Trip Reports

Fitz Hugh Ludlow's account of his cannabis use as a young man in Poughkeepsie and at Union College, published anonymously in 1857 when he was twenty-one. In this excerpt (pages 18–26) he finds Cannabis indica at a local apothecary's shop, reads about it in the Dispensatory, and takes his first doses.

The note William James added to his essay "On Some Hegelisms" in Mind (1882), reporting nitrous oxide experiments he made after reading Blood's pamphlet. He describes a sense of metaphysical illumination and reconciliation of opposites that fades on recovery into "a few disjointed words and phrases." James reprinted the note in The Will to Believe (1897), and Charles Tart excerpted it in 1969 as "Subjective Effects of Nitrous Oxide."

The Yale psychologist Edward Wheeler Scripture takes an alcoholic extract of cannabis to test the common claim that it stretches time and space. He reports strong fluctuations of attention and a sense that objects and events had become remote, and compares these with laboratory findings on attention.

The psychologist Betty Eisner (1915–2004) recalls being the first research subject in Sidney Cohen's LSD study at UCLA in October 1955, quoting at length from the report she wrote after the session. The excerpt describes the psychological tests she was asked to take while under the drug, and her sense that they were trivial beside what she was experiencing. It is the opening chapter of her unpublished memoir, Remembrances of LSD Therapy Past (2002).