one of the questions that I wanted to get your opinion on is, at the time that this was happening, there were a number of researchers both here in the United States and Canada and in Europe who were highly credentialed in medicine, in psychiatry, in pharmacology, who knew that everything that the governments were saying was a lie.
Was it simply fear of persecution that made them not stand up and say, "Hey, wait a minute." Dennis McKenna: Yeah.
I think it's fear of persecution, in the sense that, most of these people are in academic contexts.
So funding and status and tenure and all these sort of leashes that society can put on people can be threatened.
And that's been the case for a long time in academics.
I mean, academia is, in some ways, one of the more corrupted institutions that we have to deal with.
This is one reason I never tried to get tenure, because I wasn't willing to play the game. And I wanted to teach.
And I taught a lot about psychedelics.
And I think my supervisors, at the time I was an adjunct professor, they never looked too closely at what I was teaching because my classes were always over enrolled. Right?
And so, "Well, that's a measure.
He must be doing some right.
So we'll leave him alone." But I was done.
But anyway, that's a personal thing.
But a lot of researchers, I think, particularly in neuroscience and psychiatry and pharmacology and this sort of thing, the motivations for many of these folks to go into these kinds of fields like neuroscience was really motivated by a desire to understand consciousness.
And some of them have had their own psychedelic experiences.
And that just increased that desire because they could see that they were tools.
Back in the fifties, before these things became stigmatized and banned and vilified, I mean, LSD was what there was.
And Sandos was making it available to researchers, psychiatrists, to pharmacologists, to clinicians.
And even to a few philosophers and things like that.
And LSD was really responsible for the birth of modern neuroscience.
It really is what transformed neuroscience, in some ways.
Because it was a tool, a molecular tool, that opened a window into some of the processes that were clearly associated with consciousness.
I mean, the idea originally in the fifties, the idea was, well, the LSD state is like schizophrenia.
It's a model of psychosis.
So and the term they used then were psychotomimetics. Psychosis mimicking.
The nomenclature for these things has gone through an evolution, but they were psychotomimetics and the state they induced is like psychosis.
So if a psychiatrist wants to know what his patients are experiencing, they can take LSD and have a model psychotic reaction, look at it from the inside.
Well, of course it's not.
It doesn't resemble psychosis.
I mean, but that was the thinking at the time.
And then people were actually having these experiences and coming back with these mystical revelations and all this insight.
And it's like, well, no, that doesn't really seem to fit.
But the idea was that LSD could be used as a probe to understand some of the molecular mechanisms of associated with these altered states, because number one, it looked like serotonin, which was becoming a neurotransmitter that was being studied.
Researchers knew it was important.
And secondly, researchers knew that it affected serotonin.
So that was primarily what it affected.
So really, neuroscience was sort of birthed into its modern form because of LSD.
And then that work continued and began to be used clinically very effectively for certain things, especially alcoholism and that kind of thing.
Humphrey Osmond's work in Saskatchewan with alcoholics, which can begin on the fifties and continued through the sixties, very promising work.
And, like you say, when they made the prohibition, it's not that the data was destroyed or disposed of, but it was just disregarded.
It was just marginalized.
It's out there somewhere.
But it was disregarded because these drugs, the criteria was, I mean, they're schedule one.
So the criteria was, they're extremely dangerous. They're addictive.
They have no possible medical use.
They have no value whatsoever. So ban them.
And that was what defined the schedule one drug.
And that basically was implemented in the states at the end of the seventies and through the state's disproportionate influence on international regulatory bodies, the UN convention on psychotropic substances just fell into line.
And these things were prohibited for at least 20 years.