The fraction
of a milligram and everything changes.
A molecule that alters our perception.
Once experienced, it can never be forgotten.
It began on the 16th of April,
1943 in Switzerland.
Undisturbed by the terror of the Second World War,
chemist Albert Hofmann, was exploring medicine
for blood circulation.
This young father had found his job
of a lifetime at the Basel Sandoz Company.
But on that day in April, he must have come
into contact with an unknown substance.
Three days later, Albert Hofmann decided
to experiment on himself.
Being a cautious scientist, he took a very weak dosage.
But this substance was far stronger
than anything known in science research to date.
His first self-experiment was a trip into the unknown.
I believe
that every healthy person should try it.
What happens to you when you take a dose
of this strange new drug called LSD?
In less than two hours,
LSD will be (background noise drowns out other noise)
Now, as a volunteer testing subject,
his training is worthless.
Albert Hoffman worked
in his natural science laboratory with ergot.
It's a black fungus that grows mostly on rye.
Ergot has been known in natural medicines
since the Middle Ages.
But one of the new substances he isolated did not affect
the circulatory system as expected,
but the human psyche instead,
lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD,
After first clinical tests in Switzerland,
Sandoz decided to release LSD for production,
and the novel drug attracted enormous interest
from psychiatrists all over the world.
- Sandoz saw the opportunity to offer something
quite amazing to the psychiatric
and psychological circulars, so they were
actually sending samples of LSD
to universities' research institutes,
individual therapies, and they were asking,
"Would you work with it and give us feedback
"if there's any legitimate use for this substance?"
So it came to The Psychiatric Clinic in Prague.
My first LSD experience was extremely powerful.
It really completely changed my life professionally,
and also personally.
And I said, "This is by far the most interesting thing you
can do when you're a psychiatrist is to study
these non-ordinary states of consciousness."
So this is what happened in the last
over 50 years.
Whatever I did professionally, in one way or another,
was related to these non-ordinary states.
As I was sitting in session after session with artists,
with professionals, and writing the reports.
In the early years of the experimentation, we thought
about the LSD session as experimental psychosis.
That somehow pharmacologically we create some kind
of phantasmagoria that happens to be similar
to what psychotic patients experience,
so it was a model of psychosis.
And if we can somehow identify what's happening there,
we'll be able also to find a substance
that would neutralize it, so that people have
a test tube solution for
the most important problem
in psychiatry, you know, schizophrenia, and other psychoses,
which would be like a Holy Grail in psychiatry.
- Three drops of
this colorless, odorless tasteless liquid
would put you out of your mind for hours.
If you haven't heard of LSD, you will.
Impregnating sugar cubes is a common black market form.
Sometimes a dose for a dozen is counted invisibly
in a piece of blotting paper.
An effective dose is incredibly small.
These cubes contain only 150 micrograms.
Why are you taking it?
- To get high.
- Expanded consciousness. More awareness.
- How does it compare with getting high on alcohol?
- I've never been high on alcohol.
- It's the opposite. It just seems to block you.
- It opens you up.
- You can get more aware of things.
- Everything.
- Are these people getting revelations
from outside themselves or are they wallowing
in delusions brought about by the drug's distortion
of normal brain parts and processes.
How permanent is it, and is it reflective in behavior?
- Colors.
Just colors. Just colors?
Is it moving colors?
Yes. No, it's not patterns.
What kind of color are you seeing at the moment?
- Green, orange, everything centered around orange.
- No.
- When I moved into clinical work
our approach was called psycholytic therapy, which was
basically use of the
small or medium dosages,
but a whole series of sessions.
The process was more like a sort of gradual penetrating,
like a kind of a chemo-archeology in the psyche layer.
Then I found out that there was tremendous variability
of the sessions, not just inter-individual,
but if you take it repeatedly, each session
will be significantly different,
and there was a progression.
So I started thinking about something like LSD
as a capitalist so that it doesn't create
these experiences, but it makes them accessible.
With this kind of understanding, LSD becomes comparable
to what the microscope is for biology or medicine,
or what the telescope is for astronomy.
We don't think that the microscope creates worlds
that are not there.
The something is already there,
but we cannot study it without the tool.
Same thing with the telescope does not create
all the billions of galaxies.
Obviously, they have been there.
They are there, but we need the telescope to study them.
Coordinated with the United States
and the Canadian governments, that that
warning screens has been warned of an approaching enemy.
It not only the security of the United States,
but the security of the whole free world.
During the Cold War, other groups
became interested in the new wonder drug.
LSD attracted the attention
of international secret services.
In the fore was the American CIA.
- The Central Intelligence Agency was interested
in LSD because it sought to develop a truth serum,
an interrogation weapon for questioning
enemy spies suspected of disloyal people within the CIA,
any occasion that might require soliciting information
for people against their will, in order to gain
an advantage to loosen their tongue to pry into their mind.
This was the idea that the CIA had.
Where are you?
They knew it was very powerful.
They suspected it could be very helpful,
but they didn't know much about it.
So they turned to outside institutions,
outside experts, to conduct research.
Some of this research turned out to be pretty nasty.
There was a special case up in Canada
at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal,
where people were essentially used as guinea pigs
for a terrible experiment.
The idea was you break a person's mental patterns down
by giving them high doses of LSD.
When that phase was over, they would put them to sleep
for a long time using a sedative, and then engage
in a process called psychic driving,
where they'd have the same message piped in
over and over again, thousands of times,
to see if they could instill this idea
in terms of creating a new personality.
It was classic brainwashing.
The CI wanted always a certain result.
They wanted to be able to predict what would happen,
and then do something to make that prediction come true.
LSD didn't always work that way, and they found
they ran into problems because it was an unpredictable drug.
The US Army had more grandiose ideas
about what they could do with LSD.
In essence, the US Army wanted to develop LSD as a weapon
of war, as a psycho chemical weapon
that they could spray over a city.
It would make everybody crazy for a temporary period,
and the enemy soldiers were helpless to resist
because they were under the influence of LSD.
A war without death, a LSD warfare was the idea.
Here is a group of normal soldiers
responding correctly to a series of routine drill commands.
After receiving a small does of LSD,
they're confused and undisciplined.
- The idea of being able to subdue, like say, the enemy,
without harming them or killing them, was very appealing.
LSD was of interest because
it was the most powerful drug
available at that time to treat people with
with psychedelic effects and so on,
or to alter their behavior, which the CIA
was interested in doing, and we weren't interested
in either of those things.
We were interested in finding something
that would impair performance in the battlefield.
Because LSD made some volunteers uncooperative,
we wanted to have a small contained space where
we could have the individual sit, and we could televise him,
as well as the psychiatrist asking him questions.
You find the sensation unpleasant?
- No, great.
- Very much.
- When you see things, where do you see things most clearly?
In the central part of your vision, or--
- Left, about the ends of my triple vision though,
this stuff drives ya crazy.
- Nothing's going on, a whirr.
- Yeah, way in the outer core.
- Oh, fine.
- Take seven from 92.
Tried.
- Individuals react to the stress of LSD in various ways.
Here's a subject who succumbs to what has been called
cosmic laughter, as he realizes his predicament.
- Let's get going. I need a cigarette.
Ah, come on, I'm serious now.
If I can you.
- We didn't think that was the kind of result we wanted
to produce in a battlefield situation.
It would probably be dangerous for us.
We might end up on the receiving end
of an ill-advised bomb
or heavy-duty weapon,
and we were not interested in provoking that.
- This is Delta One, over.
Delta One, this is Alpha One.
It is now one, two, three, two hours.
- Well, an important thing about psychedelic experiences is
that they take you way beyond anywhere
that psychoanalysis or some related schools
can actually reach, and that's where most
of the emotional psychosomatic problems are coming from.
They're also mechanisms of healing and transformation
that are much more powerful than anything you can do
on the level of biographical material.
We have also talked to a number of people who
had years of psychoanalysis,
and they say they didn't even come close
to where the first or second session took them.
At the end of the 1950s,
LSD had found its place in psychiatry.
It was regularly used in many clinics
in Europe and North America.
Because people believed that LSD increased creativity,
more and more artists and intellectuals
became interested in the substance.
- I'm going to give you this cup
that contains lysergic acid 100 micrograms.
Will you drink it?
I would like to ask you to describe your profession.
- I'm an artist.
- That's true. Yes
12:17.
- No, it happens to be black.
You see purple?
- Yes.
- Well this is just a charcoal. Look at it, see.
Why do you do that now?
- Well, the square is the ordinary rectangle, you see.
It's one of the perfect means.
- I know, but are you trying to reassure yourself
that you're capable of--
- Yes, I think that is what I would like to do.
I'd like to find out what reality I'm in.
- 2 o'clock.
Anyhow, what I would like you to do now is
to draw another picture of Paul.
Do you still have that pleasant feeling
that you described before?
- Yes, I still have it. I'll never get over it.
- This is a general feeling,
when you look it on yourself, is that correct?
Look at the picture now.
Look at the picture.
Oh, come on, now. Concentrate.
That's just about right.
Let's suppose you take a look at these two pictures,
and compare them, and let's see if you have any comments.
Do you see any big difference?
- Not really, the eyes, for example,
are the same to me, and the line of the nose is the same,
and the mouth is still a sweet mouth.
- 2:48. He's now flying high.
- I feel these lovely colors vibrating all over me.
Aww, it's lovely.
- No.
- Just like the shimmering water, you know?
- 'cause you have tears in your eyes.
Is that a beautiful experience, would you say?
I would say yes.
- Describe it again.
- Oh, I should know.
- It's just giving of--
- You're doing fine. Just try to describe it.
- Oh, just, you don't know, you.
You want to give yourself.
You want to give yourself as much as you can.
In the mid-50s, the American researcher,
Gordon Wasson, made a mysterious discovery
in the highlands of Mexico,
an inconspicuous mushroom, swallowed as a sacrament
during religious rituals to contact the world of the Gods.
Gordon Wasson took some samples
of the mystic mushroom home to New York.
While analyzing the Mexican magic mushroom,
Albert Hofmann dared to perform another self-experiment.
In doing so, he and his team were able
to isolate the active ingredient for the first time,
psilocybin, a chemical closely related to LSD.
The American took him to Maria Sabina,
an old highly respected healing woman
in the land of the Mazatecs.
The two researchers wanted to test
their psilocybin tablets on her.
In california, a group of young people
started out across the country,
the Merry Pranksters.
Among them, was the author, Ken Kesey.
Since his best seller, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,"
he could afford an independent life.
Kesey's novel was inspired by his LSD experience
as a voluntary tester in a Californian clinic.
- Psilocybin, mescaline, LSD.
The government was doing experiments there,
and the drugs began to get out into the world.
Ken had a wide circle of friends.
I loved parties, but the alcohol was ruining it for me.
I can't drink.
And when LSD came along, you know, hooray!
Here's another direction to go in.
We had some LSD that was in a package,
and we had to create doses out of it,
and that was very difficult to do.
We wanted to make small doses, not so big.
Well, that was really hard to do.
In trying to create a way to distribute this
to other people, we sort of got very deep into it ourselves,
sort of Magic Carpet Rides inside of our own minds,
and couldn't help but talk about these things.
The minute you start to talk about this,
everybody wants some.
Wherever the old school bus stopped,
the LSD parties got bigger.
The acid test, a right of passage
into a new psychedelic lifestyle.
Millbrook, on the American East Coast.
In the vacant country house of a rich patron,
former Harvard lecturer, Timothy Leary,
founded a psychedelic commune.
- Well, the first experience I had was
with seven little mushrooms in Mexico. For
the five hours after I ate these mushrooms,
I learned more about psychology than I had
in the preceding 16 years as a psychologist.
And since that time, I've done almost nothing
but attempt to study, to learn more about how
these experiences are produced,
and how they can be used for man's benefit.
At Harvard, Leary put the study
of hallucinogenic drugs on the curriculum.
That was the beginning of the end
for the ambitious professor
and his team at the elite university.
- The one thing that it differed from
the accepted social paradigm is that we took
the drug ourself, 'cause Leary now would be
lacking behaviors paradigms, he wouldn't do that,
and the chairman of the department
was pissed off at us for doing that,
and that was unscientific.
And they said, "If you do these studies quietly,
it's gonna be okay,"
but that was not Leary's vision.
It was a democratic vision, egalitarian.
This is too good not to share with everybody.
Who are we to say?
Tim Leary and his entire team were
eventually fired from Harvard.
His new headquarters, Millbrook,
the place for contemplation and adventure alike.
- Well, I had a great time at Millbrook.
I mean, it was a place to introduce people
to the psychedelic experience
in the most beautiful way possible.
It was a stead for people to come from every walk of life
from the highest aristocrat and noble,
and royal person down
to the dirtiest hippy.
Everybody came. It was a mecca for psychedelics.
LSD was a tremendous leveler.
No matter what level of society you came from,
when you turned on to someone from another member
of society, that classed vision did not cloud your vision.
You could see that person clearly,
and you could see them as a friend.
- Any moment is a mighty, feeling condition.
- The place was beautiful.
It was 2600 acres
of Northern New York scenery,
and you just walk out there high,
and no one was going to bother you.
You were miles from the main gate.
My experience at Millbrook was not about curing ill people,
but making what well people weller,
about moving into the cosmic understanding
of our existence here on life.
We're not just dumbies brought to walk
in one path all of our lives.
We are here to fly.
Doctor Leary, what are you up to here?
- We teach the science and art of ecstasy.
We teach people how to turn on,
or how to go out of their minds.
By turnin' 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.
You have to go out of all of the static symbolic ways
in which you think.
- Leary was a provocateur. Yes, he liked being provocative.
He liked saying things in a little way
that got people to turn.
He didn't care if they misunderstood.
He said, "Think for yourself."
- America today is an insane asylum.
The American people are completely hung up
on material acquisition, on power, on war-making.
It's an insane asylum over here.
And it's our goal to lift the spiritual level
of the American people.
We're gonna try to bring about a religious renaissance
and a spiritual revolution.
In the next five or 10 years, we expect that
between 20 and 30 million Americans
will be using LSD regularly in their spiritual development
and in psychological growth.
Haight-Ashbury, previously a run-down district
in San Francisco experienced another hay day.
- It was sort of a very exciting time in the Haight-Ashbury.
It was lovely.
There was a very good community spirit.
The little stores were opening down on Haight Street.
People were very friendly with each other.
We all knew each other in the neighborhood.
And they would come up with wonderful ideas,
like, "Let's have a party in some corner of the park."
So the band would come out and bring their instruments.
The band called The Grateful Dead
have announced they will make music in the park.
And the crowd moves along,
- In the 60s, LSD was important because
it reinforced a sense that change was possible,
because if you can be one way one minute,
take a tiny little chemical called LSD,
and in an hour be at another dimension
of universe, of seeing fantastic things,
feeling things that you didn't even know you could feel,
hearing things you didn't know could be heard that way.
If you can do that to your mind with
this tiny little pill, anything's possible.
- We tell young people today, "Drop out of school,"
because school's education today
is the worst narcotic drug of all.
Don't politic. Don't vote.
These are old men's games, impotent and senile, old men;
They want to put you onto their old chess games
of war and power.
Drop out. Tune in with natural things.
Take off your shoes.
Get back in tune with God's harmony.
Surround yourself with beauty and sacred objects.
You can't get caught in the conforming,
rote lockstep, which we call American society.
- So then, at Millbrook,
when our supplies were cut off,
Timothy said, "We're all psychologists here.
"Nick's the only one with a chemical background.
"Why don't you start making the sacraments."
I said, "Okay, I'll give it a try."
My training was anthropology, but I had been involved,
growing up in a laboratory my whole life
because my father was a chemist.
So all of this was familiar and easy for me.
I studied, and I became a chemist.
We gathered the equipment and the materials
before we actually could work.
Basically, it broke down into making
an underground laboratory.
So where am I going to do this?
Well, I started out working in my mother's attic,
and then I moved down to the basement.
Then I rented a small industrial place.
Then I rented a larger industrial place.
And then I moved to California,
and so we rented another industrial property
in San Francisco, 4000 square-foot warehouse.
There are syntheses of LSD that take seven seconds,
and it's done, boom.
You got everything ready. It takes a few hours.
Put it all together. You add it together.
You stir it for an hour. It's done. You have your LSD.
Now the question is, "How do you get it out
"with starting materials that have been left over
"with the isomers and byproducts, and how do you get
"that all out so that you'll have
only 99.9% LSD?"
So that means you have to recycle that material again,
and so you recycle, and recycle, and recycle,
and the process of making very pure LSD
is extremely tedious.
We were making large amounts,
and we were able to purify in large amounts
to 100-gram crystallizations.
That's a million doses.
On the street, LSD, or acid,
was initially tolerated by the police.
Consuming the fashionable drug wasn't prohibited at first.
- San Francisco is where LSD was first marketed,
where it is most readily, and cheaply available.
In the park, a little bright afternoon,
there is a hipping wedding.
The preacher is a man called Teddy Bear.
He is a dope dealer.
LSD washed down with wine is the only sacrament.
There are no vows.
She will be his woman for as long as they feel like it.
- Do you take Kathy to be your woman, your wife?
You're married before God's poor people.
- What obviously was happening in people
who were taking psychedelics, particularly
the young generation, is that they could not agree anymore,
was the standards of the society that was around them.
They develop a whole different system of values,
a different life strategy, and so on.
Part of it certainly was very strong anti-war feelings
because when you have,
what I call transpersonal experiences,
where you feel ascential oneness with other people,
even with the animals species, with nature, and so on,
it has very significant implications for how you feel
about war, people killing each other.
So psychedelics became a very, very important
instrument of transformation,
a change of a world view in a way
that was very challenging the old, conservative values.
- I was just doing this for my heart out of faith
that this was the right thing to do,
and everywhere I went, I gave it away,
and I saw what it did to people, and I said, "This is good."
5,000 doses of the Orange Sunshine was
a little, teeny bag like that.
You know, that's a whole division of soldiers.
We sent hundreds of thousands of tablets
to Vietnam for free.
We were supporting all the war protesters,
so why not support our brothers and sisters,
the same age, but have been drafted
and dragged almost in chains to be killed in Vietnam.
Why not give them the same medicine
that was causing the movement.
- A companion peace demonstration brings out 50,000 marchers
in downtown San Francisco, pacifists and hippies together.
- Bombs in Vietnam exploded--
- The rebellion in the 1960s, I think psychedelics were
a part of it, a very significant part, but I don't think
they were the cause of what was happening.
First, he became a symbol
of all that was going on that was frightening,
of all that seemed to be wrong.
It was an easy scapegoat, easy target
for people who wanted to denounce the youth rebellion,
denounce the anti-war movement,
very easy to denounce the drug, or the drugs
that were associated with those movements.
The things that were said about LSD
in the 1960s were in many ways, ridiculous.
- It's not always easy to undo what I've done.
- LSD, I've heard about it.
I can see through the walls.
- God, help!
Help me!
- Nothing was not extreme with LSD.
It was projected in a way that made
it very provocative, very loyal.
Well, gee, is this drug gonna send me to the grave,
the mental institutions, prison, and to the gates of heaven,
and I'll have the best sex I ever had in my life.
Well, that's pretty interesting.
- KRON TV has governor, Ronald Reagan,
to comment on the problem.
- Well, I am terribly frightened by the problem of LSD.
I think there's been a great deal of misinformation
by those who seem to see no harm in it.
But as a parent and as a citizen, and certainly now
in this position, I am greatly concerned.
There is nothing smart.
There's nothing a grownup
or sophisticated in taking an LSD trip at all.
They're just being complete fools.
Anyone that would engage in this,
or indulge in this is just a plain fool.
After public debates about the dangers
of LSD became increasingly acrimonious,
the state of California eventually reacted in October 1966.
The substance was prohibited.
- And we're moving from legal to illegal,
and my status changed from one who is
a minor criminal to one who was a serious felon.
I mean, I've been convicted many times.
I've spent time in 14 different prisons.
All of this has happened to me
as a result of my devotion to psychedelics.
So, am I a criminal?
Of course, I'm a criminal.
Shortly after the prohibition of LSD,
over 20,000 people gathered in the Golden Gate Park
in San Francisco.
The hippies, the oppositional students,
the most diverse sections in the protest movement
brought together, and went on an enormous demonstration.
- Six words:
turn on, tune in,
drop out.
♫ All you need is love
♫ Love, love is all you need ♫
The sound of the youth movement
concurred the major TV studios.
The new mass media spread the hippies' message
across the entire globe.
♫ It's easy
♫ All you need is love
♫ Love, love is all you need
♫ All you need is love ♫
- The city of San Francisco has been warned
of a hippie invasion come summer
in numbers almost too staggering to comprehend.
Some estimates run as high as 200,000 young people
from all parts of the country, and be expected
to invade the city, and the influx will affect
primarily, the Haight-Ashbury.
♫ In the street
♫ Oh, in New York City
♫ Dancin' in the street ♫
- The media put in a big story
about the Haight-Ashbury,
and it was this lovely place to go,
and you might see John Lennon, or you know, perhaps--
Anyway, they created a monster for us.
And within a few weeks, it changed.
People came from all over America by the hundreds,
and then the thousands, and by early summer,
there must have been 10,000 people sleeping
on the sidewalks and in the park, and in every alley,
hungry, and homeless, and it was crazy.
- Here, San Francisco, Haight Street,
and all the dance floors, and you had
2,000 people all taking 500 micrograms of LSD.
I thought, "This was gonna be madness."
I though this would have been madness in all context.
I couldn't see how that could work.
How would you handle bad trips?
1967.
The psychedelic movement in full bloom. Summer of love.
- To the demons and America combined
and put it together, okay?
- Come on American folks, sing it with me.
♫ Wild thing
♫ You make my heart sing
♫ You make everything groovy
♫ You got my wild thing
♫ Yeah ♫
There is a steady flow
in the San Francisco hospitals of young people
who have freaked out and been picked up
by the police in a state of desperate terror.
Where are my friends?
Do my friends know I'm here?
Where am I
Where am I?
- You're in the hospital here. Come on.
- I'm Doctor McLain.
The bad trip
is a frightening thing to witness.
It must be far more terrifying to experience.
Where am I?
- Come right around here to the--
You're in the hospital.
- Your hands are cold.
- Joan.
- I don't wanna be here. Where are my friends?
- The greatest pushers in this country today
are the missionaries who make and distribute LSD
because they are convinced it's a wonderful way,
as that poisonous, evil man, Doctor Timothy Leary,
has said, it is a way to turn on, tune in, and drop out.
Timothy Leary was pronounced
by President Nixon, to be the most dangerous man in America.
A short time later, he received a draconic prison sentence
for possession of two joints.
- What happened with Leary, who made the psychedelics
much more dangerous than they would be in responsible hands,
certainly increasing the risks and minimizing the benefits,
and literally killed the legitimate research.
Albert Hofmann's magic drug
became his constant worry.
LSD ended up where it had started, in psychiatry,
where it is still tolerated in some clinics.
- When I came to the United States and I joined the team
at Spring Grove, we were using an approach that is
now known as psychedelic,
where a dose is significant.
It's between 300 and five, 600 micrograms.
We asked the patients to keep their eyes closed.
We were literally were using eye shades.
We were using headphones, hi-fi music,
and the talking was done beforehand and after.
That was a much more effective approach to the therapy
in terms of personal transformation.
Dean Colweather is arriving for his third LSD session.
Cancer of the bowel gave him almost constant pain,
but this was controlled for over six months
as a result of his previous session.
As well as that, the drug has helped him come
to terms with his condition,
and even enjoyed the life he knows will end soon.
- When we were doing the work with cancer patients,
the basic assumption was that they would somehow,
very radically, change their concept of death.
- Every drop.
- It's for people whom knew that they could die
in a matter of weeks or months,
and they were able to be reconciled,
and their way of being actually
in the world from day to day changed dramatically.
It was a very, very successful study besides being
very moving a study, as you can imagine.
People come first programmed by our culture,
that we are basically our body,
and suddenly comes an experience that shows you
that you are something much larger,
that you are not really just your body.
So you start looking at death as something that's death
of the body, and you get a sense
that death is a kind of an adventure
in consciousness and there is a sort of a large
dimension there that you actually knew nothing about.
After the special authorizations finally expired
in psychiatry, LSD disappeared underground
as an internationally outlawed drug.
Research in hallucinogenic substances
seemed to fade into oblivion.
- These cop outs were so demonized.
The whole area was so discredited
that we had this phenomenon which,
for better than 30 years,
the consensus opinion was
this research was too dangerous, or too edgy, to be done.
- We started our work with psilocybin in about 2000.
It was difficult, but we got approved.
People who are eligible for our trial
are people who have anxiety, and or depression,
secondary to their cancer diagnosis,
and they are struggling with these existential questions
of life and death, and their own psychological discomfort.
They go through two days of screening,
in which they receive a physical exam,
extensive psychiatric
and psychological testing.
So after preparation, the volunteers schedule
for their psilocybin sessions.
What we would want and hope for them
is that they have an experience that's uplifting
and alters their perceptual set
in a way that makes the remainder of their life
and their struggle with their disease process
something that's really quite manageable for them.
- The prognosis was very poor.
There were so many treatments, and since I have
a scientific background, I got very preoccupied
with researching everything, you know, micromanaging.
So my life just kind of got narrower and narrower.
I got more exclusively focused on the cancer.
I became more withdrawn.
Finally my daughter and friends
sort of told me that I needed to do something.
But I had no previous experience with psychedelics,
so I didn't know what to expect exactly.
- Looks like this is for you.
- A high proportion of volunteers have what's called
a primary, mystical type experience.
And they're absolutely sure that this experience is
more real than everyday waking reality,
and it's that element, I believe, that imprints
this experience into people's consciousness
in a way that has huge value going forward.
- In the beginning of the effects,
starting in about 10 minutes,
and it's like your brain is going offline,
one part at a time.
And I tell people this story to make it a little clearer,
since I do a lot of sailing, and if you're out
in the open ocean, and you were to fall off your boat,
you turn around and the boat's gone,
and then pretty soon the water's gone, and then your gone.
You don't have any sense of self anymore.
- That's good.
- Okay, now let's put some headphones on you, okay?
- Okay.
- Remember to let us know how the volume is
if you want it higher or lower.
- For the first hour and a half,
it was pretty frightening because I was fighting it.
I was resisting.
I wanted to open my eyes
and make things snap back into place.
If I didn't have the help of the people there,
I would have left the room and tried to walk around
and get things to focus back in again,
to look familiar again.
So the supervision, I think, is very important.
After about an hour and a half, I calmed down.
At one point, I thought I might be in a cathedral,
and I thought that it might be
a good chance to talk with God.
So I, just in my mind I said, "Well, if there was ever
"a good time, this is it, so talk to me,"
and nothing happened.
I did it again, and nothing happened.
There was just an experience of familiarity,
or tranquility, and during that time,
I could pull up past relationships
or current relationships, and look at them in great detail.
It was as if I was--
Sorry.
The depression itself lifted.
I might fall into a depression,
but I can pull myself out of it pretty easily.
It fundamentally changes the way you approach the world
so your opening out instead
of narrowing down into a negative spiral.
It's almost unbelievable that after one day,
and not any followup medications or anything,
that this could happen.
- I have had in my psychedelic sessions,
quite a few experiences where I
actually felt that I've already died,
that I wasn't around for the beyond death.
It was very, very convincing,
and I was very surprised when I actually returned
to the situation, where I took the substance.
I considered it very plausible that there is a
experiential world where we go into after the body dies,
but of course, you will never know until you get there,
but it's like a very, very
interesting journey.
- Well, right here is where it was painted, "Nothing lasts."
That's what it said.