|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Psychedelia and American Religion
| Article
# : |
13731 |
|
|
Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
|
| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1988 |
6,576 Words |
| Author
: |
Russell Hittinger
Russell Hittinger is assistant professor of philosophy at
Fordham University. |
When in 1947 Sandoz Laboratories of Switzerland first marketed LSD-25 to researchers under the trade name of Delysid, the literature that came with the substance suggested two uses. The first is analytical: to elicit release of repressed material and provide mental relaxation, particularly in anxiety states and obsessional neurosis. The second is experimental: By taking Delysid himself, the psychiatrist is able to gain insight into the world of ideas and sensations of mental patients. This was a strange pharmaceutical indeed: one that made sick people normal and normal people sick, promising mental relaxation to the one, and insight to the other.
At the very outset, there was consternation over how to classify the substance. The CIA first tested LSD as a speech-inducing drug, a truth serum of sorts. But clinical research soon indicated that it also had the effect of a psychotomimetic--a madness-mimicking agent--which could be used to temporarily incapacitate large populations. Did it produce a genuine gnosis or a psychosis? The CIA was unsure, but the agency was sufficiently intrigued by the drug's prospects that it authorized the purchase of one hundred million doses of LSD from Sandoz. (The actual purchase became unnecessary when Eli Lilly broke the secret formula in 1954 and thus insured a domestic source for the substance.)
Clinicians, too, were as intrigued by the possibilities of LSD as they were ambivalent about its proper use. On the one hand, it had experimental value as a psychotomimetic. In producing a temporary delirium tremens, it allowed psychologists to study in a controlled way the most intense aberrations of the human psyche. On the other hand, patients reported having experiences under the drug that seemed "religious" in nature. Cary Grant, for example, reported that after trying yoga, hypnotism, and psychoanalysis, he was "born again" during an LSD trip. Grant was one of many celebrities--including Henry and Clare Boothe Luce, members of Parliament, and artists such as Thelonius Monk and Dizzy Gillespie--who tried the drug long before it became associated with the "youth culture" of the 1960s. What began as a drug for inducing psychosis and for incapacitating populations for military purposes, became the recreational sacrament for hundreds of thousands of people. In fact, as late as 1968, Sen. Robert Kennedy argued on behalf of the drug, and admonished his legislative colleagues that "to some extent we have lost sight of the fact that it can be very, very helpful in our society if used properly."
Dr. Humphrey Osmond, a British psychiatrist at Weyburn Hospital in Saskatchewan, Canada,
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
