LSD Goes to College

In 1967 an article with the headline, “Mentally Ill Take LSD at U” appeared on the front page of the Minnesota Daily. The story recounted the experiences of “William,” a patient in the University of Minnesota’s psychiatric ward who was administered LSD by Amadeo Marrazzi, a professor of pharmacology, as a “clinical yardstick” to determine how the nervous system handles impulses in mentally ill patients. According to the reporter, “William sat in front of the room, put on some goggles, and was instructed to rotate a bar on the far wall, by means of a dial, until it was parallel with the floor. He did so. But after a minute, the floor was no longer parallel to the bar; it now inclined downward to the right.” William had been set up in an eight-foot-high, windowless room with three walls. His goggles were fitted with special lenses that distorted the shape of the room.
Marrazzi had already discovered that rats tripping on large amounts of LSD showed indifference to their surroundings, a phenomenon he labeled “behavioral dissociation.” In a 1966 speech to students at the university titled “LSD and Man’s Search for Understanding,” he described how one human user of the drug lost all sense of time, to the point where fifteen minutes seemed like three hundred years. This work was carried out with the help of Sandoz Laboratories, which at the time was supplying LSD to any scientist interested in conducting experiments, as well as with funding from the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Marrazzi’s findings led him to report that the use of mescaline and DMPEA (a chemical similar to LSD) “might, indeed, be a factor in the causation of some types of cerebral and mental illness.” Fortunately for patients who received heavy doses, he also discovered that “the effects of both mescaline and DMPEA can be offset by a tranquilizer drug.”
Meanwhile, the recreational use of LSD was also being promoted to the U’s student body at large. In 1966, hippie godfather and drug pioneer Timothy Leary had hooked up via an early conference call—thanks to the advice of “media is the message” visionary Marshall McLuhan—to speak to a crowd of six hundred students gathered at Coffman Union. As they took in a psychedelic light show, Leary advised them to join an estimated three million other Americans in taking LSD. “Are you going to sit back and take canned positions to life?” he asked. “When you take LSD, you talk directly to yourself.” LSD was not a drug, he argued, but a chemical that opened up the cellular level to the point where a person “goes beyond his own body.” Humans, Leary said, were caught up in “an endless round of self-deception and routine behavior,” and LSD could expand their consciousness.
Leary’s pupil, Andrew Weil, “an expert in the field of mind-altering drugs” (and current medical guru), spoke to students at the Mayo Memorial Auditorium in 1971 and pronounced that humans had an innate need to get “high.” Weil claimed to have viewed drugs from “every angle,” beginning when he was a Harvard freshman in 1960. That was when, under the tutelage of Leary, he took his first mescaline. He wrote about his psychedelic experiences in a newspaper, and said his articles were instrumental in getting Leary fired from Harvard.
Though LSD experiments at the U of M were initially publicized, today the medical records of psych patients dropping legal acid are strangely unavailable. After much investigation, I received a note in early 2006 from Jim Rothenberger, a professor at the U. He said that sometime around 1971 he had heard about the mysterious psychotropic experiments at the university from Dr. Gordon Heistad. “Gordon was then head of a unit called Psychiatry Research, which was housed in Diehl Hall. I remember that as we were talking he opened up an unlocked desk drawer and showed me that it was full of Sandoz LSD.”
Now that the paper trail for the university’s LSD experiments has conveniently disappeared, the only readily available information regarding the experiments is found in newspaper articles in the Minnesota Daily from the time.
From the 1950s through the 70s, during the height of the Cold War, the CIA conducted LSD experiments under the code name MK-ULTRA, in hopes of controlling social engineering and finding a truth serum for more effective interrogation techniques. MI6, the British spy agency, also tested LSD on patients who were told that the purpose of the experiment was to find a cure for the common cold. Perhaps the documents pertaining to the U of M experiments were removed when, sometime in the 70s, the CIA ordered that all such records from the period be destroyed.
Just a few years later, however, the drug experiments—and the open championing of drugs by counterculture gurus—had become little more than a strange and unreliable flashback. By 1976, for instance, Dr. Joseph Westermeyer had conducted a study at the U on sixty-one drug-addicted patients, from which he concluded that “drugs substitute for religion … A person may adopt a drug habit as a substitute focus for social interaction if he or she has stopped going to church.” Or as Marshall McLuhan told Timothy Leary, “Wave reassuringly. Radiate courage … You must be known for your smile.”