Long, strange trip to Ecstasy

» Discuss Article    (11 Comments)

Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who invented LSD, died Tuesday at the age of 102. Although psychedelic drug enthusiasts are busy writing online tributes to Hofmann (who died from a heart attack, not from attempting to chew off his elbow in an acid-induced freak-out), there's also a sense that few people under the age of 30 have heard much about LSD, let alone the man who discovered it working for Sandoz Laboratories in 1943.

And why should the MySpace crowd have heard of Hofmann? LSD, technically known as lysergic acid diethylamide, seems to be nearly as obsolete as the LP record. At once antiquated and frighteningly hard core, it's the weird, scary uncle of today's wildly popular and comparatively non-threatening psychoactive stimulant, Ecstasy. According to a long-term drug survey conducted by the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, in 2006 just 3.5% of college students reported having tried LSD. Nearly twice as many -- 6.9% -- had tried Ecstasy.

In 1980, according to the Michigan study, 10.3% of college students had used LSD, as had 9.3% of high school seniors. Ecstasy, then known as MDMA (its scientific name includes the word amphetamine), was around in the 1970s and early 1980s but most often in therapeutic settings, notably as an aid in marriage counseling. In 1985, after it had developed a reputation as a college party drug, the Drug Enforcement Administration made it illegal. The result, naturally, was that Ecstasy went from college party drug to universal party drug, especially at raves -- all-night dance events sometimes known for causing severe dehydration in participants too high to either stop dancing or to drink enough water.

Although it's possible to have a bad time on Ecstasy -- just as it's possible to go to Hawaii and sulk in a Days Inn the whole time -- for most people that's not what happens (but don't try it! MDMA is a neurotoxin associated with mood swings, memory problems and, in some instances, death). Acid, on the other hand, has always been as closely associated with bad trips (don't try it!) as with deep religious experiences and access to higher planes of existence.

LSD has a high-risk/high-reward ratio. It not only requires a time commitment -- an LSD trip can last as long as 20 hours, whereas Ecstasy usually peters out after five hours (though this varies) -- its early rituals suggested a deliberate, even thoughtful approach to drug taking that seems out of fashion today. Although he got a little lax about it as time went on, Timothy Leary's ideas about "set and setting," which emphasized the importance of the psychological state of the user as well as the environment in which the drug would be used, recognize that the way to avoid a bad hallucinogenic experience has a lot to do with how well you know yourself and how willing you are to remove yourself from bad-vibe people and excessive external stimuli, like televisions or ringing phones.

No wonder no one does LSD anymore! It's utterly incompatible with the contemporary American lifestyle. You have to make time for it, you can't multitask while you're on it, plus it might be unpleasant. Ecstasy, on the other hand, is known to offer a one-dimensional, blissfully brainless high. Sure, you should probably take the day off to do it, but if acid is a mental marathon, full of peaks and valleys and unexpected endorphic turns, Ecstasy is neurological air guitar. It's fun and silly and offers unearned euphoria that's less about retreating into the brain's complexities than about falling in love with the world as you already know it.

If that sounds vaguely familiar even if you've never taken Ecstasy, maybe that's because you're on the snack-pack version. Antidepressants, which, according to the Centers for Disease Control, are the most widely prescribed drug in the country, might not make people love the world, but they can be highly effective in keeping them from hating it.

If we're looking for a yardstick to measure how people's feelings about consciousness have changed over 40 years, we could do worse than to consider the enormous philosophical gulf between LSD and, say, Prozac. Whereas one purports to expand the mind, the other belongs to a class of drugs whose phenomenal success rests largely on their ability to keep the mind from expanding into uncomfortable places. Whereas one renders a person nonfunctional in the interest of questioning reality, the other is about becoming more functional while questioning very little.

In other words, we've gone from Leary's mantra of "turn on, tune in, drop out" to "turn off, tune out, drop it" ("it" being all those things that used to bother us). Is one better or worse than the other? Who knows? But if nothing else, Hofmann's passing is a reminder that before mind-altering drugs became synonymous with unadulterated euphoria, a lot of people tried to chew their elbows off. If you know someone under 30, pass it along.

mdaum@latimescolumnists.com