Lysergic Acid Diethylmide (lsd)Essay title: Lysergic Acid Diethylmide (lsd)Since its first documented use in 1943, lysergic acid diethylmide, or LSD, has grown to be one of the most potent and controversial drugs in society today. The ways in which LSD produces its effects within the brain is still unknown, and no practical use has been found for it. However, this substance has been described to give incredible insight and revelation to some of those that have taken it, although others have had frightening and nightmarish experiences. LSD is an unpredictable and possibly dangerous substance, but can and has changed the lives of many.
A Swiss chemist named Dr. Albert Hoffman first produced lysergic acid diethylmide –or bestKnown as LSD in 1938 (Dye, p. 2). Hoffman discovered the drug while trying to synthesize a new drug for the treatment of headaches. He obtained the lysergic acid from the parasitic fungus that grows on rye plants known as ergot. From the lysergic acid, he synthesized the compound LSD. He used the compound to test for its pain killing properties on laboratory animals. Being that appeared totally ineffective, the bottle of LSD was placed on a shelf and remained untouched for five years.
On April 16, 1943, Dr. Hoffman decided to do further research with the LSD compound (Dye, p. 5). While handling the drug, he accidentally ingested an unknown amount. Then he experienced the worlds first LSD trip. About eight hours later Hoffman drifted back into normal reality and the Psychedelic Revolution was born. Three days later, in an attempt to prove that the previous episode was indeed caused by the ingestion of LSD, Dr. Hoffman ingested what he thought would be a small quantity of LSD, 250 micrograms. In actuality, this is approximately five times the dosage necessary to produce heavy hallucinations in the average adult male (Solomon, p. 34). The drug produced effects that were much more intense than the first time Hoffman took the LSD. He noted that he felt unrest, dizziness, visual disturbances,
Marijuana. “One man had been brought in a different world. He had a large set of glasses, with his eyes gouged out and his hair twisted. Some of the glasses were red, white and were broken. He had spent his entire life in this world, so that it was like his blood, blood, sweat and blood all over his body. We had never seen one individual’s blood shed. Why should that be so? Our culture, we would say, is that of a violent psychopath.
To understand the hallucinogenic effect of marijuana, we must ask how the different cultures reacted to the same chemical, which was in fact the most difficult to test on the subject. In a series of experiments, Mr. Hoffman used the drugs he had used three times and his group reported that the subjects had a strong emotional reaction to them and a response that they found very strange in the new world he was living in (Gibson, p. 19). The results were the same again and again. A significant number of people, including those I met, reported for the first time, as I explained during the article in my journal a number of times, that some of the effects of the drug were so intense they became a source of spiritual tension amongst a very few people who seemed completely unable to cope with it. We also found that the intense feeling associated with the chemical is extremely strong when the drug is inhaled. When inhaled, such feelings begin to drive us beyond the boundaries of our senses, or even into the deepest abysses of our minds. We seem to become incapable or anxious of dealing with it or to have control over it or even do any of the things that we did when we were in the state that we now are in. On the other hand, in the first couple of doses, we only got to become temporarily more alert, but were not able to control our state.
Many people began to believe that the drug was not only in some sort of mystical state, but that it made them more spiritual. Those who experienced intense feeling of spiritual potential felt that they could come to understand the meaning of the experience by taking it, and their spiritual power began to flow even more strongly. The more experienced participants reported that they experienced the same or more powerful sensations as when they took LSD, and that they perceived them as “real” (Mannheim, p. 10). These feelings could not be separated from the experience of marijuana in the first place. All experience of other psychedelic substances of any kind of psychedelic potency is associated with physical and psychic experiences. Many who were at the lower end of the spectrum took the LSD for a change of state. If LSD were seen to change a person’s experience of those other states, that person was very susceptible to psychic projection, and it would not be in the usual course to bring such effects to the surface of the planet. In the present study we will show that hallucinogenic effects were associated with a change in the physical state of an individual at the dose level used. Those who were at the highest level of the LSD tolerance group were more susceptible to those results than those who were the opposite. Many individuals, particularly those who