This Obscure 1960s Guide to LSD Holds Up

The 1960s psychedelic boom in the United States was driven by flamboyant characters. Countercultural icon and psychologist Timothy Leary, who coined the phrase, “Turn on, tune in, and drop out,” was fired from Harvard University for his controversial Psilocybin Project, where he used undergraduate students in off-campus psychedelic experiments. His co-conspirator Richard Alpert, who was also fired from Harvard, later became Ram Dass, the American spiritual teacher, psychologist, and author who helped to popularize yoga and Eastern spirituality in the West. But while people like Leary and Alpert were dominating the spotlight and rhapsodizing about transcendence and esoteric psychology, another scholar in Cambridge, MA, named Lisa Bieberman was quietly working in the shadows to try to make psychedelic experiences safe and accessible for first timers. Read more: “Turning the Psychedelic Experience into a Math Problem” In February 1967, Bieberman published Session Games People Play: A Manual for the Use of LSD. “This book then is no tourist’s guide through paradise,” she wrote, “but a down-to-earth discussion of the sorts of things that can go wrong in an LSD session and how to prevent them.” She was, essentially, a pioneer of what is today known as harm reduction, a public health strategy designed to minimize harm from substance use without requiring abstinence. A few years ago, Bieberman passed away, and a team of scientists decided to see whether her advice has stood the test of time. Recently they surveyed more than 500 psychedelic users and guides, most of whom (86 percent) had taken psychedelics in the past year. What they found is that the respondents generally agreed with 18 out of 19 individual items of advice proposed by Bieberman in her pamphlet. The scientists published their results in the journal Psychedelics.* I spoke with study author Daniel Kruger, psychedelic researcher at the University of Michigan, about why Bieberman deserves a revival and which pieces of advice from her guide were most widely supported in the psychedelic community. Kruger also talked about why it’s critical that the psychedelic community participate in shaping the future of psychedelic research. Who was Lisa Bieberman? She was a student at Radcliffe College, which was later integrated into Harvard University. She worked with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert and was even a manager for the International Foundation for Internal Freedom, which Leary, Alpert and Metzger set up. She was connected with them, but really departed from them in her practical, pragmatic orientation. You’ve surely heard about the antics of Leary and Richard Alpert, who later became Ram Das. You may have seen some of the books they wrote, such as The Psychedelic Experience, which was a manual based on a Western adaptation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead—not that straightforward. There’s a lot of material that, I argue, might make more sense after people have already had a psychedelic experience, such as, “Surrender to the void.” How do you do that? Or, “Just float, turn off your mind and flow downstream.” Lisa was a pioneer of what we call “harm reduction” or “risk reduction,” before there was even a name for it, because she wanted to give people useful practical advice about psychedelics at a time when they were breaking out of the laboratory and breaking out of the more regulated professional environments that they were in. There was a whole era of psychedelic research in the 1950s and the 1960s that had a lot of promising results for the treatment of people who had substance addictions like alcoholism and mental health issues. Then famously, on both coasts, the substances escaped from the labs and turned into this cultural phenomenon, in the Boston and Harvard area, in particular. And Lisa set up the psychedelic information center in Harvard Square, so people could be better informed about these really profoundly mind-altering substances. Why was she overlooked in the history of psychedelics? She wasn’t as flashy as people like Tim Leary. She was doing something useful and practical. She didn’t get up on stage herself. She was selling these informational pamphlets. That’s part of it. Had she been more outgoing and tried to get on stage, would people have taken her seriously? She didn’t have the credentials that Leary or Alpert had. Maybe that was another factor. And especially at the time, what she was doing might not have been that interesting to the broader media. Leary came out in that Playboy interview where he said psychedelics were the best aphrodisiac ever discovered. He had a way of staying in the news, being provocative and having a good sense for what will sell. What made you want to reconsider her advice for first-time psychedelic users now? I’m coming from the approach of risk reduction and bringing a holistic framework to cannabis and psychedelics. If the field of public health was really doing its job, what would they be doing to make sure that people who privately use psychedelics are protected, to keep people safe and minimize the risks and harms? We have the highest rates of psychedelic use probably ever in the United States: Some 11 million people used psychedelics in the past year. That’s quite a lot. Almost all these people are using psychedelics outside of regulated environments. There are legal pathways for psychedelic therapy in Oregon and Colorado, but 99.99 percent of people using psychedelics are not in those clinics, paying thousands of dollars for treatment sessions. How do we keep those people safe? How do we protect those people? So that is our mission, something we think should be done and hopefully will help people. Does this guide still circulate in an underground way among recreational users? It’s on the internet now. Lisa passed away a couple years ago. She didn’t seek fame or fortune, so she kind of disappeared from the scene. But then people who are into archiving—especially internet archiving—have put it online. You can search for it and you can find the text of the document online for free, which is fantastic. But I don’t know how many people know about it. You’d have to know about it to search for it. Maybe getting this article out will bring more attention to her and her work and validate the advice that she was giving over 50 years ago. You found that among the 600 or so psychedelic users you surveyed, some of her pieces of advice were more universally supported than others. One was “be with people who all know, like, and trust each other.” The other was, “be aware that even with a guide, you have to do most of the work yourself.” Those were statements that overall, people strongly agreed with. Also, during the psychedelic experience, “recognize the experience eventually will end.” And “recognize that you might experience anxiety, which doesn’t mean that something is wrong.” Also: “select a private location where you will not be disturbed.” In other words, don’t go into the world, especially if it’s your first experience. Don’t go out and try to interact with people who are not tripping. That might lead to complications and problems. Those five were ones that, on average, participants strongly agreed with. There was one out of the 19 pieces of advice that people didn’t agree with so much, right? Yeah: Avoid looking in the mirror. This is something that we saw a whole spectrum of beliefs about. On average, it kind of cancels out because there were a lot of people who said, “Oh yes, you know, you should look in the mirror because you’re peering into your soul.” In fact, this is something that Leary and his colleagues were recommending. It goes back to psychodynamic and earlier theories about psychology that were prevalent at the time. Bieberman had a more practical perspective: You might look in the mirror, and you could see yourself turning into a Halloween monster, and that might freak you out. Some of the risks of psychedelic use that you mention in the paper, such as psychosis, mania, suicidality, cardiovascular risk, are fairly serious. Do any of the 19 pieces of advice really address those risks or are they more aimed at having a more comfortable trip? These are all about behaviors and things that you can practically do. There is some evidence that people who might be genetically predisposed to psychosis or schizophrenia, if they take a mind-altering substance—even cannabis—it could trigger psychosis. But that’s not something you can change with preparation for a trip. And certainly in Bieberman’s time, there wasn’t that kind of genetic analysis to say, “Okay, yeah, you’re at risk for this, so you shouldn’t do this or you should do that.” Psychiatrist Stanislav Grof, pioneer of transpersonal psychology, might have originally come up with this notion of psychedelics as non-specific amplifiers, in the sense that they amplify everything and anything. On a normal day, you could be sitting there in your room and you’ve got this ray of sunshine on your face, but if you were taking psychedelics, you would see it as a thousand times more powerful and have deep interpretations about it. And that could be about anything, positive, negative. Knowing things like this could help prevent people from going into a spiral. Do you think there’s anything about Bieberman’s advice that might be wrong or outdated? The people we surveyed mostly agreed with her advice, other than the mirror issue. Out of the 19 points, people either somewhat or strongly agreed with 18. We didn’t put anything in there that she didn’t include. If you’re going to design a classic psychology study, you might actually put some bad advice in there, but we didn’t see anything that she specifically said that we thought, “Oh, no, you really shouldn’t do that.” But that just validates Bieberman’s mission of educating and informing people in a way that’s actually going to help them. So her advice aligns closely with current clinical practice and evidence? With current evidence, yeah. Clinical practice is an entirely different situation than naturalistic use. In clinical settings, psychedelic use happens in a very structured environment. It’s almost becoming a stereotype. You might have seen the picture from the classic MAPS MDMA study where there’s someone with eye shades lying on the couch, and there’s two people, a man and a woman, kneeling next to her, and this comfortable environment. That’s probably reasonably accurate in terms of what these psychedelic therapy settings look like. It’s very supervised, it’s very structured, very controlled, but that’s really not what’s happening in the real world 99.99 percent of the time. So this advice provides structure for all those other conditions. Is there any kind of scientific consensus about whether it is advisable to take psychedelic trips in big groups or go out into public while you’re tripping? I don’t think anybody has studied whether it’s a bad idea to go out in public. I wouldn’t recommend it, but there is actually great interest in the value of the group versus individual therapeutic settings, because the individual settings are just very expensive. And, of course, psychedelics are not covered by insurance yet. A course of psychedelic treatment in Oregon could cost $5,000 to $7,000 out of pocket. But psychedelic retreats happen in group settings, so maybe we could have psychedelic therapy as a group. It would still be in a very different context because it’s supervised, it’s structured. You might be in there with strangers, but if it’s done well, it’s not going to be the first time that you’ve met them. You’ll have preparatory sessions in advance and everybody would meet each other and at least have some idea of their background and their situation, their intentions. But that is seen as a potential way to make psychedelic therapy more financially accessible. If it’s done well, it will probably work out pretty well most of the time. Does Bieberman’s advice borrow from or line up with traditions of indigenous use of psychedelics? It’s really complicated. First, there are at least dozens of different indigenous psychedelic traditions. They vary considerably with each other, but as a whole they are quite different from both the current “Western” clinical therapeutic model as well as most of the naturalistic use in places like the United States. In many cultures, there is someone—a healer, medicine person—who takes psychedelics on behalf of other people. There are some cultures where people take psychedelics together, and these experiences have some interesting parallels. For example, Lisa’s advice to be with people who all know, like, and trust each other, to decide well in advance who is going to participate in the session, and to have someone who is experienced to guide you, generally align with practices in these communities, which are often small-scale societies where everyone knows each other. Her advice to “refresh in your mind the things that are dearest and most sacred to you,” “select a private location where you will not be disturbed,” and, “if with a group, stay together as a group,” also are consistent with practices in cultures that use psychedelics in groups. You write that with this study you wanted to give a voice to the psychedelic community so that they can help shape the future of psychedelic research. Why do you feel this is an important mission? We have another paper out where the psychedelic community has identified the priorities that they want to see for the future of psychedelic research. And in general, our work is collaborative with the psychedelic community, meaning that I work with people who are activists and therapists, whether underground or above ground, to do the research that people in the community think is important, and think will help people. We see that as a nice compliment. The clinical trials are an investment machine, with billions of dollars in resources, that will likely result in legal pharmaceutical psychedelics in the next few years approved by the FDA. The academic studies, the brain scans, those are flashy and they get attention. But like Bieberman, we see this need to give voice to the decades of knowledge and expertise from the community that’s underground or just isn’t out there because it’s been illegal. I like finding a consensus amongst over 500 people, most of whom do have some sort of expert role in psychedelics. I think it’s reassuring. * The team is collecting data for a next round of the survey project, which is open to anyone 18 years of age and older. This time around, participants don’t need to have any experience with psychedelics because they’re asking people about their perceptions of current psychedelic clinical trials. Enjoying Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter. Lead Image: Jlmrtz Photo / Shutterstock