The Surprising Benefits and History of LSD
Disclaimer: LSD is prohibited in most countries. The author's opinions are their own, and the owner of this site neither promotes nor endorses the illegal use of banned substances outside of research officially authorized by the DEA, NIDA, or similar regulatory bodies. Anything that reads otherwise reflects the author's personal political views. None of this should be taken as medical or legal advice. Talk to a physician or an attorney before pursuing treatment or doing anything that might be illegal where you live. Do not use illegal substances without authorization from a government agency or a medical provider. The information here may be inaccurate and could cause harm if acted on. It exists for education, information, and discussion only.
Cannabis is where the shift began. Studies keep appearing on how marijuana carries unexpected health benefits, helping the body with illnesses ranging from cancer to certain mental conditions, partly because of its calming effect. Set the herbal drugs aside for now. What I want to look at is the surprising upside of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, LSD, specifically for a person's own growth. The hippies of the 1960s may have been onto something. Their mistake was in how they pursued it.
Roughly three decades before that cultural upheaval, a scientist named Albert Hofmann was at work in a laboratory studying a medicinal plant and ergot fungus. He was trying to build a stimulant for the respiratory and circulatory systems. Somewhere in the chemistry he produced LSD instead. One day he absorbed some by accident and found himself having strange, vivid visions. From what Hofmann believed was a small, safe dose, about 0.25 milligrams (250 micrograms), he traveled straight into the middle of his own mind.
Jump ahead to the cultural revolution. After thirty years of research that produced thousands of papers, LSD use expanded in the 1950s as a treatment for various mental disorders. The conclusion of the day was that psychedelics like LSD could support a person's growth by letting them reach and examine the deepest parts of a troubled mind.
So what in the 1960s brought the scientific work on LSD to a halt? That decade, the cultural revolution, saw many young baby boomers, the hippies, begin experimenting with sex, drugs, and rock and roll. These were also the people who wanted to tune out and tear down the establishment. The trouble was never really the compound itself; it was the way particular people chose to use it. The psychedelics never killed anyone on their own. External factors did.
The commonly cited dose of LSD is around 20 mcg a day. The factors that turned dangerous, death included, came from going far above that amount.
Another pattern in the 1960s was people getting high and jumping out of windows. Again, not the drug. That was misuse, or abuse. Someone would take an LSD trip with no medical professional guiding them and lose their grip on reality, and the result could be a fatal fall from a window or some other disaster.
The actual problem with LSD and other psychedelics tends to be the ordinary person's shortage of self-control. People are wired to resist authority. We assume we know better than the professionals who pored over all that research, so we start experimenting in unhealthy ways, lose our restraint, and do something foolish. The surest path to more self-control is accepting the limits set for us, limits grounded in the knowledge of those who actually study these subjects. It does not help that plenty of today's medical professionals lean toward conventional medicines that claim to be backed by science. Other research has documented the terrible side effects of some of those pills, antipsychotics and antidepressants among them. Remember, you can get high on nearly anything in large enough quantities, including SSRIs, anxiety medications, and tranquilizers. Many of these emotional highs are psychological. You feel high partly because you think you are. Some people get a lift simply from rejecting established authority, which triggers an adrenaline rush.
It can be tough to accept that a hard drug like acid has contributed anything to society, yet the benefits are real. Mention LSD and most people picture the tripping hippies overdosing in the 1960s rather than any upside. The drug and its effects were discovered by accident in a laboratory in the 1930s by Albert Hofmann, then studied in clinical research across the next three decades. It began when Hofmann was looking for something to treat respiratory problems, until he absorbed a bit of the compound by accident and experienced intense hallucinations. That was 1938, and it took about twenty years before he returned to it and it spread as a treatment for an assortment of mental health disorders.
The research on LSD was carried out at Johns Hopkins University, one of the top medical research institutions in the world. Those studies found that at a strong dose of 200 to 250 mcg, the drug could help a person detach from ordinary reality long enough to make contact with their own psyche. Only once it caught on during the cultural revolution did the government move to ban it and pour money into the War on Drugs, a fight that could not be won at any price.
What were some of the benefits, then? Without drugs like LSD, we might never have gotten the great rock and roll of the 1960s, the stretch known as the British Invasion era. Ever heard The Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"? Look at the initials and you find LSD, and the band believed the drug opened up their creativity. Listen closely and you can hear they are describing an acid experience. It is one of their few songs that makes no real sense while still carrying a fine melody. One thing LSD does is put you in contact with your own psyche, and that can unlock a creative person's potential without any obvious ceiling. The four musicians from Liverpool also recorded "Strawberry Fields Forever" during an acid trip.
Enhanced creativity shows up in another story. A woman had an idea for an experiment with an artist friend who used LSD for its creative effects. She sat and watched her friend draw a run of self-portraits for about ten hours just to see how they would change over time. For the first fifteen minutes the artist drew the way she always did. You could not tell she had taken the minimum hallucination-inducing dose of 200 mcg. Over the next half hour she managed to draw herself without looking in a mirror. In the following hour her colors grew more intense and the hair she sketched kept getting longer. Around the two-hour-and-fifteen-minute mark the portraits began to come alive with color, and by three and a half hours she had stopped putting any eyes on her little drawn selves. After six hours and more than half a dozen portraits she abandoned the black pencil altogether, and everything turned to color. At eight hours she and her friend were sitting in the dark listening to Pink Floyd, and she was still drawing herself; by then the figure appeared to be wearing a costume mask over its eyes. After nine hours she could no longer put what was in her head onto paper, because, as she put it, there was simply too much happening outside her own head.