Horizon - Psychedelic Science by Bill Eagles

[~lostgurl~]

A new entry has been added to Drugs Archive

Description:
48 mins

Bill Eagles' extraordinary film tells the story of a handful of dedicated scientists who have struggled to make psychedelic research respectable again. In the USA, psychiatrists Rick Strassman and Charles Grob, and neuroscientist Deborah Mash each quietly began investigations with unknown psychedelic compounds, to avoid the alarm bells of LSD. Strassman pursued the Federal Drug Administration for permission to do safety trials of DMT. Mash works on treating cocaine addicts, achieving success with Ibogaine, a psychedelic derived from a West African plant. Their success hinges on the patient having a 'peak' experience, entering the realm of the mystical or religious. The early researchers had spotted this. Now it was dramatically reinforced by unique new evidence from Brazil. Unable to work in the USA, Grob visited Brazil to track down the ritual use of Ayahuasca, a leaf rich in the powerful DMT. For centuries it has been used amongst the shamans of the Amazon. But today, in urban Brazil, tens of thousands of men, women and children are taking the drug as part of an ecstatic Christian cult experience. The Brazilian Government asked Grob to look at long-term damaging effects of the drug. Instead, he found no evidence of toxicity or brain damage, and also that long-term users functioned better in their community. In 1992 Brazil legalised ritual use of Ayahuasca. The FDA took careful note. Then in the early 1990s, leading lights of the US computer industry began admitting that many breakthroughs in Silicon Valley in the 70s and 80s had been inspired by regular psychedelic drug use. Nobel Prize winner Kary Mullis, and founding father of Microsoft, Bob Wallace, reveal on camera the psychedelic influence on their creativity. This anecdotal evidence raised support for the psychedelic researchers. Now Strassman has received approval from the FDA for research into LSD itself.

To check it out, rate it or add comments, visit Horizon - Psychedelic Science by Bill Eagles
The comments you make there will appear in the posts below.

[Synesthesiac]

Those youtube links dont work anymore. I just uploaded this documentary so you can uise my links instead if you want to edit it.

Part one can be found here; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iEm0-P7fN4

Its a good informative docu about the history of psychedelic research and therapy.

[~lostgurl~]

Thanks, I have edited the link.

[BloodNutz]

Comment:

brilliant documentary about this history of psychedelics and therapies, very comprehensive

To check this out, and rate it or add your own comments, visit Horizon - Psychedelic Science by Bill Eagles.
The comments you make there will appear in the posts below.

[FistyCuffs]

This is an excellent documentary. It features some of my fave druggie heros, like Karl Jansen, writer of Ketamine: Dreams & Realities, the excellent book i'm reading at the mo. Sir Humphrey Osmund (RIP), a psychiatrist, inventor of the word psychedelic, and writer of a very unique book called "Predicting the Past: Memos on the Enticing Universe of Possibility". It also features Kary Mullis, Nobel Prize winner for inventing PCR (a way of making endless copies of a DNA strand, a damn useful thingy for research etc). He's a trippy-hippy surfer dude from California, and got inspiration from a heavy acid trip. His autobiography "Dancing Naked in the Mind Field" is also very much worth a read.

Word to that