Program Notes
Guest speaker: Gary Fisher
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
Our conversation began by looking at photos of some of Gary’s former students, patients, and famous friends.
13:12 We begin a discussion of Gary’s work in the 1960s with severely emotionally disturbed children suffering from variants of childhood schizophrenia and infantile autism who he treated with LSD and psilocybin.
16:36 Al Hubbard is discussed
18:23 Gary Fisher: “All our model was from Hubbard, because Hubbard was the guy who taught my brother-in-law and Duncan Blewett… . He was the father of all this stuff… . He was the one who introduced Osmond and Hoffer to this whole approach.”
25:45 Gary provides more details about his work with the severely disturbed children, beginning with the story of Nancy’s nearly miraculous improvement after being treated with LSD.
35:59 Gary describes the deplorable conditions in the public hospital wards where severely disturbed children were being held.
THE LINKS BELOW
will take you to several articles by Dr. Fisher that have been posted on the Web stie of the Albert Hofmann Foundationin The Gary Fisher Collection:
Treatment of Childhood Schizophrenia Utilizing LSD and Psilocybin
by Gary Fisher, Ph.D.
A Note of the Successful Outcome of a Single Dose LSD Experience in a Patient Suffering from Grand Mal Epilepsy
Gary Fisher, Ph.D.
Some Comments Concerning Dosage Levels Of Psychedelic Compounds For Psychotherapeutic Experiences [Print-friendly copy]
by Gary Fisher, Ph.D.
Death, Identity, and Creativity
by Gary Fisher, Ph.D.
Successful Outcome of a Single LSD Treatment in a Chronically Dysfunctional Man
by Gary Fisher, Ph.D.
The Psychotherapeutic Use Of Psychodysleptic Drugs
by Gary Fisher, Ph.D. and Joyce Martin M.D.
Psychotherapy for the Dying:
Principles and Illustrative Cases with Special Reference to the use of LSD
by Gary Fisher, Ph.D.; Assistant Professor, Division of Behavioral Sciences and Health Education, School of Public Health. University of California, Los Angeles
Counter-Transference Issues in Psychedelic Psychotherapy
by Gary Fisher, PH.D
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from Cyrodelic Space.
00:00:20 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:24 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:31 ►
No, you’re not hallucinating and you haven’t missed a whole week since my last podcast.
00:00:37 ►
Even though it’s only been three days since the last time we were together here in the salon,
00:00:48 ►
I feel compelled to post a program today, June 10, 2007, because it has some significance in my life. Not only was it on this day two years ago that I posted the very first podcast from the Psychedelic Salon,
00:00:53 ►
but had she lived, today would be my mother’s 92nd birthday. While I’m sure that you didn’t
00:01:01 ►
know it was my mother’s birthday, several of our fellow salonners have written to ask if I’m going to do anything special
00:01:07 ►
for the anniversary program and or for the 100th podcast of this series.
00:01:13 ►
Well, several months ago, I did start to think about those questions, but now that the time
00:01:18 ►
has actually arrived, I’ve decided to just keep on keeping on and not do any kind of
00:01:24 ►
a retrospective or anything like that.
00:01:27 ►
Actually, about a year ago, I started collecting some of my favorite sound bites from various programs
00:01:32 ►
that I’d planned on using as my 100th podcast, but that quickly became more work than I had time for.
00:01:40 ►
But I decided that at least for today’s program, I should do something special,
00:01:44 ►
and I can think of no better person to have join us here today than Gary Fisher.
00:01:49 ►
Back in the summer of 2005, while I was visiting with Gary, I turned on my old cassette tape recorder, and that conversation became podcast number 15.
00:02:05 ►
and in fact that was the only interview in this series until number 64 when I began doing a few interviews just for these podcasts.
00:02:10 ►
Now I’ve always felt bad about the quality of that first interview with Gary
00:02:14 ►
and I probably shouldn’t have even used it for a podcast
00:02:17 ►
but the content was so important that I did it anyway.
00:02:22 ►
Now I’ve finally done what I should have done two years ago, and
00:02:25 ►
that is to do a little more professional kind of interview with a man who I believe history will
00:02:31 ►
record as one of our most important early psychedelic researchers. Here’s what the Albert
00:02:37 ►
Hoffman Foundation website has to say about him, and I quote, Saskatchewan group who were trained by Al Hubbard. He did extensive work treating schizophrenic and
00:03:06 ►
autistic children as well as cancer patients. The impressive results he obtained in these
00:03:11 ►
categories give testimony to the remarkable potential these substances offer when administered
00:03:17 ►
with wisdom and understanding. And in his book Higher Wisdom, Eminent Elders Explore the Continuing Impact of Psychedelics,
00:03:27 ►
Charlie Grobe writes,
00:03:29 ►
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Fisher conducted pioneering research on the use of psychedelic drugs in autistic and schizophrenic children.
00:03:40 ►
He subsequently explored the role of psychedelics in adults with major mental illness and in patients with terminal cancer.
00:03:48 ►
He has contributed a number of pivotal articles in the literature on the application of psychedelics with a variety of seriously ill subjects.
00:03:57 ►
Fisher was also a collaborator of Timothy Leary in Mexico, the Caribbean, and at Millbrook in New York.
00:04:02 ►
The Caribbean and at Millbrook in New York.
00:04:09 ►
Now, parts of our conversation that day were about people and places that, for privacy reasons,
00:04:15 ►
need to remain out of the public record, at least for another generation or so.
00:04:21 ►
But in case you’re listening to this podcast in the distant future, at least distant from 2007,
00:04:26 ►
you might be interested in knowing that the complete unedited recordings of all the conversations we’ve had here in the Psychedelic Salon have been preserved
00:04:31 ►
and they’re being stored by a friend of mine.
00:04:33 ►
But it’s doubtful that there’s anything of interest there for anyone other than a PhD
00:04:39 ►
candidate who’s mining for any little scrap of information that hasn’t already been squeezed
00:04:44 ►
out of more conventional archives.
00:04:47 ►
So please don’t feel like you’re missing anything.
00:04:50 ►
As you’ve probably figured out already, my intention with the conversations we have here in the Psychedelic Salon
00:04:57 ►
don’t focus as much on the details of the work these early researchers did,
00:05:02 ►
but instead on the stories surrounding their work.
00:05:06 ►
I figure that over time there will be enough scholars
00:05:08 ►
who will go through what records survive
00:05:11 ►
and pull out significant details of the work that was done.
00:05:15 ►
My role, as I see it, is to provide a little peek
00:05:18 ►
into the personalities that surrounded this early research.
00:05:21 ►
But if you’re looking for more information
00:05:23 ►
about the nuts and bolts of what they did, I’m including links to many of their research papers with the program
00:05:30 ►
notes to these podcasts. Well, enough in the way of introduction. If I don’t quit talking right now,
00:05:36 ►
we’re not going to have time for today’s program, which is part of a conversation I had last week
00:05:42 ►
when I visited Gary Fisher at his home in
00:05:45 ►
Southern California. We began our conversation by looking at some old photos. One of them
00:05:51 ►
was of a woman, not young, not old, rather plain looking, but who had a truly angelic
00:05:57 ►
smile that still shined through after all these years. So right now I’ll pick up on
00:06:02 ►
the part of the conversation where Gary was talking about her
00:06:05 ►
and the graduate course that he was teaching at the time.
00:06:13 ►
And I didn’t give any lectures or anything, but we would make up things for the syllabus so the
00:06:19 ►
university was satisfied that I was teaching courses. And we would call them all kinds of things.
00:06:27 ►
But she was very interesting.
00:06:29 ►
She came as a graduate student.
00:06:35 ►
And I don’t have any memory
00:06:37 ►
of why she was selected by her group.
00:06:42 ►
And to make a terribly long story short, she was just like, didn’t know what was going
00:06:51 ►
on. She didn’t have a clue. Because she had been raised as a Catholic and raised constantly
00:06:58 ►
in Catholicism. She was never exposed to the world. And one day she was sitting there and
00:07:06 ►
she stopped and she put her hands up and then she leaned forward and put her hand out to
00:07:11 ►
touch mine and she said, I just had a thought. She said, this is the first time I’ve ever
00:07:17 ►
had a thought. You’re kidding. Yeah. And from then on, oh, she was funny. She stopped
00:07:24 ►
one of the girls in the hall one day, black girl,
00:07:26 ►
and she said, I understand you people smoke marijuana.
00:07:30 ►
She said, could I get some and smoke it?
00:07:32 ►
Or would you smoke it with me?
00:07:34 ►
I want to see what it’s all about.
00:07:35 ►
How old was she, do you think?
00:07:38 ►
So she was a grad student of none, so she must have been in her 30s, I guess.
00:07:44 ►
At least. At least.
00:07:45 ►
At least.
00:07:47 ►
But she had a total metamorphosis.
00:07:52 ►
And ended up,
00:07:54 ►
she discovered that she was a lesbian,
00:07:57 ►
and she took a lover,
00:07:58 ►
and she traveled the world doing work.
00:08:06 ►
She’s an amazing person.
00:08:09 ►
Now, what was your course focused on?
00:08:13 ►
Well, what we did all our research on,
00:08:16 ►
our dissertations on,
00:08:20 ►
excuse me, my dissertations,
00:08:23 ►
was all on the use of marijuana
00:08:26 ►
in different populations
00:08:28 ►
and the effect of marijuana.
00:08:31 ►
So we did a lot of that.
00:08:33 ►
Did she actually get to try it, do you know?
00:08:35 ►
Oh, yes.
00:08:35 ►
Oh, yeah.
00:08:36 ►
She liked it?
00:08:37 ►
Yes, she liked it.
00:08:38 ►
But she was this untarnished person.
00:08:44 ►
And she still is. I talked to her. I still talk to her on the phone. untarnished person. It’s like,
00:08:46 ►
and she still is.
00:08:46 ►
She’s,
00:08:47 ►
I talk to her,
00:08:48 ►
I still talk to her on the phone.
00:08:49 ►
And,
00:08:50 ►
she’s just
00:08:52 ►
a sweetheart.
00:08:53 ►
So you,
00:08:54 ►
that course really
00:08:55 ►
kind of
00:08:56 ►
helped her to blossom?
00:08:57 ►
Oh,
00:08:57 ►
completely.
00:08:59 ►
Yeah,
00:08:59 ►
she says that,
00:09:01 ►
you know,
00:09:01 ►
that’s when she
00:09:02 ►
woke up
00:09:03 ►
and she became alive.
00:09:05 ►
Wow.
00:09:05 ►
And it obviously didn’t hurt her commitment
00:09:09 ►
to her religious faith that she stayed with it.
00:09:12 ►
We had some nuns in our family
00:09:14 ►
and we still have a priest in our family,
00:09:16 ►
we have a cousin.
00:09:17 ►
And so I understand what that culture is like.
00:09:21 ►
And it’s not easy to break out of it.
00:09:24 ►
Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, well, she never to break out of it. Go ahead.
00:09:25 ►
She never did break out of it.
00:09:27 ►
No, but she at least kind of woke up.
00:09:30 ►
Well, she
00:09:31 ►
translated
00:09:34 ►
all of
00:09:35 ►
the stuff,
00:09:37 ►
all the psychedelic stuff,
00:09:39 ►
into what
00:09:41 ►
Catholicism really should talk about,
00:09:44 ►
which is sharing and love
00:09:46 ►
and grace and forgiveness.
00:09:50 ►
And that’s what she focused on.
00:09:52 ►
And so she changed all of these people over the years
00:09:55 ►
because she gave seminars all the time
00:09:59 ►
everywhere in the United States, around the world.
00:10:01 ►
And that’s all she ever talked about.
00:10:03 ►
She didn’t talk about rules, regulations, nothing.
00:10:07 ►
Just about…
00:10:08 ►
Well, she went back to the basics
00:10:09 ►
of what that was about.
00:10:13 ►
Eliminate all that male hierarchy
00:10:15 ►
and you get back to the core.
00:10:18 ►
But she’s amazing.
00:10:22 ►
This is a nice picture.
00:10:24 ►
Oh, that’s Laura. That’s Laura.
00:10:25 ►
That’s Laura.
00:10:26 ►
And this was when Kaya was born.
00:10:32 ►
And Kaya now, you know, is…
00:10:34 ►
She must be about eight or nine.
00:10:35 ►
Oh, she’s at least nine.
00:10:37 ►
Yes, very tall.
00:10:38 ►
Very beautiful.
00:10:40 ►
And there’s Laura.
00:10:40 ►
Isn’t that a great picture of Laura?
00:10:42 ►
It is.
00:10:43 ►
And that looks like the way she looks last time I saw her.
00:10:45 ►
She doesn’t change a lot.
00:10:46 ►
No, she doesn’t.
00:10:47 ►
Now, you saw her not too long ago, didn’t you?
00:10:49 ►
And that was in 1999.
00:10:52 ►
So this has been eight years ago.
00:10:56 ►
Mm-hmm.
00:10:56 ►
Mm-hmm.
00:10:58 ►
Was that taken at Laura’s house?
00:10:59 ►
Yes.
00:10:59 ►
This was taken…
00:11:00 ►
Oh, yeah, there’s the patio.
00:11:01 ►
Yeah, there’s the patio.
00:11:02 ►
Yeah, you and Charlie went to see Laura this last summer, wasn’t there?
00:11:09 ►
In connection with that new book out about Leary
00:11:12 ►
that you couldn’t believe that she read to him on his deathbed.
00:11:15 ►
Well, I asked her if she did that.
00:11:18 ►
I said, Laura, I’m going to ask you because otherwise I’ll forget it.
00:11:21 ►
And I said, you know, in the book, was that you read to Tim on his deathbed,
00:11:27 ►
and she said, oh, no, no.
00:11:32 ►
Silly.
00:11:34 ►
So, you know.
00:11:37 ►
But, yeah, and of course Charlie and I went out
00:11:41 ►
and talked to her most recently about the Laura and Aldous Huxley Institute for Psychedelic Medicine.
00:11:52 ►
And she loves the name.
00:11:53 ►
Oh, great.
00:11:54 ►
And she really responded to it.
00:11:57 ►
Really responded to it.
00:11:58 ►
I think it would do a lot of things.
00:12:02 ►
For one thing, it really sort of legitimizes the resurgence that’s taking place now.
00:12:07 ►
Because there’s quite a few…
00:12:09 ►
You know, there’s not as many projects going on
00:12:11 ►
as there were when you were doing it.
00:12:12 ►
But compared to zero ten years ago,
00:12:15 ►
there are quite a few now.
00:12:16 ►
Oh, yeah.
00:12:18 ►
So that’s good.
00:12:20 ►
Now, this is another picture of Mara.
00:12:24 ►
She’s always wearing hats when she’s out.
00:12:26 ►
Always, always, always wore hats.
00:12:28 ►
Mary C. and I were talking about that the other day.
00:12:30 ►
I can remember my mother and aunt always wore hats and gloves to church.
00:12:34 ►
That was the 50s.
00:12:36 ►
Laura looks great in hats.
00:12:37 ►
She pulls it off quite well.
00:12:41 ►
This is two of the kids.
00:12:44 ►
And see, it was 62.
00:12:47 ►
August of 62.
00:12:48 ►
So these were two of the kids that you treated?
00:12:52 ►
Yeah.
00:12:55 ►
And they were getting to relate to each other.
00:13:00 ►
Because the only thing that he would relate to
00:13:02 ►
for a long, long time were bugs.
00:13:06 ►
He used to like to go outside
00:13:08 ►
and then have his nose into the grass
00:13:12 ►
and just bugs.
00:13:14 ►
His whole world was about bugs.
00:13:22 ►
Oh, here they’re learning how to kiss.
00:13:24 ►
Oh, here they’re learning how to kiss. Oh, wow.
00:13:27 ►
That’s about the age I was when I had my first kiss.
00:13:30 ►
I still remember it.
00:13:32 ►
They’re learning how to kiss.
00:13:34 ►
So he did start relating to these people.
00:13:38 ►
Oh, yeah.
00:13:40 ►
Because before anybody came near him, he’d scream.
00:13:43 ►
Scream bloody murder. He’d scream.
00:13:46 ►
And so how did you treat him then?
00:13:48 ►
What did you…
00:13:49 ►
Because back in those days you didn’t have IRBs and all of those things.
00:13:53 ►
What’s IRB?
00:13:54 ►
Institutional Review Board that you had to get your protocol approved.
00:13:59 ►
We didn’t have a protocol.
00:14:01 ►
No, we didn’t have anything like that. So he must have been, when you started
00:14:07 ►
working with him, what, eight, nine, ten, somewhere around there? And he would scream
00:14:13 ►
when people came around him? Yeah, if anybody approached him, he would just scream bloody
00:14:18 ►
murder and not let anybody in. He never looked at anybody. Yeah, this is an interim report we did in 1963.
00:14:32 ►
And Dan Castile was the psychiatrist on the ward.
00:14:35 ►
He would never take any psychedelic,
00:14:37 ►
but he was very, very fascinated.
00:14:40 ►
And so this was from April 62 to December, the last of December in 62.
00:14:52 ►
And the project you called,
00:14:54 ►
An Investigation to Determine Therapeutic Effectiveness of LSD-25 and Psilocybin
00:15:00 ►
on Hospitalized, Severely Emotionally Disturbed Children.
00:15:04 ►
So this is the whole write-up of that. on hospitalized, severely emotionally disturbed children.
00:15:12 ►
So this is the whole write-up of that work.
00:15:14 ►
See, frequency of treatment,
00:15:17 ►
a new treatment program is 1-1-63,
00:15:23 ►
and rationale on effective treatment techniques.
00:15:26 ►
You’re referring to Duncan Blewett’s research there.
00:15:26 ►
Mm-hmm.
00:15:27 ►
Mm-hmm.
00:15:29 ►
Yeah, Blewett and Shalales.
00:15:31 ►
Now, Shalales, of course, was my mentor.
00:15:32 ►
Oh, really?
00:15:33 ►
He was my brother-in-law.
00:15:37 ►
And he was the one I had my first LSD session with.
00:15:38 ►
That was up in Canada?
00:15:38 ►
Yeah. Do you remember when that was?
00:15:41 ►
Yes, it was in the late 50s.
00:15:43 ►
Late 50s.
00:15:44 ►
Mm-hmm. Because I just happened to hear the podcast that did of Myron that was? Yes, it was in the late 50s. Late 50s.
00:15:47 ►
Because I just happened to hear the podcast that did of Myron
00:15:49 ►
and his first experience was
00:15:51 ►
in
00:15:53 ►
00:15:54 ►
April of 56.
00:15:56 ►
So yours was right around there.
00:15:59 ►
Also in Canada, both of you.
00:16:01 ►
He went up there to
00:16:03 ►
Hubbard’s.
00:16:06 ►
Oh, so he went to Hubbard’s. Yeah.
00:16:06 ►
Yeah, Hubbard is not recognized in the literature.
00:16:14 ►
He never wrote anything, of course.
00:16:16 ►
And, you know, he was a charlatan as well.
00:16:20 ►
I mean, he was a very…
00:16:22 ►
He was a…
00:16:23 ►
He built airplanes. Yeah. Yeah, I knew He built airplanes.
00:16:26 ►
Yeah, I knew he had airplanes. He had this alleged OSSCIA connection.
00:16:31 ►
He had a boat that ran without gasoline.
00:16:34 ►
Oh, yeah, right. And Myron told me one time that
00:16:38 ►
Hubbard, he lent Hubbard money.
00:16:43 ►
And then Hubbard came back
00:16:45 ►
and wanted more money
00:16:46 ►
and he said,
00:16:47 ►
well, you haven’t paid me back
00:16:48 ►
what I’ve got.
00:16:49 ►
And so he talked Myron
00:16:50 ►
into giving him money.
00:16:52 ►
And he said,
00:16:52 ►
Myron’s so sweet.
00:16:55 ►
He says,
00:16:55 ►
what’s wrong with me?
00:16:57 ►
And I said,
00:16:58 ►
well, you’re stupid
00:16:59 ►
and Hubbard’s smart.
00:17:02 ►
What else?
00:17:03 ►
He laughed.
00:17:05 ►
But, you know, Hubbard’s smart. What else? He laughed and laughed and laughed.
00:17:10 ►
But, you know, Myron is so seducable.
00:17:12 ►
Oh, he’s such a gentle person.
00:17:15 ►
He’s almost an innocent.
00:17:16 ►
Yes, he is.
00:17:17 ►
He is.
00:17:20 ►
And so Hubbard was just the opposite. This paper of Myron’s I brought up this morning.
00:17:24 ►
It starts out with a meeting Oscar Janager had in February of 79,
00:17:30 ►
which is like 20 years after LSD started being researched.
00:17:34 ►
And he describes Hubbard’s presence there.
00:17:37 ►
He said Hubbard was there in a marshal’s uniform,
00:17:42 ►
complete with badge, gun, and ammunition belt.
00:17:46 ►
Right.
00:17:48 ►
He must have been something else.
00:17:50 ►
Yeah, because Hubbard, you know,
00:17:52 ►
all of our model was from Hubbard
00:17:54 ►
because Hubbard was the guy
00:17:56 ►
who taught my brother-in-law
00:17:57 ►
and Duncan blew it.
00:18:00 ►
And that would explain why
00:18:02 ►
St. Veronica’s Veil, that painting, is used.
00:18:07 ►
And there was a single red rose, the Rose of Sharon.
00:18:10 ►
Why do you know that?
00:18:10 ►
We used a single red rose all the time.
00:18:13 ►
And I always had that picture there.
00:18:15 ►
And then I always had a picture of the Buddha, too,
00:18:18 ►
because a guy painted one for me after a session that he had.
00:18:24 ►
Gorgeous.
00:18:24 ►
It’s up with my daughter now in washington but um
00:18:30 ►
well you know hubbard although he didn’t didn’t write anything didn’t record anything he’s very
00:18:36 ►
difficult to find any documentation on it right he had a really profound influence profound profound
00:18:42 ►
he was the father of all of this stuff he was the one you know
00:18:46 ►
the saskatchewan group that was on on schizophrenia was uh mimicking uh psychosis
00:18:53 ►
that’s what lsd did it mimicked psychosis so they thought well if they made people psychotic
00:19:00 ►
they could figure out you know how to cure psychosis.
00:19:10 ►
And Hubbard said to them, it’s easy to make people crazy, but you want to make them sane.
00:19:13 ►
And this is how you do it if you want to make them sane.
00:19:20 ►
So he was the one who introduced Hoffman and Hoffer to this whole approach.
00:19:25 ►
And your, how do you pronounce his name?
00:19:25 ►
Shuelas.
00:19:26 ►
Shuelas.
00:19:27 ►
He was your brother-in-law,
00:19:30 ►
and he worked with Humphrey Osmond up there.
00:19:30 ►
Right.
00:19:31 ►
Okay.
00:19:36 ►
And he died about three years ago.
00:19:39 ►
And of course, Blewett just died recently.
00:19:41 ►
Now, he was your brother-in-law and invited you to come up to Tri-Alice D.
00:19:44 ►
Did you ask him or he asked you?
00:19:47 ►
I don’t remember.
00:19:49 ►
I was a complete basket case.
00:19:54 ►
And totally in my head, 24-7.
00:20:00 ►
And, of course, Nick was… Nick would treat anybody.
00:20:08 ►
He was just amazing.
00:20:10 ►
And Nick was the one who treated that kid with ground mal epilepsy.
00:20:15 ►
Nick was the one who treated him.
00:20:17 ►
He was fearless.
00:20:19 ►
He had a very Buddha nature to him.
00:20:21 ►
He was rather rotund and penetrating brown eyes
00:20:26 ►
and was an
00:20:28 ►
amazing person.
00:20:30 ►
But
00:20:30 ►
he could have talked for 20 years
00:20:34 ►
and I wouldn’t understand a word he said.
00:20:36 ►
He didn’t bother
00:20:37 ►
giving you any prelims.
00:20:40 ►
Just here, take this.
00:20:42 ►
And we used very high
00:20:43 ►
dosages.
00:20:45 ►
He did.
00:20:48 ►
In like 500 microgram range, like that?
00:20:51 ►
Yeah, so your ego was obliterated and you became basically psychotic for quite a while.
00:20:56 ►
I know that when Myron took people through his program in Menlo Park,
00:21:02 ►
they had like a six-week training course
00:21:05 ►
before their first dose of LSD.
00:21:08 ►
They had Carbogen,
00:21:10 ►
and they went through several sessions of that,
00:21:12 ►
and they had to go in for evaluations.
00:21:16 ►
I asked them once how many people they turned down,
00:21:18 ►
and they did turn a few down, apparently,
00:21:20 ►
but not too many.
00:21:22 ►
Well, there was one woman one time and i always remember
00:21:26 ►
and she had been a very good person all of her life and i was talking about preparing people
00:21:35 ►
for lsd sessions and she said i don’t want to disagree with you but you could spend your whole
00:21:43 ►
life preparing someone for LSD,
00:21:46 ►
and it wouldn’t be any different
00:21:47 ►
if you’d never prepared them for 20 minutes.
00:21:50 ►
I said, that’s right.
00:21:52 ►
I have to agree with that.
00:21:55 ►
I think the work to be done
00:21:57 ►
is at the back end,
00:21:58 ►
is when people come down out of it,
00:22:00 ►
is when you can really start talking to them
00:22:03 ►
about themselves and the experience.
00:22:06 ►
Going in with no experience, no idea what it’s going to be like, you can’t tell anybody.
00:22:14 ►
Well, it took me six, seven months to come down.
00:22:17 ►
From your first trip?
00:22:18 ►
Mm-hmm.
00:22:19 ►
You told me one time about seeing two little twins shortly after, two little children in a crib or something.
00:22:26 ►
Oh, that was Nick’s kids.
00:22:28 ►
Oh, okay.
00:22:29 ►
Yeah, Nick Shuelis’ kids.
00:22:31 ►
And, yeah, I started talking to the girls, the girl and the boy.
00:22:37 ►
How old were they?
00:22:39 ►
Well, they were babies.
00:22:40 ►
Infants.
00:22:41 ►
Infants.
00:22:41 ►
Crawling.
00:22:42 ►
And so they were in a playpen, and the other one was over at the other side.
00:22:49 ►
And so she yells, she communicates to him telepathically, come over here, somebody’s
00:22:55 ►
alive over here.
00:22:57 ►
Somebody you can talk to.
00:22:58 ►
So we had this great conversation.
00:23:03 ►
How old were you then? I could do the math, I guess. Well, you do the math
00:23:10 ►
then, because I was born in 31. Okay, and this was in 58 or something. 27, so you weren’t
00:23:19 ►
quite 30. Right. Okay, good. But did you have your PhD already then?
00:23:25 ►
Mm-hmm.
00:23:25 ►
Okay.
00:23:27 ►
And after that experience, I know Myron, after his first experience,
00:23:32 ►
he decided that was going to be a focus of his life.
00:23:35 ►
How about you?
00:23:37 ►
Well, I thought that if it was effective with me,
00:23:41 ►
it would be effective with anybody.
00:23:43 ►
And so that’s why I thought the most difficult population I’d ever run into
00:23:49 ►
was at the hospital, was all these psychotic children
00:23:52 ►
who were just completely, you know…
00:23:56 ►
Well here’s a great picture.
00:24:00 ►
That’s Nancy.
00:24:01 ►
This is Nancy.
00:24:02 ►
Yes, and she’s in a camisole there because otherwise she would smash her eyes out.
00:24:08 ►
And when we first treated her,
00:24:12 ►
of course, she was tied down to a bed
00:24:15 ►
and spread-eagled, and she was skin and bones.
00:24:19 ►
Her bones were sticking out of her skin
00:24:21 ►
because she wouldn’t eat.
00:24:25 ►
She had merasmus. Do you know what Merasmus is?
00:24:28 ►
Is that that wasting? Yeah.
00:24:30 ►
Yeah, they waste away.
00:24:32 ►
And you can give them
00:24:34 ►
IV nutrients,
00:24:35 ►
and they don’t absorb them.
00:24:38 ►
They don’t even absorb IV?
00:24:39 ►
No.
00:24:41 ►
And so that’s where she was.
00:24:44 ►
And so Dan Castile said,
00:24:47 ►
well, try Nancy, because if you kill her,
00:24:49 ►
she’s going to die anyway.
00:24:50 ►
So it doesn’t matter.
00:24:52 ►
I thought, oh, good Lord.
00:24:54 ►
So Nancy was our first person we treated.
00:24:59 ►
How long was this after you had your experience?
00:25:03 ►
Years?
00:25:03 ►
Oh, no.
00:25:04 ►
No? No, no. No?
00:25:05 ►
No, because when I came back from Canada,
00:25:08 ►
I was already working at the hospital with these kids,
00:25:11 ►
so I started right away.
00:25:14 ►
And Dan just trusted me because he didn’t know.
00:25:18 ►
And so I had a group of people that were sitters,
00:25:22 ►
and I would give them a session, you know, so that they knew what this was all about.
00:25:28 ►
But Nancy’s first session, I’ll never forget, she screamed at the top of her voice for hours and hours and hours.
00:25:40 ►
She’s still tied down?
00:25:41 ►
She’s tied down.
00:25:43 ►
We tried to untie her, but, you know but she’d grab her eyes and pull them out.
00:25:49 ►
And she never talked. She never spoke, of course, to anybody.
00:25:54 ►
Before that?
00:25:55 ►
Before that. She just would scream all the time, or moan or groan. Just moan and groan.
00:26:03 ►
Boy, it’s hard to be around somebody like that.
00:26:06 ►
You feel so much they’re in pain,
00:26:08 ►
you can’t do anything for them.
00:26:09 ►
Yeah, you can’t do anything for them.
00:26:11 ►
And so we gave her LSD intravenously
00:26:14 ►
in the muscle IM.
00:26:18 ►
So a large dose?
00:26:19 ►
Oh, yeah.
00:26:20 ►
Five, six hundred miles?
00:26:20 ►
Oh, yeah.
00:26:22 ►
And so she was, you you know just screaming from her voice
00:26:29 ►
and finally out of desperation i don’t know what happened i just blew it and i just yelled at her
00:26:37 ►
stop screaming i can’t stand it anymore i can’t leave, but I can’t listen to you scream anymore.
00:26:45 ►
So just shut up.
00:26:49 ►
Very unprofessional.
00:26:50 ►
And so she
00:26:51 ►
stopped. She opened her eyes
00:26:53 ►
and she looked at me and she said,
00:26:55 ►
I have a long way to go, so
00:26:57 ►
leave me alone.
00:27:00 ►
And went back to screaming.
00:27:02 ►
First time anybody had ever heard her
00:27:03 ►
say anything.
00:27:05 ►
So she had fully developed her say anything. Wow.
00:27:07 ►
So she had fully developed speech.
00:27:08 ►
Never used it.
00:27:09 ►
And nobody knew.
00:27:09 ►
Mm-hmm.
00:27:10 ►
Mm-hmm.
00:27:13 ►
So that’s Nancy.
00:27:15 ►
Now that… Look at her eyes.
00:27:16 ►
Yeah, her eyes are all black and blue here.
00:27:18 ►
Is that from her hitting herself in the eye?
00:27:20 ►
Yeah, smashing herself.
00:27:21 ►
She looks like a cute little girl.
00:27:23 ►
Oh, she was smart.
00:27:26 ►
God, she was so smart.
00:27:27 ►
Now, you continued to treat her for like over a year or so.
00:27:31 ►
And as I recall, she came around.
00:27:35 ►
Oh, yeah.
00:27:35 ►
Oh, yeah.
00:27:36 ►
She was amazing.
00:27:37 ►
I heard her talking to the ward attendants one time.
00:27:46 ►
And she said,
00:27:48 ►
she didn’t know I was listening and she said,
00:27:50 ►
well, I’ve got the night staff
00:27:55 ►
bamboozled
00:27:57 ►
so I can manipulate the hell out of them.
00:27:59 ►
I can make them exactly do what I want.
00:28:02 ►
And so I said,
00:28:04 ►
and then I was there, you know, behind her.
00:28:06 ►
And I said, oh, you can, huh?
00:28:07 ►
And she went, oh, God, no, you’ll tell them, won’t you?
00:28:11 ►
And I said, yep.
00:28:14 ►
She was smart.
00:28:16 ►
Oh, smart as a whip.
00:28:17 ►
Smart as a whip.
00:28:19 ►
So she eventually got where she could be unconstrained.
00:28:22 ►
Oh, yeah.
00:28:22 ►
Wasting these one away.
00:28:23 ►
Oh, yeah, completely.
00:28:27 ►
She had an amazing…
00:28:29 ►
She had been raped by her grandfather.
00:28:32 ►
And she relived that over and over and over again.
00:28:35 ►
This was when she was like an infant,
00:28:37 ►
that she was raped by him.
00:28:40 ►
And she was brought to the hospital and just left there.
00:28:44 ►
Her family never came and visited or anything.
00:28:49 ►
And, but, yeah, she was a character.
00:28:55 ►
And one time somebody was on the ward
00:28:59 ►
and they wanted to visit with their children.
00:29:04 ►
And so she said, oh, I’ll show you where it is.
00:29:06 ►
So she took them down to the room.
00:29:08 ►
And she said, it was called the visitor’s room.
00:29:12 ►
But basically, she says, this is the room where you get to see God.
00:29:16 ►
And that’s where you had your session?
00:29:18 ►
Yeah.
00:29:19 ►
This is the room where you get to see God.
00:29:22 ►
Now, is she the one that you had to tell that you had to stop the treatment?
00:29:25 ►
No, that was Patty Smith.
00:29:28 ►
I’ll tell you about that.
00:29:30 ►
And here’s…
00:29:31 ►
He’s learning how to smile.
00:29:33 ►
Is this the boy that liked the bugs?
00:29:34 ►
Yeah.
00:29:35 ►
He’s learning how to smile.
00:29:38 ►
And he doesn’t know how to smile.
00:29:41 ►
But…
00:29:42 ►
Now, he looks pretty old.
00:29:44 ►
He must be 10, 11.
00:29:45 ►
Probably.
00:29:46 ►
Yeah.
00:29:46 ►
Yeah, it’s all in here somewhere.
00:29:48 ►
And so these poor kids were just like,
00:29:51 ►
now was he schizophrenic or autistic?
00:29:53 ►
We didn’t make any differentiation.
00:29:56 ►
I think what we finally decided that the autistic kids,
00:30:00 ►
the kids who were really autistic,
00:30:02 ►
I think we dropped them because they were very young.
00:30:07 ►
In fact, the youngest was three years old.
00:30:11 ►
What was interesting about her, she was, it’ll be in here somewhere,
00:30:17 ►
she was a little over three years old, and she would never let anybody touch her.
00:30:26 ►
And she didn’t have any speech.
00:30:30 ►
And cute as a button, but would never let anybody touch her.
00:30:36 ►
And after one session, what she wanted to do was sit on your knee all the time. She wanted to come up and sit on your knee and pat you and feel you.
00:30:41 ►
And again, that was a high-dose session with a three-year-old?
00:30:46 ►
Well, it’ll be here
00:30:48 ►
somewhere. I’ll show you the rest of it.
00:30:50 ►
Now, is this paper
00:30:51 ►
published anywhere?
00:30:53 ►
No.
00:30:55 ►
Now, is this all
00:30:57 ►
confidential, or could this be published?
00:31:00 ►
Oh, I’m sure Dan
00:31:02 ►
is dead and gone.
00:31:08 ►
I mean, we could take out the name of the hospital. Oh, yeah, we’d have to take out the name of the hospital.
00:31:11 ►
You know, they purged all the files.
00:31:15 ►
Because I went back there years later and wanted to see the kids
00:31:22 ►
that were treated with LSD and they
00:31:26 ►
said it never happened and they had taken all of these well you’ll see what
00:31:30 ►
what we did we had sessions from all these kids these are all your notes from
00:31:38 ►
the sessions with the kids see we had oh yeah this is what I don’t want to throw
00:31:44 ►
away right so we had all of this yeah. This is what I don’t want to throw away. Right.
00:31:47 ►
So we had all of this done,
00:31:50 ►
and they went through the files and destroyed them all and said it never happened.
00:31:51 ►
Wow, so this is the last copy of it.
00:31:54 ►
The only copy.
00:31:54 ►
The only.
00:31:55 ►
The only copy.
00:31:57 ►
Yeah, I would certainly hope that there’s some way
00:32:01 ►
we can get these cleansed of information that
00:32:07 ►
shouldn’t be public and get them scanned and made available for researchers.
00:32:13 ►
I think the people at Arrowhead might be able to get a grant to do that or something.
00:32:17 ►
I’ll have to talk to them about it.
00:32:20 ►
This is valuable information that’s going to be totally lost. And as Charlie said the other day,
00:32:26 ►
even from a dead start right now,
00:32:28 ►
it would take 10, 15 years to get back to where you were,
00:32:32 ►
where you left off.
00:32:34 ►
That’s August 62.
00:32:36 ►
That’s one of the attendants.
00:32:38 ►
And that’s me.
00:32:40 ►
And that’s Nancy.
00:32:42 ►
And that’s Coralie.
00:32:44 ►
She’s very, very young. And that’s also and that’s Coralie she’s very very young
00:32:46 ►
and that’s also one of the kids
00:32:48 ►
well you know I wouldn’t have noticed
00:32:50 ►
knowing that was you
00:32:51 ►
but you look like one of those
00:32:54 ►
60 surfer dudes
00:32:56 ►
there you know
00:32:57 ►
with the shades and everything
00:32:59 ►
that’s a really cool picture of you actually
00:33:02 ►
and look at Nancy leaning there against you
00:33:04 ►
yeah you really must have established some wonderful rapport That’s a really cool picture of you, actually. And look at Nancy leaning there against you. Yeah.
00:33:05 ►
You really must have established some wonderful rapport.
00:33:09 ►
Oh, yeah.
00:33:11 ►
Wonderful, wonderful.
00:33:13 ►
And here’s Nancy again.
00:33:16 ►
Now she’s still constrained there.
00:33:18 ►
Yeah.
00:33:20 ►
Was this the room where you did the session?
00:33:22 ►
No.
00:33:23 ►
No.
00:33:23 ►
Okay.
00:33:27 ►
She went through a long, long progression
00:33:29 ►
where finally we’d take her out of the camisole
00:33:33 ►
and she’d put Kleenexes on her hands
00:33:38 ►
and say,
00:33:38 ►
the Kleenexes are stopping me from hitting myself.
00:33:43 ►
And I’d grab the Kleenexes
00:33:44 ►
and tell her she was full of bullshit.
00:33:47 ►
And so she hit me. So she got the Kleenex again and put it back and said, no, the Kleenex,
00:33:55 ►
I need it. And I said, you don’t need it. We were screaming at each other about that.
00:34:01 ►
And here she’s smiling. Isn’t that a great shot? That really is. Yeah that’s a nice picture.
00:34:09 ►
She looks so normal here you know. She’s out of the camel saw there. See she’s got her dress up.
00:34:15 ►
Yeah yeah she’s dressed up holding a little purse. Yeah yeah. I’d love to get these pictures scanned. Yes, yes. Yeah, you must. And here is one of the
00:34:31 ►
wives of one of the guys that would help. And she was pregnant then. And this is one of the girls.
00:34:39 ►
And she actually got so well that she left the hospital and went to ordinary school with an ordinary family.
00:34:48 ►
Oh, wow.
00:34:50 ►
Again, it was LSD treatment or psilocybin.
00:34:54 ►
Do you use psilocybin sometimes?
00:34:55 ►
Well, they’re all…
00:34:56 ►
The paper says it.
00:34:57 ►
So it’s scattered throughout.
00:34:58 ►
Yeah, I’ll show you.
00:35:00 ►
How did you determine which substance to use?
00:35:04 ►
Lots of guessing. Lots of guessing. And that’s Nancy. How did you determine which substance he used?
00:35:05 ►
Lots of guessing.
00:35:08 ►
And that’s Nancy.
00:35:11 ►
Again, out of the camisole, active.
00:35:15 ►
She was active, clapping her hands.
00:35:18 ►
And this is one of the little boys who never talked.
00:35:24 ►
He’s smiling.
00:35:25 ►
Boy, these poor kids living in these worlds.
00:35:29 ►
Oh, these wars were unbelievable.
00:35:33 ►
They were just destitute.
00:35:37 ►
And feces all over the place because
00:35:39 ►
kids would get feces and throw them.
00:35:41 ►
And there was nothing in the wars
00:35:43 ►
because if they had any furniture
00:35:45 ►
they would be all wrecked.
00:35:47 ►
And so it was this barren nothingness.
00:35:50 ►
It was just a nightmare.
00:35:51 ►
Yelling and screaming probably.
00:35:53 ►
Oh yeah.
00:35:54 ►
And twirling.
00:35:55 ►
Like Patty twirled all the time
00:35:57 ►
unless she was bound up.
00:36:00 ►
She was twirling,
00:36:01 ►
bumping into things.
00:36:01 ►
She was blind.
00:36:03 ►
She would bump into everybody
00:36:04 ►
and then people would hit her. She would bump into everybody. And then people would hit her
00:36:06 ►
because they would bump into her.
00:36:09 ►
Ah, it was a nightmare.
00:36:11 ►
I guess, you know,
00:36:12 ►
not only a nightmare for the kids there,
00:36:14 ►
but for all the people that had to work with them.
00:36:17 ►
Are there still wars like that today?
00:36:19 ►
I don’t know.
00:36:20 ►
You don’t know?
00:36:21 ►
I don’t know.
00:36:25 ►
I know that one of these little boys,
00:36:29 ►
when he took LSD,
00:36:31 ►
and we were in this room,
00:36:33 ►
and he was looking out of the window,
00:36:37 ►
and he was very pensive.
00:36:39 ►
This is a kid who never talked before, you know.
00:36:42 ►
And he said,
00:36:43 ►
he said,
00:36:43 ►
he said,
00:36:44 ►
what a strange place to come back to. To come back to? He’d never talked before, you know. And he said, he stayed in the hospital. He said,
00:36:47 ►
what a strange place to come back to.
00:36:49 ►
To come back to? Mm-hmm.
00:36:51 ►
Mm-hmm.
00:36:52 ►
Because he had been in nirvana, you know.
00:36:54 ►
Yeah, yeah.
00:36:56 ►
In complete nirvana.
00:36:58 ►
And here he was, back.
00:37:00 ►
Now, their re-entry,
00:37:02 ►
all re-entries are like gradual coming back
00:37:04 ►
from coming down from a trip.
00:37:06 ►
Yes, and coming down, of course, they would scream and yell and say no,
00:37:11 ►
that they didn’t want to come down.
00:37:14 ►
That’s Nancy again.
00:37:15 ►
She was a very old, old soul.
00:37:19 ►
Sometimes she looked like she was 200 years old.
00:37:22 ►
See, what we did, we had too many kids.
00:37:25 ►
We couldn’t keep up with them.
00:37:29 ►
We have given treatment to 12 patients.
00:37:31 ►
They range in age from 4 years, 10 months, to 12 years, 11 months.
00:37:36 ►
Average age is 9 years.
00:37:38 ►
See, back then, in those days,
00:37:41 ►
you really didn’t pay any attention to symptoms
00:37:44 ►
because the kids we had were so disturbed.
00:37:50 ►
And of course, as I say, some of them didn’t have any language at all.
00:37:55 ►
Okay, you’ve got dosage charts here and everything. Usual dosage 200 to 300.
00:38:12 ►
to 300. And sometimes we would use psilocybin with LSD. Yeah and it’s a hundred mics of psilocybin with 10 milligrams or 100 mics of LSD 10 milligrams psilocybin 300 LSD and 10 psilocybin.
00:38:30 ►
LSD and 10 psilocybin. Usual dosage 10 psilocybin 200 LSD. And these are young kids you know they didn’t weigh anything. Yeah. And then we sometimes use Librium. Remember Librium?
00:38:38 ►
Sure. Librium and Methadrine when you use a pre-treatment medication in 10 sessions,
00:38:46 ►
5 milligrams methodology.
00:38:48 ►
No, we just made things up.
00:38:51 ►
Just trial and error.
00:38:53 ►
Everything was trial and error.
00:38:59 ►
And then as of 1st of January of 1963,
00:39:03 ►
we took the kids who had shown the best improvement and worked with them exclusively.
00:39:06 ►
Because otherwise, you know,
00:39:09 ►
we would do three or four sessions a week,
00:39:13 ►
and that was a lot.
00:39:15 ►
Oh, Lord.
00:39:16 ►
Because you’re talking eight to twelve hours at least, aren’t you?
00:39:19 ►
So you had to rotate sitters, I would imagine.
00:39:22 ►
Yeah, we had a lot of sitters.
00:39:24 ►
See, these are all the dates and the dosages.
00:39:32 ►
God, here’s a bunch of notes in here, too.
00:39:36 ►
And these are kids who would never touch.
00:39:38 ►
You know, they’d never get near anybody.
00:39:40 ►
And this is that picture of them kissing,
00:39:43 ►
obviously, as well, after an LSD session.
00:39:45 ►
I mean, they weren’t on anything then.
00:39:47 ►
Right.
00:39:48 ►
They just started to come back into the world.
00:39:51 ►
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:39:53 ►
Would they regress after weeks or months after they had a treatment?
00:39:58 ►
Or did they show…
00:39:59 ►
We didn’t have them long enough to know because everything stopped abruptly.
00:40:04 ►
have them long enough to know because everything stopped abruptly.
00:40:11 ►
But from what you were seeing, did it look like it was making a permanent improvement? Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah, definitely. It was cumulative. Yeah, so that’s the one who
00:40:20 ►
told me to go to San Francisco and find the guy who had the drugs
00:40:26 ►
and to tell him
00:40:27 ►
please Mr. So and So
00:40:30 ►
give LSD and psilocybin
00:40:33 ►
to Gary
00:40:34 ►
Gowie because Patty
00:40:36 ►
really needs it
00:40:37 ►
kids tell you this
00:40:39 ►
you just cry
00:40:42 ►
oh yeah
00:40:43 ►
it’s awful.
00:40:46 ►
Just awful, awful, awful.
00:40:48 ►
And we had to leave them all
00:40:49 ►
because we had nothing to do.
00:40:52 ►
So they just had to be abandoned.
00:40:53 ►
Mm-hmm.
00:40:54 ►
Yeah, they were all abandoned.
00:40:57 ►
Well, that had to take a toll on you.
00:40:59 ►
Oh, it was a nightmare.
00:41:01 ►
I imagine.
00:41:03 ►
Did you do any LSD research after this?
00:41:06 ►
Yes.
00:41:07 ►
So this was the official shutdown?
00:41:09 ►
Well, it was shut down,
00:41:10 ►
but I did my work with cancer patients after this.
00:41:14 ►
Oh, okay.
00:41:18 ►
But the major problem seems to be
00:41:20 ►
that we cannot find any evidence
00:41:22 ►
that the superintendent ever approved the project.
00:41:26 ►
This is from the head of research
00:41:27 ►
for the state of California
00:41:29 ►
that apparently
00:41:31 ►
parental consents
00:41:34 ►
were requested, but the
00:41:35 ►
actual contents are not in all the records.
00:41:38 ►
This poses some problems
00:41:39 ►
on and on and on. Well, we didn’t
00:41:41 ►
get permission from anyone
00:41:43 ►
to do anything.
00:41:47 ►
They had no idea what we were doing.
00:41:52 ►
With the present fear about LSD, we were understandably jittery
00:41:54 ►
about any publicity.
00:41:56 ►
It occurs to me that if
00:41:58 ►
the state hospital is not identified
00:42:00 ►
and the publication is in a professional journal,
00:42:04 ►
any repercussions might be avoided.
00:42:08 ►
That was in March of 1968.
00:42:13 ►
You said that your sitters, that you would take them through a session.
00:42:17 ►
These are like hospital volunteers.
00:42:19 ►
Would you do them in a group?
00:42:21 ►
Well, there was, well, let’s see.
00:42:25 ►
Here, personnel’s see. Here.
00:42:26 ►
Personnel in attendance.
00:42:28 ►
Fisher, Tom Parsons and Con Collin,
00:42:31 ►
Sonny Strom, Castile.
00:42:35 ►
These are the people in attendance.
00:42:37 ►
Five people, at least.
00:42:39 ►
Because, of course, we would have these kids tied down,
00:42:42 ►
and so we would have to sit on either side of them and hold them
00:42:46 ►
because they would throw themselves around and hurt themselves.
00:42:50 ►
This was the first session for this person.
00:42:52 ►
I noticed here at a little over an hour in,
00:42:55 ►
it said,
00:42:56 ►
The sitter held patient’s hand.
00:42:57 ►
Patient grasped Sonny’s fingers firmly and would not let go.
00:43:03 ►
This is all…
00:43:05 ►
I gave LSD to a lot of
00:43:08 ►
quote, normal people.
00:43:10 ►
And this one guy was very tall
00:43:13 ►
and very strong.
00:43:16 ►
He was probably 6’3”, 6’4”.
00:43:18 ►
I spent the whole session
00:43:19 ►
under a coffee table with him
00:43:21 ►
hanging on.
00:43:22 ►
He was hanging on to me for dear life.
00:43:24 ►
He wouldn’t let me go.
00:43:26 ►
God, I had to piss so bad.
00:43:28 ►
Finally, I pissed my pants.
00:43:29 ►
I couldn’t do it.
00:43:31 ►
Couldn’t hold anything longer.
00:43:33 ►
But he was just hanging on, and he was terror.
00:43:35 ►
It wouldn’t matter what we would say.
00:43:37 ►
He never said anything.
00:43:38 ►
He was just terrified.
00:43:39 ►
And he was a CEO of a big corporation.
00:43:43 ►
I guess he didn’t come back for a second, huh?
00:43:46 ►
You know, I don’t remember.
00:43:50 ►
Well, of course, I don’t know the end result of it either.
00:43:53 ►
I don’t remember, you know, if he finally got over that.
00:43:56 ►
But I know that we were under a coffee table for hours and hours and hours.
00:44:02 ►
You know, the hazards of being a sitter need to be enumerated at some point for people.
00:44:09 ►
You told me a story one time of one of the guys,
00:44:12 ►
maybe a security guard there,
00:44:13 ►
that you kept putting off and putting off.
00:44:15 ►
Yeah, he was a social worker.
00:44:17 ►
Big guy, big tall guy, and he choked me.
00:44:21 ►
And I let go, you know, I was ready to die
00:44:23 ►
because there wasn’t anything I could do.
00:44:24 ►
I mean, he was seriously
00:44:25 ►
choking you. How did
00:44:27 ►
you get him to stop choking you?
00:44:30 ►
Well, what happened is
00:44:31 ►
that I knew that he was
00:44:33 ►
sitting on a load of
00:44:35 ►
anger. And
00:44:37 ►
that’s why I was
00:44:39 ►
not wanting to give him a session.
00:44:41 ►
He wanted to be part of the group.
00:44:44 ►
So finally, Dan Castile said to me,
00:44:46 ►
you know, he keeps bugging me constantly.
00:44:50 ►
He wants to have a session.
00:44:51 ►
So why don’t you give him a fucking session?
00:44:54 ►
And I said, well, I guess I’ll stop playing God.
00:44:57 ►
Give him a session.
00:44:58 ►
So I think I had five other people lined up
00:45:01 ►
to sit on him if we needed to.
00:45:04 ►
Well, one by one, they left.
00:45:07 ►
One went to get lunch.
00:45:08 ►
One went to take messages.
00:45:11 ►
One went to do this.
00:45:13 ►
One went to do that.
00:45:14 ►
And basically, I was alone with him.
00:45:16 ►
Because he was quiet.
00:45:17 ►
He was lying on the couch, quiet, all that time.
00:45:20 ►
Never said anything.
00:45:22 ►
And then finally, so I was closing my eyes, listening to the music,
00:45:26 ►
and finally, you know, my skin was just crawling. I opened my eyes and there he was standing there
00:45:31 ►
terrified, standing there terrified. So he came across the room very slowly, very terrified,
00:45:39 ►
and got behind me and started choking me. Well, I weighed 120 pounds. I weighed, because it
00:45:47 ►
was in there somewhere. When I got my citizenship, I weighed 120. I weighed 120 for years and
00:45:57 ►
years and years. And he weighed 300 pounds. And so I thought, you know, he’s crazy. I’m
00:46:04 ►
not going to have a chance. I couldn’t get
00:46:06 ►
to a phone. Doors were locked. Couldn’t get out. The windows were all barred. Couldn’t go anywhere.
00:46:11 ►
So I thought, well, I’m going to die. So I don’t want to die in fear. So I kept telling myself to
00:46:18 ►
relax and to relax and let my body relax. And so finally he was choking me and choking me,
00:46:25 ►
and all of a sudden I felt my body being moved.
00:46:29 ►
And then he was sitting on the couch,
00:46:32 ►
and he held me and was rocking me.
00:46:38 ►
Well, I never raised anything with people
00:46:41 ►
until they raised it themselves,
00:46:43 ►
because you never told somebody
00:46:47 ►
what they did or what they said during the session, because you can’t assume they remember
00:46:52 ►
anything. So it was about eight, nine months later, and he came back and he said, I’ve
00:47:00 ►
just had memories and dreams. And he said, I’ve got to find out if this really happened.
00:47:07 ►
I said, well, what do you think happened?
00:47:10 ►
And he said, well, I saw you as the devil.
00:47:14 ►
And I knew I had to kill you to clear the world of being controlled by the devil.
00:47:22 ►
And you were controlling the world and you were the devil.
00:47:25 ►
So I had to kill you.
00:47:27 ►
And he said, I was terrified to do it.
00:47:29 ►
He said, so finally I was choking you
00:47:32 ►
to kill you
00:47:33 ►
and you just went very limp.
00:47:35 ►
And all of a sudden I looked down
00:47:37 ►
and you were the baby Jesus.
00:47:38 ►
So I picked you up and rocked you.
00:47:41 ►
And you were the baby Jesus.
00:47:44 ►
Amazing.
00:47:46 ►
He remembered that like seven, eight months later and said that’s exactly what happened. Totally changed his life.
00:47:54 ►
Yeah, well it would change my life as a sinner. It would have been my last time.
00:48:00 ►
Let’s take this off and take a break. Okay.
00:48:01 ►
Let’s take this off and take a break.
00:48:02 ►
Okay.
00:48:05 ►
We won’t be doing that anymore.
00:48:06 ►
No, sure.
00:48:11 ►
I’m going to have to cut it off right now, but there will be more of this conversation in next week’s podcast
00:48:16 ►
when you’ll hear one of the funniest
00:48:18 ►
and also one of the saddest LSD-related stories that I’ve ever heard.
00:48:24 ►
As an interviewer, I kind of fell down on the job here,
00:48:29 ►
because originally it was our intention to get into more detail about what I personally believe
00:48:35 ►
to be close to miraculous recoveries by these young children who were treated with psychedelic medicines.
00:48:42 ►
Just stop for a minute and think about the transformation of Nancy.
00:48:46 ►
That little girl was near death.
00:48:49 ►
She hadn’t spoken in years and had to be constantly restrained.
00:48:54 ►
Just let me read part of the interim report of this study where Gary writes about her.
00:49:02 ►
Female, age 11 years, 3 months, 11 sessions.
00:49:07 ►
This patient is considerably improved.
00:49:10 ►
When treatment began, she was in a complete bed camisole restraint
00:49:14 ►
because she was so self-destructive that she would fatally harm herself.
00:49:18 ►
She was incontinent and would not eat.
00:49:20 ►
She indulged in preservative and stereotyped behavior
00:49:25 ►
and seldom spoke.
00:49:26 ►
Extreme range reactions were common.
00:49:29 ►
She was a very difficult management problem.
00:49:32 ►
At this time, the patient is never in restraint
00:49:35 ►
and has not been in restraint for several months.
00:49:38 ►
She goes about the ward and yard
00:49:40 ►
and is seldom self-destructive.
00:49:43 ►
She eats well and takes care of her toilet needs.
00:49:46 ►
She can carry on a conversation
00:49:47 ►
when she wants to.
00:49:49 ►
She has been recently making home visits
00:49:51 ►
and now attends hospital school
00:49:53 ►
in the mornings.
00:49:55 ►
Now consider the fact that
00:49:57 ►
this work was done in 1962
00:49:59 ►
and since then,
00:50:01 ►
to my knowledge,
00:50:03 ►
there’s never been any other research
00:50:04 ►
of this kind conducted anywhere on the planet.
00:50:08 ►
Over 40 years ago, some answers were found to a horrific problem.
00:50:13 ►
And because of the insane war on drugs, not only have no advances been made since then,
00:50:19 ►
but an entire generation of sick children have been abandoned to a life in hell.
00:50:24 ►
But an entire generation of sick children have been abandoned to a life in hell.
00:50:29 ►
Should our species be fortunate enough to survive for another thousand years,
00:50:34 ►
this war on consciousness will most certainly be seen for what it truly is, a crime against humanity.
00:50:37 ►
And in my humble opinion, the men and women who are participating in the effort
00:50:41 ►
to ban all inquiry into the quite obvious benefits offered
00:50:45 ►
by these compounds, well, from where I stand, those stormtroopers fall into the same class
00:50:51 ►
as the barbarians who burned the Library of Alexandria.
00:50:56 ►
Well, that’s enough of the dark alley talk for now.
00:50:59 ►
Let’s get back to some more positive things.
00:51:02 ►
Just now you heard us talking about the unpublished paper that Gary
00:51:06 ►
wrote that detailed his initial
00:51:08 ►
LSD research
00:51:09 ►
with these children.
00:51:11 ►
My guess is that even some of
00:51:14 ►
the non-scientists here in the salon
00:51:16 ►
would be interested in reading it.
00:51:18 ►
Since it is so unique
00:51:20 ►
and I believe important,
00:51:22 ►
rather than just scan it and post it on
00:51:24 ►
the web as a JPEG or something,
00:51:26 ►
I’m going to retype it.
00:51:28 ►
It’s only about 10 pages long, but it has some detailed tables that will take me a little while to recreate.
00:51:35 ►
And then I’ll have to get it to Gary to be sure that I’ve removed all the confidential data in it.
00:51:40 ►
But sometime yet this summer, I’ll complete that little project,
00:51:44 ►
and we’ll add a link to it on
00:51:45 ►
the program notes for this podcast. So if you’re interested in reading that paper, just check back
00:51:51 ►
at www.psychedelicsalon.org from time to time and eventually you’ll find it there.
00:51:59 ►
For you scholars out there, I hope that the comment Gary made about the influence of Al Hubbard registered with you.
00:52:07 ►
For years now, I’ve known how pervasive Hubbard’s influence was on early psychedelic research,
00:52:13 ►
primarily through the stories Myron Stolaroff had told me.
00:52:16 ►
And by the way, you can hear some of those stories in the three Lone Pine Stories podcast that I did with Gene and Myron Stolaroff.
00:52:24 ►
Lone Pine Stories podcast that I did with Gene and Myron Stolaroff.
00:52:31 ►
But what I hadn’t realized is how pervasive Hubbard’s influence was in other currents of the early research.
00:52:38 ►
Because it was primarily Al Hubbard’s ideas that were used in developing the early treatment protocols.
00:52:42 ►
From the big details, like the size of the dose given to participants,
00:52:46 ►
down to the small details, like the artwork that was used in the sessions.
00:52:51 ►
So should any of you be bold enough, as Al Hubbard was,
00:52:54 ►
to sit for a friend’s first psychedelic journey,
00:52:59 ►
you might want to keep the fact in mind that the patterns you help establish on someone else’s early experiences with these substances
00:53:02 ►
could have a profound cumulative effect over time.
00:53:06 ►
In a way, you can think of psychedelic medicines
00:53:09 ►
as a form of a big lever.
00:53:11 ►
As Archimedes once said,
00:53:13 ►
give me a lever big enough and I can move the world.
00:53:16 ►
And believe me, these medicines are incredibly big levers,
00:53:20 ►
ones that can most assuredly move worlds.
00:53:23 ►
I’ll post a copy of the St. Veronica’s Veil painting
00:53:26 ►
that we referred to
00:53:28 ►
and the one that Myron used in his work
00:53:30 ►
at the Institute in Menlo Park
00:53:31 ►
I’ll post that on the web
00:53:33 ►
so you can get a better idea of the type of art
00:53:36 ►
that the early psychedelic pioneers used
00:53:38 ►
in their sessions
00:53:39 ►
again primarily due to the influence
00:53:42 ►
of the notorious Al Hubbard
00:53:43 ►
in the first part of our conversation, as you heard, we were looking at several photos as we talked.
00:53:51 ►
And hopefully I’ll be able to borrow a laptop and scanner sometime this summer and drive back up to see Gary again
00:53:57 ►
and scan some of the pictures with the intention of posting them with the program notes to this podcast
00:54:03 ►
so you can get a better idea of
00:54:05 ►
what we were talking about also if you go to www.psychedelicsalon.org and look under the
00:54:14 ►
program notes for this podcast which is number 97 you’ll find links to many of gary fisher’s papers
00:54:20 ►
including the ones discussed in this interview and i’ll have more to say about some of gary’s Thank you. Psychedelic Salon are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 2.5 license.
00:54:47 ►
And if you have any questions about that, just click on the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage.
00:54:55 ►
And if you have any other questions, complaints, suggestions, whatever, about these podcasts, just send them to Lorenzo at MatrixMasters.com.
00:55:03 ►
Just send them to lorenzo at matrixmasters.com.
00:55:07 ►
A big thank you again to Jacques Cordell and Wells,
00:55:12 ►
also known as Chateau Hayouk, for the use of your music here in the salon.
00:55:13 ►
And thank you.
00:55:17 ►
Thank you for being a part of this little experiment and virtual community here in cyberdelic space.
00:55:21 ►
Two years ago today, I posted my first podcast in this series, and within a month
00:55:26 ►
or so, there were already over 100 people joining us each week. Today, that number has grown to
00:55:33 ►
literally tens of thousands, and yet it still feels like it’s just you and me right now.
00:55:39 ►
So thanks for being here, and it’s not the end of our second year together, but rather it’s the beginning of the third year of podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon.
00:55:50 ►
For now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:55:54 ►
Be well, my friends.
00:55:57 ►
And to my dear departed mother,
00:55:59 ►
happy birthday, Mom, wherever you are.