Program Notes
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Guest speakers: Myron Stolaroff, Sidney Cohen, Al Hubbard, Timothy Leary, Oscar Janiger, and Humphry Osmond
https://erowid.org/culture/characters/stolaroff_myron/stolaroff_myron_video1.shtmlLeft to Right: Myron Stolaroff, Sidney Cohen, Al Hubbard, Timothy Leary, Oscar Janiger, and Humphry OsmondPhoto credit: Erowid.org
Date this lecture was recorded: February 16, 1979.
Today’s podcast features the audio track from the well-known last gathering of several of the men whose work was done in the very early days of what today is becoming known as the Psychedelic Renaissance. These men, who included Myron Stolaroff, Sidney Cohen, Al Hubbard, Timothy Leary, Oscar Janiger, and Humphry Osmond came together on a February day in 1979 and talked about some of their research, and some of their adventures, during the early days in which widespread use of psychedelics, particularly LSD, came into play.
VIDEO of this conversation at Archive.org
A Conversation on LSD on Erowid.org
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic
00:00:23 ►
salon.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:29 ►
And after closing my previous podcast with Warren Zevon’s great song,
00:00:31 ►
Keep Me in Your Heart for a While,
00:00:35 ►
well, it got me to thinking about some of the people who were,
00:00:39 ►
well, they were there for us back in the 1950s and 1960s when psychedelic chemicals were just being introduced to a wider audience,
00:00:43 ►
as were some psychedelic
00:00:45 ►
plants as well. And I thought that, well, every once in a while, we should keep them in our hearts
00:00:51 ►
for a while as well. So if you’ve had a chance to listen to some of my earlier programs from here in
00:00:57 ►
the salon, then you’ll remember the interviews with Gary Fisher and Myron Stolaroff, among others,
00:01:03 ►
both of whom began researching
00:01:05 ►
psychedelics as early as the 1950s. And of course, I’ve played dozens of talks by Dr. Timothy Leary
00:01:12 ►
as well. And as you know, from some of those podcasts, these early pioneers didn’t always
00:01:17 ►
see eye to eye about what the others were doing. So it was really fascinating when, in February of 1979, some of these pioneers got together and talked about what went right and what went wrong back when LSD was an as yet relatively untested drug.
00:01:34 ►
What I’m about to play for you is the audio track of a video recording of this gathering that you can watch on archive.org.
00:01:43 ►
And I’ll put a link to that in today’s program notes,
00:01:45 ►
which you can find at psychedelicsalon.com. It’s a truly interesting video, and I hope that you
00:01:52 ►
get a chance to watch it. But even if you don’t see the video, I believe that you will get a lot
00:01:57 ►
out of listening to this casual banter between, well, some people who are legendary today, but
00:02:02 ►
who were all peers back then, and at times were even close to adversaries.
00:02:08 ►
In the video, we see Timothy Leary sitting on a small sofa with Oscar Janager on his left and Al Hubbard on his right.
00:02:16 ►
To Janager’s left is Humphrey Osmond. To the right of Hubbard is Sidney Cohen and Myron Stolaroff.
00:02:22 ►
is Sidney Cohen and Myron Stolaroff.
00:02:26 ►
The recording begins with Al Hubbard and Timothy Leary talking,
00:02:30 ►
and later, when you hear someone with a slight British accent,
00:02:31 ►
well, that’s Humphrey Osmond.
00:02:34 ►
So, let’s join them now, and as we do,
00:02:39 ►
why don’t you try to imagine that you are one of the other people in the room who are listening in on these elders as they interact with one another
00:02:43 ►
in a friendly and relaxed manner.
00:02:46 ►
And then keep in mind that these people aren’t all that different from you.
00:02:50 ►
And, in fact, you no doubt could have fit right in there yourself. I read you saw that. You never did know that kind of a box.
00:03:07 ►
That’s my second degree.
00:03:09 ►
I was one of the four years.
00:03:11 ►
Is that right?
00:03:12 ►
Yeah.
00:03:13 ►
Well, I’ll thank you.
00:03:17 ►
Very serious about it.
00:03:18 ►
I loved you, yeah.
00:03:19 ►
Well, what did you do for her?
00:03:21 ►
She understood you was a box.
00:03:23 ►
I don’t want one of them.
00:03:24 ►
It’s enough boxed for her’d given him 30 years for it.
00:03:26 ►
Yeah?
00:03:27 ►
I said, I’m sure I really will.
00:03:29 ►
Anyway, I hoped he would do something.
00:03:31 ►
You were acting on his behalf, though.
00:03:33 ►
Oh yeah.
00:03:34 ►
Don’t give up, Jesse. I’ve done it 44 months and I’m still out of it.
00:03:38 ►
So listen, don’t give up.
00:03:41 ►
The case is still alive, you know.
00:03:44 ►
We’ll fix it the day I’m out of jail. That’ll be something. up. The case is still alive, you know. I need you now more than ever. When did you two guys meet?
00:03:53 ►
Oh, 20, 30 years ago. That was about 1960. Back at Harvard, 1961. When you went to Harvard? Back at Harvard, 1961.
00:04:06 ►
When he came to visit Harvard,
00:04:08 ►
was that the first time you did that?
00:04:10 ►
Yeah, that’s the first time I met him.
00:04:11 ►
1960, 61.
00:04:12 ►
I think he came together and said,
00:04:14 ►
oh, it depends on whether you can’t die or can’t live.
00:04:19 ►
I gave him a hundred,
00:04:22 ►
a tablet of 500,
00:04:23 ►
a bottle of 500 tablets.
00:04:25 ►
I remember that. I remember that.
00:04:25 ►
I gave him a bottle of 500 tablets.
00:04:37 ►
Didn’t you say that you introduced Tim to CO2?
00:04:42 ►
Yes, that’s right.
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That’s right.
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He dragged us all around
00:04:46 ►
Boston with these tanks
00:04:47 ►
and we had people
00:04:48 ►
loading in the tanks
00:04:49 ►
and he had us all strapped
00:04:50 ►
with the OS Fantasias.
00:04:54 ►
Never go to a…
00:04:55 ►
The only way to get it again
00:04:56 ►
is to visit us
00:04:57 ►
sometimes on those days.
00:05:00 ►
Well, I’d like to say
00:05:02 ►
just in general
00:05:03 ►
that I’m taking more SP
00:05:04 ►
now than I ever have before, at least once a week.
00:05:06 ►
And I find that it’s working better than ever.
00:05:09 ►
It’s a tonic, isn’t it?
00:05:11 ►
Yeah.
00:05:11 ►
You look very well.
00:05:13 ►
The new experimental forms are even better, so.
00:05:15 ►
Yeah.
00:05:17 ►
I just want to get some attention.
00:05:20 ►
And that’s the commercial.
00:05:22 ►
Now I can go back to the primetime program.
00:05:25 ►
I’m just fine on that, because otherwise, if I don’t do this, I’ll be killed. And that’s the commercial. Well, now we can go back to the primetime program.
00:05:28 ►
I’m just fine on that, because otherwise, if I don’t do this, I’ll be killed.
00:05:36 ►
Well, listen, so what has it done, actually, through all the years?
00:05:38 ►
What’s it done for us?
00:05:42 ►
A great clarity of vision, a great clarity of mind.
00:05:45 ►
We’ve never seen it, but it’s a great perspective. Oh, Al, I don’t mind. Have you ever seen me? Great perception.
00:05:48 ►
Oh, Al, I don’t say everything to you.
00:05:48 ►
I think you would have.
00:05:50 ►
Galactic Center sent you down just at the right moment.
00:05:53 ►
Yeah, she likes disturbance.
00:05:55 ►
Yeah, she likes disturbance.
00:05:59 ►
Well, gentlemen,
00:06:00 ►
what do you think is going to happen to it all,
00:06:02 ►
really? Do you think
00:06:03 ►
we’re going to get it back in some form
00:06:06 ►
that we might be able to use it effectively
00:06:08 ►
or under proper control or what have you?
00:06:12 ►
You’re talking about bureaucracy and government?
00:06:14 ►
My wife and I use moralist now than I ever did in the past,
00:06:18 ►
and sensible people are still doing it.
00:06:20 ►
And what happens in Sacramento or in Washington
00:06:22 ►
or in Peking or in Saigon,
00:06:24 ►
it’s never affected us and never will.
00:06:26 ►
Well, you certainly worn them out.
00:06:28 ►
There’s no use in bothering you anymore.
00:06:30 ►
What?
00:06:31 ►
There’s no use in bothering you anymore.
00:06:33 ►
I don’t mind being bothered.
00:06:35 ►
Well, you seem to be indestructible.
00:06:39 ►
Well, when you started with it all, Al,
00:06:41 ►
I mean, Al did, but you started with it all,
00:06:44 ►
I mean, you know, you had some with it all. I mean, you know,
00:06:46 ►
you had some kind of a purpose or vision in mind then, didn’t you? I still got it. Yeah.
00:06:52 ►
Well, and you’re responsible for carrying it, you know, you’re the Johnny Appleseed
00:06:57 ►
here, LSD, you know, planting it every way you got a chance. Well, I sure did, but I
00:07:04 ►
don’t think it was a credit thing.
00:07:06 ►
I think something should have been done, and I tried to do it.
00:07:09 ►
And I’m still trying to do it.
00:07:14 ►
And why? Why, Al? Why are you trying to do it?
00:07:18 ►
I don’t know.
00:07:20 ►
What are you doing it for?
00:07:21 ►
I don’t know. I think it’s a thing to do.
00:07:24 ►
Well, it’s because an old guy might do what’s worth doing.
00:07:30 ►
You’re looking for some sort of motives, I guess.
00:07:32 ►
No, no, no.
00:07:33 ►
What I’m looking for…
00:07:34 ►
Like Freudian motives?
00:07:34 ►
No, no, no.
00:07:35 ►
Political motives?
00:07:36 ►
No, I was just wondering…
00:07:37 ►
Economic motives?
00:07:38 ►
No, no, no.
00:07:39 ►
I was wondering because I thought that Al had some really personal interests
00:07:43 ►
that had reflected something in his own experience.
00:07:46 ►
It would have cost me a couple hundred thousand dollars.
00:07:48 ►
I don’t know if that’s a good motive or not.
00:07:51 ►
Not much of a message.
00:07:53 ►
Not much of a message.
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My friends want to talk to him.
00:07:59 ►
They all contribute freely or willingly or unwillingly contribute it.
00:08:11 ►
What do you think its best use is for now, Al?
00:08:14 ►
I don’t know, just keep on doing it. Just to keep on waking people up, letting them
00:08:19 ►
see themselves for what they are. I think old Carter could stand a good dose of it. And maybe Brown at the Pentagon,
00:08:31 ►
turn around and do him a world of good. I carried out my… But I do wish you… I do wish you’d stop scooping up.
00:08:46 ►
Stop getting in bad.
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What?
00:08:49 ►
Getting in bad.
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Bad?
00:08:51 ►
Uh-huh.
00:08:53 ►
Okay.
00:08:53 ►
Well, everything’s worked out.
00:08:55 ►
What?
00:08:55 ►
Very well.
00:08:56 ►
I’m very respectful.
00:08:57 ►
I like that.
00:08:58 ►
New Rolling Stones, you know,
00:09:00 ►
a song about talking heroin with the president.
00:09:03 ►
We’re so respectable.
00:09:04 ►
We’re so unobjectionable.
00:09:13 ►
Nobody’s bothering me. Are they bothering you? Don’t bother nothing bothers me.
00:09:19 ►
I don’t see anyone on this couch that looks being bothered.
00:09:24 ►
If something gets on my back, I get it all.
00:09:28 ►
Bill Harmon says there’s a nice way to do it.
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I don’t know what a nice way is.
00:09:36 ►
Right, Bill?
00:09:38 ►
You say you’d be gentle about it.
00:09:43 ►
It’s your floor, man, so I’ll leave it with you.
00:09:43 ►
it’s your phone I’ll leave it with you
00:09:45 ►
well
00:09:49 ►
I’m very glad
00:09:50 ►
we were just remembering the first time we met
00:09:54 ►
which is in Cambridge
00:09:55 ►
in 19
00:09:57 ►
on the night of the Kennedy election
00:09:59 ►
1960
00:10:00 ►
we went out to this place
00:10:04 ►
and Timothy then was wearing his grey flannel suit and
00:10:08 ►
his crew cut and we had this very interesting discussion with him and when we went out,
00:10:13 ►
I don’t think I ever told you this, Timothy, but when I went we went away, we both said
00:10:17 ►
what a nice fellow he is.
00:10:19 ►
And he said he’s a very nice man and Aldous said, it’s very, very nice to think this work’s going to be done at Harvard.
00:10:26 ►
He said, it’d be so good for it.
00:10:28 ►
And then I said to Aldous, I said, I think he’s a very nice fellow too, but don’t you think that he’s just a little bit square?
00:10:37 ►
And Aldous said, you may well be right.
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I said, isn’t that what we want?
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And Alderson said, you may well be right. He said, after all, isn’t that what we want?
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And Timothy, when I’m discussing the need for understanding human temperament,
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this is the story I tell, because I said,
00:10:54 ►
here, Alderson and I are very deeply interested in the nature of human temperament,
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and we meet someone who I think that was probably
00:11:01 ►
the least satisfactory description of you ever made, Timothy.
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I think even your greatest enemies would never make that description.
00:11:09 ►
We made it. We were very, very concerned because we felt that you were perhaps a bit too unadventurous.
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You see what insight we had.
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Well, you sure as heck contributed your part.
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But I’ve always considered myself very square yeah so we were right in the way
00:11:28 ►
where I always try to hang around the hippest person in the area and every continue to do that
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because I feel that I really basically feel I’m square and I have very little sense of
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aesthetic so I try to hang around the most sophisticated beautiful people in the world so hope some it will radiate off on me
00:11:47 ►
I have other qualities though
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You see your career in the sense of self improvement
00:11:53 ►
and sort of issue out of it
00:11:55 ►
It was one of the most monumental ill judgments
00:12:03 ►
but it was very very very interesting. We had
00:12:06 ►
a very good evening, but we were not able to drink anything because apparently the laws
00:12:10 ►
in Massachusetts are such that when an election’s on, no one’s allowed to drink because of the
00:12:16 ►
fear that you would corrupt the voters.
00:12:17 ►
Well, all these concepts of, you know, the hive concepts of political this or that, I
00:12:23 ►
think, that’s so many relevant. I used to say to Sidney all the time,
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I feel that I was much more conservative than you, Sidney,
00:12:29 ►
because I didn’t want the government
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to involve in any of our business.
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That was a pretty free enterprise.
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Staunch.
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We seem to have followed our own paths.
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You yours, me mine, he his.
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Fortunately, since they didn’t go in the same direction,
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a great deal of ground was covered.
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Yeah, I guess one of the things Oscar might be interested in
00:12:56 ►
is what does it all mean and how is it all going to work out
00:12:59 ►
and all that sort of thing.
00:13:01 ►
And I wonder whether, I know I couldn’t possibly evaluate.
00:13:05 ►
Anybody want to try?
00:13:08 ►
I was really interested in your opinion.
00:13:12 ►
Well, I think, as you heard, it stirred people up.
00:13:17 ►
It cracked their frame of reference by the thousands, millions perhaps.
00:13:23 ►
And anything that does that is pretty good, I think.
00:13:27 ►
Anything that shakes people up a little, not too much.
00:13:31 ►
Some people maybe it shook up a little too much.
00:13:34 ►
That was unfortunate.
00:13:35 ►
But in the totality, it may have been a desirable thing at that point in time.
00:13:46 ►
The next question would be, well, what’s going to happen?
00:13:50 ►
And there I think we will see, not soon,
00:13:54 ►
but in X number of years,
00:13:57 ►
a recrudescence of similar usage here, there, and everywhere.
00:14:02 ►
It’s happened throughout history, hasn’t it?
00:14:04 ►
Yes. So don’t you think the other very important thing usage here, there and everywhere. It’s happened throughout history hasn’t it?
00:14:08 ►
So don’t you think that the other very important thing is
00:14:09 ►
the actual time this has happened to begin with
00:14:11 ►
as you point out it’s very good for people to be shaken
00:14:14 ►
up a certain amount. So far
00:14:16 ►
on the whole our ways of shaking ourselves up
00:14:18 ►
have usually had real
00:14:20 ►
cataclysms
00:14:22 ►
I mean for instance the Iranians are being shaken up
00:14:24 ►
at the moment. It would appear that many of them might prefer not to be in this kind of way,
00:14:28 ►
because the difficulty with having the great cataclysms is that you end up worse than you began.
00:14:34 ►
If one could be able to have a sort of controlled cataclysm from time to time,
00:14:39 ►
we’d be much better off, because every society gets set in its ways,
00:14:43 ►
and a society with a vast technology
00:14:45 ►
is always likely to get to the point where it’s simpler and easier and comfier to let
00:14:52 ►
the technology take over. And one of the things it seems to me that these substances and the
00:14:56 ►
attitudes they generate very well is that one becomes less willing to do that because
00:15:01 ►
it’s not necessary. You don’t have to look upon your technology
00:15:07 ►
as your idol. And it’s easy to do this, and it’s particularly easy to do this if you’ve
00:15:12 ►
got no way out. It’s easy if you’re able sort of to separate yourself.
00:15:21 ►
So you think that in days to come as we become more constricted and more
00:15:25 ►
homogenized
00:15:29 ►
that it may be
00:15:30 ►
even more necessary
00:15:31 ►
to have such
00:15:31 ►
mindfulness.
00:15:33 ►
But I think it’s still
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very necessary
00:15:34 ►
because
00:15:35 ►
we are so clever
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at building
00:15:39 ►
all these strange
00:15:41 ►
and remarkable things
00:15:42 ►
and then
00:15:43 ►
the thing that we
00:15:43 ►
stop being clever
00:15:44 ►
is that we’re very liable then
00:15:46 ►
to make ourselves in our own image
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I mean it’s extremely interesting
00:15:50 ►
the image of the things we’ve made rather
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it’s very interesting that the
00:15:53 ►
the mind described by
00:15:55 ►
Thomas Willis
00:15:58 ►
in 1670
00:15:59 ►
was a kind of mirror
00:16:01 ►
and the reason why he described that
00:16:03 ►
the mirror was an extremely fashionable new invention.
00:16:07 ►
Then the mind that Freud described, if you remember,
00:16:10 ►
was a magic lantern.
00:16:12 ►
That’s why projection comes from.
00:16:14 ►
This was the latest thing.
00:16:16 ►
Now the mind…
00:16:17 ►
That was an indoor plumbing system.
00:16:18 ►
Yes, right.
00:16:20 ►
Then the mind became a telephone exchange.
00:16:24 ►
You’re ready for that one.
00:16:25 ►
Then it became a kind of television thing.
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And I gather the latest thing to say it’s a hologram.
00:16:33 ►
Now, the only thing that we know is it’s none of those things.
00:16:36 ►
The fact is that we’ve invented all those things,
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and it’s apparently a thing we always do.
00:16:42 ►
Now, as long as we don’t take it too seriously.
00:16:46 ►
But it seems to be one of the things that these substances and the techniques you learn from them is they
00:16:51 ►
help you not to take it seriously. With the other people, with other peoples that none
00:16:58 ►
of them have ever managed to make it seems to be me, such an inclusive technology as we’ve made.
00:17:07 ►
It’s always been much more difficult.
00:17:09 ►
Our technology is sort of marvelously able to do things which would have,
00:17:14 ►
only Terence could have done otherwise.
00:17:16 ►
Only Terence could produce vast entertainments for themselves.
00:17:20 ►
We get vast entertainments for ourselves whether we want it or not.
00:17:24 ►
And therefore we need to
00:17:26 ►
have ways of dealing with it
00:17:28 ►
I think all this was completely
00:17:30 ►
right in both
00:17:32 ►
his moralities
00:17:33 ►
in Brave New World and in
00:17:36 ►
Part of Ireland
00:17:37 ►
that our needs now are very great
00:17:40 ►
and since it doesn’t seem to me that we’re
00:17:42 ►
likely to de-technicalise
00:17:44 ►
ourselves because even if we wanted to do that me that we’re likely to dis-technicalize ourselves,
00:17:45 ►
because even if we wanted to do this, if we were able to do this, I don’t think we can,
00:17:49 ►
especially where no one else is going to do this.
00:17:52 ►
So the result of our sort of removing ourselves from the pastoral life
00:17:56 ►
would be that someone would come over and take over the conference.
00:17:59 ►
They’d be bound to.
00:18:01 ►
It would be too much of a temptation for anyone with a technology in being to see us like, say, the Americas in 1492.
00:18:13 ►
Oh, yeah.
00:18:13 ►
Listen, Bob, can I interrupt just one second?
00:18:15 ►
You mentioned names.
00:18:18 ►
Has it been done yet?
00:18:19 ►
I think we should say hello to Alice Huxley.
00:18:22 ►
Yes.
00:18:23 ►
And to Gerald Hurd.
00:18:25 ►
Yes, we should.
00:18:26 ►
And Alan Watts.
00:18:27 ►
And to Alan Watts,
00:18:28 ►
who is the most underestimated
00:18:30 ►
of all the philosophers of our time.
00:18:32 ►
And they’re here with us.
00:18:34 ►
And to say hello to Art Chandler,
00:18:36 ►
by the way.
00:18:36 ►
Hi.
00:18:37 ►
Hello, Art.
00:18:38 ►
Remember Art.
00:18:38 ►
It’s been going back a long way.
00:18:41 ►
Yeah.
00:18:41 ►
Yeah.
00:18:42 ►
And those of us in those days,
00:18:44 ►
I don’t know that we fancied what we were heading into.
00:18:48 ►
Maybe we might have been willing to call a halt then at the time.
00:18:53 ►
But somehow…
00:18:54 ►
Call a halt?
00:18:54 ►
Yeah.
00:18:57 ►
You know, we were really getting into some things
00:19:00 ►
that from different directions,
00:19:03 ►
everybody was finding their own way.
00:19:10 ►
I’d like to say, does anyone here feel that mistakes were made? Oh no!
00:19:12 ►
What mistakes?
00:19:14 ►
What mistakes were made?
00:19:20 ►
Well, Timothy, estimations and retrospect are in principle unsaid.
00:19:27 ►
It’s really like the chaps, you know, who when the generals of World War II have large
00:19:31 ►
numbers of fellows who were not born at that time who write interesting accounts of how
00:19:36 ►
the Battle of the Balshma to be better fought.
00:19:38 ►
It’s only too easy.
00:19:39 ►
Well, that’s wonderful.
00:19:40 ►
It’s only too easy.
00:19:41 ►
Everyone’s going to write their own cosmology.
00:19:44 ►
But I mean, I think that… The world was made in seven days, but where and when? Well, that’s wonderful. It’s only too easy. Everyone’s going to write their own cosmology.
00:19:46 ►
But I mean, I think that…
00:19:47 ►
The world was made in seven days, but where and when?
00:19:49 ►
But I think that those sort of things…
00:19:54 ►
I don’t say mistakes.
00:19:56 ►
Well, I say you could have seen other ways of doing it.
00:19:59 ►
My God, quantum physics now tells us that in any second it can go in how many different lengths?
00:20:03 ►
Yeah.
00:20:04 ►
That’s one thing. That was a mistake made. Nobody gave it to Nixon. Quantum physics now tells us that in any second it can go in how many different ways? Yeah.
00:20:06 ►
That’s one of the… That was a mistake made.
00:20:08 ►
Nobody gave it to Nixon.
00:20:12 ►
Well, in order to know whether mistakes were made, you have to know what the goal is.
00:20:17 ►
And if you can define a goal, I can tell you whether mistakes were made.
00:20:20 ►
I think mistakes were made.
00:20:22 ►
But that’s my own personal goal.
00:20:24 ►
Well, I’ll say one of the goals was to make the American people smarter,
00:20:29 ►
raise their intelligence.
00:20:30 ►
And I think the American people today are quantum jumps,
00:20:32 ►
more sophisticated in exactly the general directions
00:20:35 ►
in which we all hope they would become more sophisticated,
00:20:38 ►
about consciousness, about the nervous system, about the brain,
00:20:40 ►
about the options people have in creating their own realities,
00:20:42 ►
about self-actualization, self-indulgence,
00:20:45 ►
about pleasure being a self-reward as opposed to high reward.
00:20:49 ►
My God, pleasure is now the number one industry in this country.
00:20:53 ►
Recreational travel, entertainment, sensory indulgence.
00:20:58 ►
My God, it’s now, you know, no question, that’s our number one.
00:21:01 ►
Now, that was my goal.
00:21:04 ►
that’s a number one now that was my goal
00:21:11 ►
in this case you certainly made advancements let me put this at the contrary point of view we have the awkward thing that we now have
00:21:20 ►
chaps like the Ayatollah Khomeini appearing on the scene who have the potential of rather
00:21:26 ►
different goals. And certainly from where I’ve been, which you know very well, in the
00:21:32 ►
South, these other different goals are always potential.
00:21:36 ►
All right, Pakistan is now going back. We’re going to cut off hands for the first robbery
00:21:41 ►
and foot for the second. Iran is now going back to
00:21:45 ►
you know the
00:21:46 ►
interesting point
00:21:46 ►
about
00:21:46 ►
Afghanistan
00:21:48 ►
is going to
00:21:50 ►
do this
00:21:51 ►
but they
00:21:51 ►
haven’t been
00:21:52 ►
able to get
00:21:52 ►
the doctors
00:21:52 ►
to do it
00:21:53 ►
which is
00:21:54 ►
extremely
00:21:55 ►
interesting
00:21:55 ►
one thing I’ve
00:21:58 ►
learned from
00:21:58 ►
the criminal
00:21:58 ►
justice situation
00:21:59 ►
there will
00:21:59 ►
always be
00:22:00 ►
someone to
00:22:01 ►
lock the
00:22:01 ►
hands off
00:22:02 ►
they’ve got
00:22:04 ►
to lock them off now and they’ve got to lop them
00:22:05 ►
off now
00:22:05 ►
and they
00:22:07 ►
haven’t been
00:22:07 ►
able to
00:22:08 ►
do that
00:22:08 ►
what was
00:22:09 ►
your point
00:22:10 ►
Tim
00:22:10 ►
about
00:22:11 ►
the
00:22:14 ►
Ayatollah
00:22:15 ►
I still
00:22:15 ►
haven’t been
00:22:16 ►
able to
00:22:16 ►
levitate that
00:22:17 ►
Tim said
00:22:22 ►
that he
00:22:22 ►
was quite
00:22:23 ►
successful
00:22:24 ►
achieving his goals.
00:22:25 ►
Yeah.
00:22:26 ►
I think he’s a little presumptuous.
00:22:28 ►
Yeah.
00:22:29 ►
Who’s my goals?
00:22:30 ►
I’m not supposed to be talking about my goals.
00:22:32 ►
That’s right.
00:22:32 ►
I’m not.
00:22:33 ►
You’re rather presumptuous.
00:22:35 ►
Everything you say is dangerous.
00:22:36 ►
He’s optimistic, not presumptuous.
00:22:38 ►
And he ought to be optimistic.
00:22:40 ►
I mean, it’s his natural bed.
00:22:41 ►
Yeah.
00:22:43 ►
But since we all live in these bubbles that we create,
00:22:46 ►
we can only basically give ourselves our own report cards at the end of every so forth.
00:22:54 ►
Take credit for that which we didn’t do.
00:22:58 ►
Well, credit, no, I take no credit or blame. But we were talking about goals, see, that’s different, isn’t it?
00:23:10 ►
Credit and blame gets, uh, it’s another interesting topic.
00:23:13 ►
Sidney, how would you like to have seen it done?
00:23:15 ►
Suppose the scenario had been played as you’d liked.
00:23:18 ►
Well, I don’t put as high a stock on pleasure, although I enjoy it, as Tim does.
00:23:23 ►
as high a stock on pleasure, although I enjoy it, as Tim does.
00:23:32 ►
I would hope that increased human wisdom might have been an appropriate goal,
00:23:35 ►
increased human humaneness.
00:23:38 ►
This I don’t quite see as occurring.
00:23:39 ►
I don’t think we’re any wiser.
00:23:40 ►
Some of us may be. And maybe if only a few of us are wiser, that’s enough.
00:23:49 ►
That’s sufficient until the end.
00:23:52 ►
At this point, I would like to apologize to you, Sidney.
00:23:56 ►
You were right in most of our debates when you were insisting upon…
00:24:02 ►
I want a copy of that.
00:24:04 ►
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Why do you say that? I want a copy of that.
00:24:07 ►
Why do you say that?
00:24:11 ►
Well, because you were insisting upon more scientific rigor,
00:24:13 ►
and you were emphasizing intelligence,
00:24:15 ►
where I was emphasizing consciousness.
00:24:18 ►
Now, I think I was robot-programmed to do that,
00:24:19 ►
so I don’t regret doing it, but it was in the third quarter of a game we played once in the Houston Astrodome,
00:24:27 ►
when you, you know, several times, you definitely were saying things.
00:24:32 ►
I remember you were quoted in the New York Times after one of our debates as one of the quotes of the week,
00:24:38 ►
and it said that you didn’t believe that we should be encouraging the evolution of a new species of primates that went around smelling flowers.
00:24:45 ►
Remember that quote?
00:24:46 ►
I don’t remember it.
00:24:47 ►
Roughly something like that.
00:24:50 ►
And you were right.
00:24:51 ►
I don’t know whether I was right.
00:24:52 ►
Now come to think of it.
00:24:56 ►
Now, Tim, you know, you and I had an agreement once, too, the last time I saw you.
00:25:00 ►
I saw you.
00:25:04 ►
You know, we have our differences of view,
00:25:10 ►
and we were a little disturbed that some of the things you were doing and planning
00:25:12 ►
would make it more difficult.
00:25:13 ►
In fact, even at the time I saw you,
00:25:15 ►
it was making it more difficult
00:25:16 ►
to carry on legitimate research.
00:25:19 ►
And we agreed, you know, if you remember,
00:25:21 ►
that, well, Myron, you stay in there
00:25:24 ►
and you do the legitimate research, but you need somebody that well, Myron, you stay in there and you do the
00:25:25 ►
legitimate research, but you need somebody to
00:25:28 ►
kind of shake them up a bit.
00:25:29 ►
I’ll shake them up and then you can
00:25:31 ►
take them and
00:25:33 ►
show them where they can learn
00:25:36 ►
what the right path is.
00:25:37 ►
But I didn’t know that when you’re going to shake them up,
00:25:39 ►
you’re going to hit them on the head with a ball bat.
00:25:43 ►
Well, I don’t
00:25:43 ►
accept that many people do.
00:25:50 ►
I have had this experience four times in the last 15 years, 20 years.
00:25:55 ►
I was one of the younger members of that incredible revolution led by Benjamin Spock,
00:26:02 ►
Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, Rollo May, Harry Stack Sullivan, and none of us would be in this room
00:26:09 ►
if it hadn’t been for the work of these people,
00:26:12 ►
who are essentially giving conscious psychology back,
00:26:15 ►
somehow to human access, taking it away from experts,
00:26:20 ►
so that I definitely feel that I’m a product of that group,
00:26:24 ►
which was essentially a totally American point of view in psychology.
00:26:27 ►
They were giving us an American psychology of do-it-yourself,
00:26:30 ►
trust your own impulse, you’re out there in the frontier,
00:26:32 ►
you’re having trouble out there,
00:26:34 ►
you can’t call a Viennese psychiatrist and so forth.
00:26:36 ►
Then in the 60s we had the same situation.
00:26:42 ►
I went farther out in those days than Carl Rogers did.
00:26:46 ►
When we were at Harvard
00:26:47 ►
in that 50s revolution so far,
00:26:49 ►
we were giving away the answers
00:26:51 ►
to intelligence tests.
00:26:53 ►
We were giving away the answers
00:26:54 ►
to personality tests.
00:26:56 ►
We were doing everything in our power
00:26:57 ►
because we felt that the psychiatry
00:27:00 ►
at the time was making people
00:27:01 ►
more helpless.
00:27:03 ►
We were in a lot of trouble at Harvard
00:27:06 ►
you know, reversing roles
00:27:07 ►
there was Charlie Slack who was paying
00:27:09 ►
he was paying patients
00:27:12 ►
more money than he was paying the
00:27:13 ►
graduate students
00:27:15 ►
that’s one example of hundreds of
00:27:17 ►
role reversals in psychology before drugs
00:27:20 ►
and the drug thing came along
00:27:21 ►
and I had several discussions
00:27:24 ►
with Sidney and with you
00:27:25 ►
and with everyone saying, and with you too, I was saying, let us be the far-out explorers.
00:27:31 ►
And the farther out we go, the more ground it gives the people at Spring Grove to denounce
00:27:36 ►
us.
00:27:37 ►
So we were like your flanker backs or whatever it is.
00:27:39 ►
We were the, yeah, very…
00:27:41 ►
And I never felt for a second in the minutes of hundreds of times
00:27:46 ►
that we debated anything but this
00:27:48 ►
wise affection from you,
00:27:50 ►
Sidney, that we were somehow
00:27:52 ►
to the best of our abilities
00:27:53 ►
working for human freedom as we saw it
00:27:56 ►
or playing.
00:27:57 ►
And I felt that
00:28:00 ►
the particular role that I was
00:28:02 ►
playing then was to…
00:28:04 ►
And we never knew what we were doing,
00:28:06 ►
you know, in any clear, precise sense.
00:28:08 ►
But it seemed always right to us.
00:28:10 ►
Then I had the third experience.
00:28:11 ►
I was in Folsom Prison when the notion,
00:28:14 ►
when I began to understand,
00:28:15 ►
that space colonization was the same issue.
00:28:18 ►
That the notion of going into space had been taken over by NASA,
00:28:20 ►
by the Pentagon, by the Soviet Soviet.
00:28:23 ►
And again, I wrote Professor O’Neill at Princeton a letter saying,
00:28:28 ►
well, my friend, this is the third time I’ve been through this,
00:28:31 ►
and I’m telling you that I’m going to popularize space migration
00:28:34 ►
in the next two or three years,
00:28:35 ►
because it’s got to be, you know, people in general,
00:28:38 ►
a new generation, young people in college,
00:28:42 ►
young physicists students and young associations have got to realize that some of the big issues ahead of the control of space got to be taken away from the good guys, bad guys, who are always the Pentagon and so forth.
00:28:55 ►
And now there’s a fourth time involved in a situation like this.
00:29:00 ►
Genetics, the DNA code, and that sort of thing, is more important for the next decade as the brain was. Who’s going to control the brain in the late 60s and 70s?
00:29:09 ►
Now I was seeing my role as the same. I wrote the same letter to Edward Wilson,
00:29:14 ►
the very same message that, you know, same discussion that I had once in a parking lot
00:29:18 ►
with you and Paolo Altano. And I wrote Professor Wilson of Harvard, You know, he wrote Sociobiology. He’s written a new book, Non-Human Nature.
00:29:26 ►
Very interesting stuff.
00:29:27 ►
I said, look, this is the fourth time
00:29:30 ►
I’m going to do everything in my power
00:29:31 ►
to popularize the DNA code,
00:29:33 ►
Gaia, wisdom, egg intelligence, genetics,
00:29:36 ►
genetic caste, structural caste, silver.
00:29:38 ►
I’m going to take it too far.
00:29:39 ►
It’s going to be radical sociobiology.
00:29:41 ►
But I’m not interested in persuading
00:29:43 ►
the full professors, the full scientists. I’m not interested in persuading the full professors,
00:29:45 ►
the full scientists.
00:29:45 ►
I’m going to be talking
00:29:46 ►
to the undergraduates
00:29:48 ►
and to the high school students
00:29:49 ►
and I’m going to be outrageous
00:29:50 ►
and I’m going to suggest
00:29:51 ►
the possibilities
00:29:52 ►
of genetic research
00:29:55 ►
so that in five or ten years
00:29:58 ►
when they will have had
00:29:59 ►
their PhDs and their MDs
00:30:00 ►
and so forth,
00:30:01 ►
they’ll, you know,
00:30:03 ►
because it always happens.
00:30:04 ►
It’s called neoteny.
00:30:05 ►
You always have to send the message
00:30:06 ►
to the sexually active pre-adults.
00:30:10 ►
And then they will figure out what’s right
00:30:12 ►
and what’s good from all that.
00:30:14 ►
And then they’ll go ahead and perform it
00:30:15 ►
for the function of society
00:30:17 ►
that I have in the next generation.
00:30:18 ►
So that I see it all as an incredible loving hookup
00:30:22 ►
of people playing different roles.
00:30:23 ►
And I’ve never complained or never explained
00:30:25 ►
that I know of about being mistreated.
00:30:29 ►
Have I?
00:30:30 ►
I don’t think so.
00:30:32 ►
And I just wish, I hope,
00:30:34 ►
that we all understand
00:30:35 ►
that we’ve all been playing parts
00:30:37 ►
that have been assigned to us
00:30:38 ►
and there’s no good guy, bad guy
00:30:42 ►
or more credit or blame or whatever.
00:30:44 ►
You were, what Gerald Hurd would have said,
00:30:48 ►
you were on the cutting edge of things,
00:30:52 ►
and that’s probably where you belong.
00:30:58 ►
Tim, I don’t think I ever congratulated you on writing one of the best escape books.
00:31:06 ►
I don’t know if everyone here has read Timothy’s escape book.
00:31:10 ►
It’s one of the very good escape books.
00:31:13 ►
That was rather foolishly, I think, over-publicized it
00:31:17 ►
and didn’t get the thing going the right way.
00:31:19 ►
But it’s one of the best escape stories I’ve ever read.
00:31:22 ►
I’m something of an aficionado of escape stories
00:31:25 ►
and it’s one of the very, very good ones.
00:31:27 ►
Not as good as Papillon.
00:31:29 ►
No, but it’s true.
00:31:31 ►
Oh, yes, yes, yes.
00:31:39 ►
Papillon gives you the feeling that it was being written for a movie.
00:31:43 ►
Unfortunately, yours hasn’t been made into a movie,
00:31:45 ►
but it’s a very good one.
00:31:48 ►
Well, I tried to sell the rights before the escape,
00:31:50 ►
but Hollywood wasn’t ready.
00:31:52 ►
Well, I suppose that would be the best possible move.
00:31:55 ►
The movie coming out before you escape.
00:31:58 ►
When the weatherman came up in a car after I escaped,
00:32:00 ►
I knew it was the weatherman, and I turned,
00:32:02 ►
and they had false passports,
00:32:05 ►
they had false clothes. I said, didn’t you videotape this, you fools? And they didn’t
00:32:12 ►
know. Well, here we are. Yeah. It’s a great tribute to Oscar. How would you like to have seen it go?
00:32:28 ►
And I want to know how Al would have liked to have seen it go,
00:32:31 ►
because I think that in here one has a sort of temperamental network or grid system
00:32:40 ►
in which people were seeing the same thing through somewhat different lenses.
00:32:44 ►
Well, I think we need people like Tim and Al. They’re absolutely necessary to get out way out,
00:32:50 ►
too far out in fact, in order to move things around. And we need people like you to be
00:32:57 ►
reflective about it and to study it. And little by little, a slight movement is made in the totality. So, you know, I can’t
00:33:10 ►
think of how it could have worked out otherwise. I must confess that when I studied LSD, and
00:33:21 ►
then I heard there was getting out on the streets I said this will never sell
00:33:26 ►
it’s too intense
00:33:28 ►
people will
00:33:30 ►
be too shook up
00:33:32 ►
but it didn’t work that way at all
00:33:34 ►
I’m not quite sure I know
00:33:36 ►
why but apparently people were able to
00:33:38 ►
sustain it, this intense
00:33:40 ►
response, so my
00:33:42 ►
record as a prophet is about
00:33:44 ►
one down.
00:33:48 ►
Well, aren’t you right, though, if you take a longer range view? Because from what I know,
00:33:52 ►
maybe I’m not well enough informed, but it’s not a popular street drug anymore the way
00:33:56 ►
it once was.
00:33:57 ►
I think a fair number of people are still taking LSD.
00:34:00 ►
Yeah, but they’re stuck on the street. You can’t call that LSD.
00:34:04 ►
No, not LSD.
00:34:05 ►
That’s not LSD.
00:34:06 ►
Oh, wait a minute.
00:34:18 ►
Al, perhaps you have to be deciduous now in getting the good stuff.
00:34:21 ►
I can’t believe you failed to find the good stuff.
00:34:24 ►
Well, no, because I had 4,000 bottles of it to begin with. Hooray! Hooray!
00:34:27 ►
You’re in the position of an avid X and seller
00:34:32 ►
who isn’t going round looking at the new… You’re not new, you’re not looking at the recent vintages.
00:34:38 ►
To see how they’re coming along. Do you think the hippie movement would have come about without OSD
00:34:44 ►
or had its impact?
00:34:46 ►
I think that would mean a totally different impact. What? It’d be a totally different impact.
00:34:51 ►
I don’t think, I mean much less. I think it was a necessary condition for it really.
00:35:00 ►
What about heroin? Do you think we would have had a heroin epidemic without LSD?
00:35:05 ►
I don’t think it has any bearing on us, Dr. Cooley.
00:35:08 ►
It may have had some bearing. I think it had some bearing.
00:35:10 ►
Well, it’s like saying when you have a CV thing.
00:35:13 ►
When you’re giving people the concept of self-actualization,
00:35:16 ►
they can do things that formerly only experts can do, not just…
00:35:19 ►
Well, there’s other drugs.
00:35:20 ►
You have a guy, Prince, making an atom bomb.
00:35:23 ►
Tim, there’s other drugs.
00:35:25 ►
There’s at least 15 others that act entirely differently.
00:35:29 ►
There would still come others no one’s ever said anything about
00:35:32 ►
that we’ve isolated in the last 10, 12 years
00:35:35 ►
that are far more remarkable than LSD.
00:35:39 ►
They really tell you which way you’re going.
00:35:42 ►
All the Harmeling compound and
00:35:45 ►
Ayahuasca and all that stuff. We’ve got
00:35:47 ►
all that. I think another person
00:35:49 ►
we ought to mention as not
00:35:51 ►
being here, but here, is John Lilly.
00:35:54 ►
Yeah. Well, he will be.
00:35:55 ►
Oh, he will be. He’ll be here shortly.
00:35:58 ►
John Lilly. What a courageous
00:36:00 ►
person. And Laura Huxley will be here.
00:36:02 ►
She’ll be here shortly.
00:36:05 ►
So, everybody took their chances, I’ll tell you that.
00:36:07 ►
In some ways I think that John,
00:36:09 ►
we all work within the ranges and so forth,
00:36:11 ►
but John has gone so far
00:36:15 ►
and taken such risks that I just think he’s…
00:36:19 ►
He’ll be there when you get there.
00:36:20 ►
Ah, yeah.
00:36:21 ►
Shh.
00:36:22 ►
Come on.
00:36:23 ►
Yeah.
00:36:23 ►
Yeah.
00:36:20 ►
there. Ah, yeah.
00:36:22 ►
Shh.
00:36:23 ►
Yeah.
00:36:27 ►
You know, Tim,
00:36:30 ►
I think everybody took risks in their own way, you know. Oh, I know.
00:36:31 ►
Not just flying around in the
00:36:33 ►
Stratosphere One,
00:36:35 ►
or spending their time in tanks
00:36:37 ►
in the other, but there were people
00:36:39 ►
who were really working in areas
00:36:41 ►
that were very frightening
00:36:43 ►
and sometimes very awesome
00:36:45 ►
to them and trying to integrate that and still move along and do what they had to
00:36:50 ►
do and I think people like like art Chandler and so on and Bill McLaughlin
00:36:57 ►
Ron Siegel and have had you know to walk out on a very, very long, narrow plank to look around.
00:37:08 ►
And in their way, I think, brought back some very good things.
00:37:15 ►
I think it’s an interesting thing, too.
00:37:17 ►
As you go around the country, I’m sure you all have this experience,
00:37:21 ►
you talk to middle-aged, fairly respectable people
00:37:25 ►
in Tucson, Arizona,
00:37:26 ►
and they say,
00:37:27 ►
this is where the acid thing
00:37:28 ►
really happened.
00:37:30 ►
Tucson.
00:37:31 ►
In San Francisco,
00:37:31 ►
this is where it really happened.
00:37:32 ►
The Lower East Side,
00:37:33 ►
you know,
00:37:34 ►
they say that’s where
00:37:34 ►
it really happened.
00:37:37 ►
No one has ever really
00:37:38 ►
told us what was going on
00:37:41 ►
in Los Angeles
00:37:42 ►
during those years.
00:37:44 ►
I think much more was done down here.
00:37:46 ►
There was a much wider range.
00:37:47 ►
There were more doctors involved.
00:37:49 ►
There were more scientists involved.
00:37:49 ►
We had Gerald and Aldous.
00:37:50 ►
Yes, right, yeah.
00:37:52 ►
And Ivan was…
00:37:55 ►
And, of course, it was part of the coolness of the Los Angeles…
00:38:00 ►
cell, whatever you want to call it,
00:38:04 ►
that they kept a… You kept a… Well, you might not call it a cell. Let to call it, that they kept a…
00:38:05 ►
Well, you might not call it a cell.
00:38:07 ►
Let’s call it a cluster.
00:38:12 ►
Our undercover agents in Los Angeles
00:38:14 ►
were very cool about…
00:38:16 ►
And yet they did more
00:38:18 ►
in a very laid-back way.
00:38:21 ►
And it’s never been as public
00:38:22 ►
as some of the other…
00:38:24 ►
You know, the buses running
00:38:25 ►
around the country paying big load.
00:38:26 ►
Yeah, and then Zinberg says that the visionary experience and all the things he was doing
00:38:31 ►
at Harvard and the others, his residents and the rest of it he was giving LSD to, they
00:38:36 ►
never had a visionary or ecstatic or mystic experience, but the whole thing was a California
00:38:42 ►
invention, he said.
00:38:44 ►
And he said the only time it ever happened was when you crossed the Colorado River.
00:38:52 ►
I’m reading John Mark’s book on the search for the Manchurian candidate,
00:38:58 ►
in which he says that the CIA turned us all on, you know.
00:39:02 ►
the CIA turned us all on, you know.
00:39:04 ►
Well, that was Tim’s idea, too.
00:39:10 ►
I’d like to get your opinion of what started it.
00:39:12 ►
Was it Aldous Huxley’s dose of perception?
00:39:13 ►
Was it Tim Leary?
00:39:20 ►
What made the mass use of psychedelics come on, would you say?
00:39:23 ►
Well, notice that we have to mention the name of Ken Kesey,
00:39:24 ►
and of course Alan Ginsberg was that. Alan Ginsberg was an indefatigable Zionist politician for drugs, and they…
00:39:30 ►
But at the very beginning, what would you say? What turn do you want, Ken? I don’t remember.
00:39:37 ►
And Gordon Watts? Don’t ever underestimate the effect of that wonderful, respectable, far-out mind.
00:39:48 ►
In Life magazine, there is a banker,
00:39:50 ►
Morgan Guarantee Trust banker,
00:39:55 ►
lying on the mud hut of a Mexican, you know,
00:39:57 ►
saying, wonderful, wonderful.
00:40:00 ►
Talk about Joe Namath commercial.
00:40:05 ►
Sid, we ran close to a thousand people through, and each of these
00:40:08 ►
people were people that had
00:40:09 ►
considerable influence in their own right.
00:40:12 ►
And they were bringing
00:40:13 ►
the message out. Who turned down
00:40:15 ►
Cary Grant?
00:40:18 ►
Someone in his room.
00:40:19 ►
But I mean Cary Grant.
00:40:22 ►
Hartman.
00:40:24 ►
Hartman.
00:40:25 ►
And then I saw him a few times.
00:40:29 ►
But we each of us had…
00:40:30 ►
And so this thing was just moving geometrically
00:40:33 ►
from people who had large audiences themselves.
00:40:37 ►
And the rate of the way inquiries were coming in
00:40:40 ►
was geometric after a while.
00:40:42 ►
And obviously, if that continued,
00:40:45 ►
these people who then couldn’t get it from us anymore
00:40:48 ►
would be seeking to get it elsewhere.
00:40:51 ►
And it was that kind of a proportion that was taking place.
00:40:54 ►
And keeping in mind, of course,
00:40:55 ►
that was just a relatively small ripple in a larger bond,
00:41:00 ►
but it was carrying a lot of impetus with it.
00:41:04 ►
And that might have been one of those
00:41:06 ►
things, and then those enclaves joining other enclaves and so on. But I think you’re referring
00:41:12 ►
to the big explosion of the…
00:41:14 ►
The big explosion was when it came out on the cover story on all the popular magazines,
00:41:19 ►
Life, Saturday Evening Post, the whole business that were banned.
00:41:23 ►
Well, Alice’s book
00:41:25 ►
Doris of Deception
00:41:26 ►
Heaven and Hell
00:41:27 ►
were extremely important
00:41:27 ►
among intellectuals
00:41:28 ►
yes
00:41:29 ►
and Frank Barron
00:41:30 ►
was another person
00:41:31 ►
who was very active
00:41:32 ►
in the psychology
00:41:33 ►
of course it was
00:41:34 ►
Albert Hoffman
00:41:35 ►
who did it all anyway
00:41:36 ►
I know right
00:41:36 ►
yes
00:41:37 ►
your question I think
00:41:39 ►
really directed
00:41:40 ►
that
00:41:41 ►
where did the young people
00:41:43 ►
get it
00:41:44 ►
because that’s where
00:41:44 ►
the movement started that really spread it across the country what do you think about Robert DeRoff director that heard of the young people because that’s where the
00:41:45 ►
movement started
00:41:45 ►
that really
00:41:46 ►
spread it
00:41:46 ►
across the
00:41:47 ►
country.
00:41:48 ►
What do you
00:41:48 ►
think about
00:41:48 ►
Robert Duroff?
00:41:49 ►
That had a lot
00:41:50 ►
of effect
00:41:50 ►
where I was.
00:41:52 ►
I was very
00:41:53 ►
surprised when I
00:41:54 ►
saw him.
00:41:54 ►
He handled
00:41:54 ►
the
00:41:55 ►
county chapter.
00:41:58 ►
But didn’t
00:41:58 ►
that drugs in
00:41:59 ►
the mine have
00:41:59 ►
a lot of
00:42:00 ►
effect on
00:42:00 ►
campuses and
00:42:01 ►
stuff like
00:42:01 ►
that?
00:42:01 ►
It did.
00:42:03 ►
But it was
00:42:03 ►
more than
00:42:04 ►
just a book or two. It was something in the wind. And I really wondered…
00:42:09 ►
The first major burst of publicity, is that what you’re trying to focus on? Is that the…
00:42:16 ►
Well, there were steps all the way. Huxley was one of the first.
00:42:19 ►
After we were fired from Harvard that fall, every major magazine came out with a yeah it was a head cover story in society me positive and that ain’t red
00:42:28 ►
yeah there were three different stories in Playboy the F so that was yeah it was
00:42:33 ►
the firing from a Harvard plus the fact that Henry Luce was somewhere always
00:42:38 ►
behind the scenes doing certain things plus so many people have been involved
00:42:43 ►
in Los Angeles and so forth.
00:42:45 ►
But that was the first big one.
00:42:46 ►
Tim was more responsible than anybody for that.
00:42:49 ►
Tim, wasn’t it the calculated goal of FF to cause that kind of spreading?
00:42:54 ►
Yeah. I remember coming to Cambridge one time when a little article in Time came out.
00:43:01 ►
Yeah.
00:43:01 ►
Remember? And I walked in there and he said, what do you think about the Time article? It was really devastatingly bad. I thought it was terrible, I said. We
00:43:10 ►
thought it was great. You let the kids know that there’s something here, they’ll know
00:43:18 ►
it. It doesn’t make a difference whether it’s bad, good, or indifferent.
00:43:22 ►
Well, I want to point out, though, that the picture… We all know that here and now
00:43:25 ►
study pictures more than they do long columns.
00:43:29 ►
The particular picture of this article
00:43:30 ►
in Time Magazine attacking our research
00:43:32 ►
had a scientific instrument
00:43:35 ►
called the experiential typewriter
00:43:37 ►
with all these…
00:43:38 ►
It was actually filled with socks, but that’s all right.
00:43:41 ►
It had an incredibly beautiful young woman
00:43:44 ►
sitting, taking the test
00:43:46 ►
and had standing behind her
00:43:48 ►
Alan Watts
00:43:49 ►
a beautiful female Hindu guru
00:43:51 ►
named Gayatri Devi and myself
00:43:54 ►
now the
00:43:55 ►
signal content of a picture like that
00:43:58 ►
was much more important
00:44:00 ►
than the little words
00:44:02 ►
that are being written by
00:44:03 ►
some clerk at Time Magazine
00:44:05 ►
in the medical department.
00:44:09 ►
How about McLuhan?
00:44:11 ►
I’m trying to think, though,
00:44:13 ►
that what else could happen in a person’s life
00:44:16 ►
that is short from a religious conversion
00:44:19 ►
that can fire them up with the sort of zeal
00:44:23 ►
that we saw in the few people that we began to use it with.
00:44:27 ►
In other words, perhaps not everybody went out.
00:44:29 ►
It was a psychosis.
00:44:30 ►
Yeah.
00:44:31 ►
But it was a contagion.
00:44:33 ►
It was certainly a contagion.
00:44:35 ►
It was a contagion.
00:44:38 ►
It was a chance for everyone to go to the carnival all at once, you know.
00:44:47 ►
And they all came out of that place, and they were ready to really spread the word.
00:44:53 ►
I’ll tell you.
00:44:54 ►
That’s not true.
00:44:55 ►
It’s talking about old fanatics.
00:44:57 ►
They had the sacrament, and that’s how they behaved in those days.
00:45:02 ►
Now, that’s a pretty irresistible force in terms of public diffusion of information.
00:45:09 ►
And that was the kind of zeal that we experienced.
00:45:12 ►
People in this room right now,
00:45:14 ►
if we decided to do anything in the next six months,
00:45:16 ►
it was really right.
00:45:18 ►
It was right.
00:45:19 ►
We could do it.
00:45:21 ►
I’m not so sure.
00:45:22 ►
It’s amazing how many times the same mistakes are repeated.
00:45:26 ►
When I first came to Los Angeles, I was working with Murray Jarvik, who’s over here.
00:45:31 ►
Hi, Murray.
00:45:33 ►
We were setting up some LSD studies to do it, and with marijuana and a few other drugs.
00:45:40 ►
And Alan Ginsberg came by the lab to visit me one day.
00:45:43 ►
He showed Alan around.
00:45:44 ►
And as he was leaving the lab,
00:45:46 ►
one of the administrators in the building,
00:45:48 ►
over at UCLA,
00:45:49 ►
saw him and allegedly saw someone
00:45:52 ►
smoking a joint in his entourage.
00:45:56 ►
On the basis of that, there was a big flap.
00:45:59 ►
And it was like another Harvard psilocybin fiasco
00:46:04 ►
on a much smaller scale.
00:46:06 ►
There was absolutely no truth to any of the charges or anything,
00:46:11 ►
but it was an uncomfortable situation, anyone wanting to do research with these drugs,
00:46:16 ►
even though there was authorization, there was all the DEA forms,
00:46:20 ►
there was all the necessary precautions that were taken according to law.
00:46:26 ►
There’s a lot of resistance
00:46:28 ►
to doing those things.
00:46:30 ►
And I’ve encountered that again
00:46:32 ►
and again in every university I’ve gone to,
00:46:34 ►
trying to set up these studies.
00:46:36 ►
And it takes a year
00:46:38 ►
and a half of paper, I think Murray took us a year
00:46:40 ►
and a half of paperwork
00:46:41 ►
to get our
00:46:44 ►
proposal approved finally and the
00:46:47 ►
one thing that kept on coming down they didn’t mind marijuana we were given
00:46:50 ►
marijuana at 11% and listed on a proposal and the only one that they the
00:46:56 ►
proposal kept on coming back for was LSD they said oh you can use LSD you got to
00:47:01 ►
do a follow-up you got to do a 90-day follow-up you got to do a year and a
00:47:04 ►
half follow-up 30-year they didn’t a 90-day follow-up. You’ve got to do a year-and-a-half follow-up.
00:47:05 ►
A 30-year follow-up.
00:47:06 ►
They didn’t care about the mescaline. They didn’t care about the psilocybin. They didn’t
00:47:09 ►
care about ketamine, which we can give to children. And it’s the only drug that we can
00:47:15 ►
give to children without any formal, any hallucinogen that we can give to children without any formal
00:47:21 ►
studies.
00:47:21 ►
Why is that? Why are these so…
00:47:22 ►
Because it’s a normal surgical anesthetic given to hospital patients.
00:47:27 ►
Excuse me.
00:47:28 ►
Me and Ellen,
00:47:29 ►
we’re talking about
00:47:30 ►
historical moments.
00:47:32 ►
Yeah, right.
00:47:32 ►
The article that Murray
00:47:33 ►
and Frank wrote
00:47:35 ►
in Scientific American.
00:47:36 ►
And again,
00:47:37 ►
another level
00:47:38 ►
was one of the
00:47:39 ►
Everest points
00:47:40 ►
and all this.
00:47:42 ►
Yeah.
00:47:42 ►
Thank you for that, Murray.
00:47:44 ►
Indeed.
00:47:45 ►
And a man who may come today
00:47:47 ►
who really deserves a great deal of consideration in all this
00:47:51 ►
is Nicholas Purcell.
00:47:53 ►
And he may come a little later.
00:47:55 ►
He said he was going to be here.
00:47:57 ►
Nick is a remarkable man,
00:47:58 ►
very quiet and in his own way.
00:48:01 ►
Went to Europe at the very beginning of all this.
00:48:04 ►
And I suspect in writing the
00:48:06 ►
book that he may have been the very first person to use LSD in America, although that’s
00:48:11 ►
often accredited to Rinckel in Boston.
00:48:16 ►
The reason is that he was sitting…
00:48:17 ►
You know, he’s a Hungarian, and Hungarians get into rather interesting places. And he was talking to Stoll, the young Stoll, who
00:48:28 ►
he said, so he told me, he said, by the way, Nick, I don’t think you’re talking about Gary
00:48:34 ►
in a lot, he said, there’s a few things I think you ought to try. And he reached into
00:48:38 ►
his Westwood pocket and took out a few vials and then, here, when you get a chance, he
00:48:42 ►
said, you may want to try that. And that was before, to my knowledge, before Rinkle ever got the material and before they
00:48:51 ►
set up a regular program for its distribution in America. So if Nick comes later, I certainly
00:48:58 ►
would love to see him won and appreciate him.
00:49:01 ►
This is like a Grammy Awards session.
00:49:04 ►
It really is.
00:49:05 ►
That’s the category for it.
00:49:08 ►
Now, Nick, Sid, you saw Nick when he was first starting, didn’t you?
00:49:13 ►
And he had the material before you did, didn’t he?
00:49:15 ►
Yes.
00:49:16 ►
He published an article in the Archives of General Psychiatry very early.
00:49:20 ►
Yeah.
00:49:21 ►
And then the first article about Sons of Rafe
00:49:24 ►
and the Sandoz bibliography
00:49:26 ►
was attributed to two Americans named Bush and Johnson.
00:49:29 ►
Yes, of course.
00:49:30 ►
In the middle of America, who just about never showed up anywhere else.
00:49:36 ►
And I called Bush, and I said, is there really such a person?
00:49:40 ►
And he said, yeah. He said, I’m 70 years old, having a marvelous time.
00:49:45 ►
I said, hey, did you realize you were the first person to publish in an American journal on LSD?
00:49:51 ►
He said, I guess so.
00:49:53 ►
He came to some of the Macy Foundation conferences, you remember.
00:49:58 ►
You were there, I think.
00:50:00 ►
And I said, how did you get on to it?
00:50:01 ►
He said, I don’t know.
00:50:02 ►
We got the idea that if we had a good delirium going,
00:50:06 ►
he said, we may shake things up a bit, you know.
00:50:09 ►
He said, and Johnson and I, I said, where did you get it?
00:50:12 ►
1940, 50.
00:50:13 ►
He said, oh, we just sent it to Sandow.
00:50:18 ►
Amazing.
00:50:19 ►
You know Albert’s story about that, don’t you?
00:50:21 ►
About the Sandow salesman at LSE.
00:50:24 ►
Do you know that story?
00:50:25 ►
Well…
00:50:25 ►
Albert says that for many years, the last time I saw him, he said,
00:50:32 ►
the Sandals salesman would come to him and he’d say,
00:50:35 ►
When are you going to get something like LSD?
00:50:39 ►
When we used to go out, for Sandals, you know, it’s quite a small, very respectful, cis company,
00:50:43 ►
and they’d bring their wares along, and they won’t show much interest.
00:50:47 ►
But after LSD, when the Sandals salesman appeared,
00:50:50 ►
people would say, you’re the people who made LSD.
00:50:53 ►
And they would then pay great attention to every one of their products.
00:50:56 ►
And the salesman looked upon this as being the greatest sales innovation
00:51:00 ►
that Sandals ever made.
00:51:02 ►
Well, there’s another side to that story.
00:51:04 ►
When I spoke to Burrell, who was the vice president in charge of public affairs in Hanover, sales innovation that Sandor’s ever made. Well, there’s another side to that story.
00:51:06 ►
When I spoke to Burrell,
00:51:07 ►
who was the vice president in charge of public affairs
00:51:08 ►
in Hanover,
00:51:09 ►
I said to him,
00:51:10 ►
the usual subject
00:51:12 ►
about what happened to LSD,
00:51:14 ►
he said,
00:51:14 ►
hell, the reason we gave it up,
00:51:16 ►
he said,
00:51:16 ►
because we couldn’t sell it.
00:51:18 ►
Now, about that.
00:51:19 ►
He said,
00:51:20 ►
he said,
00:51:20 ►
he took the wrong view.
00:51:23 ►
They were,
00:51:23 ►
they were,
00:51:23 ►
they were selling it for sales that went with it.
00:51:28 ►
Well, I guess so.
00:51:30 ►
But I, the, I remember Tim coming to the house one day, one morning,
00:51:35 ►
and we were all having breakfast, and Robbie, my boy, was just a little fella,
00:51:39 ►
and Tim was wearing a hearing aid.
00:51:41 ►
I don’t think you remember this.
00:51:42 ►
And Rob had never seen a hearing aid.
00:51:45 ►
And I dearly loved him for this. And he said, Tim had a twinkle in his eye, you know, he
00:51:51 ►
looked like a real picaresque, you know, Spanish-Irish kind of a guy. And he said, he said, what,
00:51:58 ►
what’s that? And Tim said, well, that’s my direct line to the president.
00:52:09 ►
So Rob, that was when he was square haircut, you know, and all that stuff.
00:52:13 ►
And so Rob said, president?
00:52:14 ►
He said, yeah.
00:52:16 ►
He said, what would you like to hear from the president?
00:52:22 ►
So Rob said, he said, how about no school tomorrow?
00:52:24 ►
So he said, sure. And he pulled the hearing aid out and put it in front of him and he said, how about no school tomorrow? So he said, sure.
00:52:27 ►
And he pulled the hearing aid on and he puts it in front of him and he said,
00:52:29 ►
President Johnson?
00:52:30 ►
Yes, yes, yes.
00:52:31 ►
Is this Tim Lurie here?
00:52:32 ►
Thank you, Channing.
00:52:33 ►
Yes, he said.
00:52:34 ►
By the way, he said,
00:52:36 ►
this young man here, he said,
00:52:37 ►
Robbie, he said,
00:52:38 ►
he was riling there was no school tomorrow
00:52:39 ►
and the next day was a holiday.
00:52:45 ►
And he said, and Robbie, and for fun, Robbie said,
00:52:49 ►
does that spell everybody come back?
00:52:55 ►
I said, I don’t know.
00:52:58 ►
And I remember old Al Hubbard coming up to the house
00:53:01 ►
and he, with his leather pouch, you know,
00:53:03 ►
he used to be the, he rode the circus boy, and the house with his leather pouch. You know, he used to be the he rode the circuits boy and he opened up his leather pouch and then it was all the
00:53:09 ►
wampum and all the great stuff he had and he was trading off. Well, he said,
00:53:14 ►
what do we have here for the month now, Al? And I was like, well, we’ve got this and that.
00:53:18 ►
Something new is coming up. How would you like a little of that? Yeah, I remember. Oh, God, we were waiting for you.
00:53:25 ►
We were waiting for you like a little lady
00:53:27 ►
on the prairie waiting for the
00:53:29 ►
see his rope bug cattle.
00:53:33 ►
You did the best you could with the tools I had.
00:53:35 ►
I know.
00:53:36 ►
Al, what did you do
00:53:40 ►
with that million dollar check
00:53:41 ►
that you carried around?
00:53:43 ►
You had a check you showed me for
00:53:45 ►
one million dollars. It was the most money I’d ever seen on a check in my life.
00:53:50 ►
That’s the most I’ve seen? It’s cost me and other people a lot of money since then.
00:53:56 ►
Listen, I’m not telling tales out because I know you’ve shown it to others as well as
00:54:00 ►
myself. Well, I think probably it’s a fair kind of problem that I had. I finally got
00:54:04 ►
down to a100,000.
00:54:05 ►
And then of course they all went away. This all cost a lot of money because there was no bills to anyone except those that church-worked themselves.
00:54:15 ►
That was only a couple of hospitals and two or three clinics. But all of it cost a lot of money.
00:54:23 ►
Was it before inflation.
00:54:28 ►
It was before inflation.
00:54:33 ►
When Sid wrote his paper on the complications, do you remember that?
00:54:36 ►
And you sent us a questionnaire about, you know, that was the beginning of trying to assess what, you know,
00:54:40 ►
what kind of care we should take.
00:54:42 ►
And I got the paper, and I was thinking,
00:54:45 ►
what on earth went wrong?
00:54:46 ►
And we had a great number of people.
00:54:48 ►
But there was one, which I didn’t put on that form, Sid,
00:54:52 ►
and I have to tell you, one of our people got loose.
00:54:55 ►
And I don’t know, I have to tell you this now.
00:54:58 ►
And we couldn’t find him, and this was Wilshire Boulevard.
00:55:01 ►
Can you imagine running, and we thought we had the thing well worked out in the usual babysitting, you know, the usual routine. And he was gone down Wilshire
00:55:10 ►
Boulevard. And we were looking all over, and I thought, my God, if this fellow doesn’t
00:55:14 ►
come to light, we’re in bad, bad shape. So I was coming back to the office and feeling
00:55:19 ►
kind of glum about it, when suddenly I hear somebody whistling. And I look around, and
00:55:23 ►
I don’t see anything. I look around, nobody’t see anything I look around nobody whistling was it and there was a patient sitting
00:55:29 ►
up in a tree
00:55:31 ►
I said what are you doing up there?
00:55:34 ►
He said it’s wonderful up there. I said well don’t do anything rash.
00:55:38 ►
Oh no no he said I’ll fly right down and see you.
00:55:41 ►
I said no you won’t.
00:55:43 ►
And we had to climb the tree and inch over inch bring him down to see you. No, you won’t.
00:55:47 ►
And we had to climb the tree and inch over inch bring you down off the tree.
00:55:50 ►
And thank God for that, I’ll tell you.
00:55:52 ►
You should have joined him in the tree.
00:55:54 ►
Well, you’ve been in the tree ever since.
00:55:57 ►
Really?
00:55:58 ►
You’ve been through that one before, haven’t you?
00:56:00 ►
Yeah.
00:56:01 ►
Climb out of your tree.
00:56:02 ►
There’s nothing more to be said about the check
00:56:04 ►
that Al was waving around
00:56:06 ►
because
00:56:07 ►
it’s taken a long time
00:56:10 ►
but it was just a few days ago
00:56:12 ►
that the last steps were taken
00:56:14 ►
to see that all the money was repaid
00:56:16 ►
but it was a long battle
00:56:18 ►
but all the money went back to its source
00:56:20 ►
is that right?
00:56:22 ►
that’s right
00:56:23 ►
which money was that, Larry? oh, you had several source. Is that right? That’s right. Which one of us had Mars?
00:56:25 ►
Well, don’t you
00:56:26 ►
remember?
00:56:26 ►
Oh, you had
00:56:27 ►
several of them.
00:56:33 ►
Thank God I didn’t
00:56:35 ►
have to get involved
00:56:35 ►
in the others.
00:56:37 ►
I must say,
00:56:39 ►
the Alcremes,
00:56:40 ►
that he never
00:56:40 ►
made a lot of
00:56:41 ►
money selling
00:56:42 ►
that stuff at all.
00:56:43 ►
He was a great trader, though.
00:56:46 ►
He’d say, how about a little almost pure tetrahydrocannabinol?
00:56:51 ►
In those days, it was kind of a biscuit oil.
00:56:54 ►
Remember that stuff in tubes?
00:56:56 ►
Yeah.
00:56:56 ►
He said, what have you got to offer?
00:57:00 ►
How do you figure this belonged business, Byron?
00:57:03 ►
What?
00:57:04 ►
Run back to where it belonged. How do you figure it belonged business, Byron? What? Went back to where it belonged. How do you figure?
00:57:06 ►
From the source.
00:57:08 ►
Huh?
00:57:09 ►
The person who furnished the money got it back.
00:57:13 ►
How?
00:57:15 ►
Well, you know how.
00:57:17 ►
I don’t know how.
00:57:18 ►
But it’s not a matter for public… I don’t think it’s a matter for public record.
00:57:23 ►
You’re among friends.
00:57:27 ►
Only Harry is recording.
00:57:29 ►
$10 billion.
00:57:35 ►
One other change
00:57:39 ►
in life
00:57:40 ►
in connection with LSD
00:57:43 ►
or at least
00:57:44 ►
LSD contributed mightily I think
00:57:47 ►
was the whole
00:57:48 ►
upsurge in the study of the
00:57:51 ►
chemistry of the brain
00:57:52 ►
I think that had a lot to do with it
00:57:55 ►
although it may have happened I think
00:57:57 ►
LSD accelerated it
00:57:59 ►
yeah it’s interesting that that was
00:58:01 ►
in writing the book that’s part
00:58:03 ►
of it that I think the clinicians somehow, if not disdain that,
00:58:08 ►
at least somehow that doesn’t seem to be an area of terrible concern to them,
00:58:13 ►
and mainly in terms of what I think is this equally important impact of LSD,
00:58:20 ►
which was on accelerating the entire notion of the neurochemistry of the brain
00:58:24 ►
and how the brain processes emotion.
00:58:28 ►
And so we’re trying to include that,
00:58:30 ►
because it’s going to take a whole other group of people to look at that more critically.
00:58:35 ►
But I think, as you say, that chapter is most importantly well worth written entirely.
00:58:41 ►
I think it was LSD with serotonin,
00:58:47 ►
Entirely. I think it was LSD with serotonin which in turn gave rise perhaps to the early hypotheses of the brain amines in relation to affective disorders. That was a direct
00:58:54 ►
chain in a large extent.
00:58:57 ►
I think LSD probably had the most effect on the larger population that has never even taken it.
00:59:07 ►
The marginal participation in the counterculture movement.
00:59:12 ►
I attribute largely to LSD. I’m not attributing necessarily, but I think that’s the condition.
00:59:18 ►
Bill, when we were running our subjects, about the third or fourth subject was an artist.
00:59:26 ►
And he saw a Kachina doll that was sitting on a shelf. And he said, I must draw something.
00:59:33 ►
I’ve got to look at something. I’ve got to paint it. So we took the doll off the shelf
00:59:38 ►
and he began to sketch it. And, you know, in sort of haphazard ways you do, you know,
00:59:42 ►
he couldn’t control it very well. And when he was through with the experience, he said, this is the most important artistic
00:59:51 ►
experience that I’ve ever had. He said, do you mind if I tell other artists about it? Well,
00:59:58 ►
we weren’t quite prepared for this. I had no idea that the artist, you know, was going to be any more affected than anyone
01:00:05 ►
else. And he then began to bring in his friends. And before long, it was almost as if the entire
01:00:13 ►
project would be inundated with artists. That’s how completely eager and absolutely interested
01:00:20 ►
they were in taking it. And we had to really limit the number of artists. So at least from their point of view, and then we have a very elaborate record of
01:00:29 ►
what the artists had said and the follow-up as you know, because you
01:00:34 ►
use some of that data, and the artists seem to derive an enormous amount of
01:00:39 ►
interest and of help from the experience with LSD among all the others. The worst
01:00:46 ►
reactors we had were the psychiatrists and the second were the ministers.
01:00:51 ►
I mean they were, they were not, I mean you know there was nothing
01:00:56 ►
gravely serious but they were, they didn’t have good reactions very often
01:01:01 ►
these guys just ministers and the two or three rabbis
01:01:06 ►
and several, we had I think two Catalan priests.
01:01:10 ►
The general artists have more fun than the ministers, don’t they?
01:01:14 ►
Well, they may have more fun, but then we’re going back to the original thesis.
01:01:19 ►
Do more good then. They move even race farther ahead well
01:01:25 ►
psychedelic art is still something
01:01:28 ►
that has to be evaluated
01:01:29 ►
it’s an unproven thing
01:01:32 ►
in a way
01:01:33 ►
but we do know that we have a hundred pairs
01:01:36 ►
of the artists painting the doll prior
01:01:38 ►
and painting it afterwards
01:01:40 ►
at a time when they had no preconceived notion
01:01:42 ►
well some of course
01:01:44 ►
was accumulating, but
01:01:45 ►
not very rapidly, and so we now are processing these pairs to see what can be done, or how
01:01:52 ►
these people handled it under the drone. And if they took it a number of times, they developed
01:01:58 ►
a facility so they could deal with it and they could paint fairly decently under it. You know, that one with the leaf.
01:02:05 ►
Yeah.
01:02:06 ►
The leaf.
01:02:08 ►
An old friend of mine sent me a copy of that.
01:02:08 ►
Yeah.
01:02:10 ►
I’ll have to… Yeah, yeah.
01:02:11 ►
Yeah, I’d like to understand that a little better.
01:02:13 ►
Yeah.
01:02:13 ►
With the doll, you say you first had them paint it before they’d taken LSD.
01:02:20 ►
Yeah.
01:02:20 ►
And then during.
01:02:21 ►
Yes.
01:02:22 ►
And how about, did you do any after?
01:02:24 ►
Yes. There was some we did you do any after? Yes.
01:02:25 ►
There was some we did after, yeah.
01:02:29 ►
They felt that they had some enhanced ability after.
01:02:37 ►
Well, what was improved wasn’t their artistic ability, by no means.
01:02:41 ►
It was just this whole sense of opening up, you know,
01:02:44 ►
and having more choices and being able to see things much more, many more permutations
01:02:53 ►
and ideas and everything.
01:02:55 ►
Would you all like to have something to eat? And we’ve got a table full of stuff
01:03:12 ►
yeah You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:03:33 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:03:37 ►
I had to smile when, near the end of this discussion,
01:03:41 ►
we heard Myron Stolaroff and Al Hubbard kind of getting after one another
01:03:45 ►
a bit about some money, some money that Myron wound up paying for a debt that Hubbard had incurred.
01:03:51 ►
I can actually remember quite a few conversations that I had with Myron when he would wonder how it
01:03:57 ►
was that Al Hubbard had been able to get him to pay for things that Al committed them to without
01:04:02 ►
first asking Myron about. And while Hubbard was
01:04:05 ►
actually Myron’s mentor, and Myron truly loved him, I think that it’s safe to say that at times
01:04:12 ►
this was closer to a love-hate relationship, at least sometimes, but it was one that eventually
01:04:17 ►
turned out peaceful, I should add. In fact, Al Hubbard’s ashes were eventually scattered on
01:04:22 ►
Myron’s little place in the high desert, not far from the Death Valley site that Al Hubbard’s ashes were eventually scattered on Myron’s little place in the high desert,
01:04:28 ►
not far from the Death Valley site that was Hubbard’s favorite place to do acid.
01:04:35 ►
Actually, it was that piece of property that for a while came between Al and Myron.
01:04:37 ►
With Myron, as he told it to me,
01:04:42 ►
eventually just saying to hell with trying to work out a deal with Al to jointly purchase the property,
01:04:45 ►
and so Myron just went ahead and bought it on his own. But as it turned out, that little red house on that land became the site of a
01:04:51 ►
significant amount of psychedelic research, reports of which may be found in the back of
01:04:57 ►
Sasha Shulgin’s books, Peacol and Teacol. So in his own mysterious way, it seems that Captain Al
01:05:03 ►
Hubbard’s work continued long after his death,
01:05:06 ►
with his ashes, quite literally, under the feet of the next generation of psychedelic researchers.
01:05:13 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space.
01:05:17 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you.