In this video, Sidney Cohen (author of The Beyond Within: The L.S.D. Story, administers LSD under clinical conditions to an unnamed “normal person” (her description), some time in the 1950s. Her description of her experience is really wonderful — you can tell she’s going through something profound and amazing. As Reason’s Jacob Sullum wrote in 2011,
The experience she describes includes familiar themes such as gorgeous colors, geometric patterns, microscopic particles suddenly visible, and a sense of transcendence, oneness, and ineffability:
“I can see everything in color. You have to see the air. You can’t believe it….I’ve never seen such infinite beauty in my life….Everything is so beautiful and lovely and alive….This is reality…I wish I could talk in Technicolor….I can’t tell you about it. If you can’t see it, then you’ll just never know it. I feel sorry for you.”
Today all this may sound hackneyed, but what’s striking about this woman’s account is that her expectations were not shaped by the huge surge of publicity that LSD attracted in the next two decades. Although she had not heard what an LSD trip was supposed to be like, her experience included several of the features that later came to be seen as typical—a reminder that, as important as “set and setting” are, “drug” matters too.
Despite the similarity between this woman’s description of her experience and testimonials from acid aficionados of the ’60s and ’70s, her presentation is so calm and nonthreatening that it is hard to imagine how anyone could perceive this drug as an intolerable danger to society.
‘I Wish I Could Talk in Technicolor’
(Thanks, Fipi Lele!)