THE TRIP

Cary Grant on Acid, and Other Stories from the LSD Studies of Dr. Oscar Janiger

One morning in April 1962, Cary Grant swallowed four tiny blue pills of
lysergic acid diethylamide - LSD. Incredibly, it was the 58-year-old
actor's 72nd acid trip under the supervision of a psychiatrist. Grant
relaxed on a plush couch and sipped coffee as the drug began to take
effect. During the five-hour session, his running commentary was captured
on a small tape recorder for later transcription:

"I was noting the growing intensity of light in the room," he recalled at
one point, "and at short intervals as I shut my eyes, visions appeared to
me. I seemed to be in a world of healthy, chubby little babies' legs and
diapers, and smeared blood, a sort of general menstrual activity taking
place. It did not repel me as such thoughts used to."

Hardly the suave repartee associated with the star of His Girl Friday and
North by Northwest. But as the aging movie idol had already stated in bold
public endorsements of the experimental drug, LSD had a way of stripping
away cultivated veneers and forcing one to confront unguarded, often
unpleasant, emotions. Grant was grateful for his LSD "therapy" - over the
course of a decade, he'd drop acid more than 100 times. Among other
benefits, he credited LSD with helping him control his drinking and come to
terms with unresolved conflicts about his parents.

"When I first began experimentation," he said on that sunny spring morning,
"the drug seemed to loosen deeper fears, as sleep does a nightmare. I had
horrifying experiences as participant and spectator, but, with each
session, became happier, both while experiencing the drug and in periods
between . . . I feel better and feel certain there is curative power in the
drug itself."

Grant was just one of hundreds of citizens in the Los Angeles region who
participated during the 1950s and early 1960s in unprecedented academic
studies of the then-novel pharmaceutical. In just a few short years, of
course, LSD would become a chemical taboo, the notorious "hippie
psychedelic" vilified by the media, criminalized in every state, classified
by the FDA as a Schedule I drug of no medical value and banned globally by
international treaty. But before most Americans had heard of lysergic acid
diethylamide, here in the shadow of the Hollywood Hills students,
professionals, clergymen, writers, artists and celebrities enthusiastically
turned on, tuned in and didn't drop out.

"It was a time in the world when scientific research with psychedelic drugs
was perfectly acceptable," recalls Dr. Oscar Janiger, the psychiatrist who
administered LSD to Cary Grant and more than 900 others in the longest
ongoing experiment with LSD on human subjects in a nonclinical environment.

Flash forward 35 years to a very different time in a very different world:
In many ways, science has finally caught up with LSD. Given recent advances
in our understanding of neurochemistry - the complex chemical pathways that
drive human thought, emotions and behavior - many researchers believe that
LSD could become a valuable tool in further unraveling the mysteries of the
human brain. What's more, they say, the drug's startling, if
underappreciated, efficacy in the treatment of alcoholism, drug addiction
and a whole range of psychiatric disorders begs for renewed research. Yet
after decades in legal limbo, LSD remains a sociopolitical pariah. Though
research on animals has continued, little more than a dozen human subjects
have participated in studies since the late '60s, and no new research has
been published since the early '70s.

Some of LSD's latter-day defenders now believe that for acid science to
move forward, acid must first be rehabilitated in the public mind. And
they're pinning their hopes on a new follow-up study of Janiger's classic
experiment, conducted between 1954 and 1962. By interviewing the people who
participated in the original study (many of whom are now in their 60s, 70s
and 80s), researchers hope to show that, by and large, few of the original
human guinea pigs suffered negative long-term effects as a result of their
LSD dosings. And - shocking as it may sound - many may have benefited from
the experience.

The prime force behind the follow-up study, to be completed later this
year, is the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS),
a nonprofit research and advocacy group that has lobbied the FDA to approve
medical studies of marijuana, MDMA and LSD. Funded via academic grants and
the support of its 1,600 members, who include a number of prominent
research scientists, the North Carolina-based organization describes its
purpose as "working to assist psychedelic researchers around the world [to]
design, obtain governmental approval, fund, conduct and report on
psychedelic research in humans."

"Janiger's study was crucially important," says Rick Doblin, a
Harvard-trained social scientist and founder of MAPS, "because it was work
trying to describe what LSD does in a neutral, noncontroversial context, in
relatively healthy nonpatients."

Other studies conducted worldwide before the ban tended to focus on the use
of LSD in treating disorders such as chronic alcoholism, sexual neuroses,
criminal psychopathology, phobias, depressive states and compulsive
syndromes. But Janiger's subjects were average, middle-to-upper-class,
healthy adults with no pre-existing mental or physical problems. As Doblin
puts it: "The subjects of Janiger's experiment break all the stereotypes
about LSD users, since they are now in their 60s or older and took LSD
before it was controversial. So the followup study is like a time capsule
back to an era before the drug war. And it gives us a view of what LSD
research could be again, if we can get past the biases and just see this
drug more unemotionally, as a tool."

Janiger's study is also a time capsule back to a unique moment in the
cultural history of Southern California. Long before the acid underground
surfaced in San Francisco as the vanguard of the hippie movement, Los
Angeles was an intellectual hub for psychedelic research, and its acid
salons drew adventurous celebrities from Anais Nin to Jack Nicholson,
Aldous Huxley to Andre Previn. Those were heady days . . . in more than one
sense. As Cary Grant rhapsodized about LSD's revolutionary potential that
spring morning in Janiger's office, everyone could benefit from a good
dosing. "Just a few healthy magnums of LSD in the Beverly Hills reservoir .
. ."

[The doctor] had suggested that I listen to some music while the drug was
still effective. I am a composer and pianist, and I have never before or
since been so strongly affected by music. I listened to recordings of some
Brahms, Mozart and Walton, and was moved to tears almost immediately . . .
I then played the piano for approximately 40 minutes. I felt that I played
extremely well and possibly with more musical insight than before. I played
among other things a Chopin Fantasia which I had not looked at since my
student days, and remembered it perfectly and without flaws. A few days
after the experiment I again attempted to play this piece and found that I
had retained it completely. I would sometime be interested in repeating the
experiment and recording some improvisations while under the influence of
the pills. -Andre Previn

When acid guru Timothy Leary first met Oscar Janiger in 1962, he described
his far less flamboyant colleague as a "powerhouse" of "solid athletic
build, gray hair, strong tanned face, merry eyes." That description more or
less holds true today, although age has inevitably softened the formerly
athletic build and given the dean of Los Angeles LSD research a certain
gnomish aspect. This afternoon he and his wife, Kathleen Delaney, are
lunching in their comfortable book-lined home in Santa Monica Canyon with a
clutch of Hollywood screenwriters who hope to parlay the social history of
LSD into a feature film. (In fact, the annals of acid contain all the
dramatic convolutions of a major Oliver Stone production, from
hallucinatory visions to throbbing acid rock to a surfeit of government
conspiracy, including the CIA's infamous and highly illegal attempts to use
LSD as a mind-control drug on unsuspecting U.S. citizens.) After dessert -
alas, no electric Kool-Aid, but rather a Trader Joe's lemon torte - the
Hollywood hopefuls take their leave, and Janiger retires to his study,
where he sketches the broad outlines of his famous research.

To ensure the comfort of his subjects during their LSD excursions, Janiger
had rented a small house in the mid-Wilshire district. In one room he set
up his regular psychiatric practice. In an adjacent room, furnished with a
couch, a bed and a swanky hi-fi system, he conducted his LSD study. In the
enclosed back yard, he installed a garden, to give his experimental
trippers a safe outdoor haven to explore.

"So many of the studies prior to mine were done in hospital rooms,
restricted environments," Janiger recalls, "and I thought that my study
might be benefited by a naturalistic environment."

Though Janiger held an associate professorship in the Psychology Department
at the California College of Medicine (later to become the University of
California at Irvine), he funded the study himself by charging a $20 fee
for the experience. Sandoz Laboratories, the Swiss pharmaceutical company
that "discovered" LSD, supplied the drug free of charge. In return, Janiger
agreed to keep Sandoz informed about the results of his experiments. Unlike
many other researchers and major universities, he never accepted funding -
covert or overt - from the CIA or the military.

Janiger's research would represent a significant departure from the
orthodox thinking about LSD. Up until then, most academics had classified
the drug as a "psychotomimetic" agent - a substance that produces a state
of temporary insanity; if LSD could create dissociative states that
mirrored schizophrenia, the thinking went, the drug was ideally suited to
the study of the chemical and biological causes of mental illness. The CIA
and the military had their own ideas about LSD: They hoped to exploit the
drug's disorienting effects for the purpose of nonlethal warfare.

"My goal was simply to find out what LSD does to people under uniform
conditions," Janiger says, especially how it changes perception and
personality. Over the course of a decade, he would also study a number of
related issues, including the drug's effect on artistic creativity -
incidentally, a subject explored by Janiger's cousin, the Beat poet Allen
Ginsberg.

Janiger's approach to LSD research was influenced by his own experience
with the drug. It was in early 1954 that he had first tried acid, procured
legally from Sandoz Laboratories by a friend. "That first experience shook
me up completely," Janiger recalls. "It was extraordinary - so powerful and
so interesting. I was of course struck by how LSD works to change your
reality around. From a psychiatric point of view, it was a marvelous
instrument to learn more about the mind."

Each of Janiger's volunteers was pre-screened for obvious mental or
physical disturbances. If they passed that initial test, they were given
LSD in the morning and allowed to do whatever they wanted for the rest of
the day - listen to music, walk in the garden, draw or paint, et cetera. A
designated "babysitter" was a constant but unobtrusive presence, there to
see to a subject's physical comfort. (It was sometimes necessary to remind
a subject to use the bathroom. Even urbane Cary Grant once defecated in his
pants during an LSD session.) Typically, the babysitter was also an acid
veteran who knew how to talk a disturbed subject down from a bad trip,
which was rarely necessary, according to Janiger.

At the end of the experience - and sometimes during - Janiger's subjects
were provided with a tape recorder or stenographer so that they could
record their impressions while the images were still fresh in their minds.
Later, they were asked to fill out a questionnaire that contained queries
such as "What single event or insight, if any, during the LSD experience
would you consider to have been of the greatest meaning to you?" and "What
changes, if any, have taken place in your sense of values . . . "

Janiger broke these reports down into a series of descriptive statements
about the experience. Those "descriptors" common to all of the subjects'
experiences, then, could be seen as defining the LSD state. "Processing
this data was laborious work," he says. "We had no computers."
Nevertheless, by the end of the study, Janiger was able to distill the
quintessential LSD experience: The drug altered the user's perception of
time; it came in waves; it made colors seem more intense; it induced the
sensation that all elements of the world were organically connected in some
way.

"That, to me, was a very nice piece of business," says Janiger, "because it
clarified a great many things in my own mind. I began to see what I think
is the core of the LSD experience - the state of the experience as opposed
to the content of the experience. Up until then, that distinction had never
been made with LSD. Some people said LSD was a religious experience, or a
birth experience. But that was the content of their experience. For others
it might not be either of those things."

I was opened up to the beauty in people who had never seemed beautiful
before. The next morning at the Pancake House, I walked up and bowed to
four nuns. I had never spoken to nuns before - I couldn't penetrate their
cloak of reverence. I walked up to them, and loved them, and they were sure
I owned the place, and gave me their orders for breakfast. When the waiter
came and I sat down at my table, it shook them. But I spoke to them again
and told them I saw them as Sisters of Beauty. They tittered and giggled
and blushed, well-pleased. -Beat comedian Lord Buckley