Tom was part of a particularly shimmering moment in my own life. This is in miami in the early 1980s and it was centered around the miami herald, and particularly the sunday magazine, tropic magazine where thomas one of the principal editors. This was a moment, and i know we all succumb to the temptation, the older we get the better we were, but this was truly a moment. There was tom, dave, karl, madeline, with assist from the likes of paul levine and elmore leonard. It was a moment of creativity of innovation and of daring and editorial daring, it is a pleasure to be part of that, at least be able to watch the. The ringmasters work joseph that the post, and tom shroder. I was occasionally invited to sit at the cool kids table but i could admire them from afar. The herald folded the tropic of usually which is reminder to the younger people here the newspaper industry was an advanced agrippa to block for the digital revolution finished them off. They went on to write books and get rich. Rich. Dave barry would go to price come his nobel prize, ive lost track, and jean and tom shroder went to the Washington Post and continued to work their magic. As an editor, tom conceived and edited to pulitzer prizewinning future feature stories including fatal distraction which was a devastating story about the aftermath of a totally tragic instances when people leave small children in cars and they died because o of heat. Tom went on to launch a widely syndicated comic strip, the culdesac and added eight a best selling book, overwhelmed. As an author of his own right tom cowrote the untold story of the gulf oil disaster. His work, the hunt for bin laden, covered by the Washington Post became the number one selling single mac kindle single event so there he wrote an extraordinary book which i recommended many times to people, a book called old souls. I know this sounds like an unlikely subject, sounds like aa fringe and so they could be subject but it is totally riveting. Tom followed the four decades of inquiries the university of virginia psychiatrist in cases of people who appear to have been born with the memories and personality of individuals who were recently deceased. Apparent instances of incarnation, and the book is amazing. Tom leezer. Biz latest book acid test which chronicles the victims to acceptance of use of psychedelics, lsd and mdma for psychotherapy, especially the epidemic we have faced posttraumatic stress but its it commits pleasure to tom here tonight, and to introduce them to you now. Thank you, ed. Very nice introduction of lost mac thank you all for coming out. I hope you all signed a shining the sign i in sheet because wanted to the people who came out to talk about drugs after school. [laughter] but really, why were here, or wifi me writing about this book is because a man named Albert Hoffman in 1945 stumbled on one of the most remarkable discoveries in history, and he is an interesting story because we knew was, he was a swiss citizen, and as a child, a young boy really, he remembered having the sort of remarkable spontaneous experiences. Let me read what he had to say about this. You know, one day you and when he was 12 he was walking through a path in the forest. He said all at once everything appeared in uncommonly clear like. Was this something i simply fail to notice before . Was i suddenly discovering the Spring Forest as a factual look . It showed with the most beautiful radiance speaking to the heart as the wanted to encompass me in its majesty. I was filled with an indescribable sensation of joy, oneness and blissful security. I became convinced of the existence of a miraculous powerful and unfathomable reality that was hidden from everyday site. I was often troubled in those days knowing that i was not cut out to be a poet or an artist. I assumed i would have to keep these experiences to myself, as important as they were. So one of the great and littleknown ironies of history is that instead of becoming a poet and a scientist so he could express this experience that he had, he became a scientist, a chemist. And this was in the early days of the 20th century, and he was working in these poorly ventilated labs, all sorts of toxic chemicals, et cetera. It was about as far from being a poet as you could possibly be. But instead of learning how to describe these experiences, he stumbled on a substance that would actually create them so that anybody who took it might have one of these experiences themselves. And what happened was he was working with the substance, basically a chemical, a swiss company, and its Chemistry Department was founded on discovering uses that came for a substance which came from a wry fungus. This fungus, unbeknownst to people for hundreds of years had been killing tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of people during the middle ages, and they didnt even know it. What happened was it would be harvested and then it would get tainted with this rye fungus and it would cause convulsions, hallucinations, body parts which are black and actually fall off. And eventually people would die and for years they didnt any idea what was going on, until they eventually discovered that it was from this fungus. And somehow natural healers at the time discovered that even though it could be deadly, did you used it in childbirth it could hasten the contractions, hasten childbirth, and stop the bleeding afterwards. So for generations this had been used, you know, in childbirth, and so his boss began to experiment with this substance, and he discovered that the basic molecule that all the active parts were based on was something called lysergic acid. And so hoffmans job when he got there was to start experimenting with search acid search acid and he started playing god and combined with different chemicals that he thought, maybe they might have an interesting use, medical use. And he did 24 of these things and he found some useful compounds. And then he did the 25th one, and that was combined with by a salon which was derived from ammonia. And three at the lysergic acid, and the german word begins with an s. It was the 25th company tries of this is lsd 25. You synthesize this and the guys in the lab are unimpressed but it did have some kind of constriction of blood vessels but not as good as some of the other compounds you come up with. It in but anything else that particularly attracted them. Daily noted in their lab notes that the animals like it to display sort of this odd restlessness for a few hours after theyd given him lsd 25. And yet so you been doing a lot of chemicals and this is one they said, its no big deal. And yet somehow hoffman couldnt stop thinking about lsd 25 or to the point where for five years it was in the back of his mind that he thought they must have missed something, but the overlooked something. So five years later, and this was in 1945, im sorry, 1943, he decided he was going to read some the size of this compound to cut basically tossed in the garbage. He started to do it. As whos working on it he had a really odd feeling. He started to feel like you need to lie down. And he had to go home. He lay down on his couch and started cant he close his eyes and he started seeing these incredible colors and patterns. This lasted most of the afternoon and then it faded. So were back to the lab and thought, what was this . He couldnt believe that is actually the lsd 25 that had done it because he had been really careful with it. The only exposure could possibly add was just a very minute amount of a substance on his fingertips, and the amount he couldve absorbed within like 100 fold less than the active dose of any kind of psychoactive chemical that was known. So he didnt think it could be that so he started like stating the formaldehyde hed been using. No such similar affect. After he eliminated all of the possibilities he decided maybe it was the lsd 25. Without telling anybody except for his Lab Assistant, he intentionally dosed himself with what he thought was a very cautious and tiny dose. He was able to write exactly one sentence in his lab notes before he could no longer write. This was during the middle of a war, so no cars were available so they had to like take bikes back, his Lab Assistant escort him on a bicycle back to his house. He felt like he wasnt moving at all but in retrospect they made fairly good time. This mustve been, i dont know whether anybody in this room might have some insight into this positively, but this mustve been an extraordinary adventures of bicycle ride. He didnt know what he had done. He didnt know what this drug did but all the new was that it was affecting him big time. He got really frightened that he had maybe poisoned himself and maybe he was going to die or maybe he was going to go crazy. And he would discover later that this was a very interesting property of the experience of taking lsd 25, was that your expectation had an outside impact on the nature of your experience. And later they would call a set and setting the expectation and the environment that you were in when you are taking it could really, i mean, make a completely transform the experience depending on whether it was positive or negative, and comfortable or uncomfortable, et cetera. He practically was in the worst possible situation because he had no idea what this is going to do. He believed that ma maybe hed taken a fatal dose, and you know, he was in extreme anxiety. And so for a long time he thought maybe he would never regain sanity, that he was losing his mind. But a doctor came to visit him when he was in the middle of this, and he was physiologically completely normal. Is a Blood Pressure was a little elevated but aside from that, nothing was going on. He got through this and it slowly faded and is able to explain his experience to everybody. And the next morning he felt remarkably fresh and the world seemed like clean and new to him. So he knew that he made a remarkable discovery, and he told his bosses who actually did not believe that the little amount paid to could possibly have affected him that way. And so he really enjoyed having him take a similar amount and then hearing about their experiences the next day. So they decided this was, their first thought was this mimics psychosis and that might be really useful because psychosis was just this notoriously mysterious and difficult to treat and devastating disease. So desperate a temporary psychosis. They thought maybe this would give psychiatrists inside into the disease and let them know how the patients saw the world, and maybe that could help them. So they started sending this out the labs and psychiatrists in Research Scientists all over the world. And so they sent it also do this, the university of prague, and there was a psychiatric student there, and he had an interesting experience when he volunteered for trial of this ever going to read what he said about it. I couldnt with how much i learned about my psyche in those few hours but the sheer intensity of the array of emotion myself simply amazed me that i was hit by a radiance that seemed in comparable to the episode of the explosion or perhaps light of supernatural brilliance that appeared at the moment of death. Although the lsd affects lasted only a few hours and is the significant part only about 10 minutes, it resulted in a profound personal transformation and spiritual awakening. So now weve gone from the making psychosis to a mystical religious experience that resulted in a conversion experience basically. Grof had studied freudian psychiatry, psychoanalyst, sorry. And he had, you know, it was a brilliant theory and very absorbing to study, that the reality was that when people got into psychoanalysis they would go for years and years, and nothing would happen. They wouldnt get better. They wouldnt change their destructive behaviors, and he was so frustrated with this at that point that he was thinking of becoming an animator to make animated films. And then he had this lsd experience, and they completely changed his idea of what he wanted to do. Because here he felt was a tool that could not, not sort of treat symptoms of Mental Illness, but he could help the patient transcend the Mental Illness itself and actually change all these things that no method known have been able to change. So he began to experiment with this with people with psychiatric problems, and he did thousands of patients with tremendous success. And he noticed a pattern and he felt what was happening was dashed in what he was he gay patients a series of lsd sessions, and he understood the means to have them in a comfortable, safe environment with a therapist right there with them. What he discovered was that the lsd experience, the exact issue so at the root of the problems we began to spontaneously emerge. These are people who maybe were like repressing these things and would never be able to talk about them under normal circumstances. But suddenly just the exact issues that needed to be sorted gotten at spontaneously emerged. And not only that, but the defenses of the patient would be diminished and the insights would be greater. And he was having tremendous success with this, and he wasnt the only one. By the mid 50s, researchers have experimented with lsd during therapy for various hero sees, depression, addiction, psychosomatic illness and traumas of all kinds. There have been scores of trials including hundreds of patients. Post reported positive results. In 1954, for example, psychiatrists at an english hospital set aside an entire ward for conducting lsd therapy with patients with severe chronic treatment resistant Mental Illness. 61 out of 94, about twothirds either recovered or improved after six months. They concluded lsd appears to be of utmost value in psychotherapy. Both in cases otherwise resistant to therapy and as a method for avoiding the prolonged time necessary for a full psychological analysis. In 1958, an analysis of scores of trials came to these conclusions. One, lsd 25 lessons the defensive. Theres a heightened capacity to really earlier experiences within a Company Release of feeling. Three, therapist patient relationships are enhanced, and number four, there is an increased appearance of unconscious material. And then they said this unique property cannot be masked by any other method or tool available in mainstream psychology or psychology. In addition it offers unique opportunities for healing of emotional and psychosomatic disorders four positive personality transformation and are conscious evolutions. So between 1950 and the mid 1960s there were more than 1000 Clinical Trials, i mean papers discussing 40,000 patients, several dozen books, and Six International conferences on Psychedelic Drug therapy. In 1960, a physician named Stanley Cohen surveyed the result of 44 physicians is conducted drug trials using 25,000 doses of lsd with 5000 different subjects under widely varying conditions. He said he found quote no instance of series of prolonged physical side effects or any evidence of victims potential. The enormous scope of this, lsd is an astonishingly safe drug. Then again in 1963, there was a Global Review of all the psychedelic therapy studies, and it concluded quote some spectacular almost unbelievable results have been achieved by using just one dose of the drug. So we are in a situation here where by the early 1960s revolution of, in psychiatry, was fully under way. There were therapist all over the world that were using this with great success. The treatment of all callers him was so successful in callers him in canada that the canadian government changed saying it was a proven treatment. Then the cia got involved. And the u. S. Military, and actually the nazis had been examined in with it in the before the discovery of lsd. The nazis decided that it might be a good idea to give this to people before they tortured them, and then maybe see what, yeah, whether they could get more out of them. And they have very conflicting results. Some people said it was a bunch of garbled, did work at all. Most people said if somebody who knew what theyre doing can elicit anything from people under the influence. So the army found these papers after the war when they seized all the german records. The cia began to experiment, and they did such noteworthy thing to say actually had a brothel in San Francisco where they would lure unsuspecting johnson and does their dreams with lsd and just watch what happens. Getting someone lsd unexpectedly as one of the most dangerous situations you could have with lsd because again, the big immediate danger of lsd is an anxiety, real acute anxiety reactions. And if somebody doesnt know whats happening to them, theres going to be they will think theyre going crazy and thats going to build on itself. This resulted in some suicides, although many of the suicides attributed to lsd in those days were not actually the fault of lsd, but there actually were some people who killed themselves because they feared that they were permanently crazy. And in addition they were funding all these apparently studies secretly, and these studies were poorly audited and basically there pumping a lot of lsd into the culture, and a lot of people were getting this experience. Most people were not having negative experiences. They were having positive experiences. They were having the experience, some of them like the canadian researchers doing the alcohol studies took himself, many times, and this is what he had to say about it. His name was Humphrey Osmond, and he also had begun that the drug experience was out we ended up thinking was, for myself, my experience with these substances has been the most strange, most also and among the most beautiful things in a varied and unfortunate luck. These are not escape from the enlargements of the virgins of reality. And Humphrey Osmond is the man who introduced huxley to it and huxley had a summer extremes and wrote about in a book called lords of perception which introduced this idea to a wide culture. One of the recipients of the lsds the cias lsd, and the result was this. Can you pass the acid test . In the bay area they basically filled koolaid coolers full of koolaid and lsd in of the titanic parties with uncontrolled, unscreened usages of lsd, and all sorts of wild stuff happening. And another person who ended up with some of the cias acid was a guy named stanley. Stanley was the grandson of a u. S. Senator, and he decided that lsd presented such an amazing vision of how we all were connected that this drug would possibly bring about world peace. He was a student at an institution let me get th