Name: The Long, Strange Trip of LSD | Retro Report
Uploaded: 2017-05-09T00:46:30.000Z
Duration: 13 min 5 s
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CBS News, without any flowers in its hair, is in San Francisco because this city

has gained the reputation of being the hippie capitol of the world.

In the 1960s, a counter-culture sprang up based on peace, love, and psychedelic drugs like LSD.

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

Timothy Leary had an insight that  if you changed yourself

it would change the world and change the society.

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

The frightening thing about LSD, of course, is that it lurks in the bloodstream like a tiger.

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.

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 decades.

In January of 1967, thousands of young people gathered

in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park  to mark the dawn of a new era.

There was political speakers. There was countercultural speakers.

There was rock music  and yes, the LSD flowed like wine.

A psychologist who had taught at Harvard, named Timothy Leary, praised the power of LSD,

an increasingly popular mind-altering drug.

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

When people say "What’s the use of LSD?" I translate that into "What’s the use of my head?"

That’s a fascinating problem. Suppose man can use more of his brain.

People that took the drug felt if everybody  can have this experience, the world

would be a profoundly different place, a much better place and 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.

The city of San Francisco has been warned of a hippie invasion come summer

in numbers almost too staggering to comprehend.

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

I mean, what, you want to drop out, 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.

Psychedelics are not groovy, ok?  Psychedelics are dangerous.

Former New York City  Police Commissioner Howard Safir

was an undercover narcotics agent in the late 1960s.

Back then everybody thought of LSD was for hippies until suddenly kids

who looked like they were straight showed up in emergency rooms.

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.

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.

There is nothing smart, there’s nothing grown-up or sophisticated in taking an LSD trip at all.

Headlines warned of additional dangers  including genetic damage,

involuntary hallucinations, and even suicide.

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

After Diane Linkletter fell  from a sixth-story window in 1969,

her father, TV personality Art Linkletter, blamed LSD.

Anybody who has said anything which would encourage my daughter to take LSD

was unwittingly a part of being her murderer.

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

President Nixon went to the Narcotics Bureau  today to sign a drug bill.

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.

LSD had been developed in the labs of a Swiss pharmaceutical company.

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

It was all legal in those days.  Nothing controversial about it at all.

Bill Richards helped 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.

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

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

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.

Most people got mildly psychotic and the thought then

was that it might help us understand schizophrenia or other severe forms of mental illness.

The CIA investigated LSD as a potential truth serum,

and the Army tested the effect LSD might have on soldiers in battle.

Some early test subjects had bad reactions, and some scientists began to use LSD

in a more controlled manner, as one step in an ongoing program of psychotherapy.

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.

You’ve taken head-on the biggest thing that’s bothered you.

The LSD experience was closely monitored and guided,

with music and eyeshades used to calm  and reassure the patient.

At the end I felt a great weight had been taken off me

like it was something had opened up and things could be seen in a different light.

There was an incredible spirit of excitement.

International conferences, papers  published on LSD and psychotherapy.

But as the 1960s progressed, and as people like Timothy Leary spread LSD

from the laboratory to the counter-culture, the drug’s potential for therapy was overshadowed

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.

And after LSD was declared  a Schedule I drug in 1970,

funding and support for psychedelic research dried up.

This is the most powerful tool ever discovered to look at consciousness.

Today, the psychedelic glow of the 1960s has 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.

Folks are studying a lot of things with psychedelics now.

Matt Johnson is a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University.

He says that instead of LSD, most research today is done with psilocybin:

a similar psychedelic, with one important difference.

It comes down to the spelling of psilocybin.

It’s a hard word to spell but at least it’s not spelled LSD, which is a very strong word that people react to.