Researchers want to find out if LSD could help medical research, but first they first need to examine the inside of a brain under the influence of the drug to see exactly what’s happening. National Geographic takes an inside look at their Explorer program:
Using enhanced brain imaging, non-hallucinogenic versions of the drug and information from an underground network of test subjects who suffer from an agonizing condition for which there is no cure, researchers are finding that this “trippy” drug could become the pharmaceutical of the future. Can it enhance our brain power, expand our creativity and cure disease? To find out, Explorer puts LSD under the microscope.
Want to see for yourself? Take a look inside a tripper’s brain:
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Video: YouTube / NationalGeographic
October 27th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
Boo. Biased as anything I have ever seen. Why not document one of the far more likely awesome trips such as the one that led to the discovery of the double helix?
October 27th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
I can’t see it in spain…
“This video si not available due to Copyright restrictions in your country”.
October 28th, 2009 at 8:37 am
Can’t see it in Canada? Down with copyright restrictions!!!
Can someone at least give a description of what is in the video… I must say my curiosity is peaked.
October 28th, 2009 at 4:04 pm
lmao. that’s why i don’t drop random acid around 100 people i don’t trust. it’s also why i don’t hang out with people who would dose me without my knowledge. i think they’re missing the point: it’s not the drug… it’s her d-bag friends. n00b. why not make it so people can obtain LSD with confidence in what/how much they’re getting???
October 28th, 2009 at 7:57 pm
what a bunch of bullshit, I have tripped and had “bad” trips. It was intense but I would hardly describe it as a descent into hell. If you are a stupid little girl walking through bad neighborhoods and thinking you are going to be raped at any second, then u probably shouldn’t be taking lsd. You are an idiot. Lsd is not an escape like alcohol. If bad stuff is going on in your life before you take it, you will have a bad trip.
October 28th, 2009 at 9:32 pm
There should be more responsible documentaries on hallucinatory drug research. I suspect the fear-generating narration by Peter Coyote does not represent the views of the Swiss scientists studying the drug.
The real danger with this fragment from the National Geographic Special is that, as with the effect of “Reefer Madness,” an anti-marijuana film from a half century ago, it misrepresents the experience to many viewers who know better. As a result, “Reefer Madness” became a cult comedy used to discredit the producers and the government, and led to an increase in distrust of “authority,” by American youth, and in fact, an increase in marijuana use.
America needs to rethink its drug policies. The time has come to discard the absurd and ineffective concepts or “war” on what we don’t understand, and stop using fear-based terror messages in popular propaganda.
Only through increased wisdom and knowledge gained from scientific examination can we hope to transcend the irrational responses with which we approach the unknown.
Humans needs to become less fearfully aggressive and more compassionately curious in order to make the next evolutionary leap.
Respectfully,
Ange Lobue, MD, MPH, BSPharm
American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology
Academy of Television Arts and Sciences
trinidadca@gmail.com
October 29th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
Thanks Ange!
October 29th, 2009 at 5:51 pm
So it sounds like this clip isn’t worth watching…
Good point mclifford, you definitely don’t take LSD to escape, just the opposite. Some kids have to learn that the hard way… (it puts hair on your chest.
And very, very well put Ange!!! I’m going to save that note in text file somewhere… so lucid and succinct!
October 30th, 2009 at 7:47 am
[...] The narrator of the video sounds a bit paranoid about the subject at times, but some of the visuals (such as at the 1:15 mark) along with the info regarding the actual activity in the brain make him worth tolerating. Either that or the late hour has caused me to hallucinate. [Discover] [...]
October 30th, 2009 at 9:33 am
A bad trip can feel like being in Hell more then any other experience. I once took so much the I believed that I was dead and was surrounded with monsters. I couldn’t even see my own body. At one point I remember that I had been turned into a flying Demon. I ended up wondering into the woods at night time…. alone. I took me two or three days to come down off the stuff completely. Any-one that thinks a bad trip can’t be Hell is greatly mistaken.
LSD did change my life for the better though, It makes my a little disappointed that the positives of the substance were completely ignored.
October 30th, 2009 at 2:32 pm
Embarrassing lies from Natl Geo and Discover Magazine.
Thanks for some sanity, Ange.
October 31st, 2009 at 2:42 pm
After four decades, they trot out the same lying bag of fears. It would be humorous – if not so frighteningly pathetic. Strange that something commonly generating such awful experiences should have elicited so many upbeat testimonials. But then, you can always trust the MSM…
October 31st, 2009 at 10:19 pm
1) “Reefer Madness,” though it exaggerated some the marijuana panic fostered by Federal drug crusader/empire builder Harry Amsinger [Amslinger? I disremember the spelling], was really more a sex movie. That is, for its era.
It’s hard for our sexually UNrepressed culture to realize how “electric” a small showing of sexuality can be in a sex-repressing culture. When you watch “Reefer Madness”, remember that the Motion Picture Production Code/Hayes Office, and the Legion of Decency, had in the early 1930s so “cleaned up” Hollywood movies that MARRIED people were insanely always portrayed sleeping in “twin beds” (seperate beds for husband and wife). The Catholic Church, rather puritan sexually anyway, stole a march on American Protestantism by creating and powering these instruments of culturally-approved censorship. (It did something analogous with total-abstenance-from-liquor pledges in the 19th century.)
In the really-repressed Victorian era, mere hints of sexual practices–as in Bayard Taylor’s play “The Prophet,” or the memoirs of Anna Lenowens (the real Anna of “Anna and the King of Siam”)–had an electric effect on less-naive adult readers. Samuel Butler’s “The Way of All Flesh,” written as the era’s ethos waned, still used the electric mere hint to accuse the Episcopalian clerics of the Oxford Movement (who oft converted to Catholicism) of being gay–as many seem to have been.
Were Dr. Lobue, et al, less parochial we might not see such naive posts about a movie once shown in seedy theatres that bribed the cops to pass-over supposed “public warning” films, never made by the major studios. Of course, by the 1960s, its salacious bits no longer held any charge….
2) I’m sure most of the commenters are too young to have any memories of the absolute wreckage that the high tide of the Drug Culture stranded on the rocks. Out of many: in the late 1960s I knew a philosophy grad student who could converse perfectly about sex or apartment rents or the other banalities of life. But when you tried to discuss philosophy, he practiced solipsism–that is, his replies (though quite rational and intelligent) almost always had NO discernable relation to the specific, abstract subject you were talking about. Perhaps there’s a known-condition diagnosis in the nether parts of the DSM…but dropping acid sure helped, even if it didn’t create de novo.
3) The logic of this closing remark must not be dismissed with any of the old Drug Culture formulas: History shows that taking LSD is a self-invalidating procedure. The question to be asked of LSD users is, “How do you know what it does? You’ve taken it!”
November 5th, 2009 at 3:39 pm
“3) The logic of this closing remark must not be dismissed with any of the old Drug Culture formulas: History shows that taking LSD is a self-invalidating procedure. The question to be asked of LSD users is, “How do you know what it does? You’ve taken it!””
Not the history of the research done with LSD that I’ve read. Not with the experience’s me and my friends have had.
Question… when you drink alcohol do you what it does? By your logic you can’t know anything that’s happening to you because it is happening to you.???
You’re first two points are worthless.