COL49 LSD: Oscar Janiger

[jbor]

RIP Dr Oscar Janiger, who conducted a research study on the effects of LSD
on creativity from his Beverly Hills office during the period 1954-1962.

http://www.valleyadvocate.com/articles/lsd.html

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 Food and Drug Administration 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, 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.

[ ... ]

Oscar Janiger articles and interviews here:

http://www.cosmicbaseball.com/janiger01.html

http://www.maps.org/news-letters/v09n1/09105jan.html

http://www.maps.org/news-letters/v09n1/09107jan.html

http://www.levity.com/mavericks/janiger.htm

http://nepenthes.lycaeum.org/People/janiger.html

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