The LSD Game

The editor of this anthology concludes his arguments for wider distribution of LSD with the statement, "No social authority can successfully arrogate unto itself the right to dictate and fix the levels of consciousness to which men might aspire... Die Gedanken sind frei." Later in the book Dan Wakefield notes, "It has been reported that a pound of LSD dropped into a city's water supply could produce a psychosis of the population that would last long enough for enemy troops to take over."

Almost every contributor to this book has his own optimistic theory about LSD's application. The book contains more answers than questions. Reading it one gets the disturbing picture of a lot of children playing with fire: Timothy Leary proposing psychedelic colonies, one researcher giving LSD to psychotics, another giving it to people approaching death. Psychologists play with philosophy and novelists toy with psychology.

Solomon's anthology covers two possible approaches to LSD. Timothy Leary, Alan Watts, and Aldous Huxley speak for visionary, mystical use of the drug. The medical contributors have made isolated experiments in the use of LSD in psychiatric therapy, both in a psychoanalytic framework and in group rehabilitation

Leary in his manifesto makes philosophical assumptions which are neither self-evident nor even consistent. In various places he speaks of the goal of psychedelic therapy as "the freedom from helplessness...the religious experience...the love experience...expansion of consciousness, freedom of the brain from the mind ...survival and peace of mind." Leary explains that the LSD experience frees men from the egotistic frustration of cultural "games". "Anger and anxiety are irrelevant because you see your small game in the context of the great evolutionary game which no one can win and no one can lose."

The obvious question is whether it is necessary to take LSD to gain Leary's insights into culture. Leary's LSD sessions at the Concord state prison apparently helped some convicts to readjust. But this is a fairly specific rehabilitative use of the drug.

Leary assumes that his "game" perception is common to all psychedlic episodes, whereas Freudian investigators have reported an upsurge of childhood memories and Jungian therepists have reported their own variety of "transcendant experience."

Aldous Huxley, in his more badly philosophical article, conjectures that under LSD the "deeper self decides which kind of experience will be most advantageous."

What Leary calls the "nongame intuitive insight outlook" is more frankly described by Huston Smith (head of the MIT philosophy department) as religious experience. No less than five of the book's contributors call on William James' Varieties of Religious Experience for a precedent to LSD visions. One writer reports that most LSD subjects receive a "common vision of immortality." They, presumably, have seen through the mortality game. Although both Leary and Huxley insist that LSD is only a means of educating oneself for the normal conscious state, neither really explains why it wouldn't be nicer to spend all one's time under LSD. As an Indian student remarked recently, "Who wants to build railroads when you can have the fulfillment of all your wishes?"

Investigators have noted a close analogy between LSD symptoms and symptoms of psychosis. One psychiatrist suggests the possibility of producing and studying "model psychoses" with LSD. Hopeful research with neurotics indicates that cures result both from the disorienting experience of the drug and increased susceptibility to suggestion from the therapist. On the negative side, certain subjects, especially in unsympathetic surroundings, experience terror and suicidal urges under LSD. Psychotic symptoms have also increased in some subjects.

The four "reviews of the scientific literature" impress one with how tentative and unco-ordinated research has been. They seem to keep reviewing each other. Sanford M. Unger's is the most informative; the others can be ignored. The most frightening kind of experimental fooling-around mentioned in the book is Eric Kast's work in Chicago. Kast decided to send 128 doomed cancer patients into hopped-up oblivion by giving them LSD without warning or previous instruction. He then calmly graphed the depression and "fear and panic" reactions, hallucinations and morbid fears of death.

The effects of LSD do suggest some chemical causations in mental diseases. No one has much idea what physiological mechanism causes the LSD experience. This seems to be the most important area of research, but it receives less emphasis, at least in this book, than does shot-in-the-dark administration of the drug.