Downloaded from YTS.MX
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
>> I felt this connection with everything,
especially with nature.
>> I have understood for a long time that change is part
of the essential nature of the universe and that I've always
been afraid of change.
But today, I felt deeply that change is a gift.
>> I wish I could put it into words.
It was a sense of connectedness that runs through all of us
and also a sense of the strength of it and the power of it.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
>> Mystical experience has been a part of human nature as far
as we know.
And most major religions and religion traditions,
at the core, were about a mystical experience.
Mysticism is unlike a belief in something or knowledge
based on what someone tells you.
It's the direct experience of that thing,
what's been called the ground of being, to quote, Paul Tillich,
or all that is, [NON-ENGLISH] in Hinduism, or in Christianity,
Christ-consciousness.
It's a direct experience with all
that is with nature, with God, as some would call it.
>> The word psychedelic means "mind manifesting,"
and it came from a poem.
"To fathom hell or sorrow angelic,
just take a pinch of psychedelic."
>> The word psychedelic was coined by a psychiatric
researcher named Humphry Osmond in a letter to author Aldous
Huxley in 1956, before Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey,
or the hippie movement.
And yet the use of psychedelics goes back long
before the 20th century.
For as long as humans have been roaming the Earth,
they've ingested and worshipped these mysterious plants.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
>> In the 16th and 17th centuries,
when the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the New World,
they were horrified by what they observed.
They saw the native people using a vast pharmacopeia
of native plants for purposes of healing and divination.
And this was entirely in conflict
with the orthodox, rigid belief system
that conquistadors brought with them.
>> The mushroom ceremonies happened at night.
They involved invoking spirits, divining the future,
looking for lost things.
And there were women who were doing the ceremonies as well
as men.
So so many things, probably, about that culture
was shocking.
And certainly, in Christianity, the power
is given to priests who speak on behalf of God.
And so the thing that is scary about psychedelics
is that it gives power directly to people.
>> The inquisition, in the year 1616,
formally condemned the use of hallucinogenic plants
and stated that the punishment for anyone who would use such
plants, whether they be natives or immigrant Spaniards,
was death by the cruelest methods available.
>> 1938.
[ENGINES WHINING]
>> In 1938, as Europe stood on the brink of world war,
a chemist working for a pharmaceutical company
in Switzerland made a most unusual discovery,
one that would alter the course of human events to come.
>> Albert Hofmann was, from a young person,
very focused on nature, kind of a nature mystic almost.
And he worked at Sandoz Pharmaceutical Companies.
And they were looking-- in 1938 is when he invented LSD.
It was also from ergot, which is a fungus that
grows on wheat and barley.
He was looking at various compounds
where he could start with what was in ergot
and manipulate them in different ways.
And LSD-25 was the 25th variation.
And in 1943, five years later, he
had what he called a peculiar presentiment that there was
something worthwhile in LSD-25.
>> He accidentally ingested some,
because you don't need that much LSD to get into your system.
And he had a really unexpected experience.
It wasn't anything that blew his mind,
but it was enough that he paid attention.
>> It was on a Friday.
And so he went home over the weekend.
And on Monday, April 19, 1943, he
decided that he would do a planned experiment,
and he would take an amount that he
said was so small that he thought nothing would happen.
But he wanted to be extra cautious.
And that turned out to be 250 micrograms,
250 millionths of a gram.
>> Which 100 micrograms is usually enough for someone
who's naive to LSD to have a full-blown experience.
>> Some of the symptoms occurred immediately,
and very soon to become very, very strong, very intense.
And I became anxious, and I asked my laboratory assistant
to accompany me home.
And then, we went home by bicycle because it was wartime,
and of course, I had no car.
And I reported about this bicycle ride
because I had the feeling that time would stand still.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
>> It's quite an extraordinary property of LSD,
and yet that's a very, very deep meaning.
If you have such a deep affect of your whole body,
of your consciousness, of your senses,
LSD must attack the very center of our psychic existence.
>> Hofmann feared that his nightmare would never end,
that he had permanently damaged his mind,
and wondered what his wife and children would think when they
returned home to find a madman in the living room.
Slowly, the effects wore off.
And after a night's rest, he entered his garden,
where everything was teeming with life.
>> Woke up the next day and felt refreshed, rejuvenated.
He found things to be novel and interesting.
He went back to the lab to figure out what had happened.
Nobody had thought that anything in terms of the microgram range
could create an effect.
But in fact, he discovered this very potent compound.
And then, Sandoz Pharmaceuticals tested it in animals
for safety and toxicity, then tested it
in some of the members of Sandoz Pharmaceuticals.
>> But in 1943, Hofmann became temporarily psychotic through
accidental ingestion of the drug.
The door swung wide open for research
into the nature of the schizophrenic process,
and in a larger sense, into the biochemistry of psychosis.
>> They believed that it might be a tool to help psychiatrists
understand the inner experience of their psychotic
or schizophrenic patients.
So they packaged samples of LSD and shipped them out
to the leading psychiatric researchers around the world.
>> I'm going to give you this cup that contains lysergic
acid, 100 microgram.
>> --suggesting that they try this compound themselves,
that it was a psychotomimetic drug,
that it would induce the kind of psychotic experience that
their patients were going through and would better help
them understand and so better help them treat.
>> How you feel?
>> Well, I feel very fine.
I feel very buoyant and light and resilient.
I feel as though this chair is not solid.
It seems to be--
I have a feeling that my hands are not
resting against this chair.
And I see flashes of color quite a bit.
I see this rug, for example, seems
to have an awful lot of complements
of violet and yellow.
It seems to feel that I'm going to watch it.
>> Now, as it turned out, the experience is not at all like
what the inner experience of a schizophrenic is.
>> Now, when you look at your hands, do as I do.
Close your eyes, and just concentrate on your hands.
>> There it is.
I feel these lovely colors vibrating all over me.
Oh, it's lovely.
>> Any lines?
>> Oh.
>> Any forms?
>> Just like the shimmering water, you know?
>> You can put your hand down now.
Come on.
Describe it.
>> Oh, I don't know.
>> Hmm?
>> It's just giving, and--
you don't know.
You want to give yourself--
you want to give yourself as much as you can.
>> There's all sorts of things happening during a psychedelic
experience.
One thing is that the 5-HT2A receptor, which
is the psychedelic receptor, is being stimulated quite a bit.
And that's mostly serotonin.
But then it turns out that if you stimulate
the 5-HT2A receptor enough, it actually
creates a receptor couple with a whole other transmitter
system, which is oxytocin.
They form what's called a dimer.
They dimerize, and they create a receptor complex.
In a couple, when you fall in love with someone,
there's a lot of oxytocin, and you're open to them,
and you're bonding with them.
With a mother who's nursing a baby,
and there's like maternal infant bonding,
oxytocin is there for that.
>> I feel very benevolent.
I mean, I feel as though I have no enemies in the world.
And this is very lovely.
>> And that sense of oneness and unity and connection signifies
sort of the peak of a psychedelic experience.
And when you come away from that, you come away changed.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
>> The insight that I was getting from traditional
and classic Buddhist meditation was similar to the insight that
I'd finally arrived at under the acid.
The lesson was form is emptiness.
There's a sense of emptiness and transitoriness
in all perceived phenomena.
And there's no need to get hysterically
hung up on any thought form, no need to grab.
And there is no enlightenment, no wisdom, no illumination,
no god, no identity, no self, no reference point,
that any grabbing for a reference point is vain.
And that's one of the first things
you think when you get high anyway,
that even if you didn't get high,
you'd be seeing the same reality, that in a sense,
acid is not necessary.
And that's why it's OK.
[HORN HONKS]
>> In the early 1950s, as LSD research was in its infancy,
little was known in the West about naturally-occurring
psychedelics.
In 1953, author Aldous Huxley was
given mescaline, the active ingredient in the peyote
cactus, under the supervision of psychiatrist Humphry Osmond.
Huxley later wrote about this experience in the seminal book
"The Doors of Perception."
And in New York City, a very unlikely character
helped bridge the gap between the ancient traditions
and modern America.
>> R. Gordon Wasson was a very successful businessman
and banker.
He was a vice president of JP Morgan.
As a young man, he met his future wife, Valentina,
who was Russian.
And she had a great interest and enthusiasm for the collection
of edible mushrooms.
>> While on their honeymoon in the Catskill Mountains,
Valentina leaped with excitement after spying a cluster of wild
mushrooms growing in the forest.
She sounded off the species name in Russian
and insisted that they prepare them for dinner that night.
Wasson, of Anglo-Saxon heritage, was brought up
to believe mushrooms were poison and was horrified
at his wife's enthusiasm.
This difference in cultural attitudes
became the catalyst for Wasson's lifelong interest in mycology,
or the study of fungi.
>> And then, in the early '50s, a friend of his wrote him
a letter suggesting he look into an extant mushroom cult
in the central highlands of Mexico,
where he had heard that there was use of hallucinogenic
mushrooms.
Now, this came as quite a surprise to Wasson
because at this time, the early '50s,
it was not believed that there were such things
as hallucinogenic mushrooms.
>> We went into the Mazatec area far from the highways,
remote from Mexico City.
There we found that rotten bagasse,
as it's called, bagasso, covered with mushrooms.
These mushrooms I didn't know, had never seen.
They were the sacred mushrooms.
>> After much difficulty, and by some accounts,
manipulation on the part of Wasson,
he eventually found entry into a velada, or mushroom ceremony.
The curandera, or healer, was a woman
named Maria Sabina, who represented
a long line of underground healers
left intact since the days of Spanish conquest.
[MUSICAL CHANTING]
>> And we were seeing incredible sights.
All your senses are rendered acute.
We say that you see visions.
You see hallucinations.
But that doesn't begin to tell the story.
The hallucinations are only part of it.
You hear sounds.
You smell things.
The night was thrilling.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
>> The visions were not blurred or uncertain.
I felt that I was now seeing plain,
whereas ordinary vision gives us an imperfect view.
I was seeing the archetypes, the Platonic ideas
that underlie the imperfect images of everyday life.
The thought crossed my mind.
Could the divine mushrooms be the secret
that lay behind the ancient mysteries?
Could the miraculous mobility that I was now
enjoying be the explanation for the flying witches that
played so important a part in the folklore and fairy
tales of northern Europe?
These reflections passed through my mind at the very same time
that I was seeing the visions.
For the effect of the mushrooms is
to bring about a vision of the spirit, a split in the person,
a kind of schizophrenia.
>> Unbeknownst to Wasson, his trips to Mexico were
infiltrated by a group with more nefarious interests
in the mind-altering effects of psychedelics.
>> In their neverending search for the miracle weapon,
CIA operatives searched here in the remote mountain areas
of southern Mexico for what up to then had been considered
a myth, magic mushrooms.
>> And so Gordon Wasson was unwittingly participating
in this sort of military use of psychedelics.
>> They used this man, a part-time chemist with the CIA,
to dupe this man, a vice president of a bank
and an amateur mycologist, or mushroom expert,
to try to get to the magic mushrooms and turn them
into a drug.
>> They gave it to several different chemists to try
to figure out what was in it, and nobody could figure it out.
And so they called on Albert Hofmann,
since he had invented LSD.
And they asked him could he figure out
what was in the mushroom that made it so psychedelic.
>> It would be the amateur, R. Gordon Wasson and his
colleagues, who would win the race and develop the drug
psilocybin from the magic mushrooms.
>> I think that is very strange that LSD is not just
a laboratory product.
It is closely related with this old Indian magic drug.
That means that LSD belongs pharmacologically, chemically,
to the group of the sacred magic plants of Mexico.
It's a very important finding.
>> Wasson was friends with Henry Boothe Luce,
who was the publisher of "Life Magazine."
He told his friend Luce about his experience,
and Luce encouraged him to write up his account.
That was really the first word out to Western civilization
that psychedelic mushrooms indeed existed at all.
And it really stimulated growing interest
and led to the psychedelic explosion of the '60s.
>> Wasson's influence became due in large part to an enigmatic
Harvard psychologist named Timothy Leary.
Though he became known as the most dangerous man in America,
he might have been described by others in the year 1960
as a New England square, a hard-drinking Irishman,
or by himself, an atheist psychologist in the midst
of a midlife crisis.
>> Timothy Leary was a very prominent researcher
at Harvard.
His California Personality Inventory
is still being used today.
He was sort of a pied piper.
>> During his early years at Harvard,
Leary was in the throes of personal crisis.
His first wife had committed suicide on his 35th birthday,
reportedly after a strained open marriage.
It was during this time that he described himself
as an anonymous institutional employee who
drove to work each morning in a long line of commuter cars
and drove home each night and drank Martinis,
like several million middle-class,
liberal, intellectual robots.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Inspired by Wasson's article, Leary traveled down to Mexico
with a colleague in 1960 who had found
some mushrooms from a curandero in the mountains.
Leary later said that he learned more
about the brain and its possibilities,
and more about psychology, in the five hours
after taking the mushrooms than he had in the preceding 15
years of studying and doing research in psychology.
>> When he got back to Harvard, he got permission to do
research with psilocybin.
>> And that was the beginning of the Harvard Psilocybin Research
Project.
And that was really the beginning
of formal research, attempted clinical research,
of psychedelic agents in the United States.
>> Timothy Leary had two research products that could go
to the Harvard Psilocybin Research Program.
It was a Good Friday study with Walter Pahnke.
It was a remarkable study and groundbreaking.
They had given psilocybin and a placebo
to 20 graduate students in theology,
comparing their experiences to genuine mystical experiences
found throughout millennia, through mystics and saints.
>> They arranged to have access to the Marsh Chapel.
It was Good Friday.
They were in a basement chapel.
And the service from upstairs in the main chapel
was being piped through.
[ORGAN PLAYING]
>> The Reverend Howard Thurman was the minister,
who was Martin Luther King's mentor--
this incredible dynamic speaker, orator.
>> You, Pilate, standing for Rome, are the universal coward.
I, standing for the kingdom of God, have braved everything,
lost everything, and won an eternal crown.
>> They developed a scale of mystical experience.
Some of the items are a noetic quality, intuitive quality
of understanding things, transcendence of time and space
as we know it, a sense of unity with all living things
internally as well.
>> I shall die.
But that is all that I shall do for death.
>> Of the 20 experimental students,
nine out of the 20 people had a mystical experience.
And eight out of those nine had the psilocybin.
>> It was the first study showing that these agents,
these medicines, these sacraments,
can produce an experience that was found throughout millennia
in various religious traditions.
>> One young man had a kind of nervous--
I was going to say nervous breakdown,
but it was actually positive for him.
So he was so blown away by this spiritual experience
he was having that he kind of ran out of the chapel.
And he was trying to run to the, I think,
the dean or the president's office to proclaim everything
that he had learned.
>> And behaved rather bizarrely out in public until the sitters
found him and retrieved him and brought him back.
>> And he actually had to be sedated with a tranquilizer.
So that's kind of an interesting piece of history
that didn't get reported.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
>> The object of this presentation is to demonstrate
the effect of MER-17, a new blocking agent,
against the development of LSD-25 psychosis.
We have used two healthy graduate students in psychology
as subjects.
>> When Sandoz discovered the psychoactive effects of LSD,
they also observed that it deepens sort of introspective
insight and can be used in psychotherapy.
>> So it's a really unique history in the area of drug
research in that there was a heyday of psychedelic research
extending from the 1950s through the early '70s.
>> Back then, any psychiatric researcher or clinician could
write Sandoz to get a sample of LSD to test it or to use it
clinically.
It was legal and available.
And that really began the big experiment
with LSD that lasted close to 30 years.
>> In carefully controlled experiments,
interesting results have been reported on the therapeutic use
of LSD with the mentally ill, the drug addict,
the terminal cancer patient, and in the VA hospital in Topeka,
Kansas, a special research program for alcoholics.
>> We bring them in on one Monday,
and they spend one week of getting acquainted and having
all the tests and examinations done.
The second Monday, we give them a small dose
of LSD in the five-man ward, together.
Then, the third Monday, we give them a larger dose
individually and have each one of them cared
for by one of these teams.
And this is where we aim for the so-called psychedelic
experience.
>> The best clinical outcomes are with subjects who,
during the course of what was often just a one-session
treatment, during that session, had a psychospiritual epiphany,
a mystical-level experience.
>> I know I kept fighting the religious music.
I didn't know why then, but Dr. Koren
kept urging me to find out why I was fighting this.
And I remember I was just really scared to death.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
And I just reached up, and it was like somebody
grabbed me and brought me up.
And I interpret this as for the first time in my life,
I wanted love.
And I think this is the thing that was probably my biggest
problem is that I thought everybody was forcing it on me,
and I wasn't going to let them.
>> The amazing thing about LSD is very much its evolutionary
nature, is that it seems to concentrate in areas
of the brain that relate to mammalian and reptilian stages
of evolutionary development which are then experienced
by the person, the fact also that people become aware
of the fact that man is not just a single-dimensional being
in a physical body but exists as a being over many,
many lifetimes at many levels of consciousness beyond
the physical.
And I do feel that, in the future,
there will be centers where people
will be able to go to prepare people for any kind of turning
point or crisis in their life, such as along the lines
of the incredible powerful research
that Stan Grof and Walter Pahnke did at Spring Grove Hospital
with terminal cancer patients.
>> This is a mental institution, Spring Grove State Hospital
in Baltimore.
It is one of four places in the country where
research on LSD treatment continues
under federal sponsorship.
The tablets in Ott's hand each contain a microscopic trace
of LSD.
To an observer, the atmosphere seems closer to faith healing
than medicine.
>> So the way in which they really refined the approach is
that they used a two-person team, often a male-female.
They pioneered eight-hour therapy sessions, sometimes
even longer.
It was this very expressive, supportive environment.
>> It isn't so much the drug as the drug in the context
in which it's used, the expectations,
how the person is held safely while they're under
the influence of it, and the interpretation that's made
afterwards.
>> I was here under LSD.
This went on for a million miles on both sides,
an endless deep and eternity onto.
And it was just one of the fears I had buried,
and it was a fear of being left alone.
>> We get very stuck in our ways and sort of rigid
in our thinking.
One of the things the psychedelics do
is they increase cognitive flexibility.
You become less rigid in how you think they quiet
down the default mode network, which
is sort of the self-obsessed, self-serving, how am I doing?
Who am I?
Am I liked?
What did I do yesterday?
What am I going to do tomorrow?
And the psychedelics sort of quiet this narcissism
and neuroticism and allow other parts of the brain
to get more active or to connect with each other.
>> I feel beautiful.
>> All right.
>> I feel squashed with beautiful.
>> That's a really powerful, useful experience to have.
And it can help people out of a dark place.
>> If you hadn't been prepared for it,
if you hadn't gone through those weeks of preparation,
would LSD have meant as much?
>> If I was ill before, I would have been ill, it seems to me,
beyond repair.
I would have been so frightened without the guidance
and the trust and the preparation.
It would have been a tragedy, horrible.
>> I got interested in LSD therapy when I was in two-year
public health service at the public health prison hospital
in Lexington, Kentucky.
At that time, there was really no good treatment
for narcotic addiction.
Recidivism rate was extraordinarily high.
I think people leaving Lexington had a 90% relapse rate.
And I had read about the studies with alcoholism.
And I thought perhaps LSD might be
useful to provide some lasting change for narcotic addiction.
In looking at the literature at that time,
it looked like that therapists who
had used LSD themselves got much better results than therapists
who had not used LSD themselves.
So I decided to do a controlled study.
I would give LSD to a group of narcotic addicts at Lexington
who volunteered for the study, without having ever taken LSD
myself, to see what impact that the experience might have
on their relation with other prisoners,
with authority figures, with insight about themselves.
And then, my plan was to then take the LSD myself
under supervision from staff at the Addiction Research Center
there who were experienced with the agent
and do a second group.
But unfortunately, when I was getting ready to do that,
the company that made LSD, Sandoz, decided to recall it.
This was around 1965, 1966, because LSD
had become a street drug.
[HORNS BLARING]
>> And on streets like this, transactions involving me take
place all the time--
illegal, of course, but my tabs and caps and sugar
cubes that dissolve in your mind as well as your mouth
are selling every day.
Drop a cap on me, man, and drop out.
But watch it, because the trip can be a trap, too.
You never know where a ticket with me will take you.
>> Just as pioneers of psychedelic research were
beginning to understand its therapeutic potential,
LSD began to leak out of the laboratory.
The two figures most responsible for its expansion
into the American culture lived on opposite ends of the country
and were from equally different backgrounds.
On the West Coast, Ken Kesey was introduced to LSD
in the late 1950s as part of the CIA's MK-Ultra program.
>> At the time, I was training for the Olympics.
I made it to be an alternate.
>> As a wrestler?
>> Yeah, as a wrestler.
I'd never been drunk on beer, let alone done any drugs.
But this is the American government.
I had a neighbor who was a psychologist.
He was booked to do the experiments that Tuesday.
He chickened out.
He says, you want to do them? $20.
Show up.
They gave them to me.
I did them on every Tuesday for six or eight months.
The government wanted somebody to look in that room.
They said, hey, we got a great room.
We discovered this nice room.
Let's get somebody to go in there and look it over.
>> Kesey would go on to write "One Flew over
the Cuckoo's Nest" partly based on these experiences,
and later, to host the so-called acid tests with the Merry
Pranksters.
>> And by that time, the government had said, OK,
stop that experiment.
All these guinea pigs that we've sent up there into outer space,
bring them back down, and don't ever
let them go back up there again, because we don't
like the look in their eyes.
>> I give the CIA total credit for sponsoring and initiating
the entire consciousness movement counterculture events
of the 1960s.
>> And on the East Coast was Timothy Leary,
the now-former Harvard psychologist.
>> He began to distribute the drug beyond his research
subjects.
He began to speak quite openly to the press.
>> He signed an agreement promising that he would not
give it to any undergraduate students but only to graduate
students who were using it for some appropriate academic
purpose.
>> And Tim Leary honestly--
I don't think he ever met a rule he didn't like.
And that rule quickly was broken.
The Harvard Administration found out
and summarily dismissed him.
>> And he became the apostle preaching the religion
of psychedelic drugs.
>> We teach the science and art of ecstasy.
We teach people how to turn on or how
to go out of their minds.
By turn on, we mean tune in to get
beyond your routine ways of thinking
and acting and experiencing.
We often say that we're teaching people how to use their head.
The point is that in order to use your head,
you have to go out of your mind.
>> What were your feelings when people like Timothy Leary
and Ken Kesey--
Ken Kesey with his pranksters and Timothy Leary, obviously,
with tune in, turn on, drop out, what
were your feelings, as the chemist who had created this?
>> I was quite astonished, because when I had discovered
these very deep effects of LSD, never would I have believed
that it would be a pleasure drug on the street--
never would have believed.
The indians believe that you should take the mushrooms
only if you are prepared.
And then only do the mushrooms bring you
in contact with the gods.
If you are not prepared, then it makes you crazy,
or you may even die.
That is a belief of the Indians based on thousands
of years of experience.
>> Drugs are subversive, and psychedelics are the most
subversive of all the drugs.
And he was labeled most dangerous man
in America because of these very powerful and very subversive
drugs and ideas.
>> Many of my colleagues have maintained a rather harsh view
of Leary.
They blame him for the repression
of psychedelic research in the '60s.
We shouldn't lose sight of the fact
of the degree to which psychedelics in the culture
were associated with a very vigorous antiwar movement.
>> The kind of turn on, tune in, drop out,
that phrase gets a bad rap.
But if you look at what was happening at the time,
I think the call was for young people
to not buy into the status quo.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
>> Some people talk about the counterculture as being this
romantic, even religious movement,
that you're talking about using these means to free yourself up
from the distractions of the world so that you can transcend
it and think about ultimate questions about human
existence.
And that's really what Leary was totally talking about.
>> What we're thinking about is a peaceful planet.
We're not thinking about any kind of power.
We're not thinking about revolution or war or any
of that.
We would all like to be able to live
an uncluttered life, a simple life, a good life,
and think about moving the whole human race ahead a step.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
>> They're taking it in sugar cubes.
It's being dropped into their punch.
They're going to institutions.
They're swell for the rest of their life.
[GASP]
[SCREAM]
>> God, no, no, no, no!
>> Authorities felt they had a public health crisis
on their hands.
And these were also catalysts for change.
And the changes they were inducing
were often perceived in a very threatening manner
by those in authority.
>> This moral decay weakens our resistance to the onslaught
of the communist masters of deceit.
>> We've got to do something about this.
Don't you think so?
>> The drug war is based on demonizing drugs and demonizing
drug users.
Nixon said that the two main enemies that he had
were the Civil Rights Movement and the hippies.
And so while you couldn't criminalize the ideas
that they were struggling for, you
could criminalize the drugs that they were using.
>> We must wage what I have called total war against public
enemy number one in the United States,
the problem of dangerous drugs.
>> Richard Nixon declared war on drugs, and Congress, in 1970,
passed the Controlled Substance Act,
which essentially put all serotonergic hallucinogens,
like LSD and psilocybin, into this very restrictive category
of Schedule I, which means highest addictive liability,
no therapeutic utility.
And that was really the beginning of the war on drugs
that we now have for the last 40 years, which
has created a real problem.
>> At the time, something like 123 million prescriptions were
written by psychiatrists and doctors for tranquilizers.
And more people are killed in car crashes
because they're drunk then die because of LSD.
What kind of drugs are OK and what aren't is a very political
question.
>> Abuse of hard drugs began to replace mind-expanding agents,
and LSD faded from the culture almost as quickly as it had
exploded into it.
By the 1970s, all remaining psychedelic studies
had been shut down.
>> In 1972, '73, I had left school,
and I got a job as a research assistant in a dream research
study at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn.
And my job was to stay up all night and monitor sleep EEGs.
And every time our subject went into a dream,
I would wake them up over an intercom system,
ask them what was going through their mind,
and tape record the dreams.
But this also meant I had a lot of time during the night,
and I love to read.
And one of the researchers in his office, he
had a tremendous collection of books and articles
on psychedelics.
And I read voraciously.
Now, at that time, my father was very
concerned about what he thought was my lack of direction.
And he had told me that when I figure out
what I wanted to do with my life, I should call him.
It didn't matter what time of the day or night it was.
He wanted me to call him.
So there I was, at 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning,
just so impressed by what they had done.
I felt I wanted to do this also.
I woke him up from a deep sleep, and I said, Dad,
I figured out what I want to do.
And he said, well, what's that, son?
I said, I want to study psychedelics.
Well, why is that?
Well, they're fascinating.
There's so much we could learn about the brain, about
the mind-brain interface, about mental illness.
And there are these extraordinary treatment models.
And people who conventional treatments cannot help or help
with this model.
And he said, well, son, there might
be something to what you say.
But no one will listen to you unless you
get your credentials.
My personal background really has a lot
to do with Timothy Leary and the use of psychedelics in society.
I had been born Jewish in 1953.
I was raised on stories of the Holocaust.
And then, as a young boy, I was involved
in going to school during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
This idea that there could be nuclear war
and wipe out civilization was also very traumatizing.
The final step for me was Vietnam,
and I was in the last years of the lottery.
And I was a Vietnam War protester, a draft resister.
And so I first tried LSD in '71, but I
had a very difficult time.
And I couldn't really handle my psychedelic experiences.
I went to the guidance counselor at my college,
and I was so lucky.
The guidance counselor took me seriously.
And then, he said that this was an important exploration
that I was doing.
And he gave me a book to read, which
was a manuscript copy of "Realms of the Human
Unconscious, Observations from LSD Research," by Stan Grof.
When I read this book, everything fell into place
for me.
I saw this therapeutic use and also
the spiritual aspects of it.
And I felt, OK, this is a response
to the craziness of the world.
>> It seems to me that since the French Revolution
and the Enlightenment, man was put at the center
of the universe.
And certain difficult notions of God,
on which one was dependent, were put aside.
And that notion of man being at the center of the universe
led to the industrial society that we have around us, led
to a great deal of energy.
And the LSD experience and what we've
been through in the '60s has brought us
to a whole new philosophy, that man
is not the center of the universe,
that we're simply the transformative energies,
and that we live in a sort of cosmic ecology
for which we're responsible.
And this is, to my mind, the great challenge that's
in front of us, to take the consciousness
and the individual headspace that we've all
managed to develop and now begin asking ourselves,
what is it all for, and how can we use it?
>> We're now in what you can consider a second renaissance
of psychedelic research.
There are a handful of centers in the US, universities
that are conducting research studies.
Probably the reinitiation of psychedelic research,
I would really credit Rick Strassmann.
>> Rick Strassmann had been one of the doctors that I'd worked
with.
And he decided that he would submit a protocol for DMT,
looking at it as potential cause of schizophrenia.
>> A psychotomimetic model, so it means mimicking psychosis.
And so it's a way for a government agency
to feel OK about funding psychedelic research.
>> So the Pilot Drug Evaluation Staff approved this study
in 1990--
>> --and really kind of reinitiated the field,
I would say.
And then our work here, Roland Griffiths
got it started not long after.
>> In 2006, the Hopkins team set the standard for scientific
rigor by publishing their landmark study "A followup
to Walter Pahnke's and Timothy Leary's Good Friday
experiment," concluding that under the right setting,
psilocybin can reliably induce a mystical experience.
>> I knew nothing about Johns Hopkins.
I didn't know anything about Baltimore.
I didn't know Roland Griffiths.
I didn't know any of these characters.
And I ended up going to grad school out in California where
we were doing a study with meditators when
Roland's paper was published on mystical experiences promoted
by psilocybin.
And I just remember saying to my advisor,
I was like, that's where I'm going next.
Katherine MacLean's research on openness,
that was a really big deal, that study, because it was always
thought that your personality is your personality.
How novelty-seeking you are and how open you are,
that's just who you are, and those things don't really
change.
But what the Hopkins trials showed
was that people do become more open,
and you can actually measure it on a personality test.
And that's a big deal.
>> 70% of people were saying, this is among the five most
personally meaningful experiences of my life.
I would ask people, what does that mean?
And someone might say, well, gee,
when my first child was born, my daughter, that
changed my life forever.
And recently, my father passed away.
That was big.
It's kind of like that.
>> It was around 2006, and I had just taken over as the head
of the Division of Alcoholism and Drug Abuse at Bellevue.
As an addiction psychiatrist, I'd
always been interested in these compounds
because they just seem different from other drugs of abuse.
They didn't behave like cocaine or amphetamine or tobacco.
They seemed completely different,
yet they were labeled as the most addictive drug.
So I always thought that there was
something interesting and different about them.
At the time, one of my supervisors
was Dr. Jeffrey Guss.
>> I saw that Albert Hofmann's 100th birthday was being
celebrated in Basel, Switzerland.
>> I must do what Huxley wrote me in a letter.
What you take in by vision experience
you must give out in daily life.
And that is now the task which I try,
the feeling to be a part of the universe, which
I got by LSD experience.
This feeling is always present in my life.
>> When you think about what people thought about
in the '60s, that LSD is going to make you drop out
of society, Albert Hofmann, who discovered LSD,
was married for 79 years, had a career at the same company
for almost his entire life, and was an inspiration to quite
a few of us.
>> Sort of on a lark, I went to this conference because I
wanted to meet and see the people that were doing
psychedelic research.
And it was there that I first met Charles Grob.
>> Administering a psychedelic to cancer patient with anxiety
had not occurred since the early 1970s.
And I felt this was an ideal patient population
to really start off with because the early literature was
so impressive.
And all of this, from FDA through the hospital
committees, took several years.
But I was patient, and I was persistent,
and I felt this was really a worthy effort to make.
And in the end, we got the approvals we had requested.
>> When I was at NYU, I was working at Bellevue for nine
years, running the psychiatric emergency room.
I met with the chairman at the time, a guy named Robert
Cancro, And I talked to him a lot
about what was going on at UCLA or at Hopkins
and saying that there was really enough people at NYU who
are interested that we should try to do something in NYU.
>> In the 1970s, I came across the literature on psychedelics
and entheogens, and I also have a long interest in palliative
care--
I'm a palliative care psychologist--
and how we die in this country and the death anxiety.
And it felt the perfect match.
>> At first, we were just an education group.
But after meeting Charlie Grob at UCLA, I asked him,
so this is really possible to do this,
and you can make a career out of this?
And he said, yes, and it's all about doing it
correctly and carefully and avoiding
mistakes made in the past.
So we decided to do it.
>> My name is Estalyn Walcoff, and I work
as a psychotherapist.
>> My name is Dinah Bazer.
I teach figure skating.
>> My name is Nick Fernandez, and I work as a clinical
research coordinator in a psychiatry department
at a hospital here in New York.
>> I'm an adult literacy teacher,
part-time at the public library.
>> I was diagnosed five years ago with a type of lymphoma
that was untreatable.
And not only was it untreatable, but everybody who had had it
had died from it.
It was aggressive.
>> I was diagnosed with leukemia when I was 17 in 2004.
And it was during my senior year of high school
when I was just getting ready to go to college.
>> I received the official diagnosis in December of last
year, so just about a year ago.
>> And it changed the course of my life,
because I went from being a physically active 17-year-old
to a cancer patient.
>> When the chemo was over, I thought, oh, let's celebrate.
I thought I would want to celebrate.
And when the chemo was over, I didn't want to celebrate,
because that's when the fear set in.
That's when you start thinking, when will the other shoe drop?
When will this come back?
>> Always in my life, I've been an anxious person.
And naturally, when I was given that diagnosis
my anxiety shot up.
And even though years and years and years keep going by
and I'm still OK, I know very well
that this could return at any moment.
>> I really went to work on myself because I thought that
if I were going to die much sooner than I had planned,
then I wanted to understand myself better.
I wanted to understand spirituality better.
I wanted not to have a bitter heart.
And I wanted to be open.
So I did what I could for the past five years.
>> And I came across a post about this study.
>> I read it once, and then I closed it.
And then I read it again, and I said, I qualify for that.
So I traveled down to New York City for an initial screening
interview.
I traveled down to New York City several times
for psychotherapy sessions with my two psychiatrists.
>> After several sessions of therapy and careful
preparation, participants are given psilocybin
in a comfortable living room setting under the guidance
of their therapist team.
After a brief ritual, they are encouraged
to lie down on the couch, wear eye shades,
and listen to classical music in order
to create an inward experience.
>> Having mentioned that I had taken psychedelics in my 20s,
the whole object was to see how beautiful nature was,
to hear how wonderful music was, to see what could be seen,
to touch what could be touched.
So this was very, very different because the whole thing
that I was going to be experiencing was my own mind.
>> There was an immersion into complete chaos,
360-degree chaos, where I had no idea of up, down, left, right.
>> Initially, it was absolutely terrifying.
I think I could compare it to being
in the hold of a ship that's in a storm-tossed sea.
>> I also began experiencing great emotional pain,
in particular because I had been listening to a Black spiritual.
I felt I could hear the pain in that woman's voice
who was singing the song.
And it brought to me the whole gestalt of slavery
and what that is to pull people out of their homes
and treat them like animals.
And I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed because of that.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
And the ability to just be held by my mentors
and do that greatly, greatly relieved me.
>> And I believe it was Tony who took my hand and said,
it's all right.
It's all right.
Just go with it.
>> And the further I went into it,
the more it became evident to me that the chaos could not
maintain its magnetic draw on me nor its strength when I stayed
focused.
>> The worst pain and the worst fear and the worst anxiety
turned into something that has opened,
which is the most precious thing I've ever known.
It was a sense of connectedness that runs through all of us
that I never knew, and also a sense of the strength of it
and the power of it.
>> It looked like very dense and beautiful clouds that were
almost like in the jigsaw puzzle fashion that were backlit
by a moon that I could not see.
So they were crevices of faint light through it.
And these eyes were searching me out.
I felt it was a manifestation of an alienation I had long
carried through my whole life that was just
trying to lay claim to me.
I felt very profoundly that there was no one
that they could find.
>> I saw my fear.
I pictured it.
I don't think this was a hallucination.
I pictured it as a dark mass there.
I, like, screamed, "Get the fuck out!"
I will not be eaten alive by this fear.
And once that happened, it was just gone.
The fear was gone and didn't come back.
And it still hasn't.
>> I had this feeling coming over me,
and the thought was of compassion for myself.
It touches me the most.
That's such a gift.
>> I needed to stop talking and look inside and find that I was
part of it.
I was part of everything.
I was part of God, that you are, too.
Everything is.
And you can call it whatever you want to.
I don't usually call it God.
I just call it the one.
And that's the best thing that can ever happen to you, ever.
>> We co-evolved on the planet with cannabis and with poppy
and psilocybin mushrooms.
These things have been on the planet since we have,
as far as I can tell, which means
we've co-evolved with them.
And psychiatry is kind of failing.
Many, many people are taking sleeping pills
and anti-anxiety meds and antidepressants
and for a really long time.
I really think there's a better way to treat addiction
or to treat the sort of despair and anxiety and malaise
that many of us are feeling more and more.
We need a different perspective, and we
need that sort of overview effect
that the astronauts get when they see that every one of us
is just on this blue ball hurtling through space.
I think that psychedelics give you that perspective.
And so I hope that they can engender more cooperation,
more us versus them, more of this idea
that separation is an illusion, and that we all sort of
have the answers for our own growth
and for the healing of the planet.
If people could know how connected they really are,
connected to spirit and connected to each other
and connected to nature, so much of their fear would dissipate.
So much of their anxiety would dissipate.
And I just know that if, in the future,
this could be used with all patients,
under the direction of mentors, shamans, psychotherapists,
it would make for a much happier world.
[MUSIC PLAYING]