CHAPTER 04

Following Instructions and Going with the Flow

In general, alcoholics with this degree of severity of alcoholism did not respond to any treatment. Each of these patients had been through multiple forms of therapy without having given up alcohol. It was quite impressive and exciting to see them give up alcohol for periods ranging from six months to five years with one single treatment of tbis sort.

The design of the experiment was such that authorization was given for only one LSD treatment per patient, and the results were to be evaluated over a long period of time. In order to evaluate scientifically whether or not the single- shot treatment worked, it was necessary to avoid giving a second treatment during the evaluation period of at least three to five years.

There was extensive psychological testing before the psychotherapy, and also after the LSD, during the follow-up period.

I decided that I could not know what was going on in this treatment until I had gone through such a session myself, I didn't feel that I could design effective research programs until I had experienced, as a subject, what the patients were experiencing. My justification for this is a long-standing scientific commitment that I'd made a lot earlier during my period of working in human physiology under H. C. Bazett at the University of Pennsylvania while I was a medical student in the years following. The rationale of human physiological and psychological investigations goes somewhat as follows:

If you are a scientific investigator imterested in using human subjects, it is necessary that you follow J. B. S. Haldane's dictum: "You will not understand what is necessary in the way of scientific control unless you are the first subject in your experiments." Professor Bazett taught me this umequivocally.

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