Erowid References Database
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Kleber HD.
“Commentary on: Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance by Griffiths et al”.
Psychopharmacology (Berl). 2006 Jul 7.
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Abstract
The decade of the 1960s began the current era of heavy drug use in America, beginning perhaps with Timothy Leary’s Pied Piper invitation to, "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out" (with psychedelic drugs). While fortunately most youths who experimented did not suffer lasting damage, those of us on the mental health front lines at the time saw a number of casualties (Kleber 1967). Eventually, the hippies and the LSD-fueled "Summer of Love" in San Francisco were replaced by motorcycle gangs, amphetamines, and gratuitous violence. Psychedelic drugs receded into a permanent background of US drug use, never going away altogether, but not reaching the same penetration. Unfortunately, one of the lasting casualties of the street use of these agents was research. Sandoz, the manufacturer of LSD, discontinued supplying it to researchers around 1965, concerned that the company’s reputation was being tainted by the illicit use. Even though street chemists supplied the vast majority of the illicit use, the licit supply for research more or less disappeared and so did research funding. Prior to the cessation, research with LSD and other psychedelics was active in a variety of areas: as a potential producer of a model psychosis (it has significant limitations); the nature of hallucinations (it produces more illusions); as a therapeutic agent for trauma and the dying (inadequate data); and as a way to study altered reality states, e.g., Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, Pahnke’s Good Friday Experiment, and Blum’s Utopiates: The Use and Users of LSD-25. Some of the research was carefully done; in most, the researchers seem to be carried away by the effects of the agents.
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