Old Hollywood sprinkled with LSD?

[hailey greenhat]

http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/features/2010/08/drugs-in-hollywood-201008?currentPage=1
According to this article the rich and famous of the 50s turned to LSD by way of two hollywood psychotherapist in an attempt to cope with life. Mentioned are Cary Grant, Esther Williams, and Judy Balaban daughter of Paramount's president Barney Balaban.
I knew it was tested for use in WW2 but in 50s hollywood as a coping drug? [huh] I guess after cocaine and Freud much else shouldn't be surprising.

 

[miss_elise]

sounds interesting - i was also under the impression that it didn't really make it out of clinical trials

 

[Mario]

Fascinating read. Thanks for sharing.

 

[ScionPI2005]

Wow. I had no idea. Thanks for posting this!

 

[metropd]

ALERT! PROJECT MKULTRA

THIS IS ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THIS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKULTRA

 

[Mario]

THIS IS ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THIS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKULTRA

A friend of mine (who's a psychiatrist) chose this for his doctoral dissertation. He's still working at it and I'm keen to read it once he's finished.

 

[metropd]

A friend of mine (who's a psychiatrist) chose this for his doctoral dissertation. He's still working at it and I'm keen to read it once he's finished.

About 5 months ago I was at an upscale nightclub, and met a gentleman who had saw me around town. He was wearing a bespoke suit 2bt single breasted with Elegant wide peak lapels. He complemented me on my fedora and told me he "always loved Golden Era Fedoras." We started talking, a few scotchs later he was talking about how his much younger Russian wife left him in the dust with his two kids. I explained to him the "survival mentality" of many young Russian women that I have met. At this point he started worshiping me like a lifestyle Guru. We bought a couple rounds of Johnnie Walker Blue Label. He is very drunk by now and I am still nursing my first drink.

He then leans into me with a slight smile as to "show and tell" me something, and quietly shows me his Homeland Security Secret Service Badge, puts his arm over the lower mid section of his suit, and drunkenly smiles, a tad high on some fine Whiskey. He tells me "I've been an agent for over 2 decades". I ask him about MK-Ultra. He is very shocked but also quite intrigued. We talk about MK-ULTRA for about 30 minutes. He then asks me what I do for a living. I tell him "I'm a life long student." I then ask Him what happened to MK-Ultra. He glances at me insecurely, looks suspiciously around the room in an inebriated state and says" Its Still going on under a new name". One of the best Nights of my life!

 

[Doctor Strange]

Virtually everything in this article is old news to some of us. (I remember Cary Grant publically talking about his positive LSD experiences in an article in Life or Look magazine, circa 1965.) As is the fact that LSD can be a very beneficial agent to self-knowledge: I can attest to this from personal experience in the late 70s.

LSD never got over the largely-bushwa bad reputation it got at the hands of the press, manipulated by the government (which is totally understandable: it IS very much an anti-authoritan agent: it's impossible to take a lot of dumb stuff seriously without questioning it after you've seen how powerfully something whose dosage is measured in millionths of a gram can alter/reveal realty!)... But it is a remarkable agent for self-analysis, as well as an amazing special-effects generator.

It's good that research is finally being done with it once again. Its potential to treat many psychological/social disorders is vast, and as a tool for self-examination and method for attaining mystical/religious experience, it really is a wonder drug!

 

[metropd]

Virtually everything in this article is old news to some of us. (I remember Cary Grant publically talking about his positive LSD experiences in an article in Life or Look magazine, circa 1965.) As is the fact that LSD can be a very beneficial agent to self-knowledge: I can attest to this from personal experience in the late 70s.

LSD never got over the largely-bushwa bad reputation it got at the hands of the press, manipulated by the government (which is totally understandable: it IS very much an anti-authoritan agent: it's impossible to take a lot of dumb stuff seriously without questioning it after you've seen how powerfully something whose dosage is measured in millionths of a gram can alter/reveal realty!)... But it is a remarkable agent for self-analysis, as well as an amazing special-effects generator.

It's good that research is finally being done with it once again. Its potential to treat many psychological/social disorders is vast, and as a tool for self-examination and method for attaining mystical/religious experience, it really is a wonder drug!

I'll take your word for it. lol

 

[LizzieMaine]

I feel the same way about unsweetened baking chocolate.

 

[DerMann]

When Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) was discovered in the late 1930s, it was intended for medical use. From the 1940s on into the 1960s doctors and psychiatrists were fiddling around with it for use in therapy.

It's not unreasonable to assume that many big names from the Golden Era fooled around with it, as it wasn't made illegal until the late 1960s. Same thing happened with Marijuana. The various daemonisations of the plant began in the 1920s and was finally banned some time in the 1930s. People like Louis Armstrong and Bing Crosby were fanatical users of the substance (Louis Armstrong would write, rather descriptively, on how he used it heavily for some time), and they became good friends because of this. After Marijuana was banned, Bing Crosby began a life-long movement on supporting the re-legalisation of Marijuana until his death in the 1970s.

Although I've never had LSD (too bally hard to find in civilised places), I've had experiences with psilocybin, and I must say, of all the therapy I've gone through with my ADHD and mild depression (long story), nothing compares to the near spiritual experience one can achieve with a baggy of mushrooms, a deeply moving film (Koyaanisqatsi is particularly good), and several hours of very good music.

This is the hippy in me talking, but I really do believe that the reason why the government is so adamant about keeping substances like marijuana and LSD illegal and out of the hands of its citizens is that it makes them think. Drugs like heroin and methamphetamine are quite detrimental to not only the user, but to society, and as such it's perfectly reasonable to have them banned and the use of such a drug a valid target for government control. However, responsible use of drugs like LSD (psychedelics) and marijuana really don't do any damage, neither to the user or to society. However, when one begins seeing the faults of the current administration or society through the use of such substances, there may be a large group of people who have similar thoughts and wish to actually act on bringing about change (e.g. the 1960s counter-culture). In my opinion that is why the government has daemonised such substances.

(hope that wasn't too political, just trying to expose the reasons for which these drugs were banned)

 

[hailey greenhat]

If we're mentioning other drugs lest we forget heroin and the blues singers that fell to it like Billie Holiday.
metropd How cool was that? I would have died, i got nervous just reading it
Doctor Strange I've read quite a few articles by Doctors, they all stress that the drug should only be taken under a qualified professional's watchful eye, that doesn't sound so great to me.
Glad i could share this with those who didn't know.

 

[Geesie]

Virtually everything in this article is old news to some of us. (I remember Cary Grant publically talking about his positive LSD experiences in an article in Life or Look magazine, circa 1965.) As is the fact that LSD can be a very beneficial agent to self-knowledge: I can attest to this from personal experience in the late 70s.

LSD never got over the largely-bushwa bad reputation it got at the hands of the press, manipulated by the government (which is totally understandable: it IS very much an anti-authoritan agent: it's impossible to take a lot of dumb stuff seriously without questioning it after you've seen how powerfully something whose dosage is measured in millionths of a gram can alter/reveal realty!)... But it is a remarkable agent for self-analysis, as well as an amazing special-effects generator.

It's good that research is finally being done with it once again. Its potential to treat many psychological/social disorders is vast, and as a tool for self-examination and method for attaining mystical/religious experience, it really is a wonder drug!

I try not to buy conspiracies too readily, but I can't think of a good reason that it's almost impossible just to do research on entheogens but dangerous, highly addictive opiates are prescribed left and right.

 

[Bustercat]

I think the banning was as simple as,

"we don't want future generations sitting around navel gazing instead of working hard and spending hard, and being ready to go to war at a moment's notice if we need them."

Add to that, conspiracy theories about the soviets being involved in actively controlling the counterculture...

 

[Doctor Strange]

I know I'm treading right at the edge of getting this thread killed, but briefly:

Re navel gazing: My college friends and I only experimented with this (and lots of other!) stuff for about five or six years. We are virtually now all highly paid, respected professionals, parents, and voting/taxpaying citizens - and have been for decades.

Aside from one or two people who had emotional/psychological issues before these experiences (not that it was necessarily obvious beforehand), nobody I know became any kind of drag on society. The major burnouts and human wreckage that I have known along the way didn't become that way from experimenting with psychedelics, but from toxic dysfunction in their family backgrounds, alcoholism, and/or other inborn antisocial tendencies.

Re conspiracies and/or the political reasons why research was halted and LSD demonized: As I said above, in opening the mind, it makes taking stuff for granted just because "government experts" say so nearly impossible. There's no question that young people doing this stuff wasn't good for any party wanting to maintain the status quo, so it doesn't even matter which factions were to blame - basically, it was inevitable.

Add in what I have long thought is one of this country's biggest problems: a deeply rooted puritanical streak that regards anything pleasurable as an antisocial menace (unless there's a powerfully entrenched lobby, etc., to declare your industry immune, a la cigarettes and alcohol), and it's really a no-brainer that it was outlawed. Just look at how long it's taking marijuana - a demonstrably more benign social drug than alcohol, not to mention one with valid medical applications - to make inroads towards legal acceptance. (And don't even get me started on our utterly schizoid handling of sexual mores. We constantly vacilate between titillation and damnation regarding our natural pleasure methods, and wonder why kids are so confused!)

Anyway, I will not apologize for having done some stupid, illegal things when I was a college student - virtually everyone does (and re today, don't get me started on how dumb raising the drinking age to 21 was... yet another instance of that misguided American puritanical impulse!) - especially because, as I said right up front, they were great learning experiences.

PS - DerMann: I also did some psilocybin back in the 70s. An amazing experience, similar to LSD... yet very different. This was true of all the psychedelics I enountered, including mescaline and MDA (the forerunner of today's MMDA, aka Ecstasy.) Check out this site: http://www.erowid.org/psychoactives/psychoactives.shtml

Hailey: One of my best friends in those days was a then-premed student, now a PhD biochemist and senior R&D executive at Pfizer. She sometimes acted as a control, monitoring our vitals and keeping an eye on us. (And to this day, she maintains that our overwhelmingly positive experiences were worth our admittedly reckless behavior.)