Speaker 1: Hey everyone, it's your Buddy Josh and for this week's
Speaker 1: select I chose our two thousand and sixteen episode on
Speaker 1: L S D. We really took our time with this
Speaker 1: one and it's the longest regular single episode we've ever recorded,
Speaker 1: clocking in at over seventy five minutes. Originally it was
Speaker 1: even longer, with a thirty minute interview with John Hodgman,
Speaker 1: but we chose to remove that from this select because
Speaker 1: we've only recently broken hodgment of the habit of hanging
Speaker 1: around the studio hoping for a chance to be in
Speaker 1: the show, and we think that including the interview in
Speaker 1: this rerun might send some mixed signals to him. If
Speaker 1: you want to hear that interview, go back and listen
Speaker 1: to the original episode published in Two Thousand and sixteen,
Speaker 1: where it will remain a part of that forever and ever.
Speaker 1: One note. We recorded this several years back, as evidenced
Speaker 1: by Chuck's I can has cheeseburger reference. So some of
Speaker 1: the phrases we use our out of date, like committed suicide.
Speaker 1: Sorry for that at any rate. Tune in, turn on
Speaker 1: and enjoy the heck out of this classic episode. Welcome
Speaker 1: to stuff you should know a production of I heart radio. Hey,
Speaker 1: and welcome to the PODCAST. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles
Speaker 1: W Chuck Bryant and Jerry and this is stuff you
Speaker 1: should know. The podcast. It's right, Josh Uh, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: wish you two things. Happy Anniversary. Yes, happy anniversary, because
Speaker 1: the day that we're recording, it was eight years ago
Speaker 1: this week that we released. Well, not we've you. We
Speaker 1: I wasn't even there yet. You were here in spirit.
Speaker 1: I appreciate that. It's when stuff you should know. I
Speaker 1: was born. Yeah, two thousand and eight, mid April, eight
Speaker 1: years ago. We got forty. Two years ago. And Happy
Speaker 1: Bicycle Day. Did you know that it was bicycle day
Speaker 1: when you picked this out? No, really, really, that's actually
Speaker 1: that's amazing, isn't it? Yeah, it's weird. Yeah, it was.
Speaker 1: The thing that prompted it was that recent study about
Speaker 1: LSD and I was like wow, yeah, we should totally
Speaker 1: do LSD. We've never done it, and it was I
Speaker 1: think yesterday that I realized today is Bicycle Day. And
Speaker 1: for those of you who aren't in the know, Bicycle
Speaker 1: Day not about riding bicycles to work. No, it's not.
Speaker 1: As a matter of fact, somebody on twitter said every
Speaker 1: day's bicycle day. To me I'm like, I bet you
Speaker 1: don't so. Bicycle Day commemorates the day when Um, Albert Hoffman,
Speaker 1: the discoverer or Creator, I guess, depending on how you
Speaker 1: look at it, of LSD Um, experimented on himself and
Speaker 1: part of that included him riding his bike back home
Speaker 1: from work while he was yeah, and we'll talk about
Speaker 1: that here in a minute. But Bicycle Day itself was
Speaker 1: started supposedly by Professor Thomas Roberts of Northern Illinois University.
Speaker 1: Go huskies and commemorate ration of that what some people say.
Speaker 1: It was a great day in history. It certainly was
Speaker 1: the day that changed history. You really can't argue that. No,
Speaker 1: and Um, if you want to just hear all things
Speaker 1: LSD and stuff, you should know we and did two
Speaker 1: other shows. Two Thousand Eight. Did the CIA test LSD
Speaker 1: ON UNSUSPECTING AMERICANS? The answer is yes. Mind opening and October.
Speaker 1: Can you treat mental illness with psychedelics? And now, in
Speaker 1: typical stuff, you should know backward form. We're gonna DO LSD. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we like to nibble around that. Do L S D.
Speaker 1: You know that'd be Weird Oh, we weren't supposed to. Oh,
Speaker 1: we better get through this quick we got about thirty minutes. Oh,
Speaker 1: we should also point out at the end of this
Speaker 1: episode we have John Hodgment on is in a very
Speaker 1: special listener male audio segment where he rebuts our nostalgia episode.
Speaker 1: Although it seems like we agreed more than we didn't,
Speaker 1: he didn't end up for butting anything. Yeah, uh, and
Speaker 1: that's we worked out. That the the misunderstanding. How about that? Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we like all times that you sit down with Hodgeman.
Speaker 1: We talked for thirty minutes about one small thing. That's
Speaker 1: why this episode is Super Long, because this is gonna
Speaker 1: be long too. It is so it's super size robuts,
Speaker 1: which it saw like eight more extra ads. Oh, let's
Speaker 1: just kidding. Yeah, like Tommy Chong would probably one in
Speaker 1: on this one. He's got some businesses, doesn't hey? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I shouldn't joke, because sales will be like knocking on
Speaker 1: the door. All right, chuck really really said Chuck. We're
Speaker 1: talking about LSD today, Um, and L S D again.
Speaker 1: That that Bicycle Day, that first day seventy three years ago.
Speaker 1: I think it really did change the world, because there
Speaker 1: are very few substances that have ever been created by
Speaker 1: man that had a more sweeping, profound effect than LSD.
Speaker 1: Like you kind of a lot of people associate LSD
Speaker 1: with hippies. They're grateful dead. Sure, maybe ravers that kind
Speaker 1: of thing, but if you really start to kind of
Speaker 1: poke around popular culture here in the West, you start
Speaker 1: to see it turn up everywhere. Like every American president
Speaker 1: has taken LSD. Right. Well, it's part of the oath
Speaker 1: of office, like the Bible is laced with lst. Put
Speaker 1: their hand on their hand and it actually let's debunk
Speaker 1: that myth right now. Apparently LSD is non absorbent through
Speaker 1: the skin. Yeah, which means that those says. Well, there's
Speaker 1: a bunch of rumors, but the one with Jimi Hendrix
Speaker 1: would put LSD in his sweatband. He may have. I
Speaker 1: wouldn't have done anything, although it could have trickled down
Speaker 1: into his mouth maybe. Yeah. Uh, here's some other popular
Speaker 1: LSD myths. I don't think there have been any other
Speaker 1: drugs that have spawned. Maybe these days, but I'm not
Speaker 1: hip to all these new drugs, man, and it's impossible
Speaker 1: to be. I was doing research for this and I
Speaker 1: ran across like all the new drugs that are available today.
Speaker 1: It's incredible. There's just like an avalanche of new, new,
Speaker 1: virtually untested drugs that's being they're they're going from synthesis
Speaker 1: to human trials by way of customer like people are
Speaker 1: taking these things and they're essentially like guinea pigs for
Speaker 1: these things. Still extremely dangerous. Yeah, Molly and Billy and
Speaker 1: Jim's way beyond that, Jimmy, Jimmy's old news, Jimmy's oldness. Uh.
Speaker 1: Here just a few quickie UH highlights. Um, the guy
Speaker 1: that thought he was an orange, so he like peeled
Speaker 1: his skin off. Clearly LSD did that. Not True? Uh,
Speaker 1: college kids who stared at the Sun until they were blind.
Speaker 1: Clearly LSD is responsible for those children lick and stick
Speaker 1: tattoos given out to children at Halloween. UH, seven hits
Speaker 1: will make you legally insane. Right, you can use that
Speaker 1: as a defense in court. Diane Link Letter jumped from
Speaker 1: a window because she thought she could fly. So that
Speaker 1: was a big one. That kind of changed public opinion.
Speaker 1: She jumped from a window, she definitely did, but she
Speaker 1: was also suicide and she had taken LSD before. What
Speaker 1: made it such a huge case was that. Um, she
Speaker 1: was art link letters daughter, art link letter. At the time,
Speaker 1: this is, I think, the early Seventies. When his daughter
Speaker 1: committed suicide, Um, he was already a bit of a
Speaker 1: he was like the bill cosby of the age, which
Speaker 1: is not surprising, and in the moral crusader and kind
Speaker 1: of UM social scold of everybody and how things are
Speaker 1: just not like they used to be in the good
Speaker 1: old days. are so much better and everybody's just letting
Speaker 1: their kids get away with so much and pull up
Speaker 1: your pants and that kind of stuff. He was a
Speaker 1: bit like that already. And then his his daughter, committed
Speaker 1: suicide and Um, he was understandably uh devastated by that
Speaker 1: and he turned his ire toward drugs because she had
Speaker 1: taken LSD before. But there's no evidence that she was
Speaker 1: on on LSD at the time. She was already suicidal.
Speaker 1: But again, art link letter is going to all of
Speaker 1: the kids parents and saying like, you can't let your
Speaker 1: don't let this happen to your children too. Scared America's
Speaker 1: parents and really kind of sealed the deal of public
Speaker 1: opinion against LST at the time. Yeah, uh, and how
Speaker 1: about one more for you, uh, Pittsburgh Pirates Pitcher, doc
Speaker 1: Ellis those a no hitter on acid. That's true. That's true. Well,
Speaker 1: I know we've covered it, dufus. Okay, Oh, you were
Speaker 1: putting one into yeah, oh, sorry, there's a great documentary
Speaker 1: about it and, Um, true is the only person's word
Speaker 1: we have to go on. WAS DOC ELLIS LIST? Well,
Speaker 1: his girlfriend also, I don't want to say testify, but
Speaker 1: she she backed it up. She was like yeah, we
Speaker 1: took acid into it, though, and apparently the story changed
Speaker 1: a bit over the years and he also said other
Speaker 1: things that didn't quite match up. So there's a little
Speaker 1: speculation that he might have gussied it up a little bit. Oh,
Speaker 1: like the ball was telling him what pitch to throw
Speaker 1: and maybe when he took the acid. Um, so supposedly
Speaker 1: took it at noon and he was pitching it like seven, yeah,
Speaker 1: six thirty. So I mean he still would have been
Speaker 1: on acid, he just wouldn't have been speaking on acid
Speaker 1: or something. But it's a great documentary. You should check
Speaker 1: it out. Yeah, it's good. Okay, you threw me off
Speaker 1: with that. When you got me I was like, Chuck, wait,
Speaker 1: we did an internet round up on that. Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1: So there was another thing, chuck, that I remember growing
Speaker 1: up with is that acid. If you took acid, it
Speaker 1: would mess up your chromosome so that when you had
Speaker 1: offspring kid they would be all kinds of messed up, disfigured, deformed,
Speaker 1: would have severe developmental defects, all sorts of terrible stuff.
Speaker 1: That's what we call it back in the early eighties,
Speaker 1: by the way. Um, it could put holes in your brain. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's another one too, that everybody ringing around and believing,
Speaker 1: and one of the reasons everyone ran around believing all
Speaker 1: of these weird myths. By the way, no, LSD doesn't
Speaker 1: affect chromosomes. That actually is metabolized. It out of your
Speaker 1: system faster than just about any other drug on the planet.
Speaker 1: You pee it up very quickly, your liver starts breaking
Speaker 1: it down immediately. Um, so it certainly doesn't affect your
Speaker 1: chromosomes and it doesn't put holes in your brain. But
Speaker 1: the reason why these myths are around and the reason
Speaker 1: why people believe them is because the authorities are the
Speaker 1: ones who either made up these myths or latched onto
Speaker 1: them and basically amplified them through these kind of public
Speaker 1: service announcements and through the media, and so a lot
Speaker 1: of people walked around believing this and and on the
Speaker 1: one hand you can say, well, that's fine, it kept
Speaker 1: some kids maybe off of heroin or something. Lying to
Speaker 1: kids is fine when it comes to drugs. You can
Speaker 1: make that case right, but at the same time you
Speaker 1: can also point to the real chilling effect that the
Speaker 1: LSD hysteria had on Um understanding consciousness, potentially treating mental
Speaker 1: illness which were just now starting to realize, like yeah,
Speaker 1: it has that a lot of potential for that, treating alcoholism. Um,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of people whose lives could have been
Speaker 1: helped had at the very least uh science been allowed
Speaker 1: to continue his inquiry into LSD. But the the the
Speaker 1: fear of LSD was so widespread and so profound that
Speaker 1: even science was clamped down. Yeah, the CIA was like
Speaker 1: only week and good people LSD, not you scientists in
Speaker 1: controlled settings. There's this one guy. I don't know where
Speaker 1: the lawsuit is now, but he uh, I don't think
Speaker 1: we covered it on our show about the CIA, but
Speaker 1: the family of a guy that supposedly jumped from a
Speaker 1: window after being dosed. Yeah, but his family is suing
Speaker 1: the CIA saying no, he was beaten up and shoved
Speaker 1: out the window because he had information. I think he
Speaker 1: was actually dosed, though, and he was losing his stuff.
Speaker 1: I don't know he was dosed, but they're there. Their
Speaker 1: contention the families that he was thrown out is that
Speaker 1: he was murdered. I saw that too. Yeah, yeah, that's
Speaker 1: the Frank Olsen Project DOT org. Maybe is what the
Speaker 1: website is, and we definitely covered that. The CIA thing,
Speaker 1: because he definitely he was around at the time. That
Speaker 1: happened at that time, because that was the time when, like,
Speaker 1: if you went to a party with CIA, maybe we
Speaker 1: were all just dosing one another for fun. If you
Speaker 1: went to a San Francisco CIA party, you're a hardcore
Speaker 1: at that. You'RE gonna drinking acid unwittingly. All right. So
Speaker 1: we should, uh, even though we've covered it before, the
Speaker 1: story is so wonderful, we should go over the creation
Speaker 1: of LSD by Albert Hoffman again, do you think? Please begin.
Speaker 1: You didn't want to skip this, did you know? I was?
Speaker 1: I was. I think we should put in like a
Speaker 1: little accompanying music or some of the yeah, like uh,
Speaker 1: some Jefferson airplane maybe. So, Um, a Swiss chemist. His
Speaker 1: name was Albert Hoffman. Like we said a few times.
Speaker 1: He was working at a lab called Sandoz. Uh. They
Speaker 1: were a farmer company and now they're uh, they're still around,
Speaker 1: but there's a subsidy or I can't remember who. They're
Speaker 1: not making drugs anymore. Okay. Uh. So he was working
Speaker 1: on a project involving something called Ergot. It's a fungus,
Speaker 1: it grows on Rye and it's and blamed, uh, notably
Speaker 1: this woman named Linda L oh. I know what you're
Speaker 1: talking about. Yeah, she put forth a theory that the
Speaker 1: Salem witch trials were kicked off by a round of
Speaker 1: Ergot poisoning, and she has a lot of good evidence. Um,
Speaker 1: we'll go over it all. It's it's cool to look up, though,
Speaker 1: and a lot of people came out and like, you
Speaker 1: know what, I bet she's right. So you're going to
Speaker 1: talk about the Hoffman? Yeah, so he was working with Ergot,
Speaker 1: which grows on Rye and Um, did a lot of
Speaker 1: poisoning over the years, notably in the Middle Ages. Even
Speaker 1: though they used it medicinally, midwives used it to help
Speaker 1: speed up labor until they decided in the nineteenth century.
Speaker 1: That's pretty dangerous actually. Maybe we should just not poison
Speaker 1: these pregnant women with Ergot. Well, they were. They were
Speaker 1: not just giving them ergant to poison him for fun.
Speaker 1: Apparently it um contracts muscles, right, so it would speed
Speaker 1: up labor, right, exactly. Um, and they figured out that
Speaker 1: they would actually prove it would slow bleeding, I think
Speaker 1: by dilating blood vessels. Maybe. So they would give it
Speaker 1: to a woman after Labor still, but they stopped giving
Speaker 1: it to him, like to to create, to put a
Speaker 1: woman into Labor. But it was it was remarkable enough
Speaker 1: that even after this level of medicine Um went away,
Speaker 1: scientists were still figuring out there like there's something with Ergot,
Speaker 1: we've got to be able to do something with it.
Speaker 1: It's just too potent, you know. So, uh, in the
Speaker 1: nineteen thirties. This was the nineteen thirties. It's just so
Speaker 1: crazy to think about when you see pictures of the
Speaker 1: nineteen thirties. Yeah, they're like wires hanging everywhere, new electric lamps,
Speaker 1: like experimenting with LSD. But it happened. Um at the
Speaker 1: Rockefeller Institute in New York City, they isolated lysurgic acid
Speaker 1: from ergot and Um. This is where Hoffman kind of
Speaker 1: started his work resulting in ninety eight and the derivative,
Speaker 1: the number twenty five, is and he did twenty four previous.
Speaker 1: He finally landed on LSD and uh, that was kind
Speaker 1: of it. Yeah, and LSD, we should say, stands for
Speaker 1: lysergic acid die ethyl minde. And Uh, basically he started
Speaker 1: with this lisergic acid um and just basically tinkered around
Speaker 1: with it until he, like you said, arrived at LSD.
Speaker 1: And again, he wasn't looking for the most potent psychedelic
Speaker 1: known to humankind. No, he's looking for medicine exactly. He
Speaker 1: was looking for, I think, a respiratory Um um stimulator,
Speaker 1: something like that, maybe with asthma. So yeah, give these
Speaker 1: kids some LSD twenty five right up. And Uh, he
Speaker 1: the first time he messed around with it, he sent
Speaker 1: it off to the pharmacologists to look because he was
Speaker 1: a chemist at Sandos. Chemists at Sandos they figure out
Speaker 1: processes to extract stuff, to make new compounds, that kind
Speaker 1: of thing. But that's that's the sum of their job.
Speaker 1: Once they come up with a new pound that they're satisfied,
Speaker 1: but they send it off to the pharmacology department. The
Speaker 1: Pharmacology Department says Uh Yeah, actually this made that frog's
Speaker 1: leg jump by itself all the way across the room.
Speaker 1: I think there's some potential here. The pharmacologe just got
Speaker 1: their hands in on LSD, examined it, said we don't
Speaker 1: think there's any pharmacological potential here. Throw it away, and
Speaker 1: Hoffman did as he was told. Five years later, he
Speaker 1: um suddenly just thinks about LSD tent again and it's like,
Speaker 1: you know what, I think they missed something. I'M gonna
Speaker 1: make a new batch just on my own. Later on
Speaker 1: he was quoted as saying I did not choose LSD.
Speaker 1: LSD found and called me. So him deciding to make
Speaker 1: a batch on his own is highly irregular. For the
Speaker 1: first for one, he's a chemist. You know, the chemist
Speaker 1: don't go and tell the pharmacologist they missed something. They
Speaker 1: certainly don't have a hunch five years later they missed something.
Speaker 1: And then, thirdly, for him to make a batch of
Speaker 1: LSD was very weird. It was contrary to his work orders,
Speaker 1: and also Ergot was very expensive and Sandoz was trying
Speaker 1: to keep a lid on expenses. So it was really,
Speaker 1: really weird that five years later he mixes up another
Speaker 1: batch of LSD. That is true. But while he was
Speaker 1: mixing it up, it was a sort of a little
Speaker 1: like a Peter Parker experiment gone wrong. He got a
Speaker 1: little inside of him somehow. Uh, they think now he
Speaker 1: probably got on his fingers and maybe like licked his
Speaker 1: finger while he was he had been eating KFC for lunch.
Speaker 1: Maybe so. And Uh, it got into his body. Uh,
Speaker 1: and he, you know, he had a acid trip. He
Speaker 1: had an accidental one at first, the world's first acid trip,
Speaker 1: that's right. And that happened unless one of those pharmacologists
Speaker 1: I was keeping something on the download. He's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is useless, throw all this away, except to save
Speaker 1: me like tab since my head stats. So that was
Speaker 1: April eighteen, nineteen, prety three. and Um, the next day
Speaker 1: Albert Hoffman's like, I got to try that again. So
Speaker 1: he takes some LSD. I think he took two fifty
Speaker 1: micrograms at PM. YEA or not. I noticed that too,
Speaker 1: almost on four nineteen, but that's a marijuana thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I just I just it kind of jumped out at me,
Speaker 1: is like, I thought I saw that too. I'm sure
Speaker 1: everyone who's ever read that was like, Oh, dude, nineteen,
Speaker 1: oh he was so close. That's the universe. So he
Speaker 1: took two fifty micrograms, is that right, which is about
Speaker 1: ten times the minimum dose that an average person takes
Speaker 1: these days, and that's a lot. And he he shot it.
Speaker 1: He injected it intravenously, I believe. Yeah, didn't he? Or
Speaker 1: did he take it orally? I'm sorry, no, he took
Speaker 1: it orally. Yeah, I don't I don't see in there
Speaker 1: where he injected it. And Uh, he started to have
Speaker 1: a wild ride. He did. He went to the doctor.
Speaker 1: At first, he asked his assistant. He was like, Um,
Speaker 1: I am tripping pretty hard. You don't know what that
Speaker 1: is yet, but I do. And he said I think
Speaker 1: I should go to the doctor. And he went to
Speaker 1: the doctor and the doctor was like, Dude, you're fine. Uh,
Speaker 1: you're not fine, but there's nothing physically going on with you, right,
Speaker 1: and we should say he was that. He made it
Speaker 1: to his house with his assistant and they were on
Speaker 1: their bikes. This is why where bicycle day comes from.
Speaker 1: And he was like, Oh my God, how long did
Speaker 1: it take for us to get home? And as the
Speaker 1: system was like actually, we made it home really fast,
Speaker 1: and he's like what, he's freaking out, he's like go
Speaker 1: give me some milk from the neighbor. Ends up drinking
Speaker 1: two liters of milk that night. Yeah, because milk could
Speaker 1: supposedly quell the effects of different drugs at the time. Ye, sense,
Speaker 1: it did nothing for this no and his neighbor. Later
Speaker 1: on there's a couple of stellar quotes. Let me jump back. Sorry,
Speaker 1: Jump Back Jack, that's all right. After forty minutes after
Speaker 1: that initial dose, He wrote down in his journal Seventeen
Speaker 1: hundred hours beginning dizziness, feeling of anxiety, visual distortion, symptoms
Speaker 1: of paralysis, desire to laugh full stop. Uh. And then,
Speaker 1: following that closely, I was able to write the last
Speaker 1: words only with great effort. And then who wrote that
Speaker 1: last lot? And when he got the milk, he said, Um,
Speaker 1: the lady next door, whom I scarcely recognized, brought me milk.
Speaker 1: She was no longer Mrs r but rather a malevolent,
Speaker 1: insidious witch with a colored mask. So people think now
Speaker 1: he was fearful going into this experiment, and that's what
Speaker 1: you know. We'll talk about setting, setting and your mindset
Speaker 1: going in has a lot to do with what kind
Speaker 1: of trip you have. And people think now like he
Speaker 1: went into it fearful and ended up, by all accounts,
Speaker 1: having a bad trip. He had a bad trip, but
Speaker 1: then the doctor came and was like look, man, uh
Speaker 1: you're something wacky's going on with you, but physically you're fine.
Speaker 1: You don't have to worry about it, and I believe
Speaker 1: that's what kind of freed Hoffman up to have a
Speaker 1: good time, have a good trip. After that he uh,
Speaker 1: really started to go oh wow and really took in
Speaker 1: what he was seeing, what he was thinking, what he
Speaker 1: was experiencing and Um, moved from dysphoria to euphoria. Is
Speaker 1: it the way he would have put it? That's right.
Speaker 1: And he goes into work the next day tells everyone
Speaker 1: about this amazing experience and uh, everyone else tries it. Well,
Speaker 1: not everyone, but other people at Sandos. His two bosses did,
Speaker 1: I think, his boss and his boss's boss, and the
Speaker 1: reason they were like Nah, uh was because he said
Speaker 1: I took two and fifty micrograms. They're like that's astounding.
Speaker 1: Two fifty micrograms right that they've never heard of a
Speaker 1: compound having the kind of effects that Hoffman was reporting.
Speaker 1: And he's like, I measured it myself. I know what
Speaker 1: I was doing. And it was two D fifty micrograms.
Speaker 1: These guys each took a third of that and they
Speaker 1: tripped pretty hard themselves, and from that moment on sandals
Speaker 1: was like we're onto something here. Yeah, he also experimented
Speaker 1: on animals. He started dosing boy, you name it. He
Speaker 1: gave it to mice and he said they moved radically
Speaker 1: and showed alterations in licking behavior. They taught themselves to
Speaker 1: tide cats. Cats hair stood on end and they salivated.
Speaker 1: He put cats and mice together and instead of the
Speaker 1: cats attacking the mice, said the felines would ignore the
Speaker 1: rodents or sometimes even appear frightened by them. How about that?
Speaker 1: That's a cat on a trip. It said chimpanzees did
Speaker 1: not show any obvious signs of being affected, but normal
Speaker 1: chimps around them became upset, which he his theory was
Speaker 1: they failed to maintain these weird social norms that are
Speaker 1: only perceptible to other chimps. Fish swam oddly and finally,
Speaker 1: spiders altered web building patterns. At low doses the webs
Speaker 1: were even better proportioned and more exactly built than normally,
Speaker 1: but in higher doses the webs are badly in rudimentary,
Speaker 1: rudimentarily made. Yeah, so he would give it like look,
Speaker 1: there's a roach crawling across the floor, let's doe s
Speaker 1: it see what happens. And there's also a very famous case,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't Hoffmann who's who tested it, this dude
Speaker 1: in Oklahoma Um who was a professor of maybe pharmacology
Speaker 1: and I'm not sure psychology. He shot an elephant. He
Speaker 1: got his hands on the like Oklahoma City Zoos Elephant
Speaker 1: and shot it full of LSD. The elephant, like trumpeted once,
Speaker 1: fell on its side, started seizing its eyes, roll back
Speaker 1: on its head a bit, part of its tongue off.
Speaker 1: It stayed like this for an hour. He finally, ultimately
Speaker 1: a lot of people point to this as a fatality
Speaker 1: from LSD proving that you can die. There's such a
Speaker 1: thing as a fatal overdose from LSD Um, but other
Speaker 1: people say, well, actually, and then he shot the elephant
Speaker 1: with even more tranquilizers to try to calm it down,
Speaker 1: and that's probably what killed the elephant, but this guy.
Speaker 1: But it was like that for like an hour and
Speaker 1: a half, just suffering on just an enormous amount of acid.
Speaker 1: And the guy actually used to most about it. He
Speaker 1: kind of wore it like a badge, like it made
Speaker 1: his career and it was just such a foul thing.
Speaker 1: But even the scientologists were mad about it and released
Speaker 1: like articles criticizing the guy in his work. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then there's a lot of questions about whether he's
Speaker 1: actually Um and a CIA funded scientists as well. Well,
Speaker 1: he had a Blowgun as the first thing they give
Speaker 1: you when you sign up with the CIA. Here's your
Speaker 1: blowgun and gallon of LSD. Yeah, R I p Tusky,
Speaker 1: the elephant. He went in a really bad way. Is
Speaker 1: that his name? That's terrible. Uh. So, long story short,
Speaker 1: sandals is onto something. Um, they say this research is compelling.
Speaker 1: We're gonna patent this stuff and market it as delicid
Speaker 1: delsid D E L Y S I D and uh,
Speaker 1: they started advertising it for use. Like psychiatrists, you should
Speaker 1: get some of this stuff. Get some you should use
Speaker 1: it yourself and use it on your patients and see
Speaker 1: what happens. They said it again. I just want to
Speaker 1: repeat what Chuck said. Use It on yourself. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: so you know what's going on exactly. Well, that's highly
Speaker 1: irregular compared to the psychiatry of today. They don't usually
Speaker 1: go like here's a here's a couple of any bars
Speaker 1: for you to try. Just, you know, eat some and
Speaker 1: then you'll know what your patients are going through. They
Speaker 1: don't do that anymore. So well that they they they're
Speaker 1: not supposed to chuck Um. But yeah, sandals was like
Speaker 1: sending the stuff out as an experimental drug. That's how
Speaker 1: it was labeled at first, and as it caught on Um,
Speaker 1: they moved it into like full on marketing and started
Speaker 1: selling them like hot cakes. Yeah, it's pretty neat. If
Speaker 1: you look up delicid for Google images, you know it's
Speaker 1: just package right there. It looks like it's a very
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties boss, says, Del said LS. Here it is
Speaker 1: in the vials. So Weird. And they came in uh,
Speaker 1: microgram doses, which is a it's a low dose. It's
Speaker 1: about half of what an average dose you would buy
Speaker 1: today would be at a fish concert, I guess. I'm
Speaker 1: sure that's even a dated reference. What were people doing
Speaker 1: lsd these days? E D M shows, sure, uh, scrillics shows,
Speaker 1: how about that? That's probably dated. It probably we're old chucks,
Speaker 1: you know. We're old billy Joel Concert. Sure people inject
Speaker 1: LSD at Billy Joel concerts right in their eyeball. So
Speaker 1: by Um, by the mid nineteen sixties, uh, is when
Speaker 1: it actually became illegal, in nineteen sixty six. Stop making
Speaker 1: it before that, though, as when it was selling like hotcakes,
Speaker 1: like it was having a real beneficial effect in the
Speaker 1: psychiatric setting. Doses were given to patients. Patients got doses
Speaker 1: just in the U s alone, right. I mean like
Speaker 1: a lot of doses were sold, and that was just
Speaker 1: the U S. and it was having an effect. And
Speaker 1: the in Europe they used it for Um this they
Speaker 1: used it for I can't remember what it was called.
Speaker 1: I want to say like psychotronic or something like that,
Speaker 1: where they just give you like the the average dose,
Speaker 1: maybe two pills, a low dose, and then they would
Speaker 1: talk about your childhood and that kind of thing. They
Speaker 1: used it to to kind of disarm the patient. Right.
Speaker 1: In the US they used what was called psychedelic therapy
Speaker 1: where they would give you about ten times the minimum dose,
Speaker 1: about what Hoffman took when he experimented on himself, right,
Speaker 1: and that was meant to just not not just break
Speaker 1: down your defenses but to completely blow your mind basically
Speaker 1: so that when you came back down you had had
Speaker 1: all these revelations and you were essentially a better person
Speaker 1: with a more fulfilled sense of self and meaning in
Speaker 1: your life. Yeah, those were the two schools of thought,
Speaker 1: like in Europe, we'll talk about your childhood and give
Speaker 1: you a little acid. In America we're gonna open all
Speaker 1: these doors of perception and the thought was that you
Speaker 1: could skip years of psychotherapy with like a good acid trip,
Speaker 1: and a lot of people had this experience very famously.
Speaker 1: Carrie grant was um hugely into acid as a result
Speaker 1: of going to see a psychiatrist in Beverly Hills. And
Speaker 1: there's a really, really great article from Vanity Fair from
Speaker 1: a few years back called carrying the sky with diamonds
Speaker 1: that I would strongly recommend going and reading because it's
Speaker 1: really interesting and it gives you a really good glimpse
Speaker 1: of this era where, like, like the mad men era,
Speaker 1: everybody's taking LSD for at their psychiatrist's Office for eight hours. Well,
Speaker 1: there was an LSD episode for madness right. I think
Speaker 1: it's mentioned in that article. It's it was one of
Speaker 1: the best of a great show when Roger Sterling takes
Speaker 1: acid yeah, it was. It edit psychiatrists. Uh No, it
Speaker 1: was Um, it was just like a you know, like
Speaker 1: a party. Right, okay, but like a party where they
Speaker 1: were saying like do this to expand your mind. It wasn't,
Speaker 1: you know, slip to him or anything, right, but I
Speaker 1: had a profound effect on him. In the show and Chuck,
Speaker 1: there's actually this awesome little quote from Carrie grant that
Speaker 1: makes it in that that article about his experience with LSD,
Speaker 1: one of them at least. He said, Um, when I
Speaker 1: first started under LSD, I found myself turning and turning
Speaker 1: on the couch. And you have to imagine carry grant
Speaker 1: saying this right, which makes even better. I said to
Speaker 1: the doctor, why am I turning on the SOFA and
Speaker 1: he said don't you know why? And I said I
Speaker 1: didn't have the Vegas idea, but I wonder when I
Speaker 1: was going to stop, when you stop it? He answered, well,
Speaker 1: it was like a revelation to me. He felt like
Speaker 1: he was under the spell of LSD, or there's whatever.
Speaker 1: He realized like he had control over his life. It's
Speaker 1: kind of cool. So it did have a really big
Speaker 1: effect on people in real life as well. But, like
Speaker 1: you said, very quickly, in very short order. Within ten
Speaker 1: twelve years of it being marketed for the first time
Speaker 1: by Sandoz, it starts to become outlawed around the country
Speaker 1: and around the world by nineteen sixty five. Uh, not
Speaker 1: a lot of research was done in the United States. Um,
Speaker 1: by nineteen sixty nine there were only six projects conducted.
Speaker 1: By seventy four the National Institute of Mental Health said
Speaker 1: that had no therapeutic value and then the final experiments
Speaker 1: in the United States took place in the nineteen eighties. Uh,
Speaker 1: and those studies and most of the newer studies now
Speaker 1: are concerned with end of life care and terminally ill patients. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but the the the window is starting to open once
Speaker 1: more to studying lst and its effects on neurology and
Speaker 1: Um psychiatry and that kind of stuff. Um. And actually,
Speaker 1: when it started to get outlawed in Sandos stopped making it.
Speaker 1: They recalled their stocks of it and Um handed it
Speaker 1: over to the National Institutes of Mental Health for study.
Speaker 1: But within a few years the National Institutes of mental
Speaker 1: health staid like no, no therapeutic value whatsoever, despite forty
Speaker 1: people in the US alone based singing its praises. No
Speaker 1: therapeutic value whatsoever. Yeah, well, I don't know if all
Speaker 1: forty people said it was great. I would say a
Speaker 1: significant portion of it. If you go back and look
Speaker 1: at the media coverage of it at the time, it
Speaker 1: was mostly favorable. It's very promising. All right, so we're
Speaker 1: gonna take a break here and come back and teach
Speaker 1: everyone how to make LSD. Srye. All right, Josh. Alright,
Speaker 1: the first thing that you want to do if you
Speaker 1: want to make LSD is be a really, really good
Speaker 1: qualified chemist. Yeah, with a really good qualified set up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is not meth. You can't go to Walmart making
Speaker 1: it in a mountain dew bottle. And make it in
Speaker 1: a mountain dew bottle on aisle six, shake it up
Speaker 1: real good and you've got math. Yeah, Um, this is
Speaker 1: the ingredients are tough to get and they're highly regulated. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're not found on drug store shelves. It's very different. No, plus,
Speaker 1: I mean you can start with Um and there's actually
Speaker 1: other natural sources of LSD precursors, including Um morning glory
Speaker 1: seeds in Hawaiian baby wood rows seeds, and there are
Speaker 1: some LSD recipes that call for extracting the stuff called
Speaker 1: L s a Um from these things and starting with that.
Speaker 1: But it's it's a coin toss what kind of quality
Speaker 1: your ultimate LSD is going to be, because you don't
Speaker 1: know how how good the L S A is in
Speaker 1: these things. Plus, the government, Um, in a nod to
Speaker 1: their prohibition era tactics, actually put a toxic coating on
Speaker 1: these seeds to discourage people from using them to create
Speaker 1: LSD or even eating them, which some people do. So
Speaker 1: I guess if you're a legitimate LSD Keem, you are
Speaker 1: starting with ergic like Hoffman did. That's right, just like
Speaker 1: in the old days, in the nineteen thirties. Uh, what
Speaker 1: you want to do? You get this fungus, which is
Speaker 1: the Erg it, and you have to culture it to
Speaker 1: extract the alkaloids from that Erg it. Right, you have
Speaker 1: to have a dark room because just like sheets of
Speaker 1: acid can be contaminated by sitting it out in the
Speaker 1: sun in the back of your Jetta, the fungus itself
Speaker 1: will decompose under bright light. Right, so you gotta do
Speaker 1: some of this early work in a dark room, right, exactly. Um.
Speaker 1: And Uh, you take the org it once you have
Speaker 1: it extracted. Um, you, you're you're isolating the alkaloids. Right,
Speaker 1: organ alkaloid. and Um, when you've got the alkaloid you
Speaker 1: add some solvents and reagents to it which themselves are
Speaker 1: dangerous as well. Um, one of them is chloroform, which
Speaker 1: is no joke chemical. Yeah, Hoffman actually the next day
Speaker 1: thought he didn't quite know for sure that it was
Speaker 1: the LSD. So he huffed chloroform because he thought, you know,
Speaker 1: it's probably the chloroform. He's like Jeff Bridges and the vanishing.
Speaker 1: He has some chloroform and I guess woke up a
Speaker 1: little while later and said, nope, that wouldn't acid. Nope,
Speaker 1: something different, must be the LSD. Um. So chloroform is
Speaker 1: not good for you. Another one of the re agents
Speaker 1: is uh an, hydrous hydrazine, which sounds like a Douglas
Speaker 1: Adams character, and it's a known carcinogen, very poisonous. And
Speaker 1: both of them are easily breathed in and absorbed through
Speaker 1: the skin. So it's these things are no joke and
Speaker 1: they're important in turning erget alkaloids into LSD. So it's
Speaker 1: very difficult, very dangerous if you're not getting that picture. Yeah,
Speaker 1: hopefully no one's like setting up in their kitchen and
Speaker 1: like following along hit sweet. Well, I mean you would
Speaker 1: get nowhere very quickly. We're not giving out detailed information.
Speaker 1: And what's funny? It's funny you bring that because until
Speaker 1: I think, like nine, you could mail off to the
Speaker 1: U S Patent Office and for fifty cents they would
Speaker 1: mail you the patent to LSD, which is the recipe
Speaker 1: for LSD. You could get it directly from the US
Speaker 1: government for a few years. I bet it's online somewhere,
Speaker 1: don't you know? I'm sure. Yeah, on the dark web,
Speaker 1: probably not even on I ken has cheeseburger. So the
Speaker 1: ERGIC alkaloid is in synthesize into lesurgic acid compound. It's
Speaker 1: called ISOLOSURGIC acid hydrolyzed, I'm sorry, hydrazide. And you, uh,
Speaker 1: do you do that? By adding some chemicals, heat it
Speaker 1: up a little bit. Uh, shake it in your milk jug,
Speaker 1: put a little basil in there. Um, is it okay
Speaker 1: to joke about this? If it's not okay to joke
Speaker 1: about this, chuck, then we've lost our sense of humor.
Speaker 1: That's right. Uh, then that is isomarized, which means, and
Speaker 1: this is pretty advanced chemistry, but it's really advanced chemistry. Yeah, uh,
Speaker 1: it means the atoms are actually the molecules are being
Speaker 1: rearranged in a chemical process with a little heat, a
Speaker 1: little reagent, solvent, that kind of stuff. It's taking a
Speaker 1: compound and basically doing the old switcheroo and then Bam,
Speaker 1: you have an entirely new chemical as a result. That's right. Um,
Speaker 1: you cool that down, you mix it up with an
Speaker 1: acid and a base, evaporate it and you were left
Speaker 1: with ISOLESURGIC diathylamide. I summarize it again, because you know,
Speaker 1: if once it's good, too is better. And then you
Speaker 1: have LSD, and it's it comes in the form of
Speaker 1: a crystallized powder, I believe. I think it also says
Speaker 1: you can also make it a liquid. No, you have
Speaker 1: to do something else to make it a liquid. So
Speaker 1: when you have LSD that you've synthesized from Ergat alkaloids,
Speaker 1: it's a crystalline powder, a white powder. Yeah, and then
Speaker 1: the old days, in the in the sixties, Um, you
Speaker 1: could make micro dots, which is a tablet form. Uh,
Speaker 1: you could just mix it with liquid and, you know,
Speaker 1: use it, you know, put this drop under your tongue.
Speaker 1: Um or you know, make tea out of it or whatever. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then window pane, which was gelatine squares. So that's
Speaker 1: still around. I saw on Reddit some kid was like
Speaker 1: look at this and he was holding like a huge
Speaker 1: thing of window panes and I think he called them. Well,
Speaker 1: window panes too. Yeah, they're uh, the great, great movie
Speaker 1: flirting with disaster. Did they take Gel tabs? Well, that
Speaker 1: one of the Sun Lily, Tomlin and Ellen all the
Speaker 1: son at the end of the movie doses everyone at
Speaker 1: dinner with window pane. That's what he calls it and
Speaker 1: I always just think that that's a funny word for it.
Speaker 1: But these days you're more than likely going to see
Speaker 1: what's called the blotterer acid. Uh. And what they do
Speaker 1: is they just dissolve that powder in ethanol and then
Speaker 1: dip a sheet of blotting paper that's conveniently perforated in
Speaker 1: diod tiny little squares about a quarter inch by a
Speaker 1: quarter inch. Yeah, they're little and and he soaks up
Speaker 1: into that paper. Um. Sometimes the paper is just plain white,
Speaker 1: sometimes it's got a little cartoon characters and things a
Speaker 1: lot of times and uh, then that's you know, that's
Speaker 1: a sheet of acid right there's actually a dude in
Speaker 1: San Francisco who has an acid museum and he has
Speaker 1: a book, like a huge binder of sheets of acid
Speaker 1: just to basically show off the artistry on it. And,
Speaker 1: um it's like how has this not been rated by
Speaker 1: the D A? I think the answer that is because
Speaker 1: the d e a doesn't know it exists. It's probably fake, right, no,
Speaker 1: I would say that's stupid because he his waste of money,
Speaker 1: his Um, well, I meant fake paper in there and
Speaker 1: tell everyone it's acid, because what he's he's not trying
Speaker 1: to sell it. He's trying to say, like, look at
Speaker 1: the art that people make. You know what I'm saying
Speaker 1: that why would he waste all that money putting the
Speaker 1: drug on something? He's not. He's buying it. I don't follow.
Speaker 1: Like he's going out and being like wow, that's a
Speaker 1: really beautiful sheet of acid, buy it and put it
Speaker 1: in my museum. Well, that's even dumber. So he said
Speaker 1: that these things have been exposed to light over the
Speaker 1: years and that they're they're most likely totally inactive. That
Speaker 1: he said. The last twelve times I tried to take it.
Speaker 1: It didn't work. He's like, but I traveled back in
Speaker 1: time couple of times. So each square is a dose
Speaker 1: and you can get up to nine doses on a
Speaker 1: single sheet. UH, and we'll get to this later, but
Speaker 1: the only might as well talk about it now. Uh,
Speaker 1: there was a supreme court ruling in early nineties where
Speaker 1: they said, Um, the weight of the drug is also
Speaker 1: the weight of the paper, which, uh, yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: a lot of people got really and remain upset about this. Uh. there.
Speaker 1: The argument is that's the equivalent of saying, well, this
Speaker 1: cocaine came in this Um suitcase, so just wigh the
Speaker 1: suitcase with the cocaine and if it adds eight pounds,
Speaker 1: then it adds eight pounds. Instead of measuring the actual
Speaker 1: quantity of the drug itself, it's measuring the carrier device, right.
Speaker 1: And one reason they did that was because the weight
Speaker 1: of again LSD when you're looking at a minimum dose
Speaker 1: of about a quarter quarter of a Microgram, that's like
Speaker 1: the weight of two grains of salt. So if you're
Speaker 1: trying to bust people you could be like well, a
Speaker 1: quarter microgram get to a year. So that's why I'll
Speaker 1: see why they didn't do that. Just rewrite the law
Speaker 1: to reflect the weight of the real drug, because that's
Speaker 1: all they'd have to do. I know it was very weird,
Speaker 1: Sam fisted. Can I say that? Yeah, you just did.
Speaker 1: But the long and short of that is there are people, uh,
Speaker 1: that dealt acid at a fish show that are in
Speaker 1: prison for longer than you know, rapists and murderers. Oh Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a guy who's Um in prison for life without parole.
Speaker 1: He's like sixty six now. He's been in there for
Speaker 1: a while because he got busted with some acid. Um
Speaker 1: for life. He's spending his life in jail because he
Speaker 1: had acid with and he's seen violent criminals all around
Speaker 1: him get out of parole. I'm pretty interesting. Uh So,
Speaker 1: should we talk about what an LST trip is like? Yeah,
Speaker 1: according to whoever wrote this article, I think this is
Speaker 1: a shane of Freeman joint. Yeah, I thought most of
Speaker 1: this was pretty good. There were a few parts that
Speaker 1: I was like, come on, it was very straightforward and
Speaker 1: logical and a reasonable and rational and myth busting too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I agree. Uh so the hallucinations that one would have
Speaker 1: on LSD. I think there's there's a bit of a
Speaker 1: misnomer there and that some people might think, Oh, you know,
Speaker 1: I saw a pink elephant coming in the room and
Speaker 1: sit down beside me and I thought it was real. Um,
Speaker 1: that's not exactly what they mean by an LSD hallucination.
Speaker 1: What they mean more is, Um, you know, I stared
Speaker 1: at the wall and the wall looked like it was
Speaker 1: pulsating and breathing, or that painting had a glow around it. Uh.
Speaker 1: And and it's also a case of not oh my God,
Speaker 1: what's happening to my brain, it's Oh my God, this
Speaker 1: acid is awesome or bad or strong, but I know
Speaker 1: that I'm on a drug and it's making all these
Speaker 1: hallucinations happen precisely right. And Yeah, it's a great way
Speaker 1: to say I mean it's it's it's away from the
Speaker 1: classical definition of a hallucination, because you don't and it's
Speaker 1: also you don't, you don't believe what you're seeing is
Speaker 1: like real. You realize that it's the results of the drug,
Speaker 1: although I'm sure some people have taken asset and really
Speaker 1: uh thought like you know, it's done such a number
Speaker 1: on the brain that they didn't know that they were
Speaker 1: on the drug, which is why you have your buddy
Speaker 1: there to say no, no, no, that's the asset right. Well,
Speaker 1: that's that's another point that Um Shane of Freeman makes
Speaker 1: in this article is that because of the trip and
Speaker 1: how what a profound impact that has on the brain, Um,
Speaker 1: you typically want to trip with other people who have
Speaker 1: experienced tripping in a very calm place. And you mentioned
Speaker 1: set and setting earlier. I think that was Timothy leary
Speaker 1: that came up with that. And set, reminds, refers to
Speaker 1: mindset and setting refers to the setting that that you
Speaker 1: and you take your acid in. Right. So you want
Speaker 1: to be in a positive frame of mind or else
Speaker 1: you're going to probably have a bad trip and you
Speaker 1: want to take it in a calm, comfortable setting like
Speaker 1: your home or Shane of Freeman suggests the park. Yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe don't. If you're stressed out about finals, maybe don't
Speaker 1: take acid before you go to class to take those finals.
Speaker 1: You're probably going to have a bad time. That would
Speaker 1: betray set and setting in a profound way. Exactly. So
Speaker 1: the trip itself typically lasts for something between maybe seven
Speaker 1: to twelve hours. About halfway through you're going to experience
Speaker 1: what's called the peak and the whole thing is going
Speaker 1: to really start about thirty to sixty minutes after you
Speaker 1: take acid. Uh. Yeah, and if you've ever been to
Speaker 1: college and seeing someone taking acid on the dorm floor,
Speaker 1: you might hear a lot of like, I don't know
Speaker 1: if it's working yet. I don't think it's working yet.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I think we got ripped off, man,
Speaker 1: I don't think. And then all of a sudden, yeah,
Speaker 1: and then you just shut the door and then you
Speaker 1: go and study like a good student. Right. Physically, Josh,
Speaker 1: you might have dilated pupils, increase blood pressure, your body
Speaker 1: temperature might raise, you might go a little sweaty and dizzy.
Speaker 1: You might be drowsy. Um, you might be tingly in
Speaker 1: the extremities. Right, your stomach might feel kind of weird,
Speaker 1: have a metallic sensation in your mouth. Yeah, you're probably
Speaker 1: not hungry, right. Um, and you may uh, you're seeing
Speaker 1: things in a very weird way. You will probably start
Speaker 1: to notice patterns basically in the air. You could see
Speaker 1: a wall breathing, like you said. Um, you're going to
Speaker 1: see things in a different way than you normally do.
Speaker 1: Is the best way to put it. Um. In some
Speaker 1: extreme cases, some people have reported synaesthesia triggering in them,
Speaker 1: where their senses are basically getting mixed up. I wonder
Speaker 1: if they're synistas maybe in that like locked it. Maybe, UM,
Speaker 1: that's entirely possible, because there's a pretty well established school
Speaker 1: of thought that says that if you are predisposed to
Speaker 1: a brain based mental illness like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, Um,
Speaker 1: taking LSD can hasten its onset. It's not going to
Speaker 1: give you schizophrenia, it's not going to give you bipolar disorder,
Speaker 1: but if you were already predisposed to it and the
Speaker 1: symptoms hadn't started yet, it could hasten that. True. Emotionally,
Speaker 1: Shanna points out that kind of can run the gamut
Speaker 1: from happiness and euphoria. Uh, you love everything, you love everyone.
Speaker 1: Everything's magical. That's the key word right there. What's that? Magical? Yeah,
Speaker 1: everything seems magical to you. or it can go the
Speaker 1: other way, Um, and you can have, you know, bad
Speaker 1: emotions and that's, you know, probably part of the bad trip.
Speaker 1: Go into it in the wrong headspace, like we talked about.
Speaker 1: But that's the crux of it's still the magic. Is
Speaker 1: still the crux of it, regardless of whether you're having
Speaker 1: a u fork or a dysphoric experience, it still seems
Speaker 1: to have supernatural qualities to it. It's not just normal Um,
Speaker 1: having a bad experience, bad mood kind of thing. It's
Speaker 1: like the Universe is coming apart and it's it's all
Speaker 1: reflecting poorly on my life. Yeah, and I think with
Speaker 1: a lot of hallucinogenics. That's why they're used in in
Speaker 1: spiritual and religious ceremonies all over the world, because it's
Speaker 1: a profound experience. It can make you very contemplative, uh,
Speaker 1: you know the things you think. It can make uh,
Speaker 1: people look inward and discover things about themselves, and so
Speaker 1: that's why I mean like Ayahuasca and Uh Ayahuasca, iyahuska, Iyahuska, iyahuascajuaca,
Speaker 1: and there's somewhere in magic mushrooms. We did a great
Speaker 1: episode on that. Um. They've been used for millennia around
Speaker 1: the Campfire for people to, you know, quote unquote, unlock
Speaker 1: these doors in their mind that they don't readily have
Speaker 1: access to the doors of perception. It's right, uh, if
Speaker 1: you are an observer of people on LSD and you're
Speaker 1: not on lst, you might think, man, there talking a
Speaker 1: lot about really things that aren't very important, but to
Speaker 1: the person on the LST. It's very important. It's the
Speaker 1: most important thing in the world at that moment. The
Speaker 1: person not on LSD and the person on lst will
Speaker 1: both mutually scare one another and usually end up in
Speaker 1: different rooms at a party. Uh. And then there is
Speaker 1: the the the time jumps. Um, it just really will
Speaker 1: mess with your sense of time, according to research, and
Speaker 1: they will say that you might think you've been doing
Speaker 1: something for five minutes and it's been an hour, or
Speaker 1: it might be the reverse and you might not have
Speaker 1: any idea how much time is passing. So, whether you're
Speaker 1: having a good trip or a bad trip, the one
Speaker 1: thing that all trips are gonna have in common is
Speaker 1: that they end within about twelve hours or so. Like
Speaker 1: the magical thinking goes away. What you would perceive as
Speaker 1: normal reality starts to step back in and Um, there
Speaker 1: may be some sort of emotional or mental hangover, not
Speaker 1: a hangover like when the alcohol brings on, but more
Speaker 1: just like a whoa kind of thing after a profound
Speaker 1: emotional mental exercise or being put through the grinder. Um,
Speaker 1: you're going to you will have some sort of you'll
Speaker 1: be awash in something, but you reality will return eventually.
Speaker 1: That makes sense that you would have an emotional hangover, chuck,
Speaker 1: because LSD basically mimics the shape of serotonin and kind
Speaker 1: of hijacks your serotonin receptors. is how it does its thing.
Speaker 1: So Sarahtonin is in part responsible for mood regulation, emotions,
Speaker 1: that kind of thing. So it makes sense that you'd
Speaker 1: be a little wacky the day after you trip on
Speaker 1: lst interesting. Uh. Sometimes you might see, uh I always
Speaker 1: say college students, and to keep picking on college students,
Speaker 1: I mean when it happens about of acid trips are
Speaker 1: undertaken by college students. Um You might see a college
Speaker 1: student admit themselves to the e R or call an ambulance.
Speaker 1: The doctors like this was a terrible decision on your part. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you go, why are you talking to me about this?
Speaker 1: Just heal me and the doctor will pat you on
Speaker 1: the head and put you in a in a quiet room.
Speaker 1: And you know, the doctor coming to the hospital while
Speaker 1: you're on acid. I got you. But when you get
Speaker 1: to the R, the doctor will patch you on the head,
Speaker 1: put you in a nice, quiet dark room that everything
Speaker 1: is okay. They may give you some anti anxiety meds
Speaker 1: or a tranquilizer to sort of chill you out a
Speaker 1: little bit. But basically they just keep you in there
Speaker 1: and tell a nurse like do me a favorite every
Speaker 1: hour going there and make sure that guy isn't breaking
Speaker 1: some equipment and he'll be fine. And you know, it
Speaker 1: sounds like about six hours. So that's tripping, tripping, one
Speaker 1: on one. Um, you want to take another break before
Speaker 1: we get into like what's going on in your mind? Yeah,
Speaker 1: why not? All right, so everybody bear with us. Man. So, Chuck,
Speaker 1: what's going on right now? Yeah, well, you just went
Speaker 1: and pep, you went to a little podcasters room and
Speaker 1: now you're back during the break. That's what's going on. Uh,
Speaker 1: what's going on in the mind? You mean on LSD?
Speaker 1: Funny you should ask h here's the deal. When this
Speaker 1: article was written she said researchers aren't a hundred percent
Speaker 1: it sure what LSD is doing in the brain. They
Speaker 1: still aren't. We have a better idea. that a much
Speaker 1: better idea. Um, wells of back a little bit. As
Speaker 1: of two thousand six. Well, yeah, this this one was
Speaker 1: from two thousand eleven. A Yale psychiatrist named Andrew Sewell,
Speaker 1: one of the few dudes in the US who uh
Speaker 1: does psychedelic drug research. He's not l seven, he's not square.
Speaker 1: Remember that band else seven? Yeah, yeah, they were good. Remember.
Speaker 1: It was them, the breeders and four non blondes all
Speaker 1: came out with like great albums all at once and whole.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna take issue with whole. All right, I'll
Speaker 1: take that one back. No, fourn blonds. They have that
Speaker 1: hey song. That whole album was pretty good. Alright, we
Speaker 1: one bad. Okay, I was listening to payment the entire time.
Speaker 1: You could listen to all of it, all right, I
Speaker 1: was listening in payment to now. I'm just kidding. I
Speaker 1: like dl seven, though. Um, Andrew Sewell, uh, he was
Speaker 1: a Yale ychiatrists, like I said, or maybe still is,
Speaker 1: and he said at the time, uh, that it had
Speaker 1: to do with the Thalamus. Sensory impressions are routed through
Speaker 1: the Thalamus. Jack's as a gatekeeper. So his theory at
Speaker 1: the time, which was built upon research from Franz Volvida, Switzerland,
Speaker 1: said that drugs like LSD and psilocybin Um, they toned
Speaker 1: down the Thalamus's activity. So, in other words, the gatekeeper
Speaker 1: doesn't work. The he liken to a spam filter on
Speaker 1: email said it's not working as well. So it lets
Speaker 1: it lets unprocessed information through to consciousness, which is a
Speaker 1: great explanation of it. That was two thousand eleven. But
Speaker 1: you got this, you got that from live science, right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think so. That was a good, good explanation of it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but we have brand new, hot off the press's information
Speaker 1: which I which doesn't necessarily contradict that. Right, agreed. So
Speaker 1: I think Imperial College of London researchers got their hands
Speaker 1: and some acid, gave them to some people and threw
Speaker 1: them in a wonder machine and looked at their brain. Volunteers. Volunteers,
Speaker 1: we should add that had all taken LSD before. This
Speaker 1: wasn't against their will, no, and that they wanted people
Speaker 1: that have tripped before and people that knew they could
Speaker 1: handle taking acid and being an M R I machine,
Speaker 1: which we already have mentioned, is weird and loud and Claustrophobic,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, that's a good point. That was very
Speaker 1: wise of those guys. Yes, so the upshot of it
Speaker 1: was that we now have brain scans of people under
Speaker 1: the influence of LSD for the first time in human history,
Speaker 1: and it's it's really kind of opened up some new
Speaker 1: ideas for what's going on on an acid trip. And
Speaker 1: you should see the difference of these, like the comparison
Speaker 1: to control brain scheme and the one on acid. It's
Speaker 1: like you don't even have to read the caption to
Speaker 1: know which one's which. Like one is like, okay, I'm
Speaker 1: I guess I'm thinking, I'm aware of myself, my toe witches, wow,
Speaker 1: am I going to pay the water bill this month?
Speaker 1: And then the other one just like yeah, like that.
Speaker 1: It's amazing what they said. I'm just gonna read it
Speaker 1: because they say it better than I ever could. Um
Speaker 1: they said LSD simultaneously creates hyper connections across the brain,
Speaker 1: allowing the functions of seemingly unrelated regions of the brain
Speaker 1: to ooze into one another. At the same time, the
Speaker 1: drug apparently chips away at organization within networks. Like all
Speaker 1: of this sounds like right on the money, uh, including
Speaker 1: a system the brain differs to at rest called the
Speaker 1: default mode network, which normally governs functions of such as
Speaker 1: self reflection, bing, autobiographical memory, bing and mental time travel bing. Bing. Right.
Speaker 1: So what? What the what they're saying is is that
Speaker 1: the idea that you see things differently, that you think
Speaker 1: about things differently, that you understand concepts like the universe
Speaker 1: and reality in your place in it differently than you
Speaker 1: normally do, is accurate. It like LSD changes literally the
Speaker 1: way you think about the world by changing the connections
Speaker 1: in your brain. Yeah, and notably, they point out, Um,
Speaker 1: in the sixties you would always hear a lot about
Speaker 1: the ego and the sense of self. Uh, they think
Speaker 1: they have proven through brain scans, the LSD literally makes
Speaker 1: you forget your sense of self for that time. Right,
Speaker 1: and and it allows you to do something that LSD
Speaker 1: is very famous for, which is makes you feel connected
Speaker 1: to the universe, to humanity, to the Gazelle population, to everything,
Speaker 1: just fuel connected. And again, it's called Um Ego dissolution, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: which is one of the you know, it supports the
Speaker 1: notion that when you take acid with somebody you have
Speaker 1: this bond with them, uh, perhaps even a lifelong bond.
Speaker 1: They also found that the effects, the psychological effects in
Speaker 1: the individual as well, have lasting impacts as well. So
Speaker 1: it's not just like you're on the drug, you're under
Speaker 1: the influence of the drug. What you're thinking and feeling, Um,
Speaker 1: is temporary. It actually creates a pronounced and most commonly
Speaker 1: positive change in the individual's outlook on life, in sense
Speaker 1: of well being, which is pretty amazing. But now we
Speaker 1: have brain scans of it. The brain scans just in
Speaker 1: every way seemed to support everything everyone has always said up,
Speaker 1: not everyone, but the people that weren't making up stories
Speaker 1: about acid, about acid, the people who never said, Oh,
Speaker 1: I see a pink elephant in their room, the people
Speaker 1: who never went up to somebody and like wave their
Speaker 1: hand in front of their face. Oh Yeah, I saw
Speaker 1: somebody do that like a couple of summers ago at
Speaker 1: my neighborhood pool. There's this new behaving strangely and I
Speaker 1: was like, I wonder, and then somebody went up and
Speaker 1: went like that too. I was like, oh no, I know.
Speaker 1: So super promising research and I think it's awesome that
Speaker 1: they're looking into this stuff again. Um, do you know,
Speaker 1: are they doing this in the United States? That all yet?
Speaker 1: Because it didn't they sort of allow it again. Yes,
Speaker 1: three years ago there was a two Um study with
Speaker 1: like twelve terminally ill patients with cancer in the United States,
Speaker 1: but it's still like very small groups of scientists are
Speaker 1: probably working on like like twelve oh yeah, yeah, and
Speaker 1: they're using very small study populations. But the results that
Speaker 1: they're finding, like in this case, um, that the cancer
Speaker 1: patients reported, even twelve months on, a more positive outlook
Speaker 1: on life, despite the fact that their life was coming
Speaker 1: to an end prematurely, in their opinion, um, because of
Speaker 1: the acid. They're finding, like all of these, the studies
Speaker 1: that are being carried out are are finding such sweeping
Speaker 1: Um conclusions about the potential for LSD to positively impact
Speaker 1: people's lives that, Um, they're all of them. Are Like
Speaker 1: we need more studies, more these, more studies, we need
Speaker 1: more people involved in I'm like, let's get back to
Speaker 1: studying this, which we left off of like forty years
Speaker 1: ago for no good reason. And in forty and fifty
Speaker 1: years ago is when the scientists thought like they were
Speaker 1: on the cusp of making some real breakthroughs. When everything
Speaker 1: gets shut down. Um, and back then, like there the
Speaker 1: way they do the studies now. It seems like our
Speaker 1: way better. They didn't have controls back then, but they
Speaker 1: didn't use controls in most of these experiments. Timothy Leary
Speaker 1: was carrying out these studies. I mean, give me a break.
Speaker 1: All right, let's talk about acid flashbacks. This, yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean Shanna calls it very controversial among LSD users and researchers. Um,
Speaker 1: I'M gonna say false outright, because there's zero evidence that
Speaker 1: it's a real thing and that the body actually retains
Speaker 1: some bit of LSD. But you've heard, you know, the rumors,
Speaker 1: like it's in your spinal fluid. Uh, it's in your
Speaker 1: fatty deposits, and year, years later you can be sitting
Speaker 1: in a meeting and have a full on hallucinatory acid flashback. Right.
Speaker 1: There's no mechanism that this could be carried out by
Speaker 1: where there's like just yeah, like your your body stores
Speaker 1: some acid for later and you start to trip again. Suddenly.
Speaker 1: There are people who have reported it, Um, but it's
Speaker 1: entirely possible that they're mentally all right, or it's entirely
Speaker 1: possible they're suffering from something called hallucinogen. Hallucinogen, hallucinogen, persisting
Speaker 1: perceptive disorder. This sounds pretty awful if you ask me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this I did a little more research. Apparently this
Speaker 1: is linked to persistent LSD use. Um, someone who's done
Speaker 1: a lot of acid and it is even then it's
Speaker 1: still not due to a build up of LSD molecules
Speaker 1: in the body. So what? Maybe they rearranged their neural
Speaker 1: connections well where they also predisposed to mental illness? Well,
Speaker 1: I think a lot of times it's as current. Medical
Speaker 1: opinion is divided as to the OS. UH, some people
Speaker 1: think it's a form of PTSD. Other people think there
Speaker 1: were changes in the brain morphology because they did so
Speaker 1: much acid. But it's still not like the old story,
Speaker 1: like you had acid in your body from a trip
Speaker 1: long ago. Now he's just reactivated, just like burned out
Speaker 1: sitting in the corner. Yeah, and supposedly where this was
Speaker 1: all born. At an educational meeting for a D A
Speaker 1: agents in San Francisco, a speaker said, uh, he suggested
Speaker 1: that the rerelease of LSD hidden in the bodies of
Speaker 1: users led to untimely psychotic flashbacks. And no one has
Speaker 1: tape of this, but there are people that wrote about
Speaker 1: it and all evidence points to like this is where
Speaker 1: the acid flashback myth. Myth was born from this one speaker.
Speaker 1: That's that's really interesting. You know, sway to go, Dude.
Speaker 1: So Um again we were talking about like there's a
Speaker 1: lot of hysteria surrounding lst. People have died on LSD.
Speaker 1: What's what's that? Issue is, well, a couplefold. One, is
Speaker 1: there a lethal dose of LSD? That's never been proven.
Speaker 1: Despite the millions of acid trips that people have taken,
Speaker 1: it's never been conclusively shown that LSD led to the
Speaker 1: death of a human being. Yeah, I would assume, like
Speaker 1: there's a lethal dose of water, so I would assume
Speaker 1: if you drank five gallons of LSD you might die.
Speaker 1: But then it it's so out of the realm of
Speaker 1: believability it's just like why even talk about it? Right.
Speaker 1: And there have been cases of people ingesting massive amounts
Speaker 1: of LSD. So the minimum dose is a quarter Microgram,
Speaker 1: which is Um like twenty five thousands of a Graham,
Speaker 1: I believe. Is that like what an asset hit is
Speaker 1: these days? I think it's. That's about a half of
Speaker 1: a hit. It's a mild hit from what I understand.
Speaker 1: So if you go split sease with your girlfriend at
Speaker 1: the fish concert, then you'd have like yeah, yeah, that
Speaker 1: would be that kind of dose, I guess right. So, Um,
Speaker 1: the the that's a that's a very small amount, like
Speaker 1: thousandths of a gram. Some people have taken like no
Speaker 1: thousands of a milligram. I'm sorry, that's the that's the dose.
Speaker 1: Some people have taken milligrams of this stuff accidentally. Um,
Speaker 1: there was a group of people in and at a
Speaker 1: party and they thought they were snorting cocaine, but it
Speaker 1: turned out they were snorting powdered LSD. Boy Oh boy.
Speaker 1: And One person was shown to have had seven, have
Speaker 1: ingested seven milligrams of LSD. So That's like seventy thousand
Speaker 1: times the minimum dose, something like that. Yeah, and I
Speaker 1: think this is actually in the Western Journal of Medicine
Speaker 1: and they most of the people just boom. It knocked
Speaker 1: him out immediately and they passed out. The people that
Speaker 1: were awake, well, everyone went to the hospital because it was,
Speaker 1: by all accounts, an overdose of LSD. But every everyone
Speaker 1: was fine. So that's what it was. That's like seven
Speaker 1: thousand micrograms and a minimum dose is a quarter of
Speaker 1: a microgram. So yeah, like twelve hours later they were
Speaker 1: fine and twelve years later they, five of them were
Speaker 1: examined for years for long term issues, Um, and no
Speaker 1: one had any issues at that party, at least right.
Speaker 1: There's another one, another person who shows up in one study.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure what the case was around it, but
Speaker 1: the person survived in justing forty milligrams, which is forty
Speaker 1: micrograms Um, and apparently survived. So so the toxic dose,
Speaker 1: the LD fifty dose, which is where half of the
Speaker 1: people who took that dose would be expected to die. Um,
Speaker 1: it's never been established. We don't know what it is,
Speaker 1: but it's it's huge, it's massive. So the pharmacological deaths
Speaker 1: from LSD have probably never happened. What what is what
Speaker 1: has been documented? His behavioral deaths. People who um took risks,
Speaker 1: potentially that Um they wouldn't normally have under the influence
Speaker 1: of LSD. If he went swimming in a place, they
Speaker 1: wouldn't have normally gone swimming. Maybe jump from a building,
Speaker 1: not because they thought they could fly or anything like that,
Speaker 1: but because I think I can make it to the
Speaker 1: Ledge and go party over there, whereas if they were
Speaker 1: under normal conditions they wouldn't have engaged in that behavior.
Speaker 1: So the poor judgment basically right. But again those are
Speaker 1: pretty few and far between, although when they do happen
Speaker 1: there there tragic yeah, and there there are also cases
Speaker 1: of like heart attacks and strokes. But Um, with something
Speaker 1: like that there's usually other drugs involved and you can't
Speaker 1: conclusively say like the LSD caused the heart attack. There's
Speaker 1: also apparently no documented, confirmed, confirmed report of somebody committing
Speaker 1: suicide under the influence of LSD. It's more like art
Speaker 1: link letters daughter somebody who had taken LSD before and
Speaker 1: the l their their previous LSD use was blamed for it.
Speaker 1: But there's, from what I could find, not a documented
Speaker 1: case of someone who was on LSD and went nuts
Speaker 1: and killed themselves, and even then I think uh it
Speaker 1: was it's a that's a difficult thing to prove that
Speaker 1: something caused something because then you start digging into that
Speaker 1: person's UH closet and find out that they were suicidal anyway,
Speaker 1: and this was a long time coming. Um, who knows?
Speaker 1: It's it's a tough thing to prove. The upshot of
Speaker 1: it is that the documented evidence of the positive effects
Speaker 1: that LSD can have on the human psyche Um vastly
Speaker 1: out number the recognized tragic events that have taken place
Speaker 1: as a result of LSD. Can I read this one
Speaker 1: part about heavy LSD users, because I thought this is
Speaker 1: kind of funny. Heavy LSD users can develop profound social
Speaker 1: problems completely ruin their sleep cycles and lose entry just
Speaker 1: an eating and personal hygiene. They turn into hippies, is
Speaker 1: what they're saying. Yeah, and and she says something I
Speaker 1: do take issue with that there's no one and and
Speaker 1: Rehab for LSD. That's not true. There are people in
Speaker 1: Rehab for LSD. It's not common, because she rightly points
Speaker 1: out that when you do LSD and then you do
Speaker 1: it again the next day, you and then the next
Speaker 1: day and the next day, you become uh, you build
Speaker 1: up atolerance really fast and you just need more and
Speaker 1: more LSD and it doesn't work after a very short time. Right. Well,
Speaker 1: like I said, things normalize and you don't get the
Speaker 1: experience you're looking for. Um. So, like more most other drugs,
Speaker 1: it's not the kind of drug that you usually see
Speaker 1: people doing a lot of day in and day out
Speaker 1: all the time. Right. And what she's also saying is
Speaker 1: there's no no means for becoming psychologically or physically dependent
Speaker 1: on it, which makes it a non addictive drug, although
Speaker 1: the feds have under schedule one, which means that it
Speaker 1: has a high likelihood for abuse addiction and that it
Speaker 1: has no medical usefulness whatsoever. So both of those two, um,
Speaker 1: but that's false for for both, Um, both of the
Speaker 1: reasons that, yeah, both of the criteria for schedule one drug. Um.
Speaker 1: She also points out, and this is something I never considered,
Speaker 1: but I think it makes a lot of sense. Um,
Speaker 1: the effects of LSD aren't dependable, like you never know
Speaker 1: what you're gonna get, and addicts crave that dependability. They
Speaker 1: want to know, like cocaine will do the same thing
Speaker 1: to me every time, that bottle of Jack Daniels will
Speaker 1: do the same thing to me every time, or that cigarette. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but Um, I don't know what I'm going to get
Speaker 1: out of acids. So it just doesn't lend itself to
Speaker 1: that sort of addictive nature. Pretty interesting. Plus it's also
Speaker 1: further interesting that a lot of people have used I
Speaker 1: don't want to say a lot, I have no idea
Speaker 1: the number, but I know it's been used in the past.
Speaker 1: People have used LSD and other psychedelic drugs to quit
Speaker 1: addictions like cigarette smoking, like alcoholism and Um again, you
Speaker 1: mentioned our can you treat mental illness with psychedelics episode,
Speaker 1: which was awesome, but we talked about that in that
Speaker 1: that episode. Two. All right, Josh, let's I know this
Speaker 1: is a long one. Plus we got the Hodgman bit.
Speaker 1: This is gonna be our first two hour show, oh
Speaker 1: my gosh. But we can't finish the show unless we
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about the cultural history. Uh, notably
Speaker 1: someone you mentioned, Timothy Leary. Dr Timothy Leary actually worked
Speaker 1: at Harvard almost single handedly is responsible for the initial
Speaker 1: turn against LSD by the public and science he took.
Speaker 1: He took what was a legitimate field of inquiry and
Speaker 1: um made it completely illegitimate. Like he's almost single handedly
Speaker 1: to blame for acid being first science turning its back
Speaker 1: on acid. Yeah, he had he had a loud voice
Speaker 1: and talked about a lot of like Hippie dippy things
Speaker 1: that people didn't like. Scientists didn't like them associating it
Speaker 1: with LSD. He founded a church where LSD was the
Speaker 1: sacrament of it, the League for spiritual discovery. Previous to that, though,
Speaker 1: at Harvard, he and his colleague Richard Albert Um we're
Speaker 1: actually trying to study it a little more legitimately. Then
Speaker 1: he got fired from Harvard and sixty three and that's
Speaker 1: when he sort of went full bore towards uh, you know,
Speaker 1: tune in, turn in, drop out, which he regrets that phrase. He, he,
Speaker 1: and he he should not be blamed for that, because
Speaker 1: he said later on that he did not mean like
Speaker 1: drop out of society and like don't he said that
Speaker 1: it was taken like, Um, that people's people took it
Speaker 1: to mean get stoned and abandoned all constructive activity and
Speaker 1: that that's not at all what he meant. That he
Speaker 1: went when he was saying turn on, he was saying like,
Speaker 1: you know, turn on your brain. Yeah, turn on your brain,
Speaker 1: like turn on your potential, like like let's get things going, Um,
Speaker 1: tune in to uh, interact harmoniously with the world around you.
Speaker 1: And then drop out was to become self reliant, not
Speaker 1: dependent on the man. or so it it was basically an
Speaker 1: after schools special that he was trying to make sure, basically,
Speaker 1: the more you know. And it was taken, you know,
Speaker 1: people take things like water, like they're looking for the
Speaker 1: path of least resistance in a lot of ways. So
Speaker 1: they took it to mean like, Oh, it's great, Timothy
Speaker 1: Leary just gave us all license to like not do
Speaker 1: anything useful and didn't really upset all the crew cuts
Speaker 1: over there who are carrying everybody right now. Then there
Speaker 1: was kin Kisi, UM, author of many books, uh, notably
Speaker 1: one flew with the CUCKOO's nest, Um, which that alone
Speaker 1: makes him a great yeah, or just like a major
Speaker 1: contributor to popular culture, or culture even yeah, just that agreed. UH,
Speaker 1: he was notable for being a part of the Mary Pranksters, which, Um,
Speaker 1: it's documented in the great, Great Tom Wolf Book, the
Speaker 1: electric Koolait asset tests, that his favorite books required reading
Speaker 1: really good Um, and it documents in Mary prankster was
Speaker 1: basically a school bus, uh, psychedelically painted, full of hippies
Speaker 1: driving around with gallons and gallons of acid at the
Speaker 1: time when the cops had no idea what acid was, yeah,
Speaker 1: or when it was not yet illegal. Yeah, but he
Speaker 1: got into acid because of the CIA. He was a
Speaker 1: volunteer in the late fifties to dose himself and uh,
Speaker 1: he was, what did she call him here? An acid populace.
Speaker 1: So he was one of those that thought everybody needs
Speaker 1: to do this and it will be a different world. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then, UH, finally, Mr Owsley, Stanley, all the dead
Speaker 1: heads out there just went. You about time. They were
Speaker 1: so mad. While they never get mad, but mad because
Speaker 1: they they have a profound social interaction problems. He was
Speaker 1: a chemist who was in hate Ashbury and San Francisco,
Speaker 1: studied at cal Berkeley and he was like, you know what,
Speaker 1: I'm taking a lot of bad LSD and so I'm
Speaker 1: gonna Start making it myself. He was a self talk chemist.
Speaker 1: Did you say that? Yeah, and he got really, really
Speaker 1: good at it. And owsley L S D became the
Speaker 1: standard for good, clean acid in the nineteen sixties and
Speaker 1: seventies and they used them at the acid tests which
Speaker 1: Um Ken Kesi used to hold in San Francisco and
Speaker 1: the grateful dead used to play. And osley Stanley was
Speaker 1: also the sound engineer. Did He create the wall of sound?
Speaker 1: Was that him his doing? No, that was Phil Specter.
Speaker 1: But he was the dead's original sound man and what
Speaker 1: he got known for was he was one of the
Speaker 1: first people to mixed concerts live and in Stereo and
Speaker 1: plug right into the board. So all those old, you know,
Speaker 1: deadheads love to trade the old bootlegs. Those bootlegs sounds
Speaker 1: so good because of Owsley um, because he was, you know,
Speaker 1: he was an innovator as a sound man and he
Speaker 1: was one of the first investors in the financially and
Speaker 1: because he was a millionaire, Alice tea millionaire. PA said
Speaker 1: he made like ten thousand or ten million hits of
Speaker 1: acid in his lifetime. Uh, he gave away a lot
Speaker 1: of it, though. There was one it was a sit in,
Speaker 1: I can't remember what it was called, where he gave
Speaker 1: out and by all accounts three hundred thousand people took
Speaker 1: acid all in one place. Wow, where I had to
Speaker 1: be San Francisco. Uh. And he also designed the steely
Speaker 1: with Bob Thomas. The very famous lightning bolt skull logo
Speaker 1: on the grateful dead album steal your face right off
Speaker 1: of your head was designed by Owsley. Did Not know that? Yep,
Speaker 1: and now all the dead heads are going. Okay, he
Speaker 1: mentioned the steely. I'm sure we got something two and
Speaker 1: a half hours in. Um and acids making a bit
Speaker 1: of a comeback in San Francisco to among all the
Speaker 1: little technocrats that took that town over and they're tripping
Speaker 1: and stuff, not really tripping their micro dosing there. Basically
Speaker 1: Albert Hoffman had the idea that Um, taking minuscule amounts
Speaker 1: of LSD, could improve cognitive function. So basically they're they're
Speaker 1: getting better at coding. They're taking it and going to
Speaker 1: work and Um, not fully tripping, but just having it's
Speaker 1: having some effects. Supposedly that's like the new thing with acid. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that is another reason I want to punch San
Speaker 1: Francisco in the face. You're not the town you used
Speaker 1: to be. So and they all know it, so don't
Speaker 1: get mad at me. They it's true. They there's also
Speaker 1: some other stuff chuck like. Apparently, if you buy LSD
Speaker 1: these days there's a really high likelihood that you're actually
Speaker 1: getting something called ND Bomb Dash N B o m e.
Speaker 1: is it just another chemical? It's like a much more
Speaker 1: intense psychedelic that's very similar to LSD, but it does
Speaker 1: have show own toxic effects, like people actually have died
Speaker 1: from overdoses on this stuff thinking that they had LSD,
Speaker 1: which is not cool. Man. No, you don't sell something
Speaker 1: saying it's one thing, stay away from the Orange Sunshine Um.
Speaker 1: And then there's also some other thing called one P LSD,
Speaker 1: and it's LSD with an extra pro pion Il bond
Speaker 1: that technically makes it legal that. Apparently it's open season
Speaker 1: on the Internet with that stuff right now. Camaloi, the
Speaker 1: great comedian and friend of the show, has a great
Speaker 1: bit about some designer drug which is heroin and uh,
Speaker 1: Thailan al or Thailan AL, Cold Medicine, Oh, codeine. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like with heroin. Okay, it's just funny. He's like you're
Speaker 1: already doing heroin. It's like the heroine is enough. Thailand. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just this. It just seems like, Um, well, these
Speaker 1: are like waxing nostalgic for the good old days of
Speaker 1: just I said. But it seems like if people are
Speaker 1: dying on something they think is as said, then maybe
Speaker 1: you're not doing it right. There you go, so chuck.
Speaker 1: I think that's it. That's LSD. Man. This could have
Speaker 1: been a two parter. It could have been, but we're
Speaker 1: not greedy. We stayed true. Just one UH. If you
Speaker 1: wanted more about LSD, just type those three letters into
Speaker 1: the search bar how stuff works dot com and it
Speaker 1: will bring up this great article. Uh. And if you
Speaker 1: want to get in touch with this in the meantime,
Speaker 1: you can tweet to us at S Y S K podcast.
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