Harvard Psychedelic Club:
1956 Footage Of Housewife's Acid Trip
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/don-lattin/harvard-psychedelic-club-1950s_b_809392.html
Don Lattin
Posted: January 16, 2011
Here's some rare footage of an experimental LSD session that I came
across doing research for my next book, a group biography of British
writer Aldous Huxley, philosopher Gerald Heard, and Bill Wilson, the
co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. It's from a television program,
circa 1956, about mental health issues.
The researcher, Dr. Sidney Cohen, was dosing volunteers at the
Veteran's Administration Hospital in Los Angeles. Aldous Huxley, who
first tried mescaline in 1953 and wrote about it in his seminal book,
The Doors of Perception, got Gerald Heard interested in the spiritual
potential of psychedelic drugs.
Heard then turned on Bill Wilson, guiding him on an LSD trip
supervised by Dr. Cohen in the summer of 1956 -- perhaps in the same
room we see in this video. Wilson, who started AA in the 1930s,
thought LSD could help alcoholics have the "spiritual awakening" that
is such an important part of the twelve-step recovery program he popularized.
Heard and Huxley set the stage for better-known psychedelic research
of Timothy Leary, Richard "Ram Dass" Alpert, Huston Smith and Andrew
Weil, who are profiled in my 2010 book, The Harvard Psychedelic Club.
[See URL for video.]
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