Albion Dreaming (3 page)

This deep gratitude is just one of many hints that LSD invokes something akin to mystical or spiritual experiences – leading to the vexed question of whether these experiences are really the same or ultimately different – whether a simple drug that affects the brain can really create true spirituality. Is laughing at the ‘Cosmic joke’ and delighting in sheer acid joy the same as mystical joy? Is the sudden understanding of the power of love the same as that met in prayer or contemplation? Is the involuntary review of who we are and all we have done, with its descent into fear or disgust at our own shortcomings, the same as the ultimately freeing acceptance reported in near-death experiences? Is the terror of letting go of self, or the joyful realisation that ‘I’ am not other than the universe, the same as the oneness reached in mystical experiences. Is this loss of self the nonduality that can take years of meditation practice to find? Or are these just tricks of the ultimate trickster drug? I cannot answer this deepest question about LSD any more than anyone else can, although my own intuition is that the answer is ‘yes’.

The tragedy of LSD, as this and other books explore, is how it became abused, made illegal, and ultimately denied both to those who wanted to explore its spiritual dimensions and those could have benefited from its therapeutic potential. I get upset to think how differently things might have turned out. In my dream world I live in a society in which all recreational drugs are legally available, regulated and controlled; a society in which a culture of serious drug use rather than drug abuse grows up and matures. Just imagine being able to seek out experienced guides to take you, or your children, or your best friends, into that first trip. Just imagine a world in which professionals know how to guide people through bad trips and terrifying ordeals, and how to avoid the psychological damage that LSD can undoubtedly sometimes inflict. But I ask myself whether it could ever have been this way. Was the abuse and misunderstanding inevitable? Might we ever reach this dream world, and in my lifetime?

I do not know but I keep hoping. And in a country where more and more people want to see the end of the war on drugs, perhaps we can do it. I’ve read many histories of psychedelic drugs and met many of the characters involved, but
Albion Dreaming
gives
us something new by showing how the history of LSD played out differently here in Britain from the way it did in the USA. This is one of the reasons I enjoyed it so much, and it may perhaps give us hope for LSD’s future here in Britain.

Dr Susan Blackmore

Psychologist and author of
The Meme Machine
(1999),
Zen and the Art of Consciouness
(2011) and other books on consciousness, memes and anomalous experiences

Devon, February 2012

www.susanblackmore.co.uk

www.memetics.com

LSD:
an abbreviation of the German term
L
ysergsäure-
D
iäthylamid for lysergic acid diethylamide: a semi synthetic illicit organic compound C
₂₀
H
₂₅
N
₃
O derived from ergot that induces extreme sensory distortions, altered perceptions of reality, and intense emotional states, that may also produce delusions or paranoia, and that may sometimes cause panic reactions in response to the effects experienced.
¹

T
he American psychologist Dr. Timothy Leary once said LSD was the drug with the most unusual emotional and psychological effects when compared to any other. Why? Because just the
idea
of the drug has the power to cause terror among people who have never taken it. With this, Leary was referring to the worldwide moral panic that has attended LSD since the drug first became popular among the hippie counter culture in the Sixties.
²

For politicians, the police, the media and the public, LSD represents and remains a powerful folk devil. The idea of LSD is freighted with fears that it is capable of causing insanity after a single dose. It is believed to contribute to the moral and social
degradation of the individual and the development of a counter culture antithetical to the values of western materialism. In other words, the drug is perceived to be a serious threat to the individual and to society.

Yet there are fundamental differences in how different groups of people view LSD. Millions of individuals have taken LSD since its discovery in 1938 and its use has spawned a huge subculture. Devout supporters of the drug claim LSD is a beneficial tool for studying consciousness, with the potential of bestowing fundamental spiritual and personal insights on those who take it. Others simply laud the drug as being a powerful agent for altering consciousness and enhancing awareness, revealing the sensory world in all its glory. At the most mundane level, those who are not interested in LSD’s spiritual or consciousness expanding possibilities speak of the sheer, boundless, multi-dimensional cosmic fun to be had using the drug recreationally: a Disneyland of the mind. There are innumerable reports from people who have taken LSD who testify to its beneficial effects on their lives, yet society has deemed it so dangerous that its manufacture, distribution or possession is punishable by lengthy prison sentences.

Of course, to those who have not taken LSD such claims might appear pretentious or deluded. They will refer to the handful of people who have died whilst under the influence of LSD. Alternatively, they will recount how some have been compelled to seek psychiatric help because the effects of the drug have been so overpowering. Everyone, whether they have taken LSD or not, has their own opinions, fuelled by a combination of experience and prejudice.

There is no way of adequately explaining the result of taking LSD other than through the accounts of those who have, and observation of how they have tried to integrate the experience into their lives. All of us are familiar with the effects of at least some drugs, from the lift that can be obtained from strong tea, coffee, cola, alcohol or tobacco, to currently illegal substances such as amphetamines, cannabis, ecstasy, cocaine or heroin. But the reactions to LSD are in a class of their own. To compound matters further, LSD, unlike other drugs, does
not have a consistently predictable set of physiological or psychological reactions.

The effects of LSD on the body are minimal. On the mind, however, they are dramatic, complex, and inter-dependent on a variety of factors including purity, expectation, environment and dosage. The drug’s potency is such that doses as small as 50-millionths of a gram (50 μg) can produce powerful effects, and even a significant dose is only 250 μg. How the interplay of dosage, expectation and environment creates different theories and reactions is a theme that runs throughout this book.
³

Author, Tim Lott whose reaction to his first LSD trip can be found in
Chapter 11
, has written one of the most cogent and articulate explanations of what LSD means to him. It is a view shared, to varying degrees, by the majority of those who have taken LSD:

“I have many times tried to describe how simply taking a drug can change your whole perception of life, but it is rather like trying to explain colour to the blind. There are no terms of reference in ordinary life to help you to understand. And actually, I am torn between evangelising for the drug and warning everyone not to go within a million miles of it. I suppose the most simple and incredible fact about LSD is also the one that is hardest to believe: that what it reveals to you is not, as is popularly supposed, a hallucination, but an awe-inspiring glimpse of reality. Other drugs distort, but LSD gives you a reality far beyond words, or visual representation, or language. It is quite the reverse of seeing something that isn’t there. LSD disables some chemical filter in the brain that, in order to keep the world manageable, limits the amount of reality you can experience with your senses. An LSD trip allows ‘reality’ – and if you have never questioned what that is, you would after taking LSD – to flood in untrammelled. The result may be terrifying and it may be wonderful, but it will be more ‘real’ than anything you experience in everyday life. LSD shows you that ordinary life is the hallucination. Or to put it another way, ordinary life is like listening to a record with fluff on the needle, and LSD removes the fluff. Psychotherapeutically speaking, it releases your subconscious into the conscious mind (or vice versa).”

Anyone who has not taken LSD might dismiss Lott’s views as hyperbole to explain and justify the effects of a drug that actually mimic a form of temporary madness. But Lott has experienced mental illness, and is clear about the distinction between that and LSD, “... I’ve been mad – or at least severely mentally ill. And taking LSD is as different an experience as you can imagine.”
⁴

When LSD was discovered, the drug seemed loaded with potential. The problem was no one knew exactly what to do with it. LSD seemed to be the answer to a question that had not yet been formulated. And, like Tolkien’s ring, LSD exerted a powerful force on individuals and institutions, leading several to assert it was the answer to
their
particular question. Firstly, the intelligence services and military laid claim to it, believing it could be the solution to the problems of interrogation, investigating its potential as, among other options, a “truth drug”. The medical establishment also saw its possibilities for their profession, as a drug capable of unlocking and unblocking the unconscious mind. It was employed in experimental psychotherapy to cure obsessions and addictions, heal damaged psyches and to develop human potential. Both of these approaches yielded contradictory results, the experiments being curtailed long before any firm conclusions could be drawn or the way forward charted.

Inevitably, the secret leaked out and LSD became available to the public, slowly at first, building to a torrent after the mid-Sixties. LSD was legal in the early Sixties, those early psychedelic pioneers were awed, and astonished by the experience it provided. Travellers returned from LSD trips with tales of other dimensions, other ways of seeing, other ways of thinking and, most importantly, other ways of being. Small groups of psychonauts, often maverick professionals such as Timothy Leary, believed that LSD, if taken in the correct circumstances and with an experienced guide, could elevate consciousness to the spiritual heights tantalizingly offered by the world’s major religions and spiritual disciplines. But unlike traditional spiritual practice, which offered no guarantees and demanded years, a lifetime even, of study and devotion, LSD, it was rumoured, could deliver enlightenment in just one dose. Use of LSD required no reliance
on deity or scripture and the user was not required to be part of a spiritual hierarchy. The widespread belief was that by taking it an individual could be plugged into the hub of the Universe, to become one with everything, and could experience God directly. LSD soon became known as “the sacrament” and unsurprisingly, one popular badge in the Sixties bore the adage “God is alive in a sugar cube” – LSD soaked sugar cubes being a popular method of ingesting the drug in that decade.

Ultimately, the Establishment, that web of conservative social, political and religious ideologies, fought back. The idea of young people having access to a drug rumoured to confer instant enlightenment and spiritual freedom was abhorrent. The media, always looking for a new folk devil to exorcise, seized on LSD as the destroyer of youth, focusing only on the small number of personal disasters. Journalists, rather than exploring the success stories emanating from psychotherapists or the genuine and meaningful personality changes brought about by LSD, chose to amplify the possible dangers of a drug they knew little about.

The knock-on effect of the media offensive against LSD was that parents, with little knowledge of LSD, believed if their children took the drug they would be on the road to addiction or worse. Church leaders found the idea of instant enlightenment shallow and contrary to the ethics of Judeo-Christian religious belief, political administrations saw no purpose in a drug that encouraged people to live and think in a radically different way to that considered normal. The
idea
of LSD had grown out of all proportion to the substance itself and had, for the majority of society, become a demon, a barbarian at the doors of everyday consciousness and normality.

This intense barrage of ill-informed opinion and prejudice led to LSD being declared illegal in Britain in late 1966. Since then it has remained on the statute books as one of the most dangerous illegal drugs, ranked with heroin, cocaine and morphine. This contentious decision was based, as we will see, on the flimsiest of reasoning. LSD is not addictive and only a handful of deaths have been attributed to it. How the British Establishment has dealt with LSD is a prima face example of a
society’s inability to deal intelligently and consistently with consciousness-changing drugs.

Society’s relationship with drugs is complex. Humans have used substances that alter consciousness for millennia. In his book
The Long Trip: a prehistory of psychedelia
, Paul Devereux traces the history of intoxicants into distant pre-history. The Sumerians recorded their use of opium as long ago as circa 5000 BC, predating the earliest record of humans’ favourite drug, alcohol, which dates from 3500 BC. It seems that plants and fungi that cause hallucinatory phenomena have been used in every culture since the earliest times; the human desire to change consciousness has, it seems, always been a motivating factor in societies.
⁵