Scientists Suggest Fresh Look at Psychedelic Drugs

[Jan Klimkowski]

Thomas - good post.

Grof is a most intriguing character and thinker. His description of LSD-25 as the "divine thunderbolt" correctly describes its power... for light and dark.

Stanislav Grof had just completed his medical studies at Prague's Charles University when he caught a life-changing break. It was 1956, and one of his professors, a brain specialist named George Roubicek, had ordered a batch of LSD-25 from the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz, where Albert Hoffman first synthesized the compound in 1943. Roubicek had read the Zurich psychiatrist Werner Stoll's 1947 account of the LSD experience and was curious to test it out himself and on his students and patients, largely to study the drug's effects on electric brain waves, Roubicek's specialty. When he asked for volunteers, Grof raised his hand.

The subsequent experience assured Grof's place in history by making him among the first handful of people to enjoy what might be called a modern trip, in which the psychedelic state is matched with electronic effects of the kind that have defined the experience for generations of recreational acidheads, from Merry Pranksters to Fillmore hippies to lollipop-sucking ravers.

Roubicek's experiment involved placing Grof in a dark room, administering a large dose of LSD (around 250 millionths of a gram) and turning on a stroboscopic white light oscillating at various, often frenetic, frequencies. Needless to say, nothing like the experience was otherwise available in 1950s Czechoslovakia, or anywhere else, for that matter. That first introduction to LSD -- a "divine thunderbolt" -- set the course for Grof's lifework. He had found, he thought, a majestic shortcut on Freud's "royal road to the unconscious."

"This combination [of the light and the drug]," Grof later said, "evoked in me a powerful mystical experience that radically changed my personal and professional life. Research of the heuristic, therapeutic, transformative, and evolutionary potential of non-ordinary states of consciousness became my profession, vocation, and personal passion."

http://www.alternet.org/drugs/146393/how...ra/?page=2

However, the fact that Grof produced the first eastern bloc LSD, in Czech labs, and later ended up at the spook-infested Esalen Institute, makes a certain wary ambivalence inevitable.

The late great historian Walter Bowart interviewed Timothy Leary many times and finally managed to extract details of witting CIA sponsorship from him.

Perhaps.

I'll post excerpts from the interview below.