MINDS TUNE IN TO NEW IDEAS

Psychedelic drugs did not only blow minds - it opened them to new
technological and biological ideas, writes Tony Johnston

THE rapid development of the modern computer age and the emergence of
genetic DNA mapping and splicing may owe a significant debt to
creative minds warped by psychedelic drugs.

The scenario is fuelled by revelations that many of the young computer
pioneers of California's Silicon Valley in the 1960s took LSD and
other mind-altering drugs to enhance abstract visualisation.

Bob Wallace, one of the founding members of world computer giant
Microsoft, admits he and many other computer people used drugs to
"open their minds to other possibilities".

Wallace says that, when miniature computer-chip development was in its
infancy, some designers found LSD enabled them to visualise minute
circuitry to the point of being able to almost "walk through it", or
witness electric charges crossing through switches. This allowed them
to correct design faults.

Dr Karl Mullins, the Nobel Prize winner for chemistry in 1993, has
revealed he tripped out to help him explore the abstract world of
genetics. He went on to invent PCRs, synthetic markers that allowed
scientists to map human DNA.

These admissions, contained in a television documentary screening on
Friday, come at a time when the US Food and Drug Administration begins
to ease a 30-year ban on scientific and medical experiments with LSD
and other psychedelic drugs.

It was the absence of strict guidelines in the 1960s that led to
widespread abuse of hallucinogens, scientifically and socially, and
the birth of the psychedelic age.

Among LSD's greatest advocates was Harvard academic Dr Timothy Leary,
who urged his students to adopt it as a way of life. He coined the
infamous phrase: "Turn On, Tune In and Drop Out."

Yet psychedelia also claimed some high-profile victims: Charles Manson
was deemed criminally psychotic because of chronic LSD abuse when he
and his followers committed the horrific murders of actor Sharon Tate
and three house guests in Beverly Hills in 1969.

In 1966, the US Government banned the production, sale and use of
psychedelic drugs.

FDA official Dr Curtis Wright admits: "In the '60s we were terrified
of these drugs. We didn't know what they do to people long-term, or
what they had done to people already.

In the documentary Psychedelic Science, London clinical psychiatrist
Dr Carl Jansen says he believes hallucinogens have a place in
legitimate science. He says they have the potential to "change the way
we see things".

"And the way in which they change (our perception) of the world is not
possible by any other method," he said.

LSD was discovered by Swiss scientists in the 1950s and was initially
used as a therapy for mental illness. They found it had the ability
to mimic the symptoms of schizophrenia, thus opening the condition to
possible controls.

Soon after, two Canadian psychiatrists, Dr Abram Hoffer and Dr
Humphrey Osmond, began using the drug to treat alcoholics. LSD
enabled them to create controllable "delirium tremens" that they hoped
would scare the subjects off alcohol.

In Prague, Dr Stanislav Grof applied the same techniques to heroin
addicts and found he could quickly rehabilitate at least a third of
his subjects.

"LSD provided a quick fix instead of years of psychotherapy," he
says.

"Here was a drug that got you into the deep sub-conscious quicker. It
allowed people to see themselves differently."

Word of these successes quickly spread on both sides of the Atlantic
and, with LSD produced in commercial quantities in Switzerland, the

drug was soon picked up by academics and artists.

Experts say psychedelic drugs, such as LSD, work by blocking selective
external messages to the human brain, forcing the mind to find ways to
will the vacuum. This results in parts of the brain that might not
normally talk to each other making contacts, often creating new
perspectives.

Dr Rick Strassman, of the University of British Columbia, has spent
two years convincing influential people, and eventually the FDA, to
allow him to use synthetic hallucinogen DMT in trials with alcoholics.

And Dr Deborah Mash, of the University of Miami, has won permission to
carry out similar research with cocaine addicts.

Says Dr Jansen: "The brain and the mind are the final frontier really, and
these are the tools to explore it."