Episode 3 | 11m 46s | Video has closed captioning.
Today psychedelic drugs are back in the lab, providing hope for people who suffer from anxiety, depression, and even addiction. LSD has long been associated with 1960s counterculture. But long before it hit the streets, LSD was being studied as a treatment in psychiatry.
Aired: 10/14/19
Expires: 10/06/26
(dramatic music) - Tens of millions of Americans suffer from depression and anxiety.
And many don't respond to available treatments so finding new medications has become a priority.
But some of the drugs now showing promise aren't new at all and they come from surprising places.
- This year, the FDA approved a form of ketamine, also known as the club drug, Special K, for treatment resistant depression and then there's psilocybin, a psychedelic.
It's the active compound in magic mushrooms and the chemical cousin of LSD.
Medicine probably isn't the first thing that comes to mind when you think of psychedelics.
They're far better known for their place in 1960's counter culture.
(gentle music) When Sherry Marcy was diagnosed with stage three endometrial cancer, her life changed overnight.
- I had been an athlete all my life, so to suddenly have cancer was shocking.
I think I looked up from the phone call and said to Nancy, "I'm stunned."
- After Sherry's diagnosis, even prior to treatment, it was just like this doom had descended on her and then subsequently on us.
- It took away my whole identity.
I wasn't who I used to be.
And I wasn't the person that Nancy you know, formed a life with.
It felt like I sat on the couch and did nothing all day.
- [Female Host] Then Sherry read an article about a study for cancer patients struggling with depression.
They were given an unusual treatment, psilocybin, a chemical cousin of LSD with one important difference.
- It comes down to the spelling of psilocybin, it's a hard word to spell but at least it's not spelled L-S-D (laughing) which is a very strong word that people react to.
♪ Old child ♪ ♪ Young child ♪ - [Female Host] That reaction can be traced back to the 1960's when LSD burst onto the scene.
- CBS News, without any flowers in its hair, is in San Francisco because this city has gained the reputation of being the hippy capital of the world.
- [Female Host] It was January of 1967 and thousands of young people gathered in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park to celebrate a counter culture based on peace, love, and psychedelic drugs like LSD.
- It was political speakers, it was counter cultural speakers, it was rock music and yes, the LSD flowed like wine.
- [Female Host] A psychologist who had taught at Harvard, named Timothy Leary, praised the power of LSD, an increasingly popular mind altering drug.
- Turn on, tune in, drop out.
(clapping) - Timothy Leary had an insight that if you changed yourself, it would change the world and change the society.
- So people say, "What's the use of LSD?"
I translate that into, "What's the use of my head."
And that's a fascinating problem.
Suppose man can use more of his brain.
- People that took the drug felt if everybody can have this experience, the world would be a profoundly different place, a much better place.
And within months, this drug, this sensibility, this counter cultural revolution, if you want to call it that, attracted mass media from around the planet and that blew it up.
♪ Everything turned ♪ - The city of San Francisco has been warned of the hippy invasion come summer in numbers almost too staggering to comprehend.
- I think a lot of people intuited, in the establishment, that LSD was a direct threat to industriousness.
- I mean what, you want to drop out and not get a job?
You know, just go and live on the street in San Francisco?
I think this was seen as profoundly threatening to the social order.
- The kids who take LSD aren't gonna fight your wars, they're not going to join your corporations.
- Psychedelics are not growing, okay?
Psychedelics are dangerous.
- [Female Host] Former New York City police commissioner, Howard Safir was an undercover narcotics agent in the late 1960's.
- Back then, everybody felt of LSD was for hippies until suddenly kids who looked like they were straight, showed up in emergency rooms.
(sirens) - [Male Newscaster] There is a steady flow in the San Francisco hospitals of young people who have freed doubt and been picked up by the police in a state of desperate terror.
- I had seen people on the street who had no idea where they were.
I had arrested people on LSD who were incredibly violent so it wasn't the peaceful, non-harmful, easy drug that Timothy Leary professed it to be.
- Now there is nothing smart, there is nothing grown up or sophisticated in taking an LSD trip at all.
They're just being complete fools.
- [Female Host] Headlines warned of additional dangers.
- [Male Newscaster] Instant insanity.
- Chromosome damage.
- It may effect your unborn children.
- [Female Host] After Dianne Linkletter fell from a sixth story window in 1969, her father, TV personality Art Linkletter, blamed LSD.
- Anybody who has said anything which would encourage my daughter to take LSD was unwittingly a part of being her murderer.
- I think that raised public consciousness, probably as much as anything that happened in the '60s.
- President Nixon went to the Narcotics Bureau today to sign a drug bill.
- [Female Host] In 1970, the Controlled Substances Act made LSD a schedule one drug, the class of dangerous substances with high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use.
But it turns out that until that point, researchers had been testing the medical use of LSD in the lab with some promising early results.
- It was all legal in those days.
Nothing controversial about it at all.
- [Female Host] Bill Richards helped conduct scientific research with LSD and other psychedelics as a young researcher in the 1960's.
He says the early experiments in the 1950's were rudimentary.
- You'd simply be given a drug and see what happens.
- Do you find any difference between one half of your body as opposed to the other half?
- Well, I have a sort of a wavering tendency.
I don't know which half is trying to get into the other half but somehow or other, I seem to be going like that.
- Most people got mildly psychotic and the thought then was that it might help us understand schizophrenia or other severe forms of mental illness.
- [Female Host] The CIA investigated LSD as a potential truth serum and the army tested the effect LSD might have on soldiers in battle.
- [Male] After a few minutes, the men found it difficult to obey orders.
And soon the results were chaotic.
- [Female Host] Some early test subjects had bad reactions and some scientists began to use LSD in a more controlled manner as one step in an ongoing program of psychotherapy.
- There was a lot of excitement about the potential of psychedelics in treating alcoholism and then we moved into working with terminal cancer patients, treating anxiety and depression.
- [Male] I was taking head on the biggest thing that's bothered you.
- [Female Host] The LSD experience was closely monitored and guided with music and eye shades used to calm and reassure the patient.
- [Male Patient] At the end I felt a great weight had been taken off me.
- There was an incredible spirit of excitement, international conferences, papers published on LSD and psychotherapy.
- [Female Host] But as the 1960's progressed and as people like Timothy Leary spread LSD from the laboratory to the counter culture, the drug's potential for therapy was overshadowed by stories with dangerous street use.
- I'm a pretty black and white guy, there was never any float in my mind that there were positive uses for LSD.
I saw the results and the results were not pretty.
- [Female Host] And after LSD was declared a schedule one drug in 1970, funding and support for psychedelic research dried up.
- There's really no other example that I can think of in science where an entire area of research was put on the deep freeze for decades.
(gentle music) - [Female Host] Today, the psychedelic glow of the 1960's has faded and recreational use of LSD, which is still illegal, has fallen to low but steady levels.
But in the world of science, a new age is dawning again.
- Folks are studying a lot of things with psychedelics now.
- [Female Host] In recent years, several dozen academic studies have investigated the use of psychedelic drugs and therapy to treat problems ranging from addiction to treatment resistant depression and anxiety in cancer patients.
Sherry Marcy took part in one of them.
- There was sort of a ceremony about taking the pill and then I was there for six hours reacting to the pill.
And I process by talking so... (laughing) Something I really learned about myself then.
Because every now and then they would say, "Now why don't you stop talking and just feel."
(laughing) But what happened to me was that I ended up getting totally reconnected first to Nancy.
Nancy and I had a wonderful life together and it could go on and I hadn't known that before.
And then also my kids.
Getting reconnected to them so there was this family dynamic that just reformed and that was just great.
- She was just lighter.
Just immediately a difference.
And then we came home and it persisted.
- [Female Host] Today Sherry, who is now cancer free, says the psilocybin study helped her re-engage with life.
- It wasn't like it was psychedelic for me.
It just was me, back.
I don't know how it did that exactly.
Except to broaden out, you know.
It's like you lift up your head and you take a good, long look and you start seeing things again.
- [Female Host] Brain imaging studies have investigated the impact of psychedelics.
They found that both LSD and psilocybin foster connections between parts of the brain that normally work independently.
- It's an exciting area in neuroscience right now.
More and more groups are jumping in and it's only just begun.
But people should really be aware that there are potential dangers.
- [Female Host] Those dangers can range from a temporary bad reaction to the triggering or worsening of an underlying psychiatric condition.
So caution is a guiding principle in today's research.
But it turns out that not all of the claims made about LSD in the 1960's were true.
Studies have found little evidence that it damages chromosomes or causes birth defects.
And Dianne Linkletter's autopsy found no drugs in her system when she died.
On the other hand, Sherry Marcy says Timothy Leary didn't get it right either.
- I think the emphasis was wrong.
I mean, the turn on doesn't have to be emphasized at all.
The drop out is an absolute mistake but the tune in is crucial.
I tuned in, tuned into the world, to me, to things I used to love, to my relationships, to my family.
Tune in is what it's all about.
companion show
Retro Local is a companion initiative to Retro Report on PBS, highlighting local headlines and the historical seeds that were planted years ago in communities across the country.
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