Nobel Prize genius was on LSD when he discovered the secret of life

scojones

http://www.mayanmajix.com/art1699.html wrote:

FRANCIS CRICK, the Nobel Prize-winning father of modern genetics, was under the influence of LSD when he first deduced thedouble-helix structure of DNA nearly 50 years ago.

The abrasive and unorthodox Crick and his brilliant American co-researcher James Watson famously celebrated their eureka moment in March 1953 by running from the now legendary Cavendish Laboratory in
Cambridge to the nearby Eagle pub, where they announced over pints of bitter that they had discovered the secret of life.

Crick, who died ten days ago, aged 88, later told a fellow scientist that he often used small doses of LSD then an experimental drug used in psychotherapy to boost his powers of thought. He said it was LSD, not
the Eagle's warm beer, that helped him to unravel the structure of DNA, the discovery that won him the Nobel Prize.

Despite his Establishment image, Crick was a devotee of novelist Aldous Huxley, whose accounts of his experiments with LSD and another hallucinogen, mescaline, in the short stories The Doors Of Perception and Heaven And Hell became cult texts for the hippies of the Sixties and Seventies. In the late Sixties, Crick was a founder member of Soma, a legalise-cannabis group named after the drug in Huxley's novel Brave New World. He even put his name to a famous letter to The Times in 1967 calling for a reform in the drugs laws.

It was through his membership of Soma that Crick inadvertently became the inspiration for the biggest LSD manufacturing conspiracy-the world has ever seen the multimillion-pound drug factory in a remote
farmhouse in Wales that was smashed by the Operation Julie raids of the late Seventies.

Crick's involvement with the gang was fleeting but crucial. The revered scientist had been invited to the Cambridge home of freewheeling American writer David Solomon a friend of hippie LSD guru Timothy
Leary who had come to Britain in 1967 on a quest to discover a method for manufacturing pure THC, the active ingredient of cannabis.

It was Crick's presence in Solomon's social circle that attracted a brilliant young biochemist, Richard Kemp, who soon became a convert to the attractions of both cannabis and LSD. Kemp was recruited to the THC project in 1968, but soon afterwards devised the world's first foolproof method of producing cheap, pure LSD. Solomon and Kemp went into business, manufacturing acid in a succession of rented houses before setting up their laboratory in a cottage on a hillside near Tregaron, Carmarthenshire, in 1973. It is estimated that Kemp manufactured drugs worth Pounds 2.5 million an astonishing amount in the Seventies before police stormed the building in 1977 and seized enough pure LSD and its constituent chemicals to make two million LSD 'tabs'.

The arrest and conviction of Solomon, Kemp and a string of co-conspirators dominated the headlines for months. I was covering the case as a reporter at the time and it was then that I met Kemp's close friend, Garrod Harker, whose home had been raided by police but who had not been arrest ed. Harker told me that
Kemp and his girlfriend Christine Bott by then in jail were hippie idealists who were completely uninterested in the money they were making.

They gave away thousands to pet causes such as the Glastonbury pop festival and the drugs charity Release.

'They have a philosophy,' Harker told me at the time. 'They believe industrial society will collapse when the oil runs out and that the answer is to change people's mindsets using acid. They believe LSD can help people to see that a return to a natural society based on self-sufficiency is the only way to save themselves.

'Dick Kemp told me he met Francis Crick at Cambridge. Crick had told him that some Cambridge academics used LSD in tiny amounts as a thinking tool, to liberate them from preconceptions and let their genius wander freely to new ideas. Crick told him he had perceived the double-helix shape while on LSD.

'It was clear that Dick Kemp was highly impressed and probably bowled over by what Crick had told him. He told me that if a man like Crick, who had gone to the heart of human existence, had used LSD, then it
was worth using. Crick was certainly Dick Kemp's inspiration.' Shortly afterwards I visited Crick at his home, Golden Helix, in Cambridge.

He listened with rapt, amused attention to what I told him about the role of LSD in his Nobel Prize-winning discovery. He gave no intimation of surprise. When I had finished, he said: 'Print a word of it and I'll sue.'

Article was posted in 2004. Still quite a good read though.

Naked Lepper

LSD could have been the best thing that ever happened to the world - if the us hadnt sent all the hippies to vietnam to be killed just as the acid revolution was taking off, then america and the world would be a better place

muchos respect to albert hoffman for inventing the stuff

if you read up on his 100 year ceremony of his birth which took place recently you will find that there were plenty of highly acclaimed professors and artists there celebrating his life.

scojones

Naked Lepper wrote:

LSD could have been the best thing that ever happened to the world - if the us hadnt sent all the hippies to vietnam to be killed just as the acid revolution was taking off, then america and the world would be a better place

muchos respect to albert hoffman for inventing the stuff

if you read up on his 100 year ceremony of his birth which took place recently you will find that there were plenty of highly acclaimed professors and artists there celebrating his life.

Just had a read up on the chap. Very interesting, and what's more intriguing is he's still alive!

Naked Lepper

futher topical reading;


LSD: The Geek's Wonder Drug?

By Ann Harrison
02:00 AM Jan, 16, 2006

BASEL, Switzerland -- When Kevin Herbert has a particularly intractable programming problem, or finds himself pondering a big career decision, he deploys a powerful mind expanding tool -- LSD-25.

"It must be changing something about the internal communication in my brain. Whatever my inner process is that lets me solve problems, it works differently, or maybe different parts of my brain are used, " said Herbert, 42, an early employee of Cisco Systems who says he solved his toughest technical problems while tripping to drum solos by the Grateful Dead -- who were among the many artists inspired by LSD.

"When I'm on LSD and hearing something that's pure rhythm, it takes me to another world and into anther brain state where I've stopped thinking and started knowing," said Herbert who intervened to ban drug testing of technologists at Cisco Systems.

Herbert, who lives in Santa Cruz, California, joined 2,000 researchers, scientists, artists and historians gathered here over the weekend to celebrate the 100th birthday of Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who discovered LSD here in 1938. The centenarian received a congratulatory birthday letter from the Swiss president, roses and a spontaneous kiss from a young woman in the crowd.

In many ways, the conference, LSD: Problem Child and Wonder Drug, an International Symposium on the Occasion of the 100th Birthday of Albert Hofmann, was a scientific coming-out party for the drug Hofmann fathered.

"LSD wanted to tell me something," Hofmann told the gathering Friday. "It gave me an inner joy, an open mindedness, a gratefulness, open eyes and an internal sensitivity for the miracles of creation."

Bent with age but still eloquent, Hofmann said he hoped the symposium would encourage the renewed therapeutic and spiritual use of LSD in supervised settings.

Lysergic acid diethylamide, a derivative of lysergic acid found in the alkaloids of the ergot grain fungus, has been illegal worldwide since the mid-1960s and still generates controversy. The conference was picketed Saturday by a splinter group from Scientology opposed to drug use.

The storied history of LSD as a mind-expanding tool began five years after Hofmann discovered LSD-25, and had what he described as a "peculiar presentiment" compelling him to resynthesize the drug. Without ingesting the substance, Hofmann managed to accidentally absorb enough of the chemical to experience its effects. In a second intentional trip, Hoffman said he had a frightening experience that gave way to feelings of rebirth.

During the 1950s and 1960s, LSD was found to be a promising tool for psychiatry and psychotherapy and was studied by the CIA as a potential interrogation weapon. It was criminalized after it escaped from the lab to be widely embraced by the youth culture.

Hofmannn said millions of people have taken LSD, but some had bad reactions when they took counterfeit drugs. He would like to see a modern Eleusis, the ancient Greek site that held the rituals of Eleusinian Mysteries which took place for two millennia beginning in 1500 BC. During the LSD symposium, mythologist Carl P. Ruck and chemist Peter Webster presented their research suggesting that an ergot preparation was the active ingredient for the Kykeon beverage used during the ritual.

"When Hofmann synthesized the chemical in LSD, he stumbled upon a 4,000-year-old secret," said Ruck, author of Road to Eleusis.

In 1958, Hofmann was the first to isolate the psychoactive substances of psilocybin and psilocin from Mexican magic mushrooms (psilocybe mexicana) which were among a variety of sacred plants used around the world to invite ecstatic and spiritual experiences.

The United States Supreme Court is now considering an appeal brought by the New Mexican chapter of the Uniao do Vegetal, or UDV, which uses the outlawed ayahauska brew in its ceremonies and cites the Eleusinian Mysteries as a precedent for a psychoactive Eucharist.

At the symposium, presentations of electronic trance music and psychedelic art by painter Alex Grey encouraged meditative and spiritual reflection for participants -- especially those in altered states of consciousness.

Participants eager to describe their modern-day spiritual LSD experiences were encouraged to contribute to a library of drug experiences on the Erowid website. Earth and Fire Erowid, who operate the site, presented a sampling of comments at the symposium and documented the two to five known deaths that have been associated with LSD.

Geri Beil of Cologne, Germany, who attended the symposium, recalled his own ecstatic LSD experience on an Indian beach on New Year's day, 2000. "I was crying from happiness, so thankful to my parents that they created me," said Beil. "This experience has not disappeared; it has had a lasting effect."

Like Herbert, many scientists and engineers also report heightened states of creativity while using LSD. During a press conference on Friday, Hofmann revealed that he was told by Nobel-prize-winning chemist Kary Mullis that LSD had helped him develop the polymerase chain reaction that helps amplify specific DNA sequences.

"When you study natural science and the miracles of creation, if you don't turn into a mystic you are not a natural scientist," said Hofmann.

In his presentation, artist Alex Grey noted that Nobel-prize-winner Francis Crick, discoverer of the double helical structure of DNA, also told friends he received inspiration for his ideas from LSD, according to news reports.

The gathering included a discussion of how early computer pioneers used LSD for inspiration. Douglas Englebart, the inventor of the mouse, Myron Stolaroff, a former Ampex engineer and LSD researcher who was attending the symposium, and Apple-cofounder Steve Jobs were among them. In the 2005 book What the Dormouse Said, New York Times reporter John Markoff quotes Jobs describing his LSD experience as "one of the two or three most important things he has done in his life."

But the symposium wasn't just a census of LSD-using notables. Attendees included psychotherapists and psychiatrists who discussed research into the therapeutic usefulness of psychedelic drugs.

Dr. Michael Mithoefer presented the preliminary findings of his study in Charleston, South Carolina, which is investigating whether MDMA is effective for treating post-traumatic stress disorder in people traumatized by crime or war.

Harvard University professor, Dr. John Halpern, discussed his proposed study -- now awaiting DEA approval -- using MDMA to treat anxiety in cancer patients.

The Florida-based Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) is supporting studies and research in Canada investigating the use of ibogain to treat drug addiction.

And a study at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, supported by the Heffter Research Institute, is investigating whether psilocybin effectively eases the anxiety of terminal cancer patients. Psychiatrist Charles Grob says his research group has located six of the needed 12 subjects and is looking for more participants.

While the data has yet to be analyzed, Grob told seminar participants that all the participants in the study have shown promising reactions, and he applauded the opportunity to share the data in an international gathering.

"It's very encouraging to see such a large number of people, including very knowledgeable people, getting together and sharing a common vision that these compounds have tremendous potential to facilitate healing, especially in areas that do not respond well to conventional treatments," said Grob. "There is global healing in these compounds which have been used for millennia by indigenous people that have much to teach modern man and modern woman."

MAPS founder Rick Doblin says his goal is to make psychedelic medicines into prescription drugs, lamenting that LSD is not yet being studied for therapeutic purposes. "We have been deeply touched by our experiences with psychedelics and it is hard that there is not a single legal study with LSD given to humans anywhere in the world," said Doblin. "We need to bring what is underground and illegal back into a legal context."

But Doblin notes that a group of people who say LSD provides relief from their cluster headaches have organized online and are pushing for a study at Harvard to explore a possible therapy using the drug. If Harvard accepts the MDMA study, Doblin says it could pave the way for the symbolically important return of psychedelic1 research at Harvard that halted during the tenure of Timothy Leary. His goal, says Doblin, is to secure an LSD study in time for Hofmann's 101st birthday.

Dr. Andrew Sewell, a psychiatrist and neurologist from the Harvard Medical School who studies alcohol and drug abuse, says most problems with LSD occur when users take an unknown dose they don't feel comfortable with, in an uncontrolled setting, without supervision to shield them from dangerous situations.

"LSD flashbacks are well-confirmed phenomenon but they are relatively rare and don't seem to cause as much trouble as the media would have you believe," said Dr. Sewell at the LSD symposium.

Dr. Sewell says people who have underlying mental disorders should not take LSD because it could make their symptoms worse. "Like any powerful drug, if LSD is used incorrectly it can cause more harm than good," said Dr. Sewell. "LSD is a potentially dangerous drug and should be taken under medical supervision."

"There is no evidence that LSD causes permanent brain damage -- and quite a lot of evidence that it doesn't," said Sewell. "We are lucky that we have over 1,000 papers written in the '50s and '60s when LSD was given to thousands and thousands of research subjects so we have a pretty good idea at this point what it does and does not do."

Asked if the world needs his invention, Hofmann said he hoped that the Basel LSD symposium would help create an appropriate place for LSD in society.

"I think that in human evolution it has never been as necessary to have this substance LSD," said Hofmann. "It is just a tool to turn us into what we are supposed to be."

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70015-1.html?tw=wn_story_page_next1

InFront

Well Crick didn't advocate legalisation of drugs, and although he was an accomplished neuroscientist for many years after his work on DNA, and was a prolific researcher in the area of conscience, neither was he very pro-drugs or pro-LSD at all. Surely someone who found such benefit in LSD as is rumoured would have been vociferous into more research into that drug?

What hs been said publicly by both Watson and Crick is that they discoverd the helical nature together, and neither have said anything about LSD abuse. It's all too easy for rumour-merchants to attribute such claims after both of their deaths.

Naked Lepper

Im surprised to see you replying to a thread which involves serious discussion of psychoactive chemicals / research InFront because in the past, any post in relation to any form of mind altering chemical has involved you displaying some of the most ignorant, frustrating comments I have ever read.

However, upon seeing your name as the last reply - it comes as no surprise to me that your severe anti-drug outlook has come through in your post.

Goodbye.

But LSD is quite bad for you.Paranoia and whatnot.

ScumLord

That's such a coiencidence I was also on LSD when I discovered the double-helix structure of DNA, I just didn't go making a big deal about it. :rolleyes:

starn

Richard Feynman claimed to of experimented with Mescaline and possible LSD, and von Stradonitz was allegeldly off his face on opium when he devised the Benezene ring. Played around with with both Mesline and salvia. But LSD scares the **** out of me

Karoma

"Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration … that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There's no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we're the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the weather."

Naked Lepper

Well done on the bill hicks quote (probs my fave comic ever incedently!)

meditraitor

InFront wrote:

Well Crick didn't advocate legalisation of drugs, and although he was an accomplished neuroscientist for many years after his work on DNA, and was a prolific researcher in the area of conscience, neither was he very pro-drugs or pro-LSD at all. Surely someone who found such benefit in LSD as is rumoured would have been vociferous into more research into that drug?

What hs been said publicly by both Watson and Crick is that they discoverd the helical nature together, and neither have said anything about LSD abuse. It's all too easy for rumour-merchants to attribute such claims after both of their deaths.

Well put

naked lepper wrote:

Im surprised to see you replying to a thread which involves serious discussion of psychoactive chemicals / research InFront because in the past, any post in relation to any form of mind altering chemical has involved you displaying some of the most ignorant, frustrating comments I have ever read.

However, upon seeing your name as the last reply - it comes as no surprise to me that your severe anti-drug outlook has come through in your post.

Goodbye.

Pot and kettle my dear chap, as for it being a serious discussion of the effect of psycoactive chemicals-you couldnt be farther from the thruth
This is After Hours, such a thing would not be tolerated by the average joe's that congregate here.
So bring your almighty insight and intellect to some other forum if you want a serious discussion.

As for the dude unraveling the structure of DNA, if he took acid of course it played a part in his discovery, but so did the slap his ma gave him when he was 4 years old for not knowing his 5 times tables, the acid didnt make the man

anyone out there stupid enough to think that acid turns people into nobel prize winning scientists needs their head examined,

be cool

Naked Lepper

If you had read InFronts opinions in the cannabis thread you would see where I am coming from with my opinions of him and his posts.

Is there an ignore function on this site for him?

Anyway, I do discuss this seriously on other websites with educated and experienced people - I am not going to get into yet another boards.ie -v- drugs thread as it always results in the same outcome of people here who have been sucked up in the governments propaganda campaigns of the last 50 years displaying their ignorance.

I hope some people enjoyed reading the above articles, and I dont think there's anything more really I should add to this thread.

Peace

scojones

Karoma wrote:

"Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration … that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There's no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we're the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the weather."

Bill Hicks ftw. That dude in Dublin who jumped off a balcony was an idiot. Bill Hicks also addressed this sort of stupidity blaming acid or LSD for his death is just retarded, as he said, if he thought he could fly why didn't he take off from the ground?

InFront

Naked Lepper wrote:

Im surprised to see you replying to a thread which involves serious discussion of psychoactive chemicals / research InFront because in the past, any post in relation to any form of mind altering chemical has involved you displaying some of the most ignorant, frustrating comments I have ever read.

However, upon seeing your name as the last reply - it comes as no surprise to me that your severe anti-drug outlook has come through in your post.

Goodbye.

If you had read InFronts opinions in the cannabis thread you would see where I am coming from with my opinions of him and his posts.

Is there an ignore function on this site for him?

Relax man, take a chill pill.

View public Profile--->Ignore This User

---

>Miss You xx

Naked Lepper

http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/journalism/telegraphdrugs.htm


I take illegal drugs for inspiration

Daily Telegraph, Saturday May 21st 2005, pp 17-18


(Note: This version is very slightly different from the published, edited, version)
© Sue Blackmore 2005

Every year, like a social drinker who wants to prove to herself that she's not an alcoholic, I give up cannabis for a month. It can be a tough and dreary time - and much as I enjoy a glass of wine with dinner, alcohol cannot take its place.
Some people may smoke dope just to relax or have fun, but for me the reason goes deeper. In fact, I can honestly say that without cannabis, most of my scientific research would never have been done and most of my books on psychology and evolution would not have been written.
Some evenings, after a long day at my desk, I'll slip into the bath, light a candle and a spliff, and let the ideas flow - that lecture I have to give to 500 people next week, that article I'm writing for New Scientist, those tricky last words of a book I've been working on for months. This is the time when the sentences seem to write themselves. Or I might sit out in my greenhouse on a summer evening among my tomatoes and peach trees, struggling with questions about free will or the nature of the universe, and find that a smoke gives me new ways of thinking about them.
Yes, I know there are serious risks to my health, and I know I might be caught and fined or put in prison. But I weigh all this up, and go on smoking grass.
For both individuals and society, all drugs present a dilemma: are they worth the risks to health, wealth and sanity? For me, the pay-off is the scientific inspiration, the wealth of new ideas and the spur to inner exploration. But if I end up a mental and physical wreck, I hereby give you my permission to gloat and say: "I told you so".
My first encounter with drugs was a joint shared with a college friend in my first term at Oxford. This was at the tail end of the days of psychedelia and flower power - and cannabis was easy to obtain. After long days of lectures and writing essays, we enjoyed the laughter and giggling, the heightened sensations and crazy ideas that the drug seemed to let loose.
Then, one night, something out of the ordinary happened - though whether it was caused by the drug, lack of sleep or something else altogether, I don't know. I was listening to a record with two friends, sitting cross-legged on the floor, and I had smoked just enough to induce a mild synaesthesia. The sound of the music had somehow induced the sensation of rushing through a long, dark tunnel of rustling leaves towards a bright light.
I love tunnels. They come on the verges of sleep and death and are well known in all the cultures that use drugs for ritual, magic or healing. The reason for them lies in the visual cortex at the back of the brain, where certain drugs interfere with the inhibitory systems, releasing patterns of circles and spirals that form into tunnels and lights.
I didn't know about the science then. I was just enjoying the ride, when one of my friends asked a peculiar question: "Where are you, Sue?".
Where was I? I was in the tunnel. No, I was in my friend's room. I struggled to answer; then the confusion cleared and I was looking down on the familiar scene from above.
"I'm on the ceiling, " I said, as I watched the mouth down below open and close and say the words in unison. It was a most peculiar sensation.
My friend persisted. Can you move? Yes. Can you go through the walls? Yes. And I was off exploring what I thought, at the time, was the real world. It was a wonderful feeling - like a flying dream, only more realistic and intense.
The experience lasted more than two hours, and I remember it clearly even now. Eventually, it came to seem more like a mystical experience in which time and space had lost their meaning and I appeared to merge with the universe. Years later, when I began research on out-of-body and near-death experiences, I realised that I'd had all those now-familiar sensations that people report after close brushes with death. And I wanted to find out more.
However, nothing in the physiology and psychology that I was studying could remotely begin to cope with something like this. We were learning about rats' brains, and memory mechanisms, not mind and consciousness - let alone a mind that could apparently leave its body and travel around without it. Then and there, I decided to become a parapsychologist and devote my life to proving all those closed-minded scientists wrong.
But I was the one who was wrong. I did become a parapsychologist, but decades of difficult research taught me that ESP almost certainly doesn't exist and that nothing leaves the body during an out-of-body experience - however realistic it may feel.
Although parapsychology gave me no answers, I was still obsessed with a scientific mystery: how can we explain the mind and consciousness from what we know about the brain? Like any conventional scientist, I carried out experiments and surveys and studied the latest developments in psychology and neuroscience. But since the object of my inquiry was consciousness itself, this wasn't enough. I wanted to investigate my own consciousness as well.
So I tried everything from weird machines and gadgets to long-term training in meditation - but I have to admit that drugs have played a major role.
Back in those student days, it was the hallucinogens, or "mind-revealing" psychedelics, that excited us - and the ultimate hallucinogen must be LSD. Effective in minuscule doses, and not physically addictive, LSD takes you on a "trip" that lasts about eight to 10 hours but can seem like forever. Every sense is enhanced or distorted, objects change shape and form, terrors flood up from your own mind, and you can find joy in the simplest thing.
Once the trip has begun, there is no escape - no antidote, no way to stop the journey into the depths of your own mind. In my twenties, I used to take acid two or three times a year - and this was quite enough, for an acid trip is not an adventure to be undertaken lightly.
I've met the horrors with several hallucinogens, including magic mushrooms that I grew myself. I remember once gazing at a cheerfully coloured cushion, only to see each streak of colour turn into a scene of rape, mutilation or torture, the victims writhing and screaming - and when I shut my eyes, it didn't go away. It is easy to understand how such visions can turn into a classic "bad trip" , though that has never happened to me.
Instead, the onslaught of images eventually taught me to see and accept the frightening depths of my own mind - to face up to the fact that, under other circumstances, I might be either torturer or tortured. In a curious way, this makes it easier to cope with the guilt, fear or anxiety of ordinary life. Certainly, acceptance is a skill worth having - though I guess there are easier ways of acquiring it.
Then there's the fun and just the plain strangeness of LSD. On one sunny trip in Oxford, my friend and I stopped under a vast oak tree where the path had been trampled into deep furrows by cattle and then dried solid by the hot weather. We must have spent an hour there, gazing in wonder at the texture of this dried mud; at the hills and valleys in miniature; at the hoof-shaped pits and sharp cliffs; at the shifting patterns in the dappled shade. I felt that I knew every inch of this special place; that I had an intimate connection with the mud.
Suddenly, I noticed a very old man with a stick, walking slowly towards us on the path. Keep calm, I told myself. Act normal. He'll just say hello, walk by, and be gone.
"Excuse me, young lady," he said in a cracked voice. "My eyes are weak and, in this light, I can't see my way. Would you help me across?" And so it was that I found myself, dream-like, guiding the old man slowly across my special place - a patch of mud that I knew as well as my own features.
Two days later, my friend came back from lectures, very excited. "I've seen him. The man with the stick. He's real!"
We both feared that we'd hallucinated him.
Aldous Huxley once said that mescaline opened "the doors of perception"; it certainly did that for me. I took it one day with friends in the country, where we walked in spring meadows, identified wild flowers, marvelled over sparkling spider's webs and gasped at the colours in the sky that rippled overhead.
Back at the farmhouse, I sat playing with a kitten until kitten and flowers seemed inextricable. I took a pen and began to draw. I still have that little flower-kitten drawing on my study wall today.
On another wall is a field of daffodils in oils. One day, many years later, I went to my regular art class the day after an LSD trip. The teacher had brought in a bunch of daffodils and given us one each, in a milk bottle. Mine was beautiful; but I couldn't draw just one.
My vision was filled with daffodils, and I began to paint, in bold colours, huge blooms to fill the entire canvas. I will never be a great painter but, like many artists through the ages, I had found new ways of seeing that were induced by a chemical in the brain.
So can drugs be creative? I would say so, although the dangers are great - not just the dangers inherent in any drug use, but the danger of coming to rely on them too much and of neglecting the hard work that both art and science demand. There are plenty of good reasons to shun drug-induced creativity.
Yet, in my own case, drugs have an interesting role: in trying to understand consciousness, I am taking substances that affect the brain that I'm trying to understand. In other words, they alter the mind that is both the investigator and the investigated.
Interestingly, hallucinogens such as LSD and psilocybin are the least popular of today's street drugs - perhaps because they demand so much of the person who takes them and promise neither pleasure or cheap happiness. Instead, the money is all in heroin, cocaine and other drugs of addiction.
I have not enjoyed my few experiences with cocaine. I don't like the rush of false confidence and energy it provides - partly because that's not what I'm looking for and partly because I've seen cocaine take people over and ruin their lives. But many people love it - and the dealers get rich on getting people hooked.
This is tragic. In just about every human society there has ever been, people have used dangerous drugs - but most have developed rituals that bring an element of control or safety to the experience. In more primitive societies, it is shamans and healers who control the use of dangerous drugs, choose appropriate settings in which to take them and teach people how to appreciate the visions and insights that they can bring.
In our own society, criminals control all drug sales. This means that users have no way of knowing exactly what they are buying and no-one to teach them how to use these dangerous tools.
I have been lucky with my own teachers. The first time I took ecstasy, for example, I was with three people I had met at a Norwegian conference on death and dying. It was mid-summer, and they had invited me to join them on a trip around the fjords. One afternoon, we sat together and took pure crystals of MDMA - nothing like the frightening mixtures for sale on the streets today.
MDMA has the curious effect of making you feel warm and loving towards everyone and everything around you: within a few short hours, we were all convinced that we knew each other in a deep and intimate way. Then we deliberately each set off alone to walk in the mountains, where the same feeling of love now seemed to encompass the entire landscape.
I was told then that I should make the most of my first few experiences with MDMA because, after five or six doses, I would never get the same effects again. In my experience, this has been true, although prohibition makes it all but impossible to find such things out. In fact, we know horrifyingly little about the psychological effects of drugs that people take every day in Britain because scientists are not allowed to carry out the necessary research.
That is why I've had to do my own. I once had an expert friend inject me with a high dose of ketamine because I had heard it could induce out-of-body experiences. Known as K, or Special K, on the street, this is an anaesthetic used more often by vets than anaesthetists because of its unpleasant tendency to produce nightmares.
Get the dose right, as I did, and you are completely paralysed apart from the ability to move your eyes. This is not very pleasant. However, by imagining I was lifting out of my body, I felt I could fly, and I set off home to see what my children were up to. I was sure that I saw them playing in the kitchen; but when I checked the next day, I was told they had been asleep.


Back in the room, my guide began holding up his fingers out of my line of vision and, as soon as my mouth started working again, made me guess how many. I seemed to see the fingers all right, but my guesses were totally wrong.
I didn't repeat the experiment. It was not nearly as interesting as those drugs, such as LSD, psilocybin, DMT or mescaline, that undermine everything you take for granted. These are psychedelics that threaten our ordinary sense of self, and that is where they touch most deeply on my scientific interests.
What is a self? How does the brain create this sense of being "me", inside this head, looking out at the world, when I know that behind my eyes there are only millions of brain cells - and nowhere for an inner self to hide? How can those millions of brain cells give rise to free will when they are merely physical and chemical machines? In threatening our sense of self, could it be that these drugs reveal the scary truth that there is no such thing?
Mystics would say so. And, here, we hit an old and familiar question: do drugs and mystical experiences lead to the same "insights"? And are those insights true?
Since those first trips, I have taken many other drugs - such as nitrous oxide, or laughing gas. For just a few moments, I have understood everything - "Yes, yes, this is so right, this is how it has to be" - and then the certainty vanishes and you cannot say what you understood.
When the discoverer of nitrous oxide, Sir Humphrey Davy, took it himself in 1799, he exclaimed: "Nothing exists but thoughts". Others, too, have found their views profoundly shifted. It seems quite extraordinary to me that so simple a molecule can change one's philosophy, even for a few moments, yet it seems it can.
Why does the gas make you laugh? Perhaps it is a reaction to a brief appreciation of that terrifying cosmic joke - that we are just shifting patterns in a meaningless universe.
Are drugs the quick and dirty route to insight? I wanted to try the slow route, too. So I have spent more than 20 years training in meditation - not joining any cult or religion but learning the discipline of steadily looking into my own mind.
Gradually, the mind calms, space opens up, self and other become indistinguishable, and desires drop away. It's an old metaphor, but people often liken the task to climbing a mountain. The drugs can take you up in a helicopter to see what's there, but you can't stay.
In the end, you have to climb the mountain yourself - the hard way. Even so, by giving you that first glimpse, the drugs may provide the inspiration to keep climbing.



Psychologist Susan Blackmore, neuro-scientist Colin Blakemore and author Mike Jay will be appearing at the Cheltenham Science Festival (June 8-12) to discuss whether drugs can teach us anything about ourselves. For tickets to the Altered States session at the town hall ( £6, 4pm on Saturday, June 11) or for any other festival event , please call 01242 227 979 (information: www.cheltenhamfestivals.org.uk)

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Page created 23 May 2005
Last updated: Monday, 23 May 2005 14:33

biko

Now I want to try it too!

InFront

Then and there, I decided to become a parapsychologist and devote my life to proving all those closed-minded scientists wrong.

This is when I went :rolleyes:

RedPlanet

So, i guess that means you didn't read the very next sentence:

"But I was the one who was wrong."

meditraitor

biko wrote:

Now I want to try it too!

Send me your bank and credit card details along with a crispy €10 yoyo note and I will sort you out

onowankooo cuntcus
Nigerian embassy
No 4, Pearse street flats
Dublin


promise

biko

How about I just post them here using spoiler tags?

InFront

RedPlanet wrote:

So, i guess that means you didn't read the very next sentence:

No, it means that is an all too common belief amongst drug users. Science is wrong, and drugs are not that bad. Just look at the last cannabis thread, people openly reject accepted scientific evidence

Naked Lepper

InFront wrote:

No, it means that is an all too common belief amongst drug users. Science is wrong, and drugs are not that bad. Just look at the last cannabis thread, people openly reject accepted scientific evidence

What age are you?

I think you will find that alot drug case studies will provide inconclusive findings on the dangers of psychoactive drugs, and there is a wealth of studies which completely contradict and ruin those government issued propaganda reports.

I would suggest you go home to watch your prized copy of reefer madness again.

InFront

Originally posted by Naked Lepper
Goodbye.

Originally posted by Naked Lepper
If you had read InFronts opinions in the cannabis thread you would see where I am coming from with my opinions of him and his posts.

Is there an ignore function on this site for him?

Originally posted by Naked Lepper
I dont think there's anything more really I should add to this thread.

Originally posted by Naked Lepper
one final post in this thread for those interested

These were all posted before your above post by you.
No success with that ignore function then?

Naked Lepper wrote:

What age are you?

21, old enough to know better.

Originally posted by Naked Lepper
those government issued propaganda reports.

So science is wrong, and you, a drug user, are correct?
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=576

Naked Lepper

Yeah, i really didnt want to get involved in a 'disucssion' with you as it tends to make me slightly annoyed - which I should you should never let happen to you on a forum.

If you drink coffee, alcohol or take paracetamol you are also a drug user. It is only in the last 100 or so years out of the thousands of years that people have been using drugs that the governments have introduced prohabition against certain drugs while leaving others legal - so me being a drug user bares no weight in an arguement against drugs as we are all drug users.

Terry

Naked Lepper wrote:

Im surprised to see you replying to a thread which involves serious discussion of psychoactive chemicals / research InFront because in the past, any post in relation to any form of mind altering chemical has involved you displaying some of the most ignorant, frustrating comments I have ever read.

However, upon seeing your name as the last reply - it comes as no surprise to me that your severe anti-drug outlook has come through in your post.

Goodbye.

It seems to me that you only want to read pro-drug responses. You blather on about how people should open their eyes, yet you only want to hear the good things about drugs. I find that extremely sad.

Naked Lepper wrote:

If you drink coffee, alcohol or take paracetamol you are also a drug user.

oh for the love of god...
Can you not come up with a better arguement than 'well x drug is legal and so is y drug. therefore all drugs should be legal.'?

DarkJager

From my experience with LSD I can tell you, its not a drug to take if you are not fully prepared. While I was on it, there were patterns and colours swirling all around the room. Even the sound of silence started to reverb and music was so deep it was amazing. Just moving from a standing position to sitting on a couch felt like i was falling into a pool of silk. Your mind then begins to think about issues in your life, or questions that have always puzzled you. Conversations with anyone can evolve into deep philosophical think tanks, where you both debate up to a point where suddenly both views make complete sense.

Probably a stupid comment to make, and I'm not advising anybody to take it, but if you've ever wanted to just take a long hard look at what goes on behind your conscious mind and see the real you, then I can't recommend it enough. You'll come away from it knowing a lot more about yourself.

InFront

DarkJager wrote:

Your mind then begins to think about issues in your life, or questions that have always puzzled you.

"Are those my feet?"

Earthhorse

I wonder what the discoverer of LSD was on when he discovered LSD.

Terry

I would take anything from that site with a pinch of salt.
I think the articles from there would be better suited to the conspiracy theory forum.

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar

susan blackmore is speaking at the end of this video.. it's 3 hours long so skip through it until about uh... 2hours ten minutes or so i think.. she's the chick with the purple hair.

bloody brilliant presentation though

http://www.tsntv.org/Events/2005%20Skeptics%20Society%20Annual%20Conference/LowQuality/Session2.mov

file is 109 megs


http://www.tsntv.org/Events/2005%20Skeptics%20Society%20Annual%20Conference/LowQuality/

apparently you can stream it here.. but it won't work for me

shane86

sjones wrote:

Bill Hicks ftw. That dude in Dublin who jumped off a balcony was an idiot. Bill Hicks also addressed this sort of stupidity blaming acid or LSD for his death is just retarded, as he said, if he thought he could fly why didn't he take off from the ground?

Bill Hicks was a funny comedian. I wish people would stop confusing that with being the greatest social commentator of the 20th Century. Acid is some nasty ****e and is best avoided.

sjones- I once watched a man get into a verbal nearly physical argument with a poster of 50 Cent while high on shrooms, acid and a few other joyful mixers. Quit talking out of your arse re the paranoia.

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar

shane86 it's pretty clear that your 'man' was a ****ing muppet, don't blame acid for his stupidity.

thebaz

DarkJager wrote:

From my experience with LSD I can tell you, its not a drug to take if you are not fully prepared. While I was on it, there were patterns and colours swirling all around the room. Even the sound of silence started to reverb and music was so deep it was amazing. Just moving from a standing position to sitting on a couch felt like i was falling into a pool of silk. Your mind then begins to think about issues in your life, or questions that have always puzzled you. Conversations with anyone can evolve into deep philosophical think tanks, where you both debate up to a point where suddenly both views make complete sense.

.

Sounds similar to mine ! funny how some can discover the secret of life, and i couldn't perform such simple tasks as driving or order a pint under its influence -- i'd NEVER do it again !

slipss

For the love of God can you not come up with a better arguement than

julep wrote:

Can you not come up with a better arguement than 'well x drug is legal and so is y drug. therefore all drugs should be legal.'?

Because you seem to type that sentence pretty much word for word anytime you post in an illegal drug related thread.

InFront

Why don't you discredit it properly instead of dismissing it? It's a valid point, maybe that's why you hear it so often.

Terry

slipss wrote:

For the love of God can you not come up with a better arguement than

Because you seem to type that sentence pretty much word for word anytime you post in an illegal drug related thread.

No. It's the best one I can think of right now.
I'll get back to you if I can better it.