Emerging from the Drug War Dark Age: LSD and Other Psychedelic Medicines Make a Comeback

By Charles Shaw, AlterNet. Posted July 11, 2008.

The return flight from Switzerland was a mix of hope and solemnity for Rick Doblin, the only American to attend the funeral of Dr. Albert Hofmann, the inventor of LSD who had just died at the age of 102. Doblin, a Harvard-educated Ph.D and founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, an organization that conducts legal research into the healing and spiritual potentials of psychedelics and marijuana, had spent his entire career trying to break through the virtually impenetrable wall of obstinacy that surrounds psychedelic compounds and their potential benefits to society.

More than anyone else in his field, Doblin is all too familiar with what he refers to as the "40-year-long bad trip" that researchers like him have faced in dealing with the fallout from the introduction of LSD and other psychedelic compounds to the Western psyche in the mid 1960s. This 40-year intellectual Dark Age, Doblin says, has been characterized by "enormous fear and misinformation and a vested interest in exaggerated stories about drugs to keep prohibition alive."

We've all heard the tales of kids jumping off rooftops because they think they can fly, of otherwise normal people taking a single hit of LSD and "going insane," and of course the all-pervasive myth of the "acid flashback." Although there were acid casualties, most were rare or aberrant tragedies, most often occurring in individuals with pre-existing mental health conditions who never should have taken LSD in the first place. Most of the tales are apocryphal at best, intentional propaganda meant to discourage use.

An Era of Censorship

Why would our government embark on this 40-year Inquisition to burn the psychedelic prophets at the stake and wipe clean from the Earth the true history of psychedelic culture, as if it were the secret of the Holy Grail and the Merovingian dynasty? Why has the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s -- one of the most powerful revolutions in human consciousness in all of history -- been reduced to pejorative tales of tie-dyed morons skipping through Golden Gate Park in an orgy of self-indulgence? Why would something that the government claims does not deserve respectable attention be the recipient of such Draconian repressive measures? Could it be because, like the secret of Mary Magdalene, the truth could bring the whole order crashing down?

The answer, my friend, blew away in the wind. The extent to which LSD fomented the cultural revolution of the 1960s has all but disappeared in a miasma of drug war propaganda. But do not be fooled. This was no hippie-dippy bullshit. In its time, LSD was more dangerous to the ruling order than Mao, Che or the Founding Fathers themselves. As the New York Times obituary for Hofmann read, "[LSD] was no hustler from a shotgun lab in Tijuana, after all, but a bourgeois revolutionary, born into establishment medicine and able to travel the world and enter societies from the top down, through their most hallowed institutions."

The U.S. government threw everything but the kitchen sink at getting (certain) Americans to stop "turning on," launching the drug war that eventually locked up millions of drug users. They handed down ridiculously disproportionate federal sentences to LSD makers that would have made Pablo Escobar commit suicide. But it wasn't the "turning on" part that they feared, for there are many benefits to having a population otherwise occupied in a false reality. No, it was the "tuning in" and "dropping out" part that kept them awake at night.

Although it may be difficult for the uninitiated to understand at face value, LSD and other psychedelic compounds can have a profound life-altering affect on the user that, more often than not, serves to connect them (or reconnect, as the case may be) to the universal compassion and love for life that is inherent in our species. It invariably causes them to question the validity of the status quo, to examine their life and what surrounds them in terms of beliefs and values.

And in this epoch of industrial civilization, the last thing a corporate culture that survives on war, aggression and consumer spending needs is a consciously awakened population of people who inexorably choose to leave said culture in droves because they see it is killing the planet, themselves, and each other. This is precisely, to the letter, the meaning of "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out."

But even for those who would call this hyperbole, what was lost in all the derision and urban myths about LSD and other psychedelic compounds like ayahuasca, peyote, psilocybin and iboga -- plant medicines thousands of years old -- was the fact that they are miraculously powerful medicines, with the ability to effectively treat, and in some cases, cure some of the most debilitating illnesses and disorders plaguing humanity: addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and migraine and cluster headaches. They are also effective palliatives for the sick and dying.

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Charles Shaw, a Chicago-based writer, is a regular contributor to AlterNet. He is the former editorial director of the Conscious Choice publications and a contributor to Reality Sandwich and the Huffington Post. He is currently writing Exile Nation, a drug war memoir.

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