A Really Good Day

by Ayelet Waldman

  All joking aside, 1960s-era research, though inconclusive and anecdotal, did seem to indicate that psychedelic drugs can improve cognition and creativity. According to Fadiman, his study showed that, for his subjects, “in almost every case, new or unnoticed aspects of their problems opened up novel avenues toward solutions. Emotional residue from prior unsuccessful attempts no longer hindered their creative flexibility.” The question certainly bears further research, though as someone who came to this experience from a place of suffering, who has sought and failed to get help using established treatment models, and who, moreover, has little interest in the recreational use of drugs or even their performance-enhancing qualities, I hope that the therapeutic value of microdosing doesn’t get muffled beneath the desperate hysteria to work better, stronger, faster.

  * * *

  *1  Frustrated at never being able to figure out which silver Prius was mine, I put a second Obama sticker on the bumper, because having only one made it indistinguishable from the rest. I suppose, if I really wanted to make it easier to find, I’d slap a National Rifle Association sticker on it.

  *2  Interestingly, research shows that walking in nature, especially among tall trees, reduces anxiety and depression as effectively as SSRIs (Rachel Hine, Carly Wood, and Jo Barton, Ecominds: Effects on Mental Wellbeing, an Evaluation for Mind [London: Mind, 2013]). The Japanese even have a name for this: shinrin-yoku, or “forest bathing.” Their Ministry of Health encourages it as a stress reliever; to my knowledge, they’ve yet to weigh in on the added benefit of a tiny dose of a psychedelic drug.

  *3  In an odd coincidence, on the way home from Fadiman’s house, I just happened to be listening to an episode of a podcast called Reply All, in which a producer and one of the hosts attempted their own weeklong microdose experiment, with decidedly mixed results. They initially experienced some benefits, but soon became anxious and uncomfortable about keeping the protocol a secret from their colleagues. If my kids are suspicious of my newfound good spirits, I can only imagine how quickly grown podcast employees might catch on. One of the producers became more animated than normal, even hypomanic. He also managed, one day, to take a double dose, which meant he was out of the range of the sub-perceptual and into the perceptual. He did this on a day when he was taking a long and dull road trip. Set and setting, people—they’re everything when it comes to drug experimentation.

  *4  Of course, government approval and clinical supervision hardly guarantee safety, as we learned in January 2016, when one person died and five others were hospitalized during a clinical trial of a French pharmaceutical meant to treat anxiety, motor disorders, and chronic pain.

  *5  See, e.g., Robert Glatter, M.D., “LSD Microdosing: The New Job Enhancer in Silicon Valley and Beyond?”; Chris Gayomali, “Forget Coffee, Silicon Valley’s New Productivity Hack Is ‘Microdoses’ of LSD”; etc., etc., ad nauseam.

  *6  Andrew Leonard, “How LSD Microdosing Became the Hot New Business Trip.”

  *7  What some people call “nootropics.”

  Day 17

  Transition Day

  Physical Sensations: None.

  Mood: Contented.

  Conflict: None.

  Sleep: More than eight hours!

  Work: Productive.

  Pain: None!

  Today, when my husband was eating his breakfast, I walked up behind him, slipped my arms around his shoulders, kissed him, and said, “I know you love me.” And I left it at that. Even inside my mind.

  He pressed his head into my belly, and I felt his shoulders relax beneath my arms. This poor, patient man. I love him so much. And you know what? He really does love me. Of course he does. I’m not a terrible person who doesn’t deserve to be loved. I’m the woman who is crazy about him, who laughs at his jokes, even his puns, who delights in his company. More than that, I’m not actually unlovable. Sure, I’m volatile and mercurial, but I’m also fun. Yes, I’m occasionally bitchy, but I’m also sweet. I’m opinionated, but I’m willing to admit when I’m wrong. It is suddenly so obvious that what I need to do is just get out of my own way and enjoy my marriage and my life.

  My mood was so good today that I found myself able to approach with patience a book that I had up until now barely succeeded in paging through, let alone reading. Be Here Now—written, as the title page states, by “Dr. Richard Alpert, Ph.D., into Baba Ram Dass”—is printed primarily on butcher paper, with text that is not black but a pale blue that, depending on my mood, I find either insipid or soothing. One typical page is nothing more than a drawing of a mandala surrounded by the phrase “From Bindu to Ojas.” There are sketches of Indian gods and instructions to the reader that “The energy is the same thing as Cosmic Consciousness” or “Energy = Love = Awareness = Light = Wisdom = Beauty = Truth = Purity.” I have no idea what any of this means. When Ram Dass writes, “When I’m with the guru, there’s nobody home,” I can’t help sympathizing. When I am with this book, there’s nobody home. Until today.

  With my newfound equanimity, I find myself willing to entertain the possibility that the problem is not the book’s but mine. Be Here Now is considered one of the most influential volumes of psychedelic spiritual literature. Certainly, the first section, in which the author details his early research and experiences with LSD, is relevant to my project, if only because it describes an important moment in the history of the drug’s promulgation. Moreover, I am, like Richard Alpert, “a good, Jewish, middleclass, upwardly mobile, anxiety-ridden neurotic.” There are things I can learn from this book, if only I am able to stop rolling my eyes at lines about “the big ice cream cone in the sky” or how “if you are PURE SPIRIT you are not matter!”

  In the early 1960s, Ram Dass writes, his name was Richard Alpert and he was an assistant professor of social science at Harvard who had research contracts with Yale and Stanford. The invocation of these three most illustrious of institutions is meant, I know, to reassure and impress the most anxious of readers. Despite having gone to law school at Harvard,*1 and thus being fully cognizant of the essential similarity of the university to every other competitive institution, to my embarrassment I am in fact reassured and impressed. The mere fact that many of the early LSD pioneers in the United States attended or taught at Harvard establishes their credibility, doesn’t it?*2 At Harvard in the mid-1960s, Alpert teamed up with Timothy Leary, a clinical-psychology lecturer and expert in the field of the quantitative assessment of personality, with a Ph.D. from Berkeley, whom Alpert describes as having recently “been bicycling around Italy, bouncing checks.”*3 Leary, who had had a profound mystical experience while taking psilocybin in the form of what Alpert calls “Tionanactyl, the flesh of the Gods, the Magic Mushrooms of Mexico,” had set up the Harvard Psilocybin Project along with (among others) Aldous Huxley, who was then a visiting professor at MIT. In addition to studying psilocybin. Leary had acquired a quantity of LSD*4 and was, Alpert writes, “busy taking it and administering it.” Alpert eagerly joined in on both the self-experimentation and the research.

  Among Leary and Alpert’s research projects was the 1961 Concord Prison Experiment, designed to test the effects of psilocybin-assisted group therapy on rates of recidivism. They recruited a group of prisoners with three to five months remaining on their felony prison sentences, and administered the drug in three group-therapy situations, using standard personality tests before and after the therapy to assess the drug’s effects. Leary and his team took the drug themselves, along with their subjects, a common practice of theirs.

  Leary claimed that the therapy resulted in a marked decrease in subsequent incarcerations among treated prisoners; however, a thirty-four-year follow-up study by Rick Doblin, the founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), failed to find any long-term reduction in recidivism. Moreover, Doblin found Leary’s original report of the study to be rife with quantitative errors and erroneous conclusions.

  During the summer of 1961, Alpert and Lear
y spoke at an international psychiatry conference in Copenhagen. Their talk was not well received. Some critics called it little more than a muddled and incoherent tribute to psychedelic drugs. In the wake of that conference, a series of critical articles in The Harvard Crimson and the Boston Herald, a Hearst tabloid, led to an investigation by the Massachusetts Department of Health, which, though it didn’t shut the Harvard experiments down, did require that all drugs be administered by a qualified physician. Leary turned his supply of psilocybin over to the student health services (the same place where, thirty years later, I was to have my first, decidedly unpsychedelic, therapy appointment), but he continued to distribute LSD widely to willing volunteers.

  The year following the Copenhagen conference, Leary and Alpert supervised the Good Friday Experiment (also known as the Marsh Chapel Experiment), designed by a Harvard Ph.D. candidate in the history and philosophy of religion with a master’s from the Harvard Divinity School, Walter N. Pahnke. Meant to evaluate the effects of psilocybin on spiritual experience, the study was intended to be double-blind and controlled. Twenty divinity school students were matched in pairs for religious background and training, past religious experience, and general psychological health, among other factors. Ten were dosed with psilocybin; ten others swallowed capsules of niacin. Ten research assistants were meant to be sober providers of emotional support throughout the period of the test, but, over Pahnke’s objections, Leary insisted that they, too, be given psilocybin, albeit a half-dose. That was necessary, Leary claimed, to create a sense of community, but all it accomplished was a muddying of the results.

  The test subjects attended a Good Friday service led by a charismatic chaplain. Though observers were not informed which students were controls and which were not, all hope of double-blind neutrality quickly evaporated. The students who were given niacin got a little nauseated, and their faces turned red. The students who were given psilocybin wandered around the chapel talking to God. Many had transcendent mystical experiences that informed the rest of their lives. A long-term follow-up study, again by Rick Doblin, determined that “the experimental subjects unanimously described their Good Friday psilocybin experience as having had elements of a genuinely mystical nature and characterized it as one of the highpoints of their spiritual life.”

  Leary and Alpert ended up doing battle with the Harvard administration, which was fearful that the two were encouraging the use of “mind-distorting” drugs by students. This was, of course, exactly what they were doing. Leary and Alpert responded to their bosses that there was no evidence that psychedelic drugs were dangerous, that they were in fact “safe and beneficial.”*5 The administration was not persuaded. Leary eventually moved to California and was subsequently fired by Harvard for leaving his job without notice. Alpert was fired for distributing drugs to an undergraduate.

  Leary, never overly devoted to the conventional scientific method, eventually rejected clinical inquiry entirely. He became a celebrity and a proselytizer, with a devotion to the cause of spreading the use of psychedelics that can fairly be described as religious. He believed that the drugs could change the world. Those he “turned on” included the Beats, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and three heirs to the Mellon fortune, who provided Leary and Alpert with a mansion in Millbrook, New York, in which to continue spreading the gospel of LSD. Leary said, “We saw ourselves as anthropologists from the twenty-first century inhabiting a time module set somewhere in the dark ages of the 1960s. On this space module we were attempting to create a new paganism and a new dedication to life as art.” Hoo boy. Is it any surprise that the local assistant district attorney, a young man named G. Gordon Liddy, became obsessed with busting Leary and his pals?

  In addition to Leary and, to a lesser extent, Alpert, there were others responsible in large part for the wide dissemination of LSD beyond therapeutic, mystical, or research contexts. One, Owsley Stanley, is credited with being one of the first private individuals to synthesize the drug, with the help of a young UC Berkeley chemistry major named Melissa Cargill. Owsley produced hundreds of thousands of doses of the drug in 1965 alone. All of this production was, of course, legal: the drug had not yet been criminalized. One of Owsley’s customers was a young man who had been introduced to the drug in a CIA-funded drug trial at the Palo Alto Veterans Administration Hospital. Ken Kesey was neither a psychological researcher nor particularly mystically inclined. He was a novelist, the author of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and the leader of a group of acolytes and hangers-on who called themselves the “Merry Pranksters.” In 1964, when the publication of Kesey’s second book required him to be in New York City, he and his pranksters loaded themselves up onto a Day-Glo-painted school bus and made their way cross-country, tripping all the way.*6 Tom Wolfe’s book about the tour, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, is another classic of psychedelic literature.*7

  In 1965 and 1966, Kesey organized a series of bacchanals he called “Acid Tests,” featuring music (notably the Grateful Dead), strobe and black lights, and copious amounts of LSD. With these events, the use of psychedelics left the doctor’s office and research laboratory and spread widely through the community. At this point, the drug was still legal. In 1967, at the Human Be-In, a “Gathering of the Tribes” in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, Leary first exhorted the assembled crowds to “turn on, tune in, and drop out.” On that day, thirty thousand people tuned in to Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, and turned on by swallowing thousands of doses of white-lightning LSD that had been prepared for the occasion by Owsley Stanley.

  It was that exhortation—“Tune in, turn on, and drop out. Out of high school, junior executive, senior executive. And follow me!”*8—that caused the parental panic that led to Senate hearings on campus drug use. Poorly designed and ultimately debunked studies linking LSD to birth defects were trumpeted throughout the media, as were articles with headlines like “Strip Teasing Hippie Goes Wild in Larkspur on LSD.” Whereas the media had once published long interviews with, for example, Cary Grant on the personal insights and increased happiness he experienced as a result of LSD-based therapy, now Life magazine devoted a cover story to “The exploding threat of the mind drug that got out of control.” Significant fuel was added to the prohibitionist fire because, without adequate care to monitor set and setting in order to protect users, people began turning up in emergency rooms, seeking out medical care for “bad trips.” After hundreds, even thousands of panicked articles and television and radio news stories, the reputation of psychedelics was destroyed. In 1970, Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act, putting LSD, psilocybin, and other psychedelics on Schedule I, and launching the War on Drugs with a punitive ferocity that has only just recently begun to abate.

  Leary was eventually arrested crossing the border into Mexico. The charge? The possession of half an ounce of marijuana, found in a locket around his daughter’s neck.*9 While appeal of that case was pending, he was arrested again, also for marijuana possession, this time an even smaller amount. He did not, however, spend much time in prison. With the help of the Weather Underground, he escaped from the California Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo, and was smuggled to Algeria, where he came under the protection of Eldridge Cleaver. He then made his way circuitously to Kabul, but before he deplaned there he was arrested by an FBI agent. To mitigate his twenty-five-year sentence, Leary became a witness for the government in an investigation of the Weather Underground, though the information he provided was of very little value.

  Meanwhile, Alpert traveled to India, where he became a follower of the Hindu guru Neem Karoli Baba, who gave him his new name. Ram Dass, unlike Leary, did not devote himself to encouraging the widespread use of psychedelics. His focus turned to spirituality, though of course his interest in the latter stemmed in part from his experiences with the former. In 1971, Ram Dass published Be Here Now, the book that, despite my newfound patience, I am still finding impenetrable. It is at this point that the difference between the two men becomes most
striking. As my friend Ian Faloona, a climatologist and experienced meditator, put it to me, Leary and Ram Dass represent “a classic paradigm of two different paths to the ultimate reality. One gets bamboozled by the powers and tricks of the altered states, and one keeps in touch with his heart, exercising it with all his power, to go beyond the realm of smoke and phantasmagoria. As Rumi said, ‘Love is the astrolabe of the mysteries of God.’ ”

  On December 11, 1965, the day I celebrated my first birthday, one of Kesey’s Acid Test parties took place in Muir Beach, the bucolic town in which I am writing these very words. I wonder if the elderly couple from whom Ian and his wife bought the little homemade cottage they have lent me attended that Acid Test so many decades ago. If so, did they drink the spiked punch? Did they dance all night on the sand? And how did they make it up the steep stairs from the beach to their little shack clinging to the side of the hillside? I can barely manage it sober.

  I am so not “merry,” so opposed on principle to “pranksters.” Nothing in this world irritates me so much as a “free spirit.” I can’t abide when people shirk their responsibilities, when they act without contemplation of the consequences, when they prioritize fun and freedom above all else. Don’t even get me started on people who just won’t stay to their right while ascending and descending perilous public staircases. For a Jewish girl, I’m quite a puritan. Though I’m enough of a libertarian to believe people have the right to ingest whatever they want, in whatever asinine way they choose, I believe that it is best to experiment with psychedelics thoughtfully and carefully. I can’t think of anywhere I would have less liked to be than one of Kesey’s parties. And, yes, I know that, given the extent of my antipathy, it is more than a little ironic that I ended up doing my own private electric Kool-Aid acid test.