Bruce Eisner's Writings

LSD Purity -- From High Times 1977 -- Updated Graphics

LSD Purity - Cleanliness is next to godliness
From High Times, January 1977

By Bruce Eisner

In the late 1940s, psychologists began experimenting with LSD as a "psychotomimetic" drug - one that causes the taker temporarily to mime the condition of psychosis. Some experimental subjects, however, and eventually some modern mystics like Aldous Huxley, Allen Ginsberg, and Alan Watts discovered in LSD a shortcut to the ecstasy and egolessness of nirvana. LSD was recognized as the switch that turned on the clear light of the void.

Today's acid trip, however, is far more likely to resemble a live TV broadcast in runny color from the from seat of a roller coaster or a scene from The Exorcist. The decline in psychedelic quality over the years, which resembles the degeneration of Christianity and Russian Communism, has been a consequence of greed and opportunism on the part of manufactures and distributors. They offer to substitute immediate sensory gratifications for the original spiritual ideals. But the history of underground chemistry is also one of ingenuity and courage though influenced by haste and amateurishness. Its is the story of how LSD-25, the most powerful and spiritual molecule known to humanity became a "street drug."

Originally all LSD was made by Sandoz Pharmaceutical company, which had developed the chemical and hoped to market it commercially. It came in glass ampules filled with blue liquid, or small tablets in bottles with pharmaceutical labels specifying strength.

With underground LSD use came underground manufacture. The first recorded underground laboratory was set up by Bernard Roseman in 1962. Roseman, who now lives in seclusion in Oregon, was later arrested for allegedly attempting to smuggle 62,000 doses of LSD. In his LSD and the Age of the Mind, he has this account of the first manufacture of LSD of less than pharmaceutical quality:

I have already invested a year - on and off - and all the money I could save on this project, and I was at the point of admitting defeat. At this time, I was naturally reading everything I could lay my hands upon about ergot alkaloids. I stumbled upon a few articles that at first seemed quite unrelated to LSD, but they were logical and worth a try; because by comparison the process was exceedingly simple, compared to Hoffmann's monumental preparation.

I obtained new starting material and worked it up to the point I was sure was correct, where I had d-lysergic acid monohydrate, quite useless by itself but the prerequisite for making LSD-25 by any system. The rest of my ordered materials arrived and I was ready to proceed. After so many repeated failures, I couldn't accept the possibility that this few-day procedure would work.

I went ahead nevertheless, though pessimistically, so that my seemingly apparent failure would not bother me too much. I worked with extreme care, protecting anything from heat and light. At the last step, when I was recrystallizing the few grams I had obtained, I was filtering the crystals off by vacuum and using ether. When all the ether evaporated , the substance started to absorb moisture from the atmosphere and was turning black before my eyes. All my work was gone: I stood there shocked unable to move for a moment. My hands instinctively grabbed an alcohol bottle and I pored it over the black decomposed material hoping to salvage something. I separated it with water and disheartedly took the black mess home. All night I tossed and turned and dreamt horrible, unrelated dreams.

At the first crack of dawn, I jumped out of bed, grabbed the flask from the refrigerator, poured a teaspoonful and drank it down. I went back to bed and turned on Wagner's Parsifal. Minutes passed by and nothing seemed to happen. I had psychologically prepared myself for failure, so I just closed my eyes and lay back an listened to the wonderful sounds of Wagner. In my concentration, I failed to notice that the music was getting slowly louder and instead of just my ears hearing, all my senses seemed to encompass the sound., and instead of hearing the music - I was the music!

Beautiful, soft colors emerged and exploded as climates of tone were achieved. An immediate understanding of the composer's intentions was revealed to me; I was being taken on a heavenly excursion into the world of pure sound and emotion. All at once, I sprang up with joy. I was in the state of LSD - my own LSD which I had made. I was deliriously happy and proud of my success.

LSD is a translucent crystal; this was a black mess. Thus, the first underground LSD was also the first impure batch, and its distribution may, somewhere, have incurred the first unfavorable consumer reaction.

By 1965, use had increased sharply. Most acid at this time came in sugar cubes dropped with liquid Sandoz or some type of underground LSD. What percentage of the material was Sandoz is left to future determination. Augustus Stanley Owsley III, unable to obtain any pharmaceutical LSD, began to manufacture his own - first in Los Angeles in '65, then in nearby Point Richmond in '66.

Owsley's fellow alchemist, Tim Scully, admitted to me that the 1965 batch was impure, but claims that Owsley and he perfected a purification process in 1966. Many who used both Sandoz and Owsley - the latter came in tablets of purple (Purple Haze) and white (White Lightning) of 270 micrograms - say that Owsley acid was less mystical and had more stimulant side reactions than the Sandoz product.

Timothy Leary, who realized that impurities were a threat to the spreading psychedelic revolution, uttered prophetic words of warning at a Senate committee hearing in 1966, in exchange with Teddy Kennedy:

Senator Kennedy of Massachusetts: "What is it in the quality that you are frightened about?"

Dr. Leary: "We do not want amateur or black-market sale or distribution of LSD."

Senator Kennedy: "Why not?"

Dr. Leary: "Or the barbiturates or liquor. When you buy a bottle of liquor-"

Senator Kennedy: "This is not responsive. As to LSD, why do you not want it?"

Dr. Leary: "On possession?"

Senator Kennedy: "Why do you not want the indiscriminate manufacture and distribution? Is it because it is dangerous?"

Dr. Leary: "Because you do not know what you are getting..."

Despite Leary's warning, LSD was made illegal on October 16, 1966.

Owsley acid was the first large-scale commercialization of LSD. There were other smaller LSD laboratories before Owsley, and there were scores of laboratories that put out LSD at the same time that Owsley did. Some were making LSD of a purer form; the majority made it much worse.

After Owsley was arrested in 1967 at his tabbing facility at Orinda, California, his protege Scully set up a laboratory with Nicholas Sand, another alchemist long involved in the psychedelic scene. They manufactured a quantity of ALD-52 - a cousin to LSD, which they called Sunshine - in large crumbly orange tablets of 270 micrograms or so.

In the spring of 1969, Ron Stark, then a chemist with a European LSD factory and now a fugitive, allegedly began supplying underground acid to the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Since the Brotherhood was also, by this time, distributing ALD-52, and since both drugs were tabbed into identical pills (except for a few early blue tablets of ALD-52), many people didn't realize that there was more than one kind of Sunshine. Many counterfeit versions soon appeared on the market, most of which were impure, according to Scully.

Sand and Scully ceased manufacturing, but Stark went on to produce over 10 kilograms (over 35 million doses in crystal form) of what became the famous Orange Sunshine - the last of which actually appeared in large red and green tablets called "Christmas Acid."

With the Sunshine boom came increased reports of side effects. In addition to stimulant reactions and symptoms akin to those of strychnine poisoning being reported, there seemed to be something missing in the spiritual dimensions of this new underground acid. Michael Hollinshead, who gave Leary his first taste of acid in 1960, later wrote in The Man Who Turned on the World:

There was now (1968) little good acid around, and what there was - the so-called "street acid" - came mainly from California. There was something wrong with the synthesis; it was not pure. And you were never sure what it was exactly that you were taking, so I only dropped it on those rare occasions when someone gave me "Sandoz" or "crystal" acid...

My evaluation had nothing to do with the notion that a wholly synthetic drug produced a wholly synthetic experience - the intellectual response - but was based on direct, first-hand experience (about 30 trips with street acid in all). And in each session I felt that there was something it lacked - it was too "electric," too "speedy" and too "mind-shattering." The earlier clarity of "insight" which I had obtained via the Sandoz acid was replaced by confusion, brokenness, words and worlds thrown into absolute dismemberment, or even absolute chaos, though, I must add, often coupled with a feeling that I can only describe as "sublime inflation," a super abundance of emotive energy, but it could not signify more a passionate flame and less the life-giving sun.

At Woodstock, Hugh Romney (a/k/a "Wavy Gravy") of the Hog Farm announced to the crowd, "There's no such thing as bad acid, just acid that's made wrong." In 1969, LSD began to appear in microdots, and in 1971, on gelatin sheets of various shapes - dubbed "windowpane." The strength of individual doses swiftly decreased, and so did the purity of the average street dose.

In a correspondence with City magazine in July 1975, Timothy Leary wrote: "After 1966, my lectures and writings were mainly concerned with a general theory of psychological and political relativity and made little mention of lysergic acid, which in truth, had been driven completely off the scene by Owsley speed, orange amphetamine, and the more commercially and socially acceptable cocaine-heroin trade."

In Timothy Leary at Folsom Prison, a filmed dialog made for television but never broadcast, he amplifies: "I don't particularly recommend you take LSD. First of all, 99 percent of what they say about it isn't true." Ken Kesey also had occasion to reflect back on the acid scene in his recent book Garage Sale: "I can't really recommend acid, because acid has become an almost meaningless chemical. I mean, the first acid I took was Sandoz, given me by the federal government in a series of experiments (what now, Uncle? Don't give me that anti-American drug field bullshit: you turned me on ...!) and it was beautiful.

"With perhaps the exception of Owsley's work, every bootleg batch I've tried from then on down has been interesting, enlightening, agonizing, bizarre, etc., but never anything as pure."

Many other early trippers, including Alan Harrington (author of Psychopaths), Dr. Stanley Krippner (former head of Brooklyn's Maimonides Hospital Dream Lab) and Adam Smith (author of Powers of Mind in addition to his Wall Street best sellers), have also noted the decline in psychedelic use and linked it with the purity crisis.

An LSD experience is a complex interaction of five influential factors: set, setting, guide (fellow tripper), purity, and dosage level.

Set refers to the psychological makeup of the LSD tripper, both long term (genetic inheritance and childhood conditioning) and short term (expectations about the LSD experience and how the person feels that morning).

Setting refers to the environment of the trip - indoors or outdoors, "informal suburban house," "formal hospital room," or "windy beach at sunrise."

Set, setting and guide form the fabric of the trip. But before these influences can come into play, alteration in consciousness must occur. Thus, the nature of the biochemical used, its purity and its dosage level are most central in determining the course the session will take.

In its pure form, LSD (d-lysergic acid diethyl amide) is an odorless, colorless, and either tart-tasting (if in the tartrate form) or tasteless crystal substance. The major pharmaceutical company manufacturing pure LSD, for research purposes, is the Spofa United Pharmaceutical Works in Prague, Czechoslovakia, although it has been manufactured by many others. Besides Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company in Switzerland, there was the Eli Lilly & Company with the patent for the Garbrecht process (the most efficient process for the manufacture of LSD), and Farmitillia of Milan, Italy, which perfected the deep-vat cultivation of ergot, a mold that grows on rye, among other places, and serves as a source for lysergic acid monohydrate, the main precursor of LSD. In addition, a number of U.S. pharmaceutical firms make small amount of LSD for testing purposes.

Today, underground acid comes in many forms; in tablets of varying sizes and colors, in capsules (most popular from 1966 to 1968), as gelatin windowpane (a lamentable hardship to vegetarians, who do not eat cow hooves from which the gelatin is derived), plastic film, blotter paper, liquid vials, and many other forms - just about anything on which a liquid can be dripped has been used. Since LSD is a crystal and the average dose is so small as to be just barely visible, it is usually dissolved in a solvent such as ethyl alcohol and then dropped on some medium buffered with some inert substance. Only if a buffering substance is inert will it not affect the course of action of the biochemical mind-changer.

The most common explanation regarding impurities seems to be adulteration with some other biochemical mind-changer such as speed (amphetamine) or strychnine additives. Yet, as most testing programs and drug information organizations are fond of repeating, there is rarely speed or strychnine in street acid. The most common additive is PCP (phencyclidine, or Serylan, an animal tranquilizer that causes hallucinogenic delirium reactions), which is also present when street acid is mislabeled "mescaline" or "psilocybin." Synthetic mescaline and psilocybin (usually psilocyn) disappeared from the streets a bit after pure LSD did (around 1969), and the only genuine forms of these drugs on the streets now are the organic staples of mushrooms or buttons of peyote. (Note: The acid-PCP combination is sometimes used on store-bought mushrooms, so caution is advised.)

Because of the imprecise nature of the street-drug market, a number of street drug-testing programs were established in the 1970s. These drug organizations have repeatedly labeled most street samples of underground acid as "LSD." For example, the Straight Dope Newsletter, a compilation of information from U. S. testing organizations, reported on a total of 209 samples turned in to the various organizations during the period from March 1973 thru July 1973, of which 183 samples were "LSD."

PharmChem of Palo Alto, California, the most noted of the various street drug testing groups, reported in 1973: "Of 405 samples said to be LSD, 91.6 percent were as alleged, 3.4 percent had no drug at all, 3 percent were actually DOM, PCP and others, and 2 percent had DOM, PCP and methamphetamine in addition to LSD."

Contrast these two reports to a survey abstracted in LSD - A Total Study (edited by D. V. Siva Sankar): "Marshman and Gibbons tested 519 samples of street drugs for which the vendor's claimed composition was available. Of the samples alleged to be LSD, 44 percent contained LSD with two or more contaminants or even were mixtures of intermediate chemicals resulting from the failed attempts to synthesize LSD."

There is something wrong, something impure about today's "street acid." One possible theo[EXEC:Url '/docs/purity.shtml' not found or insecure]ry for the degeneration of LSD manufacture is given by Hollingshead in The Man Who Turned on the World:

I think the problem for the underground chemists manufacturing clandestine acid was a shortage of ergot, without which the synthesis of d-LSD-25 is impossible. Until 1965, supplies of ergot could be bought with little difficulty from three or four European chemical companies; but pressure from Washington put a stop to this, doubtlessly hopeful that this would lead to an end of clandestine LSD. In one sense, the Federal authorities were right. The underground ceased turning out d-LSD-25; instead, they discovered a wholly synthetic substance akin to d-LSD-25....Sure the new stuff "worked" in the sense that any new mind-altering chemical "works" to produce subjective effects within the body, but it didn't seem to produce in those who used it any particular noticeable elevation in either head or heart; at least it was - and probably is - an unpopular view amongst the "congnoscenti" who claim that some of the street acid is capable of producing positive subjective effects of a "long-lasting nature," though they readily admit a lot of the stuff sold as "pure acid" is actually methamphetamine (a potent form of amphetamine first developed by the U.S. Army) or a stripped-down ergotamine compound by modern molecular chemistry.

A more likely reason for the different effects of street acid and LSD is that by-product impurities contaminate the product at various points in manufacture. LSD can be made from lysergic acid derived from either morning-glory seeds or ergot, or from compounds made from ergot - including ergotamine tartrate, a pharmaceutical drug used in treating migraine headaches. LSD can also be synthesized totally from organic chemicals. No matter what process is used, if it is carried forth correctly, the resultant molecule is LSD.

Before LSD was made illegal, the materials for its manufacture could be purchased from a number of chemical companies in the United States and Europe. Most Owsley acid was manufactured from lysergic acid monohydrate obtained from Sandoz before lysergic acid was proscribed. But after 1966, properly prepared precursors were not easily obtainable.

The manufacturing of he necessary precursors is a long process, and a great many new occasions for impurities can arise. During the preparation of the main precursor - lysergic acid monohydrate - various ergot alkaloids and cycloalkamides of lysergic acid will contaminate the final product if not later removed by proper chromatographic procedures. Which contaminants do appear depends on whether the starting material was ergot, ergotamine tartate or morning-glory seeds. And once these proper precursors have been synthesized into LSD, various isomers and lumi-LSD (LSD saturated with water) may contaminate the final product if not removed by proper chromatographic procedures.

Thus, chromatography, the highly refined procedure that the organic chemist uses to isolate specific chemicals, is the key process by which impurities may or may not be removed from he eventual LSD crystal. A passage from Psychedelic Chemistry, by Michael Valentine Smith:

There is a great deal of superstition regarding purification of psychedelics. Actually, any impurities which may be present as a result of synthetic procedures will almost certainly be without any effect on the trip. If there are 200 micrograms of impurities present... and few compounds will produce a significant effect until a hundred to a thousand times this amount has been ingested. Even mescaline, which has a rather specific psychedelic effect, requires about a thousand times this amount.

Most of the books on the market that give details on the LSD process - for example, Psychedelic Guide to the Preparation of the Eucharist, by Robert Brown, Basic Drug Manufacturing and The Book of Acid, by Adam Gottlieb, as well as Michael Valentine Smith's book - fail to describe the efficient chromatographic procedures, like zone-melting chromatography, necessary for the manufacture of pure LSD. Timothy Scully told me that both he and Owsley believed the tolerable limits of impurities to be on tenth of a percentage point (requiring 99.9% purity) - far from the 50 percent figure of Michael Valentine Smith! Until careful studies are done, the true figures for tolerable impurities will remain unknown.

How do these impurities change the optimum course of action of LSD and the experience it creates? One of the theories is that, because d-LSD-25 is like a key (its outer electron shell has a specific shape), it fits into a number of tiny locks called "receptor sites." These are located somewhere in the brain - nobody is sure where, but one theory suggests that they might be in the brain stem. It is known, however, that these receptor sites interact only with extremely specific molecular configurations.

The various ergot compounds, cycloalkamides of LSD and lumi-LSD plug into the same receptor sites as LSD does. But these compounds evidently don't turn the lock in the smooth, clean manner of LSD. Many of these compounds have effects similar to symptoms of ergot poisoning - the St. Anthony's Fire of he Middle Ages. These symptoms include inflamed joints, headaches, nausea, and hot and cold flashes.

Isomers of LSD are another possible contaminant and indeed are reported present by the drug analysis groups. There are four possible isomers of LSD, but only the d-lysergic acid diethyl amide form is active. The other rotation forms - l-lysergic acid diethyl amide, d and l iso-lysergic acid diethyl amide (contrary to recent reports!) - are inactive. they have no pharmacological role, except possibly as a catalyst for some latent effect of LSD, or to block the action of LSD at the receptor site.

If a contaminated batch of diethyl amine is used in the manufacturing process, or if the chemist purposely decides to make them, LSD homologues might be present in the final crystal. Molecules similar to LSD in structure but with some addition, subtraction or rearrangement of action, homologues plug into the same keyhole that LSD does.

Some of these homologues have profound effects that vary in course of action and potency. For example, the strongest of he homologues, ALD-52, has 91 percent the potency of LSD and is said to have a slightly different effect upon the mind (there is some dispute about this).

However, as Albert Hoffmann puts it in "Drugs Affecting the Central Nervous System": LSD has the highest and most specific effect and may therefore be considered as the genuine prototype of psychotomimetic compounds."

Thus, all impurities found in LSD are like imperfect keys. Such substances as ergot alkaloids, cycloalkamides and other lysergic acid derivatives, and LSD homologues and lumi-LSD are drugs that might open the door par way. But only pure LSD opens the doors of perception all the way.

In addition to manufactured impurities, impurities can also arise from decomposition of LSD. Dr. Albert Hoffmann points out in his paper "The Chemistry of LSD": "The free base as well as the tartrate of d-lysergic acid diethyl amide, like all lysergic acid derivatives, is very sensitive to light and oxidizing agents. All preparations must be stored carefully, protected from light and from oxygen of the air, to prevent them from being destroyed within a short time."

Even if, by some chance, an underground batch were made pure, it would turn to bunk in time, especially if put in conventional underground packaging (blotter or windowpane) that does not protect it from light or air. Pharmaceutical LSD is stored in vacuum vials in nitrogen gas. A pure, viable form of black-market LSD should find its way to the consumer in a tablet coated with pure, inert buffering material or in a vacuum vial, but this expensive packaging is certainly not reconcilable with dealing for profit.

Why is it that most of he underground LSD in the United States is made wrong? There are several other possible explanations. One chemist, for instance, told me that it was "because all the pros ar out of the field." That is to say, most underground chemists, whether motivated by altruism or greed, are incompetent to manufacture pharmaceutical-grade chemicals.

Moreover, they often lack the money to buy the complicated equipment necessary to produce pharmaceutical-grade materials or to test their final product properly.

Paranoia, too, can lead to faulty manufacture. A chemist often doesn't have the time to do a full scale procedure, or will take shortcuts to limit possible exposure to bursts.

It would help if street-drug analysis groups perfected their methods of analysis. Many such groups do not have samples of the impurities that can exist in street acid, and are therefore unable to identify them.. In addition, their testing techniques are not up to the exacting task of determining the nature of their samples. Most rely on thin-layer chromatography, which can show only that LSD exists in a sample,, but not all of he other impurities lurking there.

In a private correspondence, Dr Alexander T. Shulgin, a professor of toxicology at the University of California at Berkeley commented:

In the usual analysis of LSD (such as done at PharmChem Foundation) one chromatographs an extract of the suspected drug, observes the resulting separation under UV light, and then sprays the plate with some color-generating agent such as paradimethylaminobenzaldehyde (PDAB). If there are impurities present that fluoresce (such as lysergic acid or iso-LSD) and that have mobility in the chromatographic separation, they will be seen. If impurities are present that have the intact indole-2-hydrogen atom, they will give blue to purple colors with PDAB. Both tests require, of course, that there are amounts present sufficient to be seen. But if the impurity does not fluoresce (as is known to occur with lumi-LSD or any of the photoaddition products) or will not react with PDAB (as would be found with 2-substituted impurities such as 2-oxo-ergots), then they (the impurities) would remain invisible. It is completely possible that an LSD sample could be grossly contaminated with impurities and, if they did not give any response to one of these two tests, it is highly likely that their presence would never even be suspected.

Again, it would be helpful if street-drug analysis groups started looking for by-product impurities and established criteria for psychedelic chemical purity. They must stop labeling their impure samples "LSD", a habit that suggests purity and thereby creates much confusing in the public mind and among drug writers. Instead they must clearly distinguish between street acid and pure, pharmaceutical LSD. And if they cannot afford the equipment to test LSD (mass spectrometers and electron microscopes), then they should let the public know about their true capacities. For that matter, none of the commercially sold drug-testing kits is capable of determining purity.

Many early LSD users later gave up on acid and tried other methods of consciousness-expansion as available LSD became impure. They thought that LSD did not work any more, or blamed their heads, not realizing it was a change in the nature of the actual chemical. Thus, the increasing number of impurities led many people to repress the mystical experiences they had had, and retreat to a comfortable, "cool" conformity. Or they turned to Eastern gurus and Jesus movements.

I suspect that impurities give people body trips (euphoria) rather than the pure mind trips of LSD (ecstasy). People turned to other euphoria-producing drugs (pot is on of these) because street acid fell into the realm of dishonest dealing games and lost the spiritual qualities of LSD. Just the fact that LSD did not work any more led people into attempts to escape from the all-too-static reality via coke, pot, tranquilizers, alcohol and smack.

As experiences changed, the emphasis among the makers and distributors of LSD changed. In the beginning, the main motivation was spiritual - to turn people on. Much LSD was given for free, and dealing was just an amateur pastime. As LSD became another in a long list of body drugs, avarice polluted the spiritual stream.

The real responsibility for all this lies not with the underground, or even the public, victims of brainwashing with beer and TV, but with the government. Today, a small elite of government-sanctioned scientists controls LSD in the United States. Despite the good their limited research does, their exclusive and narrow-sighted use of these drugs seems sad in the face of the much greater good that psychedelics could do if more widely used. Many suggestions for more rational use include making LSD a prescription drug, creating LSD centers or making LSD a patent medicine.

The psychedelic movement, which has been in eclipse for ten years, will remain dormant until people can get LSD of known strength and purity. Until then, if you are an acidhead, chances are you've never taken LSD.

LSD and Aldous Huxley’s Island: Setting Sail for a Better Country

LSD and Aldous Huxley's Island: Setting Sail for a Better Country

by Bruce Eisner (Note:;Published in Gaia News No.14 )

Note: See 2006 International LSD Conference talk based on this essay on Google Video

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias. Oscar Wilde

Albert Hofmann, the man who discovered the effects of LSD, has said that he hopes that what he has called his "problem child" will someday become a "wonder" child. I believe Hofmann will have his wish. In the history books of the next century, the discovery of LSD will find its rightful place as one of our most significant achievements, in the same league as the discovery of fire, the wheel, written language, and relativity. In this essay I will reflect on the history of LSD's impact on society and culture as problem child and look forward to how the conversion to wonder child might occur.

This essay is scheduled for publication on the Winter Solstice 2005. As I write this, the days are growing shorter.  Less than a month after they begin growing long again, I will be on my way to Basel, Switzerland, a city I first visited in my youth.

Basel has been home to a lineage of great minds in the search for human self- realization. Amid the dark ages, Auroleus Phillipus Theostratus Bombastus von Hohenheim, immortalized as "Paracelsus" spent a year in Basel as a Professor of Medicine. As a man of science, Paracelsus pioneered the use of chemicals and minerals in medicine. As an alchemist, Paracelsus searched for the Philosopher's Stone . Because they were persecuted by the all-powerful Church, the alchemists needed to shroud their work with hidden meanings. While they told the outside world the Philosopher's Stone's purpose was to transmute lead into gold, its esoteric meaning was as a bridge between matter and spirit, a key to illumination.

Another great Basel scientist, Carl Gustav Jung who introduced the concept of self- actualization to psychology was keenly interested in alchemy for its rich symbolism and capacity to describe the inner journey. He said "My studies of alchemy may seem obscure and baffle many people, but taken symbolically - the symbolic gold of great worth, or the transforming philosopher's stone 'lapis philosophorum' hunted for centuries by the alchemists - is to be found in man."

In the summer of 1976, I arrived by train in Basel, at age 28 a bearded long-haired hippie vagabond. I had dropped out of the university in my fourth year at age 20, hitchhiked halfway around the world and on returning to the U.S. became a journalist for the underground press. I had flown to Europe from Los Angeles to meet the third in the progression of Basel scientists on the leading edge of consciousness, Albert Hofmann, the man who had discovered the effects of LSD.

The friend who I traveled with had corresponded with Dr. Hofmann and so after we had pitched our tent in one of the Basel campgrounds, he called him. Dr. Hofmann told us to meet him in a café on Basel's middle bridge. The next day we made our way out there and waited in front of the café for him. Neither of us knew exactly what he looked like; we had only seen that one picture they used in all the old books of him taken at Sandoz in the forties.  We knew he was seventy years old and so looked around for what we expected to be an old man.

A tanned, energetic man who appeared in his mid-fifties walked up to us and introduced himself. Albert Hofmann had already found his ways of slowing the hands of time. We sat with him eating a leisurely lunch that lasted several hours.  We told him about our experiences becoming hippies and dropping out in the Sixties. He showed us from the bridge the route that he took on his famous bicycle ride home from the old Sandoz building on the day he discovered the effects of LSD.

Hofmann's discovery which is in a way is duplicated by every person who takes LSD was uniquely significant to both myself personally and my generation. I came of age in the 1960s and am part of the boomer generation who "turned on, tuned in and dropped out." The 1960s were an extraordinary period - a time in which millions of people acted as if they had swallowed some pill which made them different - and of course they had. As the decades changed digits, the cultural icon of the "man in the gray flannel suit" with a martini gave way to a hipper way of partying. The Old Ike attitudes of the fifties were replaced by a new vision of the Western world, as articulated by Kennedy, who was both a symbol of the strong stirrings of change as well as a martyr to the reaction that it would bring forth.

In this period of American culture in which I reached adulthood, roles and ways of doing things that had persisted for centuries were quickly dissolving. In the old South, young Freedom Riders rode into town and threatened to overturn "Jim Crow" discriminatory laws. Women in great numbers decided not to be housewives and play the traditional role of the submissive sex. Many concerned that economic progress might eventually ruin the earth began using the word "ecology" (heretofore reserved for those seriously academic) to talk about a movement often symbolized by the "Whole Earth" as seen by the first humans to orbit the earth. And of course, with the arrival of birth control pills, there was the sexual revolution - before the tragedy of AIDS.

The 1960s caused so much cultural change that the eminent historian Arnold Toynbee observed of this period in American history: "I have been visiting the United States since 1925. Before my last visit (1967), I had been absent for two years, and I came away with the impression that in those two years there has been more change in American life than in all the previous forty."

Of course it was LSD in the pills that gave people so much insight. LSD, a potent mind-changing drug with few physical side effects discovered in Basel, Switzerland, during the dark days prior to World War II, around the same time as a much larger group in New Mexico was cooking up the atomic bomb.

For many, LSD was a roller coaster ride through their unconscious, a virtual Disneyland. But for a much smaller number the experiences took on significance that they called "mystical" or "religious."  This smaller group, sometimes called the "Psychedelic Movement ", grew from a small intellectual elite composed mainly of writers and artists in Los Angeles, New York, and London into a mass movement which involved the "best minds of [their] generation," including college students and open-minded people of all ages.

For a few of those who took LSD, it had such a powerful immediate impact that they believed that it might provide insights of a similar magnitude in anyone who took it. There is the story told in High Priest (also see Storming Heaven)   by Timothy Leary of poet Alan Ginsberg's taking psilocybin (an extract of the "magic mushroom" synthesized by Albert Hofmann and used in early experiments with psychedelic compounds at Harvard). Ginsberg became convinced that if he could get John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev to take LSD, it would end the Cold War; after not being able to get the telephone operators to connect him to either man, he slowly returned to the realities of 1962.

These sorts of notions colored the thoughts of many participants in the Psychedelic Movement . If we remember the world's political atmosphere at that time, in which the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists which publishes a clock in each issue with its hands suggesting their estimate of how close we are to nuclear midnight saw those hands close and moving closer to within minutes of utter annihilation. This feeling of urgency was the force behind what many in retrospect consider Dr. Timothy Leary's messianic crusade to spread the use of LSD.  Leary simply believed that it was necessary to turn on a critical mass of people or the world might blow itself up.

The consideration of LSD's potential as a tool to transform society was not restricted to the radical members of the Movement. Although known to believe that LSD should be kept for the intellectual elite, even Aldous Huxley in an essay "Culture and the Individual " written in 1963 shortly before his death, speculated on a "mass experiment" of social LSD-taking as a remedy to the disturbing directions our society was taking.

How should the psychedelics be administered? Under what circumstances, with what kind of preparation and follow-up? These are questions that must be answered empirically, by large-scale experiment. Man's collective mind has a high degree of viscosity and flows from one position to another with the reluctant deliberation of an ebbing tide of sludge. But in a world of explosive population increase, of headlong technological advance and of militant nationalism, the time at our disposal is strictly limited. We must discover, and discover very soon, new energy sources for overcoming our society's psychological inertia, better solvents for liquefying the sludgy stickiness of an anachronistic state of mind. On the verbal level an education in the nature and limitations, the uses and abuses of language; on the wordless level an education in mental silence and pure receptivity; and finally, through the use of harmless psychedelics, a course of chemically triggered conversion experiences or ecstasies these, I believe, will provide all the sources of mental energy, all the solvents of conceptual sludge, that an individual requires. With their aid, he should be able to adapt himself selectively to his culture, rejecting its evils, stupidities and irrelevances, gratefully accepting all its treasures of accumulated knowledge, of rationality, human-heartedness and practical wisdom. If the number of such individuals is sufficiently great, if their quality is sufficiently high, they may be able to pass from discriminating acceptance of their culture to discriminating change and reform. Is this a hopefully utopian dream? Experiment can give us the answer, for the dream is pragmatic; the utopian hypotheses can be tested empirically. And in these oppressive times a little hope is surely no unwelcome visitant

In fact, after Huxley's passing, the next few years saw the kind of mass LSD experiment that he had envisioned. Just as Gutenberg's printing press invented at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the fifteenth century allowed for anyone to own his or her own bible, a privilege that until then had only been enjoyed by the monks, so now at the beginning of the Information Age, the same mass production machines that had turned out bibles (and later Ford motor cars) were producing insight pills.  As a result, this new Holy Grail gone high tech was given to somewhere between one and two million people between 1959 and 1970. The numbers who passed through Aldous Huxley's well-described "Doors of Perception ," stepping out of Plato's cave to glimpse the white light of the sun, far exceeded any generation before it. The mystical experience, from being something reserved for saints, became available on sugar cubes.

There were some hard lessons learned during this 1960's experiment. One lesson was that taking large dosages of LSD unprepared and in public settings could lead to negative reactions with accompanying bizarre behavior. Another lesson was that not everyone could benefit by taking LSD, that there were some people with personality disorders or pre-existing psychoses who should not take it except under the most controlled of circumstances - and some not at all under any circumstances. 

As the number of people who took LSD increased and the demographics of those people moved from a small group of intelligentsia to a wider spectrum of individuals, the incidence of negative reactions (which were called "freakouts") became a subject of media attention. LSD gained a public image as a "crazy-making" drug.  Some unfortunate people predisposed to mental disorders became what have been called LSD casualties.

Casualties is a fitting term, as some looked upon psychedelics as a nonlethal weapon in a war against the powerful economic, political and other social forces - the Establishment. From that battle came a third lesson, that cultures like the living creatures they are comprised of keep a homeostasis. The rapid changes in society as well as the challenges to the established order produced a conservative counteraction. In a rather successful effort to stuff the magic genie back in the bottle, they made possession and use of LSD and several other related psychedelic substances serious crimes.  In the U.S., possession of LSD was made a felony in 1966, and LSD's precursor, d-lysergic acid monohydrate, was similarly banned in 1968. Slowly, most of the existing supplies of LSD used by the members of the movement dried up, replaced by what has been called "street acid," a crude imitation of the pharmaceutical substance manufactured from ergotamine tartrate.

The counteraction came to be called the War on Drugs. This war never diminished the supplies of cocaine or heroin. But LSD was more dependent on special ingredients and high tech laboratories. So the Psychedelic Movement lost its ability to pass on to new people the opportunity to have the powerful experiences that LSD had given them access to. Those curious about these experiences turned to new synthetic and botanical drugs as potential replacements. But none of these substitutes provided as powerful and reliable an experience as that which had been taken away.

This story of LSD's banishment was what I told Albert Hofmann on my first visit to Basel. He listened, and despite our differences in age and positions in society, we understood each other at a profound level and became long-time friends. Getting to know Albert Hofmann, a man both accomplished in the world and connected with deep spirituality shattered my stereotypes about what hip people should be like. Freed in this way, I was inspired to shed my hippie persona and drop back into society.

In January of the next year, I moved to Santa Cruz California, and became a 29-year-old undergraduate at the University of California campus there.  In the early summer of that year, I heard that Albert Hofmann would be visiting the west coast and invited him to speak at my university. With the help of author Peter Stafford and his partner Lynn Francis, I arranged a conference around his visit which I called "LSD a Generation Later ." Because the turbulence and hysteria of the Sixties had made it almost impossible for scientific meetings to be held on the subject, this event marked the first scientific meeting on LSD in a decade. The event brought together many of the scientific researchers and counterculture figures for the first time. These included Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, Ralph Metzner, John Lilly, Oscar Janiger, Allen Ginsberg, Myron Stoloroff, John Beresford, William McGlothlin, Ronald K. Seigal, and many others.

A couple of months after this conference, a meeting was held at my home in Santa Cruz by Dr. John Beresford which led to the creation of the Psychedelic Education Center. This group which eventually became the Island Foundation worked for more than three decades to keep the the Psychedelic Movement alive during a time of cultural repression.

Earlier in this essay I talked about some of the lessons we learned from the 1960's. I have one last lesson that comes from my own experiences both as a participant and as an activist for the Psychedelic Movement. I am a humanistic psychologist and approach the use of LSD from that perspective and not from the medical model. When physicians look at LSD, they think how can I cure the sick. When humanistic psychologists look at LSD, they think how can I make exceptional people even more creative and productive and enlightened

In fact, the most significant uses of LSD in terms of its impact on society have been by informal use by highly creative, intelligent people who have personality characteristics which allow them to make good use of the psychedelic experience. In humanistic psychology, we call these people self-actualizers. It is the ability of self-actualizers to utilize the new states of consciousness for the creation of new ideas or memes that led to the breakthroughs of the 1960s.
It is with this idea in mind that I began writing about the Island Sanctuary Project named for Huxley's utopian Island. The Project which could be undertaken simultaneously with efforts to push for legitimate research and clinical use for psychedelics in the first world, but would take a different tack. There would be a search for some place in the world in which a group of people could use LSD within the context of a community in a way similar to the way that Moksha, the fictional psychedelic in Huxley's novel, was used. 

I asked Laura Huxley in 1994 about how such a community might evolve and this is what she told me:

An Island Group could adopt the methods described in Island. It can be done in a village. It is said that it takes a village to raise a child, and it is true. In a small village, a child can go out alone and visit small and adult friends. A child alone in the streets of Los Angeles is in danger both from adults and other children. You know about children being killed in the streets by other children.

They have handguns and machine guns. When they are little they are given for Christmas these war toys - a lovely way to celebrate the birth of a savior. So very soon they want to have a real gun, and when they have it they use it. People make money by selling guns to children and very young people.

Then we are surprised that they use them. But in a village where a few families have read and agreed with the method of education described in Island, a child could go out and even leave his family for a few days. Do you remember the mutual adoption club? Each family has two or three adoptive families where the child can go and take a vacation from his own family, who might also need a vacation from him.

There is so much which can be done with a small group who wants to grow its children in a safe place. This group must really have something basic in common to start a village of this kind. And now with the technological advances, it might be possible to make a living without going into the city. In Island the children have not only a loving family but also a sane environment in which to grow.

Such a group might come up with fresh visions and new memes to inspire the world toward the hopeful outcome I began this essay with.  As Oscar Wilde said, "A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias."

Notes on Images: Top graphic: The Island of Utopia: Basle Ambrosius Holbein contributed woodcuts to illustrate Froben's edition of Sir Thomas More's Utopia that was published in Basle in 1518. One shows a bird's eye view of the rocky island of Utopia (which in Greek means "no-place"). Second.graphic photo by Christian Reich of Albert Hofmann on his 80th birthday doing Tai Chi. Third graphic Time Magazine issue honoring Carl Jung. Forth graphic passport photo Bruce Eisner, 1976. Fifth illustration by Dean Chamberlein of Albert Hofmann in Maps Bulletin Volume 15, No. 1. Sixth graphic photo of Leary in the 60's from Robert Altman. Seventh graphic photo of Aldous Huxley. Eight graphic poster for the "LSD: A Generation Later" conference 1977. Eighth graphic "Hierarchy of Needs" from Abraham Maslow's Theory of Self-Actualization. Ninth graphic photo of Laura Huxley from Island Views No. 3

How a Psychonaut Became a Cybernaut Part 1

Part 1 of 2

This is the story of how I became a Cybernaut, traveling into the inner spaces created by a world-wide computer network--the Internet-- the way that astronauts explore space. Where acronyms fly by like asteroids, with names like HTML, CGI, VRML and PEARL. It's about how I learned about the World Wide Web and entered the magic world of cyberspace, whose walls promise to become papered with new ideas and whose virtual dimensions may be limitless.

Let's explore further the birth of a media that appears to be evolving into the science fiction word called "cyberspace." We'll look at the spinning of the Island Web, the creation of a virtual global community of visionaries working to build a culture based on the psychedelic experience. Finally, we'll glimpse the potentials of the Web for rapidly evolving in new and remarkable ways -- and in a direction that promises to link us into a planetary consciousness that was once the terrain only of mystics.

The Coming of the Web

Until about the beginning of 1994, most of us had never heard of the Internet. Today, we find World Wide Web addresses (URLs) on glowing images on TV tubes, bold letters on billboard signs and on the tongues of Radio DJs. In little more than two years, the World Wide Web, a new way of exploring the Internet has become the hottest, sexiest innovation to emerge in our collective public psyche since the telephone and TV. (At a recent Internet World I attended, once of the speakers predicted it would rank as the most important innovation of the Twentieth Century. And what's strange is, he might be right.)

The Internet has actually been around under various names for twenty years or more. Developed first by the military as a way of hooking up supercomputers, it soon became common at universities as a way of sharing academic information. However, because the Internet was based on UNIX, a computer operating system most people feel is difficult to use, it lay dormant for years.

All of this changed when a college student named Marc Andreessen, part of a team of teachers and students at the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications invented a graphical way looking at the Internet named Mosaic. NCSA Mosaic, uses a special language called Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) which allows book-like page combining pictures and words to be published on the Internet as well as being able to look at the information already in all the other forms also as pages as well.

Using this new technique, World Wide Web sites began to blossom, at first from a few universities and large companies. Soon, however, the underground hacker-fringe of Internet users began to publish their own Web sites. We should remember that many of the earliest Web sites were underground in nature, and focused in on topics that many of the readers of the Global Village Voice would find close to their hearts.

In April, 1994, Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics, a maker of high-end graphics workstations, joined forces with others to form Netscape. Netscape put out a Web browser similar to the NCSA Mosaic, but with advantages that made it the sleekest cyber-surfboards for the rising breed of web surfers catching this new digital wave.

Bruce Becomes a Cybernaut

Living in Santa Cruz, a beach town populated by students and a considerable group of psychonauts from the 'Sixties and only 35 miles from computer capital Silicon Valley, I came to discover this new world slightly ahead of the crowd.. when there were only 10,000 sites on the then newly created World Wide Web. Today, the Web is growing explosively -- a quarter million web sites are now up and a new web page is currently being created about every four seconds. A Psychonautt from the 'Sixties, I made the transition from "headspace" to "cyberspace.

I had first heard about the Internet two years before. At one of the Island Groups salons I hold at my home, someone in November 1992 asked me: "Do you have an e-mail address?" This innocuous question could be seen as the beginning of a transformation of my life -- a first gentle push through the door into cyberspace. It turned out that I did have e-mail, but I didn't know it-- on America On-line, I was IslandGrp@AOL.COM... I was no modem novice, having spent many a spare hour on computer bulletin boards and on-line services since I bought my trusty old Apple IIe back in 1982. But the long strange e-mail addressees looked more like the dreaded UNIX then Mac or Windows. All that work for a free, quick way to send mail to your friends? From the discovery of my e-mail address to the establishment of my own domain name and the publication of my first World Wide Web pages took a couple of years.

It was Timothy Leary who first alerted me to the promise of the personal computer. He was developing a software program called Mind Mirror back in 1982, and began to promote the PC at every stop along his college lecture circuits. . I began collecting computer "mindware": and discovered a dozen or more titles while a graduate student.

In 1988, I became I pre-Ph.D. psychology school dropout and launched the Mindware Catalog. During the five years between 1988 and 1993, I published 10 of these glossy catalogs -- and discovered and sold hundreds of different titles of these computer "mind appliances" as Leary first referred to them. By the middle of 1993, I began to realize that it was far too expensive -- as well as unecological -- to sell our computer goods through glossy color catalogs. I wanted to sell the software through major on-line services but that also was too expensive for a small company without "working capital."

A coffee break in February 1994, with one of my Mindware employees Thadd Atkins, provided the breakthrough I'd needed. He had joined with a friend to start a new company, The Human Factor, to put up what he called "web sites." These could take the form of on-line catalogs -- which would be perfect for Mindware.

Jeff White, a friend from the Bay Area rave scene had told me about "the Web." His company ,InterNex, was putting up sites -- I decided to head to the experts as I saw them. It was at InterNex that I saw had a chance to see what all the excitement was about. I decided to hire them to do a Mindware catalog on-line.

At the same time, I gave Human Factor the job of putting up the Island Group site. These three wanted to show me how well they could do on-line catalogs, so the first Island Group site was an on-line catalog. The most frustrating part of the entire process was that I could only see the catalogs briefly at the two companies' headquarters since I didn't have Internet access. After visiting InterNex and watching high speed digital ISDN connections, I decided that's what I would use. But there were no "out-of-the-box" solutions to getting this line hooked up to my office. Several months after the phone company put in my new-fangled ISDN jack, I still couldn't look at my new cyberspace structures.

Within two weeks of each other, in March of 1994, two new web sites were born. I had worked closely with Brian Job of InterNex to develop the Mindware Catalog Web Site. I wrote the words and provided graphic images, and Brian put together electronic pages in a way very similar to the way desktop publishers create catalogs.. Because there was very little cost in publishing on-line, I discovered that Mindware was finally making money. Later I gave up the catalog publishing entirely and formed a new company --Mind Media -- to publish software "mind-appliances" and sell them on the Web. You can view the current and always changing version of the Mind Media Interactive Self-Improvement Center at http://www.mindmedia.com.

The Internet as left-brained LSD

One day in April, a few days after returning from the first, quite small Internet World trade show, we finally got the ISDN talking to the computer and I had access to the Internet. Soon, I found myself staying at the office late into the night. What I found was that the World Wide Web became a kind of intellectual LSD.

Unlike ordinary pages, Web pages are sprinkled with hypertext links. The idea of hypertext had started with Ted Nelson, who many years before had conceived of a global information library connected by "hypertext" links .--which he called the Xanadu Project. Hypertext works on the principle of networks rather than hierarchies. Instead of having to navigate through a descending series of menu trees to get to your information -- you leap directly from a link to a new information source, the way that starships in science fiction bypass light years in space by traveling through theoretical hyperspace warps.

The user of the Web experiences this ability to make hypertext jumps, not only between his or her own pages but also "external jumps" to any Internet-connected computer in the world. I found in exploring topics, that I would make many such leaps. Along the way, I would find new ideas, which would take me off in an unanticipated new direction. Ideas could be followed along branching paths. Along the way, I found new words like "extopians" and 'transhumanists" which are part of a futurist movement looking at new ideas, many of which overlap with the ideas that Island has been exploring.

Both the transhumanist and the extopians had entire pages filled with hundreds of hypertext links, each pointing to web sites with more information. Some of the sites they pointed to would have hundreds of more links. Viewing a web site for the first time can be like opening the cover of a book with millions of pages.

Timothy Leary once remarked that the psychedelic experience could be rated in "realities per second." Traveling through the ever changing fields of information on the World Wide Web gives this same psychedelic quality to the endlessly transforming realities on the computer screen. The universe within, filled with ever more complex and fast changing versions of what is real is mirrored by the universe without, finally able to communicate the psychedelic world into digital information able to express this multiplex.Spinning Island's Web

After spending some time on-line, I learned the prime directive, the essential ethic of the Internet is Give back to the Internet what you take. This giving takes the form of adding new content, graphical and written information, to the Web's collective database. The catalogs selling merchandise and information should only be part of a web site. As a writer with hundreds of manuscripts, published and unpublished --, and as editor of Island Views, which has a great collection of articles in back issues, I had lots of content that could be published and made available to anyone in the world. And for free! I also had collected a large "bookmark file" in my explorations of the Web. I realized that I could organize these links into starting place for those who want to explore the many new and ancient ideas that Island Group finds significant. I decided to take back control of my web sites, and to turn the Island Group catalog site into the present Island Web.

It was hard getting control of my web sites. InterNex and Human Factor and the other web-authoring companies make their living not only by creating on-line sites but also in maintaining and changing the content of the Web. I had to move Island to another server. But in the process, I was able to get a domain name so that people could access us directly by pointing their browser to http://www.island.org.

I began to advertise on various Internet Newgroups (there are currently 15,000 different special interest forums available to everyone on the Internet)s for a volunteer programmer to work with changing Island Group to The Island Web I outlined my ideas about adding the Island Views Electro-Zine and an introduction to Island that included "links to many new ideas." The first volunteer I chose was a graphic designer who got so busy at work that the site remained just a catalog for months. Then a computer-science student from U.C.San Diego, Greg Kogut, volunteered looking forward to being able to be a bit more creative than the meteorological site he maintains for the professors there.

With Greg's help, Island Web was finally launched. But I discovered that having a web site requires continuous work. Island Web changes daily. New links are sent and are added constantly. Greg found an experimental chat program and we then put up the Island Chat, enabling people to chat with each other in a room, putting up not only words but graphics and links tosites they want to show other participants.

Mike Markowski, a young graduate student from University of Delaware, showed web pages which he titled "Thoughts on Aldous Huxley's Island." Mike explains that the novel was an attempt by Huxley to create a real model for a better culture than the one we presently inhabit. He included poems from Island, quotations from Island on topics from eating to dancing to dying to taking the Moksha Medicine (probably based on magic mushrooms) and even why you shouldn't take the medicine too often. He also excerpted from the novel's text the words of the Old Raja, whose wisdom, combining eastern mysticism with western science and pragmatism was the core upon which the Island's culture was based. As a special treat, Mike presents a selection of poems Huxley had sprinkled through the novel.
I obtained permission from Laura Huxley to publish this material on-line. We linked to Mike's server and his pages became part of the Island Web. That is one of the wonderful aspects of the Web, information from other web sites as well as different parts of your web site, can be located in different parts of the world or on your server -- it doesn't matter.

So part of Island's site is just a hypertext link to another computer in Delaware. Hyperreal's Brian Belindorf gave me permission to store Island's video and audio archives on his server, so you can download audio and video clips from seminars by myself and Timothy Leary as well as from our LSD's 50th Anniversary: Bicycle Day conference. You never really are aware that you have jumped to another server in San Francisco when grabbing megabytes of digital video and audio goodies.

Recently, a new Webmaster, Steven Harris a young programmer who loves the Grateful Dead and Mimetics and who is bringing up a baby girl with his wife Maile, has taken over the responsibility of maintaining stability within the bounds of the chaotic evolution of Island Web. If you visit our site, be sure to send him e-mail and tell him what you think. Your input makes our community grow.

To be continued...

How a Psychonaut Became a Cybernaut Part 2

Part 2  of 2

Creating a Virtual Global Community
Last week I spoke with Ram Dass, the popular elder of the psychedelic and spiritual movements, whose lectures and books, including Be Here Now, The Only Dance There Is, and the Psychedelic Experience (co-authored with Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzner). I told him about Island Group's activities, how we wanted create an experimental community based on the psychedelic vision. I expressed my hope that Island Group actually find an island or a piece of one elsewhere -- to co-create an experimental culture -- a meme that might spread. I also told him the story of how I helped spin Island's Web.

Ram Dass told me:. "I don't know if I'd want to live with a bunch of other people. But I really like your Island Web. I think that it could become a virtual community linking up people interested in spirit and psychedelics. You know, I lecture all over the world, and whatever city I go to, I find people who are part of our family."

Ram Dass went on, "The great thing about Island Web is that it can hook all these people up, so they can see that they are not just a few isolated being have woken up but are but part of a world-wide community that they can communicate with through cyberspace. It's reminds me of the novel Journey to the East by Hermann Hesse. In that novel, a group of people, each on their own path, who people banded together for a journey to the East -- not a physical journey but a journey of the mind."

Indeed, Howard Reingold, editor of the Whole Earth Millennium Catalog describes in his book Virtual Communities,. how on-line services like the Point Foundation's The Well were the beginnings of these new communities. He defines them: "Virtual communities are social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace"

Cyberspace, originally a term coined by William Gibson's in his science-fiction novel Neuromancer, is used to describe a conceptual space where words, human relationships, data, wealth, and power are manifested using the power of as a global communication device. In Neuromancer, people would literally plug their brains into the global network Gibson that called the Net and navigate through virtual reality databases made up of raw information.

Timothy Leary, self-described "cheerleader for change" has spent the past 15 years pointing out the importance that cyberspace will have to our species and its future evolution. He calls the pioneers of cyberspace "The New Breed" in his recent book Chaos and Cyberculture. Leary also was one of the first popular thinkers to write and talk about virtual reality. Virtual Reality (VR) allows us to experience the cybernetic world of the computer through simulation of one or more senses rather than just with screen, keyboard and mouse. As is true about many technologies, VR began with the military as a way to train pilots through simulation of bombing runs or aircraft battles.

Virtual reality evolved into a real-life reality much sooner than boldest prophets would have predicted, A Virtual Reality Markup language is now being standardized as a feature built into Netscapes and other Web browsers as well as plug-in modules -- able to give he first primitive three-dimensional views of cyberspace. This fall, low cost goggles will begin to be marketed, allowing for even more realistic three-dimension simulations. The world of VR that seemed so fantastic to many a few years ago is getting ready for Prime Time.

The Future of Cyberspace
The entire millennium that's about to ring down it's curtain -- the last 1000 years -- can be seen as a playing out of the split between the religious, mystical and spiritual on one hand and the rational and scientific on the other. As the millennium began, we found ourselves gripped in a Dark Age in which religion in the form of iron fisted institution along with codified superstition, led humans into mass misery. The Renaissance and Age of Enlightenment -- taking the form of science and rationalism -- rose to challenge this gloomy fate. The two forces have existed in perpetual struggle and conflict throughout the rest of the millennium -- until just recently.

It was psychedelics which provided what the alchemists had long sought --a philosopher's stone that would provide the bridge between matter and spirit. A stone that would heal the Cartesian split and show us humans first hand that we are not mere ghosts inhabiting a machine.

This remystification of science is best seen in what is considered to be the most scientific of sciences -- physics. Recent works by Fritzjoff Capra, Fred Allen Wolf and Nick Herbert have demonstrated that some of the most mystical ideas of eastern religion now seen plausible from the most modern of physical models: relativity and quantum physics. Similarly in mathematics, chaos theory has given us a view of a chaotic universe which has an underlying order that can be described by new fractal equations.

French mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin imagined a stage of evolution characterized by a complex membrane of information enveloping the globe and fueled by human consciousness. He called the noosphere. Similarly, biologists James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis in 1972 showed a fresh way of a way of looking at the entire world as one living organism, one consciousness-- "Gaia." As the Millennium draws to a close and we step across the threshold into the next, the coming of the World Wide Web and the vast cyberspace that lies beyond make these bold forecasts by mystic and scientist real.

GenerationX's favorite journalist Doug Rushkoff gives this new planetary consciousness an unlikely new name in his 1994 book, Cyberia. He tells us that this new Cyberia is a much nicer place than its physical location sound alike. "Cyberia is the place a businessman goes to when involved in a phone conversation, the place a Shamanic Warrior goes to when traveling out of the body, the place an 'acid house' dancer goes to when experiencing the bliss of techno-acid trance. Cyberia is a place alluded to by the mystical teachings of every religion, the theoretical tangents of every science, and the wildest speculations of the imagination. Now, however, unlike any other time in history, Cyberia is thought to be within our reach. The technological strides of our postmodern culture, coupled with the rebirth of ancient spiritual ideas, have convinced a growing number of people that Cyberia is the dimensional plane in which humanity will soon find itself."

Leave it to Beat philosopher Alan Watts, author Joyous Cosmology and one of the most popular philosophers of our time, for the last word.. In The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are Watts echoed the prediction that we would evolve a planetary nervous system based on technology which would unify us into a kind of global world brain in 1966! Looking toward the future, he said:." All information will come in by super-realistic television and other electronic devices yet in the planning stage or barely imagined. In one way this will enable the individual to extend himself anywhere without moving his body -- -even to distant regions of space. But this will be a new kind of individual-an individual with a colossal external nervous system reaching out and out into infinity. And this electronic nervous system will be so interconnected that all individuals plugged in will tend to share the same thoughts, the same feelings, and the same experiences ... to coalesce into a single bio-electronic body.

But Watts challenged those who would be skeptical of this then-farfetched possibility y, "If the human race develops an electronic nervous system, outside the bodies of individual people, this is almost precisely what has happened in the organization of cells which compose our bodies. We have already done it!"

Bringing It All Back Home
The World Wide Web that I discovered a couple of years ago has changed dramatically. The small, spread-about towns and villages of that time have been replaced by huge Web cities made up of store fronts put that put up small businesses seeking the glow of the "cutting edge" that Web existence can give them, as well as huge Internet skyscrapers and malls, representing multinational corporations and major retail businesses.

When I entered the Web in early 1994, I found an eclectic group of ex-hippies and cyberpunks and entrepreneurs and hackers, who were experimenting with this new and still relatively inexpensive medium. Now the Web is going mainstream, and the old trails and pathways carved by us early pioneers are sometimes hard to see beneath the new fast four lanes of the Information Superhighway.

But the Web has something for everyone, and in that lies a potential that will survive the politicians and corporate elite's attempts to domesticate it. The Web is not a mass medium, it is a medium that empowers individuals. Each of us can now have access to precisely the information we want. Anyone can publish their own web site, broadcast their own videos and music, put out their message for the world to hear and see. The multinational corporations will build the infrastructure for their Information Superhighway with their megabucks. But it is you and I who will drive our digital sportsers down the fast lane of the Infobaun.

For those of you who want some of the ideals that Island Group expresses, I invite you to join us and help keep Island's Web expanding. Visit our library, read our Island Views Electro-Zine, talk with others around the world, shop at our Marketplace, gain insight into Huxley's vision, and find a starting place, using our page of starting Links to Elsewhere for your exploration of mind-expanding ideas, both modern and ancient. If you like, become part of our Web team and help us keep putting out our message of hope.

Whether you read about it or actually begun exploring the Web, you can't escape the conclusion that a new burst of freedom and joy -- a burst similar to that which occurred during the great change in American history in the 'Sixties -- has reemerged in a new and more virulent form. It appears in the rise of the youth movements at raves and Deadhead revivals. It shines from the covers of multitudes of new books about the taboo psychedelics that have suddenly shown up in bookstores. These along with the flood of books and magazines about the Internet and even the Internet Underground. And of course, it unfolds in the ever changing Web itself.

This time, the revolution is international rather than national, integrated into the established order rather than underground and counterculture, embracing a new and enlightened technology rather than rejecting all technology. It's a revolution in human consciousness and communication that promises to link all of us into that Global Village that Marshall McLuhan once predicted.

More from Bruce to come...

Viewing Entheogens as a Whole System

Viewing Entheogens as a Whole System by Bruce Eisner (rewritten from Post to the ELF list 1997)

I have studied what many people on this list call "entheogens" for 30 years now -- since age 19. One phenomenon, that I have become acutely aware of, is an obsessive quality among some people to focus on the psychedelic compounds themselves rather than looking at the whole system, "the big picture" of how these compounds relate to the rest of the society or culture.

I think that this has something to do with having written a book about a particular drug, MDMA or "ecstasy"as it is fondly referred to. I have done countless lectures and talk shows in. which people ask me about all of the details and every bit of trivia about this fascinating compound. I have been asked the same question hundred of times, sometimes at the same lecture or talk show two or three times.

So I had to do my homework and to learn to answer the questions most people want to know about. This, of course, is a community service but I was very glad when Nicholas Sanders published his books and put up ecstasy.org. It took the burden off of me of being the font of MDMA knowledge. I still keep up with what's new but I can always refer a question of Nicholas Saunders or Rick Doblin of MAPS and get the latest news.(Note: Since this essay was written, Nicholas Saunders passed away but his website remains a memorial).

Drug information about pharmacological "nuts-and bolts", the amount of it is expanding rapidly on the web. As part of the Island Web links, I have to add maybe 3 or 4 links a day including vast new achives like the Lycaeum, Erowid and the Psychedelic Library which have been added to repositories such as alt.drugs. Add to that lists such as this ELF list and you get enormous amount of information about the compounds, a lot of information about their effects and chemistry and a great deal of first hand accounts of experiences and opinions about the compounds.

There is relatively little information putting the drug experience in context. Island Web: Psychedelic Culture has been a project of mine to do that.

My interest in psychedelic drugs began during the hippie movement. Yet the hippies were not the first "alternative culture" to explore psychedelic as a path to insight. Alternative cultures have existed throughout recorded history -- including the Brethren of the Free Spirit, The Pre-Raphaellite Brotherhood, the Dadaists, Bohemians, and the Beats -- to name just a few. Each alternative culture seems to become larger and more high profile. In a way, the way the rave scene has been turning into a mass movement the way the hippies were is a good thing.

I see alternative cultures as a future culture waiting to be born. As the world population expands and the mainstream culture breaks down under this pressure, the alternative culture becomes more important. The purpose of alternative culture incubation of a memes,, of "media viruses that might infect the world with good.  My long-range goal with regard to starting the Island Foundation is to do just that.

As Island author Aldous Huxley did, I try to look at the larger picture an understand the whole system. Drugs are just one part of a much more all-encompassing ecosystem and we should pull them out and focus our attention on them alone, to the exclusion of the context they are used, the culture they are used in, the psychology of human beings. etc. Speaking of drugs without their context is like talking about sex and focusing on "tits and asses" -- It misses the whole erotic thing . High Times is famous for publishing pictures of buds or blotter papers as centerfolds, just like Playboy is famous for printing centerfold showing tits and ass and pubic areas of females considered beautiful by our culture. The reason people are so fixated on the object rather than the process is that both drugs and sex are taboos. So people aren't allowed to access images and talk about these objects with complete openness. So they lust after the object and forget the big picture.

I continue to believe that there is an unmet need for good drug education among the youth and even among the Boomers and GenX demographic strata above them. They do no get it in school and they do not get it in the mainstream media. But it seems to me that the more central task is to move past asking what psychedelic are and what they do We should begin to address largely unaddressed larger questions that place entheogens in the larger contextof how people relate to each other and to the universe. It this way, the entheogens may be seen as the beginning point, the catalyst rather than the end point. Our consciousness is like a beam of white light, the entheogen is like a prism and the rainbow of colors that our out the other side the many new insights, ecstasies and ideas that then engender. It is then up to us to take this crazy quilt of color and make it into a the whole fabric of a new culture.

In this context, it is useful to talk about set and setting as first promoted by the Leary, Metzner, Alpert, Barron and
their Harvard Research Project of the early Sixties.. Set is our own unique personality and setting is the people and things we surround ourselves with. Our own personalities can be "reprogrammed" or "reimprinted" by psychedelic experiences within the limits of the biological constraints of the individual. Our genetics are an important component of what we call personality. Add to this a lifetime of imprinting and exposure to the setting of the culture and you get what you call your personality.

Certainly, one point that needs to be driven home repeatedly. Entheogens are not for everyone nor are do they unlock the god within for everyone. There are some people whose genetic wiring and life experiences make them bad candidates for the use of psychedelics, especially the way that the are used in this culture, which is mostly without a cultural framework or context. And even when people take psychedelics once or many times, they don’t turn into saints automatically. People like Charlie Manson and those of  his ilk prove the old homily: "you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear."

After looking at the set, next is the setting. Setting is the other people around you and the environment, in which you work and play. I certainly remember those glorious days when MDMA was legal and we were conducting large-scale experiments with groups. These groups would become temporary autonomous zones for love and compassion and noncompetitive behaviors. People would feel connected, part of a loving tribe.

Then it was back to the "work-a-day" world come Monday morning and soon people would be back at their old games, gossiping and backbiting and competitive and uncompassionate. This was because the culture did and does not reinforce the empathogenic/entactogenic experience of MDMA.

Certainly many people who have taken glorious high dose psychedelic sessions and have felt it quite difficult to "come down." Coming down means returning to a world that mostly does not support the unitive, mystical, playful experience that they have just had.

Having gazed through the lens of a psychedelic compound, they have experienced the relativity of reality itself. Each compound in that regard, is like putting a new lens into a microscope of telescope and gaining a new view of the universe which puts the other views into perspective.

But the social world we live in becomes the limiting factor. There is only so much personal enlightenment once can achieve before we begin to feel a need to turn from within outward, to start changing the setting around us. Hindu "gurus” make a big point of being able to be "happy" and "enlightened" while things are going to hell around them. Certainly this is a useful skill. But for me and I believe that for most people, coping with a world gone mad isn't really adequate. A good book that explores this dea is "A Hundred Years of Psychotherapy And the World is Getting Worse by James Hillman Ph.D. and Michael Ventura.

I think that the reason people need to repeat psychedelic experiences so much is that they need to revisit a place beyond the consensual reality in order to reassure themselves that its still there. They keep needing another fix of transcendence least they forget the vision.

The problem is that the culture is not supporting their visions or at least not enough. So how do we go about approaching this limitation? To go back to the where I started; it is by developing a big picture of the whole system. We might start asking and attempting to experimentally and experimentally and even intellectually explore what a culture might be like that could exist in the post-industrial, information age, post-modern world which we live that would support our experiences in alternative states of consciousness.

I continue to be an ELFer, and to consider you fellow Entheogen Loving Friends to be the community I choose to call my own. I enjoy my role as someone who has studied psychedelic compounds and can help answer basic questions for naivetes and enthusiasts. But I also would like to challenge those who gather here to begin looking at the larger picture.

Alternative cultures have always provided a critique of the mainstream culture and aspects of each alternative culture has found their way into the mainstream.

But with the population bomb ticking, the educational system falling apart, the social contract which makes us feel safe with one another breaking down and industrial societies splitting into a two class society of haves and have nots, it is important to address this question. How do we create an entheogenic culture with the wisdom to reverse some of these trends and turn the world into a better place to trip?

A Call for a Psychedelic Sanctuary

A Call For A Psychedelic Sanctuary
by Bruce Eisner

"Wooden ships on the water, very free and easy, Easy, you know the way it's supposed to be, Silver people on the shoreline, let us be, Talkin' 'bout very free and easy... Horror grips us as we watch you die, all we can do is echo your anguished cries, Stare as all human feelings die, we are leaving - you don't need us. Go; take your sister then, by the hand, lead her away from this foreign land, Far away, where we might laugh again, we are leaving -you don't need us." -- David Crosby, Crosby, Stills and Nash

MANIFESTO

Four decades have passed since fresh winds of change blew our nation and around the world. In Wooden Ships, David Crosby and his friends wanted to catch some of the wind those changes to "keep the party going" as the end of the magic millennium drew to a close. The winds blew icy cold as the decade ended.

The 1960s were an extraordinary period - a time in which millions of people acted as if they had swallowed some kind of pill which made them different - and of course they had. The cultural icon of the man in the thin gray flannel suit with a drink in his hand gave way to the image of a different kind of cocktail party - the kind they had on the popular TV show "Laugh In." They were having drinks with a different kind of rum. It wasn't the rum that young John Kennedy's elders had run in from Cuba in the thirties in martinis that made sixties parties swing. Old Ike's stolid attitudes had given way to a new vision of the Western world, as articulated by Kennedy, who was both a symbol of the strong stirrings of change as well as a martyr to the kind of reaction that it would bring forth.

The sixties were inspired by a new openness (you might call it predecessor of The Soviet Glasnost). Roles and ways of doing things that had persisted for centuries were quickly dissolving. In the old South, young Freedom Riders rode into town and threatened to overturn "Jim Crow" discriminatory laws. Women in great numbers decided not to be housewives and play the traditional role of the submissive sex. Many concerned that economic progress might eventually ruin the earth began using the word "ecology" (heretofore reserved for those seriously academic) to talk about a movement often symbolized by the "Whole Earth" as seen by the first humans to orbit the earth. And of course, with the advent of birth control pills, there was the sexual revolution-before the tragedy of AIDS.

It was a period marked by so much cultural change that the highly respected historian Arnold Toynbee observed of this period in American history: "I have been visiting the United States since 1925. Before my last visit (1967), I had been absent for two years, and I came away with the impression that in those two years there has been more change in American life than in all the previous forty."

Of course, it was LSD in the pills that gave people so much insight. LSD, a potent mind-changing drug with few side effects, was discovered in Basil, Switzerland during the dark days prior to World War II, around the same time as a much larger group in New Mexico was cooking up the atomic bomb. Just as Gutenberg's revolutionary printing press in the fifteenth century allowed for anyone to own his or her own bible, a privilege that until then had only been enjoyed by the monks, so now the same mass production machines that had turned out bibles (and later Ford motor cars) were turning out insight pills (handing out this Holy Grail to somewhere between one and two million people between 1959 and 1970). The numbers who passed through Aldous Huxley's well-described "doors of perception," stepping out of Plato's cave to glimpse the white light of the sun, far exceeded any generation before it. The mystical experience, from being something reserved for saints, became available on sugar cubes.

For many, LSD was a roller coaster ride through their unconscious-a kind of virtual Disneyland. But for a few, it took on a significance that they called "mystical" or "religious." It was these profound experiences which led a large segment of the Boomer generation to a commitment to altruism and idealistic pursuits that were to become the passion during what is often referred to as the "Psychedelic Sixties." In many, that commitment to change has never really faded.

The Psychedelic Movement, as it came to be known by some, grew from a small intellectual elite-composed mainly of writers and artists in Los Angeles, New York, and London-into a mass movement which involved the "best minds of [their] generation," including college students and open-minded people of all ages. This movement provided a catalyst for many changes that occurred in our culture. The long-haired, bearded hippie with his or her open, loving ways was born as an American archetype as a result of the experiences and unique consciousness that resulted from the use of LSD on a grand scale.

Because these changes were sudden and profound, they were quickly viewed as a fundamental threat by powerful forces in our society which make up the economic, political, and other social strata we call The Establishment. In a rather successful effort to keep the genie in the bottle, they made possession and use of LSD and several other related psychedelic drugs serious crimes.

In making LSD illegal, which was formerly legal and available in powerful and pure forms, the Establishment was able to effectively freeze the fluid changes of the sixties. The Psychedelic Movement lost its ability to pass on to new generations the opportunity to have the powerful experiences that LSD had given them access to, leaving those that came after them to try new synthetic and botanical substitutes which are only a shadow of the real thing.

Despite the repressive actions of the powers that be, young people continued to be fascinated by the lifestyle and values represented by the Psychedelic Movement. Many sought out and some found psychedelic compounds-mainly the psilocybin mushroom and various synthetic compounds-and, although it was harder to find them, they remained determined and persisted. The followers of the Grateful Dead kept the hippie image by following their esteemed band "on tour" each year with the look and feel of the hippies.

Since the Dead's demise, other bands attract this "rainbow hippie" following. The members of this youth movement used what compounds they could get and were able to gain an inkling of what the million-plus members of the Psychedelic Movement of the sixties had experienced. New generations maintained a faith and trust in the the Psychedelic Movement -- -treating psychedelic compounds as religious sacraments for all the years that followed the Supreme Court's ruling that psychedelic compounds could not be protected under the rights given by the First Amendment. And those of us who had those powerful experiences three decades ago continue to value them and to be guided by them.

We million-plus who participated in the Movement gained an understanding of the transparency of the superficial TV show reality most people live their lives by that cannot be erased by the passage of time. Many of us wondered what a world might be like in which psychedelics were as integral a part of society as traditional intoxicants like alcohol, coffee and tobacco.

The influence of psychedelics permeated many aspects of our everyday life and permanently changed the way we live, love, work, and play. The impact that the Psychedelic Movement made on our culture appears everywhere, from the television commercials for Coors or Porsche that look like underground films from the sixties (complete with their computer- generated effects-impossible back then), to casual clothes in the workplace. Our language is less formal, and filled with the groovin' vernacular of those heady times.

Our rock-n-roll society has adopted and made commonplace the rebellious symbols of the youth culture of the sixties. In addition, the tremendous technological advances in many areas give a science fiction veneer to our lives-making them somehow resemble the fast-paced mind acceleration characteristic of tripping. The connection between the cyberspace of computers and the shamanic space of vision quests is one example. The energies and mechanisms of new devices and gadgets we use today almost seem magical, just as our LSD trips once felt.

But while widespread adoption of sixties styles and the external advances in modern technology remain, the metamorphosis of a new culture which sometimes led LSD users in the sixties to think of themselves as a mutant species ("acid freaks"), has slowed to a glacial pace. In many ways our society has returned to the conformist trends of the early fifties that preceded the Beat movement.

Timothy Leary said back in the sixties that "this generation will never be like their mothers and fathers." Yes, we have moved forward in many ways technologically, and in some ways socially, but the feeling of rapid change that gave many participants in the Psychedelic Movement the sense that we were fast evolving toward a dramatically different and vastly more humanistic society is gone. Certainly there are social youth movements and an alternative culture. But nobody believes-as many did in the sixties-that a new culture is just around the next corner.

The media has gained tremendous power over the way we think and believe. In some ways our society resembles the "Brave New World" Aldous Huxley wrote about back in the thirties, where people enjoy their mindless pleasure while working more hours than ever before and living in a reality created by the media.

• Given the situation I have described, it is time for those of us whose lives have been touched by or identified in some way with the innovative world view inculcated by the psychedelic experience to:

• Preserve the large body of knowledge and wisdom that came out of our Psychedelic Movement against the possibility that it will be forgotten over time.

• develop an effective strategy for liberating ourselves from the frustrating and stagnant situation we find ourselves in
• Get those winds of change a'blowin' once again!

Essential to the strategy for accomplishing these goals is one central fact that many of us know at a gut level but which don't often verbally acknowledge: those of us who believe in the appropriate use of psychedelics as an experience, and one we wish to have or share with others, are for the most part not wanted or tolerated in the United States. In fact, the drug user of the year 2002 has replaced the Communist of 1951. Strong top-down hierarchical political institutions seem to need some group to scapegoat so that people's eyes are diverted from the real show in front of them. Prisons are filled with our friends.

It was in the sixties that the laws against LSD and other psychedelics were first enacted. Laws against marijuana had been on the books for years but LSD was a much more powerful experience and played a central role in creating a large group with worldviews different from any that had come before it. (see "History of the Psychedelic Rediscovery" by various authors in the web's Psychedelic Library.

For some who took it, LSD had such an impact that they believed it might provide insights of a similar magnitude in anyone who took it. There is the story told in High Priest by Timothy Leary of poet Alan Ginsberg's taking psilocybin (an extract of the "magic mushroom" synthesized by LSD discoverer Albert Hofmann and used in early experiments at Harvard with psychedelic compounds). Ginsberg became convinced that if he could get John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev to take LSD, it would end the Cold War; after not being able to get the telephone operators to connect him to either man, he slowly returned to the realities of 1962.

In a way, this kind of thinking colored many of even the most conservative leaders of the Psychedelic Movement. Although known to believe that LSD should be kept for the intellectual elite, even Huxley, in a speech delivered in Copenhagen, Denmark, speculated on a "mass experiment" of social LSD- taking as a remedy to the disturbing directions our society was taking.

However, whether an experiment of mass LSD use would have turned out differently if the Vietnam War had not been part of the scenario will never be known. Those opposed to the war advocated LSD use for everyone as a "weapon" against the US government. If LSD had instead been used as a personal development tool, the urgency to spread LSD use might have been mitigated with the result being a smoother integration into society (fewer "freak outs," etc).

But LSD was politicized and its image with the public deeply scarred by its association with the anti-war movement. The same kind of social transparency that people felt toward some of the mundane and even violent games people play was magnified when people examined from an altered consciousness the terrible costs incurred by the U.S. intervention in Vietnam. This in turn made the Establishment, already threatened by the challenge to their traditional values by LSD, even harsher in their counterattack on the Psychedelic Revolution. After all, many of those in power felt; these people (the anti-Vietnam policy hippies) were akin to traitors.

There was a split back then in the ranks of the Psychedelic Movement between those who were committed political activists and those who saw LSD more as part of an apolitical spiritual path. There were the famous Hippies vs. Yippies debates and efforts to reconcile them such as the 1967 Human Be-In in San Francisco. Those not specifically political in their participation in the youth culture imagined that when the war was over and society has progressed, LSD and marijuana would join alcohol as socially sanctioned drugs, and that some of the new ways of relating which they had learned using LSD would be assimilated into our society as a whole.

However, as one of those who looked forward with idealism and an expectation of rapid change, I don't think in my wildest dreams I could have imagined the "War on Drugs." In the thirty-three years since I first puffed a joint, there has been a trend toward marijuana decriminalization (it certainly is by no means accepted). On the other hand, LSD has been put in the same category as powerfully addictive drugs-heroin, cocaine, and amphetamines, and new drugs such as MDMA-as a threat to the health and safety of our citizens.

As the sixties ended and the seventies began, when Nixon left office and Jimmy Carter became president, there was a sense that there might be some change in the attitudes of government toward drugs. But as soon as Ronald Reagan took office, that hope was quickly dashed. Reagan and his wife Nancy had always been firmly opposed to drugs, and Nancy actively joined the War on Drugs; her "Just Say No" campaign was her personal contribution to the administration.

There were many elements at play here. Reagan was an old Cold Warrior and as the threat from Communists both at home and in the Soviet Union ended, he felt we needed a new enemy to turn our attention to. A new internal enemy to fight was the drug dealer and the drug user became that enemy. While their rhetoric was targeted toward all the major drugs we mentioned above, it is probably no coincidence that the purity and price of cocaine and heroin has decreased by a factor of ten since the War on Drugs scaled up while the availability and purity of LSD and other psychedelics has plummeted. During the years when the Grateful Dead scene threatened to keep the spirit of the Psychedelic Revolution alive, the DEA even started an Operation Deadhead to make sure that there would be no resurgence of the "craziness" of the sixties.

Because of it was used by many more people than Huxley, Leary, or Hofmann ever could have imagined or approved of, LSD gained a public image as a "crazy-making" drug, an image that has been engraved so deeply and is reinforced by the media so frequently that it is almost impossible that it can be rehabilitated in the public mind anytime soon.

As the Berlin Wall fell (perhaps partially the result of the Psychedelic Movement and its effects upon tolerance among the younger generation), the drug user has replaced the Communist as the identified threat to our society and our youth. So we must hide away to use our sacraments, and read underground magazines, and fight the propaganda war fueled by government billions-with their prime time TV commercials and school DARE programs -with a few Web sites and small circulation newsletters like Island Views.

The government is waging a war on us. According to the I-Ching (hexagram 33) sometimes the best strategy for later victory is to retreat. It is my belief that we need to go elsewhere and establish a place where a culture can be formed that allows for the use of psychedelic compounds as part of its social contract. So this is a call to found a psychedelic sanctuary somewhere in the world-perhaps somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere, far from U.S. politics-in which those of us in the Psychedelic Movement can feel at home and make a homeland.

Island Foundation and its previous incarnation, the Psychedelic Education Center (founded in 1977), was the earliest organization aimed at furthering the cause of the Psychedelic Revolution. So it is fitting that Island Foundation makes the founding of a psychedelic sanctuary our primary mission.

In the years since our founding, many other organizations have been formed; each with a specific set of agendas which, they believe, will help put the Psychedelic Movement back on track. These include MAPS and the Heftner Foundation which both hope to get psychedelic research going again (there were over 4000 studies with LSD before it was made illegal in 1966); the Albert Hofmann Foundation which hopes to build a psychedelic library; and the Council for Spiritual Practices which aims at making a legitimate religion of the use of LSD and other "entheogens" as they call psychedelic compounds.

None of these groups have been particularly effective in changing the extremely negative climate in which psychedelics continue to find themselves. Yet each of them would benefit enormously through the establishment of a psychedelic sanctuary somewhere in the world. Such a sanctuary could have research parks for both MAPS and the Heftner Foundation, permit the Council for Spiritual Practices to practice their religion, and allow for the creation of a library and museum in the name of the great Swiss biochemist Albert Hofmann.

Since we put on the "LSD-A Generation Later" Conference in 1977 and the Future of Consciousness Conference in 1980, there have been an increasing number of annual events in which members of the Psychedelic Revolution, many now in their forties and fifties, assemble to hear speakers talk about various aspects of psychedelics and entheogenic plants. These conferences also would find our new sanctuary outfitted with facilities enabling people such as Jonathan Ott and Rob Montgomery to hold meetings with a new degree of safety.

Looking at the larger picture, organizations aiming for the decriminalization of all drugs, including the powerful Drug Policy Allaince have attempted
to promote a harm-reduction strategy-popular in Europe and much of the rest of the civilized world-here in the U.S. They have had some limited success but with the recent victory of George W. Bush, I don't think that we can look for drug decriminalization as a national strategy any time soon. There will be progress but unless something unforeseen occurs, these changes will progress at a glacial speed.

In the early days of the Psychedelic Movement, many of the leaders attempted to found sanctuaries in other places-including Mexico and the Caribbean. They had limited success, I believe, because they chose to stick so close to the United States with its powerful control mechanisms. Later, the group leased a large estate at Millbrook, New York, and so was born the first of the efforts to build a community around visions emanating from the Psychedelic Revolution. As the revolution expanded, these communes and co-operative experiments proliferated.

Two years after the founding of Millbrook, the residents found themselves under siege by G. Gordon Liddy. Later in that decade, most of the rest of the hundreds of efforts at building a representative psychedelic culture dissolved due either to their own internal problems or negative forces aimed at them from the larger community. Several books, including The Modern Utopian (edited by Richard Fairfield), describe many of these fascinating, diverse efforts at creating something new right here in the good old USA.

A few of these efforts remain, most noteworthy the Farm in Tennessee, but also a handful of others. There is also an organization dedicated to intentional communities that publishes an annual guide to literally hundreds of communal efforts. What is different, however, is that psychedelics are rarely a part of this new generation of experimental communities. Even the Farm-famous for its excellent weed-has an official rule against smoking marijuana. We will discuss more about the quest for a utopian community in part two of this essay.

The desire for new vistas for the "heads" of our time became in the 1970s even- shall we say-"further out." At various times Tim Leary advocated building a starship to carry the hippie masses to a new star and even had the Jefferson Airplane-turned Jefferson Starship-singing the anthem. Later, after his release from jail, Leary decided that putting the heads in high orbiting space habitats might be a more immediate possibility. As we can see by the state of our current space efforts, he was perhaps forty or more year ahead of his time. The feeble attempts at a space station in the year 2000 hardly look like fit housing for psychedelic refugees.

Along with the strong bonds of group identity that the psychedelic community felt in the sixties, there was a strain of thought that perhaps the only way to live the way we want was to go somewhere else. In the sixties, Crosby Stills, and Nash made famous the song "Wooden Ships" which suggests we set sail and find a "distant" land. "We are leaving; you don't need us" was their refrain. Indeed, we still aren't wanted and that distant land still beckons. The mutant genes that carried our forefathers from England need new soil.

We who were the youth generation that comprised the Psychedelic Revolution are now middle-aged. We are an important segment of the huge Baby Boom generation- the population explosion that followed World War II. We went to Woodstock, we dropped in and had careers, and many raised families. Many have not forgotten their idealistic past, and our income supports many projects which we all hope in some way may improve the current situation.

I propose in this manifesto for a sanctuary, that Island Foundation set up a separate account to raise capital to purchase the land and build the facilities for a psychedelic sanctuary. Before the account is set up, there would be a committee formed to look into two important issues:

The legalities of such a sanctuary with regard to international law. The United Nations and its related World Health Organization attempt to enforce drug laws internationally. Considerations such as this must be taken into account as they relate to the feasibility of the project as well as to the decisions regarding the acquisition of the sanctuary.

. The availability of an island or island property with the proper requirements for the creation of the psychedelic sanctuary must be investigated. A German broker, Dr. Farhad Vladi, has sold over 700 islands over the past ten years and there are currently 3000 on the market.

Once these two items have been clearly understood, the committee would project a budget, and a separate "lock-box" account administered by two Island members would be formed, in which all tax-free donations would be kept and not used for any purpose until a fixed amount of money was raised. The committee would determine the amount needed to fund the project used for any purpose and no money would be withdrawn until the committee determined there would be sufficient funds to purchase the land and build the facilities for the island. Of course, all contributions would be tax-deductible and could be placed in an interest-bearing account, which would leverage our contributions.

A study committee would be formed to decide the exact requirements for being allowed to go to the island, and also to define some of the parameters-economic, political, social, and ethical - by which the island's psychedelic sanctuary should function. In fact, there might be two portions of the island, a welcoming area that would be the place where out