Acid trips in Switzerland
Growing up in Australia in the era of the late Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and San Francisco's summers of love, we were attracted by the call from across the Pacific to "Turn on, tune in and drop out." One of the things that parents cited to scare you off Dr Timothy Leary's alluring slogan was the horror of flash-backs from LSD, the chemical that drove the psychedelic movement. Acid and magic mushrooms may have been the creative juice of musicians, writers and artists, but, once consumed, it could revisit you at any time, taking you on a horror trip that could drive you to murder, suicide or other early death -- so we were told. Most of us didn't touch it, staying with lighter stuff, like Pink Floyd.
An acid flashback hit me yesterday although I had never tried it. I spent the day in the gentle Swiss city of Basle in the presence of Albert Hofmann, the chemist who invented LSD in 1937, took a lot of it and is now celebrating his 100th birthday (www.lsd.info).
Perfectly lucid and charming, Hofmann appears to be a living advertisement for the benefits of mind bending drugs. These days he rarely partakes of his "wunderkind and problem child", but he extols what he calls its sacred power -- the way that LSD expands consciousness and connects you with God, or nature. The testimony from this unassuming Swiss chemist was music to the ears of couple of thousand LSD fans who had converged from around the world to fete his birthday (Times article today).
The karma was out of sync, though. We were not in kandy-coloured tents in fields of incense and sitar music, but in Basle's banal congress centre. A message of greetings from that wild and crazy crew, the Swiss Government, kicked off a weekend of seminars led by ageing academics and creative types but attended by many devotees born since the Beatles broke up. The taming of the old counter-culture was symbolised by the eight am tune-in, a "meditative electronic sound trip" to get the good vibrations going for the day. At an hour when the old kool-aid gang would have been peacefully spaced out, we sat in a sterile conference room staring at loudspeakers that droned an unbroken bass C-sharp like salespeople watching Power-point.
The message from the scientists, therapists, writers and tantric dancers at the Basle junket is that the world is depriving itself of a precious tool for exploring the human mind. The experts want governments to ease the ban, as several have on medicinal marijuana, to let doctors and scientists use LSD for research into the human mind and for therapy. Their view is that LSD, like peyote, and other hallucinogens is a "holistic" substance, "one of the the gifts of the plants" that, in the right circumstances, heals and helps humanity. It is hard to imagine anything more out of phase with the political correctness of the age. "Legalise LSD" is not yet a slogan that would win many votes. But that is the real world. Back in Basle, they are devoting today to the theme of "The Ecstatic Adventure". The venue is appropriately the congress centre's main auditorium -- named The San Francisco room.
Maybe they should try doing surgery on people under the influence instead of with an anaesthetic. At least operations would be something to look forward to...
Posted by: Sarah Hague | 17 Jan 2006 10:54:10
Sarah has obviously never done LSD either. It is rather sad that those who have NO idea of what something is or does, are making laws to prevent those who do know something from having the experience. This is a very common trait of frightened and imature people.
From my personal experience LSD is EVERYTHING they say it is... except when you do it, when it happens to you, you realize it is not just that but everything. Its cool that this guy lived to 100, too bad the naysayers won't notice that they are wrong.
Posted by: Michael Skowronski | 1 May 2006 06:09:29
sarah, you would be freaking out! dreading havihng your insides spilled! acid in that mindset would traumatize you pre-surgery.
Posted by: ken walk | 12 Mar 2007 06:38:32