 200 miles from Prague at this time was the Czech pharmaceutical company Spofa, whose chemists were talented synthesizers of various ergot alkaloids. Grof put in a request for the company begin producing LSD; a request quickly approved by communist authorities. Soon thereafter began production of the only pharmaceutically pure LSD in the eastern bloc. (Sandoz was still producing the only pure LSD in the West.)

The early weeks of Czechoslovak LSD production were not without problems. As Spofa cranked up its line for the powerful psychedelic, its laboratory employees would sometimes accidentally absorb the compound through their fingertips, much as Albert Hoffman did when he inadvertently made his famous discovery. Whenever this happened, it was standard practice at the time to inject the subject with Thorazine and throw them into the nearest locked hospital ward. This often made a bad situation worse, and Spofa frantically turned to Grof for answers. The young doctor happily lectured them on the importance of “set and setting” in the psychedelic experience. “I assured them that there was no reason for alarm if someone was intoxicated by LSD,” Grof later wrote. “They were advised to have a special, quiet room where the intoxicated individual could spend the rest of the day listening to music in the company of a good friend.”

Spofa brass took Grof’s advice. When a 19-year-old Spofa lab assistant experienced a substantial “professional intoxication,” she was placed in a comfortable room with a colleague and music. When the drug wore off, the woman reported having “the time of her life.”

As Grof rose through the ranks at the Psychiatric Institute, his research increasingly involved using LSD in tandem with traditional Freudian psychoanalysis, in which Grof earned his Ph.D from the Czech Academy of Sciences in 1965. His dissertation was titled, “LSD and Its Use in Psychiatric Clinical Practice.” When Grof completed his Freudian training, he had nearly a decade of experience with LSD. At 34, he was also full of paradigm-shifting ambition, having decided that psychedelics “used responsibly and with proper caution, would be for psychiatry what the microscope is for biology and medicine or the telescope is for astronomy.”

It was a heady time for any young Czech with a head full of big ideas. In 1965, Czechoslovakia was then in the midst of a political and cultural thaw known as the Prague Spring. A relaxation of state control and communist mores was encouraging new forms of artistic and political expression. Filmmakers associated with Czech New Wave produced exuberant films; the cafes and theaters became hubs of a thriving youth subculture, which celebrated Allen Ginsburg “King of May” when he visited Prague in May 1965. Had the trajectory been allowed to continue, it is easy to imagine a psychedelic Czech youth culture taking form, just as it did in the United States, with Grof as its leader.

Alas, Moscow saw where the Prague Spring was heading, and crushed the flowering under the treads of Red Army tanks. But by the time the Russians rolled into Prague in August 1968, the country’s most experienced psychedelic researcher was long gone. The year before, Grof had been offered a professorship at the University of Maryland. He arrived in America during the Summer of Love in possession of one of the world’s deepest LSD research resumes.

Soon after his arrival in the U.S., Grof was named chief of research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center. Again, it was a fortuitous placement. Among his new peers, an ordained minister and fellow psychedelic pioneer named Walter Pahnke, who had conceived of the famous "Good Friday Experiment" with Tim Leary and Huston Smith while at Harvard in the early 1960s. At the time of Grof’s arrival, Pahnke was engaged in promising research into LSD therapy as a way to mitigate mortal anxiety among the terminally ill. Before Pahnke’s untimely death in 1971, he had found “dramatic improvement” among a third of his subjects, and “moderate improvement” in another third.

While the Center was a stimulating environment to continue his research, Grof’s Maryland work constituted the lesser half of his activities during the late 1960s. He also traveled regularly to Menlo Park, California, where he participated in a working group led by the founder of humanistic psychology, Abraham Maslow. Grof joined a coterie of Maslow’s colleagues and students working to build on the foundation of humanistic psychology, most famous for its positing of a hierarchy of needs.

Like so many other forward thinkers of the decade, psychedelic experiences had touched Maslow deeply. He had come to believe that the system he developed in the '50s and early '60s was formed around a stunted view of the psyche. With his humanistic psychology, Maslow had managed to go beyond Freud and Skinner (the father of behaviorism), but he did not go as far enough. The spiritual revolution of the decade, of which the LSD experience was central, had thrown the limits of humanistic psychology into sharp relief. It was, Maslow and Grof believed, still too trapped in Freudian verbal therapy, still too accepting of the idea of an individual psyche contained in one life, one skull, one personal history, one culture.

“The renaissance of interest in Eastern spiritual philosophies, various mystical traditions, meditation, ancient and aboriginal wisdom, as well as the widespread psychedelic experimentation during the stormy 1960s,” Grof later wrote, “made it absolutely clear that a comprehensive and cross-culturally valid psychology had to include observations from such areas as mystical states; cosmic consciousness; psychedelic experiences; trance phenomena; creativity; and religious, artistic, and scientific inspiration.”

As Maslow and Grof mapped out this new and expanded understanding of the psyche, they turned to the insights of Carl Jung, the brilliant Freudian renegade who posited the existence of non-material archetypal-mythological realms that contain the entire histories, collective wisdom, and totemic icons of every civilization since the dawn of time. Along with a belief in these realms, Maslow and Grof were convinced they were accessible to everyone, especially during non-ordinary states of consciousness such as those induced by a hefty dose of psychedelics.

“Experiences occurring in psychedelic sessions cannot be described in terms of the narrow and superficial conceptual model used in academic psychiatry and psychology, which is limited to biology, postnatal biography, and the Freudian individual unconscious,” Grof wrote of the insight behind transpersonal psychology. “Deep experiential work requires a vastly extended cartography of the psyche that includes important domains uncharted by traditional science.”

Once the basic elements of this new psychological school were in place, it was time to name it. Maslow wanted to call the new psychedelically inspired school “Transhumanistic.”

Grof demurred, preferring the term “Transpersonal psychology.” The name stuck.

Figures associated with Maslow and Grof’s coterie soon launched the Association of Transpersonal Psychology and assembled an editorial team for the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology. Around the same time, Robert Frager began laying the groundwork for the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto, California, which remains the leading center of transpersonal training.

* *

Just as transpersonal psychology was being institutionalized, LSD research was being systematically shut down by the government. At the end of the 1960s, Grof’s laboratory in Maryland housed the last surviving FDA-approved psychedelic clinical research program in the United States. In 1971, Maryland’s research, too, was ordered closed following the classification of LSD as a Schedule-I drug, defined as being habit-forming and having “no recognized medicinal value.”

With little interest in running a lab without access to LSD, Grof followed the action and moved west. In 1973, he began a 15-year stretch as scholar-in-residence at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. There, overlooking the Pacific ocean and against the constant rumble of rolling surf, Grof spent the next two years synthesizing his thoughts on nearly two decades of LSD therapy. The result was Realms Of The Human Unconscious: Observations From LSD Research, published in 1975.

By this time, officially sanctioned psychedelic research already seemed like a distant memory. For a new generation that graduated college after the door had been slammed shut on clinical psychedelic studies, Grof’s book was a window into a world that might have been. Among those who found inspiration in the book was a young college student named Rick Doblin, who would later found the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.

With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the possibility of a return to a rational discussion of drug policy and psychedelic research became more remote than ever. Grof was among those who kept the flame alive. Around the time of Reagan’s first Inauguration, Grof published LSD Psychotherapy, in which he expanded on the now codified transpersonal understanding of the psyche. Grof stressed the importance of two previously neglected realms of experience that psychedelic experiences can tap into where traditional therapy cannot: the “perinatal” (birth moment) and “transpersonal” (archetypical). Coming to terms with these aspects of the psyche, believed Grof, is the key to psycho-spiritual health.

“When the content of the perinatal level of the unconscious surfaces into consciousness and is adequately processed and integrated,” Grof wrote, “it results in a radical personality change. The individual experiences a considerable decrease of aggressive tendencies and becomes more tolerant and compassionate toward others. [They also experience an increase in] the ability to enjoy life and draw satisfaction from simple situations such as everyday activity, eating, love-making, nature, and music.”

Happy, well-adjusted people, Grof believed, also lead to happy, well-adjusted societies.

“One of the most remarkable consequences of various forms of transpersonal experiences is spontaneous emergence and development of genuine humanitarian and ecological interests and need to take part in activities aimed at peaceful coexistence and well-being of humanity,” Grof wrote. “This is based on an almost cellular understanding that any boundaries in the Cosmos are relative and arbitrary and that each of us is, in the last analysis, identical and commeasurable with the entire fabric of existence. As a result of these experiences, individuals tend to develop feelings that they are planetary citizens and members of the human family before belonging to a particular country or a specific racial, social, ideological, political, or religious group.”

Such sentiments were increasingly removed from mainstream culture in the age of Reagan. Buffered from the harder edges of the age of Reagan in Big Sur, Grof kept working, increasingly with his wife and creative partner, Christina. In 1984, he published LSD Psychotherapy, in which he expanded on the promise and power of transpersonal psychotherapy employing psychedelic drugs.

By the time the book’s second edition was published in 1994, a mini-psychedelic revival was underway on the West Coast. Grof had earned enough stripes to be an acid elder statesman to a generation of kids dancing to techno on ecstasy and acid. But he did not embrace the role. While Tim Leary rolled around in mutual embrace with the San Francisco rave and cyberculture scenes, Grof maintained his distance, playing the role of austere friend of psychedelics from the old school. “The hectic atmosphere of…crowded rock concerts or discos, and noisy social gatherings are certainly not settings conducive to productive self-exploration and safe confrontation with the difficult aspects of one’s unconscious,” Grof stiffly wrote in a 1994 update of his essay “Crisis Intervention in Situations Related to Unsupervised Use of Psychedelics.”

Grof had in any case by then moved beyond psychedelics. Throughout the 1980s, he had been coming to the conclusion that perinatal and transpersonal experiences were not dependent on the use of psychedelics. LSD may have launched Grof’s mind into cosmic orbit. But once there, like so many who passed through the psychedelic crucible, he had come to believe they were no longer needed. He even developed a system to prove it: Holotropic Breathing.

Grof’s lifework treats individual and social neuroses through the exploration of non-ordinary states of consciousness. Whether these states are achieved through the structured hyperventilation of Holotropic Breathing, or through psychedelic drugs, for Grof the stakes remain the same.

“If we continue using the old strategies that have caused the current global crisis and which are in their consequences destructive and self-destructive,” Grof recently wrote, “it might lead to annihilation of modern civilization and possibly even the human species. However, if a sufficient number of people undergo a process of inner psychospiritual transformation and attain a higher level of awareness, we might in the future reach a situation when we will deserve the name, which we have so proudly given to our species: Homo sapiens.”

This, in a nutshell, is the same cosmically ambitious hope expressed by the psychedelic pioneers of a half-century ago. Most of those men and women have long since given up the dream, moved on to other things, or died. Stanislav Grof is among the very few still here. Judging by the hopeful tone of next week’s MAPS conference, the world of medicine may finally be ready to catch back up with him.


Alexander Zaitchik is a Brooklyn-based freelance journalist and AlterNet contributing writer. His book, Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance, will be published by Wiley in May.

http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/146393

[willoweyes]

Sidecross, this was wonderful! Thank you thank you.

I had no idea Weil was a snitch. I'd like to do a little looking into that label; was he just performing journalistic duties, or did he mean harm?

I met Weil at a Telluride Mushroom Festival one year; it was probably twenty years ago and the commoners still mingled with the elite in that setting. The mushroom hunters all got together for a potluck dinner--I brought Black Bean soup (in which I happened to throw the remains of a pork burrito--for flavor). Weil LOVED my soup. "Is this vegetarian?" he asked me. Gulp. I lied. "Uh---yes." That horrible moment still echoes in my mind.

If he is truly a snitch, well I won't feel so bad. . . . .

[JCCamp007]

I published a paper for the Univ of New Mexico Med School titled,
"The Psychopharmacology of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide" back in 88-89.
I had a place in Tucson not far from Weil's abode.
He got caught watering his garden illegally.
He has sociopathic tendencies but who doesn't.

I just hope he gets to eat a good button or some Orange Sunshine before it's all over.
And maybe drink a glass of wine with Babba Ram Dass and me on his place N of Taos.
The Lama Foundation I think.

[sidecross]

Originally Posted by willoweyes

Sidecross, this was wonderful! Thank you thank you.

I had no idea Weil was a snitch. I'd like to do a little looking into that label; was he just performing journalistic duties, or did he mean harm?

I met Weil at a Telluride Mushroom Festival one year; it was probably twenty years ago and the commoners still mingled with the elite in that setting. The mushroom hunters all got together for a potluck dinner--I brought Black Bean soup (in which I happened to throw the remains of a pork burrito--for flavor). Weil LOVED my soup. "Is this vegetarian?" he asked me. Gulp. I lied. "Uh---yes." That horrible moment still echoes in my mind.

If he is truly a snitch, well I won't feel so bad. . . . .

Don't feell bad he was a snitch!

[suebee]

MAPS conference was sold out long ago. darn. i emailed that i'd volunteer to help. my favorite thing in daniels latest book was the inclusion of grof's speech at his "vision 97 award" in '07.

as for weil, dont you think leary would have self destructed in any case?

GREAT article sidey, thank you.

[sidecross]

Weil was very young and I would really enjoy his reflection today on how he views what he did as a young man and its ramifications.

We all do things we regret; the honorable person is the one who can take responsibility.

[sidecross]

April 11, 2010

Hallucinogens Have Doctors Tuning In Again

By JOHN TIERNEY

As a retired clinical psychologist, Clark Martin was well acquainted with traditional treatments for depression, but his own case seemed untreatable as he struggled through chemotherapy and other grueling regimens for kidney cancer. Counseling seemed futile to him. So did the antidepressant pills he tried.

Nothing had any lasting effect until, at the age of 65, he had his first psychedelic experience. He left his home in Vancouver, Wash., to take part in an experiment at Johns Hopkins medical school involving psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient found in certain mushrooms.

Scientists are taking a new look at hallucinogens, which became taboo among regulators after enthusiasts like Timothy Leary promoted them in the 1960s with the slogan “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Now, using rigorous protocols and safeguards, scientists have won permission to study once again the drugs’ potential for treating mental problems and illuminating the nature of consciousness.

After taking the hallucinogen, Dr. Martin put on an eye mask and headphones, and lay on a couch listening to classical music as he contemplated the universe.

“All of a sudden, everything familiar started evaporating,” he recalled. “Imagine you fall off a boat out in the open ocean, and you turn around, and the boat is gone. And then the water’s gone. And then you’re gone.”

Today, more than a year later, Dr. Martin credits that six-hour experience with helping him overcome his depression and profoundly transforming his relationships with his daughter and friends. He ranks it among the most meaningful events of his life, which makes him a fairly typical member of a growing club of experimental subjects.

Researchers from around the world are gathering this week in San Jose, Calif., for the largest conference on psychedelic science held in the United States in four decades. They plan to discuss studies of psilocybin and other psychedelics for treating depression in cancer patients, obsessive-compulsive disorder, end-of-life anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and addiction to drugs or alcohol.

The results so far are encouraging but also preliminary, and researchers caution against reading too much into these small-scale studies. They do not want to repeat the mistakes of the 1960s, when some scientists-turned-evangelists exaggerated their understanding of the drugs’ risks and benefits.

Because reactions to hallucinogens can vary so much depending on the setting, experimenters and review boards have developed guidelines to set up a comfortable environment with expert monitors in the room to deal with adverse reactions. They have established standard protocols so that the drugs’ effects can be gauged more accurately, and they have also directly observed the drugs’ effects by scanning the brains of people under the influence of hallucinogens.

Scientists are especially intrigued by the similarities between hallucinogenic experiences and the life-changing revelations reported throughout history by religious mystics and those who meditate. These similarities have been identified in neural imaging studies conducted by Swiss researchers and in experiments led by Roland Griffiths, a professor of behavioral biology at Johns Hopkins.

In one of Dr. Griffiths’s first studies, involving 36 people with no serious physical or emotional problems, he and colleagues found that psilocybin could induce what the experimental subjects described as a profound spiritual experience with lasting positive effects for most of them. None had had any previous experience with hallucinogens, and none were even sure what drug was being administered.

To make the experiment double-blind, neither the subjects nor the two experts monitoring them knew whether the subjects were receiving a placebo, psilocybin or another drug like Ritalin, nicotine, caffeine or an amphetamine. Although veterans of the ’60s psychedelic culture may have a hard time believing it, Dr. Griffiths said that even the monitors sometimes could not tell from the reactions whether the person had taken psilocybin or Ritalin.

The monitors sometimes had to console people through periods of anxiety, Dr. Griffiths said, but these were generally short-lived, and none of the people reported any serious negative effects. In a survey conducted two months later, the people who received psilocybin reported significantly more improvements in their general feelings and behavior than did the members of the control group.

The findings were repeated in another follow-up survey, taken 14 months after the experiment. At that point most of the psilocybin subjects once again expressed more satisfaction with their lives and rated the experience as one of the five most meaningful events of their lives.

Since that study, which was published in 2008, Dr. Griffiths and his colleagues have gone on to give psilocybin to people dealing with cancer and depression, like Dr. Martin, the retired psychologist from Vancouver. Dr. Martin’s experience is fairly typical, Dr. Griffiths said: an improved outlook on life after an experience in which the boundaries between the self and others disappear.

In interviews, Dr. Martin and other subjects described their egos and bodies vanishing as they felt part of some larger state of consciousness in which their personal worries and insecurities vanished. They found themselves reviewing past relationships with lovers and relatives with a new sense of empathy.

“It was a whole personality shift for me,” Dr. Martin said. “I wasn’t any longer attached to my performance and trying to control things. I could see that the really good things in life will happen if you just show up and share your natural enthusiasms with people. You have a feeling of attunement with other people.”

The subjects’ reports mirrored so closely the accounts of religious mystical experiences, Dr. Griffiths said, that it seems likely the human brain is wired to undergo these “unitive” experiences, perhaps because of some evolutionary advantage.

“This feeling that we’re all in it together may have benefited communities by encouraging reciprocal generosity,” Dr. Griffiths said. “On the other hand, universal love isn’t always adaptive, either.”

Although federal regulators have resumed granting approval for controlled experiments with psychedelics, there has been little public money granted for the research, which is being conducted at Hopkins, the University of Arizona; Harvard; New York University; the University of California, Los Angeles; and other places.

The work has been supported by nonprofit groups like the Heffter Research Institute and MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.

“There’s this coming together of science and spirituality,” said Rick Doblin, the executive director of MAPS. “We’re hoping that the mainstream and the psychedelic community can meet in the middle and avoid another culture war. Thanks to changes over the last 40 years in the social acceptance of the hospice movement and yoga and meditation, our culture is much more receptive now, and we’re showing that these drugs can provide benefits that current treatments can’t.”

Researchers are reporting preliminary success in using psilocybin to ease the anxiety of patients with terminal illnesses. Dr. Charles S. Grob, a psychiatrist who is involved in an experiment at U.C.L.A., describes it as “existential medicine” that helps dying people overcome fear, panic and depression.

“Under the influences of hallucinogens,” Dr. Grob writes, “individuals transcend their primary identification with their bodies and experience ego-free states before the time of their actual physical demise, and return with a new perspective and profound acceptance of the life constant: change.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/12/sc...gewanted=print

[JCCamp007]

Again,Sidey,another great reading.
And you SB.I admire your foresight but my story outdoes them all and validates the experience with psychedelics is greatly influenced by surroundings.
"Knights in White Satin" by the Moody Blues and London Symphonic orchestra on a beach with James and John.

[sidecross]

Psychedelic trip aids cancer patient in study

Malcolm Ritter, Associated Press

Friday, April 23, 2010

(04-23) 04:00 PDT New York - --

The big white pill was brought to her in an earthenware chalice. She'd already held hands with her two therapists and expressed her wishes for what it would help her do.

She swallowed it, lay on the couch with her eyes covered, and waited. And then it came.

"The world was made up of jewels and I was in a dome," she recalled. Surrounded by brilliant, kaleidoscopic colors, she saw the dome open up to admit "this most incredible luminescence that made everything even more beautiful."

Tears trickled down her face as she saw "how beautiful the world could actually be."

That's how Nicky Edlich, 67, began her first-ever trip on a psychedelic drug last year.

She says it has greatly helped her psychotherapeutic treatment for anxiety from her advanced ovarian cancer.

For researchers, it was another small step toward showing that hallucinogenic drugs, famous but condemned in the 1960s, can one day help doctors treat conditions like cancer anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The New York University study Edlich participated in is among a handful now going on in the United States and elsewhere with drugs like LSD, MDMA (Ecstasy) and psilocybin, the main ingredient of "magic mushrooms."

The work follows lines of research choked off four decades ago by the war on drugs. The research is still preliminary.

"There is more psychedelic research taking place in the world than at any time in the last 40 years," said Rick Doblin, executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, which funds some of the work. "We're at the end of the beginning of the renaissance."

He said that more than 1,200 people attended a conference in California last weekend on psychedelic science.

But doing the research is not easy, Doblin and others say, with government funders still leery and drug companies not interested in the compounds they can't patent. That pretty much leaves private donors.

Edlich, whose cancer forced her to retire from teaching French at a private school, said recurrences of her ovarian cancer had provoked fears about suffering and dying and how her death would affect her family. She felt "profound sadness that my life was going to be cut short."

The homey NYU room where Edlich had been getting psychotherapy was the setting for her drug experiences. She had brought along photos of her son, grandchildren and partner. She met with two therapists she'd come to trust, knowing they would stay with her through her hours under the influence.

After swallowing the white pill, Edlich perused an art book for about a half-hour while waiting for the psilocybin to take effect. Then she lay on the couch with headphones and listened to music with eyeshades over her eyes.

Did the drug experience help?

"I think it made me more aware of what was so important and what was making me either sad or depressed. I think it was revelatory."

Experts emphasize people shouldn't try psilocybin on their own because it can be harmful, sometimes causing bouts of anxiety and paranoia.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...type=printable

[sidecross]

How LSD Destroyed God's (and Dad's) Rigid Authority and Ended the Dull 1950s

By Ram Dass and Ralph Metzner, Brain Waving

The following is adapted from the Foreword to Birth of a Psychedelic Culture: Conversations about Leary, the Harvard Experiments, Millbrook and the Sixties, by Ram Dass and Ralph Metzner with Gary Bravo, from Synergetic Press.

LSD is a drug that produces fear in people who don’t take it. –Timothy Leary

It’s now almost half a century since that day in September 1961 when a mysterious fellow named Michael Hollingshead made an appointment to meet Professor Timothy Leary over lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club. When they met in the foyer, Hollingshead was carrying with him a quart jar of sugar paste into which he had infused a gram of Sandoz LSD. He had smeared this goo all over his own increasingly abstract consciousness and it still contained, by his own reckoning, 4,975 strong (200 mcg) doses of LSD. The mouth of that jar became perhaps the most significant of the fumaroles from which the ‘60s blew forth.

Everybody who continues to obsess on the hilariously terrifying cultural epoch known as the ‘60s – which is to say, most everybody from “my gege-generation,” the post-War demographic bulge that achieved permanent adolescence during that era – has his or her own sense of when the ‘60s really began. There are a lot of candidates: the blossoming pink cloud in the Zapruder film, Mario Savio’s first speech in Sproul Plaza, the passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the Beatles’ first appearance on the the Ed Sullivan Show, the first Acid Test, the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, the release of the song “Good Vibrations,” the day Jerry Garcia got kicked out of the army. But as often as not, if you are a Boomer, the ‘60s began for surreal on the day you dropped acid. And if that is when the shit hit your personal fan, you may owe a debt of ambiguous gratitude to the appealingly demonic young sociopath who conveyed the Stark Bolt of Chemical Revelation to the nice young gentlemen of the Harvard Psilocybin Project.

The essential tameness of the group that was to become so notorious is only one fascinating feature of discourse to follow between the Project’s second and third most celebrated veterans: Ram Dass ( who as Richard Alpert, PhD, was Tom Sawyer to Tim Leary’s Huckleberry Finn) and Dr. Ralph Metzner (who began as an acolyte and wound up presiding over the remains).

In some of the photographs of members of the Project, taken prior to the arrival of Mr. Hollingshead and his Magic Mayonnaise Jar, the learned investigators are actually whacked on psilocybin and yet, their narrow black ties are still neatly knotted, their horn-rimmed glasses are on straight, their earnest civilization is still visibly intact.

Consider that Dr. Alpert’s first impulse, upon regaining the ability to walk during his first psychedelic experience, was to head off through the snow to his parents’ house and start shoveling their driveway. Upon being discovered, his defiant response was to dance a jig. This is truly a rebel without claws. But a few days after that fateful lunch with Hollingshead, Timothy Leary dropped acid and everything changed. The sober, scientific center of the Harvard Psilocybin Project lost its hold on the centripetal edge. The past started to end and the future started to begin. Their ties loosened and disappeared, along with belief in any such prosaic artifact as objective reality and the social conventions that accompanied it. As Leary later wrote in High Priest ( p. 256-257 ): “From the date of this session it was inevitable that we would leave Harvard, that we would leave American society and that we would spend the rest of our lives as mutants, faithfully following the instructions of our internal blueprints, and tenderly, gently disregarding the parochial social inanities.”

Ram Dass had a somewhat more alarmed reaction. “When Tim first took LSD, he didn’t speak for weeks. I went around saying, ‘We’ve lost Timothy, we’ve lost Timothy.’ I was warning everybody to not take that drug, because Tim wasn’t talking and he was sort of dull … When I took it, I felt it went so far beyond the astral, beyond form, to pure energy. It showed me that in previous psychedelic sessions, I had been screwing around in the astral plane. LSD was no nonsense. If you weren’t grounded somewhere, you’d go out on this drug.”

They were both right, of course. These were by no means unusual responses to the experience. Thanks in very large part to the subsequent exertions of Drs. Leary, Alpert and Metzner, the experience was one shared over the following decade by tens of millions of Americans, the larger part of whom found it difficult ever after to take seriously the verities that few in Eisenhower’s America would have questioned. Our paradigm got fucking well shifted. At least mine certainly did. And so, I would venture, did that of the United States of America, during the trip we took between 1961 and 1972.

One can make a non-ludicrous case that the most important event in the cultural history of America since the 1860s was the introduction of LSD. Before acid hit American culture, even the rebels believed, as Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman implicitly did, in something like God-given authority. Authority, all agreed, derived from a system wherein God or Dad (or, more often, both) was on top and you were on the bottom. And it was no joke. Whatever else one might think of authority, it was not funny. But after one had rewired one’s self with LSD, authority – with its preening pomp, its affection for ridiculous rituals of office, its fulsome grandiloquence, and eventually, and sublimely, its tarantella around Mutually Assured Destruction – became hilarious to us and there wasn’t much we could do about it.

No matter how huge and fearsome the puppets, once one’s perceptions were wiped clean enough by the psychedelic solvent to behold their strings and the mechanical jerkiness of their behavior, it was hard to suppress the giggles. Though our hilarity has since been leavened with tragedy, loss, and a more appropriate sense of our own foolishness, we’re laughing still.

Birth of a Psychedelic Culture is a saga of holy heroism. The people in it were like the Lewis and Clark of the Mind. But it is also a cautionary tale and contained within it is a lot of the real reason that America had such a visceral immune reaction to our sudden, terrifying and transforming “Otherness” in the middle of its consciousness.

Before delightedly steering the train off its rails, we were given a glimpse of grace and infinity. But like all that is utterly true, the lightning was brief and the thunder rolls still. In the beginning for me – and for many of us – there was the realization that religion was mostly the creation of God in man’s own image. Just as Tim Leary became furious at Catholicism shortly after hitting West Point, I bought a little Honda motorcycle and found that my dopily consoling Mormonism couldn’t seem to ride along. Like the maddeningly glib Dick Alpert – and believe me, he was a man of many words in those days – I left monotheism for sex and velocity. But there had been, even in a book as weird as the one the Angel Moroni purportedly gave Joseph Smith ( Mark Twain called it “chloroform in print”), a spark of something. It was not religion, but you could almost see it from there.

I sped around with a longing for the Spirit that seemed inaccessible until sometime in 1964 when I read about the “Good Friday Experiment” in which, on Good Friday of 1962, Walter Pahnke, Tim Leary and the two battle-scarred saints of the Unnamable whose reminiscences you can read in the book (Ram Dass and Ralph Metzner), had given psilocybin to some divinity students in Boston University’s Marsh chapel and – mirabile dictu! — they fucking saw God or something like It. And all because somebody gave them a pill.

Like most people raised by hick kids in the mountains, I was a mystic without ever having heard the word. If I could have a direct experience of The Thing Itself, without all that regulatory obligation wrapped around it, I would become whole again. After that, I read everything I could find about mystico-mimetic chemicals: Gordon Wasson’s 1957 article for Life magazine about magic mushrooms, Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception, Bill Burroughs’s Yage Letters, etc. I wanted a piece of that communion wafer and so did a lot of other kids raised around the dreary wasteland of American piety.

In the fall of 1965, I entered Wesleyan University where both the man who was to become Ram Dass, as well as the man who sheltered and then spurned the Harvard Psilocybin Project, Dave McClelland, had taught shortly before. I knew about Leary, Alpert and Metzner and had my own copy of The Psychedelic Experience. But I thought they were still at Harvard. I was going to go find them.

Before I could get around to that pilgrimage, I found myself at a Vassar mixer one late night in late 1965 and met a strangely luminous Indian Brahmin fellow who stood apart. He asked me if I could give him a ride to the “religious retreat” where he was staying not far from Poughkeepsie and I agreed. So we wheeled around shiny narrow roads to Millbrook in a truly Biblical downpour and the next thing I knew I was looking at the headquarters of the Castalia Foundation.

He invited me in. I didn’t know who lived there. Now, at that point, my heroes had not only been cast out of Harvard, but paradise as well. Inside the house it was not such a pretty sight. The social order had been whupped upside the head too many times already, but that didn’t bother me. I had Forrest Gumped my way into the Temple of Delphi.

Not long after that, I was fully enrolled in the Eastern Orthodox Church of LSD. A great deal more could be said about my initiation and the adventures that followed, but this is not about my long, strange trip. Besides, there are better stories about the perception of mysterium tremendum and its effect upon mere mortals. (Understanding the legend of Dr. Faustus might not be a bad start either. )

I will say that there was a night in late 1966, I think, when I rode a motorcycle from Millbrook to Middletown during an ice storm and was, because of the acid, convinced that I could no more leave the road than an electron could escape the centerline of a linear accelerator. I will also say that by then I’d switched my academic focus from physics to phenomenology with a particular focus on Medieval Christian mystics like St. Theresa, St. John of the Cross, and Meister Eckhart. I had a sign on my dorm room door displaying the following formula: [picture of me] + [skeletal schematic representation of the LSD-25 molecule] = [ picture of the Buddha ].

The acid was working. What I didn’t know then was that my best friend from prep school, a kid named Bob Weir, who had been strangely incommunicado since shortly after he worked on my family’s ranch, had been right next to another great fumarole of pharmaceutical whacketydoodah, the Acid Tests. His little band, the Grateful Dead, had been part of an experiment in mass hallucination which seemed, from our East Coast view, to make Millbrook look like a Trappist monastery. It sounded to me like what these West Coast people were doing was a particularly blasphemous form of drug abuse, the spiritual equivalent of breaking into Chartres Cathedral and getting drunk on the communion wine.

But, while we were looking down our long patrician noses at these barbaric shenanigans, they were apparently producing transformations similar to our own. Five years later, Hunter S. Thompson recalled 1965 and 1966 in San Francisco like this (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, pg 68):

“There was madness in any direction, at any hour … You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle – that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail.”

Yes. That seemed right. Even as we were dismantling the monotheistic model of God as Abusive Father, we were assembling another one – in our own image of course – more personally available through mysticism and generally more immanent than the Previous Dude, but still inclined to lend special sanction to the actions of a particular socio-political cohort which, happily, turned out to be ours. God, or Something Like It, was on our side this time. The fact that God might turn up looking like a fat guy with an elephant head or as an aperture into pure, spirit-scalding Light, or even as Michael Hollingshead on a bad day, didn’t matter to us. The Apocalypse was nigh. The Age of Aquarius had dawned, and God was no longer in his Heaven but getting down, right there inside of us and our holy pills.

By spring of 1967, Leary, Alpert, and Metzner had already started to feel the arrogance of this premise. All three had gone to India and two had come limping back. Personally, I was still accelerating into the radiant fog, and so was a large percentage of my swollen generational demographic.

The Gathering of the Tribes had taken place in Golden Gate Park in January of that year. Leary and Allen Ginsberg had turned up there along with the international press, and the coastal schism in the Church of Acid had been officially healed. Somewhere in there, Time magazine ran a cover story on “The Hippies.” A more attentive cultural observer than I would have known by that sign that we’d reached our high-water mark. Whatever my earlier misgivings about the Acid Tests, I had learned by then that my dear Weir had been part of this heresy.

I was tickled to hear that the Grateful Dead were going to play their first New York gig at a Bleecker Street disco called the Cafe Au GoGo in June. Early June 1967 was a mighty time, the reverberations of which are now as ubiquitous in American cultural history as is the Big Bang in the rest of the universe. As I remember it, the Dead played on June 6th. The Six Day war had broken out the day before. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band had been released five days before, as had the Grateful Dead’s eponymous first record. I had helped make arrangements to take the Dead up to Millbrook the day after.

After the show, which was kind of forgettable, Weir and I wandered over to Washington Square Arch and were trying to debrief one another. It was steady work. It wasn’t obvious that he had entirely passed the Acid Test. His eyes were all pupil, it seemed. He had the longest hair I’d ever seen on a human with a penis. And he’d become a fellow of very few words.

While we were struggling with the acquisition of a common language, a pale green Ford Falcon station wagon leapt the curb fifteen feet away and, like evil clowns emerging in platoon strength from a tiny circus car, some ten Long Island toughs poured out of it and headed toward us. You could see with one eye that they weren’t from our side of a culture war that had already gotten ugly in America. Like T cells in jackboots, they took us for antigens and meant us harm. As they were circling, Weir looked up and said mildly, “ You know, I sense violence in you guys, and whenever I feel it in myself, there’s a song I like to sing.” ( And I’m thinking, “??!” ) All of a sudden he’s chanting “Hare Krishna,” and what with my wondering ears should I hear but the toughs singing along. For about fifteen seconds. And then they beat the crap outof us.

So, as I drove my 550 horsepower Chevy Super Sport up the Taconic to Millbrook the next day, both Bobby and I looked like Wiley Coyote after a bad run-in with an Acme product. Also on board was a girl named Bos ( over whom I was totally goofy at the time), Phil Lesh, and Frank Zappa’s star chick singer, a hot number who called herself Uncle Meat. We listened to war news from the Holy Land on the radio and we had on board a copy of Sgt. Pepper’s, which I’d bought on the way out of town and which none of us had heard yet.

I was trying to explain to my inamorata Bos, both of whose parents were Jewish psychiatrists, why I felt so moved by St. John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul. It was a moment in the ‘60s, that day was. When we got to the Hitchcock Mansion, it was pretty clear that whatever else the charming Dr. Leary was trying to tell the world, housekeeping tips were not being integrated into it.

Few of the regulars remained. Ralph, Tim, and even Michael Hollingshead had reached a point the year before when they’d found Dr. Alpert’s manias so alarming that they’d sent him packing off to India. (Where he was, by this time, already in a dhoti and well on his way to becoming Baba Ram Dass. He dropped the Baba as soon as the wisdom actually kicked in.)

That night we all gathered in the second floor library and, with ecclesiastical ceremony, we put on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Nobody said a word while the record played. Many of us couldn’t have if we’d wanted to. I was so high I could taste the music and found the purple notes a little hard to chew. When the London Philharmonic’s last cacophonous notes trailed out of “A Day in the Life,” there was a portentous silence and … Timmy intoned solemnly, “My work is complete.”

Little did he know how right and how wrong he was. I say this because while he and the rest of us crazy angels had truly delivered some form of apocalypse, it could not actually take effect in a couple of years or even a couple of generations. No revelation so culturally shattering was going to be universally accepted overnight. No generation that called itself now was going to find lengthy evolution palatable, but that was what was on our plate nonetheless.

Yes, the Beatles had dropped acid and the whole world had noticed, but not everyone was pleased. The Empire was about to strike back. Moreover, we had, with our giddy carnival frenzies and darker madnesses soon to come, sown the seeds of our own disaster. There was a moment in the fall of 1967 that I myself became convinced, with passionate intensity, that we were that “rough beast” Yeats had described. We were leading society into such a quagmire of narcissistic, self-reaffirming subjectivism that if we continued to “Storm Heaven,” as Jay Stevens put it, little of what might be a reasonable basis for polity or even what passes for civilization would survive our selfindulgence.

I went unhinged. I became psychotic and grandiose and decided to become what would have been America’s first suicide bomber. I was prepared to sound a warning with my own spattered flesh and that of innocent others. I would be the admonition on the front page of every paper that would slow the juggernaut of hideous Truth. I had the means and the moment. Fortunately, praise Providence, I was found out and stopped forty-five minutes short of my own vile apocalypse. I lived on Thorazine for a while after that. But my intended mission attracted other willing soldiers. In my stead, we got Charlie Manson and Altamont. We got the behavioral sink of the long autumn that followed the Summer of Love. We got the Chicago Democratic Convention, the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Front, the communes that turned into rural slums overnight.

What we got was the Bill. Hunter S. Thompson put it very harshly but with some accuracy a few years later in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (pgs 178-179): “All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours, too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create … a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody … or at least some force — is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.

Who can blame the Rotarians of America for being alarmed? We became terrifying enough to scare ourselves. The Babbitry came down with a not ill-considered immune response that, however draconian its methods, was nevertheless their Apollonian duty just as appropriately as the creation of Dionysian chaos had seemed to be ours. But perhaps even more unsettling to the Powers That Had Been was the fact that, as I mentioned earlier, in addition to calling into question their version of God-given authority, we now found them amusing.

Since there is nothing authority hates worse than being laughed at, the authorities resolved to make themselves even less funny. The harder the acid heads laughed, the more bellicose, pig-headed, and, well … authoritarian the Powers became. And thus, instead of a quick abdication by the cultural forces that had been in charge of Western “Civilization” for two thousand years and a peaceful transfer of power to the laughing Aquarians, there commenced the forty year Mexican standoff that I call the War Between the Fifties and the Sixties.

Of course, this conflict had a lot of other names along the way, most of them delicious with the kind of dark irony it takes an acidhead to properly savor. There was the Viet Nam War, the War on Poverty, The War on Terror, both Wars on Iraq, and throughout, interwoven into every inch ofAmerican life, there was the War on ( Some ) Drugs. There was also, implicitly, the War on the Bill of Rights.

Whatever its other depraved social consequences – the millions jailed, the military dead and maimed, the deceit and denial at all levels of American society, particularly within the nuclear family – the War Between the Fifties and the Sixties endowed us with a golden age of irony. If you didn’t have a sense of irony, you were missing most of the fun, and, um, ironically, just about the only Americans who did have one were the acid heads. This created yet another badly hung loop as various iterations of “We had to destroy the village in order to save it” concatenated through the culture and, once again, we were the only ones laughing.

And then, lest we forget, throughout much of this period, and scarcely mentioned by anybody, acid head or Republican Whip, was the greatest surreality of all: the almost universal belief that somewhere and some time soon, someone would foul up and launch the nuclear storm thatwould glaze the planet with our elemental constituents. And if you couldn’t laugh at that, what could you laugh at?

Now, it seems many of these horrors may be consigned to the history of a future that never happened. While new horrors surely await us, very few still believe we’re likely to go “toe-to-toe with the Russkies” in nuclear combat as Slim Pickens put it in one of the most immortal lines of the 1960s.

Better still, the worst of the authoritarian prigs have so magnificently shot their wad during eight long years of Cheney/Bush that only those savagely beaten by their own fathers or the clergy support them now.

Aside from the coming kerfuffle over war crimes indictments and ongoing skirmishes along the Mason-Dixon Line, the War Between the Fifties and the Sixties may be finally drawing to an end. Indeed, as I write these words, the President of the United States, in addition to being black and self-admittedly smart and well-educated, strikes me as a fellow who probably dropped acid at some point. At the least, when asked if he “inhaled,” he replied, “I thought that was the point.”

Now that the worst of it may be over, perhaps it may become possible for various members of Congress, federal judges, ranked military officers, prominent clergy, and captains of industry — aside from the peculiarly honest Steve Jobs – to do as most of these, had they been brave enough, ought to have done decades ago and say in public: There was a moment, years ago, when I took LSD. And, whatever the immediate consequences, it made me a different person than I would have been and different in ways I have been grateful for all this time.

That would be a mighty moment. Those who still live are all now older and wiser than we were in those literally heady days, and we may finally be ready to tell such truths without setting off another round of conflict.

Ram Dass has come a long way along the path of the profound since I first met him as the maddeningly manipulative Dick Alpert. Indeed, at one point some years ago, I was having dinner with him and confessed to a moral dilemma that I was having a hard time teasing apart. I can’t even remember what it was now, but he cut through it snickety-snack, like a sword through the Gordian Knot, with a few well chosenwords.“That’s the problem with you, man,” I said, and continued with a concession I would not have made even to Baba Ram Dass, who turned up first at Wesleyan when he returned from India, still pretty full of self-promoting nonsense, “You’re just a lot wiser than I am.” His eyes narrowed. “Don’t you lay that wisdom shit on me, Barlow,” he retorted, thereby defeating his own argument with its refutation.

But even before then, he had uttered a motto that has been far more important to carrying the essential message of the sixties than “ Turn on. Tune in. Drop out” ( which was actually coined by Marshall McLuhan and given toTim Leary since it didn’t fit McLuhan’s rap). Ram Dass said, “Be here now.” And here we all are. Now. Ready at last with the patience, forgiveness, contrition and self-amusement necessary to continue the work in earnest.

It is a good time to go back to the beginnings of the revolution still under way and take stock. It is a good time to read this book.

http://www.alternet.org/drugs/146942...he_dull_1950s/

[sidecross]

A web site called ‘Psychedelic Salon’ has pod casts worth listening too.

They can be found at I Tunes or at http://www.matrixmasters.net/blogs/ .

For instance yesterday I listened to a Timothy Leary talk at MIT in ’67; I remember Leary using the phrase “Tune in, Turn on, and Drop out” and not the quote in the article I posted above. He also said this was to be repeated and not just as a one time event.

[suebee]

i took a lot of lsd. it changed me in ways i too still appreciate, despite the resigned view of the world that resulted.

i reread remember be here now (front face title) (be here now-spine title) around christmas. its still a good trip.

thanks sidey.

[sidecross]

As I have post before I took Sandoz LSD at 400mcg 5 times in ’66; I am still to this day digesting what it had told and shown me.

I am still a user of cannabis and would not again take LSD unless I could be sure of the chemist.

Studies have shown that ‘street acid’ was about 80 mcg in the 60’s and today ‘street acid is between 20 mcg and 40mcg.

At a dose of 400 mcg LSD is no party drug or a substance to be used in most social settings.

[sidecross]

I am currently listening to a pod cast from ‘psychedelic salon’ of a ’67 talk with Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, Gary Snyder, and Alan Ginsberg!

[JCCamp007]

Orange Sunshine baby,Orange Sunshine but I too,like you SB,believe that one will never look at life and spirit as it was before one's innoculation.
I would recommend it to no one for no reason.
Peyote.Now that is a different story for us Comanches.

[sidecross]

For a chance to recharge our perception I would suggest listening to a new pod cast I heard today of Timothy Leary and Richard Albert recorded at Harvard in ’83for the twentieth anniversary of their firing from Harvard University.

You can get this pod cast from ITunes at the ‘Psychedelic Salon’ episode #233. You can also find an MP3 version (I think) at:

http://www.matrixmasters.com/podcasts/

[suebee]

sidey this is great. im listening to "pod 233".
"political stupor structure"

[suebee]

http://m.io9.com/5617273/two-new-sci...-mental-health

[sidecross]

Originally Posted by suebee

http://m.io9.com/5617273/two-new-sci...-mental-health

Ketamine was used by combat medics in Vietnam too.

It is a dissociative and if your ‘legs just got blown off’ it certainly would help.

McKenna was not a big fan, but others include Dr John Lilly used it often.

[JCCamp007]

Antigua's probably getting it at this moment.Monterrat,a bit to the notyh and east of St John's.
Loved my time there in med school.
Treated like a king,surrounded by some impressive people from all over the world.

The world is going to be how it is supposed to be or it's in a mass psychosis,letting the masses starve and die of disease.EARTHQUAKE.

[JCCamp007]

Antigua has 365 beaches,and,
"..the wind always blows in Antigua"
the stewardess said to me as I left the plane and she slipped me her tele number.
"I'll be home in about an hour" she whispered.

Three days of bliss before reporting to school.
I kept thinking of "Maggie May".I sure didn't want to FU this attempt to get my MD finally.

About the size of McIntosh county,Okla,Antigua is-pronounced ga,not gua.
I drove the circumference of the island in one day.
The Med School there-I think there are two now,was located on an abandoned satellite tracking station owned by the US gov.
Anyway the President of UHS,a Nigerian King and Presidental candidate,was rarely there and his son ran the school.
He was a massive black man who kept his tribal wear in his office on the wall and an apartment in Chicago.
Cold-bloodied and it was said that for one to graduate from UHS-Univ of Health Science.........
His wife was a popular dentist in St John's.

One weekend a fellow student was killed while riding his motorcycle and Akande apparently had to pay to ship his body back home.He gathered all 15-20 students and told us we had to get insurance to cover such shipments.

I am sure Dr Akande sr ran for President of Nigeria and had alot of oil so that is why the good ol USA let him rent "the Farm and facilities" for next to nothing.

Akande jr traveled in an old limozine(sp),drived by a bodyguard who carried a machine gun,
That made me a bit nervous and I stayed away as much as possible at a Canadian's friends house with two other students and a teacher-MD from Cuba-about half mile from school and a rock's throw from the beach.Azure water,a bunch of psychotic blacks.And 20 mostly rich students.
Every Sunday,different bands would gather in their seperate houses and the hills above St John were filled with the sounds of reggae.

EARTHQUAKE.
It's all about being here now.
MPSKI

[JCCamp007]

Earthquake,earthquake,earthquake.

[suebee]

David Silverberg

From Thursday's Globe and Mail Published on Wednesday, Sep. 08, 2010 5:07PM EDT Last updated on Friday, Sep. 10, 2010 9:58AM EDT

They chat away breezily between vaporizer tokes, sometimes veering off into conspiracy theories about the government or discussions of the healthiest way to smoke marijuana. Then the 12 yoga lovers extend their arms and breathe deeply. Yoga mats cover the floor. A guitarist strums chords as incense weaves its tendrils across the room.

As the light haze of pot smoke dissipates in the downtown Toronto living room, the ganja yoga session begins.

“When you’re high, you can focus better on your breath,” says Dee Dussault, who runs a monthly session of “cannabis-enhanced yoga” at her home dubbed Follow Your Bliss.

She says smoking marijuana in small doses before a yoga class also makes students more receptive to the poses and philosophies behind the activities. “For some people, it makes them uninhibited and open to the idea of the heart chakra, for example.”

Heart chakras aside, ganja yoga has the THC whiff of being the latest yoga fad, following on the heels of hot yoga, circus yoga, pre- and postnatal yoga, acro yoga (acrobatics), even hip-hop yoga. While cannabis has been deeply entwined with spiritualism over the centuries, some yoga practitioners say that a pure body is ideal for the exercise and that smoking pot could cause an unwieldy imbalance. As one online-forum commenter opined: “Why should we try to purify our body and soul through yoga if we later intoxicate it again with marijuana or other substances?”

Yoga instructor Dee Duss teaches to participants of her "ganja yoga" class, where people smoke marijuana before starting their yoga session at her studio on Grange Ave., Toronto Ontario September 01, 2010.

But Dan Skye, senior editor at New York-based High Times magazine, which tracks marijuana trends, disagrees with yoga purists who believe getting high before a class is detrimental. “Pot is changing medicine; it’s changing recreational habits,” he says. The latest research seems to back up his claim: A recent McGill University study found that cannabis helped alleviate chronic neuropathic pain.

Ms. Dussault remains unfazed. For the past year, she has run ganja yoga out of her home studio as well as at the Hot Box Café in Toronto’s Kensington Market. The class takes place on the last Friday of the month, after work, and she charges $15 for each session. Often, she invites a musician to play some relaxing tunes during the 90 minutes, and she gives out munchies – fruits, nuts, tea – after the class.

Because Ms. Dussault publicizes ganja yoga openly, there is the question of legal repercussions. But she’s quick to say, “No, I’ve never been worried about cops. I think they have bigger fish to fry.”

Among the ground rules at the studio, participants must bring their own pot – and there’s no dealing or mooching. And she makes a point of meeting students before the session “to determine if they want to come just to get stoned.”

Ms. Dussault also encourages participants to fine-tune their yoga skills before embracing ganja yoga. She wants to ensure that people “first experience the true teachings of yoga” and then try ganja yoga to enjoy a different yoga flavour.

Her studio isn’t the only site for cannabis-enhanced yoga. The B.C. Compassion Club Society, a full-service compassion club in Vancouver, offers yoga sessions for those who use medicinal marijuana. Nicole Marcia, the club’s yoga therapist, says she notices that many yoga patrons are “medicated” once they start the session, but for one important reason.

“They need marijuana in order to fight the chronic pain and anxiety they feel,” Ms. Marcia says. She notices that some patients with multiple sclerosis, for instance, are able to “be present” and practise yoga once they’ve gotten high.

Many pot dispensaries and compassion clubs in California and Colorado – where pot is decriminalized – offer yoga classes, including The Herb Shoppe in Colorado Springs. Qat Carter, who teaches there, says that some of her students prefer to eat marijuana edibles, such as pot brownies, because ingesting cooked pot lengthens the high. “My husband says it helps him increase his body awareness and makes him more relaxed when he does the poses.”

Torontonian Melinda Reidl, 36, enjoys how the marijuana buzz complements the yoga experience. “Marijuana quells those voices in your mind,” she says, adding that ganja yoga encourages more deliberate movements. It’s not a competition to push you to sweat hard, like in some hot yoga studios, Ms. Reidl notes. She calls Ms. Dussault’s sessions “a slow-dub version of yoga.”

Blending a stoned perspective and the precision of yoga could be dangerous, warns Monica Voss, an instructor of 30 years who practises out of Esther Myers Yoga Studio in Toronto. “Some people might not be aware of their body when they’re high and maybe they would injure themselves,” she points out.

She would like to see academic studies done to determine cannabis’s relation with pain release and concentration. That way, yoga practitioners may feel more comfortable recommending this type of yoga combination. “It’s healthy to see all these yoga variations, but buyer beware,” she adds.

But Mr. Skye, who used to work in the fitness industry, says he saw many people smoking before stretching. “I knew a few muscle heads who used to toke up on the gym’s fire escape just before class,” he says.

“I like the idea of smoking pot as a spiritual experience, not just for recreational use,” says Tanya Pillay, 35, who attended her first ganja yoga class in August. “When you take an activity like yoga and take the altered state smoking pot creates, it combines to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.”

“Yoga and marijuana, together,” Ms. Pillay says, “it’s like putting salt on your food. It’s just a little enhancement.”

[Van Gogh]

What do you think about that SB and Willow?

[sidecross]

Originally Posted by Van Gogh

What do you think about that SB and Willow?

I like them!

[Van Gogh]

How long have you had those kind of thoughts?

I for one am very serious about getting some land in Mexico and letting Daniel try to play out his game.
I also feel if the 17 States of Mexico were to apply for admission to the United States we would probably have a native Mexican for President within three or four generations.That is if the world doesn;t end in 2012.

Where in Mexico you will probably ask.

Remember I went to med school there so I know abit of the safe places.


Here is a clue though where they are,

Who said,
"I will drink wine with you in the Kingdom of Heaven..."

[Van Gogh]

Several months ago I predicted the number 26 would make synchronous showing.

John 14:26,15:26,16:13.Was that a miracle or not.