What is a Psychedelic Drug

Excerpt from Why We Get High by Bruce Eisner

Almost all of you have gotten "high." You might call it "getting stoned" or "tripping" or "having a session" or "going on vision quest" or "partying" but the urge to switch channels and move to another and less usual state of consciousness is as old as our species itself. Actually the quest for intoxication is even older!

Ronald Siegel, in his book, Intoxication, documents numerous animal species and most of the various human cultures that strive to get high or as he calls it, to intoxicate themselves. Siegel proposes that after food, drink and sex, "Intoxication is the fourth drive." He demonstrates through zoological and sociological evidence, that the urge to get high is among the most basic of motivations.

Andrew Weil, M.D., and Wilfred Rosen, in their wonderful introductory book From Chocolate to Morphine, explaining psychoactive drugs for the young reaffirms this idea. They point out:

Human beings it seems, are born with the need for periodic variations in consciousness. The behavior of young children supports this idea. Infants rock themselves into blissful states, many children discover that whirling or spinning is a powerful technique to change awareness, some also experiment with hyperventilation (rapid deep breathing) followed by mutual chest squeezing or choking, and tickling to produce paralyzing laughter. Even though these practices may produce some uncomfortable results such as dizziness or nausea, the whole experience is so reinforcing that children do it again and again, often despite parental objections. Since children all over the world engage in these activities, the desire to change consciousness does not seem to be a product of a particular culture but rather to arise from something basic. As children grow older they find that certain available substan

The Psychedelic Movement of the Sixties excerpted from Bruce Eisner's A Call for a Psychedelic Sanctuary

The 1960s were an extraordinary period - a time in which millions of people acted as if they had swallowed some kind of pill which made them different - and of course they had. The cultural icon of the man in the thin gray flannel suit with a drink in his hand gave way to the image of a different kind of cocktail party - the kind they had on the popular TV show "Laugh In." They were having drinks with a different kind of rum. It wasn't the rum that young John Kennedy's elders had run in from Cuba in the thirties in martinis that made sixties parties swing. Old Ike's stolid attitudes had given way to a new vision of the Western world, as articulated by Kennedy, who was both a symbol of the strong stirrings of change as well as a martyr to the kind of reaction that it would bring forth.
(you might call it predecessor of The Soviet Glasnost). Roles and ways of doing things that had persisted for centuries were quickly dissolving. In the old South, young Freedom Riders rode into town and threatened to overturn "Jim Crow" discriminatory laws. Women in great numbers decided not to be housewives and play the traditional role of the submissive sex. Many concerned that economic progress might eventually ruin the earth began using the word "ecology" (heretofore reserved for those seriously academic) to talk about a movement often symbolized by the "Whole Earth" as seen by the first humans to orbit the earth. And of course, with the advent of birth control pills, there was the sexual revolution-before the tragedy of AIDS.

It was a period marked by so much cultural change that the highly respected historian Arnold Toynbee observed of this period in American history: "I have been visiting the United States since 1925. Before my last visit (1967), I had been absent for two years, and I came away with the impression that in those two years there has been more change in American life than in all the previous forty."

Of course, it was LSD in the pills that gave people so much insight. LSD, a potent mind-changing drug with few side effects, was discovered in Basil, Switzerland during the dark days prior to World War II, around the same time as a much larger group in New Mexico was cooking up the atomic bomb. Just as Gutenberg's revolutionary printing press in the fifteenth century allowed for anyone to own his or her own bible, a privilege that until then had only been enjoyed by the monks, so now the same mass production machines that had turned out bibles (and later Ford motor cars) were turning out insight pills (handing out this Holy Grail to somewhere between one and two million people between 1959 and 1970). The numbers who passed through Aldous Huxley's well-described "doors of perception," stepping out of Plato's cave to glimpse the white light of the sun, far exceeded any generation before it. The mystical experience, from being something reserved for saints, became available on sugar cubes.

For many, LSD was a roller coaster ride through their unconscious-a kind of virtual Disneyland. But for a few, it took on a significance that they called "mystical" or "religious." It was these profound experiences which led a large segment of the Boomer generation to a commitment to altruism and idealistic pursuits that were to become the passion during what is often referred to as the "Psychedelic Sixties." In many, that commitment to change has never really faded.

The Psychedelic Movement, as it came to be known by some, grew from a small intellectual elite-composed mainly of writers and artists in Los Angeles, New York, and London-into a mass movement which involved the "best minds of [their] generation," including college students and open-minded people of all ages. This movement provided a catalyst for many changes that occurred in our culture. The long-haired, bearded hippie with his or her open, loving ways was born as an American archetype as a result of the experiences and unique consciousness that resulted from the use of LSD on a grand

LSD : Generic name for the hallucinogen lysergic acid diethylamide-25. Discovered by Dr. Albert Hofmann in 1938, LSD is one of the most potent mind-altering chemicals known. A white, odorless powdera semisynthetic psychedelic drug of the ergoline family. Its unusual psychological effects, which include visuals of colored patterns behind the eyes, a sense of time distorting, crawling geometric patterns, and the loss of the user's sense of identity has made it one of the most widely known psychedelic drugs. It has been used mainly as a recreational drug, an entheogen, and a tool to supplement various practices for transcendence, including in meditation and illicit, formerly legal psychedelic therapy.

Psilocybin is a psychedelic indole of the tryptamine family, found in psilocybin mushrooms. It is present in hundreds of species of fungi, including those of the genus Psilocybe, such as Psilocybe cubensis and Psilocybe semilanceata, but also reportedly isolated from a dozen or so other genera. Psilocybin mushrooms are commonly called "magic mushrooms" or more simply "shrooms". Possession, and in some cases usage, of psilocybin or psilocin has been outlawed in many if not most countries across the globe.[1]. Proponents of its usage consider it to be an entheogen and a tool to supplement various types of practices for transcendence, including in meditation, ps