LSD: A breakthrough, or an illusion?

In the 1960s, everyone took a trip on LSD, said Edward Rothstein in The New York Times. Even if you never actually “dropped acid,” you couldn’t help but fall under the hallucinogenic drug’s widespread influence. LSD, whose creator, Albert Hofmann, died last week at the age of 102, induces wondrous, sometimes terrifying visions that users claim have given them a new, and truer, view of reality. For several years, as artists, writers, and rock stars emerged from LSD trips with messianic fervor, the psychedelic counterculture was popular culture: “Typefaces ballooned and swooped, melting across posters and album jackets in drug-induced swoons. Lucy was in the sky with diamonds, the Byrds were eight miles high, the Magical Mystery Tour was overbooked.” But with Hofmann’s passing, people are asking, Did the LSD really produce a breakthrough in consciousness—or was it all an illusion?

Take it from me—it was no illusion, said Tim Lott in the London Independent. I took LSD but twice, many decades ago, but I’ve been inspired and haunted by those experiences ever since. Each trip—one beautiful, one utterly horrible—ripped the filter off my perceptions, and showed me that what I thought of as reality was merely a mental construct, limited by habit and conditioning. This “epiphany-in-a-pill” gave me a truly profound spiritual experience, showing me that the world is “bigger, richer, and, above all, stranger” than I had ever imagined. Sadly, pop culture reduced these insights into silly, Day-Glo art and psychedelic music, while frightened authorities outlawed LSD as a threat to the established order. Imagine how much we could have learned if mature adults had been free to tap the drug’s full potential.

I tried it, too, said Crispin Sartwell in The Philadelphia Inquirer, and found that its insights generally were gone the next day. I also knew people who saw their own deaths on trips, or a world full of agonized faces, and wound up in mental institutions with fried brains. For that reason, perhaps, LSD fell out of favor, said Meghan Daum in the Los Angeles Times. Only 3.5 percent of today’s college students have ever tried LSD. Twice as many have tried Ecstasy, which is so much more suited to the modern American lifestyle. It offers “a one-dimensional, blissfully brainless high”—no frightening journeys into alternate realities, just a pleasant new way of experiencing the life you already know. Come to think of it, that’s the same promise offered by Prozac. Americans, it seems, no longer want to expand their minds. They’d rather be comfortably numb.

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