(continued from part 2)

Soon after Janiger opened his office to experimental trippers, word of
mouth prompted an unending stream of volunteers. Many of those eagerly
rapping on Janiger's door had already read The Doors of Perception, which
dealt with Huxley's experiences with another hallucinogen, mescaline.
Others had fallen under the spell of acid proselyte Timothy Leary, who wa
s
rapidly becoming LSD's loudest and most reckless cheerleader, urging a ne
w
generation of hipsters to "turn on, tune in and drop out." Still other
seekers had picked up on the Beat poets' positive vibe about psychotropic
drugs. And the Hollywood grapevine had hipped the show-biz community to t
he
fact that Janiger's office was where it was at.

"It was a mystery to me how the word got around so fast," says Janiger.
"People were calling all the time. From everywhere. It spread
geometrically. People would tell their friends and then those friends wou
ld
tell their friends. Consequently, we got a good sample, and we chose peop
le
to fill out the demographic picture of our scheme. Still, it took a certa
in
kind of person, I imagine, to be curious or interested enough."

To be sure, Janiger wasn't the only researcher dispensing experimental ac
id
in the Los Angeles region. Some professional shrinks were already using L
SD
in their practices; Cary Grant took his first five dozen or so trips in t
he
offices of Drs. Arthur Chandler and Mortimer Hartmann. At UCLA,
psychiatrist Sydney Cohen was conducting his own LSD studies. It was Cohe
n
who turned on Henry Luce, the consummate Cold Warrior and president of
Time-Life. Cohen also gave LSD to Luce's gadabout wife, Claire Boothe Luc
e.
The Luces took half a dozen trips during the late 1950s and early 1960s,
and Henry claimed that on one such magical mystery tour he had chatted up
God on a golf course. Claire thought that LSD was well and good for the
elite, but definitely not indicated for the hoi polloi: "We wouldn't want
everyone doing too much of a good thing," she sniffed.

By the late 1950s, a salon of psychedelic dilettantes had sprung up aroun
d
Oscar Janiger. Everyone called him Oz, and as the custodian of this
fantastic and surreal drug, he was a bit of a wizard. Janiger referred to
the group, which met informally to talk about their acid experiences, as
the "consciousness clan." Among the regulars were British expatriates
Huxley, philosopher Gerald Heard and novelist Christopher Isherwood; Cohe
n
and other UCLA faculty members; Anais Nin, Alan Watts and the occasional
Hollywood celebrity. The evenings, Janiger says, were "rife with accounts
and stories of what this substance was doing and what it could do."

Southern California was rapidly becoming a locus of the psychedelic
movement, matched in energy only by academic enclaves in British Columbia
and along the East Coast, where Leary, with the backing of Billy Hitchcoc
k,
an adventurous heir of the Mellon fortune, had established a boisterous
colony of self-dosing higher-consciousness seekers at a posh New York
estate. Janiger kept a much lower profile, and worried - correctly, it
would turn out that Leary's brand of in-your-face publicity would spur th
e
government to move against LSD. Still, he welcomed a number of high-profi
le
personages into his hi-fi trip room.

James Coburn took 200 micrograms of LSD on December 10, 1959 - his first
trip. In his paperwork, he gave his reason for volunteering: "to gauge
present consciousness (where I am to where I can possibly go)." Now 69 an
d
still acting, Coburn looks back fondly on his session with Janiger. "It w
as
phenomenal," he says. "I loved it. LSD really woke me up to seeing the
world with a depth of objectivity. Even though it was a subjective
experience, it opened your mind to seeing things in new ways, in a new
depth." Coburn also credits his LSD session with helping him
occupationally. "One of the great things about LSD is that it does
stimulate your imagination. And it frees you from fears of certain kinds.
"

Another celeb who tried LSD as part of Janiger's experiment was a
25-year-old Jack Nicholson, who listed his occupation as "actor" and took
his first trip (a dose of 150 micrograms) in Janiger's office on May 29,
1962. Nicholson would later incorporate his experiences into his script f
or
The Trip, a 1967 low-budget film about an intense LSD session starring
Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, another volunteer in Janiger's study.

Hopper, Fonda and Nicholson would team up again in 1969 on Easy Rider, wi
th
Hopper directing. It became the seminal film in the "New Hollywood"
movement, which rejected traditional studio notions about content, style
and production in favor of the edgy visions of its auteurs. Obviously,
Hopper and company were channeling other, nonchemical, influences,
including the work of French New Wave directors, but Easy Rider's
then-revolutionary style - the jump cuts, time shifts, flash forwards,
flashbacks, jerky hand-held cameras, fractured narrative and improvised
acting - can also be seen as a cinematic translation of the psychedelic
experience. "LSD did create a frame of mind that fractured experience,"
says Peter Biskind, author of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998), which
chronicles the rise and fall of the drug-fueled New Hollywood. "And that
LSD experience had an effect on films like Easy Rider and [the
Nicholson-penned Monkees movie] Head, which are essentially experimental
movies."

"This is civilization," [my driver] remarks as we enter the Miracle Mile.
I
nod, laughing, muttering. "Idiots! Jesus! Shit!" It seems to me the stree
ts
are full of women - mainly ugly, middle-aged women carrying crumpled
shopping bags. "Look at them, hurrying to get across before the light
changes to green - don't they realize how unimportant that is?" Lots of
dummies in shop windows. I am struck by the similarity of the passersby a
nd
these dummies. "Really, there isn't much difference. In fact, these peopl
e
are all becoming dummies." Noticing more billboards, I elaborate. "These
little people erect dummies and huge images of themselves, which grin dow
n
at them and tell them to smoke cigarettes and drink drinks and eat foods
they are already eating. They erect these effigies of themselves to
reassure themselves they should do what they're already doing."
- -Author-screenwriter Gavin Lambert

Celebrities notwithstanding, the vast majority of Janiger's volunteers we
re
average citizens. Which has made tracking them down for the followup stud
y
a challenge - complicated by the fact that many have already died. With t
he
help of a private detective and lots of Internet searching, MAPS has to
date located and interviewed 40 of Janiger's original subjects who are
still living in the Los Angeles area. Janiger would like to double that
number before next fall.

According to Kate Chapman, the MAPS researcher who conducted the
interviews, most of the subjects "had a positive experience, with no
long-term harm." One exception was a man who had "a bad, bad, bad trip, a
nd
would even say that it was psychologically damaging." In his essay writte
n
shortly after his LSD session, says Chapman, this man described "an awful
account of how some intensely repressed psychosexual problems surfaced to
the conscious front under the influence."

"In a way," says Rick Doblin of MAPS, "you hope to find nobody like that,
but the fact that we did find something negative and are willing to repor
t
it will hopefully add credibility to the study. We're trying to develop
guidelines for future research, so what this tells us is that LSD shouldn
't
be given in research unless there is someone with therapeutic skill
present."

The volunteers I spoke to all had good things, or at least neutral things
,
to say about their LSD experiences. Zale Parry is a still-fetching
65-year-old woman who played a major role in L.A.'s early acid days. She
now lives in the San Fernando Valley, and jokes that her neighbors would
probably be shocked to learn that she was once something of an acid queen.
No doubt they would also be shocked to learn that the vibrant
impressionistic painting of a wild artichoke in bloom that hangs on the
wall above her sofa was rendered by one of Janiger's acid-tripping artist
s.

Parry's late husband, Parry Bivens, a pioneer scuba diver, inventor,
medical doctor, chemist and drug experimenter, is the man who introduced
Janiger to LSD, after obtaining a mail-order supply from Sandoz
Laboratories. According to his widow, he also had the distinction of bein
g
the first person on the West Coast to synthesize mescaline in a garage la
b
- - "It was pure satin," she says knowingly.

An accomplished pioneer diver in her own right, Parry graced the cover of
Sports Illustrated in 1955 and worked as an actress and underwater stunt
double in Hollywood, standing in for Sophia Loren and co-starring with
Lloyd Bridges in TV's Sea Hunt. She describes her two dozen acid sessions
of the mid-1950s as "happy trips - joyful." She credits LSD with helping
her to appreciate the intricacies and interconnectedness and beauty of li
fe
in the "underwater world." After her first several sessions, she became a
volunteer babysitter for Janiger's subjects. She hasn't taken any drugs
since then, and feels no need to try LSD again.

Sixty-nine-year-old Loring Ware says that his six to eight doses of LSD i
n
Janiger's office opened his eyes to "the world around me, but with some o
f
the veils taken away that I didn't even know were there." Before those
experiences, Ware was following what he felt to be an uninspiring career
path as a technical illustrator. "LSD made me less happy with my job," he
says. "I recognized the essential meaninglessness of my job." Subsequentl
y,
Ware switched careers and became a radio announcer. Though he hasn't had
much experience with other drugs - other than "a little pot in the 1960s"
-
he believes that LSD "should be incorporated into some kind of rite of
passage for young people, so they enter into adulthood with an
understanding of the broadness of life, instead of becoming little cogs i
n
a machine."

Ernest Pipes, 71, was one of eight Unitarian ministers who dropped acid i
n
Janiger's office one day in the late 1950s. Now retired and living in San
ta
Monica Canyon, not far from Janiger's house, Pipes says he was disappoint
ed
with his trip only because it was not a transcendent experience. "As it
turned out," he recalls, "each of us had a very different experience - so
me
went very deeply into a state of transcendent ecstasy, others did not. I
had an intensified aural and visual experience, but I was unable to
surrender fully to the effects of the drug in that setting." Pausing a
moment, he adds, "But I have always regretted that I was not transported
more effectively into altered states of consciousness, and thus enabled t
o
be in touch with other dimensions of reality."

Pipes and his colleagues had eagerly accepted Janiger's invitation to
participate in the study. "We, as clergy, knew that one's inner life can
be
altered through music and liturgy and devotional reading, a beautiful
sunset or a nature walk. So when it became possible for us to experiment,
we thought that professionally we were obliged to do it." Though Pipes ha
s
never tried other drugs, he says wistfully, "I've always wanted to try it
again. Wouldn't it be great, in the proper set and setting, to have an
inward journey?"

An inclination to "break wind" was inhibited by the fear that it might tu
rn
into a multi-dimensional faux pas, reverberating uncontrollably through
this Riemannian cosmos! -Philosopher Alan Watts

By the early 1960s, it was apparent that the era of inward journeys - or
at
least legal ones - was fast approaching an end. LSD had seeped into the
underground youth culture, and the forces of prohibition were already in
play. Long before LSD was outlawed, Sandoz, under international pressure,
cut off researchers' access to the drug.

And what of LSD's reputed perils? "A lot of the so-called dangers were
hyperbole exaggerated by the press and misunderstood by science," says
Ronald Siegel, who has studied psychopharmacological agents at UCLA for
nearly 30 years. The claim that LSD causes genetic damage, for one, turne
d
out to be inaccurate. "In fact," Siegel continues, "the drug does not
present a lot of toxic dangers to individuals, simply because the dose th
at
turns them on and the dose that kills them are so far apart. No one has
ever died from a direct toxic overdose of LSD.

"There are psychological problems for many people," Siegel says, "but by
and large LSD has been tolerated very well. And one of the examples of th
at
is the fact that more people are using LSD today in the United States tha
n
ever before in our history, and there are fewer problems than ever before
."

According to Janiger, researchers themselves are partly responsible for t
he
drug's fall from grace. "LSD didn't pan out as an acceptable therapeutic
drug for one reason," he says. "Researchers didn't realize the explosive
nature of the drug. You can't manipulate it as skillfully as you would
like. It's like atomic energy - it's relatively easy to make a bomb, but
much harder to safely drive an engine and make light. And with LSD, we
didn't have the chance to experiment and fully establish how to make it d
o
positive, useful things."

So acid has continued to hang in limbo. Says Siegel: "Because LSD carries
with it so much political baggage, it has become extremely difficult to
generate approval for new studies."

For researchers hoping to resume LSD studies with human subjects, progres
s
on the regulatory front has been excruciatingly slow. Since the early
1970s, only a dozen or so people have participated in FDA-sanctioned
studies, and those were continuations of projects approved before the ban.
Last year, Baltimore psychologist Richard Yensen was ready to administer
499 doses of LSD to down-and-out alcoholics and drug addicts in a
resumption of his work begun in the early '60s at the Maryland Psychiatri
c
Research Center. But early this year, the FDA put the study on "clinical
hold," demanding that Yensen revise his research and safety protocols.
Yensen says he has no idea why the FDA suddenly hit the brakes, but he
suspects that a recent Esquire magazine story publicizing his obscure
research spooked government regulators.

Other planned research projects with hallucinogens have hit similar
regulatory obstacles. For now, at least, says Siegel, "Psychedelics are
more useful as a basic research tool than as an applied medical tool. And
because of that, hallucinogens have very limited appeal to government
agencies to foster further research."

Some critics of psychedelic science argue that LSD's would-be
rehabilitators are really mounting a crypto-legalization campaign. Rick
Doblin of MAPS denies that charge, at least in the sense that he's lobbyi
ng
for LSD to be sold over the counter like cigarettes and alcohol. Yet he
asserts that "the ultimate goal is to have legal access to LSD, more like
ly
than not in specially licensed centers to specially licensed therapists."

Janiger also envisions a place for LSD in our culture. He would like to s
ee
studies of LSD and other psychedelics "become fair-minded and at parity
with other kinds of research," and the fruits of such research applied to
"acceptable social and medical uses." He cites the Eleusinian Mysteries o
f
ancient Greece as a model for LSD's potential place in our own society. F
or
nearly 2,000 years, the Greeks participated in an annual ritual in the ci
ty
of Eleusis, 22 kilometers west of Athens. In the secret ceremony,
participants from all walks of life (Plato and Aristophanes, as well as
slaves) imbibed a sacred drink called "kykeon" and then proceeded to
experience what one ancient author described as "ineffable visions" that
were "new, astonishing, inaccessible to rational cognition." Says Janiger
,
"Those who underwent the mysteries came out at the other side, the sages
tell us, as changed people who saw the world differently." In short, the
Golden Age of Greece may have also been a very psychedelic age.

If Janiger's own experiments in Los Angeles resembled a kind of modern-da
y
Eleusinian Mystery, that was no accident. "The discussions I had with
Huxley and Watts and the others in those early years," he says, "really
centered around the way our culture might institutionalize LSD, and it
would be very much like the Greek model."

Clearly, Janiger isn't advocating "legalization" in a simplistic sense. H
e
is talking about the kind of self-transformation that leads to larger
cultural transformations. And for that reason, his vision may ultimately
be
even more radical than the notion of over-the-counter psychedelics. But
what a long, strange trip it was for about 2,000 years in ancient Greece.
And what a short, strange trip it was for about a decade in Los Angeles.

MAPS is still searching for people who participated in Dr. Oscar Janiger'
s
LSD study. The MAPS contact number is (704) 334-1798. You can find more
information about MAPS on its Internet Web site, http://www.maps.org.

Copyright A9 1998, Los Angeles Weekly, Inc. All rights reserved.