her clinical observations. This policy remained more or less unchanged
from 1949 to 1966 and was in large part responsible for setting off the
first wave of psychedelic research—the one that crashed in 1966, when
Sandoz, alarmed at the controversy that had erupted around its
experimental drug, abruptly withdrew Delysid from circulation.
So what was learned during that fertile and freewheeling period of
investigation? A straightforward question, and yet the answer is
complicated by the very nature of these drugs, which is anything but
straightforward. As the literary theorists would say, the psychedelic
experience is highly “constructed.” If you are told you will have a spiritual
experience, chances are pretty good that you will, and, likewise, if you are
told the drug may drive you temporarily insane, or acquaint you with the
collective unconscious, or help you access “cosmic consciousness,” or
revisit the trauma of your birth, you stand a good chance of having
exactly that kind of experience.
Psychologists call these self-fulfilling prophecies “expectancy effects,”
and they turn out to be especially powerful in the case of psychedelics. So,
for example, if you have ever read Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception,
which was published in 1954, your own psychedelic experience has
probably been influenced by the author’s mysticism and, specifically, the
mysticism of the East to which Huxley was inclined. Indeed, even if you
have never read Huxley, his construction of the experience has probably
influenced your own, for that Eastern flavoring—think of the Beatles song
“Tomorrow Never Knows”—would come to characterize the LSD
experience from 1954 on. (Leary would pick up this psychedelic
orientalism from Huxley and then greatly amplify it when he and his
Harvard colleagues wrote a bestselling manual for psychedelic experience
based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead.) Further complicating the story
and adding another feedback loop, Huxley was inspired to try
psychedelics and write about the experience by a scientist who gave him
mescaline in the explicit hope that a great writer’s descriptions and
metaphors would help him and his colleagues make sense of an
experience they were struggling to interpret. So did Aldous Huxley “make
sense” of the modern psychedelic experience, or did he in some sense
invent it?
This hall of epistemological mirrors was just one of the many
challenges facing the researchers who wanted to bring LSD into the field
frankie
(Frankie)
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