A Novelist's Personal Experience

"... Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different ... No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question ..."

This question raised by psychologist William James more than half-a-century ago is no longer academic. The use of new drugs that bring about "these other forms of consciousness" has become an explosive issue in scientific, medical, religious, and educational circles and a source of increasing fascination for the public. James was led to consider the question while reporting on the powers of nitrous oxide, commonly known as laughing gas, to "stimulate the mystical consciousness" and today such stimulation by newer types of "hallucinogenic" -- or hallucination-producing -- drugs such as mescaline, LSD and psilocybin is being explored by growing numbers of amateur as well as professional experimenters. Psychologists, hipsters, ministers, mental patients, movie stars, housewives and college students have taken these drugs in the past several years, with results ranging from hellish to heavenly -- as well as nothing more than ordinary nausea.

The interest as well as the controversy stirred by these substances has grown ever since the accidental discovery of LSD 25 (the shorthand name for lysergic acid diethylamide) in 1943 and scientists were faced with the problem, as candidly described in a medical journal, of "what to do with it." Writing more than a decade after its discovery, the researcher wryly noted that the drug had already been used for "almost everything from distorting spider webs and scaring salamanders to 'shaking up' psychological trainees or having LSD social parties, to curing schizophrenia." (continued overleaf)Wakefield(continued) The various hallucinogens (they are similar in make-up and effects) have also been used, or proposed for use in the future, as a cure for alcoholism, a means of transcending what has been called the dim and drab world of everyday existence, a therapeutic aid in treating neurotics, a means of instant self-understanding, a spur to creative activity, the key to a modern religious revival, and a substitute for cigarettes. This promise-filled horizon, however, is clouded by the darker effects of the drugs that have led to a strong editorial "warning" in a recent issue of the AMA's Archives of General (continued overleaf)Wakefield(continued) Psychiatry that "Latent psychotics are disintegrating under the influence of even single doses [of LSD]; long-continued LSD experiences are subtly creating a pathology. Psychic addiction is being developed and the lay public is looking for psychiatrists who specialize in its administration." The editorial concluded by cautioning the psychiatric profession that "greater morbidity, and even mortality, is in store for its patients unless controls are developed against the unwise use of LSD 25."

While widespread public interest in these drugs is a recent phenomenon, hallucinogens have been used in their natural forms for at least 3000 years. It may seem a wonder that men ever got around to such mundane pursuits as plowing and planting at all after finding the artificial paradises offered by the hallucinogens; but Gordon Wasson, a banker who has gained renown through his study of mushrooms, believes that rather than holding man back, the hallucinogens (especially the mushroom varieties) were probably responsible for the origins of human culture.

Banker Wasson brought new scientific attention to the powers of the mushroom when he journeyed to a remote Mexican village in Oaxaca province in 1953, and discovered the hallucinating "sacred mushrooms" (psilocybe mexicana) which had been providing the natives with visions for more than four centuries. They transported Wasson as well, taking him to realms of the mind such as one he reported when "I saw a mythological beast drawing a regal chariot. Later it was as though the walls of our house had dissolved, and my spirit flown forth, and I was suspended in midair viewing landscapes of mountains."

Wasson's reports excited scientists, who soon synthesized the active chemicals into psilocybin, the newest of the hallucinatory drugs, and stimulated fresh interest in its chemical companions. Though mushrooms lately have attracted more historical interest than the other hallucinogens, they are only one of a galaxy of flowers, roots, seeds and plants that men have used in all ages and all parts of the world to escape to a world of visions; there are 13 phantastica (the original botanical name given to the hallucinogens) used by the Indians of Mexico alone. Peruvian Indians prepare a hallucinating brew from a jungle vine called caapi or yajé, and natives in the Orinoco basin use a hallucinatory snuff known as yopo.

Until very recently the only interest that people of advanced civilizations took in these practices was trying to stop them. Spanish conquistadors outlawed the rites of the sacred mushrooms among (continued on page 200)Wakefield(continued from page 88) the Indians of Mexico, with the result that the practice went underground and was altered mainly by the addition of Roman Catholic symbolism to the ceremony. The U. S. Bureau of Indian Affairs and assorted Christian missionaries met with similar results when they tried to stamp out the Peyote religion of the Indians of the Southwest. The principle effect of nearly half a century of trying to suppress this native religious cult was that Jesus Christ replaced the thunderbird as the main object of worship in the ritual. But at least one man who heard about the vision-making powers of the Indians' peyote was more interested in learning about the drug than in suppressing it. Neurologist Weir Mitchell, a friend of Walt Whitman, chewed the "mescal buttons" of the peyote cactus in the late 19th Century and reported: "Stars, delicate floating films of color, then an abrupt rush of countless points of white light swept across the field of view, as if the unseen millions of the Milky Way were to flow in a sparkling river before my eyes ... zigzag lines of very bright colors ... the wonderful loveliness of swelling clouds of more vivid colors gone before I could name them."

Mitchell's enthusiastic descriptions of the provinces of peyote aroused the interest of William James, and were even tantalizing enough to cause Havelock Ellis to take time out from his studies of sex to investigate hallucinatory mysteries. A few scattered scientists took up the threads of this early research, but the recent explosion of interest in hallucinogens didn't occur until a chemist in Switzerland took one by mistake -- a mistake that has, in the words of one medical expert, "precipitated the whole field of biochemistry into a new look at the brain."

One April afternoon in 1943, Dr. Albert Hofmann was in his laboratory in Basel working on a new compound of lysergic acid, derived from a common fungus called ergot. Unknowingly, he swallowed some of this powerful chemical. He began to feel dizzy, decided that he must be ill, and went home. It was soon clear that his illness was not an ordinary one, for when he went to bed he found himself "in a not unpleasant state of drunkenness which was characterized by an extremely stimulating fantasy. When I closed my eyes (the daylight was most unpleasant to me) I experienced fantastic images of an extraordinary plasticity. They were associated with an intense kaleidoscopic play of colors. After about two hours this condition disappeared."

Suspecting that this experience might have been caused by the drug he was working with. Dr. Hofmann took some intentionally several days later. This time the effects struck him "like a bolt of lightning," and when he got on his bicycle to go home, time and space seemed out of joint. The short distance he had to peddle was like a journey of thousands of miles. The drug he synthesized, LSD 25, was the first hallucinogen produced in a laboratory since Sir Humphry Davy concocted laughing gas (nitrous oxide) in 1799.

The scientific and medical interest aroused by LSD 25 set chemists to work producing other new hallucinogens given such Brave New World names as JB 239 and IT 290. As well as the work on these substances made from combinations of chemicals, research was revived on mescaline, synthesized from the mescal buttons of the peyote cactus, and more investigations were inspired when Wasson's sacred mushrooms were synthesized into psilocybin. It was soon found that these drugs were not only capable of producing hallucinations but also were believed to produce in healthy persons many of the actual symptoms experienced by schizophrenics -- the feeling of being divided into two separate beings, distortions of time, space and sound, and a tremendous intensity of colors and light (one former patient described the state of schizophrenia as "the country of lit-upness.")

Studying the effects of these model psychoses produced by mescaline sulfate, two Canadian doctors advanced the theory that schizophrenia was caused by a substance similar to mescaline produced in the body during times of stress. This revolutionary idea opened up whole new avenues of attack on schizophrenia, the mental disease that has been described as "the greatest of all public health problems," and also set off resounding theoretical warfare about the causes of mental illness.

Freud-scoffers used the new theory to argue that all mental problems were the result of physical disorders, and that a middle-aged man's melancholia, for instance, was produced by a bad chemical in his system rather than bad treatment from his mother at the age of three. Yet Freud himself had said that "Psychoanalysis never claimed that there were no organic factors in the psychoses ... It is the biochemist's task to find out what these are ... So long as organic factors remain inaccessible, analysis leaves much to be desired."

Recent reports have increasingly disputed the model-psychoses theory of the hallucinogens and more interest has been shown in their use as an aid in psychotherapy to facilitate insight into the patient's problems. But most doctors still consider hallucinatory drugs too dangerous and unpredictable for widespread use in treatment. Until quite recently, reports of such treatment were limited to medical journals, but in 1962 one of the small number of patients to undergo therapy with LSD wrote a confessionlike book about her experience which may yet start a general clamor for chug therapy from thousands of American women. The author, a housewife and mother, describes in vivid detail how she was cured of sexual frigidity.

Constance A. Newland, the pseudonym of the author of Myself and I was "a widow of respectable age and weight and height, in excellent health, who loved and cared for her children by pursuing a career as a writer" when she volunteered for a psychotherapeutic experiment with LSD. She had been through an orthodox psychoanalysis, but still had not overcome her frigidity. Under LSD Miss Newland plunged back into childhood traumas and fantasies, pursuing their meaning with the help of the therapist and recording the details of her sessions in extensive notes. She later used these to write her book, in which there are chapters titled, "The Closed Up Clam," "The Purplish Poison Peapod," and "The Slim Black Nozzle." After struggling through nearly every fearful Freudian fantasy imaginable, Miss Newland finally found fulfillment with a fantasized man who looked like Michelangelo's statue of David:

"Somehow ... somehow ... in the act of love ... I became both David the Man and Myself the Woman. Together we reached ecstasy, twin ecstasy. And together we dissolved, in ecstasy, into the Energy which exists before Matter. And there, in pure Energy, was All-Knowledge, miraculous realm where I wanted to linger and linger--"

Miss Newland, however, returned to her household and a graduate course in psychology -- although with "new savor ... new meaning" in her life. The transformed author conscientiously explains that the mere taking of the drug was not what caused a cure: "It cannot be emphasized too strongly that LSD is merely an adjunct to therapy, a powerful adjunct which should be administered only by skilled psychotherapists." Her caution about the drug is underscored in an introduction by Dr. R. A. Sandison, who emphasizes that "It must be remembered that we are still far from perfecting this treatment, and that if its many dangers arc to be avoided it must be carried out in a hospital or clinic environment by skilled therapists."

Reports from such experimental clinics indicate a variety of results, but hopeful signs have come from some of them: A Canadian hospital treating hard-core alcoholics with LSD therapy showed results of 100 cases with 52 "much improved," 29 "improved" and 19 "no change." A group of English doctors found that LSD treatment helped 61 of 100 mental patients to "recover or improve," but their report in the London Journal of Mental Science stressed the enormous dangers as well as the benefits of this new type of treatment.

The English doctors pointed out that the drugs make the symptoms of real psychotics even worse, but can sometimes produce dramatic results in helping psychoneurotics (like the formerly frigid Miss Newland). LSD especially has the effect of bringing back painful childhood memories, "sometimes even to the moment of birth," according to the journal of Mental Science. But the sudden raising of these long-buried thoughts, which are only extracted in psychoanalysis after years of digging, can be dangerously disturbing. The English physicians reported that "one patient attempted to strangle herself at the height of the LSD reaction," while "three others have expressed urgent desires to go and throw themselves in the nearby river, and had to be restrained from doing so."

The main difference among the three leading hallucinogens is in their potency: the synthetic LSD, strongest of all, is rated 100 times as powerful as psilocybin (derived from the Mexican mushroom) and 7000 times as powerful as mescaline (a peyote derivative). A minute speck of LSD that weighs no more than 1/200,000 of an ounce is capable of producing the hallucinogenic effects, while proportionately larger doses of the other drugs are needed to produce similar kinds of chemical experience. The time of onset of the drug's action, when taken on an empty stomach, is 20 to 30 minutes for LSD and psilocybin, and one to two hours for mescaline. The duration of the drug experience is usually eight to ten hours with LSD and mescaline, and five to six hours with psilocybin. Aside from these distinctions, the action of the drugs is similar.

Their effects are not limited to the period of intoxication, but may arise days, weeks, or even months after a person has taken them. Doctors at the University of Cambridge studying delayed reactions to mescaline reported the case of one man who had severe attacks of panic after the intoxication wore off, and another who for several months after taking the drug saw "statues in churches and museums ... move in a lifelike way." A volunteer experimenter who had no previous history of psychosis or neurosis, and only experienced a mild effect under mescaline, began to suffer from fatigue and lack of sleep several weeks after he had taken the drug.

The dangers of using hallucinogens have been reported by a number of medical researchers, but the laymen's literature on the subject has mainly been devoted to flowery reportage of spectacular visions, usually unsullied by the more unpleasant potentials of the drugs.

One exception is the French poet and painter Henri Michaux, who took mescaline and described it as a "miserable miracle." In a room of his Paris flat, Michaux took mescaline four times before recording the experience in book form, and reported that "for a complex man who has within him contradictory tendencies and urges, each experiment can be a severe test." Though none of his experiences with the drug were pleasant, the fourth time he took it he mistakenly gave himself a dose six times the amount that had transported him on the past occasions, and experienced a horribly magnified nightmare. After seeing enormous vibrating lines, Michaux records that "... I Went Under. The submergence was instantaneous. I closed my eyes to recover my visions, but, as I realized, it was no use, it was over. I had cut off that circuit. Lost at an amazing depth, I was no longer moving ... several seconds elapsed. And. suddenly, the innumerable waves of the mescalinian ocean came pouring over me and knocked me down. Kept knocking me down, knocking me down, knocking me down, knocking me down."

The great diversity of results with the drugs has led in recent years to a number of new terms to describe them. The label psychotomimetic was coined by those who found the drugs' basic result to be a mimicking of the psychoses, and this description obviously seemed inappropriate to other researchers who found the effects to be rewarding and beneficial to the user. Researchers who have found positive results from these substances have called them mysticomimetic (mimicking the mystic experience), transcendental, consciousness-expanding, psycheletic (mind-releasing) and psychedelic (mind-manifesting or mind-opening) and the latter label has stuck most permanently among the proponents of the drugs.

In the vanguard of the psychedelic school of researchers are Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, two former Harvard psychologists whose experiments with psilocybin as a consciousness-expanding agent have stirred tremendous controversy. Timothy Leary, a Ph.D. in psychology who served as research director of the Kaiser Foundation before joining the Harvard faculty as a lecturer on social psychology, and Richard Alpert, formerly assistant director of Harvard's laboratory of Human Development, began their psilocybin research in 1960 with an experiment testing the effects of the drug on maximum-security prisoners at Concord prison. In addition to this formal project, which was carried out under the auspices of Harvard's Center for Research in Personality, Leary and Alpert conducted wide-ranging investigations of their own outside the university, and by the fall of 1962 had dispensed more than 3500 doses of the drug to some 400 volunteers including doctors, artists, poets, ministers, writers, graduate students, and assorted intellectuals -- as well as themselves. They reported that 73 percent of their subjects had a "very pleasant" experience under the drug and that 95 percent said it had "changed their lives for the better."

Leary and Alpert believe that one of the key factors to a beneficial consciousness-expanding experience with psilocybin is the setting of the experiment, which for good results they say should be as relaxed, informal, and comfortable as possible, with trusted friends and beautiful surroundings -- as far removed as possible from the "institutional" atmosphere. They arranged these settings for sessions in private apartments in Boston and New York, and did their best to provide similar surroundings for their prison subjects by hauling out candles, Oriental rugs, soft mattresses and LP records to Concord prison for the psilocybin sessions. Leary and Alpert turned out enthusiastic reports on these projects as they progressed, noting in an interim account of the prison study that "while it is premature to draw conclusions, the results so far look hopeful." The report said 36 prisoners had taken the drug, 20 of them had been on parole "an average of eight months," and only 25 percent had been sent back to prison instead of the usual recidivism rate of 50 percent. Psilocybin experiments were also conducted with graduate theology students, and Walter Houston Clark of the Andover Newton Theological School wrote that "many religious people who have participated in the Harvard psilocybin research have reported their spiritual sensitivities have been expanded." Leary found that while only 10 of his original psilocybin volunteers were orthodox religious believers, more than half used such terms as "God," "divine," and "deep religious experience" to describe their feelings under the drug.

But all aspects of the experiments were not so transcendent, and as Leary and Alpert's investigations expanded, criticism of their activities began to mount. The controversy broke out publicly at a meeting of the Center for Research in Personality in March of 1962, when the Harvard Crimson reported that "opponents of the psilocybin studies claimed that the program was run nonchalantly and irresponsibly and that alleged permanent injury to participants had been ignored or underestimated." Dr. Herbert G. Kelman, a lecturer on social psychology, said in the meeting that "I question whether this project is carried out primarily as an intellectual endeavor or whether it is being pursued as a new kind of experience to offer an answer to man's ills."

By the fall of 1962 the university decided that the still new and powerful drug was too dangerous for the kind of admittedly nonmedical experimentation that Leary and Alpert were conducting; given their choice of continuing with either Harvard or hallucinogens, the two psychologists promptly chose the latter, and with private donations formed the International Federation for Internal Freedom to carry on their research. They offered membership in the organization for $10, and explained in a recruiting letter that "The relationship of our project to Harvard has always been uneasy. We were enthusiastically introducing a powerful, nonverbal, meta-intellectual agent into a community which is fervently dedicated to words and intellectuality. We appreciated and sympathized with the academy's dilemma, and congenially separated when IFIF was formed in November 1962." Whatever congeniality existed was shattered, however, for although Leary and Alpert had planned to finish out the academic year, President Nathan M. Pusey publicly fired Dr. Alpert on May 27 when it was found that he had given psilocybin to a Harvard student in violation of an agreement with the university not to involve any undergraduates in the drug research. (Leary had been dropped from the faculty in the spring for failure to show up at an honors-program committee meeting, and says he will appeal his dismissal to the American Association of University Professors.)

Leary and Alpert got in a further expression of their own view of the academic troubles in a jointly authored article for the summer 1963 issue of the Harvard Review titled "The Politics of Consciousness Expansion" in which they wrote: "Social processes: The free expansive vision is molded into the institutional. Hardly has the institutional mortar set before there is a new cortical upheaval, and explosive, often ecstatic or prophetic revelation. The prophet is promptly jailed. A hundred years later his followers are jailing the next visionary ... The university is the Establishment's apparatus for training consciousness-contractors. The intellectual ministry of defense."

Exiled from academia, Leary and Alpert have devoted their efforts to their new Internal Freedom Federation, which now has 3000 members and offices in Boston, New York, and Los Angeles. The official IFIF position, unlike that of most other investigators of hallucinogens, is that the drugs are "basically educational (rather than medical) instruments." The Federation states that its basic purpose is "to work to increase the individual's knowledge and control of his own nervous system" and believes that everyone who wants to have an experience with the psychedelic drugs should be able to do so. Dr. Walter M. Presnell, a psychiatrist who had participated in some of the psilocybin studies with Leary and Alpert, has resigned from IFIF, citing among his reasons for leaving the organization his belief that subjects should be screened for mental and physical ailments before being allowed to take the drug.

IFIF executive secretary Frank Ferguson, who gave up his graduate work in anthropology to devote full time to the Federation, elaborated on IFIF's goals by explaining that Eastern mystics had been able to gain control over their nervous systems after 20 or 30 years of study and discipline, but that "Now. with hallucinogens, there is no reason why we all can't be taught these Eastern skills in a matter of weeks." The long and arduous meditation of the mystics is not required for what Leary has described as "drug-induced satori" (the state of inner perception achieved in Zen Buddhism). This promise is of course tremendously appealing, and as Brandeis psychologist David F. Ricks commented in the Harvard Review, "People who have taken the drugs have hoped to find a quick and easy way to reach the kinds of inner experience that have in the past been available only to those who were willing to undergo the pain and work of falling in love, fasting and meditating, or learning to recall dreams and free-associate to them."

The partisans of IFIF believe that, as Ferguson put it, "In asking Tim and Dick to stop their research on psilocybin, Harvard was in effect asking them to stop experimenting with something as historically important as the wheel," and the Federation followers have done their best to keep such experimentation alive -- even by carrying the research into their daily lives. In the fall of 1962, some of the organization's leaders began an utopian-living experiment that might best be described as a "transcendental boarding house" in Newton, Massachusetts.

IFIF also had sponsored a larger experiment in chemical utopianism at the Hotel Catalina in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, in the summer of 1962 when 35 adults and nine children carried on a program of "study, retreat, recreation, and experimentation in the expansion of consciousness." But the Federation's plans to carry on a year-round program there as an "experiment in transpersonative community living" were stymied last summer when lurid reports in the Mexican press led to the expulsion of the "LSD colonists" on the technical grounds of their having engaged in unauthorized activities while visiting the country on tourist visas. Several of the IFIF leaders went afterward on a reconnaissance mission in the Caribbean to find a permanent home for their activities, and after failing to make satisfactory arrangements for the program on the British West Indian islands of Antigua and Dominique, they finally negotiated for eventual settlement on what Leary said was an "uninhabited island in the Caribbean where we will set up facilities for 60 people beginning in January of 1964."

Before their expulsion last summer from Zihuatanejo, Leary and pharmacologist Ralph Metzner and his wife had led psychedelic experiments with a group that included a stockbroker, banker, teacher, secretary, rabbi, pharmacist, editor, psychologist, actress and psychiatrist. The psychiatrist participating in the program, Dr. J. J. Downing, who has treated alcoholics at the San Mateo, California, General Hospital with LSD therapy, later evaluated the IFIF program in Zihuatanejo by saying that, "The atmosphere was highly unusual. People accepted one another without suspicion or anxiety. They seemed very open, very relaxed ... Six weeks is too short a period to measure any results. It must be regarded as a ruined experiment. My own view is that Leary and Alpert have developed techniques of potential value. But I do not agree with them that LSD should be available to all who want it. It is a potent, potentially dangerous drug, and should be used on an experimental basis only, by qualified researchers."

The question of who are "qualified researchers" has become increasingly controversial, and charges have been leveled at Leary and Alpert that their own use of the drugs has destroyed their objectivity as scientists. Dr. David C. McClelland, chairman of the Center for Research in Personality and the man who brought Leary and Alpert to Harvard, has said that the more they took the drug "the less they were interested in science." The Archives of General Psychiatry editorial warning against the dangers of the drugs noted that some researchers "who became enamored with their mystical hallucinatory state, eventually in their 'mystique' became disqualified as competent investigators." On the other hand, mushroom expert Gordon Wasson has pointed out that such charges against investigators who have taken the drug lead to the dilemma that "we are all divided into two classes: those who have taken the mushroom and are disqualified by our subjective experience and those who have not taken the mushroom and are disqualified by their total ignorance of the subject."

Timothy Leary feels that the investigator's taking of the drug is in fact essential to a true understanding of the experience: "We are engaged in what is called a transactional research design," he said. "The researcher sees himself as part of the transaction, and is an active learner in the experiment. Most American psychology today is only a description of what the researcher sees -- it is only the report of the researcher's experience in observing the subject, rather than what the subject is really experiencing. The subject-object method of research is inadequate for studies of human consciousness."

Leary feels that "People who take psychedelic drugs should take them with a trained 'guide,' " but that the guide does not necessarily have to be an M.D. "People who conduct psychedelic sessions have to be trained, just as an airplane pilot has to be trained -- but you don't have to be an M.D. to fly an airplane, or to conduct a psychedelic session." One of the aims of IFIF is to train such "guides" for dispensing the drugs, and Leary has already prepared one of a series of "training manuals" for the experience. The manual explains that the "guide" is: "The ground control in LaGuardia Tower. Always there to receive messages and queries from high-flying aircraft. Always ready to help them navigate their course, to help them reach their destination ... The pilots have their own flight plan, their own goals, and ground control is there, ever waiting to be of service."

Leary admits that not all psychedelic flights end happily, though he feels that even a bad experience can be beneficial. He explains that, "Sometimes people having a bad experience get frantic and want to go to a hospital. We have had some people in New York go to Bellevue. What happens then depends on how the doctors treat the patient. If he feels himself to be psychotic and is treated as a psychotic he may continue that way. But now most of the hospitals in major cities -- at least in New York. Boston and San Francisco -- have had enough experience with people coming in under psychedelics to know how to treat them -- give them some tranquilizers and dismiss them the next day."

Leary feels that the "training manuals" IFIF is preparing will help the psychedelic "guides" to prevent such hellish experiences, or draw the subject out of them. While working to perfect these manuals for hallucinatory "flights" and "voyages," however, IFIF is at least temporarily prevented from sending people off on them. Leary explained that the organization plans to apply for permission from the Food and Drug Administration to obtain drugs for use in their research, but the extensive application will probably not be ready for filing before the end of this year. "At the present time," Leary said this past summer, "we are purely an educational organization." In the meantime, IFIF is gathering recruits; Leary believes the psychedelic drugs offer "the best road to happiness" and he is anxious to put more people on the road.

Whether or not techniques will be perfected to guide people into the desired state of consciousness under the drugs, at the present imperfect stage of experimentation the experience may lead to neither heaven nor hell but only a purgatorial state of little or no reaction at all. Dr. Robert DeRopp has observed that the people who are unaffected by mescaline are not -- as might be assumed from some reports -- "degraded types whose 'doors of perception' are so hopelessly muddied that even the cleansing action of mescaline makes no impression on the encrusting grime." Yet just as much of Western society is likely to regard experimenters with any kind of drug as dope fiends, the hip vanguard is equally likely to look clown on all those who don't attain the artificial paradise as lacking in spiritual and intellectual endowments. Timothy Leary observed in one of his reports on the prisoners who took the drug that "a cultlike closeness and trust often developed." The cult of hallucinogenic experience has grown steadily over the past decade, especially among beats, hipsters, and assorted intellectual circles. Just as the teenage-gang kid may be tempted to move on to heroin for a bigger kick than marijuana, the intellectual pot smoker is apt to try to journey further out with mescaline, mushrooms, or LSD. For some of these people the hallucinogens have become a standard part of the paraphernalia of The Good Life. Village Voice columnist John Wilcock set forth the current components of that avant-garde version of the American Dream recently when he wrote that, "The year since I left The New York Times has been one of travel, freedom, writing, parties, girls, and discovery or rediscovery of jazz, Henry Miller, and such interesting things as mescaline, peyote and psilocybin. A life, in short, of enjoyment and involvement; almost pure hedonism."

But however negatively the hedonistic appeal of hallucinogens may be viewed, their nonmedical use in America today does not justify the fears of Weir Mitchell. when he predicted in 1898 "a perilous reign of the mescal habit when this agent becomes attainable." The current popular interest in hallucinatory drugs has more the proportions of a fad than a perilous reign, and anthropologist J. S. Slotkin was probably right when he said "I do not think that most middle-class Americans would be interested in the effects of peyote."

A great many good middle classers would probably share the view of one Marie Snyder of Wichita, Kansas, who wrote in complaint to Life magazine after it carried Gordon Wasson's description of the rites of hallucinatory mushrooms that, "Your description of the rites of hallucinatory mushrooms is an outrage to faithful Christians." But a significant minority report came in from Jane Ross of New York City, who informed the editors of Life that far-out visions were not restricted to the far-off mountains of Mexico:

Sirs: I've been having hallucinatory visions accompanied by space suspension and time destruction in my New York apartment for the past three years.

The essential difference between Mr. Wasson's visions and my own are that mine are produced by eating American-grown peyote cactus plants....

I got my peyote from a company in Texas which makes C.O.D. shipments all over the country for $8 per 100 "buttons." It usually takes about four "buttons" for one person to have visions.

There is no way to know how many people in addition to Miss Ross have suspended space and destroyed time in the comfort of their own apartments by sending mail orders to Texas, but the business in peyote buttons has at least been large enough for one Texas "floral" company to open a cacti department and go to the trouble of giving its customers peyote "recipes" along with their shipments. This may be a unique service, for even Betty Crocker doesn't provide such culinary instruction as the following from the cacti department:

Boil eight buttons about I hour, pouring off the water and replacing with fresh water. Keep the poured off water in the jug. After boiling, throw away the buttons, put the peyote water back into the pot, and boil until there is as little as 1/2 tsp. left. It is easier to use a Waring blender and a pressure cooker if you have them ...

Visionary chefs still order peyote buttons through the mail from various "floral" companies in the Southwest, though peyote has been outlawed in some states, including Massachusetts and California. Peyote is classed as "habit-forming" in the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act -- despite most medical evidence to the contrary -- and shipments that do not carry this warning can be confiscated by the Government.

The hallucinogens are not addicting, and none of them are included in the Federal Narcotics Act. Though they fall under the jurisdiction of the Federal Food and Drug Administration, their legal status is cloudy at best and the procurement of them is full of contradictions and confusion. They are classed as "new drugs," available only to "qualified" investigators -- though exactly who is qualified is not defined. Several years ago a group of Harvard undergraduates who wrote to drug companies asking for mescaline, honestly filled out a Food and Drug Administration form sent by one of the firms, and received the drug. In some places, ordinary citizens have been able to buy hallucinogenic drugs simply by going to the corner drugstore and ordering them. General ignorance about the new drugs apparently facilitates their purchase until their use becomes widespread enough in a particular place to attract unfavorable attention.

When reports of experiments with vision-producing LSD at the Psychiatric Institute of Beverly Hills got around Hollywood several years ago there was a run on the drug by local people and a crackdown ensued. Several movie notables were among the volunteer subjects of medical experiments in Beverly Hills with LSD, though the doctors in charge of the project refused to reveal their names. But Cary Grant, after taking LSD in therapy with his psychiatrist, reported his experience and said, in what the press described as a "confessional lecture" at UCLA, that "I was a sell-centered boor. I was masochistic and only thought I was happy. When I woke up and said 'There must be something wrong with me,' I grew up." Grant later elaborated to a reporter that the LSD experience had helped him grow up "because I never understood myself. How could I have hoped to understand anyone else? That's why I say that now I can truly give a woman love for the first time in my life, because I can understand her." Some years later Grant's third wife, Betsy Drake, added an unhappy ending to these revelations when she filed for divorce.

Some visionaries have been able to buy mescaline with a doctor's prescription (one bill written several years ago on the stationery of a New York pharmacy showed 10 capsules of mescaline sulfate sold for $45) and some were able to get mescaline and other hallucinogenic drugs through academic and medical experimenters. The most popular method of supply until recently was simply sending off to chemical companies in Europe, some of which sent back the drugs accompanied by a mimeographed warning about their potency. Since last winter, however, unhappy amateurs report getting nothing but "rejection slips" from the European drug houses that once shipped them hallucinogens almost as casually as aspirin.

The increase in the nonmedical use of the drugs led to a tightening of restrictions in October 1962 by the Federal Food and Drug Administration, and has apparently resulted in greater caution on the part of medical manufacturers. Sandoz Laboratories, which manufactures psilocybin, is now only supplying it to researchers whose work is carried on under Federal Government grants. But the general confusion promises to grow as more interest is aroused in these substances. An unforeseen complication was recently added by the discovery that the seeds of several types of morning-glories -- appropriately named "Heavenly Blue" and "Pearly Gates" -- produced hallucinogenic effects and an unseasonal demand for them was reported by perplexed seed stores in Boston, New York, and San Francisco. According to reports, 200 to 500 seeds ingested resulted in effects similar to those of a high dose of LSD, lasting five to eight hours. It was reported that the FDA might go to Congress to ask for amendments to the narcotics law barring morning-glories; as The New York Times explained, "Morning-glories may join marijuana as a back-yard flora non grata."

The knotty aspects of the morning-glory problem were illustrated by a brief, unofficial exchange on the subject between an FDA representative and a hallucinogenic enthusiast attempting to ascertain the possibilities of the situation.

"If I have a lot of morning-glory seeds," the citizen asked, "how do you know I don't simply intend to plant them and grow morning-glories?"

"Well," the FDA man said, "if you did that, it would be all right because the morning-glories wouldn't be a drug."

"But what if I ate them and had a hallucinogenic experience?"

"Then they would be a drug."

"So the same seeds are either a drug or not depending on what I do with them."

"Up until the time you would take them, they would not be a drug; after you take them, they're a drug."

While these seemingly metaphysical problems are being worked out, a black market in hallucinogens is growing. The most popular product is a lump of sugar containing LSD, psilocybin or mescaline that sells for a dollar, and reportedly these have been purchased in New York, San Diego, and Cambridge. The summer 1963 issue of the Harvard Review, stated that the sugar-lump business that sprang up a year before had grown to include other products: "This year mescaline and psilocybin may both be had, though at prices well above their value in legal trade. A large black market in the drugs has sprung up, particularly in university communities." Dr. Dana L. Farnsworth, director of Harvard University Health Services, and Dean John U. Monro of Harvard College, have alerted students to the dangers of mind-distorting drugs and warned that ingestion of such substances as LSD, mescaline and psilocybin "may result in serious hazard to the mental health and stability even of apparently normal persons. The drugs have been known to intensify seriously a tendency toward depression and to produce other dangerous psychotic effects."

Many people who have found an artificial paradise in the hallucinogens are anxious to continue their chemical pilgrimages, even if it means buying them through the new hallucinatory black market. The IFIF people say they will fight to make the drugs available on the open market to all who want them, arguing that the internal freedom some people find through the drug is a personal and not a governmental matter.

A number of writers and artists have experimented with their work while under the influence of hallucinogens, and medical studies have been made in an attempt to determine whether the drugs really have the power sometimes claimed for them of stimulating the creative process. Perhaps one of the most interesting pieces of narrative produced under the influence of hallucinatory drugs is the following stream-of-consciousness passage:

Doctor, where have you been? I'm Alabama bound! I'm carbamino bound. I suggested that to Bruce to use it in the show. Bruce-Brusl. That's breast in German. Yeah. Bard Hall. Bard Hall. Leon M. Bard. Loeb. Loeb. Kuhn-Loeb. I was at the Jewish museum yesterday and all those people had medallions. Jones of microbiology used to say "No levity in the autopsy room." I love to play tennis. Tennis. Tennis. Six love, love six. I love you.

Though this passage might well have been found in any number of post-Joycean novels, it was actually transcribed from the monolog of a medical student participating in an experiment with psilocybin. The possibilities thus opened to avant-garde novelists by the use of a tape recorder and a bottle of psilocybin pills seems enormous, but all this may not be a true gauge of the worth of drugs for conscious creative activity. The possibilities of becoming a Matisse by means of mescaline, for instance, seem rather slight, on the evidence of two medical studies reporting the effects of hallucinogens on painters. One medical study of a single painter's work under LSD concluded that the pictures he produced with the aid of the drug "do not contain any new elements in the creative sense, but reflect psychopathological manifestations of the type observed in schizophrenia." (Italics in text.) Another study of the work of four artists while intoxicated with mescaline, and, at another time with LSD, found that though the works were judged by other artists to have "greater aesthetic value" than work produced by the same men without the drugs, "the benefits derived ... were offset by the difficulties these subjects had in mobilizing their perceptions and energies in the pursuit of creative art." While under the drug, three of the artists "reported that they did not want to concentrate on their work, but only wanted to 'look and feel ...' "

Creative work is not the only activity of the ordinary world that people are likely to lose interest in while under the influence of hallucinating drugs. Some people transported by hallucinogens find that even such a highly fascinating human activity as sex seems to be too much trouble to bother with. Medical studies in fact have reported that hallucinogens possess anaphrodisiac qualities -- but this may be due to the antisexual atmosphere of the hospital setting where such studies were conducted rather than to an actual property of the drug. A number of free-lance experimenters have reported on sexual pleasures while using the drug, and one connoisseur explained that, "While these drugs are not actually aphrodisiacs-- that is they don't specifically stimulate the user to sexual activity -- a good experience with the drugs heightens and intensifies all experience, and just as one can enjoy music and art during the experience with a new and deeper appreciation, so one can do the same with sex -- it can be a beautiful experience under the drug." Such an experience, the connoisseur explained, of course takes place when the parties involved are attuned and desirous of the experience, and quite disturbing scenes have arisen from attempts at secret seduction by such drug doses on an unsuspecting female: "She doesn't know what's happening, and is likely to go screaming out into the street." David Ricks, a psychologist at Brandeis University, noted in the Harvard Review that, "I know from direct reports that the drugs have at times been used as consciousness-suspending aids to seductions and other manipulations of an extremely messy sort."

According to unpublished material from the now-defunct Harvard Psilocybin Project, "Objective data about sexual reactivity" to the drugs "is classically difficult to obtain." While acknowledging that, "The early studies from psychological laboratories and psychiatric clinics reported that psychedelic drugs were not aphrodisiac," the study maintains, "More recently, evidence obtained from more than 25 married couples taking psilocybin or LSD in their own homes seems to indicate that psychedelic substances can provide extraordinary intensification and broadening of all types of sensory experience, including the sexual.

"There are many factors involved among which some of the most important are release from neurotic blocks which enable the person to achieve healthy, mature sexual responses, and profound feelings of interpersonal communion and unity which endow every action with beauty and significance. The increased sensitivity and awareness not only enhances the pleasurable aspects of sexual experience but also makes only too evident any manipulatory or crude seductive action on the part of any individual in the session.

"The expansion of the subjective time sense is another factor contributing to the intensity of the experience." The study establishes that subjects regularly report that one moment of clock time in an LSD session can be an eternity of ecstasy, and that: "There is a complex relation between dosage and the type of experience. With low dosages (less than 100 gamma LSD), subjects report interpersonal intimacy and heightened genital responsiveness. With higher dosages, new forms of sexual experience are reported. These involve awareness of more basic forms of biological processes. Subjects tend to use such extravagant-sounding phrases as 'cellular orgasm,' 'pulsating energy patterns,' 'internal fire flow,' 'melting and flowing of the entire body,' etc., in their descriptions of these experiences. These reports, interestingly enough, are quite similar to the accounts given by adepts of Kundalini Yoga and certain forms of Tantrism."

Again, as with most other aspects of the drugs, both hellish and heavenly experiences can result in sex as well as other activities. Depending on the setting and the intent of the users, communal consumption of the drug might result in love-making, or in what Havelock Ellis described as an "orgy of vision" rather than sex. A hallucinogen party will not, by definition, look like a scene from La Dolce Vita but may, to an unhallucinated observer, bear more resemblance to an especially slow-moving Beckett play. At one of these informal rites held recently in a New York apartment, an intellectual medicine man passed out the sacred mushrooms, in the form of psilocybin pills, to five volunteer consumers, including two writers and one former alcoholic. The experimenter dispensing the pills was a firm believer in the all-round curative powers of the mushroom drug, and enthusiastically explained to the uninitiated visitor that the alcoholic had been taking the pills all weekend (it was Sunday night) and hadn't had any desire to drink, while one of the writers who had been under the influence of the mushrooms for the same period had not once shown his usual hostility. In addition to these excellent psychological effects, the dispenser said the pills were also good for creativity, and, perhaps to illustrate this aspect of the drug, he fed one of the writers additional pills and handed him a pencil and paper. The writer leaned forward groggily, pulled up a chair, and placed the piece of paper on it. Dispenser and visitor looked on expectantly, and after several minutes of intense concentration, the writer bore down with the pencil and drew a series of straight lines across the paper; then, after studying his work, he turned the paper around and drew another series of lines across the lines he had already made. He handed this creation to the dispenser, who looked at it, laughed rather nervously, and went in to give more pills to the others. After a while two of the mushroomers lay down on mattresses on the floor (separate mattresses) and three others sat leaning on the kitchen table, listening to a jazz record. One of the men at the table turned to the fellow next to him and said, "Man, you know what this is like?" The second man asked "What?" and the first one said, "It's like being on a rocket ship." The second man drowsily pondered this thought and said "Yeah, that's what it's like." The two men did not appear to the visitor as if they were on a rocket ship, and he smiled. A girl at the table saw the smile and said: "You've just had a break-through!"

A number of people claim to have indeed gained profound and soul-soothing "break-throughs" with the aid of the hallucinatory drugs, and feel that the artificial paradise is the best one -- perhaps the only one -- available to mortals.

Of course the products of the chemical revolution might be used for fiendish as well as divine purposes -- already the powers of the hallucinogens are being investigated for their potential as a weapon of war. The Army Chemical Corps has studied LSD along with other drugs that upset the normal functioning of the brain and they are therefore put in the military category of "incapacitating drugs." It has been reported that a pound of LSD dropped into a city's water supply could produce a psychosis of the population that would last long enough for enemy troops to take over -- though there might be bizarre and unforeseen problems involved in the invasion of a city of schizophrenics. On an individual cloak-and-dagger level, there is always the possibility of putting one of those LSD sugar lumps into the ambassador's espresso and watching him writhe with psychotic visions (perhaps re-enacting some childhood trauma) at some crucial historic moment.

But the dangers of a chemical heaven still seem a greater problem -- perhaps even a greater threat -- to the future than the dangers of a chemical hell. There are those, after all, who agree with Dostoievsky that a life of complete satisfaction would be an intolerable bore. But perhaps when the chemical millennium arrives there will be a way to purchase certain black-market pills that will produce just a little bit of tension. Such drugs will have to be bought under the counter, authorities will crack down on the illicit traffic, poets will pen hymns to the invigorating effects of pill-produced tension, civil libertarians will protest the Government's right to ban the drug, and those who really want it will somehow or other be able to get it -- perhaps by sending oil to a mail-order house in Texas or even by swallowing the seeds of some seemingly innocuous vine growing in their own back yards.