American Trip: Set, Setting, and the Psychedelic Experience in the Twentieth Century by Ido Hartogsohn

Author:Ido Hartogsohn [Hartogsohn, Ido]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: from CIA LSD experiments the Harvard Psilocybin Project., social, and cultural forces shaped the psychedelic experience in midcentury America, How historical
ISBN: 9780262539142
Google: hLT4DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2020-07-15T00:35:41.680015+00:00

The Political Uses of LSD

As the recreational use of LSD became increasingly widespread toward the end of the 1960s, yet another of its potentials came to the fore: the use of psychedelics within a political and activist context for the purposes of raising political awareness, radicalization, and the promotion of revolutionary ideas.

The notion that the use of LSD could have profound political implications was not new in itself. The understanding that LSD could foster feelings of brotherly love and understanding has been present since the earliest days of LSD research. Lee and Shlain, for example, describe the 1950s attempts of Al Hubbard and Humphry Osmond to bring about a chemically assisted world peace. They report that Hubbard and Osmond attempted to expand the minds of global leaders by conducting a series of LSD sessions, with participants including members of the British parliament, assistants to heads of state, UN representatives, and a prime minister.139

There are several reasons why psychedelics may have profound effects on political views and activity. Spiritual experiences that induce a feeling of unity can sometimes arouse feelings of comradeship, solidarity, and understanding. In a 1962 study, 40 percent of participants reported that LSD had made them more tolerant and broadminded, and 42 percent felt that LSD should be used to help people understand one another.140 Doblin’s 1991 follow-up on the Good Friday Experiment found that participants in the psilocybin experiment believed that the experience had empowered them to become more actively involved in social causes and led them to develop greater empathy toward minority groups.141 The visionary, euphoric, and empathogenic qualities of psychedelic experiences can also support the emergence of utopian and universalist modes of thinking, of the type that was strikingly common in the idealistic counterculture of the 1960s. In the euphoric unity state achieved during a psychedelic peak experience, the distinctions between countries and nations often seemed contrived and artificial. They seemed to dissipate and give way to a new vision of humanity freed from factionalism and united by empathy. Moreover, it has often been suggested that psychedelics tend to strengthen users’ feelings of empathy and their connection to nature and the cosmos, an idea captured in Richard Doyle’s designation of these substances as ecodelics to signify that their effect is to enable their users to “perceive their interconnection with the ecosystems of our planet.”142 Others have referred to the emergence of ecological and humanitarian interests as a primary benefit of the transpersonal psychedelic experience.143 Some recent studies have even found correlations between psychedelic experimentation and the adoption of progressive political views.144

For the post–World War II American intellectual elite, shaped by what philosopher Alston Chase called a “culture of despair” emphasizing “a life without God, meaning or value,”145 the psychedelic message signified a rare promise to deliver humanity out of the spiritual and moral impasse it had reached in Auschwitz and Nagasaki and that was profusely evident in the rise of existentialism and relativism. Psychedelics, it seemed, could act as wonder pills that would enable humanity

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