I have done psychedelics,
less now, but once a lot.
Yeah, I have exactly zero experience using psychedelics.
Reality is distorted somewhat,
and there's a lot of laughing.
Psychedelic drugs have impacted humanity
for as long as there've been people
who wanna get their minds blown.
There has been hardly any society
that hasn't used some kind of psychoactive substance.
It's been used ritualistically,
it has been used therapeutically.
They can cause shifts and perspectives
that can be terrifying or revolutionary.
I definitely think psychedelics played a role
in changing the status quo.
Women went from the kitchen to the boardroom,
people of color from the woodshed to the White House.
gay people from the closet to the altar.
The one ingredient in the recipe is social transformation
and change is that millions of us laid prostrate
before the gates of awe, having taken a psychedelic.
These substances are so powerful
that the tiniest amount can make a big difference.
Two hundred and fifty micrograms.
Two hundred and fifty.
Like, let's say you take 350 micrograms,
then what happens?
Two hundred and fifty.
Two hundred and fifty micrograms,
that's gonna change everything.
Such a tiny amount can change
not only the way we see the world,
but change the world itself.
This is a psychedelic history
with trippy numbers that are groovy, man.
(upbeat music)
Let's begin at the beginning
and start with the number one.
Psychedelics like magic mushrooms and LSD
are a class of drugs that alter the user's cautiousness
They can cause hallucinations
and ecstatic feelings of communion.
Psychedelics are popular now
because they help us have experiences and thoughts
beyond what is considered common or normally acceptable.
And people often really enjoy those experiences.
Or they can cause fear, paranoia and confusion.
Bad trips are really bad.
The hallucinations takeover,
paranoia sets in,
and a person dissolves
into the experience and are essentially assaulted
by the images, sounds and hallucinations.
Which is why,
according to the U S Drug Enforcement Agency,
psychedelics are a controlled substance
and a schedule 1 drug.
But if you're not a government agency,
being number one is sometimes the whole point.
Take Steve jobs.
Steve Jobs is the entrepreneur
and co-founder of Apple computer.
Before that, he was a hippie.
We started Apple because we wanted the product ourselves.
Job said that using psychedelics
was a profound and positive life changing experience.
But I don't think it's because of the experience
of LSD that Jobs was creative,
but I think happened was that people like Jobs,
rewrote the meaning of computers,
turned them from tools of cold war industry,
into tools of personal exploration.
At the same time,
turning Apple into the number one company in the world.
A lot of people that I know doing psychedelics
are not inventing any iPhones or iPads.
The iPhone is the ultimate toy for somebody who's high.
Drug use is fantastic for ideation.
It's not great for actually working on things
and implementing them being functional.
Admittedly, Steve jobs was one in a million
or perhaps one in 32 million.
Ten percent of the adult population in the United States
has used psychedelic drugs at least once.
That's 32 million people.
It's a psychedelic Renaissance.
And surprisingly, it puts the 1960s to shame.
Today's millennial might not look like yesterday's hippie,
but if you're in your thirties,
you are 10 times more likely to use psychedelics
than the flower power generation was.
Groovy.
LSD, the psychedelic of the hippie generation
was discovered as a result of 25 trials
and one tiny error.
It's 1943 in Basel, Switzerland.
Albert Hoffman is doing medical research.
Ah, very interesting.
And he is just about to accidentally kick off
the modern psychedelic era.
Hoffman from a young age
was a mental explorer.
He was very spiritual.
His friends were surprised
when he decided to become a chemist.
Nineteen forty three, working on ergot,
this curious fungal parasite,
Hoffman had made on a whim,
the 25th of a series of indole alkaloids
when suddenly he got dizzy.
A tiny trace has found its way onto his skin.
As little as 20 millionths of a gram.
As he put it, he felt quite sick, but not unpleasantly.
Hoffman scientific curiosity
is aroused by this one tiny mistake.
And on April 19th, he ingests a higher dose,
250 micrograms,
then decides to head home.
He was riding his bike back at home
and he end up going on the most momentous
bicycle ride in history
Because the substance was LCD-25.
He went on the world's first acid trip.
Can you imagine riding home on your bicycle hallucinating,
seeing, you know, purple rings around the lights,
seeing the traffic going by
and making strange cenesthetic sounds.
Tsh, tsh, tsh, tsh, tsh, tsh.
I don't know whether it would've been terrifying,
delightful or both.
He was watching the road one minute.
And then the next second,
the whole thing turns into an episode of the Simpsons.
If I'm tripping balls,
I don't want to be operating any sort of a vehicle.
I can't even operate this vehicle
by putting one foot in front of the other.
You made it home safe, that's all that mattered.
This is an electrifying experience for Hoffman
who believes he has discovered a sacred drug,
a drug so powerful that this magic bike ride
is fueled by an absolutely teeny weeny dose.
Two hundred and fifty micrograms
is 10 times lighter than a human hair.
Two hundred and fifty micrograms
is a pretty small amount,
but it can have a massive impact.
Neuro-transmitters are already relatively small molecules.
So it wouldn't take a whole lot of lysergic acid
to completely reorient the way you see the world.
So what exactly does this minuscule dose
do to Hoffman on his famous bike ride?
Shuts down parts of your prefrontal cortex.
So there was parts of yourself that associate your identity
with how you look,
how you dress,
what you're capable of.
All those regions go off-line.
You're no longer
so associated with your identity,
that you can only see your existence through your lens
at that time.
Hoffman presents his LSD findings to Sandoz,
the pharmaceutical firm he's working for.
But they consider it of no practical use and shelve it.
Ten years later,
Hoffman's moldering joy drug will be dusted off
by the unlikeliest of customers.
It's the 1950s an agricultural scientist, Sidney Gottlieb,
is living in a rural cabin without any running water
when he's recruited by the CIA
in the fight against communism.
We're trying to invent faster than them,
we're trying to invent more destructive devices than them.
We're trying to impact, politically,
more countries than they are.
So it's literally a two-country fight for world domination.
We're locked in a cold war
and American state officials were terrified
that there were these secret communist forces
slipping into our society.
Do you have any evidence of any claim to win the case
if there's any subversive amongst these young men.
(bomb exploding)
The U S has a stockpile
of around 1,000 nuclear warheads,
but that's not nearly enough weapons for the CIA,
which wants a thousand times more.
And Gottlieb is the man to get them.
The CIA taps him to come in
and research potential
poisons for warfare uses
and Gottlieb ends up getting the nickname,
the black sorcerer.
The sorcerers' on the case.
Gottlieb thinks way,
way outside the box.
Later in his career,
he will try to take down Fidel Castro.
Viva la Revolution.
And he's not above using slapstick comedy
to do it.
Ouch.
He attempts to kill Castro
with a poisonous cigar, and exploding conch shell,
and a pair of radioactive shoes
designed to make Fidel Castro's beard dropout.
The U S was really desperate to find any kind of weapon
that would allow them to one up the Russians,
whether that's a warhead
or some sort of chemical weapon.
When Gottlieb hears about LSD
from an operative in Switzerland.
Hello.
He spies a one in a million opportunity.
The CIA, one of the things they were looking for
was some sort of truth serum,
and they were hoping that LSD would provide that.
Gottlieb wants to corner the market
before the Soviets can get to this powerful new drug.
So he agrees to pay $240,000
for what he believes is the world's entire supply,
100 million doses.
He not only keeps the drug out of the hands of the Russians,
but he also becomes the unwitting drug mule
who brings LSD to the states.
There were already rumors of Chinese mind control
being experimented on American soldiers
during the Korean war.
Then there've been talk of brainwashing.
wasn't brainwashing a big thing with the Chinese?
In 1953, the CIA appoints Gottlieb
as head of project MK-Ultra,
a program that will test drugs like LSD
on unsuspecting members of the American public.
Gottlieb will head MK-Ultra for 20 years.
That's a long time.
In that time,
he will oversee 149 mind control experiments,
more than 25 of these experiments
involve administering LSD
to thousands of non-consenting victims.
One test subject was given LSD for 174 consecutive days.
But much of MK-Ultra's research
is carried out in broad daylight.
The subjects of MK-Ultra with which I'm most familiar,
were college students and young people
here in Northern California
administered as a standard drug trial,
just as any other drug trial would have been.
For all the time and effort,
the extensive MK-Ultra experiments
failed to produce any practical applications.
I really don't think LSD would make a great truth serum.
You're still capable of lying on acid.
They gave acid to Ted Kaczynski,
a brilliant mathematics student at Harvard,
and then subjected him to a traumatic experience.
Guess what gave the world the Unabomber?
It's like, that's so inconsiderate.
I don't know what type of truth you're going to get.
It might be somebody's own truth, which is I am a tree.
I don't think LSD worked as a truth serum at all.
I don't see any evidence for that.
I think more recently,
LSD has been shown to offer a sense of interconnection.
With MK-Ultra was not looking to help people
feel more peaceful and happy with one another.
MK-Ultra was looking to stave off communism.
The CIA's truth serum has zero success,
but it will prove to be a game changer.
Thanks to 14 tie dye t-shirts.
The CIA's MK-Ultra program had some unintended consequences.
They were trying to root out subversive elements in America.
But for many of the participants of the experiments,
LSD opened their eyes to a new way of seeing the world.
The CIA gave the gift of LSD to the 1960s,
creating a whole new class of subversive weirdos,
beat poet, Allen Ginsburg,
and Grateful Dead lyricist, Robert Hunter,
had their first experiences with LSD in these experiments.
This is a program designed to produce the truth serum,
but it ends up energizing the counter-culture.
In the late 1950s, Ken Kesey is a young writer
who was working in a psychiatric ward
and volunteering in drug trials to make some extra money.
Ken Kesey was in the process of writing
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
and he participated in the MK-Ultra studies in 1959.
He said he suddenly cracked open
and became a different kind of person.
He formed a group of 14 psychedelic adventurers
called the Merry Pranksters.
And fits them out with a vehicle designed to travel
into the cosmic heart of America.
Imagine if you would,
the same school bus to pick you up everyday
as you went to school,
covered in swirling pinks and greens and yellows.
On the front, they paint their destination.
Further.
This becomes the name of the bus,
as well as the mission statement for the Merry Pranksters.
They become kind of
1960s Instagram influencers
going around and putting on artistic shows,
sharing LSD with people and living #vanlife.
The kind of free artists lifestyle
that is very aspirational today.
They drive from California to New York,
a 12-day hallucinogenic odyssey.
When the bus swerves off an Arizona highway into a swamp,
they pour paint into the water and dip their clothes,
inventing the classic uniform of the 1960s.
Love the colors.
The tie dye t-shirts.
And whether antics attract the attention to the police.
Groovy ticket, baby.
They skate away without consequences
because in 1964, LSD is still completely legal.
The Merry Pranksters create the template
for the hippie movement, freedom, spontaneity,
and communion with art and nature.
It's all an alternate universe that's unlocked with LSD.
A substance that is still legal,
but finding a source for the stuff is tricky.
Owsley Stanley or Bear
was famous for being the live mixing board operator
for the Grateful Dead,
but he was also the one that made the LSD
that was given to dozens of musicians from the time period
that we associate with psychedelics.
Between 1965 and 1967,
Owsley Stanley produces 500 grams of LSD,
more than 5 million doses.
He produces so much, in fact,
that Owsley is added to the Oxford English dictionary,
meaning an extremely potent high quality form of LSD.
But the sixties will be a decade split down the middle
by the number 23.
Owsley calls his acid, white lightning,
and Ken Kesey and the pranksters
begin to distribute it at a series of 23 parties
they call, acid tests,
multimedia events that celebrate LSD.
You would've have seen flickering lights.
You would have heard the music of the Grateful Dead.
You would've seen DayGlo paint.
There's just an enormous dance party
and people are tripping
and they are forming a new kind of society
connected by the sensation of shared consciousness.
Tales of Kesey's acid tests
spread like wildfire.
LSD becomes a rite of passage for the baby boom generation.
But the party suddenly stops on May 30th, 1966.
Enter Donald L Grunsky,
Senator for California's 23rd district,
whose bill will make LSD illegal in the state.
Uh, bummer, man.
But the genie isn't going back in the bottle.
Legal or not, LSD is part of a cultural shift
that's sweeping America,
a shift that's defined by six simple words.
It's January 14th, 1967,
Timothy Leary is a 47 year old psychologist
who has been fired from Harvard for his work on LSD.
And he's become a full-time evangelist for the drug.
He is about to address 25,000 hippies
who have gathered at San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.
Many of them are naked.
The Human Be-In was a festival in Golden Gate Park.
People came from all over the city.
They put flowers in their hair.
A parachuter throws free doses of LSD
to the crowd.
The local chapter of the Hells Angels,
mellowed by LSD, are the security.
They listened to music by Janis Joplin
and Jefferson Airplane.
They hear Alan Ginsburg chanting Hare Krishna.
The hippies are confronting the darkness
in their country with love.
Make love not war.
This is during the Vietnam war.
This is in the wake of race riots
that are occurring around the United States.
The Human Be-In offers us a glimpse
of a different America,
an America that could be based around peacefulness.
Timothy Leary takes the stage
and utters six words that will define a generation.
Turn on,
tune in,
drop out.
Turn on, take LSD.
Tune in to the secret system of vibrations
and currents that LSD revealed,
and drop out of mainstream bureaucratic society.
They thought that if they did,
society as a whole would change,
we'd have a new America.
You know, telling kids to just tune in, turn out
and drop out, seems pretty negative,
especially from a teacher.
Never encourage my students to drop out.
I'm going to pass on to my psychedelic co-religionists
the lessons that we have learned over the last six years.
I think many young people, even today,
connect to with the phrase, turn on tune in and drop out,
because it suggests a spiritual connection
between us and the larger universe.
The Human Be-In
was the dress rehearsal for Woodstock,
a three-day music festival in upstate New York.
That includes a tent to help people navigating bad trips.
Four hundred thousand people
showing up in the same place to share an experience,
to receive a message and to commune with one another.
Well, what the hippie generation
doesn't realize is that they're late for their own party.
Approximately 9,000 years late.
In 1955, Gordon Wasson is a banker,
but more importantly, he's a mycophil, a mushroom lover.
And he'll be one of the first Americans to discover
there was more than one way of getting high,
more like 200 ways,
sprouting up all over the planet.
But he wouldn't have found out
if it had not been for the number 58.
It's important to remember that,
whereas the era of Timothy Leary
led to the complete popularization of these substances,
up until 1960,
those who studied these plants were really remarkable
at collecting handful of scholars.
Gordon Wasson has a theory
that there are cultures who use mushrooms
for their religion.
Hmm, I wonder?
So when he learns from a pen pal
that the people in Oaxaca have a mushroom,
they call Teonanacatl, God's flesh.
He gets there as fast as he can.
The Mazatec people were not the only indigenous group
that used psilocybin,
but he was the one that he found.
Ola.
Wasson meets a woman named Maria Sabina,
who knows about Teonanacatl.
Maria Sabina was a traditional Mazatec healer.
In many ways she was just
one among other healers.
She was very humble, poor local woman.
Gordon Wasson pretends to be sick
and persuades Maria to let him attend
one of her all night Veladas or healing ceremonies.
He is the first outsider to ingest this mushroom
in a sacred context.
And he photographs it.
He wrote it up for life magazine,
an editor picked a snappy title,
Seeking the magic mushrooms.
Timothy Leary had a subscription.
He made his own beeline to Cuernavaca.
The psychedelic gold rush was on.
Suddenly the whole world knows
that if you want magic mushrooms,
Maria Sabina is the woman to see.
Maria Sabina got to be really famous,
but she also experienced the cruelties of that fame.
Maria's village is overrun with hippies,
scientists and all kinds of scumbag who just wanna get high.
Hey, you know where
I can score some shrooms?
To the police, she's a drug dealer.
Her house was burnt,
there was a lot of tragic episodes in her life.
Maria's life is shattered by the attention
from the outside world.
Wasson on the other hand,
had a terrific Mexican adventure paid for,
as it turns out by the CIA as MK-Ultra sub-project 58.
When he was done,
he sent samples of the mushrooms to his pal, Albert Hoffman.
You see, it's all connected, man.
From that point forward,
Americans became fascinated by mushrooms.
You don't have to synthesize them in a laboratory,
like LSD or MBMA.
You can just go in the field, pick them,
dry them, and eat them.
No one knows how many species of mushroom
there are.
Though it's estimated there may be as many as 3.8 million.
Of these, more than 200 are psilocybin mushrooms.
Psilocybin is the magic part of magic mushrooms.
The chemical that causes psychedelic effects.
Psilocybin mushrooms grow across six continents.
There aren't any mushrooms on Antarctica.
Mexico is the global hotspot,
home to 53 species of magic mushrooms.
Do mushrooms count?
Oh, then I have been high on psychedelics.
I like shrooms more,
if we're going to be talking about drugs.
It's like acid with a seatbelt, so it's nice.
We don't realize that in order to find out
what you can eat,
that people literally had to try things
and make people aware that this is something
you want to stay away from.
Or Hey, this mushroom right here, it's nourishing.
And it gives you an interesting perspective on life.
And as we're discovering,
people have been getting an interesting perspective on life
for the last 9,000 years.
Probably our very earliest evidence
that people were using mushrooms
for reasons other than a food
is from the site of Tassili N'Ajjer in Algeria .
We have a depiction of a humanoid figure
who has a bee or insects' face,
but they're also surrounded by an aura of mushrooms,
which suggests to us
that this is about a religious experience.
People have been finding different ways
to alter their minds for a long, long time.
And it's not just mushrooms.
They've been using flowers, cacti, vines, and even toads.
Of the 120 or so recognized hallucinogens,
several of which are questionable.
Fully 90% of them are from the American hemisphere.
It turns out Albert Hoffman and Gordon Wasson,
not to mention Sydney Gottlieb,
weren't discovering anything new,
which begs the question.
Why did it take the west so long to catch on
when psychedelics can be found almost everywhere?
One answer can be found hiding somewhere in the number 548.
For many cultures, psychedelics aren't drugs,
they're religious or ritual sacraments.
The use of psychedelics, particularly,
has been really influential
for indigenous peoples across the Americas,
but not only in Americas, all over the planet.
Indigenous people have used these substances
for thousands of years and having no drug abuse problems.
How did they do it?
Well, first they recognize the use of these substances,
a legitimate thing to do.
They use their plants in natural form,
which is pharmacological safer,
and critically, they envelop the user
in a protective cloak of ritual
that insulates him or her
from the sometimes dazzling psychological
and psychic power of these substances.
And so that's the path we should follow,
the path of the shaman.
Standing at just half an inch high,
the Psilocybe mexicana magic mushroom
packs a psychedelic punch.
By contrast the Amazonian psychedelic vine,
Banisteriopsis caapi,
is 2,352 times bigger
at 98 feet long.
But as Explorer, Manuel Villavicencio, finds out,
size doesn't matter.
It's all about how you brew it.
In the 1850s,
Manuel Villavicencio is following the path of the shaman
across Ecuador and in the remote Eastern part
of the country,
he becomes immersed in the traditions of the Jivaro people.
He studied the Jivaro,
the Jivaro were famous and a little bit exoticized
for the practice of shrinking heads and things like that.
Manual Villavicencio watches
as the Jivaro shaman brews a drink
from the bark of a giant vine boiled for 12 hours.
By firelight, the shaman drinks
and hands it to Villavicencio.
He takes a swig and suddenly he's swimming
or is he flying and tastic birds glide by
and speak to him.
Hey, man, how's it going?
And then he plunges to earth
to be consumed by unimaginable horrors.
Manuel Villavicencio has taken Ayahuasca,
one of the most potent hallucinogens on the planet.
Ayahuasca is a very traditional sacred plant of the Amazon
that has been used by more than 17 indigenous groups.
Ayahuasca, it means vine of the soul.
The people of the actual Northwest Amazon
say you're sucking at the breast of Jaguar woman
when she tears you from her tit
and throws you in the pit of vipers.
It's about getting to the other side.
Villavicencio writes one of the first accounts
of Ayahuasca in his book, Geografia Republica Del Ecuador.
It was only published in Spanish.
So it didn't get a lot of visibility.
It's one of the most powerful psychedelics
known to humankind.
But Villavicencio's obscured geography textbook
is no bestseller.
And the secret of Ayahuasca will lie hidden
somewhere inside it's 548 pages for a hundred years.
But if Ayahuasca was one of the best kept psychedelic
secrets of the last century, it isn't anymore.
Today, living in the bay area,
the Uber driver knows about Ayahuasca,
the person who grow food knows about Ayahuasca.
But for rookie Westerners,
this is not a substance that should be taken lightly.
The few people that I know who've tried Ayahuasca
describe it as physically really rough.
It makes you very nauseously vomit.
Blaargh.
Traditionally is considered
some kind of purging substance,
like having a medicine that cleans you up.
And then you have a series of hallucinations
that are very much a kind of religious experience,
almost a kind of psychosis.
It's a psychosis best explained
by the number 13.
Ayahuasca's powerful effects can be attributed
to its main active ingredient dimethyltryptamine or DMT,
a chemical in the brain
associated with near death experiences.
People often describe leaving the experience
as a feeling reborn.
And so to be reborn,
one must die in a spiritual sense.
And this is a common description that we see
even in people recently who've tried Ayahuasca.
Because end of the day,
we're talking about the great mysteries of life,
and we still have a lot of existential questions.
In a recent scientific study,
out of 13 volunteers, given DMT,
all 13 have out of body experiences.
Hey, has anyone seen my body?
Sixty six percent report meeting aliens,
robots were elves during their trip.
Oh, not the probe, again.
And 80% reported their experiences
under the influence are more real than their waking lives.
Whether you're talking about the Siberian shaman,
who traveled through the trees
and go up into the spirit world,
or whether you're talking about the Peruvian shamans
who do the same with the vine of the soul, Ayahuasca
there is the sense of traveling
through some sort of spirit world
that cuts across psychedelic rituals across the planet.
But indigenous peoples are not the only ones
who've had their culture shaped by psychedelics.
It turns out, so was the west.
If you've ever counted how many days till Christmas,
you've been waiting for one of the patron saints
of psychedelia.
There is speculation that Santa Claus
was a mushroom, Amanita muscaria,
because it is a red and white buttoned mushrooms.
He goes on a trip across the sky with flying reindeer,
a species that also incidentally loves to eat mushrooms,
especially Amanita muscaria mushrooms.
A dude's going to come into your home
and not steal your things,
but he'll give you things, you know,
like, all he asks is milk.
You have all sorts of characters dealing drugs.
You got Santa Claus, apparently, leprechauns,
my old college roommates.
But Santa isn't the only trace
of psychedelics in Western culture.
One of the active ingredients in LSD is nothing new.
It's called, Ergot, a fungal parasite
that develops on crops, such as oats, rye, barley, and rice.
Hoffman thought he was the first
to go on the trip of a lifetime.
It turns out he was more like the 6 millionth.
Let's rewind 2,500 years to ancient Greece.
Socrates, yes, that Socrates,
was one of 6 million men were inducted into a secret society
known as the Eleusinian mysteries,
a multi-day ritual with a psychedelic conclusion.
We know that people were pilgrimaging for multiple days,
praying, chanting in these large groups
and at the very end taking a drink
that cause them to have experiences that were incredible,
but we don't know what exactly the elixir they take
at the end to hallucinate, was.
This elixir was called Kykeon
and no one knows what the active ingredient was,
but psychedelic scholar, Gordon Wasson, remember him?
He had a theory.
He suggested that wasn't in fact psychoactive
and that it was based on ergot,
which of course years later, Albert Hoffman,
would be working with when he discovered LSD.
Ancient Greece was not the first
or last culture in the west to tangle with ergot,
which has proved to be both a blessing
and a curse to humanity.
Remember the adage of Paracelsus,
the difference from a poison, a drug,
and hallucinogen and narcotic, is just dosage.
In the middle ages,
ergot was both a poison and a drug.
Midwives used it to aid childbirth,
but a tainted loaf of rye bread
could cause temporary madness or worse.
Ergot, this curious fungal parasite
that caused St Anthony's fire when entire medieval towns
would go crazy and fingers would go necrotic
and noses would fall off.
Lots of people in medieval Europe and in the Americas
understood not to eat ergot, and to remove it from the rye.
But sometimes people didn't know
and it can decimate a village.
what is a hallucinogen?
What is a poison?
I mean the key thing is whether or not a culture
is able to use a plant substance in helpful ways.
How can you tell the difference between
psychedelic good and psychedelic bad?
In 17th century, New England,
the number 24 will show just how bad it can get.
It's 1692, a nine-year-old Betty Parris is not feeling well.
After she and her friends dabble in fortune telling,
she develops a fever.
But soon she is hiding under furniture.
(Evil laughing)
Then she barks like a dog. (dark barking and howling)
She has uncontrollable screaming fits,
and then the condition spreads to her friends.
(Kids screaming)
We're talking about a very restricted
conservative society.
Any sort of strange behavior,
especially on the part of young girls
would have been viewed as heresy.
The local minister believes she's bewitched
and it will end badly in the Salem witch trials.
(child screaming)
I remember watching Salem witch trial movies
when I was in junior high school.
And it was just put forward
that these witches had gone crazy.
More recently, there is speculation
that they might have been eating tainted bread with ergot.
What she was experiencing may have been in her mind,
or it may have been LSD.
We have many examples in the past of ergotism
impacting entire communities.
And even fairly recently in the 1950s
that occurred in France
And in 2001 in Ethiopia,
this is not something relegated to the past.
During the Salem witch trials,
over 200 people are accused of witchcraft.
Thirty are found guilty.
Nineteen are hanged.
Four die in prison.
And one is crushed to death under stones.
That's a total of 24 deaths and countless ruined lives.
Betty Parris was lucky.
She survived the witch hunts.
But 300 years later,
a new kind of witch hunt is taking place.
Remember Woodstock in the summer of 1969?
Well, 400,000 party-goers
are about to come up against the power of the number one.
LSD and the hope for society
based on benevolent shared consciousness
is bumping up against the reality of our crimes
in the Vietnam war and the race riots
and the racial tension here at home.
And it becomes clear that LSD can't fix that stuff.
What's more, LSD starts to look like a source of crime.
At the same time as Woodstock,
a gruesome mass murder in Hollywood shocks America.
These seven murders were committed by a gang of hippie thugs
known as the Manson family.
Charles Manson is said to have used LSD
to control his followers
and reshape their sense of morality and reality.
When it came to the Manson trial,
that was everything the government needed.
People take this, they commit acts like this,
and that was extremely powerful anti LSD advertisement
right there.
There was a lot of hysteria about people painting LSD
on door knobs or putting it in Halloween candy.
There was never any documented evidence of this occurring,
but this really scares a lot of Americans.
LSD has already been classified
as a schedule 1 controlled substance,
the same legal category as heroin.
I am glad that in this administration,
we have increased
the amount of money for handling the problem
of dangerous drugs, seven fold.
In 1971, President Richard Nixon goes further
and declares drugs to be public enemy number one,
putting psychedelics
squarely in U S law enforcement's crosshairs.
Then in the 1980s,
Nancy Reagan spearheads the war on drugs with her,
Just say no, campaign.
It's never been because the drug is bad for you.
It's always been a way to target the community using it.
You have marijuana in the early 1900s,
which target Mexican laborers.
Then you have the criminalization of cocaine,
which was targeting the African-American community.
Prohibition is about a hundred years old
and it's a kind of anomaly in the history of humankind
if you look in the bigger picture.
The war on drugs has gone on now for 50 years,
it's cost a trillion dollars.
A trillion dollars is a stack of dollar bills
that would reach a quarter of the way to the moon.
And today, there are more people in more places
using worst drugs in worse ways than ever before.
The number of Americans
arrested for drug possession has tripled since 1980.
Every 25 seconds, somebody is arrested
for drug possession in the U S.
In 2015, there are 1.3 million arrests.
That's the equivalent of one in every 252 Americans,
Twenty percent of the prison population,
or 456,000 individuals are serving time on a drug charge.
That costs the Federal Government $9.2 million every day
or 3.3 billion annually.
War on drugs, that's just not gonna work.
It feels like a failure, yeah.
To be honest with you,
I think there's other bigger battles to fight,
war on poverty, how about that?
Illegal or not,
new drugs keep coming into fashion.
In the 1990s, a whole new generation
experiences their version of psychedelia.
So how many letters does love have?
The answer turns out to be 29.
Methylenedioxy methamphetamine is a 29 letter word
that shortened to MDMA.
And as otherwise known as ecstasy.
MDMA both encourages the release of serotonin,
but also inhibit the uptake of serotonin.
So people get really flooded
by this feel-good neurotransmitter.
It makes them want to
dance and hug,
and it's like receiving the best news of your life
when nothing really has happened.
Known as the love drug,
It is the fuel for rave and electronic dance music culture
that starts in the eighties and is only getting bigger.
It's not hard to see the allure of a pill
that promises ecstasy.
But MDMAs blast of bliss
can put users in dangerous situations.
A handful of MDMA deaths by dehydration,
set off a moral panic in Britain, in the 1980s.
There were some deaths because of it.
What happened in the 1980s, especially in the UK,
was that MDMA was used at very early raves.
And some of these clubs were turning off the taps
in the bathroom and then selling cups of tap water for $15.
There was no ventilation in the dance clubs.
They were overheating on the MDMA
and they weren't realizing it
because they were having such a serotonin-based
blissful experience.
More recently,
the psychedelic spotlight has returned to California.
This time it's not naked hippies or groovy Hells Angels.
It's the digital denisons of Silicon Valley
who are hacking the technology of their own bodies
by microdosing.
Remember Albert Hofmann
and what 250 micrograms did to him?
Well, what if you took something smaller, much smaller,
say 10 micrograms, what would happen then?
Microdosing is taking very small amounts of LSD
that will not produce the kinds of hallucinations
that a larger dose would produce.
But might produce a mood shift.
People are taking very minute doses
much less than you would take to get high
and using that instead of mood stabilizing drugs.
And considering how many bad side effects are associated
with the current pharmacology
around treating depression, anxiety,
this may be a really great solution.
Microdosing is like a sneaky, fancy way
to use drugs at work.
But like if you work at a startup,
I feel like the company just gives you some
on your first day.
If it actually helps people, great.
So, yeah, I think it's worthy of study.
After decades when it was impossible
to study psychedelics legally,
therefore is to follow the same path
that cannabis took to legalization.
First medical then recreational.
And now billions of dollars of investment
is pouring into the psychedelic startup sector.
In the last two decades,
the number of people using LSD in the U S
has increased by over 200%.
And you're more likely to be a user
if you have a college degree,
are single, divorced or separated,
and you're in your late thirties or forties.
The middle class is the new psychedelic generation,
sorry hippies.
In the USA, 17 states have legalized
the recreational use of cannabis,
36 have legalized it's use for medicinal purposes.
One state has taken this a step further
into the realm of the psychedelics.
Just this last year,
Oregon voted to openly allow the sale
and distribution of psilocybin mushrooms.
I hope to see for the future of psychedelics,
that there's more openness
to researching their possible uses in humans.
On the positive side,
I see psychiatry embracing psychedelic therapy,
but the money behind it
is going to drive false claims about psychedelics.
And you're going to see more and more
that the medical industry is going to push psychedelics
into places where they might not necessarily fit.
I do think certain psychedelics will become legal,
especially for medical reasons, but it is still illegal.
I do not promote it.
I do not encourage anybody to do it.
Without dough, substance like ecstasy is ideal
for couples therapy.
It's ideal
for post-traumatic stress.
A substance like the tryptamines mushrooms,
I can see being extremely valuable for palliative care,
for hospice care, for end of life counseling.
I think it's important to really understand
that psychedelics is not a panache for everything,
not a magic solution.
And it's not for everybody.
Hey, kids don't do drugs, but if you do do drugs,
picture you'd have snacks.
Oh God, my parents are gonna watch this and be like,
oh my God, my son is a drug addict.
They need to do shrooms.
I've had some ideas that I've written down
when I was on psychedelics and they weren't so good.
That's why I don't tend to mess
with those kinds of things
'cause I'm like, a small amount of that
can do irreparable damage.
I just want to know that I can do basic arithmetic
when I come back.
(upbeat music)