Tripping in LSD's Birthplace, John Horgan [parable of the sower read online .txt] 📗

We seemed to drive forever, arcing over stone bridges, sailing across squares, creeping down narrow winding streets. Buildings, cars, trees, signs, everything looked streamlined, gorgeous, opulent, bathed in glycerin, and aroused in me a tactile, feathery pleasure. As we rounded a cobblestoned corner, a silver Porsche glided noiselessly past us, like a stingray cruising the ocean floor. The restaurant bordered a canal whose surface was as satiny and textured as a raven’s wing. The restaurant’s windows were beveled, like huge diamonds, and ringed by Christmas lights. The restaurant was equally lovely within. The candles, crystal, silverware, flowers, laquered wood all glowed rosily, as did the shy, French-accented lass who served us.
After ordering for Krupitsky and me, Halpern served as conductor of our conversation. At Halpern’s urging, Krupitsky told me about his investigation of ketamine as a treatment for alcoholism. Ketamine is a general anesthetic—used more often in veterinary than human medicine--that when injected at subanesthetic doses triggers an extremely disorienting hallucinogenic episode lasting an hour or so.
Since the early 1980’s, Krupitsky has been successfully treating alcoholics with ketamine supplemented by individual and group psychotherapy. He was careful to qualify his results. He noted that those who go through with ketamine therapy after being forewarned about its harrowing aspects may be more highly motivated to stop drinking than run-of-the-mill alcoholics.
I vaguely recalled that ketamine had been a favorite drug of John Lilly, pioneer of dolphin-language studies, inventor of sensory-isolation tanks, and all-round scientific polymath. He was the role model for the brilliant-but-unstable psychedelic researcher played by John Hurt in the movie Altered States. Lilly’s career as an eccentric but brilliant scientist supposedly went downhill in the 1980’s after he became addicted to ketamine, known by the street name vitamin K. Lilly injected himself with the drug for days on end; he claimed that in these states he made contact with solid-state, extradimensional aliens who were displeased by humanity’s treatment of dolphins and other animals.
Krupitsky assured me that the patients in his studies take ketamine only a few times, at most, under safe, supervised conditions. The ketamine experience can be ego-shattering, but that in a sense is the point. Therapists hope to get alcoholics to feel revulsion toward their former way of life. One trick the therapists employ is to make the ketamine-intoxicated patients sniff from a bottle of booze at the peak of their session; the patients often feel a disgust that persists long after the ketamine’s effects have worn off. Krupitsky has had so much success that he had been invited by researchers at the Yale Medical School to collaborate on a similar treatment program.
Telling me all this, Krupitsky was soothingly phlegmatic. His English was a bit shaky, though, and he showed no irritation when John Halpern broke in to clarify, annotate, or digress.
Halpern also told me about his investigation of the effects of long-term ingestion of peyote by members of the Native American Church. According to Halpern’s preliminary results, church members show no ill psychological or physiological effects from peyote; in fact, they are in general healthier and happier—and much less prone to alcoholism—than non-church members. Halpern was careful to point out that these benefits could derive from the social fellowship provided by church membership.
Halpern periodically asked me how I was doing, and I kept saying fine. He advised me to close my eyes for fifteen seconds to test my “visuals.” I closed my eyes for few seconds and--dizzied by the riotous polychromatic swirling—opened them again. I’m fine, I reiterated. Halpern launched into a paean to psilocybin mushrooms. Here I was, quite intoxicated, and yet I could still handle myself in a highly structured social setting with no obvious signs of disorientation. Yes, I crowed, I love my job! Halpern and Krupitsky avowed that they loved their jobs, too. I raised my mug of beer, Halpern his goblet of wine, and Krupitsky his tumbler of water. Clinking our glasses together, we toasted our good fortune.
Of course, psychedelics can also cause great harm, Halpern reminded us. He went on to regale Krupitsky and me with stories about the insidious ends to which psychedelics have been put by the U.S. government. Beginning in the early 1950’s, the Central Intelligence Agency created top-secret programs such as Bluebird, Artichoke, and MK-Ultra to test the potential of LSD and other drugs as truth serums and brainwashing agents. Some government employees were given LSD without their knowledge or consent. One, the Army biochemist Frank Olson, apparently suffered an extended psychotic breakdown and died in 1953 after falling from a hotel window.
The CIA paid psychiatrists to test LSD’s brainwashing potential on prisoners and mental patients. A Canadian psychiatrist named Ewen Cameron, the former head of the American Psychiatric Association, tried to “re-program” patients by piping tape-recorded exhortations into their rooms after they had been rendered malleable by barbituates, LSD, and electroshock therapy. The U.S. Army gave LSD to soldiers engaged in field exercises, too. Halpern had seen film footage of the exercises, in which the soldiers staggered about comically.
In the 1960’s and 1970’s, the Army stockpiled tens of thousands of cannisters of an extremely potent hallucinogenic “incapacitant” called BZ. The idea was that the BZ, when wafted in gaseous form over enemy troops, would turn them into gibbering idiots for up to 80 hours. BZ was never deployed, apparently because American military commanders feared the unpredictability of its effects; killing the enemy with bullets and bombs was much more reliable.
Halpern occasionally interrupted this litany to ask me if I found it disturbing. Not at all, I kept replying, I find it fascinating. And that was true. But I also was vaguely convinced that this was my much-deserved penance for having eaten mushrooms so blithely this evening. I was being reminded that the world does not exist merely for my aesthetic delight, and psychedelics—which at their best unveil the world’s astonishing beauty--can also serve evil ends. The same drug that awakens us can enslave us or drive us mad. This is not a game, I thought. This is not a game.
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Publication Date: 11-20-2009

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