This 11-minute video shows students how LSD was once a legal and widely studied drug whose potential uses attracted the attention of psychiatrists, the C.I.A., and the U.S. military. After becoming intertwined with the youth culture of the 1960s, it was banned, and research was largely suspended. The video connects this past with an emerging future in which researchers are pioneering new ways to use hallucinogens in monitored clinical settings for patients with stubborn symptoms. Useful as a way of illustrating the controversies surrounding the classification of psychoactive drugs, the video fits in well with units focused on the biological bases of behavior and the physiological and psychological effects of drugs.
LSD Gets Another Look
LSD has long been associated with 1960s counterculture. Today, psychedelic drugs are back in the lab, providing hope for people who suffer from anxiety, depression and addiction.
In the 1960s, a psychologist and former Harvard teacher named Timothy Leary coined the phrase ‘Turn on. Tune in. Drop out.’ The slogan was inspired by advertising jingles, but Leary wasn’t pushing a product, he was promoting a drug: LSD.
LSD was little more than a scientific curiosity in the early 1960s when Leary first took it. Developed by a Swiss pharmaceutical company, the drug had been sent out into the world in the 1940’s and 50’s with no clear idea of what it might do. At first, researchers used LSD to mimic psychosis in an attempt to study the origins and nature of schizophrenia. It was also given surreptitiously to soldiers in the search for a military application. But the most promising use of LSD was as an aide in psychotherapy, particularly when aimed at problems like alcohol addiction or depression and anxiety in terminal cancer patients.
And then along came Timothy Leary. He had conducted research at Harvard with psilocybin, another psychedelic drug derived from mushrooms. But after trying LSD, he became convinced the drug had even greater potential beyond the scientific realm and began preaching that young people could change their lives with an LSD trip. Before long, as the drug grew more popular, the stories about the dangers of recreational street use grew and it was declared a schedule one drug – the class of highly dangerous drugs with high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use.
But today, scientists are studying psychedelics once again, in the latest twist in the long, strange story of LSD.
View full episodes at PBS.org/RetroReport.
Related: LSD-Like Drugs Are Out of the Haze and Back in the Labs by Clyde Haberman
- Lesson plan 1: Hallucinogens as Treatment?
- Read transcript
- Producer: Joshua Fisher
- Editor: Anne Checler
- Associate Producer: Victor Couto
- Reporter: Meral Agish