A Really Good Day(42)
F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” If that is the case, then surely one shouldn’t condemn someone merely because one (or a dozen) of those ideas is bat-shit crazy. Still, I find it disconcerting to watch a video of a pretty young woman with whom I share an agenda, both personal and political, drilling a hole in her head and reveling in the resulting “expanded consciousness.” Nothing makes me embrace my constricted consciousness more than the sight of the blood running into her smile.
* * *
*1 ?Harvard Law School is known to alumni and others as the Law School, as if no others exist.
*2 ?See, e.g., Theodore Kaczynski.
*3 ?Leary’s sojourn abroad was preceded by the suicide of his wife, his marriage to and divorce from another woman, and the arrest of his thesis adviser and purported lover for solicitation of sex in a public restroom.
*4 ?By some accounts, a man named Michael Hollingshead, described by one of my sources as a “charming psychopath,” gave Leary a mayonnaise jar full of LSD, which he had obtained from a New York City psychiatrist who had himself ordered the drug directly from Sandoz Pharmaceuticals.
*5 ?http://www.thecrimson.com/?article/?1962/?12/?13/?letter-from-alpert-leary-pfollowing-is/.
*6 ?The survivor of many a publicity tour, I can only say that this isn’t the worst solution I’ve encountered to the malaise of trudging from city to city, flogging one’s book.
*7 ?And, more important, the inspiration for Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem’s bus in The Muppet Movie.
*8 ?Robert Greenfield, Timothy Leary: A Biography, p. 302.
*9 ?Or in her underwear. Reports differ.
*10 ?Perhaps this is not irony but, rather, poetic justice.
*11 ?Harvard! Again! You might be forgiven for wondering what the heck’s going on there.
*12 ?As did Hofmann’s, as well as that of other early proponents of LSD-enhanced psychotherapy, such as Stanislav Grof.
Day 18
Normal Day
Physical Sensations: None.
Mood: Even-tempered. Pleasant.
Conflict: None.
Sleep: Adequate. Seven Hours.
Work: Remarkably productive.
Pain: Minor.
It’s a relief to have another Normal Day that feels so good. I was worried that the microdose of LSD was having the effect of making Microdose Day happy but activated (raising fears of hypomania), Transition Day marvelous, and Normal Day unreliable. But today was a really good day, and I’m under the influence of nothing at all.
As someone who never took a math class after eleventh grade, and who satisfied her college natural-science distribution requirement with a class called The Origins of Human Sexual Behavior, I find it remarkable not only that I spent this really good day reading complicated articles in scientific journals, the results of the various psilocybin studies that are currently in process at UCLA, Johns Hopkins, and NYU, but that I found them so fascinating.
Though my microdosing experiment shares little with these research projects—my dose is a fraction of the ones being studied, and their goals are far more ambitious than the slight mood modification I seek—these studies are compelling and instructive. Moreover, they have relieved any residual anxieties I had about the safety of my project. It’s encouraging that legitimate researchers whose approving institutions demand careful consideration of all risks are comfortable administering much higher doses of a drug that operates nearly identically to and is no more or less dangerous than LSD. I will die eventually, but it’s not going to be from two drops of diluted acid every three days.
After a long hiatus, approval for human-subject research on psychedelic drugs was given by the FDA. The first such study was with the drug N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) at the University of New Mexico, conducted by Rick Strassman and published in 1994. Since then, clinical research has slowly and carefully resumed. In the first human study addressing a clinical use (a so-called Phase Two clinical protocol), the researcher Charles S. Grob, M.D., and his colleagues at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center investigated whether psilocybin could reduce anxiety, depression, and pain in patients with terminal cancer. Annie Levy, one of the participants in this twelve-subject pilot study, a middle-aged woman with short gray curls and large, luminous eyes, recalled that before the study began she was anxious and terrified. She had lost her faith, was being irritable with her husband. “I was worried about the process of dying, about suffering and being in pain.”
In a room decorated with purple fabric wall hangings and fresh orchids, Annie and the other research subjects were given .2mg/kg of psilocybin, a moderate dose sufficient to make them feel the effects of the drug.*1 Annie lay in bed, wearing an eye mask and listening to music. Afterward, she told an interviewer, “As soon as it started working, I knew I had nothing to be afraid of, because it connected me with the universe.” She recounted a remarkable emotional experience. “I was lying on this hospital bed and it felt like the bed had turned into this circle of hands that was holding me. I was being supported.”
Her husband recalled that when they returned home “it was like someone had put on a lightbulb inside of Annie’s head. She was literally glowing.”
At the conclusion of the experience (approximately six hours after consuming the dose), Annie and the other subjects were evaluated and given the opportunity to discuss and process their experiences with a trained researcher. They continued to meet with the researcher periodically over the next six months—for discussion only, not for further drug treatment. None of the subjects experienced any negative physical or emotional consequences of the psilocybin. On the contrary, their despair and anxiety were substantially alleviated. The effects on Annie of this single psychedelic experience lasted until her death in 2009. Her remaining days were, more often than not, really good days.