278 - Oscar Janiger Interviewed by Peter Gorman

Program Notes

Guest speakers: Oscar Janiger and Peter Gorman

[NOTE: All quotations are by Oscar Janiger.]

[In regards to the dangers of taking LSD]
“Not everybody is committed to go to Everest. Not everybody is going to go to the Serengeti and shoot lions or whatever you want. These are risk-taking adventures. There are people courageous and adventuresome enough who are willing to do it, and when you do it you study your risks.”

“You can die of over taking aspirin and drinking too much water, but [not] LSD, and by the way, there is no evidence of physical death from marijuana either.”

“It’s just the same as we go back to Everest, you can fall of the fuckin’ mountain. That’s all there is to it. I’m not going to make any apologies for that. You’ve got to be prepared. You know that old adage that LSD favors the prepared mind.”

“[The Sixties was] a time when people began to see that what was laid down for them as obligatory reality was not obligatory.”

Wikipedia article about Dr. Oscar Janiger
Peter Gorman’s 1993 interview with Dr. Albert Hofmann
Albert Hofmann.org (online Hofmann Foundation papers)

Transcript

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Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.

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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

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And with me as virtual host today are some fellow salonners who either made a direct donation to help with the expenses here in the salon,

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or who bought a copy of my Pay What You Can audiobook, my novel, The Genesis Generation,

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whose proceeds also go to cover some of the costs of these podcasts. And these kind souls are Auden P., I think I’m pronouncing that right, A-U-D-U-N, Auden,

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I’m sorry if I’m mispronouncing it, Auden P., Roy T., and Dwayne C.

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Also, I want to once again thank my dear friends and patrons Ron and Claudia, who have been here with me in the salon since even before my first

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podcast. And without their love and support these past years, well, these podcasts probably would

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never have taken place. So, Claudia and Ron, thank you again ever so much. And I should also mention

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that I truly appreciate all of the wonderful birthday greetings that so many of our fellow

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salonners sent to me via my Facebook page.

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In all my life, I’ve never received so many happy birthdays,

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and in fact, you made me feel so good that I’ve decided to hang around again for another year or so,

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just so I can have another big day like that.

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And I again want to thank Peter Gorman for providing this recording for us to listen to here in the salon,

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and also to Hector Glass, who helped Peter rescue it from a hot Texas garage and then digitize it for us.

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So, thank you both ever so much.

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It was really a great feeling for me to get to hear Oscar’s voice once again.

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I really appreciate that you guys sent this to me.

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The person I’m talking about, of course, is Dr. Oscar Janager,

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who moved on to his next trip about, well, 10 years ago this week.

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Now, in case this name is one that you aren’t really familiar with,

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well, by way of introduction, I’ll just give you the headline.

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During the years 1954 to 1962 or thereabouts, Oscar, who was a Los Angeles

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psychiatrist, gave LSD to somewhere around a thousand people, including many celebrities

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like Cary Grant and Jack Nicholson, just to name a few. It was really a monumental amount

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of early psychedelic research, and to state the obvious, well, no study even

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close to it has ever since been attempted.

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So you can probably tell that I’m really excited about today’s program, as it features one

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of our elders who I was fortunate enough to get to know slightly during the years that

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turned out to be his final years.

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And what we are about to listen in on is a telephone conversation between Dr. Oscar Janager

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and Peter Gorman. And Peter conducted this back in 1993 while he was working on the High Times

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issue commemorating the 50th anniversary of the discovery of LSD. And on Peter Gorman’s website,

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which I’ll link to, you can find a copy of the interview that Peter did with Albert Hoffman for that anniversary issue,

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but I’ve done several searches and haven’t found the other essays,

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including the one about Oscar that this interview is for.

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And when I get a chance, I’ll ask Peter about this,

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but since this is the 10th anniversary week of Oscar Janager’s death,

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I thought that, well, I’d get this out

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without bothering to track down that information for you first.

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Now, the reason I’ve given you all this background is to kind of put the beginning of this interview in some kind of a perspective.

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As you’re going to hear in just a moment, at the time this interview took place,

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Peter was talking to a lot of people while preparing for the High Times edition that would feature articles about the discovery and the early days of research with LSD.

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So the tape begins right where Oscar is in the middle of explaining to Peter why he most likely won’t be able to get anyone from Sandoz Labs to talk to him about the story he was working on.

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now for leaving this little bit of pre-interview banner in is to remind our young salonners who are just now entering into the world of big science something that we’ve all learned elsewhere

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in our lives and that is it doesn’t matter how intelligent and sophisticated a group of people

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are that you may work with or play with in the end well we’re all humans who are struggling

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mightily to control our egos.

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And can you just imagine what the world would be like if we didn’t at least try to hold these petty tyrants in check?

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Even though I, for one, seldom succeed, I should add.

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But enough of my ego talking here.

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It’s time to put that little fellow away for a while and join Oscar Janager as he tells Peter Gorman a little

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story about his own frustration in dealing with Sandoz Labs. The president of Sandoz International

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in Basel finally reached him. He said they had a policy of not contributing anything to their

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scientists because they had employed such distinguished people they’d have a list a yard long so that’s

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an attitude so i said well is there anything you guys can do for us no but we wish you luck and so

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on so if you’re looking for anything from them i don’t think you’re going to get much so

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just a thought i was trying to nail him personally you know through al Albert? Yeah. Well, Albert, yeah, but we had talked with Albert in the past,

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and he said that he might go to Sandos

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for some kind of whatever,

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publicity funds to commemorate this,

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but after what I heard from Eklund,

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I don’t know that they’re out to…

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In other words, he said,

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if we show any preference for one of our people,

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the others will get very jealous.

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Can you imagine this?

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This is what I’m talking to the second in command of the Sand Duns.

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Well, they think themselves pretty seriously.

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I said, don’t be jealous.

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You should be proud of the people that are working for you.

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He said, well, on one level.

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He said, on another. He said, we have to keep peace in the you. He said, well, on one level. He said,

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on another, we have to keep peace in the family. I said, well, that’s okay.

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Now, Albert may have some way of doing this that I don’t know, but I’ve spoken to three.

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I spoke to Sandoz, America, the head of that, and then these two people in Basel so I don’t know whether they’re going to be of much help.

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Well, I suspect I’m not going to get anything from them.

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If you’re not going to get anything from them, they know who you are.

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Well, sure.

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I pulled all my weight, gave them all my credentials.

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They thought it was an awfully good idea, but they’re a pretty tight-fisted group, I guess. Maybe he says that they’ll incur jealousy, which never occurred to me, frankly,

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if they help one person over another.

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There may be another door to get into, but I don’t know.

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I don’t know what to do.

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So how did I be of any help?

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Well, I am,

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not to be too

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cute, but

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basically the

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story that I

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think is key

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to this is to

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paint a window

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pane picture of

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the LSD

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experience.

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Uh-huh.

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So I’ve been

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in touch with

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people, a

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number of

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people, and

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hopefully the

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list will grow

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from each from

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the different

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areas of the

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LSD experience.

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Some, like Tim Leary and Ram Dass, just put it out there.

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Some new researchers like Rick Doblin.

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And Humphrey Osmond, if you want to talk about…

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I’d love to be able to talk to Osmond.

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There were several generations, and I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how this is structured,

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but there were several layers of people that were responsible through the years

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for their work in one way or another.

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And that’s on one definition.

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The other is on the people that did the laboratory work

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and kept relatively quiet,

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and those that were doing clinical work

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and were out in the front with people.

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So if you want, generally people ask for those,

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the pioneers who were with with people not the pioneers

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in the laboratory because they constitute a different

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group. So if we break those

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down as to say all

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those before 1960

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or 62 you still

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have a long thin gray line of about

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12 or 15 people

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left who were active

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reasonably active during that period.

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I’m just breaking it down for you.

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I hope I’m not giving you too much information

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that you don’t need.

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Those are the key points.

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Then after that, oddly enough,

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Leary and the others come later

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than that first group.

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That doesn’t matter.

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I’m not saying each of them are important,

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but for general purposes of the context of this, that’s about the way.

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And then, of course, obviously the ones before that who are now posthumous,

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like Sidney Cohen and Aldous Huxley,

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they would be in that original group who had since passed away.

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Right.

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So Laura Huxley is on my list.

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Laura, good.

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Laura is about, and I’m with the older statesmen, so.

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Right, and Stanley Groff has promised to contribute.

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He’s, you know, and I’m hoping he will.

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Oh, I’ll have no problem with that.

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And neither of her boys suggest, she said, well, you’re not going to leave out Stanley Krivner, are you?

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And I said, I don’t really know who Stanley Krivner was.

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And he said, well, the Dream Lab.

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And I said, oh, okay, I’ve read about the Dream Lab.

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So I’m trying to get every, you know what I mean?

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I am trying to do, I think, just what you suggested.

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Well, the actual people that worked in LSD,

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and I’m sure you know,

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they say six or eight people of which,

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in the world, maybe a dozen or 12 left.

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There are about five or six in the Americas

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that would include Humphrey Osmond.

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Let’s see, who else is left,

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Stan Grof, for example,

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I think would be one of those heavy hitters.

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And there would be a man named Walter Houston Clark

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and a chap named Schultes, who was at Harvard.

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Richard Schultes is a pal at Harvard. Richard Schultes.

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Richard Schultes.

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He’s actually become…

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He’s a dear man.

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He’s one of the nicest people.

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I’ve known him for years,

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and these are the old-time pioneers,

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the ones who were in the fire.

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And so from then on, of course,

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it’s anything, you know, you can deal with anything you need.

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But those are the people, and I might make a modest suggestion that you get the oldest ones first.

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Because I don’t know how many of us are left, you know.

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But that’s about it.

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Cappy Hubbard passed away.

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Avram Hoffer is another one of the old-timers who isn’t too well-known.

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Well, are you going to entrust me with a couple of phone numbers that I don’t have for some of these people?

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Oh, sure, sure, absolutely.

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They’ll be the arbiters of what they want to do.

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Sure.

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On the non-scientific side, of course, there’s my cousin, Alan Grinsberg.

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Alan is my cousin.

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We spoke yesterday.

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I didn’t know he was your cousin, but we spoke yesterday briefly and he said, I’m just leaving

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the office.

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Of course I’ll do it, but I’m leaving now.

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I’m leaving now.

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This is the most cooperative, wonderful human being you’ve ever seen.

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And the other one is Ken Kesey.

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Ken I got yesterday.

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The first time he’s ever talked in LSD.

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I mean in High Times.

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He’s been quoted, he’s been etc., etc., but he has endeavored since 1980 when High Times. He’s been quoted, he’s been etc., etc., but he has endeavored since 1980

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when High Times went through a real bad period

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of just celebrating a lot of bad

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stuff. And we’re the new crew

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in the last few years. We’re trying to pull it back together.

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That would be good. We need

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the best image we can get.

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Did you see 48 Hours?

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Yes. Okay, so you can see

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that weird mixture of what

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the ambivalence is so evident in that film.

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Certainly.

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They don’t know where the hell to turn, but at least we’re getting some modestly good respect.

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Right, and we’ve got, by nailing a few people from the writing community, like Peter Stafford,

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I’ve got him, and Sasha Shilgin, of course, as an inventor.

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Are you staying with the Americans?

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And Sasha Shulgin, of course, as an inventor.

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Are you staying with the Americans?

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There are about four or five in Europe that still are that same ilk,

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you know, the heavy-duty people who are associated with the origins and the first times, like Lerner and Hans Karl Lerner

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and Bastians and Sanderson in England. Those are like the three lights that are left.

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Well, I’m relying on people like you to steer me to the next group.

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Oh, sure.

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So each person gives me, if I get one extra number, my list is now got to be 30.

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Well, that’s about it. So I think I’m giving you exactly what you want. And I think that of the Americans, I think, fortunately, we don’t have to spend too much time.

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There aren’t that many.

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But I think you’ve pretty well got a feeling for who those guys were.

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There’s one very, very interesting man who is not really well-known, but who has played an enormous role and is still alive,

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a man named Nicholas Purcell, B-E-R-C-E-L.

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And to the best of my ability, and I’ve known him for years,

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he was the first American person to use LSD.

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Having gone to Europe, he was part of the European extraction.

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And his distinction, among others, is that he, I think,

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was the first person to have that substance in America and to use it.

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Well, I’ve got Howard Lotsoff, the first American arrested for LSD.

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Who is that?

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Howard Lotsoff.

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He’s the first American arrested. That’s a distinction I have.

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He was arrested four hours after it was made illegal.

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Is that right?

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He actually is the fellow who now is working with Ibogaine.

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Yeah, I know him.

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Oh, okay.

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Well, yeah, he’s called and been here.

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That’s fine.

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And a gentleman named Curland, of course, who runs that place in Maryland, you know,

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the one in the movie that you saw.

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Spring Grove.

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The Maryland Psychiatric Hospital, whatever it’s called.

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Yeah.

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He’d be another of the old-timers.

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So we’re talking Carlin and Humphrey Osmond, of course,

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and Laura Huxley and myself and Stan, what’s his name?

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Groff.

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Groff and a few, one of two others whom I might have missed, but that’s

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about it. And our letterhead, by the way, of the Hoffman Foundation, it would be very

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helpful, we have a list of just about everybody in the world that has some reasonable application

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LSD. Have you seen that? Do you get our copies of the bulletin? No. You don’t? We’re not on the list. For heaven’s sake.

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We have to correct that right away.

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We publish a bulletin, and in it there’s a list of everybody that’s really been involved.

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Do you get our magazine?

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No, I don’t.

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Well, then the Albert Hoffman Foundation ought to get it.

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Sure.

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Send me yours, I’ll send you mine.

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Oh, okay.

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I’ll put you on the list.

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Well, we should do that right away.

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What is your address?

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We’re at 235 Park Avenue South.

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Park Avenue South.

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New York, New York?

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Yeah.

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1-triple-0-3.

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Now, are you guys doing all right now?

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We actually, we’re doing very well.

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Yeah.

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It’s actually a little bit frightening.

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We’re actually doing very well.

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Percentage of sales is really in the top, top, top of any magazine.

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Yeah.

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Actual print run is probably a quarter of a million.

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I think we’re selling about 125, 135,000.

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That’s great.

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And I hope, like you, that we are.

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We’re trying to put the whole thing on a better footing now.

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We think we have a chance to really learn from the past

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and put out a better image of what this stuff can do

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and be reasonable about it.

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And I know you are doing the same.

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Well, we had a breakthrough recently.

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I mean, a few breakthroughs, and you’re probably getting the same.

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But with the interest in, or new interest, for instance, in medical marijuana,

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we’ve been getting calls from all the TV stations.

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You know, the same when we did the Forfeiture series recently.

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Yeah.

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And it was a good, hard job I did in that promote.

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You know, suddenly you’re getting, you’re saying,

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wait a minute, CNN is calling us to get that series

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when they’re putting their Forfeiture.

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Somebody’s out there saying, hey, we’re paying attention a little bit.

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Oh, we feel that too.

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And, of course, you probably know all about the recent,

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the least restriction to some extent of the research protocols that have been trying to get in for years.

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The one that brought the protocol for MMPA and Straussman’s for BMP and so on.

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So the government is looking a little bit more favorable at the research proposal, clinical research.

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Right.

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That’s very important.

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Yeah.

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And then, you know, in the marijuana thing, the other end,

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JAMA just hired, commissioned, and accepted a piece from me on medical marijuana,

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which is for them to come to high times.

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You know what I mean?

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So, yeah, we’re hoping that there is a change, at least a little bit more realistic view.

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And, of course, the Swiss experiment,

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which had its ups and downs, I suppose,

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but is still limping along.

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But we hope it’ll get better.

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You’ve probably been following that, I’m sure,

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about the legalization of Swiss research in Switzerland.

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Yeah, we keep our eye out.

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Keep your eye out.

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Probably not as closely as you,

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and sometimes the research stuff doesn’t quite, you know,

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it goes over my head.

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Yeah.

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A couple more names for your consideration would be Lester Greenspoon at Harvard,

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who’s a wonderful man and been on drug policy work.

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Now you see, one of the things,

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and this is what we sent out to our membership,

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whether we should begin to encourage a shift in policy.

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Our original policy was simply an information center.

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We were accumulating everything.

00:18:37 ►

We had all the reports and private papers

00:18:40 ►

and the right of all these people,

00:18:42 ►

and we strictly kept it neutral.

00:18:44 ►

But of late, the membership and the board had been agitating toward a more positive attitude

00:18:50 ►

about lobbying a little bit for reform and research and so on.

00:18:56 ►

So I think this is in the wind, the feeling that it’s all right to say,

00:19:00 ►

fellas, let’s see if we can get this stuff back and some legitimate use and so on.

00:19:05 ►

So that’s the shift in attitude.

00:19:08 ►

We’re a fairly conservative group,

00:19:10 ►

and we’re very strongly considering

00:19:12 ►

taking a more active political stance.

00:19:15 ►

As per our membership, that’s what they want us to do.

00:19:18 ►

And we have about 1,000 members

00:19:20 ►

and some interesting people.

00:19:23 ►

So I think maybe…

00:19:24 ►

So in any case, you know Richard Schultes, you know Alex, you know Sasha Shulgin, right?

00:19:30 ►

Yeah.

00:19:31 ►

And Ron Siegel, who may or may not come forth, but he’s a bright man.

00:19:37 ►

He’s in the middle group, the second generation.

00:19:41 ►

There’s about three generations now.

00:19:44 ►

Ronald would be second.

00:19:46 ►

The third group are a bunch of kids that we hear from occasionally, some up there in the

00:19:52 ►

Bridge Conference business up in San Francisco.

00:19:55 ►

There’s Andy Weil.

00:19:58 ►

You probably know him.

00:20:00 ►

He’s on the list, although I haven’t reached him yet.

00:20:02 ►

Good for you.

00:20:03 ►

Let’s see who else I could give you.

00:20:05 ►

And this is, I have most of the people right here,

00:20:09 ►

if you’re not thinking of Europeans.

00:20:11 ►

Marlene de Rios.

00:20:13 ►

But that’s more with ayahuasca, no?

00:20:16 ►

Did she also experiment?

00:20:17 ►

No, she did work in both.

00:20:18 ►

But her principal work, Betty Eisner, is a really important name.

00:20:23 ►

Because for the connection with LSD and

00:20:25 ►

Ayahuasca was both

00:20:28 ►

Schultes and then Cody and

00:20:30 ►

Naranjo. Good, good.

00:20:32 ►

Well, that’s right. And Marlene has

00:20:34 ►

they did work in

00:20:36 ►

both areas, but you’re right. They’re also

00:20:38 ►

she’s also second generation.

00:20:40 ►

Betty Eisner is a name

00:20:42 ►

you wouldn’t hear who’s first generation

00:20:44 ►

who did work with LSD.

00:20:46 ►

That’s in LA. And let’s see who else. Alan, you took care of already.

00:20:51 ►

Willis Harmon. Do you know about him? No.

00:20:55 ►

Willis Harmon? Oh, he’s head of a group called the Noetic Society.

00:21:00 ►

And he’s on the… See, even the people who are proponents that go from conservative

00:21:05 ►

to a fairly liberal

00:21:07 ►

and I would say that

00:21:09 ►

Willis was one of our conservative researchers

00:21:12 ►

but a good man

00:21:13 ►

and he should at least

00:21:16 ►

query him as to what he would like

00:21:18 ►

to do

00:21:18 ►

he’s an important person

00:21:21 ►

Bo Holmsted of course

00:21:24 ►

is in Europe

00:21:24 ►

oh I have been in touch with him really? important person. Bo Homestead, of course, is in Europe. That didn’t help.

00:21:26 ►

Oh, I have been in touch with him.

00:21:27 ►

Really?

00:21:28 ►

Well, he read a paper of mine

00:21:29 ►

a couple of years ago

00:21:30 ►

and he liked it.

00:21:32 ►

And he called me.

00:21:34 ►

So now I’m trying to stay

00:21:35 ►

in contact with him.

00:21:37 ►

Very good guy.

00:21:38 ►

And I mentioned

00:21:39 ►

Walter Houston Clark.

00:21:40 ►

You may not know

00:21:41 ►

too much about him,

00:21:42 ►

but he was a professor

00:21:43 ►

of religion or philosophy

00:21:45 ►

or whatever, and has been a force. He’s an older man by now.

00:21:50 ►

My only religious take is Rabbi Zalman Schachter.

00:21:54 ►

Yeah, he…

00:21:55 ►

Fellow…

00:21:56 ►

Where, in San Luis Obispo?

00:21:58 ►

No, he is… He took 215. Where’s the 215 area?

00:22:07 ►

Oh, 205?

00:22:08 ►

No, 215.

00:22:09 ►

Oh, 215.

00:22:10 ►

I think he might just be like Philadelphia or something.

00:22:13 ►

Yeah.

00:22:13 ►

But he took it as part of the Spring Grove experiments

00:22:16 ►

for healers.

00:22:18 ►

Oh, good.

00:22:18 ►

That would be of interest.

00:22:20 ►

I need some new names.

00:22:21 ►

So I wanted to get him as part of the group that would say…

00:22:25 ►

When you talk to them, tell them the Foundation would very much welcome their correspondence.

00:22:30 ►

Okay.

00:22:31 ►

That’s good.

00:22:31 ►

We think we’ve about collected everybody, but we never know.

00:22:34 ►

Have you been in touch with Gene Houston and Masters, those guys?

00:22:38 ►

No.

00:22:38 ►

No, really?

00:22:40 ►

Well, I mean, my list is fairly short.

00:22:43 ►

It’s about 30 people.

00:22:45 ►

I know I can’t really, for this piece, if everybody gets one column, that’s kind of…

00:22:49 ►

I’m sure.

00:22:50 ►

But in any case, for your own record, Gene was a very active and very fine lady.

00:22:57 ►

Gene Houston, they wrote a couple of books on the subject.

00:23:01 ►

The Master Gamers, I don’t forget now, but they’re okay people.

00:23:05 ►

Masters was his name.

00:23:08 ►

I met John Lilly, of course, but he’s not here.

00:23:10 ►

He’s in Hawaii.

00:23:13 ►

Very interesting man named Arnold Mandel that goes back many, many years,

00:23:18 ►

but I think he’s too much into academia at the moment,

00:23:21 ►

but the name you should know.

00:23:23 ►

Brilliant guy.

00:23:24 ►

He was a professor at UC San Diego for many years.

00:23:29 ►

And Dennis and Terrence McKenna, whom you probably know.

00:23:33 ►

Terrence, unfortunately, called back one day to say,

00:23:36 ►

Peter, I’d love to contribute a bit for the LSD,

00:23:41 ►

but I’m going to Mexico now.

00:23:43 ►

So he just left for Mexico, and I got the message shortly.

00:23:46 ►

I was out when I got the message and I got back a few hours later and he’d already left.

00:23:49 ►

Well, Ralph Metzner, you probably got over. And of course you mentioned Claudio and David

00:23:58 ►

Nichols, Humphrey Osmond, Ram Dass.

00:24:02 ►

Ram Dass I put a call in, but I’m trying to get through. Yeah.

00:24:05 ►

Secretary, I guess, Marlene.

00:24:07 ►

Yeah, Ronald Sanderson, who is in England, I’m the chief guy there.

00:24:13 ►

We mentioned him.

00:24:14 ►

Well, can you give me some of these numbers?

00:24:16 ►

Yeah.

00:24:16 ►

Let’s take them.

00:24:17 ►

I will.

00:24:17 ►

One more.

00:24:18 ►

And David Smith.

00:24:20 ►

David Smith, that was his.

00:24:21 ►

He was head of the clinic up there.

00:24:22 ►

Sure.

00:24:23 ►

In San Francisco.

00:24:24 ►

Myron Stolaroff, who you may or may not have heard.

00:24:28 ►

No, no.

00:24:28 ►

He’s also a really good guy and contributor.

00:24:32 ►

And finally, down to the wire, there’s Charlie Tartt

00:24:36 ►

and a guy named Young-A-Lighter, who’s UCLA.

00:24:40 ►

Andrew Weil, and finally, Richard Yensen.

00:24:44 ►

So these are an assorted lot, of which, as

00:24:48 ►

I say, about seven or eight are the people who were there from the beginning.

00:24:53 ►

Okay. Now, can I talk to you?

00:24:56 ►

Sure.

00:24:57 ►

And the talk to you is, in this series of people that I’m collecting, I’m basically,

00:25:06 ►

because of time constraints,

00:25:09 ►

I really would love to do full-length interviews with everybody.

00:25:14 ►

So what I’m trying to do is just compose from the different people kind of a picture window for some of our readers

00:25:18 ►

to look through to see the experience.

00:25:21 ►

So, I mean, you worked in psychotherapy early on.

00:25:26 ►

Yes, I did.

00:25:27 ►

You have your own experiences with LSD.

00:25:30 ►

Yes, sir.

00:25:31 ►

And so, if you would, I would just like you to talk about your work.

00:25:36 ►

Tell me about your work.

00:25:37 ►

Tell me about the positive and or negative aspects of it.

00:25:40 ►

Well, would you want to do that as a telephone thing,

00:25:44 ►

or do you want me to write something for you?

00:25:46 ►

No, I like to do it on the phone. I’m kind of putting everybody on the spot.

00:25:49 ►

I will fax you the copy before I give the copy to anybody else.

00:25:56 ►

Well, my experience, very briefly and in a very factual way, began in April of 1954 when I first took LSD. It was new and the effects

00:26:11 ►

of it were relatively unheard of. The response of the experience I had was one of an enormous

00:26:20 ►

sense of something, some aspect of reality or some sense of my perceptions that I was not

00:26:29 ►

able to easily access.

00:26:32 ►

Something was coming out of me, something that I was being able to relate to that was

00:26:36 ►

larger than myself, some larger picture. I was, frankly, somewhat astonished at the fact that I myself was dealing with feelings

00:26:50 ►

and perceptions that I was hardly aware of that I had.

00:26:55 ►

That was quite a shock and a surprise.

00:27:00 ►

From that, I vowed that I would go ahead and study this stuff.

00:27:03 ►

This was in April 1954.

00:27:06 ►

I went on and did an experiment that involved close to 1,000 people from all walks of life.

00:27:15 ►

What I would say was the largest single experiment of its kind,

00:27:19 ►

which was to give LSD to people from a variety of occupations,

00:27:26 ►

education, cross-section from all walks of life,

00:27:30 ►

and to give them a naturalistic experience

00:27:33 ►

that didn’t involve hospital rooms and consultation rooms and testing and the like,

00:27:39 ►

but to leave them relatively free in a pleasant environment,

00:27:48 ►

a nice living room, an i-fi and a little garden,

00:27:52 ►

and just quietly experience medicine.

00:27:56 ►

And at the end of that time, as quickly as possible,

00:27:59 ►

tell us what they went through.

00:28:04 ►

And for that end, we had one or two people who sat by very quietly.

00:28:08 ►

When they were willing to talk, they took down everything they said.

00:28:10 ►

We had accumulated.

00:28:15 ►

We had given it finally 200 and 2,500 times.

00:28:17 ►

In other words, several people had repeat trips. We had those number of records of reports of people who had gone through the experience in this kind of naturalistic way,

00:28:27 ►

let’s call it, or unencumbered way, and told us about what they experienced.

00:28:33 ►

And we took those and codified them.

00:28:36 ►

We put them on little cards.

00:28:38 ►

We took the first group, the first person, and took down all of the features of his experience, put those on cards and

00:28:47 ►

said to the second person, there are three bins.

00:28:50 ►

Put in the first bin the one that suits your experience, if like yours.

00:28:54 ►

The second might be in the third, not like yours at all.

00:28:58 ►

And after 2,000 applications, we found about 50 to 100 cards in the first bit. In other words, all of those

00:29:06 ►

people had that experience. That was a way we were getting to refine the LSD state as

00:29:14 ►

a thousand people from different walks of life experienced it. So we just wanted to

00:29:21 ►

know from a phenomenologic point of view what does this stuff do to these people and how do they talk about it without interference?

00:29:30 ►

And that was my cardinal experiment.

00:29:32 ►

In the middle of that, an artist came along and said he wanted to paint something.

00:29:36 ►

And out of that grew what I think now is a rather well-known experiment with artists,

00:29:47 ►

well-known experiments with artists in which we had close to 75 to 80 artists who painted an object before and during the experience

00:29:51 ►

and gave us a marvelous insight into the creative process

00:29:55 ►

as was evidenced by the use of LSD.

00:30:00 ►

So we have in our possession and had shown this around of a series of artists

00:30:06 ►

and painting this same thing before and during the experience.

00:30:11 ►

And so that was another one.

00:30:13 ►

And then any number of corollary things we did, identical twin studies, for example,

00:30:19 ►

high-dose studies, chronic administrations, just trying to find out what the stuff does.

00:30:26 ►

All this was pure Sandoz acid at a time when it was totally legal.

00:30:31 ►

And I was getting the material from Sandoz.

00:30:35 ►

And your dose was?

00:30:37 ►

That was 2.5 micro per kilo, which meant the average of about 150 micrograms per person of average

00:30:49 ►

weight and height.

00:30:51 ►

And then we took all those reports and began to analyze them for content and so on, just

00:30:59 ►

to give us a flavor of what this stuff was like, without touching the data.

00:31:04 ►

The data came from the people themselves.

00:31:06 ►

We inferred nothing.

00:31:07 ►

At a time of the world when there were no preconceived notions about it, we gave them

00:31:12 ►

no hints.

00:31:14 ►

They took it, made their statements, and that was it.

00:31:17 ►

Then we analyzed what they did and felt against their backgrounds, against their age, their

00:31:24 ►

education, and the like.

00:31:26 ►

That was a formidable experiment.

00:31:29 ►

And that basically was what I was involved in.

00:31:32 ►

And then after that, they sort of took all our stuff,

00:31:39 ►

and we couldn’t work after that.

00:31:41 ►

In 1962, they came in, before the bans, by the way, before the legal ban.

00:31:46 ►

They simply came and confiscated what we had left.

00:31:50 ►

The FDA did that, and I think that was a move to sweep all the LSD out before they made it illegal.

00:31:57 ►

Because they were afraid, I think, that maybe they would hide some of it or something.

00:32:02 ►

So that’s how that worked.

00:32:01 ►

Maybe they would hide some of it or something.

00:32:02 ►

Yeah.

00:32:03 ►

So that’s how that worked.

00:32:07 ►

Just one thing in my head.

00:32:10 ►

Your first sentence, then you took it in 1954.

00:32:12 ►

Who turned you on to it? Well, I was a teacher at the university,

00:32:16 ►

and one of the students invited a guest, a young man, who came to hear me.

00:32:21 ►

And I had a lot of guests, the people I used to lecture a lot.

00:32:21 ►

who came to hear me.

00:32:24 ►

And I had a lot of guests, the people I used to lecture a lot.

00:32:30 ►

I was lecturing on the changes of consciousness that the primitive, quote-unquote, native people used

00:32:34 ►

in these various substances like Iowa,

00:32:38 ►

the magic mushroom, and all this comic-con.

00:32:41 ►

Excuse me one sec. Let me get rid of this quote.

00:32:44 ►

Hi.

00:32:47 ►

Yeah, so he some with a medical student and they sat and i was lecturing at that time i was even before i was

00:32:53 ►

the interested in in the peyote and you know strange plants that do funny things to people’s

00:32:59 ►

minds and he said that he had something which might interest me. He had been to Europe and brought back something.

00:33:07 ►

It wasn’t that difficult then to obtain it.

00:33:12 ►

He was a gentleman who later on went on to be an engineer and then to be a physician.

00:33:20 ►

He wasn’t in the mainstream of the drug-taking group or whatever.

00:33:27 ►

So your first event was in the comfort of a house?

00:33:29 ►

Oh, yeah.

00:33:30 ►

People that you were comfortable with?

00:33:31 ►

That’s a good point.

00:33:32 ►

No, I knew instinctively it was my home in Lake Arrowhead, a beautiful home there.

00:33:37 ►

And I just sat there quietly with them, another couple, myself and my wife.

00:33:42 ►

And we all experienced it, yes.

00:33:44 ►

It was a good surrounding.

00:33:46 ►

So I started on the pretty good auspices, I’d say.

00:33:49 ►

Yeah, well, I think the right auspices,

00:33:51 ►

and I think it’s one of the problems that kids experience before and now,

00:33:54 ►

is the wrong time, wrong place.

00:33:57 ►

Oh, sure, and I think so much is laid onto that.

00:34:00 ►

And another thing that really bothered me,

00:34:02 ►

which was so typical at 48 hours,

00:34:05 ►

they’d say, well, this guy had 500 hits of something and he had these perceptual disorders. Number

00:34:11 ►

one, 500 is an awful lot to suddenly decide that you’re going to get hurt from one shot

00:34:16 ►

of LSD. The second is nobody knew what he took because anything that you took after

00:34:22 ►

1965, 66, 7 or whatever, you had to know what it was.

00:34:27 ►

There was no, for our purposes, it could have been anything that people took after that.

00:34:32 ►

There was no quality control.

00:34:34 ►

We didn’t know what they took.

00:34:35 ►

So on a hundred talk shows I’ve been in, God knows how many, people will forever say to me,

00:34:40 ►

well, I did this and so and it worked out.

00:34:42 ►

I said, when did you take it?

00:34:44 ►

Yeah, this and that. I said, how did you

00:34:46 ►

know it was pure? Well, it was told. It was told

00:34:47 ►

it was pure. Now, it may have been,

00:34:50 ►

but that’s a very moot point.

00:34:52 ►

Bits and pieces that have trickled

00:34:54 ►

through. It was just

00:34:56 ►

stopped. All those supplies were given to the U.S.

00:34:58 ►

government.

00:35:00 ►

So that point is never made.

00:35:02 ►

You know, first of all, he has

00:35:03 ►

500 experiences of what?

00:35:06 ►

And 500 experiences of some unknown substance, and then he has some condition.

00:35:10 ►

Well, good luck.

00:35:12 ►

Well, even, I mean, it seems to me there’s, with any experience, not to diminish your point at all,

00:35:21 ►

but a different point is that with any experience, particularly those that take you closer to an outside edge of some sort,

00:35:28 ►

expand you, whether it’s falling in love

00:35:30 ►

or deciding you want to race a car and see if you can do 140.

00:35:33 ►

Or climbing Mount Everest.

00:35:34 ►

Exactly.

00:35:35 ►

You are going to come out different.

00:35:37 ►

Absolutely.

00:35:38 ►

And to me, it’s not the fault of Mount Everest if you fall off.

00:35:42 ►

It’s your commitment to climate that

00:35:45 ►

resulted in it. You know what I’m saying? So even if the public perception is that it’s

00:35:50 ►

the LSD experience that pushed the occasional person over the end, and I don’t know very

00:35:55 ►

many people who were pushed over the edge by any substance that we’d call drugs, particularly

00:36:03 ►

the psychedelics. I mean, I’ve heard some Indians, when I do Native American

00:36:06 ►

church ceremonies occasionally, say,

00:36:08 ►

Oh, that’s the Native American church. Everybody goes crazy. I’m like, where are the crazy

00:36:12 ►

people? Do you just put them in a hole?

00:36:13 ►

We know that very well. Long of the stuff was on the cutting room floor of 48. By the

00:36:19 ►

way, they spent the whole damned afternoon here,, you know, I kept saying to them, you know, why this man who was a total idiot,

00:36:27 ►

why, Terry Grant, did you realize what you were doing while you saw that?

00:36:31 ►

And my answer is, listen, let me tell you something.

00:36:33 ►

LSD, like anything else, is an adventurous experience.

00:36:36 ►

It’s a discovery experience.

00:36:38 ►

It’s something you do at some risk, you know.

00:36:40 ►

Not everybody’s committed to go to Everest.

00:36:42 ►

Not everybody’s going to go in the Serengeti and shoot lions or whatever you want.

00:36:46 ►

I said, these are risk-taking adventures.

00:36:49 ►

There are people courageous and adventuresome enough who are willing to do it.

00:36:52 ►

And when you do it, you study your risks, don’t you?

00:36:55 ►

You don’t go up into the moon, you know, naked and barefoot.

00:36:58 ►

You don’t do any of these things.

00:37:00 ►

You use reasonable caution when you take any kind of adventuresome risk.

00:37:04 ►

And as far as Cary Grant andary Grant, let me tell you something.

00:37:07 ►

These were bold, adventurous, and curious men.

00:37:09 ►

Just because they were movie actors doesn’t mean, in fact,

00:37:14 ►

that was why, in a sense, that a guy like Jack Nicholson,

00:37:17 ►

because he had the curiosity.

00:37:20 ►

These were not just peer pressure.

00:37:22 ►

These were people who, under different circumstances, would take other kinds of risks for adventure.

00:37:28 ►

This point is never made, you see.

00:37:31 ►

These are adventuresome things.

00:37:32 ►

These are exciting adventuresome possibilities, not for everybody,

00:37:36 ►

and to be prepared for as much as one could possibly prepare themselves for it.

00:37:41 ►

And those are the circumstances.

00:37:43 ►

If you fall off, you know, and you’re

00:37:45 ►

climbing barefooted, then it’s shame

00:37:47 ►

on you.

00:37:49 ►

Now, I realize that unless

00:37:51 ►

some people have restrictions, even

00:37:53 ►

at Everest, I hope you understand,

00:37:55 ►

there’s so damn many people going up there

00:37:57 ►

poorly prepared that the government has posted

00:37:59 ►

an inspection station.

00:38:02 ►

By the way, it’s a nice metaphor,

00:38:03 ►

you know, for the thing.

00:38:05 ►

Because everybody says, well, I know, for the thing. Yeah.

00:38:05 ►

They don’t want just, because everybody says, well, I’m going to climb Everest.

00:38:08 ►

So they go up there and fall down from exhaustion about three miles up the slope.

00:38:13 ►

You know, the lower.

00:38:14 ►

Sure, sure.

00:38:15 ►

So that’s what we’re talking.

00:38:16 ►

That’s what we’re talking about.

00:38:18 ►

Now, you could say, well, objectively, what are the dangers?

00:38:21 ►

Well, objectively, we could tell you.

00:38:24 ►

But that’s nothing to say that Everest is shrouded in snow

00:38:27 ►

and that it has low oxygen and the like.

00:38:29 ►

Sure.

00:38:30 ►

But the rest is up to you.

00:38:34 ►

The chromosome damage,

00:38:36 ►

we did the three papers that exposed the fact

00:38:38 ►

that there was no chromosome damage.

00:38:40 ►

They came out of my laboratory.

00:38:46 ►

Have you, uh,

00:38:47 ►

how about the myth of the elephant

00:38:49 ►

with the 3,000 doses? Well, it’s not a

00:38:51 ►

myth. It actually happened. Okay, I can’t

00:38:53 ►

nail that one down. Tell me about it. Huh?

00:38:55 ►

I can’t nail that one down. Tell me about it. Oh, sure.

00:38:58 ►

The guy with that who’s

00:38:59 ►

formerly head of the UCLA

00:39:01 ►

psychiatric department,

00:39:03 ►

I can’t think of his name at the moment.

00:39:05 ►

He gave it to an elephant.

00:39:07 ►

You’ll find it, by the way, in news clips.

00:39:08 ►

You can get it from the newspaper.

00:39:10 ►

Time magazine ran it.

00:39:12 ►

I don’t know the appropriate number of years before.

00:39:15 ►

Your research people can pull it right out, by the way.

00:39:18 ►

They’ll have no trouble.

00:39:19 ►

Why he did this was real stupidity on my part,

00:39:24 ►

but he lost his one experimental subject, the elephant.

00:39:29 ►

What was the autopsy on the elephant?

00:39:31 ►

Well, they claimed that it died of some suffocation or some obscurity.

00:39:37 ►

You can’t do very much with an elephant on their LSD,

00:39:40 ►

but it was something that equated ultimately to elephants are unusually sensitive to LSD,

00:39:46 ►

namely on the basis of one elephant.

00:39:49 ►

And was the dose indeed 3,000?

00:39:51 ►

The dose was, yeah, oh, sure.

00:39:53 ►

At what, 150 mics, 250 mics?

00:39:57 ►

No, you mean how much did the elephant get?

00:40:00 ►

Yeah.

00:40:01 ►

I don’t know exactly, but he got some whopping amount, yeah.

00:40:04 ►

But, you know, LSD is one of the safest of all drugs.

00:40:08 ►

Well, I can’t find any other deaths.

00:40:11 ►

There is no, I have in all my experience, and believe me it’s considerable,

00:40:15 ►

of a person who died from the physical effects of LSD.

00:40:19 ►

Not the mental effects, I won’t tell you that.

00:40:21 ►

But from the physical effects.

00:40:23 ►

In fact, you can’t say that virtually about any other medicine.

00:40:27 ►

You can die of overtaking aspirin, God knows what, and drinking too much water.

00:40:32 ►

But LSD, there is no, and by the way, there is no evidence of physical death from marijuana either, you know.

00:40:38 ►

Right.

00:40:38 ►

I know I researched that at one time.

00:40:40 ►

I went to Jamaica and all that kind of stuff.

00:40:42 ►

There just isn’t.

00:40:43 ►

So if you’re going to commit suicide, I would suggest you try something else.

00:40:48 ►

Mm-hmm.

00:40:49 ►

Yeah.

00:40:51 ►

Now, this is true.

00:40:52 ►

This is a hard fact, by the way.

00:40:54 ►

Yeah.

00:40:54 ►

Yeah.

00:40:55 ►

Now, what about in your own experience?

00:40:57 ►

I’m talking about pure LSD, by the way.

00:40:59 ►

Right.

00:40:59 ►

We’re not talking about when somebody messes around and adds F-shape.

00:41:02 ►

No, I don’t know.

00:41:03 ►

See, again, I’m going to tell you, on every count, people like you should know this and do this.

00:41:07 ►

When did you take it?

00:41:08 ►

Did you know what you were taking?

00:41:10 ►

You took LSD.

00:41:11 ►

When?

00:41:12 ►

Well, what was it?

00:41:13 ►

Who knows?

00:41:14 ►

Who knows?

00:41:15 ►

It may have been, but just who knows, you know?

00:41:17 ►

Mm-hmm.

00:41:18 ►

Really.

00:41:19 ►

Okay.

00:41:20 ►

In your own experience with consuming LSD…

00:41:24 ►

Sure.

00:41:24 ►

Anything…

00:41:24 ►

I took it 13 times, by the way. 13 times you took it? Yeah, right. Yeah. In your own experience with consuming LSD, anything that absolutely stands out by themselves?

00:41:35 ►

Oh, yeah.

00:41:36 ►

The incredible range of emotions.

00:41:40 ►

The things you’ll hear, the reason I don’t mention them is that they’re almost banal at this time,

00:41:44 ►

like reciting a dream.

00:41:47 ►

It’s the extraordinary wealth of associations, the kinesthesias,

00:41:52 ►

the synesthesias, being able to transfer the sensory impressions,

00:41:58 ►

the heightened feeling of awareness, the sense of communion,

00:42:02 ►

and the feeling of being at one,

00:42:05 ►

the unity with things, the cosmic experience, all of those.

00:42:09 ►

I deliberately avoid putting on the religious, mystical part of it.

00:42:13 ►

These are just phenomenal logics.

00:42:15 ►

These are things that happen.

00:42:16 ►

What they meant, where they were going, was of second consequence.

00:42:21 ►

First, it was just the feeling of it,

00:42:23 ►

a heightened sense of being

00:42:25 ►

in the world, a sense of immediacy with your environment, a feeling of narrowing the moment

00:42:31 ►

down to that single intrinsic feeling of communication between you and the world around you.

00:42:41 ►

Those kinds of things which we’ve known for so many years different words

00:42:45 ►

different expressions

00:42:47 ►

yeah

00:42:48 ►

any

00:42:51 ►

and also not last but certainly not least

00:42:54 ►

is certain kinds of

00:42:56 ►

access to certain

00:42:58 ►

feelings and memories

00:42:59 ►

that were in effect hidden

00:43:02 ►

from me prior to the experience

00:43:04 ►

any regrets or that were, in effect, hidden from me prior to the experience.

00:43:10 ►

Any regrets from your personal use?

00:43:13 ►

Not your experimental use first, but your personal use?

00:43:13 ►

No, no, fine.

00:43:16 ►

From my personal use, none whatsoever.

00:43:20 ►

And incidentally, I’m going to digress from that.

00:43:23 ►

None of the old-timers, the people I trust and respect,

00:43:26 ►

have ever said to me one time,

00:43:30 ►

and by the way, I have a film of that, which was the only film of its kind,

00:43:34 ►

a meeting with these people, said to me, I’m sorry I did it.

00:43:35 ►

It was a folly of youth.

00:43:36 ►

It was this and that.

00:43:39 ►

Nobody has recanted, in my impression.

00:43:43 ►

That doesn’t mean they didn’t want to go public, you understand,

00:43:45 ►

or that they had reservations.

00:43:46 ►

They certainly did.

00:43:50 ►

And they had very careful, conservative opinions of what I was using.

00:43:52 ►

But none of them recanted.

00:43:56 ►

None of them said, this is a mistake, this is a folly, this is an illusion,

00:43:58 ►

this is meaningless, this is trivial. Nothing like that.

00:43:59 ►

Nobody.

00:44:01 ►

In my impression.

00:44:02 ►

And I’ve been in touch with just about everybody in the world.

00:44:02 ►

in my impression.

00:44:04 ►

I’ve been in touch with just about everybody in the world on this.

00:44:06 ►

You just read the foreword to both

00:44:07 ►

Storming Heaven and

00:44:10 ►

Acid Dreams.

00:44:12 ►

I was really coached

00:44:14 ►

and mentored both of those books, by the way.

00:44:16 ►

I’m sure.

00:44:17 ►

Marty Lee is supposed to get back to me today.

00:44:20 ►

Marty’s a dear, sweet friend.

00:44:22 ►

But I only say that because

00:44:23 ►

I want to acquaint you with the fact that

00:44:25 ►

if there were such disclaimers, I certainly would be interested in those myself.

00:44:30 ►

Well, I don’t find any.

00:44:32 ►

But I definitely, in collecting this information for this particular piece,

00:44:38 ►

I want people to know.

00:44:40 ►

There are people like Ann Sheldon where she says,

00:44:43 ►

you know, given my preference, I’d rather not be picked up by the scruff of the neck with LSD.

00:44:48 ►

I’d rather be walked into the experience by a coyote.

00:44:52 ►

And those are just comments about how the thing should be done, not whether it should be done at all.

00:44:58 ►

Well, I can’t find anybody who would.

00:45:00 ►

But I was asking you because maybe you were going to tell me a story that I didn’t hear.

00:45:03 ►

Well, I would be happy to.

00:45:05 ►

And I’ve dealt with some very conservative

00:45:08 ►

people who perhaps would never

00:45:10 ►

do it again or didn’t think what

00:45:11 ►

that did to them was that remarkable,

00:45:14 ►

but they never felt that it was

00:45:15 ►

totally something that they wouldn’t

00:45:18 ►

do or were sorry that they did.

00:45:20 ►

No.

00:45:22 ►

There may be a lot of people who felt

00:45:24 ►

that way, but they had different kinds of experiences, but not in my estimation.

00:45:28 ►

They were the people I knew.

00:45:32 ►

By the way, this proposes a peculiar problem in dealing with this.

00:45:36 ►

I can talk to you this way, but if I talk to anybody in the media, which I have, I can assure you any number of times,

00:45:41 ►

I’ve been fighting this battle pretty much for a long time, and sometimes in the dark, that they will say, well, you know, you’re

00:45:49 ►

an apologist, or you’re telling me all these good things, and so I have to be very careful

00:45:55 ►

of telling them what I feel is the truth of something, because it sounds too good. For

00:46:03 ►

their purposes.

00:46:04 ►

Yeah.

00:46:05 ►

And let’s hold on one second.

00:46:07 ►

Sure.

00:46:07 ►

Hi.

00:46:08 ►

This is Tom Lytle.

00:46:09 ►

Do you know Tom?

00:46:10 ►

Oh, yeah.

00:46:10 ►

Yeah, okay.

00:46:11 ►

So he was doing a story on the 10 myths for me.

00:46:15 ►

By the way, this isn’t to say that people, that it is a powerful drug.

00:46:19 ►

You know, even as I say it, I sound kind of like a sort of an Olympic disclaimer.

00:46:26 ►

But this is a powerful joke, and it can hurt people psychologically.

00:46:29 ►

It certainly can.

00:46:31 ►

It’s just the same as we go back to Everest.

00:46:33 ►

You can fall off the fucking mountain.

00:46:35 ►

Yeah.

00:46:35 ►

That’s all there is to it.

00:46:36 ►

I’m not going to make any apologies for that.

00:46:39 ►

You’ve got to be prepared.

00:46:40 ►

You know that old adage about LSD favors the prepared mind.

00:46:44 ►

Yeah. Yeah, that’s the whole, you’ve got to be prepared. You know that old adage about LSD favors the prepared mind. Yeah. Yeah, that’s

00:46:46 ►

the whole, you’ve got to be prepared.

00:46:47 ►

I also think that each one teach one, which is how

00:46:50 ►

I was brought into it. Absolutely, and so

00:46:51 ►

without that in place,

00:46:53 ►

then you’re going to get troubles, you know.

00:46:55 ►

And we’re not going to blame all mountains.

00:46:58 ►

Yeah, exactly. Good point.

00:46:59 ►

Yeah.

00:47:01 ►

Tell me a little about the,

00:47:03 ►

I’ll tell you what, you are so clear, so well spoken on this that I’m feeling like, hey, let’s just, you know, turn this into a, instead of, you know, reduce it to one column, let’s fucking blow this up to a fucking feature interview.

00:47:20 ►

I’m not kidding.

00:47:22 ►

Sharp’s attack.

00:47:23 ►

But tell me a little about the Hoffman Foundation.

00:47:27 ►

Oh, good.

00:47:28 ►

About three or four years ago, it occurred to me that out there in the world was floating all kinds of valuable stuff,

00:47:34 ►

memorabilia, ephemera, pieces of paper, stuff that will never be collected.

00:47:39 ►

Nobody seems to know what quite to do with them.

00:47:42 ►

Everything to do with that rich, incredibly interesting period of the

00:47:46 ►

60s that had to do with drugs

00:47:48 ►

and so on. And there was no concerted

00:47:50 ►

effort. The first people that did was Fitzhugh

00:47:52 ►

Ludlow Library, who a couple of friends

00:47:54 ►

of mine decided to collect these books.

00:47:56 ►

But nothing, they hung around,

00:47:58 ►

wound up in a warehouse,

00:47:59 ►

boxes. It needed money,

00:48:02 ►

it needed a certain kind of direction.

00:48:04 ►

They didn’t have a container

00:48:05 ►

that is a political and economic container to put it in. So we decided to bring together

00:48:12 ►

all these wordies from those years and tell them we wanted a place where this stuff could

00:48:17 ►

be stored for future reference. And 100, 200 years from now, they’ll be looking back and

00:48:23 ►

thinking, my God, what a golden age.

00:48:25 ►

How come the people didn’t chronicle this more closely?

00:48:29 ►

Like we feel now about mesmerism and some of the stuff we wish we knew about

00:48:33 ►

the early days of hypnosis that we don’t know about.

00:48:36 ►

So we were in a really important era of change,

00:48:41 ►

and this is an incredibly important group of a lot of information out there so i said

00:48:47 ►

let’s collect it if nothing else we’ll put it together codify it maybe get a couple of computers

00:48:53 ►

put a database out and above all put it in a place where it won’t be harmed and we’ll be there for

00:48:58 ►

posterity and for people who want to come and research us like yourself. And so a couple, three years ago, we started,

00:49:05 ►

and we put together the advisory board and so on,

00:49:09 ►

collected some money,

00:49:10 ►

and now have a sizable collection of these things

00:49:13 ►

codified through the various computer stuff we have and so on.

00:49:18 ►

So we were basically a repository of information.

00:49:22 ►

And to that end, a couple of people have called us, like the Supreme Court,

00:49:26 ►

one of the cases wanted some information,

00:49:28 ►

which we gave them.

00:49:29 ►

We became an amicus curiae.

00:49:32 ►

Or sometimes we’ll have people come

00:49:34 ►

because they’ve been guided by,

00:49:35 ►

we don’t know where else to find this stuff.

00:49:38 ►

The libraries are remarkably short

00:49:40 ►

of material, by the way.

00:49:42 ►

Even the prestigious UCLA Medical Library,

00:49:46 ►

there are a few threadbare,

00:49:47 ►

you know, stain-worn copies of these stuff,

00:49:49 ►

and that’s all there are.

00:49:51 ►

You can’t get hold of anything.

00:49:53 ►

Sure, there are private libraries

00:49:54 ►

where people have them,

00:49:55 ►

but very little in the public libraries.

00:49:59 ►

So we have that information,

00:50:00 ►

and essentially that’s where we were.

00:50:02 ►

But it wasn’t a very,

00:50:03 ►

it was kind of a static thing

00:50:05 ►

so we didn’t you know we couldn’t make people aren’t going to give that much money to a library

00:50:10 ►

whatever even though they see the value of it so we limped along managing however to hold our own

00:50:15 ►

and you know and we put out a few newsletter and some reports and reprints for sale and that kind of thing. And then now the group wants to go a little more active.

00:50:29 ►

They say, fine, we’ll change the purposes which we originally set down

00:50:33 ►

and let’s try to pump for some change in the laws.

00:50:39 ►

And I said, well, we’ll look at our charter, we’ll see whether we can do it.

00:50:42 ►

And that’s precisely where we are right now, looking at that change.

00:50:46 ►

We’ve told the delegation they all want to do it.

00:50:51 ►

I think it’s the wind.

00:50:52 ►

I think the tides are changing.

00:50:54 ►

You know, after 20 years after I did my work, I went virtually underground.

00:50:58 ►

I’m not the best known of the people of this group that you talk with.

00:51:03 ►

But because one of the things I did, I was a teacher,

00:51:06 ►

and I had other research projects, really big ones that I was involved in.

00:51:12 ►

So I took everything.

00:51:13 ►

I must confess I was a little put off by when they came in

00:51:17 ►

and confiscated my stock and stuff.

00:51:19 ►

They were sort of preemptorily, you know.

00:51:22 ►

And then I put everything away and said, you know, screw it.

00:51:25 ►

I’ll just keep it undercover, and that’s it.

00:51:29 ►

So for years, that stuff was untouched.

00:51:31 ►

I never looked at it, never did a thing with it.

00:51:34 ►

Did you just teach during that time?

00:51:35 ►

Oh, yeah.

00:51:36 ►

I was teaching.

00:51:37 ►

I did research.

00:51:37 ►

I taught several, a couple thousand medical students and residents in God knows what.

00:51:43 ►

In what field?

00:51:45 ►

Psychiatry.

00:51:45 ►

I was a professor of psychiatry at UCI, University of California, Irvine.

00:51:52 ►

And so I did all that and had a lot of good, interesting research projects.

00:51:57 ►

Our team was one of the first that found a biological marker in homosexuality, for example.

00:52:03 ►

We did work on premenstrual depression,

00:52:07 ►

which is another subject that’s a little off the track from LSD,

00:52:11 ►

and all sorts of things.

00:52:13 ►

So we were working along those lines.

00:52:16 ►

And then in the 19, I guess it was middle to late 70s,

00:52:20 ►

there was a little activity up north, I think.

00:52:22 ►

In that case, Peter Stafford and his group,

00:52:26 ►

and Peter’s an art fellow,

00:52:27 ►

and he invited Albert to come.

00:52:30 ►

And there was a sort of renaissance,

00:52:32 ►

a sort of re-sparking of this whole thing.

00:52:35 ►

And I began to feel that maybe it was time

00:52:37 ►

that we took some of the wraps off.

00:52:40 ►

But it had an incubation period,

00:52:42 ►

about a 20-year incubation period,

00:52:43 ►

a little less maybe.

00:52:45 ►

And then when UCLA wanted me to talk on creativity, I said,

00:52:50 ►

well, I’ll do it on condition that you let me mention these horrendous drugs, you know, these drug rules.

00:52:57 ►

And I may have mentioned them favorably.

00:52:59 ►

Oh, well, we’ll have to think about it.

00:53:01 ►

And then they met, called me back and said it was okay.

00:53:03 ►

And when that happened, I said, well, the light is beginning to dawn again. I went there and lectured that evening

00:53:08 ►

on the use of LSD and creativity and got a standing ovation. I realized that maybe some

00:53:15 ►

of the old rancor and the old finger-pointing and blame and so on had begun to disappear.

00:53:21 ►

That was a great moment for me, by the way. They were young kids. I thought

00:53:27 ►

maybe the new generation isn’t carrying some of that.

00:53:30 ►

Now, look, I’d like to make my point clear that if I were in high place in government,

00:53:35 ►

I’m going to tell you, I would close it down too. I just want you to know. I’d close the

00:53:40 ►

damn thing down. It was just getting crazy. It was getting crazy. We stepped into something

00:53:44 ►

we knew nothing about. The government was puzzled. It was getting crazy. We stepped in this time and we knew nothing about it.

00:53:46 ►

The government was puzzled.

00:53:47 ►

Everybody was.

00:53:48 ►

Nobody expected the dam to leak into the streets the way it did, create havoc and so on.

00:53:55 ►

There were no provisions made for how to take it, what to do with it.

00:53:59 ►

It ran willy-nilly.

00:54:00 ►

And they caught a kind of firestorm with this stuff.

00:54:03 ►

and they caught a kind of firestorm with this stuff

00:54:04 ►

and what happened eventually is

00:54:06 ►

they dug their own grave

00:54:08 ►

just like I’m afraid it will happen now

00:54:10 ►

with their raves and all that shit

00:54:11 ►

so there’s a line between

00:54:15 ►

even the most liberal person

00:54:17 ►

that says gee this is a wonderful thing

00:54:19 ►

and someone says yeah but

00:54:21 ►

if they open the trail to Everest

00:54:23 ►

and the people start falling off the mountain

00:54:24 ►

then we can’t have that And someone says, yeah, but if they open the trail to Everest and the people start falling off the mountain,

00:54:27 ►

then, you know, we can’t have that, you know.

00:54:31 ►

Then the legitimate climbers, they won’t have a shot at it.

00:54:32 ►

Right.

00:54:33 ►

You know?

00:54:35 ►

So that’s what it is.

00:54:37 ►

So I want you to know, I’m not sanctioning.

00:54:41 ►

That’s where Tim and I sort of part. If you read flashbacks, he has a whole chapter on me there where we first met.

00:54:45 ►

He came here because I was doing the work

00:54:47 ►

and wanted me to be his research director.

00:54:51 ►

And at that point,

00:54:52 ►

I simply had too many other things to do.

00:54:55 ►

So he went down to Zihuatanejo

00:54:57 ►

and I didn’t go.

00:54:58 ►

I just felt that,

00:55:00 ►

not because of anything personal with Tim,

00:55:02 ►

but I simply couldn’t get involved in that

00:55:04 ►

at that time the way they were setting it up.

00:55:08 ►

So in any case, all I’m saying is that there were, I don’t hate the word abuses, but there were sort of mismanaging this thing or mishandling it.

00:55:20 ►

Which anyone would agree, really.

00:55:36 ►

Which anyone would agree, really, that if you take 200 mics and get in your car, you know, and get down and see a Grateful Dead concert and then go careening through the streets, you know, with a couple of belts of booze, that isn’t exactly the most social situation.

00:55:45 ►

No, but don’t you think some of that is the fault, or could some of the fault for that be laid on the, let’s say, the educational system?

00:55:45 ►

Oh, absolutely.

00:55:49 ►

Which, by just telling us, don’t use it, denies us the information. Oh, of course.

00:55:50 ►

But, you see, that’s after the fact.

00:55:53 ►

You see, that’s post hoc.

00:55:55 ►

Because at that time, you know, who would say, what are you going to educate people to do?

00:56:00 ►

They’d get out and say, hey, fellas, this is the right way to take LSD.

00:56:06 ►

Your voice would be drowned by people saying, turn on, tune in, and drop out, you know.

00:56:10 ►

There was a tremendous wave of anti-establishment, freedom-oriented behavior that said, we know

00:56:17 ►

what to do, fellas.

00:56:19 ►

We’ve listened to you guys long enough.

00:56:20 ►

We’ve got something finally we can do ourselves, you know.

00:56:25 ►

Yeah.

00:56:30 ►

So if you were the educator now, writing the pamphlet, what would be your… At that time, you mean?

00:56:31 ►

No, right now, with the second wave.

00:56:33 ►

Oh, I would say…

00:56:34 ►

What would be your five things?

00:56:35 ►

Well, gee, I could write the damn thing.

00:56:37 ►

I could write two or three wonderful things.

00:56:40 ►

Look, if you’ve got to take it or got to, you know, if you want to take it, heck, it’s

00:56:44 ►

no more than saying if you’re going to ride this airplane,

00:56:46 ►

make sure you check one, two, three, four out, otherwise you’ll fall to the ground.

00:56:50 ►

I mean, I could write a wonderful paper that wouldn’t be biased at all,

00:56:54 ►

that would simply say these are the dangers, these are the things you look for,

00:56:58 ►

these are the advantages, this is what you have to do.

00:57:01 ►

Respect it, it’ll respect you.

00:57:02 ►

You don’t respect it, you tweak the dragon’s nose, he’s going to bite you. You know, he’s not going to hang around, it’ll respect you. You don’t respect it, you tweak the dragon’s

00:57:05 ►

nose, he’s going to bite you. He’s not going to hang around, he’ll bite you. The Indians

00:57:09 ►

knew that. I did my work on chromosome damage among the Weechaw Indians, which was a landmark

00:57:15 ►

paper, by the way. We went down there and took blood samples of the Weechaw, the first

00:57:19 ►

time this was ever done. It took me two years to establish contact with the people of the tribe and the

00:57:25 ►

Mexican government, and then flew up the samples to City of Hope where they did chromosome

00:57:30 ►

studies. And so during that time, we found no chromosomal breaks. And all that bullshit

00:57:39 ►

was people looking for what they were looking for. But what I could tell you is that I would say to people, you know,

00:57:49 ►

there’s a right way and wrong way of doing this from old-timers

00:57:52 ►

who are not trying to steal your precious incentives and spontaneity away from you.

00:57:57 ►

But these are, you want to have a good trip, this is how to do it.

00:58:00 ►

You know, or at least have a reasonably secure one.

00:58:04 ►

Well, what would they be?

00:58:06 ►

Well, the setting.

00:58:09 ►

You already almost preempted me on that by telling me that you want a nice home

00:58:14 ►

or a place that’s familiar to you,

00:58:16 ►

a place where you have some degree of security

00:58:19 ►

and a feeling of personal connection.

00:58:24 ►

And you certainly want to be in a place where you could option to be in nature if you wanted to

00:58:28 ►

or have available music.

00:58:30 ►

Music is an extremely important adjunct to the experience.

00:58:34 ►

Or music.

00:58:35 ►

And have around you, if necessary, one person who is familiar with the experience,

00:58:41 ►

who you can somehow feel some sense of security and camaraderie with and have that person available to you at your particular request.

00:58:49 ►

These are just minimal sort of requirements.

00:58:54 ►

And to go into the experience with the knowledge that you’re facing some rather remarkable

00:59:02 ►

and unusual experiences.

00:59:08 ►

We think that in the Eleusinian Mysteries in Athens,

00:59:14 ►

where the damn population of Athens poured through the Mysteries of Eleusis for maybe five, six hundred years,

00:59:16 ►

where they had these experiences,

00:59:18 ►

we assume, if you read Hoffman’s book,

00:59:21 ►

that they may have been given a potion of some kind.

00:59:25 ►

We could find in that a wonderful model for the way Sid Cohen and I and the other Bellwethers

00:59:30 ►

of this movement were thought about, like Huxley and Alan Watts, by the way.

00:59:36 ►

All of these people were subjects of mine.

00:59:38 ►

We could say, what would be the best thing?

00:59:40 ►

How could we have an ideal setting for people to go and have this as

00:59:45 ►

a quiet or reflective experience or whatever you wanted that would be free of potential

00:59:51 ►

harm and danger to the person? If we look at the Eleusinian setup, the best we know

00:59:56 ►

about it through Alcibiades, who was one of the Roman generals at the time, who shouldn’t

01:00:02 ►

have bespoken himself, but he did, because it was considered

01:00:05 ►

a bad form to talk about the industry.

01:00:08 ►

I believe he was a Greek general.

01:00:10 ►

In any case, the setting was one of serenity, calm, peacefulness, and I think there may

01:00:18 ►

have been music, for all I know, but it’s very much the same.

01:00:23 ►

These are some of the considerations.

01:00:25 ►

Well, I certainly find with my work in ayahuasca in the jungle

01:00:29 ►

that people often say, I’ve had several experiences,

01:00:34 ►

and people often say, well, can I pay you to come?

01:00:36 ►

And I always tell them no.

01:00:38 ►

First of all, just because I think that’s the wrong way.

01:00:40 ►

When they’re called, they’ll find their way.

01:00:44 ►

But secondly,

01:00:45 ►

sometimes people tell me,

01:00:47 ►

well, I flew to Iquitos

01:00:48 ►

and I found this, you know,

01:00:50 ►

curandero that afternoon

01:00:51 ►

and had ayahuasca

01:00:52 ►

and I flew back two days later

01:00:53 ►

because it’s a horrible place.

01:00:54 ►

Yeah.

01:00:55 ►

And my feeling is like,

01:00:56 ►

what a strange way to take it.

01:00:57 ►

Oh, sure.

01:00:58 ►

My guy is like a couple of days

01:01:00 ►

on the river,

01:01:00 ►

then another little day

01:01:01 ►

in a canoe.

01:01:02 ►

Oh, yeah.

01:01:02 ►

Then I get there

01:01:03 ►

and he tells me,

01:01:04 ►

I need a new floor, my hut,

01:01:06 ►

I’m so old.

01:01:07 ►

So you cut a floor, you make a floor

01:01:09 ►

for a day, and then he says, oh, my

01:01:11 ►

wife, you know, she needs these

01:01:13 ►

vegetables. And then he says, you look fat,

01:01:16 ►

take a day, don’t eat for a couple

01:01:18 ►

of days, here’s a piece of fish.

01:01:20 ►

And then, you know, five

01:01:22 ►

days into it, suddenly he’s whacking

01:01:23 ►

the ayahuasca in the morning.

01:01:25 ►

And that night, after an additional day fast, you sit and he administers.

01:01:32 ►

And to me, the experiences have been extraordinary.

01:01:36 ►

And one is more extraordinary than the next.

01:01:38 ►

But many times he won’t even serve it to me.

01:01:41 ►

You know, all that’s been corrupted, too, by the people pouring into their Iquitos and all that

01:01:45 ►

and getting their hit and running back, as you said.

01:01:48 ►

And a lot of the Ayascarros, the guys who give it,

01:01:52 ►

I tell you, some of them are conscubious enough

01:01:54 ►

to take advantage of that, too.

01:01:56 ►

So they’re corrupting that whole thing.

01:01:58 ►

It’s very, you know, the American Express

01:02:00 ►

now includes an ayahuasca trip on its, you know,

01:02:04 ►

in the I Akito portion.

01:02:06 ►

It was out of us, wasn’t it, to take a ritual or some kind of ceremony

01:02:10 ►

and turn it into a fast food process.

01:02:13 ►

What can I tell you?

01:02:14 ►

You know, it’s nothing.

01:02:16 ►

We go to, our television is an undigested cop, you know, stuff and so on.

01:02:21 ►

So we’re bound and determined to, I guess the word is abuse it or mishandle it or whatever, you know.

01:02:28 ►

Well, you hope that the fad fades out.

01:02:30 ►

Yeah.

01:02:30 ►

And that those people who are somewhat sincere will continue to work.

01:02:33 ►

Yeah.

01:02:34 ►

The unfortunate part is to watch some of the people who are sincere

01:02:38 ►

end up in jail for 20, 30 years.

01:02:39 ►

Oh, this is terrible.

01:02:41 ►

Another thing, though, that I’d like to point out,

01:02:43 ►

I think that whole experiment in the 60s had some salutary value

01:02:47 ►

in that we shook down an awful lot of things, and a lot of things happened.

01:02:52 ►

And my estimation is that at least 10 million people have had LSD

01:02:55 ►

at least one time, frankly, in the world.

01:02:59 ►

And I don’t know, that’s a figure that may be standing a lot of scrutiny,

01:03:02 ►

but if you count the number of people

01:03:06 ►

that were at the big

01:03:08 ►

Iraq festival, how many

01:03:10 ►

were there? Woodstock? Half a million

01:03:12 ►

right there. Now, let’s say

01:03:13 ►

at least half of those people

01:03:15 ►

I was one of them.

01:03:18 ►

So already

01:03:19 ►

the figures are not so outrageous,

01:03:22 ►

right? And so in any case,

01:03:24 ►

yeah, what we’re dealing with is the fact that there are people

01:03:28 ►

who have gone through the experience and constitute a kind of a group of fairly level-headed people at this point

01:03:37 ►

who come to us at the foundation.

01:03:39 ►

And this is extremely interesting.

01:03:41 ►

There are people I meet, for example, what do they call those, baby boomers and so on,

01:03:46 ►

who come, well-to-do people, lawyers and doctors and people in middle life and so on,

01:03:51 ►

and who know, who just know, and who support us, sometimes clandestinely, surreptitiously,

01:03:59 ►

but who have a feeling for it.

01:04:01 ►

And I think they lend a kind of basic stability to the situation because

01:04:08 ►

even as the kids get nuttier these days, it’s not as nutty as it used to be.

01:04:13 ►

There’s a different feeling about the excessive amounts of LSD which people are not taking

01:04:18 ►

by the way, like they used to.

01:04:20 ►

They take it, but they’re not.

01:04:22 ►

Now I may be just talking through my hat, but I would like to believe that. We had a shakedown cruise in the 60s.

01:04:30 ►

I recently did a, somebody from Houston Post or something called me at high times to ask

01:04:36 ►

about the LSD, and I had said, it seemed to me that instead of saying that the people

01:04:40 ►

who are making it are trying to poison the kids. The point should be made that people who are manufacturing it

01:04:45 ►

are manufacturing 50 and 100-mic doses,

01:04:48 ►

which are very mild and relatively very controllable

01:04:53 ►

compared to 250 or 350-mic hits that we were eating sometimes back then.

01:04:59 ►

Yeah.

01:05:00 ►

So, you know, if maybe somebody would have said,

01:05:04 ►

well, it’s, say, 250 mics and you eat three of them over the course of a 12 or 14 hour period, that’s 750.

01:05:10 ►

You’d have to eat sometimes, you know, 7 or 15.

01:05:14 ►

So it seems to me those manufacturers are showing a great deal of restraint and respect.

01:05:19 ►

Yeah, and also I think the kids are somehow getting that information somewhere that you don’t have to beat it to death.

01:05:27 ►

Like in the early days, it was like,

01:05:30 ►

who’s going to take the most and do the craziest things?

01:05:33 ►

Some of that, I think, is worn off a little bit.

01:05:40 ►

Some of that sense of the reckless for its own sake, I think, is worn off.

01:05:42 ►

I’d like to believe that in any case. In other words, there’s been a surfacing infrastructure of how all the abuses and things that were

01:05:51 ►

used and somehow a more stable kind of feeling about it has incurred.

01:05:56 ►

That may not be true in the long run, but we’ll soon see how it is.

01:06:01 ►

So these are some of my recollections.

01:06:04 ►

Of course, I don’t mention the counterculture,

01:06:06 ►

which had a whole life of its own and impinged on this in every which way. We’re still wondering

01:06:12 ►

about that. Were we the catalyst for the counterculture? Was the counterculture somehow

01:06:18 ►

encouraging the advent of LSD use and back and forth and so on. So my cousin would be a better person to address himself to that, I think, and so on.

01:06:28 ►

But my own role is it was a rich and wonderful and exciting time.

01:06:33 ►

It was a time of change, internal change.

01:06:36 ►

It was a time of being able to see the world in a way that allowed you for much greater tolerance for ambiguities.

01:06:44 ►

Much greater.

01:06:45 ►

At a time when people began to see

01:06:47 ►

that what was laid down for them as obligatory reality

01:06:51 ►

was not obligatory.

01:06:54 ►

If it becomes legal,

01:06:56 ►

with the constraints looking like they’re dropping,

01:06:59 ►

would you begin new experimentation?

01:07:02 ►

Well, I’m getting on.

01:07:03 ►

I’m 75.

01:07:01 ►

you begin new experimentation?

01:07:03 ►

Well, I’m getting on.

01:07:04 ►

I’m 75.

01:07:07 ►

What I see myself as a kind of elder statesman,

01:07:10 ►

I would be happy. That’s why I was a little

01:07:12 ►

miffed about the Swiss

01:07:14 ►

who are younger people

01:07:15 ►

who went in and started their experimentation

01:07:17 ►

without consulting the elder

01:07:19 ►

statesman. They should have three or four of the

01:07:21 ►

old-timers get together and say,

01:07:23 ►

Hey, fellas, we went through this.

01:07:25 ►

We’re going to save you a lot of hardship.

01:07:26 ►

I don’t care how smart you are.

01:07:28 ►

Yeah.

01:07:28 ►

And they didn’t do it, and they paid a price for it.

01:07:30 ►

Yeah.

01:07:31 ►

So that’s the role I see myself in.

01:07:34 ►

It’s a sort of a gentle, reasonable, guiding hand.

01:07:39 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one

01:07:44 ►

thought at a time.

01:07:46 ►

So, for any future historians who may be listening to this podcast, now you have quite a litany of

01:07:53 ►

some of the more notable early pioneers of psychedelic research right from the mouth of

01:07:58 ►

someone who was there. And while all of these names and talk of the old days may not be of

01:08:03 ►

great interest to some of our fellow salonners,

01:08:06 ►

I still think that it’s important to keep in mind, the next time you drop a few tabs of acid,

01:08:12 ►

that there actually is a lineage of use of that sacred sacrament

01:08:15 ►

that can be traced directly back to the very first time that a human being ingested that magical substance.

01:08:22 ►

And wouldn’t it be lovely if we were able to trace a similar

01:08:26 ►

lineage with something like ayahuasca? My point being that there’s a vast difference in the length

01:08:32 ►

of time that humans have been using certain substances to launch them on psychedelic journeys

01:08:37 ►

compared with some of the newer ones. With ayahuasca, you’d have to go back several thousand years to discover the names of the early pioneers with that elixir.

01:08:48 ►

And for cannabis, I’m told that archaeologists have discovered evidence suggesting that it was used as far back as the Stone Age.

01:08:57 ►

Maybe it was the Stoned Age, huh?

01:08:59 ►

So put that in your pipe and smoke it if you’re one of those misinformed prohibitionists.

01:09:05 ►

You just say no people.

01:09:07 ►

Actually, none of them ever listened to the Slons,

01:09:09 ►

so all I can say is that maybe putting a little cannabis in a prohibitioner’s pipe

01:09:14 ►

is possibly exactly what they could use to turn them into more civilized humans.

01:09:20 ►

But I digress again.

01:09:23 ►

Now, one of the other things I really feel I should mention about Oscar was that he was also a regular attendee at Kathleen’s Great Salon that she hosted in Venice Beach for over seven years.

01:09:35 ►

And as you’ve heard me say before, well, those sessions turned out to be one of the main places on earth that were frequented during those years by many of our most important psychedelic elders and youngers and I guess all of us in-betweeners. It was a

01:09:51 ►

really wonderful place to gather each month and if you’ve heard or read my novel, The Genesis

01:09:57 ►

Generation, you’ll recognize Kathleen’s Salon as the place where I set the scene in Chapter 9,

01:10:02 ►

which is titled Caitlin’s Salon.

01:10:12 ►

And a final comment about the real thing, Kathleen’s Salon, is the interesting little fact that for the first few years, that monthly event was officially known as the Albert Hoffman

01:10:18 ►

Foundation Monthly Potluck Dinner, which also accounts for the appearance each month

01:10:23 ►

by so many notables in the psychedelic

01:10:26 ►

community. Now, as much as I’d like to continue down memory lane and talk about some of the great

01:10:32 ►

evenings at Kathleen’s, there are two more things that I want to cover before letting you get on

01:10:37 ►

with your life outside of the salon. The first thing is that I’ve been receiving messages from

01:10:43 ►

some of our fellow salonners regarding what the corporate media is calling, and I quote, the Hacker Collective Anonymous.

01:10:51 ►

And I realize that this is way off topic here in the salon, but it seems to be on a lot of minds these days, and so I thought that I should let you know where I stand on this topic.

01:11:01 ►

First of all, I don’t think of Anonymous as a collective, particularly a hacker

01:11:06 ►

collective. To me, Anonymous is an idea, and I’ll tell you why I think that. Of all the actions that

01:11:14 ►

are being attributed to Anonymous, the one that has caused by far the most significant impact on

01:11:20 ►

the establishment is when they called for people to drop their PayPal accounts.

01:11:25 ►

As you already know, that call resulted in tens of thousands of people closing their

01:11:30 ►

accounts and ultimately costing PayPal’s parent company to lose around a billion dollars in

01:11:35 ►

stock value.

01:11:37 ►

Now I may be wrong, but it seems to me that not very many of those 40,000 people who responded

01:11:43 ►

to that call are actually hackers.

01:11:46 ►

So, with that in mind, now let’s look at what’s been going on with the riots in the UK and

01:11:51 ►

the BART protests in San Francisco for just two examples.

01:11:56 ►

Although I’ve taken some flack from people for posting articles on my personal blog that

01:12:00 ►

explore the root causes of the rioting in England, and I agree that from appearances most of what took place there was criminal activity,

01:12:08 ►

I still stand by my position that nonetheless the so-called gentlemen

01:12:13 ►

who have control of power in the UK

01:12:15 ►

should be looking at the causes lurking behind this activity

01:12:19 ►

and not just try to fob it off as the work of gangs fueled by social media.

01:12:24 ►

As one young man over there put it,

01:12:27 ►

sure, it’s much better to have peaceful protests,

01:12:30 ►

but until there were riots, the establishment-owned media never even bothered to come to their neighborhoods

01:12:35 ►

and look into the abysmal conditions that the government cutbacks have caused.

01:12:40 ►

The root of the problem, at least as I see it from this great distance,

01:12:44 ►

lie not in the gangs and the internet,

01:12:46 ►

but lie squarely with the government of the country

01:12:49 ►

and the dismissal of the working class by the wealthy establishment,

01:12:53 ►

who seem to lack all traces of empathy for those who weren’t so fortunate

01:12:57 ►

as to be born into the ruling class like themselves.

01:13:01 ►

Now, back over here in the States,

01:13:03 ►

we see that the protest over the murder by the police

01:13:06 ►

of a homeless man at a San Francisco BART station has been twisted into a discussion about Anonymous

01:13:12 ►

and social media. And don’t get me wrong, I think that most of what Anonymous has done is splendid,

01:13:19 ►

but I really don’t understand how hacking into the BART website and publicizing the names and personal information of BART passengers gets anyone anywhere.

01:13:30 ►

In fact, I’m sure that some of those people whose personal information was made public also think of themselves as part of the idea we call anonymous.

01:13:43 ►

that if you consider yourself to be in tune with Anonymous,

01:13:47 ►

then I think it’s even more important to become well-informed about what the politicians and banksters are doing to our world.

01:13:51 ►

But don’t punish or irritate other working-class people like us,

01:13:54 ►

like you and me.

01:13:56 ►

It’s the corporations and governments who are the bad guys here,

01:13:59 ►

not the law enforcement people, not the military,

01:14:02 ►

and not the average person who is working in a shop for a

01:14:05 ►

living or who is just trying to take a subway home after a long day at work. That’s all. You know,

01:14:10 ►

just use your head and always keep in mind that it’s far better to do something completely within

01:14:15 ►

the law like canceling your PayPal account or boycotting a particular corporation. That’s always

01:14:21 ►

going to be a lot more effective than doing something that’s just going to strengthen the already too strong police states that most of us are living in today.

01:14:30 ►

And other than that, I’m going to try to keep my comments about these issues out of these podcasts,

01:14:35 ►

simply because there’s already enough chatter about this coming from all other directions.

01:14:41 ►

But in the interest of full disclosure, although I am fully in tune with the

01:14:45 ►

idea we call anonymous, I have to admit that I was not one of the great people who dropped their

01:14:50 ►

PayPal accounts, simply because, even though the amount that comes through my account is small,

01:14:56 ►

it still amounts to enough to supplement my social security check and allow me a few luxuries,

01:15:02 ►

like wine and cannabis. So I guess the bottom line is that while

01:15:07 ►

I can talk the talk, I don’t always walk the walk. But my deepest respects go to those who do it

01:15:13 ►

so much better than me. However, I’m not completely a lost cause yet. So if you are at the 2012

01:15:21 ►

Burning Man Festival next year and you see some old guy wearing a Guy Fawkes mask,

01:15:27 ►

well, please join him in chanting,

01:15:29 ►

We are anonymous. We are a legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget.

01:15:35 ►

Expect us.

01:15:37 ►

But even before then, you can expect me, without the mask, on Orcas Island, Washington,

01:15:44 ►

which happens to be my very favorite

01:15:46 ►

place on all the earth. As you know, I’m planning on joining Bruce Dahmer for a workshop there, and

01:15:53 ►

also for one next June 15th through the 17th at Esalen Institute, and finally for the 2012

01:16:00 ►

Burning Man Festival. Now, outside of those three events, my current plan is to

01:16:06 ►

make them my final personal appearances. At the Burning Man event, I’ll be celebrating my 70th

01:16:12 ►

birthday, and that seems to me to be a good time to end my days of traveling around and speaking,

01:16:18 ►

not that I’ve done much of it lately anyway. And the truth is that I’m feeling a little bit

01:16:24 ►

worn out and can think

01:16:26 ►

of nothing more enjoyable than being able to hibernate here in the salon and enjoy my old age

01:16:31 ►

playing with grandchildren. I am, however, greatly looking forward to getting to meet a few more of

01:16:36 ►

our fellow salonners in person one last time. And so if you are somewhere not too far from Orcas

01:16:42 ►

Island this October 1st,

01:16:46 ►

well, I hope to see you there.

01:16:49 ►

And for more information about that event,

01:16:53 ►

you can go to www.SomaticRevolution.com That’s S-O-M-A-T-I-C-R-E-V-O-L-U-T-I-O-N

01:16:58 ►

www.SomaticRevolution.com

01:17:01 ►

where you can purchase a ticket to that Friday, Saturday, and Sunday event for only $45, part of which will be sent on to Sasha Shulgin to help with some of his health care expenses.

01:17:25 ►

this and most of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 3.0 license.

01:17:31 ►

And if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom

01:17:35 ►

of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us. And if you’re

01:17:42 ►

interested in some of the stories that may or may not have led you and me to where we are sharing this moment

01:17:48 ►

together right now, well, you can read a few of them in my novel,

01:17:52 ►

The Genesis Generation, which is available in Kindle and other

01:17:56 ►

e-book formats, as well as a pay-what-you-can audiobook read by me.

01:18:00 ►

And you can find out more about that at genesisgeneration.us.

01:18:05 ►

And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:18:10 ►

Be well, my friends.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

278 - Oscar Janiger Interviewed by Peter Gorman

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Program Notes

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