Pubdate: Tue, 13 Nov 2012
Source: National Post (Canada)
Copyright: 2012 Canwest Publishing Inc.
Contact: http://drugsense.org/url/wEtbT4yU
Website: http://www.nationalpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/286
Author: Oliver Sacks
Note: Excerpted from Hallucinations. Copyright  2012 Oliver Sacks. 
Published by Knopf Canada, an imprint of the Knopf Random Canada 
Publishing Group, which is a division of Random House of Canada 
Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved

ONE PILL MAKES YOU LARGER

In a new book, renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks describes his 
experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs in the 1960s

By the time I qualified as a doctor, at the end of 1958, I knew I 
wanted to be a neurologist, to study how the brain embodies 
consciousness and self, and to understand its amazing powers of 
perception, imagery, memory and hallucination.

A new orientation was entering neurology and psychiatry at that time; 
it was the opening of a neurochemical age, with a glimpse of the 
range of chemical agents, neurotransmitters, which allow nerve cells 
and different parts of the nervous system to communicate with one 
another. In the 1950s and '60s, discoveries were coming from all 
directions, though it was far from clear how they fit together.

It had been found, for instance, that the parkinsonian brain was low 
in dopamine, and that giving a dopamine precursor, L-dopa, could 
alleviate the symptoms of Parkinson's disease, while tranquilizers, 
introduced in the early '50s, could depress dopamine and cause a sort 
of chemical parkinsonism. For about a century, the staple medication 
for parkinsonism had been anti-cholinergic drugs. How did the 
dopamine and acetylcholine systems interact? Why did opiates - or 
cannabis - have such strong effects?

Did the brain have special opiate receptors and make opioids of its 
own? Was there a similar mechanism for cannabis receptors and 
cannabinoids? Why was LSD so enormously potent? Were all its effects 
explicable in terms of altering the serotonin in the brain? What 
transmitter systems governed wake-sleep cycles, and what might be the 
neurochemical background of dreams or hallucinations?

Starting a neurology residency in 1962, I found the atmosphere heady 
with such questions. Neurochemistry was plainly "in," and so - 
dangerously, seductively, especially in California, where I was 
studying - were the drugs themselves.

Thoughts like this tipped the balance for me, along with the feeling 
that I would never really know what hallucinogenic drugs were like 
unless I tried them. I started with cannabis. A friend in Topanga 
Canyon, where I lived at the time, offered me a joint; I took two 
puffs and was transfixed by what happened then. I gazed at my hand, 
and it seemed to fill my visual field, getting larger and larger 
while at the same time moving away from me. Finally, it seemed to me, 
I could see a hand stretched across the universe, lightyears or 
parsecs in length. It still looked like a living, human hand, yet 
this cosmic hand somehow also seemed like the hand of God. My first 
pot experience was marked by a mix of the neurological and the divine.

On the West Coast in the early '60s, LSD and morning glory seeds were 
readily available, so I sampled those, too. "But if you want a really 
farout experience," my friends on Muscle Beach told me, "try Artane." 
I found this surprising, for I knew that Artane, a synthetic drug 
allied to belladonna, was used in modest doses (two or three tablets 
a day) for the treatment of Parkinson's disease, and that such drugs, 
in large quantities, could cause a delirium (such deliria have long 
been observed with accidental ingestion of plants like deadly 
nightshade, thorn apple and black henbane). But would a delirium be 
fun? Or informative? Would one be in a position to observe the 
aberrant functioning of one's brain - to appreciate its wonder?

"Go on," urged my friends. "Just take 20 of them - you'll still be in 
partial control."

So one Sunday morning, I counted out 20 pills, washed them down with 
a mouthful of water and sat down to await the effect. Would the world 
be transformed, newborn, as Huxley had described it in The Doors of 
Perception, and as I myself had experienced with mescaline and LSD?

Would there be waves of delicious, voluptuous feeling? Would there be 
anxiety, disorganization, paranoia? I was prepared for all of these, 
but none of them occurred. I had a dry mouth, large pupils and found 
it difficult to read, but that was all. There were no psychic effects 
whatever - most disappointing. I did not know exactly what I had 
expected, but I had expected something.

I was in the kitchen, putting on a kettle for tea, when I heard a 
knocking at my front door. It was my friends Jim and Kathy; they 
would often drop round on a Sunday morning. "Come in, door's open," I 
called out, and as they settled themselves in the living room, I 
asked, "How do you like your eggs?"

Jim liked them sunny side up, he said. Kathy preferred them over 
easy. We chatted away while I sizzled their ham and eggs - there were 
low swinging doors between the kitchen and the living room, so we 
could hear each other easily. Then, five minutes later, I shouted, 
"Everything's ready," put their ham and eggs on a tray, walked into 
the living room - and found it completely empty. No Jim, no Kathy, no 
sign that they had ever been there. I was so staggered I almost 
dropped the tray.

It had not occurred to me for an instant that Jim and Kathy's voices, 
their "presences," were unreal, hallucinatory. We had had a friendly, 
ordinary conversation, just as we usually had. Their voices were the 
same as always; there had been no hint, until I opened the swinging 
doors and found the living room empty, that the whole conversation, 
at least their side of it, had been completely invented by my brain.

I was not only shocked, but rather frightened, too. With LSD and 
other drugs, I knew what was happening. The world would look 
different, feel different; there would be every characteristic of a 
special, extreme mode of experience. But my "conversation" with Jim 
and Kathy had no special quality; it was entirely commonplace, with 
nothing to mark it as a hallucination. I thought about schizophrenics 
conversing with their "voices," but typically the voices of 
schizophrenia are mocking or accusing, not talking about ham and eggs 
and the weather.

"Careful, Oliver," I said to myself. "Take yourself in hand. Don't 
let this happen again." Sunk in thought, I slowly ate my ham and eggs 
(Jim and Kathy's, too) and then decided to go down to the beach, 
where I would see the real Jim and Kathy and all my friends, and 
enjoy a swim and an idle afternoon.

I was pondering all this when I became conscious of a whirring noise 
above me. It puzzled me for a moment, and then I realized it was a 
helicopter preparing to descend, and that it contained my parents, 
who, wanting to make a surprise visit, had flown in from London and, 
arriving in Los Angeles, had chartered a helicopter to bring them to 
Topanga Canyon. I rushed into the bathroom, had a quick shower and 
put on a clean shirt and pants - the most I could do in the three or 
four minutes before they arrived. The throb of the engine was almost 
deafeningly loud, so I knew that the helicopter must have landed on 
the flat rock beside my house. I rushed out, excitedly, to greet my 
parents - but the rock was empty, there was no helicopter in sight, 
and the huge pulsing noise of its engine had abruptly cut off. The 
silence and emptiness, the disappointment, reduced me to tears. I had 
been so joyfully excited, and now there was nothing at all.

I went back into the house and had put on the kettle for another cup 
of tea when my attention was caught by a spider on the kitchen wall. 
As I drew nearer to look at it, the spider called out, "Hello!" It 
did not seem at all strange to me that a spider should say hello (any 
more than it seemed strange to Alice when the White Rabbit spoke). I 
said, "Hello, yourself," and with this we started a conversation, 
mostly on rather technical matters of analytic philosophy. Perhaps 
this direction was suggested by the spider's opening comment: Did I 
think that Bertrand Russell had exploded Frege's paradox? Or perhaps 
it was its voice - pointed, incisive and just like Russell's voice - 
which I had heard on the radio, but also, hilariously, as it had been 
parodied in Beyond the Fringe).
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom