Drug Trip

From BoingBoing here is a video from the this "research":

Here's some rare footage of an experimental LSD session that I came across doing research for my next book... It's from a television program, circa 1956, about mental health issues. The researcher, Dr. Sidney Cohen, was dosing volunteers at the Veteran's Administration Hospital in Los Angeles.

This was the "snake oil" that Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert of Harvard University were selling back in the mid-1960s. I remember that as a high school student in 1964 reading an article in Scientific America that talked about this "LSD research". This drug ruined so many lives. It gutted the anti-war movement as people decided to "tune in, turn on, and drop out". This drug passivity is what allowed Nixon to walk in and take over and turn the US on the right wing political path it has been ever since. The anger of the working class and middle class over youth throwing away their lives helped fuel a mindless lurch to the right as they tried to clamp down on the indiscretions of youth. The "war on drugs" didn't fix the problem.

You don't solve social problems by legal fiat. It requires a moral commitment on the part of the overwhelming majority to change the heart of a people. The anti-war violence of the late 1960s gave way to the apathy and bizarre drug cults and "self discovery" nonsense of the 1970s. Meanwhile the socially conservative movement got in lockstep and decided to deny modernity by harking back to fundamentalist Christian values. Their fear of change drove them into a fiercely held radical conservatism. Rather than constructively engage in a dialog about facing the future and making the necessary social adjustments to better deal with the future, these people simply rejected it. And so the "culture wars" started.

I have no love for the radical left. They were nuts. They embraced more causes than they had fingers and toes and made a mess of all of them. These people simple-mindedly embraced the outsider and the criminal. They willingly encouraged social dissolution.

I have no love for the radical right. They were fanatics who refused to confront reality. They wanted to press everybody into a cookie-cutter mold whether it fit or not. They had no empathy of the outsider or those who were "different".

Dealing with the real world is really rough. It takes courage. It takes patience. It take subtlty. And it take the long haul. It can't be done in a sound bite. It can't be done with political slogans. And it can't be force marched into existence. It has to come from the ground up. It has to come from people feeling in their guts a common bond and a need to come together to put the society on a sound foundation. In the US it happened in 1776 with a Declaration and in 1787 with a Constitution and in 1862 with a Proclamation and in 1941 with Four Freedoms.