Acid Test

a review of: Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered Lester Grinspoon and James B. Bakalar Originally published in 1979 by Basic Books Inc., New York.

Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered

The re-edition of 1997 is the first volume of the Drug Policy Classics Reprint Series,

published by The Lindesmith Center, 1997, ISBN: 0-9641568-5-7

I believe that these agents have a part to play in our survival as a species, for that survival depends as much on our opinion of our fellows and ourselves as on any other single thing. The psychedelics help us to explore and fathom our own nature.... I believe that the psychedelics provide a chance, perhaps only a slender one, for Homo faber, the cunning, ruthless, foolhardy, pleasure-greedy toolmaker to merge into that other creature whose presence we have so rashly presumed, Homo sapiens, the wise, the understanding, the compassionate, in whose fourfold vision art, politics, science, and religion are one. Surely we must seize that chance.i — Humphrey Osmond, 1957

A long time has passed since anyone has taken such statements seriously, or so it would seem. Many of the intellectuals and scientists who in the 1950s spoke of such potentials for the use of psychedelic drugs later tempered or even recanted their enthusiasm for one reason or another, typically in response to the widespread illicit use of psychedelics and accompanying negative propaganda that soon followed. The great popularity of psychedelic drugs among the young combined with the political and social turmoil of the Vietnam War era seemed to turn the original psychedelic vision into merely another utopian tale to be written about in novels, or as some would insist, a hopeful dream into a nightmare; by the late 1960s the pioneering work of Osmond, Huxley, and many other famous names was no longer given much credence by intellectuals, world leaders, and others ‘in the know’ about the reality of modern civilization.

Stanislav Grof, one of the most knowledgeable researchers in the field of psychedelic drugs and their uses, writes of the early enthusiasm for the newly discovered LSD: “Never before had a single substance held so much promise in such a wide variety of fields of interest.”ii Grof notes that the fields of psychology, neuropharmacology, psychiatry, religion, anthropology, education, creativity research, art and music, were all being significantly influenced by the new research, and he draws our attention to the fact that the use of these psychedelic substances in their natural plant forms was an activity that had intimately accompanied humankind’s long evolutionary journey to the present. We see that what was occurring was not so much a discovery as a re-discovery of a long-lost elixir and mode of consciousness held in high esteem by all ancient and pre-industrial peoples. The rediscovery of such an important influence on human development should of course have far-reaching significance for every area of human understanding. A few short years into this worthy project, however, and all was in shambles, and a Prohibition was enacted outlawing essentially all use and experimentation with psychedelics, even by research professionals.

No doubt the reasons for this tragic turn of events will be analyzed and written about long into the future, and modern society’s prohibitionist rejection of those brief years of discovery will for the historian provide great insight about our times and the psychology of those who dwelled in them. By the late 1970s, when the first edition of Grinspoon and Bakalar’s Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered appeared, they could state in the first paragraph of their Introduction,

Psychedelic drugs are very much out of fashion. Illicit drug users have less in­terest in them now than at any time in the last fifteen years. Researchers in psychology and psychiatry are showing no interest at all, or are being allowed to show none in practice. Many people will say that this is just as well. LSD and its relatives represent nothing more than a drug abuse epidemic that has mercifully receded and an insane pseudoreligion that has ruined the lives of thousands of young people. More than enough has been said about these drugs and far too much has already been done with them. They may be use­ful for a few specialised experiments on animals but are otherwise best for­gotten and, if necessary, suppressed. (p 3.)

The purpose of Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered is to plead the case for a reopening of psychedelic research and therapy, and to present an overview of what has so far been accomplished in the understanding of “these most complex and fascinating of all drugs,” in the words of the authors. The book is intended as a “reminder of where psychedelic drugs have taken us — as a culture, in science, in psychiatry — and where we abandoned the journey.” In a very ambitious exposition the authors attempt to cover the entire territory from the chemistry and botanical sources and effects of the major psychedelic drugs (chapter 1), the history of use of the natural forms of these substances in preindustrial cultures (chapter 2), to the story of their 20th Century rediscovery (chapter 3). Psychedelic experiences of users are described and analyzed in detail in chapter 4, and a brief but thorough look at potential therapeutic uses and the occurrence and treatment of adverse effects are covered in chapters 5 and 6. The possible applications and implications of psychedelic drug research for the broader study of consciousness and the human mind are examined in the concluding chapters. An extensive annotated bibliography is included, providing short overviews of essentially all the important psychedelic literature to date.

The authors note that psychedelic drug research and therapy was an enterprise of quite some significance and respectability for many years, and nowhere in the context of this work were good reasons found to discontinue it or believe that the field was somehow a dead end, or that it should be abandoned for whatever reason. Not only the general public, but a great majority of the scientific community today appear ignorant of the breadth and importance of the psychedelic research already accomplished, and quite willing in their ignorance to favour its continued prohibition. In fact, the research was brought to a sudden end by government fiat precisely at the point where important breakthroughs were occurring. As a result of the forced abandonment of research Grinspoon and Bakalar remark that,

There have been few serious attempts to make theoretical sense of the full range of psychedelic experiences in terms that do justice to the understanding of those who undergo them. Psychologists and psychiatrists have chosen to ignore and dismiss most of this impressive clinical material, possibly because it seems so hard to incorporate into any acceptable theory of the mind. But we should not treat an experience as meaningless or demanding no explanation just because our present explanatory powers are inadequate to it. We ought to take these matters more seriously and at least try to find ways of investigating them as we do more familiar and intellectually comfortable aspects of our world.... The present disreputable status of psychedelic drug research has been created partly by unwillingness to confront these phenomena intellectually and emotionally. This unwilling­ness not only obstructs advances in the relatively narrow field of psychophar­macology, but also limits the improvement of our general understanding of human nature and experience. (pp. 155-6)

In contrast to the sometimes unrealistic enthusiasm of early statements and reports about the drugs, we can see here, and throughout the book, a maturing of view about the potential of psychedelic drugs and their uses. Yet this mature view reiterates, if in a more subdued and cautious way, much of the original sentiment that the rediscovery of psychedelic drugs might well turn out to be one of the most important developments of our time, as important as many of the great discoveries punctuating the rise of modern civilization. While such a statement may seem to some yet another example of excess enthusiasm, the wealth of information about psychedelics and the excellence of Grinspoon and Bakalar’s presentation in this valuable book should convince many skeptics that the ‘scandal’ of psychedelic drugs is not that they are popular and a common item of illicit commerce, but that their proper scientific study has been made impossible for completely unscientific reasons. The net result of their prohibition is that the substances seem to be available everywhere except where they should be, in the research institutions and hospitals as well as the practices of qualified psychologists and psychiatrists.

Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered succeeds admirably in the task of its broad examination, and the reader soon begins to suspect that the prohibition of these drugs is really an attempt to kill the messenger rather than deal with the message that we receive, not from the drugs per se, but from within ourselves both individually and collectively on the occasion of the re-experience of this primordial influence on human consciousness. The distinction between what the drugs actually ‘do’ to those undergoing the experience and what is inherent in altered states of consciousness no matter what the cause, has been a matter of debate and confusion from the start. A significant part of the resistance to psychedelic use in research and therapy stemmed from a misunderstanding of cause and effect in relation to the content and source of psychedelic experience, the paradigm of modern pharmacology insisting that a drug have clearly defined effects on clearly defined aspects of the organism for it to be of clearly defined use.

The early researchers soon realized the limitations of trying to force psychedelic experience into the Procrustean mold of simple cause and effect offered by the modern life sciences. In the study of human consciousness as in modern physics, the researchers were finding that the classical laws and boundaries tend to dissolve in apparent paradox at the fringes of the known: In physics when we wish to understand the very small, the very large, the very rapid or distant, the very extremes of physical manifestation, we find that measurement and even causation itself depart radically from classical theory. The early psychedelic researchers were discovering analogous principles in the case of the long-ignored fringes of human consciousness and employed the concept of set and setting to try to describe the observed non-specificity of effect of psychedelics and the corresponding broad range of possible therapeutic and experimental uses being explored.

The concept of set and setting as the determinant of psychedelic experience was frequently misunderstood, however, even by some of the psychedelic researchers. A merely superficial interpretation of the concept seems tautological, for we might say that not only psychedelic experiences but the entire range of human awareness is highly dependent on the setting, or environment, and the set, the expectations, prejudices, personality and general outlook of the experiencer. For the newcomer to the concept, the temptation to over-simplify is understandable, but he must realize that in any new area of understanding, especially one involving a shift in paradigms as may be the case here, close attention must be paid to the deeper intended meanings of terms and concepts necessarily borrowed from the old paradigm for use in the new, which of course must in the beginning suffer from a lack of appropriate descriptive terminology.

In reading Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered, the reader should come away with a useful and correct understanding of the set and setting concept as it applies to psychedelic experience, yet if I may make a criticism that does not indicate serious error but merely an oversight in the application of the set and setting concept, even these respected authors do not adhere to the full implications of the idea in some parts of the book. In chapter 3, “Psychedelic Drugs in the Twentieth Century,” we see upon close scrutiny that the authors’ recounting occasionally fails to recognize that analogous to the understanding of the effect of psychedelic drugs on an individual, we must also employ the concept of set and setting on the collective level of society to understand how psychedelic drugs have affected our times and modes of living and thinking.

In this chapter all of what the authors say is perfectly true in many important respects. In fact it is one of the best overviews to date of the changes brought about by the interaction of modern mores and beliefs, and the psychedelic rediscovery. Yet if we shift our viewpoint slightly, taking into account the set and setting lessons we have learned in the case of individual psychedelic experience, we realize that psychedelic drugs do far more to reveal what is already latent not only in our individual minds, but in an important sense, in history itself. Psychedelic drugs have not been rediscovered and then caused some alteration of the course of human events as a normal historical analysis might wish to claim. We must ask not what these drugs do to us either individually or collectively, but what they show us about ourselves. Just as it is futile to try to understand these substances if we search for their precise ‘effects’ on us as individuals, we likewise will go astray in trying to understand how they have affected modern societies, as if the ‘effects’ were somehow inbuilt into the drugs, alien or abnormal to human consciousness, part and parcel of the nature of the drugs rather than the nature of ourselves and our times.

Thus for example when we read the authors’ analysis of the ‘hippie phenomenon’ in chapter 3 of Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered, from the common perspective of our established paradigm we want to believe that the psychedelic drugs were a root cause of observed events, and the authors allow us to see it thus. If instead we see the influence of psychedelic experience as not causative in the strict sense, but rather as revelatory of innate human propensities and characteristics both individually and collectively, it should slowly dawn on us that the psychedelics are merely holding a mirror to our modern times, not a distorting mirror but in an important sense one of the more valuable and undistorted views available to us. True, from our present perspective we hardly recognize ourselves in this strange apparition, but the universality of the psychedelic experience and its intimate and constant connection with human development must show that our unfamiliarity is itself a function not of the strangeness of the drug experience but of the strangeness of our times, our mores and beliefs, and the fragmentary nature of our perceived collective identity.

We tend to view ourselves as ‘modern and advanced,’ after aeons of struggle and turmoil we believe we have finally put behind us our primitivity and ignorance, that we are no longer the slaves of ritual, superstition and blind instinct.... But humans have always believed such myths about themselves, always perceived that they were ‘living in modern times,’ and in this we are no different than the earliest of our ancestors. Thus psychedelic experience may allow us to see through the illusion we constantly manufacture and instead of the modern use of psychedelics seen as a collision or conflict between Western Civilization and ‘primitive practices,’ a disrupting influence come to disturb our confidence and pride in our achievements, we may instead understand their collective influence as an indicator of our identity and our place in the continuum of human experience as we would understand it from a perspective above and beyond our own times, a universal perspective available in the recent past to only a few artists, poets, and mystics, but now with the potential to enter the mainstream of collective perception. This more universal view then puts a very different aspect on the current deprecatory judgement of what the ‘hippie generation’ was about, for we see illustrated precisely what would be expected of a youthful if immature and unprepared culture able to glimpse a wider view long unavailable to the establishment, but having to do so in the face of ignorant and forceful repression:

The hippie movement in its visions combined a theoretical benevolence and gentleness with an interest in communitarian experiments. the occult, magic, exotic ritual, and mysticism. It borrowed its crazy-quilt of ideas from depth psychology, oriental religion, anarchism, American Indian lore, and the Romantic and Beat literary current of inspired spontaneity. Middle-class young people, provided with a childhood free of the most obvious forms of coercion and made self-conscious by the adolescent subculture and the youth consumer market that supplied it, were unwilling to submit to what they saw as the hypocrisies and rigidities demanded by adult jobs and roles, the unfreedom of adult life....They rejected the accepted social definitions of reason, progress, knowledge, and even reality; they proclaimed their abandonment of the egocentrism and compulsiveness of the technological world view. American society was seen as a dehumanizing, commercialized air-conditioned nightmare, meanly conformist in its manners and morals, hypocritical in its religion, murderous and repressive in its politics....Like the Huichols, they would return through psychedelic drugs to a lost state of innocence, a time before time began when the creation was fresh and the earth a paradise. They would turn away from the empty democratic political forms of industrial society and organize themselves into “tribes,” imitating the organic community of preliterate hunters and gatherers. (pp. 71-72)

This passage, along with much additional comment, thus has a double meaning: one derived from the perspective that psychedelic drugs were a causative agent behind the hippie consciousness, in today’s common estimation a seducer of immature minds leading to a rejection of modern culture that simply had no justification, the other meaning more difficult to understand because it becomes clear only from the perspective of the new paradigm. If the collective effect of psychedelic experiences on the younger and more open if immature strata of society of the time are seen as a cleansing or dissolving of the prejudices and habits of thinking installed by the modern affluent society of the 1950s, we can understand far more deeply not only the motivations and expressions of the hippie phenomenon but also the uptight reaction of establishment:

So some sensitive outsiders, like cultivated Romans contemplating a Hellenistic sect, regarded the whole phenomenon, even in its most exalted and philosophical aspects, as a form of barbaric enmity to reason and civilization, a sometimes sadly naive and confused, sometimes aggressively coarse and brutal mixture of fraud and folly, a compound of collective eccentricity and personal aberration that could only be destructive. (pp. 72-73)

But these “sensitive outsiders” have it all wrong: The hippie ideal was certainly an immature expression, but at root a natural and altogether valid reaction to the reality of modern times. The psychedelics merely allowed this reaction to express itself through the vehicle of a youth culture primed to see things in a new light. The psychedelics merely provided the catalyst that energized the process. These “sensitive outsiders” take the scene (and themselves) not only ‘too seriously’ and without the tolerance essential to wisdom, but make the grave error of dismissing the idea that there might even exist a serious, logical alternative that can be expressed collectively in response to the deep folly of modern times.

The perspective necessary for understanding the psychedelic phenomenon both ancient and modern is therefore quite a unique one, and it is also a fundamental one for in many ways we are beginning anew the process by which ancient man came to an understanding of the significance of the psychedelic experience and his place in creation. We must view our modern rediscovery not as story of what psychedelic drugs ‘do’, but a story of how one particular phase in Western Civilization reacted to fundamental knowledge about itself — of how set and setting on the collective level became the determinants of what our newly researched collective reactions to psychedelics signified. We need to avoid collectively the same misperception the individual psychedelic user makes when he describes his experience in terms of what the drug ‘did to him’ rather than see that the experience is revealing to him his essential nature.

It might be ventured that a rediscovery of psychedelic drugs by a more peaceful, balanced, and stable society than our own would have been more propitious and benign, and that it is likewise understandable that psychedelics are accused of causing unnecessary turmoil in our own very destructive and perhaps collectively psychotic civilization. If we recognize that psychedelic drugs were instrumental in shaping and guiding much of mankind’s early development, however, if they have accompanied and perhaps directly and deeply influenced our awakening and social evolution, we may come to see that very possibly they may be necessary agents for our continued development, even our “survival as a species,” in the words of Humphrey Osmond. Perhaps humankind cannot hope to create a stable, sane society without the help of these substances, if they are indeed the catalyst to human consciousness in the first place. The present conjunction of ignorance and prohibition of psychedelics and the sorry state of our times may be no coincidence.

In the last chapter of the book, “The Future of Psychedelic Drug Research,” we read a passage indicating that the authors are no strangers to some of the viewpoints I have discussed above,

We know (or ought to know) that [psychedelic drugs] are neither a menace to mental health and civilized society nor the great liberating force of our time, the destined sacrament of the Aquarian Age. We have a reasonably good idea of their actual dangers and their prospects as experimental and therapeutic tools. The trouble is that it seems impossible to restrict the subject in this way; it touches too deeply on our fundamental conception of ourselves. Just as the effects of these complex drugs form an indissoluble unity with the mind of the individual user, the social response to them is intimately bound up with a whole set of attitudes about everything from drugs-in-general to mysticism-in-general. (pp. 291-292)

This is perhaps one of the most rational, down-to-earth statements that has been published on the subject in a long while, and the lack of such statements in the current drug policy debate a sure sign both of the great irrationality of the times and the danger inherent in such periods of turmoil. Nevertheless, the statement merely scratches the surface of what needs to be said.

Surely psychedelic drugs are not the “liberating force of the Aquarian Age,” for that kind of claim again falls into the causation fallacy, and is a mere parody and caricature of what the psychedelic experts were saying before the ‘scandal’ of widespread clandestine use forced caricature into the public perception as a means of criticism and dismissal. But the quotation at the beginning of this review was accompanied by many more, from a great many sources who cannot so easily be disqualified as ‘New-Age Kooks.’ If one has the detachment to study these early views immunized from the ‘scandal’ of the ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’ era, the predictions of Osmond, Huxley, Gerald Heard, Alan Watts, Houston Smith, Walter Houston Clark, and a large number of other extremely qualified experts lose none of their inherent wisdom, in fact, they become even more worthy of consideration.

What psychedelics show us collectively about ourselves is that we have squandered the greatest of all opportunities. Just as the natural plant psychedelics have catalyzed and accompanied important evolutionary developments for mankind in the distant past, they have still an enormous potential for helping to bring about further far-reaching benefits. Not in a year or two, of course! but rather in the long-run of many generations as they “help us to explore and fathom our own nature,” in the words of Humphrey Osmond. I do not know of anyone who is personally acquainted with these archetypal states of consciousness who believes themselves capable of drawing the limits of their importance or potential to assist eventual far-reaching beneficial changes in society. Psychedelics do not correct behavior, of course, nor will they act as a ‘medicament’ that will cure some malady or dysfunction even when the patient is unconscious or indisposed, they are no ‘cure’ for what ails the human race, no insurance that the events of the 21st Century and beyond will not be even more menacing and filled with atrocity than our own sad example of civilization in the 20th. But psychedelics can and have historically acted as a potent aid and illuminating window to a larger consciousness potential in all human beings, but one which had no evolutionary advantage until the dawn of human existence. Thus this larger consciousness is not instinctively inherent in our makeup, we do not automatically bring it to bear nor trust in it the way we instinctively trust fear or other evolution-installed states of consciousness, but rather avoid it. The task before us is to gain trust in the psychedelic experience, to let the wider vision provided act as our guide and teacher for overcoming primitive instincts that no longer serve our survival but actually endanger it.

The reason the psychedelic drugs are not now ‘working’ to bring about beneficial change is that we are collectively using them all wrong — instead of creating a situation in which those interested to use them must incur risks and ostracism in no way connected with correct use but rather with their irrational prohibition, we should by now have structured our institutions to provide for these persons. But look at the spectacle that has happened instead! See what the presence of psychedelics in our midst has demonstrated about our culture and collective nature! It has been said that if peaceful aliens from another planet landed on earth, we would most likely misunderstand their intentions, betray and destroy them long before learning of the reason for their visit. This is precisely what has happened with psychedelic drugs, for they are visitors from the ancient past, the equivalent of another universe of consciousness, returning with messages of peace and co-operation among men, and instead of hearing them out we have made war against them.

Man's collective mind has a high degree of viscosity and flows from one position to another with the reluctant deliberation of an ebbing tide of sludge. But in a world of explosive population increase, of headlong technological advance and of militant nationalism, the time at our disposal is strictly limited. We must discover, and discover very soon, new energy sources for overcoming our society's psychological inertia, better solvents for liquefying the sludgy stickiness of an anachronistic state of mind. On the verbal level an education in the nature and limitations, the uses and abuses of language; on the wordless level an education in mental silence and pure receptivity; and finally, through the use of harmless psychedelics, a course of chemically triggered conversion experiences or ecstasies—these, I believe, will provide all the sources of mental energy, all the solvents of conceptual sludge, that an individual requires. With their aid, he should be able to adapt himself selectively to his culture, rejecting its evils, stupidities and irrelevancies, gratefully accepting all its treasures of accumulated knowledge, of rationality, human-heartedness and practical wisdom.iii — Aldous Huxley, 1963

Psychedelic drugs would indeed be, as Huxley says in the above quotation, “harmless,” if only we had accepted them with the respect and reverent intentions they merit. What harm they may do is not of their making but our own, a function of our disrespect, mistrust, and essential paranoia about each other and about Nature: We assume first that the Universe is a hostile place needing to be subjugated and conquered. We have certainly failed our acid test, and the penalty must surely be more ominous than we can even imagine. Shall I add, however, that there is still hope if only we would reconsider?

i Humphrey Osmond, "A Review of the Clinical Effects of Psychotomimetic Agents," Annals N.Y. Acad. Sci., March 14, 1957. Dr. Osmond was a pioneer in the use of psychedelic drugs in psychotherapy, and guided Aldous Huxley’s first mescaline experiences described in the classic essays The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell.

ii From the prologue to The Secret Chief: Conversations with a Pioneer of the Underground Psychedelic Therapy Movement by Myron J. Stolaroff. Published by The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, 1997, ISBN: 0-966019-0-7

iii “Culture and the Individual,” ©1963 Aldous Huxley, originally appeared in Playboy magazine.