YOUTH CULTURE PAVED A PSYCHEDELIC PATH

Series Of Films Playing At Pacific Cinematheque Takes A Trippy Step
Back In Time

When most people think about the 1960s, the cool places that come to
mind are neighbourhoods such as California's Berkeley and San
Francisco's Haight Ashbury and Kitsilano's West Fourth. But there was
a place a long, long way from the mainstream of everything that played
a key role in paving the psychedelic path followed by the youth
culture of the ' 60s.

The place was Saskatchewan Hospital in Weyburn.

This is no practical joke. From the early 1950s to 1961, the big
blocky institutionallooking hospital on the Prairies was the world's
centre for the investigation into the link between psychedelics,
especially LSD ( lysergic acid diethylamide), and schizophrenia.

Long before Timothy Leary coined the phrase " Turn on, tune in, drop
out," Humphrey Osmond was the head of a team doing cutting edge
research into the boundaries of human consciousness.

While mainstream psychiatry at the time believed schizophrenia was
entirely psychological in origin, Osmond promoted the radical idea
that it was caused by chemical imbalances in the brain -- by the body
creating its own hallucinogens.

By the time he arrived in Saskatchewan, Osmond, a British
psychiatrist, had already tried mescaline, believing it allowed him to
temporarily experience the world as a schizophrenic. Hired as the
hospital's superintendent in 1951, Osmond later hired psychiatrists
Abram Hoffer and Duncan Blewett, who gathered and tested hallucinogens
from around the world.

Osmond supplied writer Aldous Huxley with mescaline, a trip that led
to his book The Doors of Perception. In a poem explaining his
experience, Huxley wrote " To make this mundane world sublime take
half a gram of phanerothyme" ( phanerothyme is a synonym for a
hallucinogen). Osmond responded with " To fall in hell or soar
angelic, you'll need a pinch of psychedelic," coining the term
psychedelic ( soul-opening) and making himself forever linked to a
word that became synonymous with the 1960s.

Among Osmond's therapeutic discoveries was that LSD played a
significant role in helping people kick their alcohol abuse problems.
More importantly, Osmond and his researchers discovered that LSD
opened the doors of human perception and consciousness like nothing
else. It was said that one afternoon on LSD was better than 15 years
in therapy.

Although there were clear therapeutic and personal benefits to the
drug, society wasn't ready for a substance that broke down social
barriers and brought personal awareness and spiritual insight. As LSD
leaked out of the research labs and onto the tongues of the public,
the usual sources of

The Psychedelic Pioneers is one of many feature films and
documentaries being shown at Pacific Cinematheque during its Summer of
Love series, which starts Friday and runs until Aug. 16.

The Psychedelic Pioneers is being shown Wednesday, Aug. 8 at 7: 30 p.
m. It will be preceded by two shorts: Sal Mineo narrating LSD: Insight
or Insanity?, a scare film about the dangers of LSD, and LSD: The Trip
to Where?, which includes Leary talking about the difference between a
good and bad trip on acid.

Curated by Videomatica's Graham Peat and Jim Sinclair, with help from
Kier-la Janisse, the Summer of Love series includes many rarely seen
films such as The Trip, described as one of Hollywood's most accurate
portrayals of what it's like to take LSD, Psych- Out, set in Haight-
Ashbury and starring Susan Strasberg, Dean Stockwell, Jack Nicholson
and Bruce Dern, and Something's Happening a. k. a. Hippie Revolt, a
cinema verite look at youth culture in San Francisco and Los Angeles
in 1966- 67.

The focus shifts to B. C. for Stan Fox Presents:
Summer of Love: The Vancouver Scene on Thursday,
Aug. 16 at 7: 30 p. m. Fox, a former CBC producer
and director who recorded as much of the scene as
he could, will present a selection of rare
vintage films from the era that include What
Happened Last Summer, a CBC program about the
hippies in Kitsilano, and The Be- In, a
documentary about the March 26, 1967 happening in
Stanley Park. The Be- In captures the utterly
innocent charm of young people who truly wanted to change the world.

The 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love culminates with a street
festival on West Fourth Avenue on Saturday, Aug. 18.