WOW! I feel your pain Nelson, I lost my only brother to suicide too.
Some of you guys may not be old enough to know some of the more colorful history of research into mental illness using psychoactive drugs. Way back in the late 50's Dr. Richard Alpert and Dr. Timothy Leary, who both worked at Harvard University teamed up to start the Harvard Psilocybin Project. Ironically Timothy Leary became known as the father of the psychedelic movement of the 1960s. Both Leary and Alpert sought to document psilocybin's effects on human consciousness by administering it to volunteer subjects and recording their real-time descriptions of the experience. They believed that psilocybin could be the solution for the emotional problems of the Western man.
That same year, writer Ken Kesey volunteered to take part in a CIA study of the effects of psychedelic drugs, in particular LSD. The CIA's experiments with LSD were all part of The MK-Ultra program seeking to find out of LSD could be weaponized to control human behavior during the Cold War. Kesey ended up stealing a lot of the CIAs supply of LSD and started giving it to friends in San Francisco kick starting a huge counter culture which actually wound up fueling a generational rebellion that was dedicated to destroying everything that the CIA held dear and defended. Ironic huh?
Before that, novelist Aldous Huxley took mescaline under the direct supervision of psychiatrist Humphry Osmond. Osmond was one of a small group of psychiatrists who pioneered the use of LSD as a treatment for alcoholism and various mental disorders. Between the years of 1950 and 1965, some 40,000 patients had been prescribed one form of LSD therapy or another as treatment for neurosis, schizophrenia and psychopathy. It was even prescribed to children with autism.
70 years later we are still experimenting with psychedelics in hope of solving the emotional problems of Western man.
