Drugs: The Pros & Cons of LSD

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"Endure Not to Know." If LSD is taken on three successive days, the subject builds up a tolerance for it and gets no effect from the normal safe dose, which is only 100 micrograms (1/300,000th of an ounce). After a few days, this wears off, and the same person can take LSD again. The drug is not addicting, though it may be habituating. A second experience is not likely to be a repeat of the first. A woman who had been preoccupied with external matters on her first dose decided, on the second, to look into her own soul. Typically, she became two people, but each was herself. One self asked: "What should be my relation to Ultimate Reality, to God?" And the second self answered: "Endure not to know."

To Psychiatrist Cohen, some of the most interesting questions about LSD involve its value as an aid to psychotherapy, especially in the treatment of alcoholics. The main advantage, Dr. Cohen believes, is that the patient becomes better able to accept what are normally painful insights into his own shortcomings. He can observe himself with detachment, and this speeds treatment. There are some patients, though, especially those on the borderline of a psychosis, for whom LSD is definitely dangerous.

Antics & Reaction. In the last few years, Dr. Cohen and other reputable researchers have been disturbed by what he calls the "beatnik microculture" and its abuses of LSD and other hallucinogens. The danger, he says, is that public reaction against oddball antics may set back serious research for many years.

It is tempting, he suggests, to say that one gets from the LSD encounter what one deserves, but he quotes Aquinas for a more accurate summation: "Quidquid recipietur secundum modum recipientis recipietur"—our nature determines what we receive. But mankind will not always know its present mental limits. "The mind's surmised and still unknown potential," says Dr. Cohen, "is our future. The experience called hallucinogenic will play a role in leading us into the future."