Original subtitles

[birds chirping]

[melodic music plays]

[man] I'm really a late bloomer when it comes to psychedelics.

I am now 65.

I have a successful career as a writer and a professor.

At this age, sometimes you need to be shaken out of your grooves

and take a chance and surrender.

There's a word for the kind of person who seeks to expand their consciousness

with the mind-altering power of plants.

A psychonaut.

[woman] I've been called many things. I've been called a shaman.

I've been called a medicine woman.

I actually don't like the term shaman.

I think it's been way overused and appropriated.

So I've settled on ceremonial leader.

Um, and I've also been tagged with wisdom keeper.

[high-pitched whistle]

[Erika] Great spirit, great mystery. Gratitude for this brand new day.

Gratitude for the greatest gift that we've been given,

the gift of life upon this planet.

What I've truly learnt

is that most of us just want to be happy.

But we have experiences in our life that can be painful.

And so we have a choice about what we're gonna keep alive,

and what we choose to release.

Everything that has happened to us in the past that cannot be changed

can be a gift or a teaching or a healing for us.

They usually are. In fact, sometimes our...

[Michael] So as I began my journey,

the psychedelic I wanted to explore first was LSD.

But when my friend Erika explained to me that in certain indigenous cultures,

tobacco is a powerful, sacred medicine used to heal the spirit

and clear the mind, and that it happens also to be legal,

I decided to begin there.

[melodic synth music builds]

[inhales]

[Erika] Stamp one foot.

Sound. Sound out loud.

- [Michael grunts] - That's it. Moving it through.

Moving it through. Uh-huh...

[grunting]

That's it. That's it.

[Michael] I felt this flame going back through my head

as if my brain were on fire.

[exhales]

[sighs]

And it worked its way down through my body

and I sort of felt like it was pulling stuff out of me.

Strong emotions are just passing through like weather systems.

[breathes deeply]

[Erika sings in Spanish]

It was an unexpectedly short-lived,

but powerful experience of, really of catharsis.

[singing in Spanish]

[singing continues]

This is the same chemical that kills people.

Four or 500,000 people a year in the United States alone

die because of tobacco.

And yet the same plant in another context,

used in a ritual way, can actually heal people.

[Erika sings in Spanish]

We have to think about these substances in a very clear-eyed way,

throw out the inherited thinking about it and, like, what is it good for?

What if mental health problems like PTSD,

OCD, alcoholism, and depression

could all be helped by psychoactive substances

such as mescaline, psilocybin, MDMA, and even LSD?

[melodic synth music swells]

[birds chirping]

[Michael] For many years, I've been writing about the relationship

of humans and plants,

and that led me down the path of several books about food.

And I gradually got more and more interested

in the most idiosyncratic use we have of plants,

which is plants that change consciousness.

Whether in an everyday way that we're barely aware of,

like our addiction to coffee and tea,

or in more radical ways with the psychedelic plants and substances.

The ones that radically change consciousness

and raise really important questions about consciousness itself.

I wanted to understand these substances

and their potential to heal so many people.

[melodic synth music plays]

I began reading about some groundbreaking studies being done in Switzerland.

Healthy volunteers would spend a day in the hospital

and have their vital signs monitored while taking a high dose of LSD.

Sometimes referred to as "acid."

The study investigates how LSD affects the physiology

and the, um, the mind.

[nurse in Swiss German] Any unexpected or undesired effects since last session?

Any particular concerns or fears about today?

Um... [exhales]

[in Swiss German] I actually feel ready.

Thank you.

[Felix in English] The hardest thing is the not knowing

what you will experience.

Each session is different.

You have to be open

with regard to experience, um...

not refuse anything that is appearing.

Just trying to be open and to make sense

and to appreciate what is coming up.

[Michael] We've all heard really scary things about LSD

and other psychedelics.

So I took a good hard look at it and was very surprised at what I found.

The first was that these are not addictive drugs.

They are remarkably non-toxic.

There is no known lethal dose of LSD,

but that's not to say there aren't risks.

Some people who are vulnerable or disposed to serious forms of mental illness,

like schizophrenia, can be triggered into their first psychotic break

by a bad psychedelic trip.

[melodic music plays]

But in a situation where you're being guided,

you're in a very safe environment.

You have kind of optimized everything we've learned about psychedelics

into a set of practices and instructions

that minimizes the chance of anything bad happening.

[Felix] It was in the second session

where I experienced myself being in the womb of my mother.

The umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck.

The experience was not quite nice because I...

That fear of not surviving the state.

I felt I had to decide.

Should I die?

Or should I use my whole energy

to pull the umbilical cord away to be able to breathe?

And I did it, and it worked.

[birds chirping]

And it felt good afterwards,

because I re-experienced this traumatic phase in my life

and I somehow processed, also,

the emotional things that were associated with this experience.

[upbeat synth music plays]

I'm quite convinced that it's not a fantasy because I asked my mother.

My mother told me that in the later parts of the pregnancy,

I had problems with my heart.

That my heartbeat was not strong enough.

The whole experience triggered a long discussion with my mother,

and it deepened the relationship.

She also asked me if she could be part in the study and experience the same

or try also this substance.

These substances are quite powerful.

You can really work with your forgotten experiences

that may be influencing the whole life continuously.

So it's uh... it's quite a gift.

[melodic music plays]

[Michael] Like most people, I figured psychedelics were a product of the '60s.

I was born in 1955, so Summer of Love I was only 12,

and by the time psychedelics swam into my conscious awareness,

the backlash had begun and everything you heard about them

was that they scrambled your chromosomes,

they caused you to hop off of buildings and think you could fly.

- It was all terrifying. - [tires screech]

- People dying. - [screams]

Get away!

[Michael] People going crazy. And I believed it all.

- Get away. - [doctor] You're all right.

[Michael] It wasn't until I started doing some reporting on it

that there was this long pre-'60s history.

From 1950 to 1965,

there had been this remarkably fertile period of research,

specifically into LSD,

and that LSD was really considered a miracle drug.

But you really have to excavate this knowledge,

'cause it was erased from the history of science, really.

It was just buried.

And so, I started excavating that history.

[birds and insects chirping]

[interviewer in Swiss German] Nineteen forty-three...

That was the year the atomic bomb was discovered.

And you discovered the bomb for the head, for consciousness.

Can you talk about that?

[in Swiss German] Yes. I don't know if that was a coincidence

or probably no coincidence exists...

[chuckles]

...in this world.

In any case, it is strange.

It is true that...

the ordinary bomb is to the atomic bomb

what an ordinary intoxicant is to LSD.

[electronic music plays]

[Michael] Albert Hofmann was a very brilliant Swiss chemist

working for Sandoz.

And he was working on finding a new drug for women after childbirth.

Ergot is a fungus that grows on rye plants,

and his job as a chemist was to break down the ergot into the various compounds.

The twenty-fifth was LSD-25.

[pulsing psychedelic tones]

[cryptic music plays]

[in English] During the testing of LSD-25,

it was remarked that the experimental animals became restless.

But the new substance aroused no special interest

in our pharmacologists and physicians.

Five years after the first synthesis,

a peculiar presentiment induced me

to produce LSD-25.

In the final step I was interrupted

by unusual sensations.

Possibly a bit of the LSD solution had contacted my fingertips

and absorbed through the skin.

[in Swiss German] I had this wondrous experience.

But I didn't know how it had happened.

[birds and insects chirping]

All my thoughts turned into pictures.

Beautiful! I lay down at home in the afternoon...

[breathes deeply]

...and then it slowly faded away.

Watching these strange pictures and feeling exhilarated.

[electronic music plays]

[Michael] So after this experience,

he did what any self-respecting chemist would do then,

which is to try more LSD.

He took .25 milligrams.

But LSD is active at incredibly small doses.

It's measured in micrograms, millionths of a gram.

[Albert in English] Only with difficulty could I still speak intelligibly.

I asked my laboratory assistant to escort me home by bicycle.

[bike bell chimes]

Everything in my field of vision

wavered and was distorted as if seen in a curved mirror.

I also had the sensation of being unable to move from the spot.

[discordant music plays]

[church bells chime]

[indistinct chatter]

[church bells echo]

[church bell ringing]

Riding home, my condition began to assume threatening forms.

[sinister instrumental music plays]

[baby crying]

[birds squawking]

[insects chirping]

[sound echoing]

[in Swiss German] That was a terrible, torturous experience.

[eerie instrumental music plays]

The feeling that I'm in a different world.

This is probably the end.

I've passed on to the other side.

[music building]

[Michael] He's convinced he's gone stark raving mad.

But as the effects subsided, he walked out into the garden and he said

everything glistened and sparkled in a fresh light.

[melodic music plays]

The world was as if newly created.

[Albert in English] The climax of my despairing condition passed.

Now I gradually began to enjoy

the unprecedented colors and plays of shape.

Kaleidoscope-ish like, fantastic images surged in on me.

It was particularly remarkable

how every acoustic perception

became transformed into optical perceptions.

[buzzing]

[in Swiss German] And the following day,

I woke up feeling

that I was starting a new life.

That I was born again.

[buzzing]

[cryptic music plays]

[Michael] Sandoz now has this powerful psychoactive chemical,

more powerful than anything anyone had seen because it worked in such tiny doses.

But what is it good for?

So, they decided to essentially have

an open-source research and development program.

So they put out word to any researcher, any psychotherapist,

that they had this new substance

and they would send you for free

as much as you wanted as long as you produced

a nice piece of letterhead that said you were a researcher.

And many people from psychiatrists to addiction specialists

started trying to figure out what was LSD good for.

And that launches this incredibly fertile period of research all through the 1950s.

[car horns honking]

New chemicals allow us to experience some of the unbelievably unpleasant

and sometimes quite terrifying mental agonies of the schizophrenic patient.

[Michael] At first, they were called psychotomimetics,

which means they mimic psychosis.

And that was the first paradigm of understanding

and there were a lot of experiments done by a English psychiatrist

living in Saskatchewan named Humphry Osmond.

[Humphry] The first rule is do it yourself.

Then you know and can feel with the patients

as you can in no other way.

[eerie instrumental music playing]

A sense of special significance began to invest everything.

Everything was brilliantly sharp and significant.

If I fixed my attention on a flower,

I felt that I could spend all day in contemplating it.

Beauty, a terrible beauty was born every moment.

Phrases such as,

"I've seen with the eye of the world, the eye of a newborn and the new dead,"

sprang to my tongue, apparently without construction.

These experiences have been most strange,

and in their own way, amongst the most beautiful in my life.

[Michael] And when he did take LSD, he said,

"This doesn't feel like madness, this just feels too good."

So they threw out that paradigm.

Humphry Osmond became interested in figuring out a better name for it.

[interviewer] The term "psychedelic" is actually a word that you coined.

It came as a result of going down to, uh... Los Angeles

and seeing Aldous Huxley.

When I gave him an experimental dose of mescaline there

and after he wrote The Doors of Perception.

[Michael] Humphry Osmond had a very active correspondence

with the English writer Aldous Huxley,

who was very interested in changing consciousness.

So they exchanged letters and they each proposed an idea,

they made a little rhyme that went with it.

But it wasn't the great writer who came up with the winning entry,

it was the psychiatrist.

"To fathom hell or go angelic, just take a pinch of psychedelic."

[sitar music playing]

Psychedelic means "mind manifesting" and that seemed more accurate.

This compound was bringing aspects of the mind

that are not normally accessible

into the field of awareness.

[Humphry] I think it's time for you to have your lysergic acid.

Drink this down, and we'll be back after a while and see how you're doing.

What do you see?

[woman gasps]

[Humphry] Well, tell me.

[woman] Well, I just couldn't. I couldn't possibly tell you. It's...

It's here.

Can't you feel it? This whole room.

And I can feel the air. I can... I can see it.

I can see all the molecules.

[ethereal music plays]

[quavers]

I'm part of it. I'm...

Can't you see it?

[patient] This is purple, isn't it?

No, it happens to be black. You see purple?

Yes.

[doctor] Well, this is just the charcoal. Look at it.

Well, in my mind's eye, now I see that it's charcoal.

[doctor] Now close your eyes.

Close your eyes now.

Would you give me a description

of the first thing that you see with eyes closed?

I feel these lovely colors vibrating all over me. Oh, it's lovely. [chuckles]

- [doctor] Any lines? - Oh...

[doctor] Any forms?

Just like the shimmering of water, you know?

[gasps]

[sighs]

[doctor] You feel happy now?

[sighs]

[doctor] I know you must be, because you have tears in your eyes.

[chuckling, sighing]

[doctor] Is that a beautiful experience, would you say?

[sighs]

[chuckles]

It's just, giving and...

[gasps]

[sighs]

[doctor] You're doing fine. Just try to describe it.

[sighing]

Oh, you... you don't know. You...

[breathes heavily]

You...

You wanna give some... [gasps]

You wanna give yourself as much as you can...

[Michael] I don't think people realize Bill Wilson,

co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous,

he was administered a psychedelic and that's how he got sober.

He had a spiritual experience

that transformed his thinking about his addiction.

[birds chirping]

[Bill] And then I remember crying out,

"If there is a God, will he show himself?"

And then came the miracle.

[uplifting music plays]

[Michael] The spirituality of AA

we most attribute to a kind of latent Christianity.

No, it's latent psychedelia.

Do you consider yourself an alcoholic?

Yes, sir. Definitely.

It's caused me a lot of trouble in the past.

And at this point I feel that I haven't really accomplished anything

and I'd like to start over.

[Michael] From 1950 to 1965,

there had been a thousand scientific articles on psychedelics.

[Bill] The battle you're fighting is one that's in the past.

[sniffles]

[Michael] There had been 40,000 research subjects

and that there had been six international conferences

about LSD alone in that period.

They were getting very good results.

And what they found is that the drug

allowed people to open up

and put down their defenses

in such a way that they could deal with difficult material.

[reporter] Six months afterwards, Arthur King has already beaten

the percentages on alcoholism.

Within six months after the conventional cures,

nine out of ten have gone back to drinking.

Something did happen.

Something that is still waiting to be explained,

and it has to do with the potent mystery called LSD.

[jazz music plays]

[Michael] Psychedelic research was proceeding.

There was a lot of good results.

A lot of people thought it was the future of psychiatry.

But beginning in the early '60s,

the research kind of escapes the laboratory.

Dr. Timothy Leary has been described as being either a prophet or a fiend.

He is the dominant figure in the current uproar on the use of LSD.

When, doctor, did you first start experimenting with LSD?

Six years ago.

[interviewer] That was when you were on the faculty...

I was, uh, teaching psychology at Harvard.

[inhales deeply]

I've been a psychologist for 15 years.

- [interviewer] Right. - I'd come to the sorry conclusion that uh...

psychology wasn't doing much to solve the emotional or the mental problems

of the human race, and particularly, the American people.

['60s rock playing]

[Michael] Leary is a very well-regarded personality researcher.

He gets a hold of some mushrooms

and over the course of four hours, he said he learned more about the mind

then he had in his entire career.

And he realized, this is the next thing.

This is the tool for understanding the mind.

While at Harvard, Timothy Leary and a colleague, Richard Alpert,

started conducting experiments with LSD and psilocybin.

[Alpert] Under suitable safety conditions we provided the opportunity

for some 200 very varied types of people from prison inmates to jazz musicians,

to philosophers to have this experience and give us reports back.

The analysis that these reports showed us

that the nature of the experience is a function of the set and the setting.

[Michael] The great contribution was the concept of set and setting.

That the kind of psychedelic experience you have will be strongly influenced

by the setting in which you have it, and your set.

Your mindset. Your internal and external environment shape the experience.

But the experiments got sloppier and sloppier,

and they were tossed from Harvard.

What's going on in the United States today is, in my opinion,

nothing least than a religious renaissance.

And I want to say right at the beginning that the LSD boom is just beginning.

[somber melodic music playing]

[male narrator] LSD is the most powerful substance

that the human being has ever developed for influencing mind.

I've used the comparison of nuclear energy or a fissionable material.

[man] I took LSD and that was the day

my life was transformed.

Where I realized that Jim Fadiman,

for all of his benefits and flaws

was a subset of a larger being

and that larger being was connected to all other beings.

[pulsing tones]

In other words, a classical mystical experience

of awareness of the unity and the interweaving of all things.

[ringing]

[Alpert] I really do think man is part of divine or total consciousness

and that if you didn't close off, you would see it all.

[Michael] Richard Alpert went on to become Ram Dass,

one of the foremost spiritual teachers,

while Leary became LSD's most outspoken evangelist.

[Leary] Most of us, most of the time

see the world through a very small set of filters.

When you'd take LSD and your consciousness expanded,

the number of possibilities, the number of perspectives dramatically multiplies.

[bass guitar playing]

['60s rock music playing]

[James] Tim said, "Look, I want everyone to take it.

It should be in the drinking water."

His vision was to change the culture.

He wanted people to be free.

He wanted them not to be caught up

in the rigidities of the institution,

the rigidities of their religion, the rigidities of their parents.

[Leary] Turn on. Tune in.

Drop out.

I didn't invent LSD. God made LSD.

[Michael] A lot of people blamed Leary for everything that went wrong

with psychedelics, but it was gonna get in the culture Leary or not.

There were leaks other places.

For example, during this whole period,

the CIA was conducting its own research program

and they were trying to figure out what to do with psychedelics also.

[eerie synth music plays]

[male voice] There was much laughter. The men found it difficult to obey orders.

And soon, the results were chaotic.

[Michael] Could it be a bioweapon?

Could you give it to your enemy and make it impossible for them to fight?

Was it a truth serum that could be used in interrogation?

The CIA was giving LSD to people

out of the VA Hospital associated with Stanford.

And one of the people they dosed was a young writer named Ken Kesey.

If I say one thing today, it may not...

[indistinct male voice]

[interviewer] Would you repeat that?

Moo!

[men laughing]

[Michael] With Ken Kesey, the CIA had turned on exactly the wrong man.

In what he aptly called "the revolt of the guinea pigs,"

Kesey, with his band of Merry Pranksters

proceeded to organize a series of acid tests,

in which thousands of young people in the Bay Area were given LSD

in an effort to change the mind of a generation.

A case can be made that the cultural upheaval we call the '60s

began with the CIA mind control experiment gone terribly wrong.

[church bell ringing]

[birds chirping]

[indistinct chatter]

[James] I was introduced to Richard Alpert.

I then came to Stanford as a graduate student in 1960.

This part of California was becoming a techno hub.

And the studies that we were doing

were with, um, people from the neighborhood.

In order to get into a study we did on creativity,

senior scientists had to have a problem

that they had been working on for at least three months and failed.

We said to them, "We can help you with your problem."

And we're gonna give you a psychedelic. A hundred micrograms of LSD.

[psychedelic music playing]

And out of the people who came,

we had 48 problems and 48 satisfactory solutions.

We had patents, we had publications.

And because most of these people worked in industry, we also had products.

And eventually the computer world emerged here.

[electronic music playing]

If you are supplied with a computer

that was instantly responsive to every action you had,

how much value could you derive from that?

We have a pointing device called a mouse. I don't know why we call it a mouse.

[Michael] LSD was a critical ingredient in nourishing the spirit of Silicon Valley

that distinguished the computer culture of the West coast.

[Jobs] The '60s happened in the early '70s, right?

And that's sort of when I came of age. So I saw a lot of this.

Taking LSD is one of the most important things in my life.

Not the most important, but right up there.

[grunts]

There was something beyond

sort of what you see everyday.

Things talk to you, their spines talk to you.

[Michael] When Silicon Valley is having its flirtation with psychedelics,

there's a very interesting character named Stewart Brand.

Before Steve Jobs, he rethinks the personal computer,

not as this tool of industrial repression,

but as a tool of personal liberation.

[Stewart] In the spring of 1966 on LSD,

I had a genuine creative experience

realizing that if we ever got a photograph of the Earth from space,

it would change people's perspective on everything.

[Michael] So after this trip, he begins a campaign

to get NASA to turn the cameras around and take a picture of Earth from space

and he starts handing out buttons

that have this kind of slightly paranoid slogan.

[melodic electronic music plays]

We don't know for sure whether it reached the executives at NASA,

but they sent back this stunning photograph of the Earth.

[male astronaut] It's awe-inspiring

and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth.

[Michael] The first time we had seen the Earth whole.

This blue marble in this black expanse.

This contributes to the rise of the environmental movement

and a sense of planetary consciousness

that became a very important part of the '60s.

Kary Mullis is the guy who invented the PCR method,

which gives us the ability to duplicate DNA.

This opens up the whole field of genetics

making it one of the most important inventions of the twentieth century.

I was down there with the molecules when I discovered it.

And I wasn't stoned on LSD, but my mind by then had learned

how to get down there.

I could sit on a DNA molecule and watch the moonrise go by. [chuckles]

That's just the way I think.

It's like I put myself in all different kinds of spots

and I've learned that through psychedelic drugs.

[Michael] Turn on, tune in, drop out,

that sounds kind of quaint as a bit of '60s rhetoric,

but it was very threatening at the time.

It was a time of incredible ferment and tumult.

But the character of the era was definitely colored by psychedelics.

The kids were designing their own alternative culture.

They looked different, sounded different, acted different.

And they were dropping out. And so this was enormously threatening.

Especially during the Vietnam War.

['60s rock music plays]

For most of human history,

when you send 18-year-olds to go die in a war they march off and go.

And for one of the first times in history, many of them decided not to go.

And in the eyes of President Nixon, psychedelics were the reason.

[chanting]

[Nixon] This is one area where we cannot have budget cuts,

because we must wage what I have called total war

against public enemy number one in the United States,

the problem of dangerous drugs.

[grim music playing]

[whistling]

[exploding]

[indistinct chanting]

In order to fight and defeat this enemy,

it is necessary to wage a new all out offensive.

[gun barrel clicking]

[male announcer] It's up to you.

Taking LSD is much the same as playing Russian roulette.

[gunshot echoes]

[Michael] The media does a U-turn on psychedelics.

There was a scientific study that alleged to show

that it scrambled your chromosomes.

[male doctor] This is a fetus from the mother receiving LSD.

Note, the abnormal face, the characteristics of the skull,

and the brain, which is extended to the outside.

It was bullshit science, but I remember reading about that when I was like ten.

[Reagan] Well, I'm terribly frightened by the problem of LSD.

There is nothing smart, there's nothing, um, grown-up

or sophisticated in taking an LSD trip at all.

They're just being complete fools.

[ominous music plays]

[Michael] The government turns against it.

LSD is made illegal in California.

In 1970, the federal government made LSD a Schedule I substance.

Classifying it as an illicit drug with no medical use.

[James] The day that LSD research was stopped,

there were about 60 different studies going on around the United States.

The government sent us a letter and says,

"As of the receipt of this letter, your investigational exemption

to use these substances is canceled."

And that ended that research,

that kind of legitimate research part of my life.

[Albert in Swiss German] When it tipped over in America

the miracle drug suddenly became a Satan drug.

And this whole beautiful, wonderful development,

was interrupted in one fell swoop, because of the American story.

[Michael] What had been a miracle drug is now a destroyer of young minds

and what had been this very promising, and hopeful line of inquiry stops.

And then we enter the dark ages of psychedelic research,

a period that lasted for more than three decades.

Perhaps not surprisingly,

it was in Switzerland, the birthplace of LSD,

where research slowly began to pick back up in the early 2000s.

[church bell ringing]

[man] I wanted to restart the research with LSD.

But for a lot of people, this was the bad and evil drugs,

especially within all the medical framework.

A lot of people were really against this kind of substances.

For them, there was no use for such experiments

and for such treatments.

But I was convinced, no, the opposite is true.

There are really people who could benefit.

In 2006, Albert Hofmann celebrated his hundredth birthday

and there was a birthday conference in Oslo.

Happy birthday to you!

[Peter] More than 1,000 people from all over the world came.

[crowd cheers]

[upbeat electronic music plays]

[Peter] At the end of this conference,

there was an open letter to health ministries,

all over the world, appealing to the authorities

to allow LSD research again.

There was no authorities responding to this letter, except the Swiss.

I developed this LSD protocol

and it was approved by the Ministry of Health

and I went to Bern and I got the package,

and there I was very proud and I thought, yes, I'm a legal holder of LSD.

I'm walking through the streets of Bern. [laughing]

Even the police would not stop me because I'm allowed to do that.

The study was for treating people

who suffer from severe physical illness like cancer.

They suffer from anxiety

and existential distress,

and we wanted to show that our treatment will help these people.

[indistinct conversation]

My study was the first study with LSD after 35 years.

[indistinct conversation]

My first patient suffered from stomach cancer.

This patient came to us really depressed.

[melodic music plays]

It was a really deeply human experience.

Patient was crying and this crying was so freeing.

The experience brought them back into life again.

LSD makes this kind of meaningful change. It's not an intoxication.

It's a kind of transformation with so little substance.

That's... That's miraculous.

It's an experience that helps us to feel connected again

to the universe,

the creation, nature, to relationships.

I think this is one of the healing aspects.

[birds chirping]

When I started to do the protocol,

Albert Hofmann said that he would like that I visit him.

He told me that he is happy that I am doing that work

because he was really suffering with his problem child

over so many years.

[melodic music playing]

And now it seemed to be again, could benefit many people

and for me,

his appreciation for that was like a kind of,

how should I say that? A blessing.

I would like that other people would step in,

continue this work.

[tech 1] It should be not bad now.

If we look at the E-field, which is going up in almost 25...

- [tech 2] It's going to be fantastic. - [tech 1] So, yeah.

[tech 2] Okay.

- [tech 1] We'll have a good signal there. - [tech 2] Yes.

- Can you go and fix that now? - [tech 1] Yeah. Now I'm fixing...

[Vollenweider's voice] My lab is trying to understand

the effect of psychedelics on a system level.

Not at the receptor level alone, but they interact in with brain receptors.

We started to look at regions in the brain

where the sense organs come in, act as a filter.

And LSD was very helpful because

psychedelics have a profound effect

opening the filter, for at least the external information.

Sometimes so strong, such an opening

that everything becomes a whole cosmic dance.

The receptors have been discovered in being involved in the self

which is the most complex experience we have.

[beeping]

What's the foundation of having a self?

We all think, "It's me, I'm the owner of my thoughts."

But we don't really know how this is going to be constructed in the brain.

And because psychedelics reduce defense and ego boundaries and rigidity,

they allow us to study the foundation

of conscious mechanism

that you can hardly study in "normal" states.

We learned, indirectly, a lot from psychedelics.

Like how they can be used in psychotherapy.

Psychedelics also reduce, somehow, anxiety and pain.

[traffic passing]

[somber electronic music plays]

[in Swiss German] From an early age, I always had a lot of strange headaches.

It's called chronic cluster.

It's an almost unbearable pain.

As if a smoldering ice pick were stuck into the back of your eyes.

Over the last year, I've not had any pain-free days...

Sometimes eight attacks a day...

and that led to me losing my hair.

[beeping]

In Switzerland we have an institution called Exit,

where you can choose suicide.

And that always remains a realistic thought to me.

To what extent is a life worth living?

After it got really bad last year,

I started to do some research and found out about

a study here in Basel with LSD and cluster.

[upbeat melodic music playing]

[soft chiming]

Since I've taken part in this study I've had five pain-free days

and those days are extremely beautiful.

I'm definitely convinced that with LSD

there's a path to improvement for my cluster attacks.

This opportunity gives me a lot of hope for the future.

[birds chirping]

[typing]

[Michael] In America, sanctioned studies of LSD are still considered taboo.

So I became very curious

when I began looking into the latest trend of microdosing.

Citizen scientists have taken it upon themselves to experiment

with low doses of LSD to help with things ranging from creativity to depression.

Living in the Bay area near Silicon Valley,

microdosing seemed to be going on all around me.

Not surprisingly, all roads lead back to Jim Fadiman.

I've been called, among other things, the father of microdosing.

Microdose obviously means little dose,

between a tenth and a twentieth

of what would be called a recreational dose.

[cryptic music playing]

Wired Magazine called me and said,

"We're interested in doing an article on microdosing."

He wrote a lovely article about a single individual,

a young scientist, a Stanford Graduate,

but the headline suggested there was more people using it.

So suddenly, it was a fad.

It's no longer possible to put the genie back in the bottle.

The question obviously, is, what are the benefits of microdosing?

People who microdose report, about 80%,

that microdosing lifts their depression differently than an antidepressant.

The most common comment is, "I'm back. I feel like myself."

[Michael] So I've known Ayelet Waldman for many years.

I was skeptical about microdosing

and wanted to hear about it directly from a trusted friend.

[birds chirping]

- [woman] Hey! - Hello, Ayelet.

Hello, Michael. So good to see you.

[Michael] Nice to see you too.

Come on in.

[chopping]

[Michael] So I'm kinda curious about how you reflect back on...

- [Ayelet] On my microdosing epic? - [Michael] Yeah.

Well I was desperate, you know?

I mean I was really actively suicidal.

And I... You know, I tried all sorts of things and nothing was working.

Nothing that worked before was working.

- [Michael] When you say all sorts of... - [Ayelet] Every med you can...

- [Michael] Prescribed? - [Ayelet] I think I had a mood disorder.

[somber melodic music playing]

[Ayelet] My father had very clear bipolar disorder.

He would cycle between serious depression and quite intense mania.

But then we also felt like there was something wrong with us.

I mean, that was really the experience for me.

When my father would have those cycles, it made me depressed.

That's what I did to my kids.

That was why I was so desperate to try to think of anything

that would make me feel better.

They'd come down in the morning

and there'd be this moment, like, who is she today?

Is it good Mom or bad Mom? And that's just...

It's a terrible thing for them to live with.

The thought that's the dangerous is they'd be so much better off without me.

Like you're doing everybody a favor by killing yourself.

When I started having those thoughts, I knew I had to do something.

[Michael] When you first heard of microdosing, you followed

James Fadiman's protocol.

One day on, two days off, and it was, it was really remarkable.

And really did like immediately

short-circuit this suicidal period that I was in.

And like, mornings are very hard for me,

and I tend to just wanna sit grimly with a cup of tea

until I would have to braid someone's hair, you know?

Or make pancakes or whatever.

And um... I was like making waffles

and you know, singing...

- My daughter said, "Oh my God! - Did your kids notice the change?

What's wrong with you? Are you on acid or something?" And...

[Michael laughs]

[chuckles] It was so funny.

I'm like why would you say that? That was insane.

Well, how... Tell me, how did you feel? I mean, here is this... this substance.

A molecule that changed your life and saved you. Really.

- At a very dark moment and it's illegal. - Right.

If the drug war ends, what's the peace look like?

You know? We don't know yet.

We have an idea with what we did with cannabis,

but each drug is gonna have to be treated differently.

[melodic music plays]

[birds chirping]

After researching psychedelics for months,

I was finally ready to try LSD.

And despite everything I'd learned about the moral panic and the supposed dangers,

I have to confess, I was nervous.

I was just passing through these places and I would end up in a jungle

or I would end up in an Australian desert.

And I remember climbing ladders

and finding myself getting higher and higher.

I kept meeting people in my life, my son, and my parents, and my wife,

and feeling this incredible warmth and love toward them in this,

you know, unacknowledged love that needed to be expressed.

The importance of love. That love is everything.

They're platitudes, but they're also true.

And so you're re-experiencing them as if you heard it for the first time.

Oh, yeah. Love.

That's the most important thing in the universe.

Duh. But you feel it.

[music swells]

[birds chirping]

[Peter] I remember this phrase of Albert Einstein.

He said that the deepest thing a person can experience in life

is the mystery.

And it is something that we experience also when we take LSD,

and at the deepest moments,

you feel something that is not explainable in cognitive words.

We can try to talk about the mystery yet it remains a mystery.

[Michael] One of the things psychedelics do

is reveal all sorts of secrets about consciousness,

which is the biggest mystery of all.

[bird calls]

Psychologists often talk of two kinds of consciousness.

There is spotlight consciousness, which is very directed.

We aim our attention at something and we think about it,

and that's a very powerful tool.

And then there's this other kind of consciousness

associated with young children, and that's Lantern Consciousness.

And instead of illuminating that one fixed point,

they're Illuminating everything

and everything's coming into them and they haven't seen it before.

You know, a worm on the floor, a ladybug on a leaf.

We talk about recapturing this joy.

This freshness, this first sight and wonder of children.

It's as if you've cleaned the window and you can see more clearly.

[melodic music plays]

These drugs allow us to experience awe in places we haven't experienced it

since we were young children.

You're reminded about the world and its wonders

in a way you may well have forgotten.

Now, you don't want to be in a state of wonder and awe all the time.

It's not a sustainable state. You wouldn't get anything done.

But every now and then it's a wonderful reminder.

A literally wonderful reminder of what's out there.

My psychedelic journey had changed my mind about LSD.

It also made me want to go deeper and explore psilocybin next,

the chemical produced by the mysterious magic mushroom.

[music swells]

[upbeat melodic music continues]

[low-key melodic music playing]