All language subtitles for 2.hofmann-b(Av63316915,P2)

to most LSD

or psychedelics

are synonymous with the 1960s in the hippie generation

but mind altering plants and hallucinogens

have been around as long as human beings

may even have sparked the early art

and imaginings of our prehistoric ancestors

had it not been for the scientific investigation of

one man coyote

magic mushrooms

and other sacred plants

may remain hidden in the shadows even today

little is known about them

some scientists feel hallucinogens may hold

valuable clues to the workings of our minds

you know when I was a young student at Harvard

Richard Evan Schultz was sort of a legend on the campus

and then the kindly professor

who shot blow guns in class

and had lived mysteriously in the Amazon for years

of probably

the greatest living explorer of the 20th century

and what really intrigued him of course

were the curious plants that first inspired him

in his work in Oklahoma

later work in Mexico

these curious plants that we know as the hallucinogens

now the active

intoxicating principle

in late 1973

I knocked on Shoalty's office door

two weeks later

I was in the Amazon

living amongst many of the same tribes of

Shoalty's have visited 30 years before

as an anthropologist and botanical explorer

I shared many similar adventures

becoming lost in the forest

tending off strange diseases

and participating in sacred ceremonies

in all my years of exploration

I was always inspired by his example

whatever he told me to do I did

whether investigating zombies in Haiti or searching for

new hallucingens in the Amazon rainforest

I later spent years researching and writing

his biography one river

the more I Learned about his exploits

the more the man amazed me

now I'm retracing his route to witness sacred

lucinogenic rights

from the American desert to the jungles of the Amazon

in the summer of 1936

a twenty one year old Harvard student left Boston

and began one of the longest

strangest trips of the 20th century

his inspiration was a plan

in the obscure German book

Richard Evans Shorties had read of a small

hallucinogenic cactus

that could induce otherworldly visions

its name was peyote

he was so amazed

he decided to drop everything to study it

he was inspired by his professor Oaks Ames

director of the Botanic Museum

who encouraged students in

his class to sample exotic stimulants

and even distilled alcohol during prohibition years

themes provided the money to send shorties

14 miles away to Oklahoma

to unravel the secrets of coyote

use amongst the chiawanians

Coyote grows in the American Southwest

and northern Mexico

for 3,000 years

the ancient peoples of Mexico

use the cactus as a direct line to god

then the newly arrived Spaniards bandit in 1521

in the late 1800s

German scientists extracted the active ingredient

the hallucinogen mescaline

yet even by Salty's day

few knew of the religious use of peyote

amongst Native Americans

in the late 1800s

early 1900s

there were few

non Indians who were experimenting with the Americans

some literary people like we're Mitchell

William James

philosopher

uh they were experimenting with peyote

and describing the experiences in very interesting ways

where the Mississippi River

Shorty's trip to the Kyla was a logical choice

the tribe had been visited once before

by his new traveling companion

graduate student and anthropologist Weston Lebar

this was to be an extraordinary adventure

they had a beat up 1928 Studebaker

the trip to Oklahoma lasted days on road

so bad it sometimes took 12 hours to go 100 miles

and there was no guarantee what they'd find

at the end of their journey

and the federal government

battled a nation of law breakers

the law of the land said it was illegal to bring a

shortly set out

a fourteen year war against alcohol had just ended

and surrender

prohibition was repealed

but a nation that had demonized rum

wasn't ready to legalize a mind altering cactus

hallucinogen

drugs are different from other classes of drugs

for starters

hallucinogens are not addictive substances

it's not something you can take every day

it just doesn't work that way ordinarily

and I can't imagine anyone want to

it is such a powerful experience

it takes time to integrate it

it's not the kind of thing

you're gonna wanna do every day

that's the huge difference between the LSD

for instance

and heroin uh heroin

you can put everything off forever

using heroin you know

all really matters is the heroin is being comfortable

human beings are born with an

innate drive to experience

other states of consciousness

native peoples use psychedelic plants

natural lucinogens

for very positive purposes

they use them for healing

uh for contacting spiritual reality

and they do this by using these plants

ritually and purposefully

like shorties

my journey begins at home in the United States

I'm traveling to Navajo country

to experience a ritual seldom seen by outsiders

you know in the 1930s um

most of the world

had never even heard of hallucinogenic plants

outside of a small little circle of scholars

and that made it all more incredible

this young kid from um

Harvard who had never been west of Boston

decided in the summer of 1936

to travel out to Oklahoma and live amongst the kyola

instead of the ways of the peyote cult

and it's something I

I've always wanted to witness

I've always wanted to know it

and it's difficult

I mean you can

just can't get access to it

and only the Native American Church is allowed to

legally use peyote in the sacred context

unfortunately

the Navajo still have this practice

and they invited me to join the sacred circle

within the TP

and witness the remarkable ritual that is the

essence of the peyote way

yeah you know Calvin

I'm extremely grateful that you're having us here

because for me

all my life

I wanted to

witness and participate in a beauty ceremony

all my life

but and well

because my great hero

the man who taught me everything

who is that

uh his name was Professor Richard Evan Shorties

uh I read everything he ever wrote about it you know

and yet I've never had the opportunity to witness it

so this is a very important thing

extremely grateful that you've made this possible

so you haven't going through the coyote yet

no not yet no

wood lots of it is needed to keep two fires going

one for the peyote ceremony later in the evening

the other for sweat launch

across North America

sweats are vital part of Indian life

rocks are heated in a fire

and later water will create the steam

the ritual is said to purify the individual

both physically and spiritually

and in the case of the peyote way

it prepares you

for the intensity of the sacred ceremony

where to learn something and to sweat it up to

we don't just go and we talk about

we teach a young generation

Calvin Socie is a revered elder of the peyote church

is called a roadman because he guides believers

down a road of righteousness

away from such visors as alcohol

the cactus is the vehicle

Richard Schultes Learned about peyote

from a legendary roadman

Melo Cozat who was born

at a time when buffalo still covered the planes

when we go into this right

it's like going into Mother Earth

you're going into the mother's womb

um things that hurt a person

it's all inside of us

we go in there

clean that out of us

and then when we go in the ceremony

we're clean

we can still pray in them

then that's when the medicine works

it's a little bit like entering another

and once you're inside

it's pitch black

but then the song begin

preparing you for long night of period rituals ahead

it's always said that temperatures in these

traditional sweats can get so intense

that if you don't sing

if you're not involved in a chance

you can get overwhelmed

sweat lodge ceremonies are sacred

and Calvin doesn't want any cameras inside

you know feels like you've had to sort of

I mean it's great

because you feel like you've had a bath and shower by

like a thunderclat or something

you know like

some warm rain that's come pouring down all over you

which is your own sweat

in 1936 Shorties experienced these rituals too

but it took time

when he first arrived

the Kylo were cautious

they had suffered in the past

for practicing their sacred ways

and now Labar was back with a stranger

who wanted to understand their most solemn ceremony

by respecting their traditions

Shultis earned the Chiwas trust

with no hesitation

he swallowed the bitter

sacred medicine up to four times a week

shorties found the kaleidoscopic colours astonishing

but even he could not escape

the nauseating side effects of the cactus

seen as an essential

part of the ritual

by taking the cactus

shorties established a precedent he would follow

for the rest of his career

he refused to be the clinical scientist

outside looking in

he immersed himself in native culture

to learn secrets denied outsiders

I think from the moment that I saw him

I was fascinated by him

he had an amazing fond of knowledge

he was just an interesting person

somebody wanted to know

I think underneath my senses that he was quite a uh

wild person

I'm attempted even say a proto hippie

who back in that year

there was really no social support

for that kind of thing

Shorty's research came at just the right time

there were still a few elders left of the

very generation that had first created the peewee way

tomorrow I'm gonna have a

chance to do something I want to do ever since

meeting shorties

participate in a traditional peyote ceremony

for him that summer in Oklahoma

was just the beginning of a life of exploration

he would discover sacred plants

and hallucinations so powerful

it would change generation

plant explorer

Richard Evan Shorties was a real life Indiana Jones

whose discovery of hallucinogenic plants laid

the foundation for the psychedelic 60s

his adventure began in Oklahoma in 1936

working with the Kiowa Indians

to unravel the mysteries of the Peyote Way

for years I studied with Shorties

now I'm retracing his journey

starting here at a rarely witnessed peyote ceremony

just be prepared

peyote ceremonies

are a blend of Native American Christian beliefs

a half moon altar is prepared and later

blowing coals in the shape of a mythical thunderbird

so that's a

this is a crescent altar

which once it's formed in the shape

becomes a symbol of the hilly road

which is a path of righteousness you

you must walk

and then the fire will be here

dead center

and eventually the ashes

you can almost see how the

the ashes will be formed

in the shape of the thunderbird

no Navajo Celebration will be complete

without a mutton feast

the purity ceremony is no different

this sheep will be cooked for the next day's meal

it's just something so wonderfully ordinary about life

of all people all times

just like the Pitty Company

it's not you know

it's just so much background of people's lives here

it's just it's what you do to be well

here peyote is sacred

it's never taken just to get high

in fact tribal members trying to kick a drug habit

will actually turn to peyote

this is our thing

our traditional thing to do

but if they want to help out there and take their drugs

and if they want to get out of it

so they would come into the poet meeting

and they'll get a cure

for anyone stop using drugs or alcohol

they can come in a meeting

so the way you don't even think of this is a drug

it's no this is a medicine used to treat it

helping you out

drugs you might know

I've spent seven years studying amongst Navajo

Native Americans

another Native Americans

their use of coyote

and I just completed a new science study of

close to 200 people

in the final published study

the result show that these people are healthy

the ritual is protected federally by an act of Congress

the American Indian Religious Freedom Act

passed in 1994

yet not all state laws conform with the federal mandate

creating confusion so

Native American church members are sometimes arrested

when transporting their legal sacrament

across state lines

in the 16th century

the Spanish band peyote use

even killing Aztec priests yet

it continued to flourish amongst the Indians of Mexico

not until the late 1800s did the ritual start to spread

to the tribe of the United States

the man who started it all

was a Comanche chief of mixed blood named Quana Parker

in 1884 badly wounded and battle

Parker received peyote to heal his wound

then while in trance

Parker said Christ appeared to him

and gave him a message to spread the peyote faith

it was Parker who created the Half Moon altar

the peyote of the center as a new kind of sacrament

but its power grew out of the fact that

as the traditional ways declined

as the buffalo were reduced to a shadow in the prairie

as the wisdom of the elders became just a memory

as the Sundance was forbidden

and has all the ritual practices

which made this extraordinary

culture of the plane so majestic

when all that was lost

here was something that offered a new promise of hope

a vision of god

a new possibility for life itself

yet despite the effort to Quana Parker

the peyote ceremony remained illegal

the man who helped legalize a peyote way

was a pioneering anthropologist named James Mooney

this fellow

James Mooney

came along and encouraged the China Rapo Nation to

to incorporate as a church

we call it the parody church

the Native American Church

this is a parody way

this is a native traditional way and

but this word church

to please the white missionaries and stuck

when shelters came to the Kaiwa

Greater white America either didn't know about peyote

we were hostile to it

and so the Americans that were in

charge of reservations were trying to stamp it out

it was very much hidden

but it was also illegal

the Native American church

was formally incorporated in 1918

with some 20,000 members spread across several states

a government opposition continued for decades

Sophie's first peyote ceremony was a revelation

the cactus was used here as a healing tool

a kind of communion waver

to bring participants closer to god

the parody ceremony begins as a different shorties day

with the words of a tribal member who is suffering

the patient Karen has survived a whole range of abuse

she has come to be healed

it's just what people do to stay well

it's what they do to make sense out of sensation

to heal themselves when they're ill

to rebalance their energy in their spirits

when they feel low

no we can't sing

the crown of the peyote cactus is cut off and dried

the plant is extremely bitter

some users manage to chew it

Calvin has grounded up

and also prepared a tea to make it easier to take

then we go ahead eat some medicine

not us that we can't force nobody

throughout the ceremony

the participants use the peyote as a sacrament

they take as much or as little as they desire

what they must do is Revere the plant

at times the people will take small symbolic amounts

so little that the plant has no physical effect

but when being necessary for healing

the roadman and the participants will consume

enough to induce a powerful psychopathic experience

but that experience

specialty discovered

does have side effects

beyond the powerful visions in euphoria

compounds in the cactus often induce nausea

and vomiting

the roadmen believe this is a medicines

way of purging illness from the patient

as don breaks the parody starts to wear off

Calvin closes a ceremony

as Road Man did in Shorty's time

with the Sacred Eagle fan

a final brushing off of sorrow and pain

in the early morning the TV comes down

every sign of the ceremony is swept away

the final act is a cutting of the cord that ties the TP

Poles together

symbolically and perhaps tangibly

Karen's sorrows will disappear

it's gotta work from teaching people to

really understand what they're doing to their bodies

and the sanctity and the holiness of their body

and to protect it

and once people have an appreciation of that

maybe it's not so bizarre

then for a Navajo elder to suggest to a grandson

to come with him to pray uh to god

to their creator

with their sacrament

which they call medicine with capital m

and that medicine today

it's still peyote for them

you know that summer in Oklahoma

really changed Salty's life

he went back east

and not long after

he went down to Washington DC

the nation's capital

and he testified at Congress in favor of the life

that they were

their people to use peyote in traditional context

and while he was there

he was doing some research at the Smithsonian

he came upon a letter that provided a clue

that would allow him in time to solve one of the

really great mysteries in the whole history of botany

and salty solving of that puzzle

would unwittingly usher in a whole new era

a time in lifestyle and culture

merged with religion and politics

a revolution that continues to affect us to this day

while in Washington DC 1937

botanist Richard Evans Shorties

came across an astonishing letter

in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution

in the letter

a Mexican doctor

Las Pablo Raco

made a passing reference to a long lost hallucinogen

tejuanacotal

flesh of the gods

used by Aztec priest to commune with their creator

pinned to a peyote specimen

Raco's letter stated that tiwanacotta was not peyote

as commonly believed

but was a mushroom

still used by Indians in the mountains of Oaxaca

shorties believe Raco and then convinced his professor

Ames to fund his journey to Mexico

to search for the true identity of the Aztec plant

I come down here to follow the trail of the mystery

the letter from Raco really was a key to the puzzle

because it suggested

not only the Tejuana Castle really was a mushroom

but the mushrooms were still being used

in ceremonies in remote reaches of Mexico

shorties contacted Raco

who sent him samples of the mushrooms in 1937

but the specimens arrived in such terrible shape

they couldn't be scientifically identified

so Sophie decided himself to travel to Mexico

really with the goal of finding the mushrooms growing

if they existed

so that he'd be able to click proper specimens

that would allow him to identify at last

this mysterious sacred plant of the Aztec

so he came south by Greyhound bus to Mexico

met up with Raco

and they travel by train

south of the mountains of Oaxaca

and eventually by horseback

to reach the small maztec community of Guadala

we're leaving Oaxaca City by road

traveling 200 miles inland to welcome according that US

female shaman still practice her sacred rights

transporting patients into supernatural realms

using magic mushrooms

a term that in 1938 had not been invented yet

it's hard when you come into a country as we did

to realize and

imagine what it was like in the time of Shorties

he had to take a broken down railroad

south from Mexico City

get off a random railhead in some small town

hire a mule and come up 14

15 hours overland to get to a very small village

nestled in the mountains in the mist

what he found was a unique cultural universe

which was the Mazitec world

the Mazitec Indians lived throughout the mountain

Oaxaca while of the Jimenez

is one of their larger towns

you know it's most strange

and wonderful to be here in Wodeland

I have such an image of the place in my head

from all the photographs that Salty's took

incredible to think about him

in 1938 he came up this very street

then it was just a simple cobblestone track

flanked by Matt to pick homes on either side

and to his astonishment

he discovered that his companion Raco

who would first turn them onto

the idea of these curious mushrooms

was an ardent Nazi sympathizer

now this is a year before

Europe is about to drop into the Second World War

and to make things even more incredible

there was another team of scholars

LED by Bernard Bevin and Robert Wheatlander

and it turned out that Bevin

released by rumor

was British Secret Service

so you had the scenario right out of Indiana Jones

these two teams of scholars

converging on the small mazetec village

in search of the mystery of the sacred mushrooms

so with Raco's help

Shorty searched the village

for people might know of this hallucinogenic mushroom

he needed a complete specimen to

scientifically classify this living flesh of the gods

I'm trying to track down a well known courundetta

with a hope

she'll let me witness the shamonic mushroom ceremony

the shamonic path is not for everybody

it's the individual who is touched by the divine

who has a special calling

who is one who becomes the intermediary between

the realm of the mundane

the realm of the ordinary and the realm of the spirits

like all couldn't that has in this calls the mushrooms

the little gods

in this said that um

when I asked what was

what was the significance of the mushrooms

she said that

and we call them the little gods for a reason

that they are in fact

are in the sense little gods of the Mastic

even though they are hallucinogenic

they are no way a drug

they are something that's used to cure

and to cure not only problems of the body

but any kind of problem

the mushroom itself is a vehicle to another realm where

where good things can happen

the nest is taking me on a hunt for the little gods

the maztec idea of the mushroom

is a total fusion of pre clumbing ideas

and Catholic ideas

that the belief isn't that

the mushrooms simply grow from the ground

they only grow with blood of Christ

fell onto the ground

or where the saliva of Christ fell off the ground

now Shorties used to say that the

missionaries complained to him about

how difficult it was to explain to the mazatec

The Holy Communion was

because the Mazitec would say

we already do that

we already eat the body of Christ

so when you took the mushrooms

you were engaged and taken into your body

not only sort of the Mazitec tradition

but also quite literally

the body of Christ

in 1938 Shalties and Raco spent weeks searching

for the identity of the Mazitec mushroom meanwhile

Robert Wheatlander and the other team of scholars

sat in one of the secret ceremonies

and reported a special mushroom being consumed

but actual specimen eluded both parties

word was put out to locals

and one day

an Indian showed up with a

selection of freshly picked mushrooms

shorties recognized one of them from Raco's

earlier dried specimens

this was it

Taiwana kotle

the flesh of the gods

Shorty was the first to collect a voucher specimen of

the solution chain and scientifically identified

15 years later

inspired by Shorty's work

an investment banker and vice president JP

Morgan would venture down here

what he found would start a revolution

high in the mountains of Oaxaca in 1938

Richard Evans Shorties

had identified an ancient Aztec hallucinogen

Taiwana kottle

the flesh of the gods

turned out indeed to be a mushroom

what's more

it was still being used in secret ceremonies by

contemporary Indians

the hallucingen

was traditionally eaten at royal Aztec feasts

sometimes following human sacrifice

priests also used them to diagnose illness

banned for centuries by the Spanish

Taiwanakato rituals went underground

only to reemerge as a combination

of Christian and precumbian beliefs

jolties always said that

if you were to know the ways of the shaman

you had to participate in all of their rituals

tonight I'll take part in a

ceremonies seldom experienced by outsiders

a journey inside the mind guided by a nest

a remarkable healer years ago

she witnessed a mushroom ceremony for an Englishman

his name was John Lennon

one of these boys suffers from unexplained pain

mother has brought him here to be doctored

both in s and the boy will take the mushrooms

like the ancient Aztec

the Cotin data believes that the mushrooms allow her to

diagnose illness

first all the participants are purified with incense

and it isn't leaves

anything about the ceremony

is just the symbolism of it all

the lights the purity

the flowers

the the smoke

the copal taking the prayers to heaven

now the journey really begins

in it sings to help guide participants on their journey

she has Learned her art of healing

her art of of um

of a ritual

not from a book

not even from another person or another could have been

but actually from the mushroom itself

the mushroom is the teacher

in

this applies a final

symbolic dusting of sacred tobacco powder

to protect me during the ceremony

for as long as people have taken the mushrooms

they reported profound sensations

some feel the presence of god

others feel reborn

the mushroom's active ingredient is psilocybin

a substance similar to chemicals

that control certain brain functions

including how we perceive the world

the compound is similar enough

that when humans take the mushroom

its chemicals co op their own

the result and altered state of perception

Walter Panky at MIT

did this famous Good Friday experiment with suicidal

showing that in this kind of research setting

that there was a potential to cause mystic experience

and there was very recently

a study from Charles Hopkins that interestingly

made front page news around the world about suicidal

having the potential to induce mystical experiences

it's the morning after the ceremony

throughout what I couldn't

that has been

taking dozens of seekers on similar journeys

through the night

it's always a remarkable experience in a you know

fantastic opportunity to be able to um

go through a ritual ceremony as I did last night

um shorties of course

when he came here was able to identify the mushroom

but he did not have the opportunity to actually

take the mushroom in sacred context

in part because Raco advised him that it was simply too

um secret to sacred

impossible to penetrate

in 1938 while shorties look for the mushrooms

Swiss scientist Albert Hoffman

conducted test on another curious substance

an unusual fungus that grew on rye grain

ergot had been known since the Middle Ages when

was used by midwives to control bleeding and childbirth

red contaminated by ergod

was responsible for outbreaks of mass hallucinations

hysteria and sometimes death

working with a potent extract of ergot

Hoffman synthesized a compound he called

lysergic acid diethyl alamide LSD

then he forgot about it until five years later

he was working as a research scientist

for Santos Pharmaceutical Company

in 1943 he looked through his notebook

found this compound

thought it might be interesting took it

had some of it

and while working with it started to feel strange

a very strange

um experience

which reminded me to some experience I had in childhood

the feeling of oneness

to be one is nature

the feeling to see now is a true aspect of nature

and he reasoned

that he must have absorbed some of it through his skin

so the next day he talked deliberately

what he thought would be a minuscule dose

a truly minuscule dose is between 100

and 500 micrograms

about one tenth the mass of a grain of sand

that um this very small

those the first

those of my experiments I planned was very

very strong

it turned out to be a huge dose

because at that time nobody knew that

a drug could work in microgram announced

and he realized quickly that he was having a very

strong uh reaction

so he rode his bicycle home

and there's uh

he's giving us quite an account of that bicycle trip

Last Friday

April 16th, 1943

I was forced to interrupt my work in the laboratory in

the middle of the afternoon and proceed home

in affected by remarkable restlessness

combined with the slight dizziness I

perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures

extraordinary shapes

with intense kaleidoscopic play of colors

3

2 1

at home the visions grew with nightmarish intensity

for a moment Hoffman thought that he might be dying

and the object like this chair had most likely

if he was a living object

that became moving from inside

and he had the first recorded LSD experience um

I think he found that quite engaging

uh rather than scary

and um shortly afterwards

he introduced the LSD experience to uh uh

the president and the chairman of the board at Sandos

one of them had a very positive experience

one very negative

and I think that's LSD in a nutshell

that has both of those faces

uh for a number of years

the man who had the positive experience uh

was in charge of Sandos policy

during that time

the company sent

uh samples of LSD researchers around the world

that really was the

the way that

the psychedelic experience got introduced to

uh hormone in the world

through serendipity

and the clever manipulation of the ergot molecules

Hoffman had stumbled on the most potent

synthetic hallucinogen

he went down in history as the father of LSD

but back in Mexico in the 1930s

Solty's work wasn't quite finished

in 1939 he convinced Oaks aims to fund him once more

to pursue the other great Aztec mystery

the sacred hallucinogen or luliki

the serpent vine

it had been described in the early Spanish text

yet there was disagreement in academic circles

as to its true identity

Mexican botanist

had suggested that it could be a Morning Glory

others disagreed

but Shorties was able to indeed confirm that there were

in fact two different species of morning glories

very closely related to your common garden variety

that were used as sacred

hallucinogenic plants by the peoples of Mexico

About 12 years later

Gordon Watson was able to collect seeds of oluiki

and send them to Doctor Albert Hoffman

in his lab in Switzerland

and Hoffman

was able to find out what the chemicals were

that were responsible for the power of the plant

what Hoffman found was really extraordinary

because it turned out that the key chemical

constituents of the serpent vine were indole alkaloids

nearly identical to LSD

which meant in effect

that four years before Hoffman synthesized LSD

in the laboratory

salties have found its counterpart in nature

in the seeds of a humble Morning Glory

long worshipped

as a god incarnate by the ancient peoples of Mexico

beginning in 1939

Shelty's published several papers about

his magical discoveries in Oaxaca

few read them

more than a decade later

English writer and mythologist

Robert Graves saw Shelty's article in Sacred Mushrooms

in an anthropological journal

graves sent the article to a friend

and mushroom scholar

New York banker

Gordon Watson

inspired by shorties

Watson journeyed to outlaw

to seek a codenada named Maria Savina

with a hope that she would

let him into the secret ceremony

after three expeditions

he finally gained her trust

and became the first Westerner to ingest

the flesh of the gods in a magic test ceremony

Watson's photographer

Alan Richardson

documented the ritual

unknown to Watson

his field trips will be monitored by the CIA

when Watson returned to Oaxaca

the agency planted a spy

posing as a scientist on the expedition

to bring back the mushrooms for testing

the CIA thought that he was

a drug that had anxiety built into it

and you give it to a person and make them so anxious

they freak out

and then they'd be vulnerable to manipulation by a spy

by you know the US spy

by then scientists

and spies weren't the only ones in on the secret

it was really

not until Wallace published the life magazine article

1957 that it really

uh blew open

because he made the connection with shamanism within

with the archaic world

and he grounded it in something other

than the paranoid fantasies of the CIA

Watson's Life magazine article was a watershed

an editor attached the snappy title

seeking the Magic Mushrooms

and opened a new door

perception for a whole generation

by age 26 Shorties

had made enough discoveries for a lifetime

but he was just getting started

as long as Odyssey lay just ahead in the Amazon

and little did he know

the seeds of the psychedelic revolution

have now been sewn

in 1939 with World War 2 underway in Europe

Richard Evan Solty's pioneering work

on a hallucinogenic cactus and a magic mushroom

that little to catapult him into stardom

what the war did promise

were thousands of wounded soldiers

and they would need surgery

medical science was on the hunt

for ways of improving surgical anesthesia

in 1941 Shorties received a grant from

the US National Research Council

his assignment

traveled to South America

to identify the botanical source of Carrari poison

he entered the land of the Cofon Indians

the most notorious poison

makers in the northwest Amazon

here among the cofan

he also came upon the most powerful hallucingen

found in nature

I've come thousands of miles south

to the Ecuadorian Amazon to continue my journey

retracing my professor's explorations

as he pursued the secrets of the Amazonian vision Vine

sixty years ago

this territory was untouched force

today I've got to pass through the sidi

Ecuadorian border town

perched on the dangerous Columbian frontier

to reach the descendants of the Cofound Indians

at shorties met

I first came here in the mid 70s and it's changed a lot

well the amazing thing is

this entire place has grown up since

since oil was discovered in the 1974

one single MUD strip

couple of hotels

couple of whorehouses

and you know

it happened to sit on top of the biggest pool of oil

ever discovered in Ecuador

probably in South America

and the coupon just had the misfortune to be the

owners of that land under which oil was found

from this landing

I've got a nine hour river trip ahead of me

to get to the Cofon Indian Village

you know when Sophie's finished his work in Mexico

he had two job offers

after he got his PhD

he could have gone to become a school teacher

to private school in New England

or he could have gone to the Amazon to search for

the mystery of a plant known as the flying death

fortunately for science

he chose the Amazon

to reach the Cofan

shorties travel for weeks

first through Columbian foot over the Andes

and then by boat down one river

the not the Sucombeos River

into the land of the poison makers

in the 16th century

explorers like Sir Walter Ali

were amazed by the blow gun

darts dipped in plant poisons

that could kill silently from a distance

terrified Europeans dubbed it the flying death

rally described its horrifying consequences

victims of the poison

suffer an ugly and lamentable death

sometimes dying start mad

the poison was karari

a mixture of plants

since its discovered by the Spanish in the 16th century

scientists have been fascinated by its paralyzing

properties and its medical potential

small samples would find their way out of the jungle

but no one knew their source

then in the 1930s

scientist discovered that Carrari

was a powerful muscle relaxant

that had the promise of transforming modern surgery

Shorty's hunt began in 1941

other explorers

who had entered this region of the Amazon

had returned with lured and fantastic tales of

terrible diseases

and even cannibals

it was one of the last unknown places on the planet

the area shortage explored

was the size of Western Europe

Months passed with no contact with the outside world

he survived treacherous rapids

encounters with wild animals

near fatal plane crashes

and suffer from any number of tropical diseases

he travelled light with a single change of clothes

a pit helmet

a hammock a camera tank collecting gear

snake bite serum

a machete and beloved L L B moccasins

he never carried a gun

he was the first outsider some tribes had ever seen

I do not believe in hostile Indians

shorties once wrote

all that is required to bring out their gentlemanliness

is reciprocal gentlemanliness

Shorty is the the

the big figure of the 20th century

an inspiration to

outside of ethnobot

and he's the anthropologist

you know he wouldn't

took the Indians seriously in the 1940s and 50s and

and listened to them and

and swallowed their plants when they said he should

and Learned from them

and in a world of racism and prejudice

where everybody thought Indians were a bunch of losers

and Stone Age obstacles to progress

he realized that they were a path to knowledge

when I was doing my uh

researches in Colombia in the 1970s um

I was told by a Colombian botanist that if I ever had

difficulties out in the jungle or anywhere

that if I just mention Shorty's name

instead of associate with him

he said it would just open doors

he said that down here

Shorty Estios

Shorty's is god

nine hours down river from the end of the road

we're approaching the Cofon village

the same tribe Shorties visited in 1941

I'm dropping in on an old friend

Randy Borman

Randy's parents were missionaries

and was raised from birth and forest

and grew up as a cofon

speaking a language and learning the ways of the elders

you know it's incredible from Shorties came

you gotta sense that it was a very remote place

oh yeah incredible

Randy and I are tracking down some of

the same magical plants that Shorty saw

those discoveries would lead him

to a new kind of hallucingen

the most powerful found in nature

in 1942 ethnobotanist Richard Evans

Shorties working for the US National Research Council

came to the Amazon

to seek the botanical sources of karrari

it was believed that this poison

could be used as an effective supplement

to modern anesthesia

today my friend

Randy Warman is taking me to a part of the forest

where the cofon still gather

the plants that yield the toxin

the actual compounds are created by the plants

in order to protect themselves from predation

in this kind of

orgy of life that is the Amazon rainforest

so dtu corrarean

from an evolutionary point of view

was created by the plant to protect itself

from insect predation

and of course

that's what the indigenous people have been exploiting

for so many thousands of years

blue guns 8 feet in length

combined with poison tip darts

are used to take down animals as small as a hummingbird

or as big as a taper

occasionally

they've proven deadly on humans

during times of tribal wars

this is condodenron

which is the main ingredient of the aero poison

tell me this is Condodeno tomantosin or something

and this is the classic flying death

this is the aero poison

foundation of all the major aero poisons in the

in the northwest Amazon

getting liana takes work

these vines grow more than 40 feet from

the fourth floor

you can chew on

the bark of karrari without it doing any damage

it's incredibly bitter

but obviously

it's not gonna kill you

because it hasn't been concentrated

and that's the whole thing

about these plants that were seen in the forest

the Indian people have Learned to find ways to

concentrate the poison inside this bark to

a level of intensity that actually allows you to kill

Richard Evans Schulti

discovered that the Cofan were sophisticated pharmacist

manipulated in

combining plants with incredible dexterity ingenious

its discoveries of more than a dozen

Carrari ingredients added to the knowledge of the toxin

soon to be a standard addition

to modern surgical anesthesia

all of these different ad mixtures that are put into it

are what made the cofon poison

especially potonite

there's at least 15 different

separate species that form part of the cofon karari

the Cofon Logan poison

the Cofon Logan poison

was then known throughout the whole region

as the superior concoction

from the point of view of the COFAN

you go up to this extraordinary forest

you find all these different toxic plants

and you learn to combine them in ways that

create powerful effects

it's such an extraordinary level of genius

it's just unparalleled

karrari was just the beginning

the cofan used plants to stun fish

heal the sick

and above all

alter perception

the sacred hallucinogen

iowaska or ya hey

was a potion so sophisticated in its preparation

that it would astonish the scientific world

first reported in 1851 by Salty's great hero

the legendary plant explorer

Richard Spruce

the exact ingredients and the ritual remained a mystery

shorties learn that for the Cofan

ya hey has always been a path to discovery

in the sense that the western world uses

they're not hallucinogens or stimulants

or any of these other things

for instance

for a cofan

no surprise whatsoever

when they look through a microscope

and all of a sudden find a complete new world

down there on the microscope slide

uh because they knew it all the time

they knew that they were all these dimensions

all sorts of things that you can't see around you

the microscope

is seen very much in the same way as Yahoo seen

it's a means to be able to get to where

you can see what's going on down there

what Salties found was extraordinary

a hallucinogen that seemed to tap through

the very synapses of the brain

made possible

by the cofon's uncanny knowledge of plant chemistry

on the verge of unraveling the mysteries of iowasco

and ways the shaman

Salty's life

was catapulted in a totally different direction

in 1942 war raged in the Pacific

and the Japanese swept across Southeast Asia

taking control of 95%

of the world's domestic rubber supply

the allies desperately needed alternative sources

and the best place to go was the Amazon

where the rubber tree was native

Richard Evan Shorties was called back to Washington

DC at a meeting at the department of agriculture

in November of 1942

he Learned that supplies of natural rubber

essential for jeeps

tanks ships and planes

were dangerously low

there were no synthetic sources

and the war demanded that America alone

produce 1 million metric tons of rubber every year

President Roosevelt ordered US

scientists to begin scouring the Americas

for supplies of any and all latex bearing plants

Shorty's new Amazon assignment helped save the country

by finding new sources of latex and light free

fast growing rubber trees

his work on Iowaska

the sacred hallucinogen

would have to wait

Randy and the cofan are leading me to a place in the

forest where iowaska can be found

you take it in your mouth

you know it tastes a little bitter

but so many other plants in the forest do

and so what were the clues

you know what allowed them to know

however many hundreds or even thousands of years ago

you could take this

you know woody vine of the forest

combine it with this shrub

um which is just again

doesn't look like anything out of the ordinary

and yet inside the plants

are these remarkable chemicals that wind

combined in this unique way create a kind of powerful

um synergistic effect

almost like a sensitive

biochemical version of the holding grid in the

some of the parts

and it's really one of the great mysteries of all

of ethnobotany

of all of the science of plants in the Amazon

we know of course

how the chemicals interact

but we don't know is

how the people first made this extraordinary discovery

shorties collected thousands of plants from the Amazon

like Alaska

many were used by shaman to cure illness

shaminism involves

it is natural products chemistry

shamins are not priests

they're scientists

or natural philosophers

in the original sense of the term

and they were always looking for

the active principles of plants

and trying to get concentrated activity

I do think that there are many things that shamans do

that could be very useful

for doctors in our society to do

I think shamans are really masters of the

psychological realm

and the whole area

what they call the art of medicine

of like knowing how to take a patient's

projection of belief onto you and reflect it back in a

way that increases the possibility of healing

now so this is the other admixter

the other plant that's added to the preparation

remembering that Iowa wasp is not a plant

it's a combination of plants

this is known scientifically as psychotheria verdice

it's in the coffee family

you can tell by the opposite leaves

if you look a little fruited

this looks a little bit like a coffee bean

and yet again

you know you look in the forest with this stand

out of any other plant

not particularly what happens if you eat it now

look little bitter but no more so than this one

nothing that you would say that

you know if you just took this

you somehow know

that this had some real magic within it

I could eat

as many of these leaves as I could get off this branch

and nothing would happen to me

because the chemical that's found within this

is denatured by enzyme

found naturally in the human stomach

but combine the leaves with this vine

and you neutralize the stomach enzyme

it's this combination that produces

the astonishing hallucinogenic effects

chemicals found in Iowaska

resemble those used in modern antidepressants

such as Prozac

and they've been tested in clinical trials to treat

Parkinson's disease

they may have other properties

still not fully understood by science

but it was tales of the wild

visions that brought beat writer William Burrows

who studied anthropology at Harvard

down to Columbia in 1953 in search of iowasco

when he went to his first jungle town

he got rolled raw

beaten up and jailed

the writer most famous for counterculture books

like The Naked Lunch

decided he better look up Richard Evans

Solties in Bogota to help him find a safer route to

the sacred hallucinogen

when Burrows finally took Iowa's gun he was terrified

and when some like William Bros

came looking for just another kick

and got scared out of his mind

you know this whole Yahoo

is not for the faint hearted it's not

it's not really supposed to be pleasant

it was never supposed to be a pleasant thing

I mean if you're facing down some force

for those embarking on the Iowa experience

there's always a sense of trepidation of fear

the coffon speak of facing down the jaguar

one who knew this path was Richard Evan Schultes

in an era before psychedelics

he was the first outsider

to walk with the shaman

to provide a glimpse into a hidden world

known only to these forced peoples

by the end of World War 2 in 1945

pressure was off Richard and Shorties

but rubber remained of strategic importance

and the US government continued to fund his work

in the Amazon

by the 1950s

the seeds of

his hallucinogenic discoveries were beginning to sprout

but in ways he never envisioned

in 1953 beat writer William Burrows wrote his friend

the poet Allen Ginsberg

about his recent expedition with shorties

and the sampling of iowasco

their correspondence was published as the Ya Hey

letters and along with his other books

help forge the framework of the psychedelic era

that same year

a British psychiatrist

Humphrey Osmond

researching schizophrenia

sprinkled some mescaline crystals into

the glass of a willing

all this Huxley

the best selling author of Brave New World

Huxley documented his fantastic visions in another book

The Doors of Perception

Osman coined the term psychedelic

mean mind manifesting

huxley's book became a manifesto of the era

and it will be extremely good for almost anybody with

fixed ideas with

with a great certainty about what's what

to take this thing

and to realize that the world he is constructed is

by no means the only world

that there are these

extraordinary other types of universe

which we may inhabit

and which we should be very grateful

for inhabiting I think

in the immediate aftermath the Second World War

America settled into the stayed and comfortable 1950s

but soon life would be all shook up

first by rock and roll

then by a 39 year old assistant professor of Harvard

you consider me eccentric

suddenly hallucinogenic drugs slipped

out of the hands of jungle shaman

and into the minds of the masses

you didn't have to do that in 1960s

you don't have to travel

all the way to another continent

and track through the jungle and

and sit through a ritual for many hours

and get sick and vomit to have this experience

it was much easier if down in the street corner

somebody you knew at a school or university

was selling these tiny little pills that would provide

essentially the same kind of experience

that was LSD

of course so

ladies and gentlemen

there's a level of reality

which is invisible to naked eye

but which has a Hoffman's

LSD was still legal

so was a mushroom base so Simon

Timothy Leary began testing both on Harvard students

following the footsteps of researcher Humphrey Osmond

who successfully treated alcoholics with hallucinogens

in England in the 1950s

the effect is someone like looking through a microscope

suddenly uh

when you look through a microscope

you discover that there's an invisible world around you

that you hadn't known about before you did it

the same thing is to a psychedelic drug

I met leery in the fall of 1960

um and then knew him

and also I was the investigative reporter

for the Harvard newspaper that

and did most the writing about the

and what became the drug scandal at Harvard involving

uh involving leery

initially the testing continued at Harvard unopposed

and by 1961

Lyrian his colleagues left campus to test the drugs

imprisoned inmate volunteers

we give some assignment to prisoners on the

with the hope that they would um

get some self understanding and be able to

lower the recival rate

that was the cause

that was the behavioral index of consciousness change

some psychoanalyst would say that's insane

you're gonna give this drug to these guys who would

murders and rapists and thugs and what not

and you've never released their unconscious right

you take your life into him was totally ridiculous

was never a single moment of violence in the prisons

early results look promising

if your inmates seem to return to prison

but later analysis showed outside factors

like counseling and skewed the result

recidivism hadn't changed

Liri continued to test LSD in suicidal

on student volunteers until 1962

when his methods began to veer from scientific

to the mystical

the study came to an end

there was contention with the university about whether

um he could use undergraduates as research subjects

this was a huge story that eventually became front page

news on the New York Times when uh

uh you know

when we were left Harvard and

and Albert was fired

the explosion around that

I think was really what sent the psychedelic culture

into the mainstream in the US

and many people in North America

probably many people had never heard of these drugs

Leary set up a center for studying LSD

and other hallucinogens at Millbrook Mansion

in New York

estate donated by the heirs of the Melan fortune

any religious group just beginning

Tim Leary had a trust in democracy

and he thought that if you popularize these drugs

if you can if you broadcast the message

uh that there were gonna be many people

who were going to get it

there gonna be a lot of people who didn't get it

who were going to lose their way

and he knew that it was a big social experiment

LSD didn't reach the street overnight

it had made its own long

strange journey from the Swiss lab of Albert Hoffman

to various English and American psychiatric institutes

for testing

and even into the hands of the CIA

so you had the CIA in the one hand very

very interesting

not just LSD

but you know

bunch of different hallucinogenic drugs

you have to beats at the same time experimenting

you had psychiatrist

therapist looking at it

ways to understand mental illness better

all these different elements ended up mixing together

and setting stage for the 1960s

a far cry from the sacred ways

unveiled by Richard Evans Shorties in the Amazon

in the 1960s

shorties disapproved of

the wholesale release of luciengens to the public

knowing that most often they would not have a shaman

to guide them to the visionary world

with potentially negative results

the shaman blesses the Iowa's with potion

to be consumed by the cofan in the sacred enclosure

you know it's amazing to think that these two

plants that we found in the forest eight hours ago

have been cooked all day

prepared all day

and will in the end

launch the cofant

on a kind of journey to this extraordinary realm

you know one of Solti's greatest friends

was the chlumine anthropologist

eraldoracodomatuff

and he said that to drink ya hey

was to return to the cosmic uterus and be reborn

the eye was a ceremony

is both social event and healing ritual

the shaman takes the medicine with the patient

in order to enter the realm where it can stop disease

iowaska is as complex as a human mind

the novice participant

guided by the shaman

travels through a hidden world of sometimes

frightening visions

for the apprentice

the potion is used as a tool

to move through stages of shamanic power

such as conquering and taking on the spirit of animals

Randy Borman understands his process

once you're to the point where you're actually seeing

past just the bright colors in the loud sounds

and actually begin to see the forest people

or the animals or whatever like that

then you go to the next stage

which is to actually be able to interact with those

with shamingness of help

you go into the room

that has all the jaguar skins in it

if you're able to get to the point where

you can actually reach out and grab that

when you're a spirit persona and close yourself in that

then you're on your way to become a jaguar shaman

and actually be able to control the jaguar

and actually change it shape

changing the jaguar

in stark contrast to the traders

and ventures before him

Shorties developed a mutual respect with Cofan

he took their medicines to better understand the people

and their plants

more than anyone else

shorties brought this hallucinogen to the attention of

the outside world

used today by religious groups in Brazil and America

the full medical potential by Waska remains unknown

Shorty search for new species of plants to come deeper

and deeper in the rainforest

in his first dozen years in the Amazon

Shorty's narrowly survived the host of accidents

injuries and jungle diseases

then on a trip up Brazil's real negative

Salty's found himself in

the remotest part of the Amazon

on the very edge of death

throughout the 1950s

Richard Evan Schultez

continued his work on developing hardy

light resistant strains of rubber trees

for the US Department of agriculture

but he never stopped looking for new species of plants

including hallucinogens

meanwhile in the United States

by the mid 1960s

Albert Hoffman's LSD genie was well out of its body

creating a hallucinogenic revolution

that Shorties never endorsed

back in the mid 60s

when LST first

came to the four

people were taking it quietly

individually for uh

for the purposes of introspection

and that is simply not what we were up to

we were uh we were taking it in groups

and it was basically

basically a sort of a party situation

but there was a

I don't wanna see a serious component to it

but there was a forward thrust to it

we were looking to basically to

to find new levels of communal experience

soon psychedelia was everywhere

millions of Americans took LSD

and as it grew worldwide

it impacted everything from fashion to the

composition of music

among those who help LSD go mainstream the CIA

it's kind of an interesting phenomenon

because every drug that became popular on the street

has an illegal substance of black market substance

in 1960s and thereafter

had been previously tested

scrutinized

in some cases even developed

by the Central Intelligence Agency and the US military

I'm talking about marijuana

mescaline LSD

nitrous oxide

cocaine heroin

magic mushrooms

the whole gamut of reclusocol recreational drugs

so it's kind of ironic that he had in the 1950s

the CIA in the army

studying these drugs to develop weapons

and then later on

those same drugs were being braced not as weapons

just the opposite

as a form of recreation or maybe it's a form of insight

at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital near San Francisco

the CIA financed a study named MK Ultra

on the effects of psychoactive drugs

among the Guinea pigs was a promising young writer

Ken Kisi out of his experience became a 1962 bestseller

One Flew Over Cuckoo's Nest

Kisi became a celebrity while LSD was still legal

he formed the Merry Pranksters

a free Wheeling group of beats and hippies

who held parties

where guests could experiment with the drug

entertaining the guest

was a band of young musicians called the warlocks

soon to become better known as the Grateful Band

we started taking LSD every Saturday night

with the keys crewing

and having these big parties that were called

the Acid Tests

and the idea was just to see where it was gonna take us

and we we started discovering stuff you know

I guess psychic links or splices

we used to call them

uh I think the

in classical

more classical terms

I think it was active gustalt linkage

basic telepathy

and what we discovered is that

this stuff is happening all the time

it's just that

it gets a little faster and more furious when

when you remove the barriers that

you were wrecked as a child

with the advent of acid

we discovered a new way to think

and it had to do with

piecing together new thoughts in your mind

that produced people like Bob Dylan and John Lennon

and William S

Burroughs that were using new images together

in a way that

jarred the mind and

and produced images that were latent

in our consciousness

but we're not being brought about by reading

Vanity Fair

a woman's own companion

the morning after the iowasca

at the ya hey ceremony

you can only be astonished by how brilliantly the cofan

manipulate these plans to explore states of mind

most people will never experience

you know the Amazon is amazing

but it's a formidable place

and you never really sense its power until you're

completely exposed to it

and it makes so much sense to me

that ya hey is this sort of plant that

results in this cascade of emotions and a power

in the serpentine sense of this other series of realms

I just cascade over your imagination

and really surround you

and almost drown you with the intensity

and I've often joked that you know

people who say they love the Amazon

either haven't been here

or they're liars

and the amazing thing about Shorty is that he really

was a guy who liked the Amazon

he lived for it and

and he came to understand every aspect of it

not only the plants

the life ways of the people

the way of the animals

and he became

in the sense

of child of this forest

even a child of the forest

can be abandoned by its mother

on a journey up Brazil's Rio Negodo in 1947

Shorty's luck finally ran out

he noticed a tingling sensation in his fingertips

perhaps he thought it was a formaldehyde

used to preserve his specimens

but after a few days it moved to his toes

it was very buried

a dreaded tropical disease caused by vitamin deficiency

1,000 miles from the nearest city

with no more than a few cans of beans in his pack

shorties now risk total paralysis and death

his only chance for survival

a huge dose of thiamine

vitamin B12 and shorties

with a very long way from pharmacy

rock with Barry

Barry plant explorer Richard Evans solty's found

himself in the most dangerous situation of his life

he was beginning to lose feeling in his extremities

and was doomed unless he got the medication he needed

located hundreds of miles away in the city of Manaus

he headed to the nearest outpost

where a missionary suggested a shortcut

to military airfield for a quick flight out

the shortcut turned into a grueling month

so his feet grew completely numb

he could walk only with the aid of two sticks

he encountered a group of nomadic Indians

who invited

him to join them in a hallucinogenic ceremony

the next morning

his mind still reeling with visions

shortly search for the sacred plant

on the brink of death

he discovered not only a new species

but a new hallucinogen

that never before been reported by science

but his ordeal had just begun

he had no food

in treacherous rapids

his canoe capsized

dumping all of his remaining supplies and specimens

into the river

when he reached the military outpost

he discovered that there were no planes

he turned around and headed back down river

after a month of travel

he finally reached the port of the mouse

there he got his life saving thiamine injections

and he rested for only three days

before heading back to the jungle

twenty years later

the quiet world of discovery

that shelters enjoyed in the Amazon had exploded

with a global embrace in Celebration of psychedelics

my senses that there are really no good or bad drugs

that all drugs have the potential for

constructive use and destructive use

and the challenge for human beings is

when you find these powerful substances in nature

uh you have to find ways of using them to contain their

destructive potential

by the 1967 summer of love

globe trotting botanist Richard Evans Shorties

was a tenured professor at Harvard

students discovered

his obscure papers on their Hallucingen Poluluiki

and set off a rush on Morning Glory seeds

they lined up outside his office

for a glimpse of the psychedelic pioneer

marijuana is the most variable

the psychedelic arrow

was the unwanted child of shorties

you know he never thought of himself as an advocate of

of recreational drug use

in fact he was always publicly against it

I he was one of that codre

one of that generation of scholars and seekers who

who's interpretation of the use of these magic plants

was unfiltered by this kind of the miyasma of the 60s

and these were these remarkable individuals Huxley

Gordon Waston

Albert Hoffman

shorty's Weston Lebar

who are simply drawn to the inherent interest they had

in these remarkable

curious plants in

the

sixth

stories began emerging about bad LSD trips

people jumping off rooftops thinking they could fly

by 1967 LSD was illegal

and Timothy Leary was soon to be a fugitive

I want shouldn't underestimate

the potential dangers of these kind of drugs

particularly if one is not prepared to take them

it's not being supervised properly

but on the other hand

I think there was also a journalistic exaggeration

the dangerous of these drugs

there were things that were said about them

there blatantly untrue

such as that LSD causes chromosome damage

the army documents state very clearly

LSD causes less chromosome damage than caffeine

it's a direct quote from these documents

the psychedelic movement started to emerge in the 1960s

um a very conservative America blamed on psychedelics

um the environmental movement

the civil rights movement

the women's uh rights movement

and so easy to blame it on on a substance

if all we just do is stamp it out

we'll be healthy

LSE killer drop

LSE killer drop

LSE killer drop

LSE killer drop

the psychedelics are lumped with marijuana and

heroin and cocaine in the category of bad drugs uh

and then there are the drugs we promote

alcohol and tobacco and various forms of caffeine

and medically used uppers and downers and uh

you know we don't even see often that they're drugs and

and the irony is that that category often has uh

much more dangerous physical effects

much higher potential for addiction

psychedelic work

at leading American universities

researchers are reconsidering hallucinogens to

treat mental disorders

alcoholism and to aid the dying

I do think that these plants and the

the chemicals in them have a potential

um to show people possibilities

that are more optimistic and freeing than

you know we see in our ordinary reality

and um you know

maybe it's no coincidence they

appeared at this phase in human evolution

when civilization seems to be in such crisis and

heading so rapidly toward destruction in 2,006

the discoverer of LSD celebrated his hundredth birthday

colleagues from all over the world came to Switzerland

to honour Albert Hoffman

another reluctant father of the psychedelic era

who called LSD my problem child

shorties never understood the hit the era

when William Burrows described his Yahoo

trippers for shattering

shorties replied

that's funny Bill

all I saw were colors