PART II THE NATURE OF THE EXPERIENCE

The fundamental reason for taking psychedelics is the expe-riences they produce. These experiences may be of many kinds. Walter Pahnke (1967) has recently classified them into five types: psychotic, characterized by fear, paranoid symptoms, confusion, impairment of abstract reasoning, re-morse, depression, isolation, and/or somatic discomfort; psychodynamic, in which unconscious or preconscious material becomes vividly conscious; cognitive, characterized by "aston-ishingly lucid thought"; aesthetic, with increased perceptual ability in all sense modalities; and psychedelic mystical, marked by all the characteristics of spontaneous mystical experience observed in the literature. 'These experiences may be the cause for the effects of psychedelics on behavior. They are also the fundamental thing that must be explained if psychedelics and their effects are to be understood.

In the papers that follow, samples of experience with the major psychedelic drugs are presented. No claims are made with respect to their representativeness. The experiences are grouped by drug, so that states produced by different drugs may be compared. Examination of these accounts suggests that the differences among the experiences are less than their similarities. The entire range of phenomena listed by Mas-ters and Houston (1966) as occurring in the course of psyche-delic experiences appears among them. It is also apparent that the set of the subject toward the experience, and the setting in which the drug is taken, are of overriding significance in determining the kind of experience achieved.

The mescaline papers deal with what may be regarded as psychotomimetic experiences. The paper by Humphry Osmond is a reprint of one not generally available, which gives a sense of the impact of these chemicals in the early days of their use and provides a sense of the excitement aroused among psychiatrists and psychologists who felt that here at last was a way to understand schizophrenia. The paper by Sinnett discusses these issues in more detail.

The psilocybin papers both come from Harvard Psilocybin Project, whose results catapulted psychedelia into the mass media, and its originators out of Harvard. These studies had two aspects: those using ordinary volunteers, and a special project utilizing prisoners. The general development of the project is discussed by Leary (1968) in High Priest. The controversy that has surrounded this situation has obscured the fact that interesting and seminal observations have been made here and that nobody has pursued them further. 'The paper by Jonathan Clark deals with a drug experience he had in the course of the prisoner-rehabilitation project. The paper by Stanley Krippner focuses on the experience of a volunteer in the experiments that were carried out with non-prisoners.
Both the LSD experiences reproduced here are examples of experiences produced under controlled conditions during the time when LSD was legal and obtainable. Should the hysteria over LSD ever abate, experiences like these, under professional supervision, might be available to individuals screened against the likelihood of psychiatric abnormality and with set and setting controlled to provide maximum safe-guards against any deleterious effects. The purpose of Aaron-son's experience was to see what psychedelics were like; Rich-ardson's experience was to help him solve a problem. Both, however, have therapeutic overtones.

The paper by Stafford shows the ways in which psyche-delics tend to be used at present in the community of users. The substance spoken of as "yage" was probably not yage, but harmine or harmaline. Of special interest are the use of one psychochemical to ameliorate any difficulty arising from the use of another, and the use of marijuana in conjunction with the experience without any thought that the marijuana might influence the experience. Elements of this experience lead Mr. Stafford to speculate on psychedelics in general and their possible future impact on society.