(continued from part 1)

Lysergic acid diethylamide had been around since 1938, when Dr. Albert
Hofmann serendipitously formulated the first dose at Sandoz. Hofmann was
experimenting with derivatives of ergot, a rye fungus, in an attempt to
develop a circulatory stimulant. Instead, what he discovered in his 25th
attempt (the official name of the drug would become LSD-25) was a substance
of extremely peculiar qualities.

The story of the first acid trip ever is now famous: Hofmann unknowingly
absorbed the experimental compound through his fingers. "As I lay in a
dazed condition with eyes closed," he would recall, "there surged up from
me a succession of fantastic, rapidly changing imagery of a striking
reality and depth, alternating with a vivid, kaleidoscopic display of
colors." Two days later, Hofmann deliberately swallowed a miniscule 250
micrograms (a millionth of an ounce), which launched him on an even more
dramatic head trip. "I had great difficulty in speaking coherently," he'd
later say of that session. He managed to ride his bicycle home, but was
soon enduring the world's first bad trip, wondering if he was going insane:
"I thought I had died. My 'ego' was suspended somewhere in space, and I saw
my body lying dead on the sofa."

Hofmann survived the ordeal, and soon returned to the realm of pleasant
hallucinations. So began the era of academic experimentation with the
unusual compound.

By 1965, researchers had published more than 2,000 papers describing the
treatment of 30,000 to 40,000 patients with psychedelic drugs, including
mescaline and psilocybin, but mostly with LSD. Among the more stunning
results were studies in which LSD was given in high doses to children
suffering from schizophrenia and autism. One such study reported that for a
group of young autistic children with speech difficulties, "the
vocabularies of several of the children increased after LSD." What's more,
"several seemed to be attempting to form words or watched adults carefully
as they spoke; many seemed to comprehend speech for the first time." The
autistic children all "appeared flushed, bright-eyed and unusually
interested in the environment."

Even more dramatic were the successes during the 1950s and 1960s in
treating chronic alcoholics at Hollywood Hospital in British Columbia and
at Spring Grove State Hospital in Baltimore. After ingesting relatively
large doses of LSD (up to 800 micrograms, in some cases) and undergoing
directed therapy, about half of all patients "were able to remain sober or
to drink much less," according to pioneers Bernard Aaronson and Humphry
Osmond (who coined the word "psychedelic") in their book Psychedelics
(1970). Often after only one dose patients remained totally abstinent.
"This seems to be a universal statistic for LSD therapy," they reported.

Exactly how LSD worked for alcoholics, heroin addicts and schizophrenic
children remains something of a mystery. One school of thought advanced the
theory that a "peak" LSD experience can be as nerve-rattling as a case of
the delerium tremens, which many reformed alcoholics cite as the nadir
before they decided to stop boozing. Others noted that patients weren't
likely to experience a dramatic recovery unless the LSD experience was
guided by a skilled therapist.

In fact, to this day scientists know little about how LSD interacts with
the human brain on a neurological level. The ban on human research with LSD
is partly to blame. But beyond that, LSD operates in mysterious ways. The
drug remains in the brain for a relatively short period, disappearing at
about the time the mental light show begins. This short half-life of the
drug suggests that the hours of hallucinations and consciousness-warping
experienced by acid eaters is due not to the drug itself, but to some
little-understood neurochemical chain of events unleashed by LSD.

Research on animals has suggested that LSD stimulates the serotonin
receptors of the brain - the same neurological connections that Prozac and
other new antidepressant drugs zero in on. "Why a drug that stimulates a
serotonin receptor should effect changes in consciousness and perception is
the thing that we don't actually know," says David Nichols, founder of the
Heffter Research Institute, a nonprofit group that funds and conducts
clinical studies of psychedelic substances.

"One could look at LSD as having an action somewhat like an
antidepressant," says Richard Yensen, a pioneering LSD researcher and
psychologist who successfully treated alcoholics at the Maryland
Psychiatric Research Center, on the grounds of Spring Grove State Hospital.
But, he adds, "LSD belongs to a unique family of drugs that are first and
foremost sensitive to the way they are given. And the mechanism of cure has
not to do with whether the person got the drug or not, but with whether the
person had a transcendental experience with the drug."

After decades of experimentation - clinical and otherwise - it's clear that
LSD's effect on individuals varies hugely. A person's response depends not
only on his or her mental state or "set," but also on a multitude of other
factors, including the setting in which the drug is taken, the influence of
others in the room and even the prevailing cultural climate. For instance,
during the late 1960s, after the frenzy of hyperbolic media reports on the
dangers of LSD, the numbers of illegal users experiencing the proverbial
"bad trip" multiplied. Many observers suspected a direct relationship
between the upswing in "bummers" and the surge of acid scare stories. (The
fact that the doses available then were often more than twice as high as
today's street-grade hits may also account for the higher incidence of bad
trips.)

Undoubtedly, LSD's mercurial nature has a lot to do with why it became so
controversial so quickly, and why it was never fully accepted as a worthy
addition to the store of mainstream pharmacopoeia.

I thought I was the quickest the quickest the quickest mind alive and the
quickest with words but words cannot catch up with these changes, these
changes are beyond words, beyond words, beyond words. While I repeated
these words I felt the waves of pleasure like those of the most acute
pleasure of lovemaking . . . I felt the impossibility to tell the secret of
life because the secret of life was metamorphosis, transmutation, and it
happened too quickly, too subtly. -Anais Nin

"I never saw my work as being therapeutic," Janiger says, "but in the
course of the study we made some ancillary discoveries." One such discovery
involved a painfully shy firefighter. "Although he was a very pleasant,
intelligent man," says Janiger, "he was extremely shy and sort of a shut-in
personality. He could never mix with people because there was a terrible
barrier, an inhibition about being in spontaneous social gatherings."
Janiger gave the man "minimal doses" of LSD for a period of several months.
By the end of that period, "his personality had changed markedly." Says
Janiger, "He became very affable and quite a man of public affairs, going
out and talking to people." Even after he stopped taking LSD, he remained
extroverted.

Intrigued by the firefighter's transformation, Janiger sought out a pair of
identical twins to see if LSD might affect their personalities in different
ways. "After three years of looking," he says, "we found two 19-year-old
girls who dressed alike, went everywhere together, very closely identified.
One was engaged but didn't want to get married until the other one was
engaged." The young women agreed to participate, and they were taken to
separate rooms and given identical doses of LSD. Separated, "they had
totally different reactions," says Janiger, which seemed to confirm the
importance of set and setting on an individual's experience. "From that
point," says Janiger, "their lives parted dramatically. One got married and
moved away. I kept a correspondence with them, so I have a history of this
very interesting phenomenon."

Janiger also experimented with LSD's effects on pain dissociation, a common
symptom of mental illness. Would LSD produce in users a similar state? "We
did an experiment where a fellow had his tooth pulled while under LSD, but
without any other anesthetic," Janiger recalls. A dentist at UCLA pulled
the tooth and the subject didn't flinch, didn't protest, didn't so much as
blink. Then the dentist touched the exposed nerve ending, and still the
subject remained calm and conversant. According to Janiger, the
flabbergasted dentist exclaimed, "In all my years of dentistry, I've never
been able to touch a naked nerve without a person going to pieces."

"I had the choice of doing a lot of little experiments like that," says
Janiger. "I knew that the days of LSD research would eventually come to an
end. The burden of riches was so great, I wanted to open up as many new
possibilities as I could."

Perhaps the most interesting side experiment evolved from the fact that
Janiger's volunteers tended to reflect the cultural foment of Los Angeles.
After artists began to ask for drawing materials during their sessions, he
decided to launch a special study of LSD's influence on creativity. He gave
70 professional artists LSD and asked each of them to create two renderings
of a common reference object, a Hopi Indian kachina doll that he had in his
office. The first rendering would be done before taking LSD, the second
while under acid's influence. The results were dramatic.

"To the artist," says Janiger, "the drawings done under the influence of
LSD were very important. Who knows if they were better or worse? But I
couldn't deny the artists their own experience. They'd say, 'This is
something I've been trying to do for years, a way of looking at this
thing.' I said, 'I'm not gonna argue.' And there wasn't a single artist who
didn't think they had had some kind of revelation."

The very same kachina doll sits today on the mantle in Janiger's living
room, under a particularly stunning framed pair of before-and-after
renderings of it. Painted by Fortune illustrator Frank Murdoch, the picture
on the left is of draftsmanlike quality, a perfect "representational"
image. Its acid-inspired twin couldn't be more different - awhirl with
color and asplash with motion, its planes and curves lurching in multiple
directions. But it is recognizably the same kachina doll. And if anything,
its colors more accurately capture the doll's brilliant hues. (Janiger has
saved all the pieces from the study, consistently declining offers from the
artists to buy back their work. Several years ago, he mounted a successful
gallery exhibition of the acid art.)

The data from the art study are particularly rich, says Janiger. "It
remains for someone highly gifted as an artistic critic and interpreter to
take that material and develop a theory in terms of perception and the
creative and artistic processes. And that opens up the whole issue of
whether or not drugs fire up your imagination in terms of writing and
poetry."

After taking LSD at Janiger's office, the writer Anais Nin developed her
own theory about the drug's effect on the creative impulse. She later
incorporated her rough notes, which Janiger has saved in his plenary files,
into an essay included in The Diary of Anais Nin. "I could find
correlations [to the LSD imagery] all through my writing," she wrote, "find
the sources of the images in past dreams, in reading, in memories of
travel, in actual experience, such as the one I had once in Paris when I
was so exalted by life that I felt I was not touching the ground, I felt I
was sliding a few inches away from the sidewalk. Therefore, I felt, the
chemical did not reveal an unknown world. What it did was to shut out the
quotidian world as an interference and leave you alone with your dreams and
fantasies and memories. In this way it made it easier to gain access to the
subconscious life."

Though she never admitted it publicly, Nin's access to her inner life was
dramatically augmented by LSD. According to author and screenwriter Gavin
Lambert - who was referred to Janiger by Nin - she privately confessed that
her acid trip was traumatic. "For Anais," says Lambert, "it was a disaster.
On LSD the world seemed to her terrifying. This, to me, was extremely
interesting, because Anais Nin's life was a high-wire act of lies. She had
two husbands - was bigamously married - and neither of them knew about the
other. And I think that her whole high-wire act became very naked to her
under LSD, and she couldn't take it. She was a creature of such artifice,
and then suddenly the artifice was stripped away."

Many of Janiger's subjects were interested in using LSD to catalyze the
kind of mystical experience that Aldous Huxley, Hollywood's most famous
British literary expatriate, had written about in The Doors of Perception.
But as Janiger and so many others would discover, LSD was difficult to
control. At one point, Janiger invited a group of Unitarian ministers to
drop acid. Several were disappointed when the drug produced peculiar aural
and visual effects, but nothing of deeper spiritual significance.

In the wake of his first session with LSD in Janiger's office, philosopher
Alan Watts compared his trip somewhat unfavorably to the rare mystical
experiences he had undergone earlier in his life. Those events, which
weren't catalyzed by drugs, "just didn't feel like the LSD experience," he
wrote. "They were very much more convincing. They seemed to be more a
matter of insight than perception. They changed the meaning of experience
rather than experience, and although modification of pure meaning was so
much a part of LSD, it didn't happen in the same way. LSD seemed to
complicate meaning rather than simplify it. It gave the sense of
indescribable complexity rather than indescribable simplicity. For this
reason it did not seem to be a particularly liberating experience. It was
fascinating rather than illuminating, and felt more like the statement of a
complex problem than its solution."

I began to experience very strong feelings of sensuality in and around my
belly and the inside of my thighs. Needless to say, the feelings were
extremely pleasurable, but unlike the usual sexual excitement, I didn't
feel the need for gratification . . .

During this period, I decided that, since I was feeling so sensual, I
should fabricate sexual fantasies to synchronize with my feelings but was
not very successful. I tried to imagine "M" making love to me but that
seemed to put a damper on things, so, as a last resort, I tried to imagine
Doctor K. kissing my vagina and making love to it. He looked about one foot
tall and his body appeared to be in the form of a square with round
corners! . . . As he went to kiss me, his tongue started to grow until it
seemed to be eight feet long. I tried to stop this unpleasant image but
couldn't do so. -Rita Moreno