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Thread: Was Timothy Leary right?
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04.25.07, 01:56 PM #1
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Was Timothy Leary right?
Are psychedelics good for you? It's such a hippie relic of a question that it's almost embarrassing to ask. But a quiet psychedelic renaissance is beginning at the highest levels of American science, including the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and Harvard, which is conducting what is thought to be its first research into therapeutic uses of psychedelics (in this case, Ecstasy) since the university fired Timothy Leary in 1963. But should we be prying open the doors of perception again? Wasn't the whole thing a disaster the first time?
The answer to both questions is yes. The study of psychedelics in the '50s and '60s eventually devolved into the drug free-for-all of the '70s. But the new research is careful and promising. Last year two top journals, the Archives of General Psychiatry and the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, published papers showing clear benefits from the use of psychedelics to treat mental illness. Both were small studies, just 27 subjects total. But the Archives paper--whose lead author, Dr. Carlos Zarate Jr., is chief of the Mood and Anxiety Disorders Research Unit at NIMH--found "robust and rapid antidepressant effects" that remained for a week after depressed subjects were given ketamine (colloquial name: Special K or usually just k). In the other study, a team led by Dr. Francisco Moreno of the University of Arizona gave psilocybin (the merrymaking chemical in psychedelic mushrooms) to obsessive-compulsive-disorder patients, most of whom later showed "acute reductions in core OCD symptoms." Now researchers at Harvard are studying how Ecstasy might help alleviate anxiety disorders, and the Beckley Foundation, a British trust, has received approval to begin what will be the first human studies with LSD since the 1970s.
Psychedelics chemically alter the way your brain takes in information and may cause you to lose control of typical thought patterns. The theory motivating the recent research is that if your thoughts are depressed or obsessive, the drugs may reveal a path through them. For Leary and his circle--which influenced millions of Americans to experiment with drugs--psychedelics' seemingly boundless possibilities led to terrible recklessness. There's a jaw-dropping passage in last year's authoritative Leary biography by Robert Greenfield in which Leary and two friends ingest an astonishing 31 psilocybin pills in Leary's kitchen while his 13-year-old daughter has a pajama party upstairs. Stupefied, one of the friends climbs into the girl's bed and has to be pulled from the room.
A half-century later, scientists hope to unstitch psychedelic research from their forebears' excesses. Even as the Clinical Psychiatry paper trumpets psilocybin's potential for "powerful insights," it also urges caution. The paper suggests psilocybin only for severe OCD patients who have failed standard therapies and, as a last resort, may face brain surgery. Similarly, subjects can't take part in the Ecstasy trials unless their illness has continued after ordinary treatment.
Antidrug warriors may argue that the research will lend the drugs an aura of respectability, prompting a new round of recreational use. That's possible, but today we have no priestly Leary figure spewing vertiginous pro-drug proclamations. Instead we have a Leary for a less naive age: Richard Doblin. Also a Harvard guy--his Ph.D. is in public policy--Doblin founded the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) in 1986 to help scientists get funding and approval to study the drugs. (Doblin, 53, says he was too shy for the '60s, but he was inspired by the work of psychologist Stanislav Grof, who authored a 1975 book about promising LSD research--research that ended with antidrug crackdowns.) Doblin has painstakingly worked with intensely skeptical federal authorities to win necessary permissions. MAPS helped launch all four of the current Ecstasy studies, a process that took two decades. It's the antithesis of Leary's approach.
All drugs have benefits and risks, but in psychedelics we have been tempted to see only one or the other. Not anymore.
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04.25.07, 02:46 PM #2
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I had drinks with the good doctor back when he was doing that tour with G Gordon Liddy.
You know what he told me?
He said that if he had to do it all over again he would have kept his mouth shut. Why? He said that the fact it that the majority of people are just too stupid to do LSD.
I had much more respect for him after that."Nothing is ever what it seems but everything is exactly what it is." - B. Banzai
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04.26.07, 08:23 AM #3
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I don't do drugs anymore but LSD was my favorite. Many wonderful experiences while tripping.
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04.26.07, 08:36 AM #4
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Just say no to drugs!!!
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04.26.07, 08:38 AM #5
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Most important thing to remember if you ever decide to try LSD is be with people you know and trust. It could be the difference in having a good trip or a bad trip. Oh, and don't have any plans for at least 12 hours
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04.26.07, 10:56 AM #6
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Yeah we always would have a sober person chaperone us around when tripping. We used to go to some pretty screwed up places to be tripping and wanted to be safe. I remember one time I started walking in the surf of the North Sea because I could hear music and wanted to hear it better. Thankfully my friend pulled me out while I was up to my waist in 50 degree water.
Yeah when tripping you really can't make plans for about 24 hours. 12 for tripping and 12 for recovering.
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04.26.07, 11:13 AM #7
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Nobody makes good, high quality LSD anymore. In today's world, what is mis-named "acid" is little more than brain eating rat poison, which ultimately never breaks down in one's system.
The idea that something someone did as a lark in college may come back at an inopportune time (such as when the student is years later conducting brain surgery) is a tad frightening, wouldn't you agree?"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."George Bernard Shaw
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04.26.07, 12:10 PM #8
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i owe a awful lot to lsd, or the thought patterns that i developed under the influence.
that being said, i don't think you can pay me enough to take it at this stage in my life.
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04.26.07, 12:14 PM #9
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04.26.07, 01:31 PM #10
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In 1983 at the ripe old age of 18 I dropped a hit of purple microdot acid, along with 4 other friends on the way to the Judas Priest (Screaming for Vengeance tour) concert. the opening act was a band called Heaven. Its funny sometimes how this event is so vivid and clear as a bell in my mind even to this day. I did fine through the show for the most part. We were close to the stage ( general admission in those days) and I remember being blown away by the band, Halford and that incredible metal voice, guitar solos, beating the Harley with the leather whip, scantily clad honeys everywhere...etc...and those fucking pyros
Anyway, in the parking lot afterwards, my seemingly peaceful acid journey began to become a little more surreal. I recall thinking heavy shit like: why god gave us music and fully understanding the complexities of the decision to do so. he obviously knew that we needed such a medium for it to exist right? Keep in mind my early church upbringing here in the bible belt
Then I begin to imagine that Satan had infiltrated the music gift that god had given us and that I had just partaken in a demonic ritual that I must be punished for immeadiately. So all of the sudden I began to imagine that my mom was going to be dead when I got home. I seriously fucking believed this. Then I became physically violent toward my friends to the point where thay had to physically restrain me in the back seat of the car. Then I began to imagine that all my buddies ( since they were holding me down and touching me) were fucking gay. And they were going to beat my ass because I wouldn't be gay with them.
Long story short, when I did finally get home that night my mom wasn't dead but was highly pissed and scared of my erratic behaviour, called the cops, who kindly escorted me to the emergency room where I was administered Valium.
I really didn't do it too many more times after that but did experience a few really good trips where all I did was laugh my ass off for hours (watching porn on fast forward). The good trips were spent lounging around the house with friends of like mind and nowhere to go.
Last edited by weesfreewheelin; 04.26.07 at 01:51 PM.
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04.26.07, 02:15 PM #11
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yeah... i'm just guessing here, but i think your experience that night was probably more than partially due to the bible belt upbringing...
drugs like that tend to just turn the amp up to 11.
i had a pretty intense fundamental upbringing as well, and hallucinogens carried a little bolder punch for me as well, seeing as how under that influence you're as close to the "spirit world" as you've ever been... and if your spirituality was tainted by "fanaticism"...well, you reap what you sew... (queue new rush track armor and sword...
that being said, using those experiences to turn inwards 180 degrees from where i had been was an invaluable experience and i am stronger person for it.
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