Acid Dreams; The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, The Sixties, and Beyond

Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain

Quotations reprinted without permission from the Grove Weidenfeld edition 

``It is possible that a certain amount of brain damage
  is of therapeutic value.''

         -- Dr. Paul Hoch,
            erstwhile Commissioner for Mental Hygiene,
            State of New York
In one experiment, a hallucinogen was administered along with a local anesthetic and the subject was told to describe his visual experiences as surgeons removed chunks of his cerebral cortex.
Whereas most psychedelic therapists were prepared to assist their patients should difficulties arise, Dr. Salvador Roquet, a maverick Mexican psychiatrist, consciously sought to induce a bummer as part of his 'treatment.' Roquet utilized various hallucinogenic drugs, including LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, datura, and ketamine. Known as 'a master of bad trips,' and 'a pusher of death,' Roquet subjected people to adverse stimuli while they were drugged; Jewish subjects, for example, were given acid and then forced to listen to a recording of Hitler's speeches. 
"I have never recovered from that shattering ontological
 confrontation. I have never been able to take myself,
 my mind, and the social world around me seriously."

        -- Timothy Leary, contemplating the effects
           of his first acid trip
In those days [at Millbrook] a high dose of LSD was viewed as a solution for almost anything, and someone had the bright idea that it might solve the 'Kleps problem'. One of his comrades -- Kleps swore it was Hollingshead -- placed a few thousand mikes of pure Sandoz in a snifter of brandy beside his bedstand. Before he even rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, Kleps downed the brandy. A few minutes later he realized he was having trouble brushing his teeth. 'I was knocked to the floor as all normal sensation and motor control left my body. The sun, roaring like an avalanche, was headed straight for me, expanding like a bomb and filling my consciousness in less time that it takes to describe it. It swirled clockwise, and made two and one half turns before I lost all normal consciousness and passed out right there on the floor.' As he groveled on all fours he got a shot of Thorazine in the rear, but it failed to bring him down. He spent the last hours of the trip sitting in a bed in the lotus position. As Kleps told it, a big book appeared, suspended in space about three feet in front of him, the pages turning automatically, every letter illuminated in gold against sky-blue pages. It was only years later, when he read a description of the two and one half turns that characterize the classic kundalini experience, that he came to an understanding of what he went through the day he'd been 'bombed,' as the parlance had it.
"To bring to the world a greater awareness of God through the teachings of Jesus Christ, Buddha, Ramakrishna, Babaji, Paramahansa Yogananda, Mahatma Gandhi, and all true prophets and apostles of God, and to spread the love and wisdom of these great teachers to all men... We believe this church to be the earthly instrument of God's will. We believe in the sacred right of each individual to commune with God in spirit and in truth as it is empirically revealed to him."

(from the articles of incorporation of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love) 

"Marxism is the opiate of the unstoned classes."

      -- Arthur Kleps