A LONG, STRANGE TRIP FOR PSYCHEDELIC DRUGS

In the '60s, they helped the counterculture drop out. Now the FDA has tuned
in to approve two trials for therapeutic use.

When Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters made their storied journey across
America in 1964, they included a pilgrimage to Millbrook, N.Y., the Hudson
Valley town where Timothy Leary had turned a Victorian mansion into a lab
for his LSD experiments.

The meeting was supposed to join the two wings of the nascent drug culture:
Kesey's woolly West Coast hedonists and Leary's League of Spiritual
Discovery. But the vibe was all wrong.

The Pranksters, spilling from a 1939 bus labeled Furthur, came on like
unwashed trouble; the Leary crowd, with their meditation rooms and trip
diaries, seemed no fun. The diodes of the electric drug culture remained apart.

Kesey, who died Nov. 10 after surgery to treat liver cancer, might have
been amused by the latest twists in the long, strange legacy of the
psychedelic era. Talk about karma: Eight days before his death, the Food
and Drug Administration approved a pilot study of the drug ecstasy for
patients with post-traumatic stress disorder.

And FDA- approved trials of another psychedelic drug, psilocybin, as a
treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder, are scheduled to begin at the
University of Arizona in January. The studies mark the first therapeutic
trials of psychedelic drugs in the United States since the 1970s.

They also mark the passing of the torch from counterculture renegades like
Leary and Kesey to dutiful surfers of the bureaucracy like Dr. Rick Doblin,
president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a
nonprofit organization that conceived the two new studies.

The group is also involved in overseas studies of two other psychedelic
drugs, ibogaine and ketamine, to treat heroin addiction, depression and
anxiety.

Doblin, who holds a Ph.D. in public policy from Harvard, does not consider
himself a drum beater in a bus. "What's different between now and then is
that we're not self-selecting ourselves out as the counterculture," he
said. "Part of my mission is to bury the ghost of Timothy Leary."

This mild mission carries the psychedelic lamp a long way from Kesey, who
said the purpose of taking the drugs was "to learn the conditioned
responses of people and then to prank them." During the 1964 presidential
campaign, the Pranksters draped their bus in American flags and drove it
backwards through Phoenix, hometown of Barry Goldwater, waving a banner
that read, "A Vote For Barry Is a Vote For Fun." Instead of offering escape
from the dull workaday world, the drugs are now being tested as a means to
help people get back in. Yet Doblin, who said he has used ecstasy for
recreational as well as therapeutic purposes, has also confronted the
legacy of his forebears, and found much of it wanting.

In the 1980s, he followed up on two of Leary's Harvard studies with
psilocybin (conducted between 1961 and 1963, when it was still legal),
which claimed to show the drug produced religious experiences and reduced
criminal recidivism. Doblin found that Leary had either fudged the data or
buried evidence of a bad trip.

Kesey's own history illustrates how slippery and unpredictable the mantle
of the drug culture can be. In 1960, as a graduate student in Stanford
University's creative-writing program, he volunteered for government tests
of various "psychomimetic" drugs at a veterans hospital. The CIA and Army
were testing LSD for a variety of uses, including as a truth serum.

By the time Kesey got his doses, the agencies were starting to phase out
LSD in favor of more powerful hallucinogens, said Martin A. Lee, co-author
with Bruce Shlain of the 1985 book "Acid Dreams: The Complete Social
History of LSD -- The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond." Kesey had other plans
as well; he liked LSD so much in the lab, he brought it home for his friends.

The merry prank, launched with government acid, was on.

That was then. Psychedelia and alternative consciousness -- with or without
the bad clothes -- have long since seeped into the mainstream. Never mind
wresting the psychedelic experience from the counterculture; it already has
a booth at the mall.

Even so, today's researchers continue to face official resistance. The
National Institute on Drug Abuse, an office of the National Institutes of
Health, opposes medical testing of psychedelics, citing evidence that the
drugs can cause brain damage and memory loss. And even medical cover may
provide limited protection from the law. Doblin sees an opportunity in
these conflicting impulses. "They're saying medical issues should not be
resolved at the ballot box," he said. "I agree. But you can't on the one
hand block research and on the other say it's the only direction.

This resistance will have the unintended consequence of furthering research."