colorless, tasteless.

It contains 100 gamma of LSD-25.

One tenth of a milligram.

The equivalent of one six hundredth of a grain.

An ounce of this material will make a 150,000 of such doses.

Let us observe the effect some three hours later.

Well, tell me.

I just couldn't, I couldn't possibly tell you.

It's here, can't you feel it?

This whole room.

Everything is in color

and I can feel the air

I can see it... I can see all the molecules.

I'm part of it... can't you see it?

I'm trying

Oh it's just like you are released

or you are free, or...

I don't know I can tell you...

I wish I could talk in technicolor or...

or let you see...

...can you....

did you say you can see it?

no I can't quite see it, tell me about it

It's...

I can't tell you about it.

If you can't see it then you'll just never know it.

I feel sorry for you

It's almost impossible of course, as all the patients fail to describe it.

You can only say it isn't it isn't it isn't...

trying to tell people what it is.

Well I mean there are the colors and the beauties, the designs

the beautiful ways things appear.

People themselves, dull people - that I thought dull,

appear fascinating, interesting, mysterious, wonderful.

But that's only the beginning.

Suddenly you notice

that there aren't these separations,

that we are not on a separate islands shouting across to somebody else

and trying to hear what they're saying and misunderstanding them.

You know, you use the word yourself:

"Empathy"

This thing is flowing underneath, we are parts of a single continent;

It meets underneath the water,

and with that goes such delight,

the sober certainty of waking bliss.

One of the questions was could psychedelics be used for non-mystical problem solving,

for scientific, hard-nosed, data-rich stuff.

And the answers that we had at that time was nobody had any idea.

So we took senior scientists

and said to them we will give you a Psychedelic session

and the price of admission is a problem that you have been working on for at least three months

and are frustrated about, and matters to you a lot.

Their problems ranged from abstract scientific equations

to practical architecture and furniture-designs.

We gave them the psychedelic, we gave them some hours to just relax and be with themselves

and then we got them up and said it's time to work on your problems, and they dove in.

I took a trip through architectural history

and visited and saw various cities and places.

Each subject claimed that with focus and guidance.

LSD allowed them to approach their problem with a fresh perspective.

Or in-stealth them with the freedom to explore ideas more openly.

the result...

Patents issued, products built, theories extended and improved, papers published,

and more importantly

for many weeks there-after, according to the scientists, their overall level of creativity was up.

Bio-geneticist Dr.Kary mullis had won the nobel prize for inventing PCR

a revolutionary technique for multiplying tiny amounts of DNA

for use in genetic research;

A creative breakthrough he claims came from Psychedelic drug use.

I don't do experiments often

what if I had not taken LSD ever

would I have still invented PCR?

I don't know, I doubt it. I seriously doubt it.

It's not that psychedelics manufacture wonderment

or they can automatically make us more imaginative beings

but what psychedelics do is pull us so radically out of our comfort-zones

they decondition our thinking;

They thrust us out of everything we thought we knew about the world

in order to see things things as if for the first time and form new synaptic connections.

They change our context.

That's why people take psychedelics and they say "take a trip"

"take a trip" well look at the physical equivalent of that

Taking a trip means physically go somewhere you've never been before where no one knows your name

see the world differently

and jump into a new culture

I think it has to do with

forcing yourself to gain different perspectives and how you see reality.

You know reality is made of language.

and, so how you map your reality really matters; the words you used to map you reality.

and so i think that what psychedelics do is, I think they are tools

that's what I think

which is very different from just fully advocating their use.

I think that they are tools, they need to be treated with respect.

In 1965 the US government began shutting down

scientific studies across the country.

Fadiman's was one of them.

In the middle of our seventh session

around literally noon,

a certified letter arrived from the federal government.

We opened it and it said as of the moment of reading this letter

your research is terminated.

The research is over.

I held this letter and I looked around the room knowing that in the other room

we had four scientists

in the midst of a Psychedelic session with major problems on their minds

and i said to the group

Within five years the US government classified it as a schedule one drug

declaring that it had no medical value.

Research hit a brick wall and stopped.

and so that was the last research for about forty years.

As many as you know, I'm a great fan

and spokesman for Psilocybin,

for the Mushrooms.

The mushrooms that i am so stoked on

were discovered in 1953 by Gordon and Valentina Wasson, in Wattala

discovered in 53

made absolutely schedule one illegal in 1966.

13 years

was the window

in which western civilization had to study this compound and figure out what it was for.

and they were just

beginning to focus upon it when it was made illegal

LSD discovered and 1937,

not brought into the scientific literature until 1948,

not generally available even in the laboratory until 1950,

made totally illegal in 1966.

16 year window.

Think about the fact that when LSD was was legal

psychiatrists, professional researchers, were consistently reporting

cures of chronic alcoholism

with one 500gamma dose

one dose;like a fifty percent cure rate without recidivism

for chronic alcoholism.

spectacular findings were being reported.

When LSD swept through the scientific community

for pharmacologist, psychotherapists, psychiatrists

it had the same kind of excitement and feeling of breakthrough

that the splitting of the atom had for the Physics community in the late thirties.

we've had ... a mind programming excise called The War On Drugs for the last forty years

which has been designed to create an internal enemy in our societies

and convince people that there are these evil wicked groups who are doing these terrible sinful things

smoking these doing this and that

and there is a very dark image has been created around it

and people get very upset, irrationally, about this whole issue.

and actually what's being forgotten in all of this

and for me it's become... I regard it as an extremely important issue

is that when the state sends us to prison

for essentially exploring our own consciousness

This is a grotesque abuse of human rights.

it's a fundamental wrong

If I as an adult, am not sovereign over my own consciousness, then I'm absolutely not sovereign over anything

I can't claim any kind of freedom at all.

And what has happened over the last forty-fifty years under the disguise of the War On Drugs

is that we have been persuaded to hand over the keys of our consciousness to the state.

The most precious, the most intimate, the most sapien part of ourselves

the state now has the keys

and further more

they have persuaded us that that's in our interest.

This is a very dangerous situation.

One of the things that always freaks me out is

the people's inability to even consider that there is a difference between a Psychedelic experience on drugs

and a drug that's going to ruin your life.

They are not even interested in considering that possiblity.

It's like the same thing, it's like someone resisting...

Definitely, and again, let's remember,

that funded with our money, our tax-payer's money,

there has been forty years of programming; more than forty years

there has been forty years of programming; more than forty years on this subject

to make us all develop a kind of aversion, fear, hatred, horror of drugs.