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The Trip ('LA Weekly' Recounts The Experimental Psychiatric Use Of LSD
Between 1954 And 1962 By Cary Grant And Hundreds Of Other Patients
Under The Care Of Dr. Oscar Janiger - Now, Proponents Of Scientific Research
With Psychedelics Are Pinning Their Hopes On A Follow-Up Study
On The Original Subjects, To Be Completed Later This Year
By The Multidisciplinary Association For Psychedelic Studies)
From: "Todd McCormick" (todd@a-vision.com)
Subject: Cary Grant on acid, and other stories...
Date: Fri, 3 Jul 1998 13:43:13 -0700
http://www.laweekly.com/
The Trip
Between 1954 and 1962, before most
Americans had heard of LSD,
psychiatrist Oscar Janiger
administered it to Cary Grant and
more than 900 others. Now,
proponents of scientific research
with psychedelics are pinning their
hopes on a new follow-up study of
Janiger's experiment.
by JOHN WHALEN
The Trip
Cary Grant on acid, and other stories from the LSD Studies of Dr. Oscar
Janiger
One morning in April 1962, Cary Grant swallowed four tiny blue pills of
lysergic acid diethylamide - LSD. Incredibly, it was the 58-year-old actor's
72nd acid trip under the supervision of a psychiatrist. Grant relaxed on a
plush couch and sipped coffee as the drug began to take effect. During the
five-hour session, his running commentary was captured on a small tape
recorder for later transcription: "I was noting the growing intensity of
light in the room," he recalled at one point, "and at short intervals as I
shut my eyes, visions appeared to me. I seemed to be in a world of healthy,
chubby little babies' legs and diapers, and smeared blood, a sort of general
menstrual activity taking place. It did not repel me as such thoughts used
to."
Hardly the suave repartee associated with the star of His Girl Friday and
North by Northwest. But as the aging movie idol had already stated in bold
public endorsements of the experimental drug, LSD had a way of stripping
away cultivated veneers and forcing one to confront unguarded, often
unpleasant, emotions. Grant was grateful for his LSD "therapy" - over the
course of a decade, he'd drop acid more than 100 times. Among other
benefits, he credited LSD with helping him control his drinking and come to
terms with unresolved conflicts about his parents.
"When I first began experimentation," he said on that sunny spring morning,
"the drug seemed to loosen deeper fears, as sleep does a nightmare. I had
horrifying experiences as participant and spectator, but, with each session,
became happier, both while experiencing the drug and in periods between . .
. I feel better and feel certain there is curative power in the drug
itself."
Grant was just one of hundreds of citizens in the Los Angeles region who
participated during the 1950s and early 1960s in unprecedented academic
studies of the then-novel pharmaceutical. In just a few short years, of
course, LSD would become a chemical taboo, the notorious "hippie
psychedelic" vilified by the media, criminalized in every state, classified
by the FDA as a Schedule I drug of no medical value and banned globally by
international treaty. But before most Americans had heard of lysergic acid
diethylamide, here in the shadow of the Hollywood Hills students,
professionals, clergymen, writers, artists and celebrities enthusiastically
turned on, tuned in and didn't drop out.
"It was a time in the world when scientific research with psychedelic drugs
was perfectly acceptable," recalls Dr. Oscar Janiger, the psychiatrist who
administered LSD to Cary Grant and more than 900 others in the longest
ongoing experiment with LSD on human subjects in a nonclinical environment.
Flash forward 35 years to a very different time in a very different world:
In many ways, science has finally caught up with LSD. Given recent advances
in our understanding of neurochemistry - the complex chemical pathways that
drive human thought, emotions and behavior - many researchers believe that
LSD could become a valuable tool in further unraveling the mysteries of the
human brain. What's more, they say, the drug's startling, if
underappreciated, efficacy in the treatment of alcoholism, drug addiction
and a whole range of psychiatric disorders begs for renewed research. Yet
after decades in legal limbo, LSD remains a sociopolitical pariah. Though
research on animals has continued, little more than a dozen human subjects
have participated in studies since the late '60s, and no new research has
been published since the early '70s.
Some of LSD's latter-day defenders now believe that for acid science to move
forward, acid must first be rehabilitated in the public mind. And they're
pinning their hopes on a new follow-up study of Janiger's classic
experiment, conducted between 1954 and 1962. By interviewing the people who
participated in the original study (many of whom are now in their 60s, 70s
and 80s), researchers hope to show that, by and large, few of the original
human guinea pigs suffered negative long-term effects as a result of their
LSD dosings. And - shocking as it may sound - many may have benefited from
the experience.
The prime force behind the follow-up study, to be completed later this year,
is the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), a
nonprofit research and advocacy group that has lobbied the FDA to approve
medical studies of marijuana, MDMA and LSD. Funded via academic grants and
the support of its 1,600 members, who include a number of prominent research
scientists, the North Carolina-based organization describes its purpose as
"working to assist psychedelic researchers around the world [to] design,
obtain governmental approval, fund, conduct and report on psychedelic
research in humans."
"Janiger's study was crucially important," says Rick Doblin, a
Harvard-trained social scientist and founder of MAPS, "because it was work
trying to describe what LSD does in a neutral, noncontroversial context, in
relatively healthy nonpatients."
Other studies conducted worldwide before the ban tended to focus on the use
of LSD in treating disorders such as chronic alcoholism, sexual neuroses,
criminal psychopathology, phobias, depressive states and compulsive
syndromes. But Janiger's subjects were average, middle-to-upper-class,
healthy adults with no pre-existing mental or physical problems. As Doblin
puts it: "The subjects of Janiger's experiment break all the stereotypes
about LSD users, since they are now in their 60s or older and took LSD
before it was controversial. So the followup study is like a time capsule
back to an era before the drug war. And it gives us a view of what LSD
research could be again, if we can get past the biases and just see this
drug more unemotionally, as a tool."
Janiger's study is also a time capsule back to a unique moment in the
cultural history of Southern California. Long before the acid underground
surfaced in San Francisco as the vanguard of the hippie movement, Los
Angeles was an intellectual hub for psychedelic research, and its acid
salons drew adventurous celebrities from Anais Nin to Jack Nicholson, Aldous
Huxley to Andre Previn. Those were heady days . . . in more than one sense.
As Cary Grant rhapsodized about LSD's revolutionary potential that spring
morning in Janiger's office, everyone could benefit from a good dosing.
"Just a few healthy magnums of LSD in the Beverly Hills reservoir . . ."
***
"[The doctor] had suggested that I listen to some music while the drug was
still effective. I am a composer and pianist, and I have never before or
since been so strongly affected by music. I listened to recordings of some
Brahms, Mozart and Walton, and was moved to tears almost immediately . . . I
then played the piano for approximately 40 minutes. I felt that I played
extremely well and possibly with more musical insight than before. I played
among other things a Chopin Fantasia which I had not looked at since my
student days, and remembered it perfectly and without flaws. A few days
after the experiment I again attempted to play this piece and found that I
had retained it completely. I would sometime be interested in repeating the
experiment and recording some improvisations while under the influence of
the pills." - Andre Previn
***
When acid guru Timothy Leary first met Oscar Janiger in 1962, he described
his far less flamboyant colleague as a "powerhouse" of "solid athletic
build, gray hair, strong tanned face, merry eyes." That description more or
less holds true today, although age has inevitably softened the formerly
athletic build and given the dean of Los Angeles LSD research a certain
gnomish aspect. This afternoon he and his wife, Kathleen Delaney, are
lunching in their comfortable book-lined home in Santa Monica Canyon with a
clutch of Hollywood screenwriters who hope to parlay the social history of
LSD into a feature film. (In fact, the annals of acid contain all the
dramatic convolutions of a major Oliver Stone production, from hallucinatory
visions to throbbing acid rock to a surfeit of government conspiracy,
including the CIA's infamous and highly illegal attempts to use LSD as a
mind-control drug on unsuspecting U.S. citizens.) After dessert - alas, no
electric Kool-Aid, but rather a Trader Joe's lemon torte - the Hollywood
hopefuls take their leave, and Janiger retires to his study, where he
sketches the broad outlines of his famous research.
To ensure the comfort of his subjects during their LSD excursions, Janiger
had rented a small house in the mid-Wilshire district. In one room he set up
his regular psychiatric practice. In an adjacent room, furnished with a
couch, a bed and a swanky hi-fi system, he conducted his LSD study. In the
enclosed back yard, he installed a garden, to give his experimental trippers
a safe outdoor haven to explore.
"So many of the studies prior to mine were done in hospital rooms,
restricted environments," Janiger recalls, "and I thought that my study
might be benefited by a naturalistic environment."
Though Janiger held an associate professorship in the Psychology Department
at the California College of Medicine (later to become the University of
California at Irvine), he funded the study himself by charging a $20 fee for
the experience. Sandoz Laboratories, the Swiss pharmaceutical company that
"discovered" LSD, supplied the drug free of charge. In return, Janiger
agreed to keep Sandoz informed about the results of his experiments. Unlike
many other researchers and major universities, he never accepted funding -
covert or overt - from the CIA or the military.
Janiger's research would represent a significant departure from the orthodox
thinking about LSD. Up until then, most academics had classified the drug as
a "psychotomimetic" agent - a substance that produces a state of temporary
insanity; if LSD could create dissociative states that mirrored
schizophrenia, the thinking went, the drug was ideally suited to the study
of the chemical and biological causes of mental illness. The CIA and the
military had their own ideas about LSD: They hoped to exploit the drug's
disorienting effects for the purpose of nonlethal warfare.
"My goal was simply to find out what LSD does to people under uniform
conditions," Janiger says, especially how it changes perception and
personality. Over the course of a decade, he would also study a number of
related issues, including the drug's effect on artistic creativity -
incidentally, a subject explored by Janiger's cousin, the Beat poet Allen
Ginsberg.
Janiger's approach to LSD research was influenced by his own experience with
the drug. It was in early 1954 that he had first tried acid, procured
legally from Sandoz Laboratories by a friend. "That first experience shook
me up completely," Janiger recalls. "It was extraordinary - so powerful and
so interesting. I was of course struck by how LSD works to change your
reality around. From a psychiatric point of view, it was a marvelous
instrument to learn more about the mind."
Each of Janiger's volunteers was pre-screened for obvious mental or physical
disturbances. If they passed that initial test, they were given LSD in the
morning and allowed to do whatever they wanted for the rest of the day -
listen to music, walk in the garden, draw or paint, et cetera. A designated
"babysitter" was a constant but unobtrusive presence, there to see to a
subject's physical comfort. (It was sometimes necessary to remind a subject
to use the bathroom. Even urbane Cary Grant once defecated in his pants
during an LSD session.) Typically, the babysitter was also an acid veteran
who knew how to talk a disturbed subject down from a bad trip, which was
rarely necessary, according to Janiger.
At the end of the experience - and sometimes during - Janiger's subjects
were provided with a tape recorder or stenographer so that they could record
their impressions while the images were still fresh in their minds. Later,
they were asked to fill out a questionnaire that contained queries such as
"What single event or insight, if any, during the LSD experience would you
consider to have been of the greatest meaning to you?" and "What changes, if
any, have taken place in your sense of values . . . "
Janiger broke these reports down into a series of descriptive statements
about the experience. Those "descriptors" common to all of the subjects'
experiences, then, could be seen as defining the LSD state. "Processing this
data was laborious work," he says. "We had no computers." Nevertheless, by
the end of the study, Janiger was able to distill the quintessential LSD
experience: The drug altered the user's perception of time; it came in
waves; it made colors seem more intense; it induced the sensation that all
elements of the world were organically connected in some way.
"That, to me, was a very nice piece of business," says Janiger, "because it
clarified a great many things in my own mind. I began to see what I think is
the core of the LSD experience - the state of the experience as opposed to
the content of the experience. Up until then, that distinction had never
been made with LSD. Some people said LSD was a religious experience, or a
birth experience. But that was the content of their experience. For others
it might not be either of those things."
***
"I was opened up to the beauty in people who had never seemed beautiful
before. The next morning at the Pancake House, I walked up and bowed to four
nuns. I had never spoken to nuns before - I couldn't penetrate their cloak
of reverence. I walked up to them, and loved them, and they were sure I
owned the place, and gave me their orders for breakfast. When the waiter
came and I sat down at my table, it shook them. But I spoke to them again
and told them I saw them as Sisters of Beauty. They tittered and giggled and
blushed, well-pleased." - Beat comedian Lord Buckley
***
Lysergic acid diethylamide had been around since 1938, when Dr. Albert
Hofmann serendipitously formulated the first dose at Sandoz. Hofmann was
experimenting with derivatives of ergot, a rye fungus, in an attempt to
develop a circulatory stimulant. Instead, what he discovered in his 25th
attempt (the official name of the drug would become LSD-25) was a substance
of extremely peculiar qualities.
The story of the first acid trip ever is now famous: Hofmann unknowingly
absorbed the experimental compound through his fingers. "As I lay in a dazed
condition with eyes closed," he would recall, "there surged up from me a
succession of fantastic, rapidly changing imagery of a striking reality and
depth, alternating with a vivid, kaleidoscopic display of colors." Two days
later, Hofmann deliberately swallowed a miniscule 250 micrograms (a
millionth of an ounce), which launched him on an even more dramatic head
trip. "I had great difficulty in speaking coherently," he'd later say of
that session. He managed to ride his bicycle home, but was soon enduring the
world's first bad trip, wondering if he was going insane: "I thought I had
died. My 'ego' was suspended somewhere in space, and I saw my body lying
dead on the sofa."
Hofmann survived the ordeal, and soon returned to the realm of pleasant
hallucinations. So began the era of academic experimentation with the
unusual compound.
By 1965, researchers had published more than 2,000 papers describing the
treatment of 30,000 to 40,000 patients with psychedelic drugs, including
mescaline and psilocybin, but mostly with LSD. Among the more stunning
results were studies in which LSD was given in high doses to children
suffering from schizophrenia and autism. One such study reported that for a
group of young autistic children with speech difficulties, "the vocabularies
of several of the children increased after LSD." What's more, "several
seemed to be attempting to form words or watched adults carefully as they
spoke; many seemed to comprehend speech for the first time." The autistic
children all "appeared flushed, bright-eyed and unusually interested in the
environment."
Even more dramatic were the successes during the 1950s and 1960s in treating
chronic alcoholics at Hollywood Hospital in British Columbia and at Spring
Grove State Hospital in Baltimore. After ingesting relatively large doses of
LSD (up to 800 micrograms, in some cases) and undergoing directed therapy,
about half of all patients "were able to remain sober or to drink much
less," according to pioneers Bernard Aaronson and Humphry Osmond (who coined
the word "psychedelic") in their book Psychedelics (1970). Often after only
one dose patients remained totally abstinent. "This seems to be a universal
statistic for LSD therapy," they reported.
Exactly how LSD worked for alcoholics, heroin addicts and schizophrenic
children remains something of a mystery. One school of thought advanced the
theory that a "peak" LSD experience can be as nerve-rattling as a case of
the delerium tremens, which many reformed alcoholics cite as the nadir
before they decided to stop boozing. Others noted that patients weren't
likely to experience a dramatic recovery unless the LSD experience was
guided by a skilled therapist.
In fact, to this day scientists know little about how LSD interacts with the
human brain on a neurological level. The ban on human research with LSD is
partly to blame. But beyond that, LSD operates in mysterious ways. The drug
remains in the brain for a relatively short period, disappearing at about
the time the mental light show begins. This short half-life of the drug
suggests that the hours of hallucinations and consciousness-warping
experienced by acid eaters is due not to the drug itself, but to some
little-understood neurochemical chain of events unleashed by LSD.
Research on animals has suggested that LSD stimulates the serotonin
receptors of the brain - the same neurological connections that Prozac and
other new antidepressant drugs zero in on. "Why a drug that stimulates a
serotonin receptor should effect changes in consciousness and perception is
the thing that we don't actually know," says David Nichols, founder of the
Heffter Research Institute, a nonprofit group that funds and conducts
clinical studies of psychedelic substances.
"One could look at LSD as having an action somewhat like an antidepressant,"
says Richard Yensen, a pioneering LSD researcher and psychologist who
successfully treated alcoholics at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center,
on the grounds of Spring Grove State Hospital. But, he adds, "LSD belongs to
a unique family of drugs that are first and foremost sensitive to the way
they are given. And the mechanism of cure has not to do with whether the
person got the drug or not, but with whether the person had a transcendental
experience with the drug."
After decades of experimentation - clinical and otherwise - it's clear that
LSD's effect on individuals varies hugely. A person's response depends not
only on his or her mental state or "set," but also on a multitude of other
factors, including the setting in which the drug is taken, the influence of
others in the room and even the prevailing cultural climate. For instance,
during the late 1960s, after the frenzy of hyperbolic media reports on the
dangers of LSD, the numbers of illegal users experiencing the proverbial
"bad trip" multiplied. Many observers suspected a direct relationship
between the upswing in "bummers" and the surge of acid scare stories. (The
fact that the doses available then were often more than twice as high as
today's street-grade hits may also account for the higher incidence of bad
trips.)
Undoubtedly, LSD's mercurial nature has a lot to do with why it became so
controversial so quickly, and why it was never fully accepted as a worthy
addition to the store of mainstream pharmacopoeia.
***
I thought I was the quickest the quickest the quickest mind alive and the
quickest with words but words cannot catch up with these changes, these
changes are beyond words, beyond words, beyond words. While I repeated these
words I felt the waves of pleasure like those of the most acute pleasure of
lovemaking . . . I felt the impossibility to tell the secret of life because
the secret of life was metamorphosis, transmutation, and it happened too
quickly, too subtly." - Anais Nin
***
"I never saw my work as being therapeutic," Janiger says, "but in the course
of the study we made some ancillary discoveries." One such discovery
involved a painfully shy firefighter. "Although he was a very pleasant,
intelligent man," says Janiger, "he was extremely shy and sort of a shut-in
personality. He could never mix with people because there was a terrible
barrier, an inhibition about being in spontaneous social gatherings."
Janiger gave the man "minimal doses" of LSD for a period of several months.
By the end of that period, "his personality had changed markedly." Says
Janiger, "He became very affable and quite a man of public affairs, going
out and talking to people." Even after he stopped taking LSD, he remained
extroverted.
Intrigued by the firefighter's transformation, Janiger sought out a pair of
identical twins to see if LSD might affect their personalities in different
ways. "After three years of looking," he says, "we found two 19-year-old
girls who dressed alike, went everywhere together, very closely identified.
One was engaged but didn't want to get married until the other one was
engaged." The young women agreed to participate, and they were taken to
separate rooms and given identical doses of LSD. Separated, "they had
totally different reactions," says Janiger, which seemed to confirm the
importance of set and setting on an individual's experience. "From that
point," says Janiger, "their lives parted dramatically. One got married and
moved away. I kept a correspondence with them, so I have a history of this
very interesting phenomenon."
Janiger also experimented with LSD's effects on pain dissociation, a common
symptom of mental illness. Would LSD produce in users a similar state? "We
did an experiment where a fellow had his tooth pulled while under LSD, but
without any other anesthetic," Janiger recalls. A dentist at UCLA pulled the
tooth and the subject didn't flinch, didn't protest, didn't so much as
blink. Then the dentist touched the exposed nerve ending, and still the
subject remained calm and conversant. According to Janiger, the
flabbergasted dentist exclaimed, "In all my years of dentistry, I've never
been able to touch a naked nerve without a person going to pieces."
"I had the choice of doing a lot of little experiments like that," says
Janiger. "I knew that the days of LSD research would eventually come to an
end. The burden of riches was so great, I wanted to open up as many new
possibilities as I could."
Perhaps the most interesting side experiment evolved from the fact that
Janiger's volunteers tended to reflect the cultural foment of Los Angeles.
After artists began to ask for drawing materials during their sessions, he
decided to launch a special study of LSD's influence on creativity. He gave
70 professional artists LSD and asked each of them to create two renderings
of a common reference object, a Hopi Indian kachina doll that he had in his
office. The first rendering would be done before taking LSD, the second
while under acid's influence. The results were dramatic.
"To the artist," says Janiger, "the drawings done under the influence of LSD
were very important. Who knows if they were better or worse? But I couldn't
deny the artists their own experience. They'd say, 'This is something I've
been trying to do for years, a way of looking at this thing.' I said, 'I'm
not gonna argue.' And there wasn't a single artist who didn't think they had
had some kind of revelation."
The very same kachina doll sits today on the mantle in Janiger's living
room, under a particularly stunning framed pair of before-and-after
renderings of it. Painted by Fortune illustrator Frank Murdoch, the picture
on the left is of draftsmanlike quality, a perfect "representational" image.
Its acid-inspired twin couldn't be more different - awhirl with color and
asplash with motion, its planes and curves lurching in multiple directions.
But it is recognizably the same kachina doll. And if anything, its colors
more accurately capture the doll's brilliant hues. (Janiger has saved all
the pieces from the study, consistently declining offers from the artists to
buy back their work. Several years ago, he mounted a successful gallery
exhibition of the acid art.)
The data from the art study are particularly rich, says Janiger. "It remains
for someone highly gifted as an artistic critic and interpreter to take that
material and develop a theory in terms of perception and the creative and
artistic processes. And that opens up the whole issue of whether or not
drugs fire up your imagination in terms of writing and poetry."
After taking LSD at Janiger's office, the writer Anais Nin developed her own
theory about the drug's effect on the creative impulse. She later
incorporated her rough notes, which Janiger has saved in his plenary files,
into an essay included in The Diary of Anais Nin. "I could find correlations
[to the LSD imagery] all through my writing," she wrote, "find the sources
of the images in past dreams, in reading, in memories of travel, in actual
experience, such as the one I had once in Paris when I was so exalted by
life that I felt I was not touching the ground, I felt I was sliding a few
inches away from the sidewalk. Therefore, I felt, the chemical did not
reveal an unknown world. What it did was to shut out the quotidian world as
an interference and leave you alone with your dreams and fantasies and
memories. In this way it made it easier to gain access to the subconscious
life."
Though she never admitted it publicly, Nin's access to her inner life was
dramatically augmented by LSD. According to author and screenwriter Gavin
Lambert - who was referred to Janiger by Nin - she privately confessed that
her acid trip was traumatic. "For Anais," says Lambert, "it was a disaster.
On LSD the world seemed to her terrifying. This, to me, was extremely
interesting, because Anais Nin's life was a high-wire act of lies. She had
two husbands - was bigamously married - and neither of them knew about the
other. And I think that her whole high-wire act became very naked to her
under LSD, and she couldn't take it. She was a creature of such artifice,
and then suddenly the artifice was stripped away."
Many of Janiger's subjects were interested in using LSD to catalyze the kind
of mystical experience that Aldous Huxley, Hollywood's most famous British
literary expatriate, had written about in The Doors of Perception. But as
Janiger and so many others would discover, LSD was difficult to control. At
one point, Janiger invited a group of Unitarian ministers to drop acid.
Several were disappointed when the drug produced peculiar aural and visual
effects, but nothing of deeper spiritual significance.
In the wake of his first session with LSD in Janiger's office, philosopher
Alan Watts compared his trip somewhat unfavorably to the rare mystical
experiences he had undergone earlier in his life. Those events, which
weren't catalyzed by drugs, "just didn't feel like the LSD experience," he
wrote. "They were very much more convincing. They seemed to be more a matter
of insight than perception. They changed the meaning of experience rather
than experience, and although modification of pure meaning was so much a
part of LSD, it didn't happen in the same way. LSD seemed to complicate
meaning rather than simplify it. It gave the sense of indescribable
complexity rather than indescribable simplicity. For this reason it did not
seem to be a particularly liberating experience. It was fascinating rather
than illuminating, and felt more like the statement of a complex problem
than its solution."
I began to experience very strong feelings of sensuality in and around my
belly and the inside of my thighs. Needless to say, the feelings were
extremely pleasurable, but unlike the usual sexual excitement, I didn't feel
the need for gratification . . .
***
"During this period, I decided that, since I was feeling so sensual, I should
fabricate sexual fantasies to synchronize with my feelings but was not very
successful. I tried to imagine "M" making love to me but that seemed to put
a damper on things, so, as a last resort, I tried to imagine Doctor K.
kissing my vagina and making love to it. He looked about one foot tall and
his body appeared to be in the form of a square with round corners! . . . As
he went to kiss me, his tongue started to grow until it seemed to be eight
feet long. I tried to stop this unpleasant image but couldn't do so." -Rita
Moreno
***
Soon after Janiger opened his office to experimental trippers, word of mouth
prompted an unending stream of volunteers. Many of those eagerly rapping on
Janiger's door had already read The Doors of Perception, which dealt with
Huxley's experiences with another hallucinogen, mescaline. Others had fallen
under the spell of acid proselyte Timothy Leary, who was rapidly becoming
LSD's loudest and most reckless cheerleader, urging a new generation of
hipsters to "turn on, tune in and drop out." Still other seekers had picked
up on the Beat poets' positive vibe about psychotropic drugs. And the
Hollywood grapevine had hipped the show-biz community to the fact that
Janiger's office was where it was at.
"It was a mystery to me how the word got around so fast," says Janiger.
"People were calling all the time. From everywhere. It spread geometrically.
People would tell their friends and then those friends would tell their
friends. Consequently, we got a good sample, and we chose people to fill out
the demographic picture of our scheme. Still, it took a certain kind of
person, I imagine, to be curious or interested enough."
To be sure, Janiger wasn't the only researcher dispensing experimental acid
in the Los Angeles region. Some professional shrinks were already using LSD
in their practices; Cary Grant took his first five dozen or so trips in the
offices of Drs. Arthur Chandler and Mortimer Hartmann. At UCLA, psychiatrist
Sydney Cohen was conducting his own LSD studies. It was Cohen who turned on
Henry Luce, the consummate Cold Warrior and president of Time-Life. Cohen
also gave LSD to Luce's gadabout wife, Claire Boothe Luce. The Luces took
half a dozen trips during the late 1950s and early 1960s, and Henry claimed
that on one such magical mystery tour he had chatted up God on a golf
course. Claire thought that LSD was well and good for the elite, but
definitely not indicated for the hoi polloi: "We wouldn't want everyone
doing too much of a good thing," she sniffed.
By the late 1950s, a salon of psychedelic dilettantes had sprung up around
Oscar Janiger. Everyone called him Oz, and as the custodian of this
fantastic and surreal drug, he was a bit of a wizard. Janiger referred to
the group, which met informally to talk about their acid experiences, as the
"consciousness clan." Among the regulars were British expatriates Huxley,
philosopher Gerald Heard and novelist Christopher Isherwood; Cohen and other
UCLA faculty members; Anais Nin, Alan Watts and the occasional Hollywood
celebrity. The evenings, Janiger says, were "rife with accounts and stories
of what this substance was doing and what it could do."
Southern California was rapidly becoming a locus of the psychedelic
movement, matched in energy only by academic enclaves in British Columbia
and along the East Coast, where Leary, with the backing of Billy Hitchcock,
an adventurous heir of the Mellon fortune, had established a boisterous
colony of self-dosing higher-consciousness seekers at a posh New York
estate. Janiger kept a much lower profile, and worried - correctly, it would
turn out - that Leary's brand of in-your-face publicity would spur the
government to move against LSD. Still, he welcomed a number of high-profile
personages into his hi-fi trip room.
James Coburn took 200 micrograms of LSD on December 10, 1959 - his first
trip. In his paperwork, he gave his reason for volunteering: "to gauge
present consciousness (where I am to where I can possibly go)." Now 69 and
still acting, Coburn looks back fondly on his session with Janiger. "It was
phenomenal," he says. "I loved it. LSD really woke me up to seeing the world
with a depth of objectivity. Even though it was a subjective experience, it
opened your mind to seeing things in new ways, in a new depth." Coburn also
credits his LSD session with helping him occupationally. "One of the great
things about LSD is that it does stimulate your imagination. And it frees
you from fears of certain kinds."
Another celeb who tried LSD as part of Janiger's experiment was a
25-year-old Jack Nicholson, who listed his occupation as "actor" and took
his first trip (a dose of 150 micrograms) in Janiger's office on May 29,
1962. Nicholson would later incorporate his experiences into his script for
The Trip, a 1967 low-budget film about an intense LSD session starring Peter
Fonda and Dennis Hopper, another volunteer in Janiger's study.
Hopper, Fonda and Nicholson would team up again in 1969 on Easy Rider, with
Hopper directing. It became the seminal film in the "New Hollywood"
movement, which rejected traditional studio notions about content, style and
production in favor of the edgy visions of its auteurs. Obviously, Hopper
and company were channeling other, nonchemical, influences, including the
work of French New Wave directors, but Easy Rider's then-revolutionary
style - the jump cuts, time shifts, flash forwards, flashbacks, jerky
hand-held cameras, fractured narrative and improvised acting - can also be
seen as a cinematic translation of the psychedelic experience. "LSD did
create a frame of mind that fractured experience," says Peter Biskind,
author of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998), which chronicles the rise and
fall of the drug-fueled New Hollywood. "And that LSD experience had an
effect on films like Easy Rider and [the Nicholson-penned Monkees movie]
Head, which are essentially experimental movies."
***
"This is civilization," [my driver] remarks as we enter the Miracle Mile. I
nod, laughing, muttering. "Idiots! Jesus! Shit!" It seems to me the streets
are full of women - mainly ugly, middle-aged women carrying crumpled
shopping bags. "Look at them, hurrying to get across before the light
changes to green - don't they realize how unimportant that is?" Lots of
dummies in shop windows. I am struck by the similarity of the passersby and
these dummies. "Really, there isn't much difference. In fact, these people
are all becoming dummies." Noticing more billboards, I elaborate. "These
little people erect dummies and huge images of themselves, which grin down
at them and tell them to smoke cigarettes and drink drinks and eat foods
they are already eating. They erect these effigies of themselves to reassure
themselves they should do what they're already doing." - Author-
screenwriter Gavin Lambert
***
Celebrities notwithstanding, the vast majority of Janiger's volunteers were
average citizens. Which has made tracking them down for the followup study a
challenge - complicated by the fact that many have already died. With the
help of a private detective and lots of Internet searching, MAPS has to date
located and interviewed 40 of Janiger's original subjects who are still
living in the Los Angeles area. Janiger would like to double that number
before next fall.
According to Kate Chapman, the MAPS researcher who conducted the interviews,
most of the subjects "had a positive experience, with no long-term harm."
One exception was a man who had "a bad, bad, bad trip, and would even say
that it was psychologically damaging." In his essay written shortly after
his LSD session, says Chapman, this man described "an awful account of how
some intensely repressed psychosexual problems surfaced to the conscious
front under the influence."
"In a way," says Rick Doblin of MAPS, "you hope to find nobody like that,
but the fact that we did find something negative and are willing to report
it will hopefully add credibility to the study. We're trying to develop
guidelines for future research, so what this tells us is that LSD shouldn't
be given in research unless there is someone with therapeutic skill
present."
The volunteers I spoke to all had good things, or at least neutral things,
to say about their LSD experiences. Zale Parry is a still-fetching
65-year-old woman who played a major role in L.A.'s early acid days. She now
lives in the San Fernando Valley, and jokes that her neighbors would
probably be shocked to learn that she was once something of an acid queen.
No doubt they would also be shocked to learn that the vibrant
impressionistic painting of a wild artichoke in bloom that hangs on the wall
above her sofa was rendered by one of Janiger's acid-tripping artists.
Parry's late husband, Parry Bivens, a pioneer scuba diver, inventor, medical
doctor, chemist and drug experimenter, is the man who introduced Janiger to
LSD, after obtaining a mail-order supply from Sandoz Laboratories. According
to his widow, he also had the distinction of being the first person on the
West Coast to synthesize mescaline in a garage lab - "It was pure satin,"
she says knowingly.
An accomplished pioneer diver in her own right, Parry graced the cover of
Sports Illustrated in 1955 and worked as an actress and underwater stunt
double in Hollywood, standing in for Sophia Loren and co-starring with Lloyd
Bridges in TV's Sea Hunt. She describes her two dozen acid sessions of the
mid-1950s as "happy trips - joyful." She credits LSD with helping her to
appreciate the intricacies and interconnectedness and beauty of life in the
"underwater world." After her first several sessions, she became a volunteer
babysitter for Janiger's subjects. She hasn't taken any drugs since then,
and feels no need to try LSD again.
Sixty-nine-year-old Loring Ware says that his six to eight doses of LSD in
Janiger's office opened his eyes to "the world around me, but with some of
the veils taken away that I didn't even know were there." Before those
experiences, Ware was following what he felt to be an uninspiring career
path as a technical illustrator. "LSD made me less happy with my job," he
says. "I recognized the essential meaninglessness of my job." Subsequently,
Ware switched careers and became a radio announcer. Though he hasn't had
much experience with other drugs - other than "a little pot in the 1960s" -
he believes that LSD "should be incorporated into some kind of rite of
passage for young people, so they enter into adulthood with an understanding
of the broadness of life, instead of becoming little cogs in a machine."
Ernest Pipes, 71, was one of eight Unitarian ministers who dropped acid in
Janiger's office one day in the late 1950s. Now retired and living in Santa
Monica Canyon, not far from Janiger's house, Pipes says he was disappointed
with his trip only because it was not a transcendent experience. "As it
turned out," he recalls, "each of us had a very different experience - some
went very deeply into a state of transcendent ecstasy, others did not. I had
an intensified aural and visual experience, but I was unable to surrender
fully to the effects of the drug in that setting." Pausing a moment, he
adds, "But I have always regretted that I was not transported more
effectively into altered states of consciousness, and thus enabled to be in
touch with other dimensions of reality."
Pipes and his colleagues had eagerly accepted Janiger's invitation to
participate in the study. "We, as clergy, knew that one's inner life can be
altered through music and liturgy and devotional reading, a beautiful sunset
or a nature walk. So when it became possible for us to experiment, we
thought that professionally we were obliged to do it." Though Pipes has
never tried other drugs, he says wistfully, "I've always wanted to try it
again. Wouldn't it be great, in the proper set and setting, to have an
inward journey?"
***
"An inclination to "break wind" was inhibited by the fear that it might turn
into a multi-dimensional faux pas, reverberating uncontrollably through this
Riemannian cosmos!" - Philosopher Alan Watts
***
By the early 1960s, it was apparent that the era of inward journeys - or at
least legal ones - was fast approaching an end. LSD had seeped into the
underground youth culture, and the forces of prohibition were already in
play. Long before LSD was outlawed, Sandoz, under international pressure,
cut off researchers' access to the drug.
And what of LSD's reputed perils? "A lot of the so-called dangers were
hyperbole exaggerated by the press and misunderstood by science," says
Ronald Siegel, who has studied psychopharmacological agents at UCLA for
nearly 30 years. The claim that LSD causes genetic damage, for one, turned
out to be inaccurate. "In fact," Siegel continues, "the drug does not
present a lot of toxic dangers to individuals, simply because the dose that
turns them on and the dose that kills them are so far apart. No one has ever
died from a direct toxic overdose of LSD.
"There are psychological problems for many people," Siegel says, "but by and
large LSD has been tolerated very well. And one of the examples of that is
the fact that more people are using LSD today in the United States than ever
before in our history, and there are fewer problems than ever before."
According to Janiger, researchers themselves are partly responsible for the
drug's fall from grace. "LSD didn't pan out as an acceptable therapeutic
drug for one reason," he says. "Researchers didn't realize the explosive
nature of the drug. You can't manipulate it as skillfully as you would like.
It's like atomic energy - it's relatively easy to make a bomb, but much
harder to safely drive an engine and make light. And with LSD, we didn't
have the chance to experiment and fully establish how to make it do
positive, useful things."
So acid has continued to hang in limbo. Says Siegel: "Because LSD carries
with it so much political baggage, it has become extremely difficult to
generate approval for new studies."
For researchers hoping to resume LSD studies with human subjects, progress
on the regulatory front has been excruciatingly slow. Since the early 1970s,
only a dozen or so people have participated in FDA-sanctioned studies, and
those were continuations of projects approved before the ban. Last year,
Baltimore psychologist Richard Yensen was ready to administer 499 doses of
LSD to down-and-out alcoholics and drug addicts in a resumption of his work
begun in the early '60s at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center. But
early this year, the FDA put the study on "clinical hold," demanding that
Yensen revise his research and safety protocols. Yensen says he has no idea
why the FDA suddenly hit the brakes, but he suspects that a recent Esquire
magazine story publicizing his obscure research spooked government
regulators.
Other planned research projects with hallucinogens have hit similar
regulatory obstacles. For now, at least, says Siegel, "Psychedelics are more
useful as a basic research tool than as an applied medical tool. And because
of that, hallucinogens have very limited appeal to government agencies to
foster further research."
Some critics of psychedelic science argue that LSD's would-be rehabilitators
are really mounting a crypto-legalization campaign. Rick Doblin of MAPS
denies that charge, at least in the sense that he's lobbying for LSD to be
sold over the counter like cigarettes and alcohol. Yet he asserts that "the
ultimate goal is to have legal access to LSD, more likely than not in
specially licensed centers to specially licensed therapists."
Janiger also envisions a place for LSD in our culture. He would like to see
studies of LSD and other psychedelics "become fair-minded and at parity with
other kinds of research," and the fruits of such research applied to
"acceptable social and medical uses." He cites the Eleusinian Mysteries of
ancient Greece as a model for LSD's potential place in our own society. For
nearly 2,000 years, the Greeks participated in an annual ritual in the city
of Eleusis, 22 kilometers west of Athens. In the secret ceremony,
participants from all walks of life (Plato and Aristophanes, as well as
slaves) imbibed a sacred drink called "kykeon" and then proceeded to
experience what one ancient author described as "ineffable visions" that
were "new, astonishing, inaccessible to rational cognition." Says Janiger,
"Those who underwent the mysteries came out at the other side, the sages
tell us, as changed people who saw the world differently." In short, the
Golden Age of Greece may have also been a very psychedelic age.
If Janiger's own experiments in Los Angeles resembled a kind of modern-day
Eleusinian Mystery, that was no accident. "The discussions I had with Huxley
and Watts and the others in those early years," he says, "really centered
around the way our culture might institutionalize LSD, and it would be very
much like the Greek model."
Clearly, Janiger isn't advocating "legalization" in a simplistic sense. He
is talking about the kind of self-transformation that leads to larger
cultural transformations. And for that reason, his vision may ultimately be
even more radical than the notion of over-the-counter psychedelics. But what
a long, strange trip it was for about 2,000 years in ancient Greece. And
what a short, strange trip it was for about a decade in Los Angeles.
MAPS is still searching for people who participated in Dr. Oscar Janiger's
LSD study. The MAPS contact number is (704) 334-1798. You can find more
information about MAPS on its Internet Web site, http://www.maps.org.
Questions or comments?
Email letters to the editor: letters@laweekly.com
Copyright (c) 1998, Los Angeles Weekly, Inc. All rights reserved.
to 1998 Daily News index for July 2-8