The Surprising Benefits and History of LSD
A note before anything else: LSD remains illegal in most of the world. The opinions here belong to the author and nobody else. The person who runs this site does not encourage breaking the law or using banned substances outside of a research setting that has been cleared by the DEA, NIDA, or an equivalent regulatory body. Nothing here is medical advice or legal advice. Talk to a physician or a lawyer before pursuing treatment or doing anything that might be illegal where you live. Some of what follows could be wrong, and acting on it could hurt you. Treat it as reading material and conversation, nothing more.
Cannabis is what cracked the door open. Studies keep appearing that credit marijuana with helping the body fight off conditions ranging from cancer to a handful of mental illnesses, partly because of how it settles a person down. Set the plant medicines aside for a moment, though. What I want to look at is Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, LSD, and what it seems to offer a person who is trying to grow. The hippies of the 1960s may have had the right instinct. Where they went wrong was the method.
Roughly three decades before that decade of upheaval, a chemist named Albert Hofmann was at work in a lab studying a medicinal plant and the ergot fungus. He wanted a compound that would stimulate breathing and circulation. What came out of his chemistry instead was LSD. He absorbed some by accident one day and found himself pulled into a run of strange and vivid imagery. The dose he believed was tiny and harmless, around a quarter of a milligram (250 micrograms), carried him straight into the middle of his own mind.
By the 1950s, after decades of work had produced thousands of papers, LSD was being used on a wide scale to treat various mental disorders. The thinking of the time held that a psychedelic like LSD could move someone's personal development forward by letting them reach and examine the farthest rooms of their own mind, especially a mind weighed down by a serious disorder.
So what put a stop to the science? The 1960s. Young baby boomers, the hippies, started experimenting with sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and a lot of them wanted to drop out and bring down the established order. The trouble was rarely the compound. It was how particular people chose to handle it. Psychedelics did not kill anyone on their own; what killed people were the circumstances around the use.
The dose that gets cited as standard is about 20 micrograms a day. The way you get yourself into danger, death included, is by going far past that.
There were also the stories from the 1960s of people getting high and going out of windows. Again, the chemical did not do that. Misuse did, abuse did. Someone would take a trip with no doctor anywhere nearby, lose their grip on what was real, and the ending might be a fatal fall or some other disaster.
What that points to is a problem with ordinary self-control rather than a problem with the drug. People bristle at authority; it is part of how we are built. We decide we know better than the specialists who actually sat with the research, so we start experimenting carelessly, and then we do something foolish. The steadier path is to accept the boundaries set by people who have studied the material. It does not help, admittedly, that plenty of today's clinicians lean hard toward "conventional medicine" that gets marketed as "backed by science." Research has also documented the grim side effects of some of those pills, antipsychotics and antidepressants among them. And remember, enough of almost anything will get you high, SSRIs and anxiety medications and tranquilizers included. A fair amount of that feeling is in the head to begin with; you feel high partly because you expect to. For some people the rush comes from the simple act of defying authority and the adrenaline that follows.
It is a stretch to picture a hard drug like acid making any contribution to society, yet there are real benefits on the record. When most people hear LSD, they picture tripping hippies overdosing in the 1960s and nothing else. The compound and its effects turned up by accident in Hofmann's lab in the 1930s and then went through thirty years of clinical study. It began with his search for something to treat breathing problems, until he absorbed a bit of it and the intense hallucinations started. That was 1938, and it took another twenty years before he returned to it and the substance spread into treatment for an assortment of mental health conditions.
Johns Hopkins University, a top-tier medical research institution, ran careful work on what LSD could do. At a strong dose in the range of 200 to 250 micrograms, the research suggested, a person could step far enough outside ordinary reality to make contact with their own psyche. Only once the drug caught on during the cultural revolution did the government move to ban it and pour money into a War on Drugs that could never be won.
What were some of the upsides? Without drugs like LSD, the great rock music of the 1960s might never have existed, the stretch people remember as the British Invasion. Think of The Beatles and "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." Look at the title and the initials jump out, and the band saw LSD as a way to open up their creativity. Play the song and you can hear that it is describing an acid experience. It is one of the few Beatles tracks that makes no literal sense and still carries a fine melody. That contact with the psyche is one of the benefits people point to, because it can unlock an artist's creative reserve. The same four from Liverpool cut another track, "Strawberry Fields Forever," while on a trip.
There is also the case of a woman who set up an experiment with an artist friend who used LSD for its effect on creativity. She sat and watched her friend draw a run of self-portraits for about ten hours just to see how they would change. For the first fifteen minutes the artist drew the way she always did; you would not have guessed she had taken the minimum 200-microgram dose that brings on hallucinations. Over the next half hour she could sketch herself with no mirror. In the hour after that the colors grew louder and the hair in the drawings kept getting longer. Around two hours and fifteen minutes the portraits seemed to be coming alive with color, and by three and a half hours she had stopped putting eyes on the little drawn versions of herself. Past six hours and more than half a dozen portraits in, she abandoned the black pencil and worked only in color. At the eight-hour mark the two of them were sitting in the dark with Pink Floyd playing while she kept drawing, and by then her figure appeared to be wearing a mask across the eyes. After nine hours she could no longer get down what was in her head, because, in her words, there was simply too much happening outside of it. Between that strung-out artist and The Beatles, the reinvention was total.