Acid Test

International Journal of Drug Policy 9 (1998) 373–380

Review

Acid Test

Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered, by LesterGrinspoon and James B. Bakalar. Originally pub-lished in 1979 by Basic Books Inc., New York.The re-edition of 1997 is the first volume of theDrug Policy Classics Reprint Series, published byThe Lindesmith Center, 1997, ISBN 0-9641568-5-7.

I believe that these agents have a part to play inour survival as a species, for that survival de-pends as much on our opinion of our fellowsand ourselves as on any other single thing. Thepsychedelics help us to explore and fathom ourown nature …. I believe that the psychedelicsprovide a chance, perhaps only a slender one,for Homo faber, the cunning, ruthless, fool-hardy, pleasure-greedy toolmaker to merge intothat other creature whose presence we have sorashly presumed, Homo sapiens, the wise, theunderstanding, the compassionate, in whosefourfold vision art, politics, science, and reli-gion are one. Surely we must seize that chance.1

Humphrey Osmomd, 1957

A long time has passed since anyone has takensuch statements seriously, or so it would seem.

Many of the intellectuals and scientists who in the1950s spoke of such potentials for the use ofpsychedelic drugs later tempered or even recantedtheir enthusiasm for one reason or another, typi-cally in response to the widespread illicit use ofpsychedelics and accompanying negative propa-ganda that soon followed. The great popularity ofpsychedelic drugs among the young combinedwith the political and social turmoil of the Viet-nam War era seemed to turn the originalpsychedelic vision into merely another utopiantale to be written about in novels, or as somewould insist, a hopeful dream into a nightmare;by the late 1960s the pioneering work of Osmond,Huxley, and many other famous names was nolonger given much credence by intellectuals, worldleaders, and others ‘in the know’ about the realityof modern civilisation.

Stanislav Grof, one of the most knowledgeableresearchers in the field of psychedelic drugs andtheir uses, writes of the early enthusiasm for thenewly discovered LSD: ‘‘Never before had a sin-gle substance held so much promise in such awide variety of fields of interest.’’2 Grof notes thatthe fields of psychology, neuropharmacology, psy-chiatry, religion, anthropology, education, cre-ativity research, art and music, were all being

1 Humphrey Osmond, A Review of the Clinical Effects ofPsychotomimetic Agents, Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci., March 14,1957. Dr. Osmond was a pioneer in the use of psychedelicdrugs in psychotherapy, and guided Aldous Huxley’s firstmescaline experiences described in the classic essays The Doorsof Perception and Hea6en and Hell.

2 From the prologue to The Secret Chief: Con6ersations witha Pioneer of the Underground Psychedelic Therapy Mo6ementby Myron J. Stolaroff. Published by The MultidisciplinaryAssociation for Psychedelic Studies, 1997, ISBN 0-966019-0-7.

0955-3959/98/$ - see front matter © 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

PII S0955-3959(98)00041-3

Re6iew / International Journal of Drug Policy 9 (1998) 373–380374

significantly influenced by the new research, andhe draws our attention to the fact that the use ofthese psychedelic substances in their natural plantforms was an activity that had intimately accom-panied humankind’s long evolutionary journey tothe present. We see that what was occurring wasnot so much a discovery as a re-disco6ery of along-lost elixir and mode of consciousness held inhigh esteem by all ancient and pre-industrial peo-ples. The rediscovery of such an important influ-ence on human development should of coursehave far-reaching significance for every area ofhuman understanding. A few short years into thisworthy project, however, and all was in shambles,and a Prohibition was enacted outlawing essen-tially all use and experimentation withpsychedelics, even by research professionals.

No doubt the reasons for this tragic turn ofevents will be analysed and written about longinto the future, and modern society’s prohibition-ist rejection of those brief years of discovery willfor the historian provide great insight about ourtimes and the psychology of those who dwelled inthem. By the late 1970s, when the first edition ofGrinspoon and Bakalar’s Psychedelic Drugs Re-considered appeared, they could state in the firstparagraph of their Introduction,

Psychedelic drugs are very much out of fashion.Illicit drug users have less interest in them nowthan at any time in the last fifteen years. Re-searchers in psychology and psychiatry areshowing no interest at all, or are being allowedto show none in practice. Many people will saythat this is just as well. LSD and its relativesrepresent nothing more than a drug abuse epi-demic that has mercifully receded and an insanepseudoreligion that has ruined the lives of thou-sands of young people. More than enough hasbeen said about these drugs and far too muchhas already been done with them. They may beuseful for a few specialised experiments on ani-mals but are otherwise best forgotten and, ifnecessary, suppressed. (p. 3)

The purpose of Psychedelic Drugs Reconsideredis to plead the case for a reopening of psychedelicresearch and therapy, and to present an overview

of what has so far been accomplished in theunderstanding of ‘‘these most complex and fasci-nating of all drugs,’’ in the words of the authors.The book is intended as a ‘‘reminder of wherepsychedelic drugs have taken us – as a culture, inscience, in psychiatry – and where we abandonedthe journey.’’ In a very ambitious exposition theauthors attempt to cover the entire territory fromthe chemistry and botanical sources and effects ofthe major psychedelic drugs (chapter 1), the his-tory of use of the natural forms of these sub-stances in preindustrial cultures (chapter 2), to thestory of their 20th Century rediscovery (chapter3). Psychedelic experiences of users are describedand analysed in detail in chapter 4, and a briefbut thorough look at potential therapeutic usesand the occurrence and treatment of adverse ef-fects are covered in chapters 5 and 6. The possibleapplications and implications of psychedelic drugresearch for the broader study of consciousnessand the human mind are examined in the conclud-ing chapters. An extensive annotated bibliographyis included, providing short overviews of essen-tially all the important psychedelic literature todate.

The authors note that psychedelic drug researchand therapy was an enterprise of quite somesignificance and respectability for many years, andnowhere in the context of this work were goodreasons found to discontinue it or believe that thefield was somehow a dead end, or that it shouldbe abandoned for whatever reason. Not only thegeneral public, but a great majority of the scien-tific community today appear ignorant of thebreadth and importance of the psychedelic re-search already accomplished, and quite willing intheir ignorance to favour its continued prohibi-tion. In fact, the research was brought to a sud-den end by government fiat precisely at the pointwhere important breakthroughs were occurring.As a result of the forced abandonment of researchGrinspoon and Bakalar remark that,

There have been few serious attempts to maketheoretical sense of the full range of psychedelicexperiences in terms that do justice to the un-derstanding of those who undergo them. Psy-chologists and psychiatrists have chosen to

Re6iew / International Journal of Drug Policy 9 (1998) 373–380 375

ignore and dismiss most of this impressive clin-ical material, possibly because it seems so hardto incorporate into any acceptable theory of themind. But we should not treat an experience asmeaningless or demanding no explanation justbecause our present explanatory powers areinadequate to it. We ought to take these mat-ters more seriously and at least try to find waysof investigating them as we do more familiarand intellectually comfortable aspects of ourworld …. The present disreputable status ofpsychedelic drug research has been createdpartly by unwillingness to confront these phe-nomena intellectually and emotionally. This un-willingness not only obstructs advances in therelatively narrow field of psychopharmacology,but also limits the improvement of our generalunderstanding of human nature and experience.(pp. 155–156)

In contrast to the sometimes unrealistic enthusi-asm of early statements and reports about thedrugs, we can see here, and throughout the book,a maturing of view about the potential ofpsychedelic drugs and their uses. Yet this matureview reiterates, if in a more subdued and cautiousway, much of the original sentiment that therediscovery of psychedelic drugs might well turnout to be one of the most important developmentsof our time, as important as many of the greatdiscoveries punctuating the rise of modern civili-sation. While such a statement may seem to someyet another example of excess enthusiasm, thewealth of information about psychedelics and theexcellence of Grinspoon and Bakalar’s presenta-tion in this valuable book should convince manysceptics that the ‘scandal’ of psychedelic drugs isnot that they are popular and a common item ofillicit commerce, but that their proper scientificstudy has been made impossible for completelyunscientific reasons. The net result of their prohi-bition is that the substances seem to be availableeverywhere except where they should be, in theresearch institutions and hospitals as well as thepractices of qualified psychologists andpsychiatrists.

Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered succeeds ad-mirably in the task of its broad examination, and

the reader soon begins to suspect that the prohibi-tion of these drugs is really an attempt to kill themessenger rather than deal with the message thatwe receive, not from the drugs per se, but fromwithin ourselves both individually and collectivelyon the occasion of the re-experience of this pri-mordial influence on human consciousness. Thedistinction between what the drugs actually ‘do’to those undergoing the experience and what isinherent in altered states of consciousness no mat-ter what the cause, has been a matter of debateand confusion from the start. A significant part ofthe resistance to psychedelic use in research andtherapy stemmed from a misunderstanding ofcause and effect in relation to the content andsource of psychedelic experience, the paradigm ofmodern pharmacology insisting that a drug haveclearly defined effects on clearly defined aspects ofthe organism for it to be of clearly defined use.

The early researchers soon realised the limita-tions of trying to force psychedelic experience intothe Procrustean mould of simple cause and effectoffered by the modern life sciences. In the studyof human consciousness as in modern physics, theresearchers were finding that the classical lawsand boundaries tend to dissolve in apparent para-dox at the fringes of the known: In physics whenwe wish to understand the very small, the verylarge, the very rapid or distant, the very extremesof physical manifestation, we find that measure-ment and even causation itself depart radicallyfrom classical theory. The early psychedelic re-searchers were discovering analogous principles inthe case of the long-ignored fringes of humanconsciousness and employed the concept of setand setting to try to describe the observed non-specificity of effect of psychedelics and the corre-sponding broad range of possible therapeutic andexperimental uses being explored.

The concept of set and setting as the determi-nant of psychedelic experience was frequently mis-understood, however, even by some of thepsychedelic researchers. A merely superficial inter-pretation of the concept seems tautological, forwe might say that not only psychedelic experi-ences but the entire range of human awareness ishighly dependent on the setting, or environment,and the set, the expectations, prejudices, personal-


ity and general outlook of the experiencer. Forthe newcomer to the concept, the temptation toover-simplify is understandable, but he must re-alise that in any new area of understanding, espe-cially one involving a shift in paradigms as maybe the case here, close attention must be paid tothe deeper intended meanings of terms and con-cepts necessarily borrowed from the old paradigmfor use in the new, which of course must in thebeginning suffer from a lack of appropriate de-scriptive terminology.

In reading Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered, thereader should come away with a useful and cor-rect understanding of the set and setting conceptas it applies to psychedelic experience, yet if I maymake a criticism that does not indicate seriouserror but merely an oversight in the application ofthe set and setting concept, even these respectedauthors do not adhere to the full implications ofthe idea in some parts of the book. In chapter 3,Psychedelic Drugs in the Twentieth Century, wesee upon close scrutiny that the authors’ recount-ing occasionally fails to recognise that analogousto the understanding of the effect of psychedelicdrugs on an individual, we must also employ theconcept of set and setting on the collective level ofsociety to understand how psychedelic drugs haveaffected our times and modes of living andthinking.

In this chapter all of what the authors say isperfectly true in many important respects. In factit is one of the best overviews to date of thechanges brought about by the interaction of mod-ern mores and beliefs, and the psychedelic redis-covery. Yet if we shift our viewpoint slightly,taking into account the set and setting lessons wehave learned in the case of individual psychedelicexperience, we realise that psychedelic drugs dofar more to re6eal what is already latent not onlyin our individual minds, but in an importantsense, in history itself. Psychedelic drugs have notbeen rediscovered and then caused some alterationof the course of human events as a normal histor-ical analysis might wish to claim. We must asknot what these drugs do to us either individuallyor collectively, but what they show us aboutoursel6es. Just as it is futile to try to understandthese substances if we search for their precise

‘effects’ on us as individuals, we likewise will goastray in trying to understand how they haveaffected modern societies, as if the ‘effects’ weresomehow inbuilt into the drugs, alien or abnormalto human consciousness, part and parcel of thenature of the drugs rather than the nature ofourselves and our times.

Thus for example when we read the authors’analysis of the ‘hippie phenomenon’ in chapter 3of Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered, from the com-mon perspective of our established paradigm wewant to believe that the psychedelic drugs were aroot cause of observed events, and the authorsallow us to see it thus. If instead we see theinfluence of psychedelic experience as notcausative in the strict sense, but rather as revela-tory of innate human propensities and character-istics both individually and collectively, it shouldslowly dawn on us that the psychedelics aremerely holding a mirror to our modern times, nota distorting mirror but in an important sense oneof the more valuable and undistorted views avail-able to us. True, from our present perspective wehardly recognise ourselves in this strange appari-tion, but the universality of the psychedelic expe-rience and its intimate and constant connectionwith human development must show that ourunfamiliarity is itself a function not of thestrangeness of the drug experience but of thestrangeness of our times, our mores and beliefs,and the fragmentary nature of our perceived col-lective identity.

We tend to view ourselves as ‘modern andadvanced,’ after aeons of struggle and turmoil webelieve we have finally put behind us our primitiv-ity and ignorance, that we are no longer the slavesof ritual, superstition and blind instinct.... Buthumans have always believed such myths aboutthemselves, always perceived that they were ‘livingin modern times,’ and in this we are no differentthan the earliest of our ancestors. Thuspsychedelic experience may allow us to seethrough the illusion we constantly manufactureand instead of the modern use of psychedelicsseen as a collision or conflict between WesternCivilisation and ‘primitive practices,’ a disruptinginfluence come to disturb our confidence andpride in our achievements, we may instead under-


stand their collective influence as an indicator ofour identity and our place in the continuum ofhuman experience as we would understand it froma perspective above and beyond our own times, auniversal perspective available in the recent pastto only a few artists, poets, and mystics, but nowwith the potential to enter the mainstream ofcollective perception. This more universal viewthen puts a very different aspect on the currentdeprecatory judgement of what the ‘hippie genera-tion’ was about, for we see illustrated preciselywhat would be expected of a youthful if immatureand unprepared culture able to glimpse a widerview long unavailable to the establishment, buthaving to do so in the face of ignorant andforceful repression:

The hippie movement in its visions combined atheoretical benevolence and gentleness with aninterest in communitarian experiments. the oc-cult, magic, exotic ritual, and mysticism. Itborrowed its crazy-quilt of ideas from depthpsychology, oriental religion, anarchism, Amer-ican Indian lore, and the Romantic and Beatliterary current of inspired spontaneity. Middle-class young people, provided with a childhoodfree of the most obvious forms of coercion andmade self-conscious by the adolescent subcul-ture and the youth consumer market that sup-plied it, were unwilling to submit to what theysaw as the hypocrisies and rigidities demandedby adult jobs and roles, the unfreedom of adultlife....They rejected the accepted social defini-tions of reason, progress, knowledge, and evenreality; they proclaimed their abandonment ofthe egocentrism and compulsiveness of the tech-nological world view. American society wasseen as a dehumanizing, commercialized air-conditioned nightmare, meanly conformist inits manners and morals, hypocritical in its reli-gion, murderous and repressive in its poli-tics....Like the Huichols, they would returnthrough psychedelic drugs to a lost state ofinnocence, a time before time began when thecreation was fresh and the earth a paradise.They would turn away from the empty demo-cratic political forms of industrial society andorganize themselves into ‘tribes,’ imitating the

organic community of preliterate hunters andgatherers. (pp. 71–72)

This passage, along with much additional com-ment, thus has a double meaning: one derivedfrom the perspective that psychedelic drugs were acausative agent behind the hippie consciousness,in today’s common estimation a seducer of imma-ture minds leading to a rejection of modern cul-ture that simply had no justification, the othermeaning more difficult to understand because itbecomes clear only from the perspective of thenew paradigm. If the collective effect ofpsychedelic experiences on the younger and moreopen if immature strata of society of the time areseen as a cleansing or dissolving of the prejudicesand habits of thinking installed by the modernaffluent society of the 1950s, we can understandfar more deeply not only the motivations andexpressions of the hippie phenomenon but alsothe uptight reaction of establishment:

So some sensitive outsiders, like cultivated Ro-mans contemplating a Hellenistic sect, regardedthe whole phenomenon, even in its most exaltedand philosophical aspects, as a form of barbaricenmity to reason and civilization, a sometimessadly naive and confused, sometimes aggres-sively coarse and brutal mixture of fraud andfolly, a compound of collective eccentricity andpersonal aberration that could only be destruc-tive. (pp. 72–73)

But these ‘sensitive outsiders’ have it all wrong:The hippie ideal was certainly an immature ex-pression, but at root a natural and altogethervalid reaction to the reality of modern times. Thepsychedelics merely allowed this reaction to ex-press itself through the vehicle of a youth cultureprimed to see things in a new light. Thepsychedelics merely provided the catalyst that en-ergised the process. These ‘sensitive outsiders’take the scene (and themselves) not only ‘tooseriously’ and without the tolerance essential towisdom, but make the grave error of dismissingthe idea that there might even exist a serious,logical alternative that can be expressed collec-tively in response to the deep folly of moderntimes.


The perspective necessary for understanding thepsychedelic phenomenon both ancient and mod-ern is therefore quite a unique one, and it is alsoa fundamental one for in many ways we arebeginning anew the process by which ancient mancame to an understanding of the significance ofthe psychedelic experience and his place in cre-ation. We must view our modern rediscovery notas story of what psychedelic drugs ‘do’, but astory of how one particular phase in WesternCivilisation reacted to fundamental knowledgeabout itself – of how set and setting on thecollective level became the determinants of whatour newly researched collective reactions topsychedelics signified. We need to avoid collec-tively the same misperception the individualpsychedelic user makes when he describes hisexperience in terms of what the drug ‘did to him’rather than see that the experience is revealing tohim his essential nature.

It might be ventured that a rediscovery ofpsychedelic drugs by a more peaceful, balanced,and stable society than our own would have beenmore propitious and benign, and that it is likewiseunderstandable that psychedelics are accused ofcausing unnecessary turmoil in our own very de-structive and perhaps collectively psychotic civili-sation. If we recognise that psychedelic drugs wereinstrumental in shaping and guiding much ofmankind’s early development, however, if theyhave accompanied and perhaps directly anddeeply influenced our awakening and social evolu-tion, we may come to see that very possibly theymay be necessary agents for our continued devel-opment, even our ‘survival as a species,’ in thewords of Humphrey Osmond. Perhaps hu-mankind cannot hope to create a stable, sanesociety without the help of these substances, ifthey are indeed the catalyst to human conscious-ness in the first place. The present conjunction ofignorance and prohibition of psychedelics and thesorry state of our times may be no coincidence.

In the last chapter of the book, The Future ofPsychedelic Drug Research, we read a passageindicating that the authors are no strangers tosome of the viewpoints I have discussed above,

We know (or ought to know) that [psychedelicdrugs] are neither a menace to mental healthand civilized society nor the great liberatingforce of our time, the destined sacrament of theAquarian Age. We have a reasonably good ideaof their actual dangers and their prospects asexperimental and therapeutic tools. The troubleis that it seems impossible to restrict the subjectin this way; it touches too deeply on our funda-mental conception of ourselves. Just as theeffects of these complex drugs form an indissol-uble unity with the mind of the individual user,the social response to them is intimately boundup with a whole set of attitudes about every-thing from drugs-in-general to mysticism-in-general. (pp. 291–292)

This is perhaps one of the most rational, down-to-earth statements that has been published onthe subject in a long while, and the lack of suchstatements in the current drug policy debate asure sign both of the great irrationality of thetimes and the danger inherent in such periods ofturmoil. Nevertheless, the statement merelyscratches the surface of what needs to be said.

Surely psychedelic drugs are not the ‘liberatingforce of the Aquarian Age,’ for that kind of claimagain falls into the causation fallacy, and is amere parody and caricature of what thepsychedelic experts were saying before the ‘scan-dal’ of widespread clandestine use forced carica-ture into the public perception as a means ofcriticism and dismissal. But the quotation at thebeginning of this review was accompanied bymany more, from a great many sources whocannot so easily be disqualified as ‘New-AgeKooks.’ If one has the detachment to study theseearly views immunised from the ‘scandal’ of the‘turn on, tune in, drop out’ era, the predictions ofOsmond, Huxley, Gerald Heard, Alan Watts,Houston Smith, Walter Houston Clark, and alarge number of other extremely qualified expertslose none of their inherent wisdom, in fact, theybecome even more worthy of consideration.

What psychedelics show us collectively aboutourselves is that we have squandered the greatestof all opportunities. Just as the natural plantpsychedelics have catalysed and accompanied im-


portant evolutionary developments for mankindin the distant past, they have still an enormouspotential for helping to bring about further far-reaching benefits. Not in a year or two, of course!but rather in the long-run of many generations asthey ‘help us to explore and fathom our ownnature,’ in the words of Humphrey Osmond. I donot know of anyone who is personally acquaintedwith these archetypal states of consciousness whobelieves themselves capable of drawing the limitsof their importance or potential to assist eventualfar-reaching beneficial changes in society.Psychedelics do not correct behaviour, of course,nor will they act as a ‘medicament’ that will curesome malady or dysfunction even when the pa-tient is unconscious or indisposed, they are no‘cure’ for what ails the human race, no insurancethat the events of the 21st Century and beyondwill not be even more menacing and filled withatrocity than our own sad example of civilisationin the 20th. But psychedelics can and have histor-ically acted as a potent aid and illuminating win-dow to a larger consciousness potential in allhuman beings, but one which had no evolutionaryadvantage until the dawn of human existence.Thus this larger consciousness is not instinctuallyinherent in our makeup, we do not automaticallybring it to bear nor trust in it the way we instinc-tually trust fear or other evolution-installed statesof consciousness, but rather avoid it. The taskbefore us is to gain trust in the psychedelic experi-ence, to let the wider vision provided act as ourguide and teacher for overcoming primitive in-stincts that no longer serve our survival but actu-ally endanger it.

The reason the psychedelic drugs are not now‘working’ to bring about beneficial change is thatwe are collectively using them all wrong – insteadof creating a situation in which those interested touse them must incur risks and ostracism in noway connected with correct use but rather withtheir irrational prohibition, we should by nowhave structured our institutions to provide forthese persons. But look at the spectacle that hashappened instead! See what the presence ofpsychedelics in our midst has demonstrated aboutour culture and collective nature! It has been said

that if peaceful aliens from another planet landedon earth, we would most likely misunderstandtheir intentions, betray and destroy them longbefore learning of the reason for their visit. This isprecisely what has happened with psychedelicdrugs, for they are visitors from the ancient past,the equivalent of another universe of conscious-ness, returning with messages of peace and co-op-eration among men, and instead of hearing themout we have made war against them.

Man’s collective mind has a high degree ofviscosity and flows from one position to an-other with the reluctant deliberation of anebbing tide of sludge. But in a world of explo-sive population increase, of headlong techno-logical advance and of militant nationalism, thetime at our disposal is strictly limited. We mustdiscover, and discover very soon, new energysources for overcoming our society’s psycholog-ical inertia, better solvents for liquefying thesludgy stickiness of an anachronistic state ofmind. On the verbal level an education in thenature and limitations, the uses and abuses oflanguage; on the wordless level an education inmental silence and pure receptivity; and finally,through the use of harmless psychedelics, acourse of chemically triggered conversion expe-riences or ecstasies-these, I believe, will provideall the sources of mental energy, all the solventsof conceptual sludge, that an individual re-quires. With their aid, he should be able toadapt himself selectively to his culture, rejectingits evils, stupidities and irrelevancies, gratefullyaccepting all its treasures of accumulatedknowledge, of rationality, human-heartednessand practical wisdom.3 Aldous Huxley, 1963

Psychedelic drugs would indeed be, as Huxleysays in the above quotation, ‘harmless,’ if only wehad accepted them with the respect and reverentintentions they merit. What harm they may do isnot of their making but our own, a function ofour disrespect, mistrust, and essential paranoia

3 Culture and the Individual, ©1963 Aldous Huxley, origi-nally appeared in Playboy magazine.


about each other and about Nature: We assumefirst that the Universe is a hostile place needing tobe subjugated and conquered. We have certainlyfailed our acid test, and the penalty must surely bemore ominous than we can even imagine. Shall I

add, however, that there is still hope if only wewould reconsider?

Peter WebsterFrance

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Acid Test