CHAPTER 04

Following Instructions and Going with the Flow

electrodes into one's own brain, I didnt feel that there was any justification for inserting electrodes into anybody else's brain. This turned out to be a very cogent argument in supressing the use of brain electrodes.

I began to apply the same argument to the LSD work. I found that, in reality, at Spring Grove no one was doing psychotherapeutic work with LSD until they had been through the LSD session tbemselves as a training procedure. Therefore, when I arrived at Spring Grove, it was obvious that they were following the ethic that I was already following myself despite the official protocol.

Even though I'd had extensive experience with LSD in the isolation tank under the particular conditions that I had set up for myself in the Virgin Islamds, I had not taken LSD under the circumstances prevailing at Spring Grove. By that time I had a very high respect for what LSD could do and for what it did do or what happens under the influence of LSD, which varies considerably with what is going on inside one's self and with what is going on in the surroundings at the same time. Therefore, until I had taken LSD, that is, in the "psychotherapeutic" setting used with the patients, I would not know how that reflected on their gettmg rid of alcohol as a mainstay in their lives.

After several weeks of preparation, Sandy and I decided that it would be possible for me to have a session within the next few weeks. At the time it was very hard to run sessions on the professional personnel because this was not authorized by all of the agencies concemed. Tbe large national negative program on LSD was still highly operative and the regulations were extremely restrictive. (Since then training sessions have been authorizcd.) We were proceeding on tbe high-level medical ethical tradition that the medical scientist

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