LSD's Long, Strange Trip
NY Times, Retro Report
Video

BMM

[♫ Music ♫.]  

Reporter:   CBS News, without any flowers in its hair, is in San Francisco because this city has gained the reputation of being the hippie capital of the world.  

Narrator:   In the 1960s, a counterculture sprang up based on peace, love, and psychedelic drugs like LSD.  

Male:   The kids who take LSD aren't going to fight your wars.  They're not going to join your corporations.  

Male:   Timothy Leary had an insight that if you changed yourself it would change the world and change the society.  

Narrator:  Authorities quickly cracked down on the drug, fearing its alleged health effects.  

Male:   Instant insanity.  

Male:   Chromosome damage.  

Female:   It may affect your unborn children.  

Male:   A frightening thing about LSD, of course, is it lurks in the blood stream like a tiger.  

Narrator:  But today, half a century later, some psychedelic drugs are making a comeback, not on the streets but in the laboratory which is where it all began.  

Male:   There's really no other example that I can think of in science where an entire area of research was put on the deep freeze for decides.  

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[00:01:18]

Narrator:  In January of 1967, thousands of young people gathered in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park to mark the dawn of a new era.  

Male:   It was political speakers; it was countercultural speakers.  It was rock music, and yes, the LSD flowed like wine.  

Narrator:  A psychologist who had taught at Harvard, named Timothy Leary, praised the power of LSD, an increasingly popular, mind-altering drug.  

Leary:   Turn on, tune in, drop out.  

Narrator:  For Leary, turning on with LSD was the key to achieving a higher level of consciousness.  

Leary:  When people say, "What's the use of LSD," I translate that into, "What's the use of my head," and that's a fascinating problem.  Yeah, suppose man can use more of his brain.  

Male:   People that took the drug felt if everybody can have this experience, the world will be a profoundly different place, a much better place.  Within months, this drug, this sensibility, this countercultural revolution (if you want to call it that) attracted mass media from around the planet, and that blew it up.  

Reporter:   The city of San Francisco has been warned of a hippie invasion come summer in numbers almost too staggering to comprehend.  

Coyote:   I think a lot of people intuited in the establishment that LSD was a direct threat to industriousness.  

Male:   I mean, what?  You want to drop out and not get a job?  You know, just go and live on the street in San Francisco?  I think this was seen as profoundly threatening to the social order.  

Safir:   Psychedelics are not growing, okay?  Psychedelics are dangerous.  

Narrator:  Former New York City police commissioner, Howard Safir, was an undercover narcotics agent in the late 1960s.  

Safir:  Back then, everybody thought LSD was for hippies until suddenly kids who looked like they were straight showed up in emergency rooms.  

Reporter:  There is a steady flow into San Francisco hospitals of young people who have "freaked out" and been picked up by the police in a state of desperate terror.  

Safir:  I had seen people on the street who had no idea where they were.  I had arrested people on LSD who were incredibly violent, so it wasn't the peaceful, non-harmful, easy drug that Timothy Leary professed it to be.  

Male:  There's nothing smart; there's nothing grown up or sophisticated in taking an LSD trip at all.  They're just being complete fools.  

[00:03:54]

Narrator:  Headlines warned of additional dangers including genetic damage, involuntary hallucinations, and even suicide.  

Reporter:  20-year-old Diane Linkletter killed herself on October 4th.  

Narrator:  After Diane Linkletter fell from a sixth-story window in 1969, her father, TV personality Art Linkletter, blamed LSD.  

Linkletter:  Anybody who has said anything which would encourage my daughter to take LSD was unwittingly a part of being her murderer.  

Safir:  I think that raised public consciousness probably as much as anything that happened in the '60s.  

Reporter:  President Nixon went to the narcotics bureau today to sign a drug bill.  

Narrator:  In 1970, the Controlled Substances Act made LSD a schedule I drug, the class of dangerous substances with high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use.  

But before it became a street drug, LSD had been developed in the labs of a Swiss pharmaceutical company.  

Male:   They weren't sure what it could be used for, and they sort of fanned it out to the scientific community.  

Richards:  It was all legal in those days, nothing controversial about it at all.  

Narrator:  Bill Richards help conduct scientific research with LSD and other psychedelics as a young researcher in the 1960s.  He says the early experiments in the 1950s were rudimentary.  

Richards:  You'd simply be given the drug and see what happens.  

Male:   Do you find any difference between one half of your body as opposed to the other half?  

Male:   Well, I have sort of a wavering tendency.  I don't know which half is trying to get into the other half, but somehow or other, I seem to be going like that.  

Richards:  Most people got mildly psychotic, and the thought then was that it might help us understand schizophrenia or other severe forms of mental illness.  

Narrator:  The CIA investigated LSD as a potential truth serum, and the Army tested the affect LSD might have on soldiers in battle.  

Male:   After a few minutes, the men found it difficult to obey orders.  And soon, the results were chaotic.  

Narrator:  Some early test subjects had bad reactions, and some scientists began to use LSD in a more controlled manner as one step in an on-going program of psychotherapy.  

[00:06:23]

Richards:  There was a lot of excitement about the potential of psychedelics in treating alcoholism.  And then we moved into working with terminal cancer patients, treating anxiety and depression.  

Male:   [unclear] is taking head on the biggest thing that's bothered you.  

Narrator:  The LSD experience was closely monitored and guided with music and eye shades used to calm and reassure the patient.  

Male:   At the end, I felt a great weight had been taken off of me, like it was something that had opened up and things could be seen in a different light.  

Richards:  There was an incredible spirit of excitement: international conferences, papers published on LSD in psychotherapy.  

Narrator:  But as the 1960s progressed and as people like Timothy Leary spread LSD from the laboratory to the counterculture, the drug's potential for therapy was overshadowed by stories of its dangerous street use.  

Safir:  I'm a pretty black-and-white guy.  There was never any thought in my mind that there were positive uses for LSD.  I saw the results, and the results were not pretty.  

Narrator:  After LSD was declared a schedule I drug in 1970, funding and support for psychedelic research dried up.  

Male:   The is the most powerful tool ever discovered to look at consciousness, and it was taken away.  

Narrator:  Today, the psychedelic glow of the 1960s had faded, and recreational use of LSD which is still illegal has fallen to low but steady levels.  But in the world of science, a new age is dawning.  

Johnson:   Folks are studying a lot of things with psychedelics now.  

Narrator:  Matt Johnson is a Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University.  He says that instead of LSD most research is done with psilocybin, a similar psychedelic with one important difference.  

Johnson:  It comes down to the spelling of psilocybin.  It's a hard word to spell, and at least it's not spelled L-S-D which is a very strong word that people react to.  

[00:08:35]

In recent years, more than a dozen studies at several universities have investigated the use of psilocybin and therapy to treat problems ranging from addiction to depression and anxiety in cancer patients.  

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In 2010, Sherry Marcy was diagnosed with stage III endometrial cancer.  Her life changed overnight.  

Marcy:  I had been an athlete all my life, so to suddenly have cancer was shocking.  I think I looked up from the phone call and said to Nancy, "I'm stunned."  

Quay:  After Sherry's diagnosis, even prior to treatment, it was just like this doom had descended on her and subsequently on us.  

Narrator:  Undergoing both radiation and chemotherapy, Sherry began taking anxiety, sleep, and pain medications to cope with her symptoms.  

Marcy:  It took away my whole identity.  I wasn't who I used to be, and I wasn't the person that Nancy, you know, formed a life with.  I'm about to cry now just getting back into it.  It felt like I sat on the couch and did nothing all day.  

Narrator:  Then, in 2012, Sherry read an article that mentioned a Johns Hopkins study on psilocybin and cancer patients who were suffering from depression and anxiety.  

Marcy:  It sounded like it fit me.  It just fit.  

Narrator:  8 weeks later, the couple traveled to Baltimore where Sherry had the first of 2 psilocybin doses.  

Marcy:  There was sort of a ceremony about taking the pill, and then I was there for 6 hours reacting to the pill.  I process by talking, so [laughter] something I really learned about myself then.  Every now and then, they would say, "Now, why don't you stop talking and just feel."  

But what happened to me was that I ended up getting totally reconnected, first to Nancy.  Nancy and I had a wonderful life together, and it couldn't go on, and I hadn't known that before.  Then, also my kids, getting reconnected to them, so there was this family dynamic that just reformed, and that was just great.  

[00:10:51]

Quay:  She was just lighter, immediately a difference.  Then, we came home, and it persisted.  

Narrator:   Today, Sherry, who is now cancer-free, says the psilocybin study helped her re-engage with life.  

Marcy:  It wasn't like it was psychedelic for me.  It just was me.  Back.  I don't know how it did that exactly, except to broaden out.  It's like you lift up your head and take a good, long look, and you start seeing things again.  

Narrator:  Recent brain imaging studies have investigated the impact of psychedelics.  They found that both LSD and psilocybin foster connections between parts of the brain that normally work independently.  

Johnson:  It's an exciting area in neuroscience right now.  More and more groups are jumping in, and it's only just begun, but people should really be aware that there are potential dangers.  

Narrator:  Those dangers can range from a temporary bad reaction to the triggering or worsening of an underlying psychiatric condition, so caution is a guiding principle in today's research.  

But it turns out that not all of the claims made about LSD in the 1960s were true.  Studies have found little evidence that it damages chromosomes or causes birth defects, and Diane Linkletter's autopsy found no drugs in her system when she died.  

[00:12:17]

On the other hand, Sherry Marcy says, "Timothy Leary didn't get it right either."  

Marcy:  I think the emphasis was wrong.  I mean, the "turn on" doesn't have to be emphasized at all.  The "drop out" is an absolutely mistake, but the "tune in" is crucial.  I "tuned in"-- tuned in to the world, to me, to things I used to love, to my relationships, to my family.  "Tune in" is what it's all about.  

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