Along with watches and cuckoo clocks, the Swiss produce drugs. They have been doing it for a long time— since Paracelsus of Basel, a contemporary of Columbus. On April 16, 1943, another Basel chemist, Albert Hofmann, was working in his laboratory at Sandoz. His specialty was ergot, a fungus that grows on grains. Starting with lysergic acid, the ergot nucleus, Hofmann had synthesized several...
The evolution of LSD use and the controversy surrounding it are reviewed. LSD is treated as a powerful drug whose mind-revealing effects embodied the potential for both psychological harm and personal insight. Predominant motives for LSD use appear to have shifted from desire for self-exploration to a desire for fun. Early LSD use, stimulated by curiosity and adventure seeking, focused on the...
One hundred twenty-three persons with a history of LSD use were studied for the presence of the LSD flashback phenomenon and compared with 40 control subjects. A syndrome emerged that included ten distance visual disturbances. It had lasted for five years in half of the population, was treatable with benzodiazepines, exacerbated by phenothiazines, and precipitated by 19 different stimuli, most...
We studied whether patients hospitalized for LSD psychosis are clinically separable from acute schizophrenics. The family histories, manifest symptoms, premorbid adjustment, and profiles on an extensive test battery were analyzed for 52 LSD psychotics and 29 matched first-break schizophrenics. The LSD patients did not differ from schizophrenics in incidence of psychosis or suicide among the...
The serotonin precursor L-5-hydroxytryptophan reversed the symptoms of a 23-year-old man suffering from LSD-induced psychosis who participated in a randomized, double-blind crossover study of the drug and a placebo. This finding is compatible with the speculation that some LSD-induced psychotic disorders may be caused by a relative deficiency of CNS serotonin.
Brain ResearchNovember 4, 1982M A McCall, D G Tieman, H V Hirsch
In kittens, but not in adult cats, depriving one eye of pattern vision by suturing the lids shut (monocular deprivation or MD) for one week reduces the proportion of binocular units in the visual cortex. A sensitivity of cortical units in adult cats to MD can be produced by infusing exogenous monoamines into the visual cortex. Since LSD interacts with monoamines, we have examined the effects of...
A comparison was made of the effects of 5-MeoDMT or LSD on serotonergic unit activity in the dorsal raphe nucleus (DRN) and nucleus raphe pallidus (NRP) of freely moving cats. NRP neurons were substantially less responsive than DRN neurons to both drugs. NRP neurons were unresponsive to behaviorally effective low doses of these drugs whereas the activity of DRN neurons was strongly depressed....
Slices of rat hypothalamus prelabeled with [3H]-5-hydroxytryptamine ([3H]-5-HT) were superfused and the release of the labeled transmitter was elicited either by electrical stimulation or by fenfluramine. Whereas the electrically stimulated release of [3H]-5-HT was completely abolished by removing calcium from the superfusion medium, the fenfluramine-induced release of [3H]-5-HT was...
Rats were trained to discriminate injections of either 5-OMe DMT (1.5 mg/kg) or LSD (0.096 mg/kg) from saline in a two-lever drug discrimination task. After stable discrimination performances were attained (greater than 85%) in each group, dose-response generalizations between the two groups of animals were examined. The results revealed that the 5-OMe DMT-stimulus response generalized to LSD...
A free exploration test was used to examine the effects of LSD on investigatory responding and locomotor activity in a novel environment. Rats were injected with 20–30 μg/kg LSD or saline prior to being placed in a home cage. After 10 min, a door was opened permitting entry into a larger holeboard chamber where crossovers, rearings, hole pokes, and routes of locomotion were monitored. When...