Sound & Video

John Huston's documentary for the U.S. Army about soldiers treated for psychiatric breakdown at Mason General Hospital on Long Island after the Second World War. The Army kept it from the public until 1980. Its scenes of narcosynthesis, in which doctors interview soldiers under an intravenous barbiturate, record a drug-assisted psychotherapy that came before the LSD era.

A 1955 medical film made for the drug company Wm. S. Merrell about Howard D. Fabing's experiments at Christ Hospital in Cincinnati. A 22-year-old graduate student, "Ronnie," takes 100 micrograms of LSD; the film then shows Merrell's compound MER-17 (azacyclonol, sold as Frenquel) given to prevent or reverse the effects. It belongs to the 1950s search for drugs that could block a "model psychosis."

An excerpt (25:14–36:48) from a February 1965 UCLA lecture by Sidney Cohen on extrasensory perception and claims of "dermal optical perception," or seeing through the skin. Cohen mentions synesthesia under LSD and mescaline, then argues that unproven claims belong in a "suspense file" rather than being accepted or dismissed.

A reel-to-reel tape made on April 19, 1965, at John C. Lilly's Communication Research Institute on St. Thomas, with the sounds of the dolphin Peter after he was given LSD; Lilly can also be heard. Stanford University Libraries digitized the tape in 2014.

Allen Ginsberg's tape of a December 1965 conversation with the psychologist Joe K. Adams, with Peter Orlovsky present. Adams describes the months-long manic episode that followed an LSD session in 1960 and his involuntary hospitalization, and talks about figures in Bay Area psychedelic research such as Charles Savage and Karl Bowman.

A talk at UCLA in March 1966 by Sidney Cohen, the Los Angeles psychiatrist who had studied LSD since 1955. Cohen compares the drug state to religious mystical experience and calls LSD a valuable research tool, but predicts that its future is "miserable" as accidents, public fear, and new laws pile up.

NET Journal debate with transcript from Innisfree's LSD: The Great Debate

A televised debate between Timothy Leary and MIT professor Jerome Lettvin over LSD, religion, danger, judgment, and social control, staged at MIT's Kresge Auditorium and later broadcast by NET Journal.