CHAPTER 04

Following Instructions and Going with the Flow

does the first experiment on himself. We felt that eventually the comrnittees involved and the various agencies would agree to this point of view. There really is no other way of getting the primary information that one needs. It was a scientifio necessity to do "training sessions."

The reason for the restrictions on the use of LSD on professional personnel was the fear that LSD damaged the brain, and later the fear that it damaged the chromosomes. In the early sixties I proposed studying the problem of brain damage by giving experimental animals extensive amounts of LSD over a long period of time. As this project was about to start in 1966, the national fear built up to a point that made the project impossible to carry out. Those of us who had taken LSD a large number of hmes were extensively tested and found not to have damaged brains. However, this positive data could not be presented nor accepted in the hysterical atmosphere that had been generated by the national media against LSD.

There were also many rumors that scientific investigators had taken LSD and had either gone psychotic or had dropped out of their profession. I tracked down some of these rumors and found out what had happened to these various people. As far as I could make out, some of them had taken up rather untenable positions in regard to the use of LSD. The most famous case was Dr. Timothy Learv, who was not a medical scientist, but a psychologist without medical training. He was not acting in the scientific medical tradition in his presentations of a revision of our culture to incorporate LSD as some sort of a sacrament. However, there were enough such cases to cause various committees and administrators to realize that LSD could cause trouble in their own organizations. My attitude was that this was the first series of investigators to have

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