LSD and Psychedelic Drugs

Despite the draconian view that most contemporary societies have on mind-altering drugs, whether natural or synthetic, there has always been a religious undercurrent around the world that takes them seriously as a conduit to deep spiritual insight and encounters with the holy.

This is the religious - and highly ambiguous - legacy left by two LSD pioneers who died within the past two weeks. Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann - who discovered LSD in 1938 - died on April 29, at the age of 102; US psycho-pharmacologist Murray Jarvik - one of the first to study the drug's chemical properties and their mind-altering effects - passed away last Thursday.

Both experimented with the drug and vouched for its religious significance. Having lost or severed any connections with natural psychoactive plants, it is not surprising that it took a synthetic drug for the modern industrialised world to retrieve a psychoactive connection with the holy.

In her popular book A History of God, the historian of religion Karen Armstrong characterises a pivotal moment in the great religious transformation of the west as that in Judaism when the Jews and their prophets realised a growing unbridgeable chasm had arisen between an increasingly remote God and themselves. This experience of being forsaken was at the root of a predominately western religious view and would find its way into Christianity. It is, however, one that is totally foreign to native religions among indigenous people around the world. For them, the holy spirits are always close by.

For many natives, plants with psycho- active properties have always been associated with gods or special spirits. Communal rites and shamanism enable participants to take these psychoactive substances and communicate on intimate terms with these spiritual beings.

Centuries of western colonisation have wiped out most of these native communities and their religions, yet some survive on the fringes of modern societies. Today, an entire tourist industry, recounted by Daniel Pinchbeck in his 2002 book, Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism, ferries eager spiritual seekers from the developed world to such places.

The common effects of LSD, such as psychological insights into self, philosophical reflections and religious or spiritual sentiments, most closely resemble accounts of writers who have taken psychedelic plants in shamanistic practices.

Certainly, many serious writers and thinkers rallied around the synthetic drug LSD during the first decades following its synthesis by Hofmann. Sadly, western drug propaganda has come to equate these psychoactive substances with the same category of dangerous and highly addictive drugs such as heroin and cocaine.

The British novelist Aldous Huxley, the comparative religions writer Alan Watts, and Gordon Wasson, an investment banker and amateur ethnobotanist who studied psychedelic mushroom cults in Mexico and elsewhere, all favoured a 'shamanistic' approach. This meant the use of LSD should be guided by knowledgeable people with experience and wisdom. Certainly, the drug was not for recreation or 'tripping'.

Their idea was that only influential and 'important' people in business, government, academia, science and the arts should be given the drug with which to experiment. The drug's effects needed to be better understood before it could be passed on to the rest of society. The 1960s' flower children and western rock stars hijacked the drug, which was soon outlawed by governments. The drug slowly fell out of fashion, and has now been overtaken by party drugs.

The search for spiritual meaning by the use of psychoactive substances will always be riddled with danger, including society's prejudices. It is, therefore, remarkable that both Hofmann and Jarvik died as respected scientists and cult heros, not crackpots.