White and Wild by wilshire|oneWhy We Need LSD
“I think that in human evolution it has never been as necessary to have this substance LSD,” said Hofmann. “It is just a tool to turn us into what we are supposed to be.”
In January 2006, a major symposium was held in Basle, Switzerland to celebrate the life and work of Albert Hoffman, the Swiss scientist who discovered LSD. The event was timed to coincide with Mr Hoffman’s 100th birthday – a fact that has come as a big surprise to those who have long thought of LSD as just another nasty synthetic drug, the use of which would inevitably lead to madness, brain damage or worse. The opposite appears to be true. Here is a man who has ingested large doses of LSD ‘dozens of times’ and gone on to live to a ripe old age, retaining a sharp intellect and undimmed passion for the substance he refers to as ‘my problem child’.
Over the decades since the sixties, LSD has become a societal taboo. A subject not to be raised in polite society. Intrepid psychonauts with the temerity to openly discuss the substance receive withering glances from those quite happy to ingest other, more damaging substances such as Cocaine and MDMA. It seems that in a world obsessed by appearance and surface impressions, there is no room for the deep and sacred. Indeed, the average citizen of the so called developed world can measure their own prestige by the accumulation of material possessions and total divorce from the natural world. From house to car to office, the average human experiences nature as that bothersome force that damages property, slows down the commute and puts leaves on the line.
This is the problem. As Mr Hoffman himself has said “It is very dangerous to lose touch with nature”. And this is why we need LSD. Of course, any substance as powerful as LSD (which is the most powerful substance known to man, active at only 200 millionths of a gram) can be very dangerous if used without due care and attention. Many people have experienced a ‘bad trip’, usually because of the lack of proper supervision, or ingestion in the wrong environment.
If used carefully and respectfully, by adults, LSD seems to communicate a message of love and planetary unity. To see the world on LSD is to see the world anew. It is as though the inner child is awoken for a brief period, allowing the soul to once again experience nature as if seen for the first time. But this is not all that LSD engenders.
It seems to want us to link together with each other all over the planet. There also seems to be a relationship between LSD, computers and the Internet. It seems to say, ‘this is the intended path for evolution. Make your connections, communicate’. In his 2005 book, ‘What the dormouse said’, New York Times columnist John Markoff drew attention to the fact that many of the original movers and shakers behind what became the PC revolution have experimented with LSD. Apple Computer founder Steve Jobs has said that LSD was one of the most important experiences of his life, and even Bill Gates himself has acknowledged using the substance in his younger days.
So why is LSD taboo? To answer this, we need to look back to the time when LSD was a new and exciting substance that had yet to be unleashed upon the World at large. Sandoz, the pharmaceutical company that employed Hoffman began to market LSD as a tool for psychiatrists. Sandoz believed that the state of LSD intoxication closely resembled that experienced by schizophrenics and thought that important insights into the condition might be gained if mental health professionals could actually experience madness first hand for themselves.
In order to test the validity of this theory, Sandoz sent supplies of LSD around the world to facilitate testing of the substance in the real world. Before long, word began to spread about this miraculous substance. An American named Al Hubbard (Who subsequently became known as ‘the Johnny Appleseed of LSD’), secured a supply and began to visit famous intellectuals, artists and writers in order to let them try the substance for themselves. At around this time, there had been an emerging interest in substances such as mescaline and psylocybin, and there was an appetite amongst the intellectuals for new psychedelic experience. Of those turned on by Hubbard, one of the most famous was Aldous Huxley, who immediately saw the potential for positive social change from LSD. But there was a difference in Huxley’s vision from that which would emerge during the LSD fuelled 1960’s. Huxley believed that LSD was such a powerful psychedelic, it would be too dangerous to hand out to just anybody. Instead, he envisaged a situation where the drug would be made available to those best equipped to both cope with the effects, and transmit their findings back to the rest of humanity. He believed that those people were the artists, writers and intellectuals – the very people he himself could most easily identify with.
Unfortunately, Huxley was not to have his way. Thanks to the likes of Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey, with their absolute conviction that LSD was too important to reserve for the elite, the substance was destined for mass dissemination. The resulting cultural tidal wave gave rise to what we now know as ‘The Sixties’ but also to numerous casualties. Middle class commentators were outraged at what they saw as the destruction of American youth, and harsh new laws were soon passed all over the world, making LSD a schedule 1 controlled substance carrying penalties of up to life in prison for those caught in possession.
Interestingly, it is reported that Tim Leary said ‘Huxley was right’ while on his death bed. When he died, his body was cremated and the ashes launched into space. (Interesting fact: Tim Leary was the first to coin the term ‘Internet’).
Back to the present day, and the situation has not changed, despite a brief resurgence in popularity of LSD during the early 1990s during which time I attended A Cycle in the Park at Hyde Park in London, when large numbers of people took LSD and cycled around in an extremely chaotic fashion to mark the 50th anniversary of the discovery of LSD, which of course was first famously experienced by Albert Hoffman while cycling home from work.
So here we are at the beginning of a new millennium, and although we have gained much from the psychedelic 60’s, the planet and our very survival appear to be in peril. I believe that LSD offers us the best hope of waking up humanity to the real, sacred nature of reality, and in doing so, saving us all from ourselves.
“What is it about it that scares people so deeply? Even the guy that invented it? Because they are afraid that there is more to reality than they have confronted, that there are doors that they’re afraid to go in – and they don’t want us to go in there either, because if we go in, we might learn something that they don’t know and that makes us a little out of their control…”
Ken Kesey
Taken from the 1986 BBC Documentary ‘LSD – The Beyond Within’
