I just got a piece published in Newsweek! This makes me happy, to be sure. But if you see the paper version, the headline they picked does NOT appeal to me: “My Kool Acid Test”. Hmmm….not my choice, but I couldn’t talk them out of it. Oh well, it’s Newsweek, and I’m a shameless publicity hound these days…
Here’s the link to the online edition. Below I’m going to paste in the UNABRIDGED text. Although I was after a story-line that focuses on the sixties, I think the “then and now” aspect is really interesting. And though they cut this part for the publication, check out the contrast between Ecstasy, today’s favourite party drug, and LSD, our drug of choice 40 years ago.
I’m a neuroscientist, I try and understand how the brain works, but I take a special interest in how it doesn’t work when people take drugs. That interest arose from memories of my own troubled youth: I used to be one of those people. For most of my late teens and twenties I ingested every drug I could find, and I became seriously addicted to hard drugs for part of that time. Now I try to make sense of those years, by exploring how different drugs modify brain function and how those modifications can become so terribly attractive. The drugs we find appealing reveal much about who we are; yet their effects remain mysterious, almost unknowable, until we look at the brain and its own intrinsic chemistry.
My drug-taking adventures began in the late sixties – when the world seemed wide open, waiting to reveal its wonders. I had just arrived in Berkeley, California, and my newfound friends and I were spellbound by the mind-expanding potential of LSD. But the world has changed since then, and the drugs we take today, including SSRIs and ecstasy, send our brains in a very different direction, toward comfort rather than freedom. The irony is that both these pathways begin with one very special molecule: a neurotransmitter called serotonin.
LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) goes to work in the brain by blocking serotonin receptors, the gateways that allow serotonin into our neurons. As a result, serotonin molecules flowing from our brain stem have nowhere to go and nothing to do. Serotonin’s job is to reduce the firing rate of neurons that get too excited because of the volume or intensity of incoming information. That’s how it calms synaptic traffic, modulates extremes, regulates and supervises the brain. Serotonin filters out unwanted noise, and normal brains rely on that. So, by blocking serotonin, LSD allows information to flow through the brain unchecked. It opens up the floodgates – what Huxley called the “Doors of Perception” – and that’s just what it felt like the first time I took it.
My first acid trip was both wonderful and terrifying. I was in a friend’s apartment, among a rag-tag assortment of hippie types, and I swallowed a little purple pill during a prolonged Monopoly game. About 45 minutes later, the room started to disintegrate. I had to stop playing; I could no longer read the numbers on the dice. The dice, the plaster walls, the chattering voices, the facial hair of my compatriots – each perceptual gestalt broke apart into its constituent details, moving, changing, swirling, arranging themselves into patterns of geometric beauty or turgid ugliness. My senses and thoughts were out of control, and the world rushed in relentlessly.
LSD was invented by Albert Hofmann in the 30s, but its psychedelic properties were not apparent until he tried it on himself, in 1943, and thought he was going mad. For a couple of decades, psychiatric researchers tried to treat disorders ranging from schizophrenia to alcoholism with LSD. The CIA and US military got into the act in the 50s and 60s, with the hope of manipulating potential informers or instilling mass confusion in enemy troops. But the effects of LSD remained elusive and unpredictable. It was deemed more trouble than it was worth in government circles, but it found its true calling as the emblem of a generation intent on change. For my friends and I, LSD was revered as a key that could unlock human perception and redefine human potential. So I took acid at least once a week and watched the grain of the sidewalk separate into rainbow fragments, gazed at the canopy of a redwood forest devolving into geometric scribbles, or tossed in the surf of my own cognition as it swelled in profundity. I wanted to open up my senses, strip off my mental armor, and let reality enter. And I didn’t give up for several years, until acid finally became routine, and I got drawn toward darker adventures with addictive drugs, heroin among them.
Still, for those few years from 1968 to 1972 , acid seemed the leading edge of a culture bent on charting new territory. “The times they are a changin’” chanted Dylan, and the world seemed rich with possibilities. As far as my friends and I were concerned, LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin – all compounds that torpedoed serotonin – made that world accessible. Move over, serotonin. Safety is out. Infinity is in. So we popped our pills and wandered the frontiers of inner space. At least until the drug wore off and our serotonin molecules flowed huffily back into place.
In the last ten years, serotonin has again been the target of a culture-wide chemical invasion, but the new drugs shift human experience in the opposite direction. SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) — like paroxetine (Paxil) and fluoxetine (Prozac) — are used to treat depression, anxiety, PTSD, OCD, and undefined feelings of ickiness. Instead of getting rid of serotonin, these drugs block the reabsorption process, so that serotonin keeps piling up in the synapses. The result: an extra-thick blanket of serotonin that filters out the intrusions of anguish and anxiety, making our inner worlds secure. Instead of turning on, tuning in, and dropping out, they help us turn off, tune out, and drop in – into a solipsistic safety zone, protected from too much reality.
Unlike the psychiatric researchers of the 50s and 60s, today’s psychopharmacologists are pleased with their progress. Every year or two, new and perhaps improved SSRIs are dumped into the waiting hands of millions of needy patients. (By 2007, antidepressants were the most pescribed drugs in the U.S., according to the Center for Disease Control.) But what do these new molecules tell us about our culture, about how we perceive our world? Apparently, now is not a time of exuberant exploration, but a time to hunker down and play it safe. The world seems too upsetting to wander in search of new adventures, too dangerous to explore beyond our own front porch. Instead of letting the world in, with all its uncertainties, we try to keep it out. And a barricade of serotonin makes that possible.
Even the recreational drugs of today’s youth point the weather vane of serotonin toward comfort rather than freedom. Ecstasy (MDMA) increases serotonin in the synapses, like a hyped-up antidepressant, making the world feel cozy. And while it’s true that most people don’t take serotonergic drugs, either from their doctor or their dealer, it’s no accident that those who do are resonating to a cultural theme much different from the optimistic vision of the sixties: Life is dangerous, protect yourself, or at least make yourself comfortable.
The drugs we take, the drugs we create, offer an idealized antidote to the cravings of our times. LSD was born from our craving for freedom. SSRIs reflect our need for security. Molecular makeovers never quite get us there, but they can show us where we are and where we’ve been.
Informed by unparalleled neuroscientific insight and written with his usual flare, Marc Lewis’s The Biology of Desire effectively refutes the medical view of addiction as a brain disease. A bracing and informative corrective to the muddle that now characterizes public and professional discourse on this topic.” —Gabor Maté, M.D., author of In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction
Marc, enjoyed both your article “Kool Acid” and NPR Krys Boyd interview re: Memoir of “Fun Times.” I’m eager to read your new book. I had a nervous breakdown in college, 3 week quick therapy, cocktail of RX, and back on track w/ sage advice from Dr. Charles Brown [ture]: Ladies don’t have fun. [F— being a lady]. Learn to say No [F— no] and Teakettle Theory: Don’t keep emotions bottled in and pull telephones from the wall [late 60s]. Following TCU, I lived in Viet-Nam 68-70, married to an Air America pilot who was killed flying in Laos 18 Feb 70. Brother in US from 2 VN tours, heroin addict, in prison for false drug offense, saving his life. I returned in widow weeds, wearing PTDS, 3 months bio-feedback and back in the saddle. My brother Frederic suffered from polio, PTSD, Hep C, Agent Orange, 200 101st Airborne jumps, & a fall from 40 feet while he was hanging iron for Brown & Root. With no veins, he developed an infection in C1-5 and 2 surgurgies rendered him a quad, not feeding himself or writing his name. Then 6 months of physical therapy and a blessed pain management doctor in Dallas gave my big brother back his dignity, tho he never slept w/o nightmares. His IQ 145 was expressed in a wealth of military history & biblical knowledge. Depression & addiction is prevelant in my family. My niece, thus far, is out-running the bullet–with advice from her 40 yrs in the classroom aunt: balance. My brother, niece, & I went to Israel for a week, Paris for 4 days, and Amsterdam for a week. As I don’t inhale, I ate “the whole yellow cake” at the Sugar Factory. Fred died a week after we returned to Dallas, his ‘nine lives’ running out. We’re attending Burning Man in August. I work now with PTSD, addiction, and brain trauma patients in a writing lab. Enjoy the journey. You’re on the “write” track. [I follow Willie Nelson’s thinking about marajuana. Legalize it and make some money.]
What an incredible, fascinating, overflowing, traumatic, redemptive life you’ve had. Thanks for sharing the highlights and lowlights. You ARE a survivor, and it sounds like a very wise aunt. I appreciate your good wishes. We’ve both survived a fair bit and we keep on trucking.
Take care,
Marc
Hi Marc,
It’s a fascinating topic, but isn’t there lots of debate about the role of serotonin in depression; whether its low level is a cause? _Psychology Today_ has run a couple articles on the debate in the last couple years, including on the effectiveness of SSRIs. (Leaving aside professional journal articles.)
Rottenberg, J. (2010)
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/charting-the-depths/201007/the-serotonin-theory-depression-is-collapsing
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/charting-the-depths/201002/listening-prozac-hearing-placebo
===
Kramer, P. (2008)
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/in-practice/200804/the-chemical-imbalance-theory-dead-or-alive
===
I’m not expert here, but I have been given a couple antidepressants; it’s to be noted that some–e.g. Wellbutrin– seem to work *without* affecting serotonin levels.
Don’t you think it’s likely true that for serious depression and a number of other mental disorders or problems, there is no one neuro chemical that’s the blame?
Thus raising the level of one (or preventing its re uptake) may not be a remedy, at least past the short run?
This is a great topic for discussion and congratulations on getting this article
in Newsweek.
I’ve taken plenty of both LSD and MDMA and I can tell you that MDMA is WAY more enjoyable. Many mix the two. It’s called ‘candy flipping’. But as you allude to…I took LSD in my college days when I was searching for something. I was young and ideological. I started taking MDMA later. MDMA even beats heroin in terms of that feeling of euphoria. But you cant really abuse MDMA daily like you can heroin.
I can tell you, though, that coming down from ecstasy is a terrible feeling, similar, but worse, than coming down from an acid trip. Thats why people mix MDMA w/pot, coke, meth and ketamine…to extend the buzz. The comedown is really that bad. I always came down using benzos and heroin.
Good Lord! I’m glad I stopped doing drugs a few decades ago. It sounds really complicated these days. But I have had the delightful experience of coming off SSRIs….which I tried for a harsh depression a few years ago. Not fun! I imagine coming off MDMA would be similar in some ways. Probably worse in the moment, but not as long lasting.
I did try ecstasy (MDMA) once, to see what all the fuss was about. I actually found it a bit boring….but maybe i didn’t take enough. I think in the old days we simply had better drugs!
The quality of the pressed pills (the pills with the logos on them) has gone down dramatically over the past 10-15 years or so. However, since then Molly (or pure MDMA powder typically sold in capsules) has become more available, and it is far more enjoyable than the average pressed pill, which used to be amazing.
And yes, the comedown from MDMA is very short..a couple of hours, depending on the quality of the MDMA taken.
Socially speaking, MDMA and LSD is a great combination. You get the intense visuals of LSD with the incredible emotional trip of MDMA. Also MDMA makes music sound incredible so I’d highly reccomend it in a musical setting.
when
I was a younger, more drug experimented girl, I was quite hard into
popping ecstasy pills. I had social anxiety issues before, well
extreme people pleaser I suppose you\’d call it. But was undiagnosed.
So ecstasy was a big deal for me. Set me free from my fears. After
doing it so much, maybe 3 or 4 times a week, I started getting
sketched out, a lot. With everything. I\’d like to say I quit on my
own, I think I nearly started going insane. Last time I did it, I
couldn\’t move off my friends bed. Completely droned, but terrified.
And I thought I was urinating everywhere! Terrible feeling. Embarrassed. Shaking,
sweats. Thinking ideas that i was dying. I know ecstasy uses up your
serotones, but is it possible to never get them back? Or break or tamper with them the
production for good? I was on antidepressants for a few years for high
school but off them now. It does feel, even now still, that I have a
harder time getting truely comfortably
happy with myself and forgiving myself for the simplest things. Then I
start to dissociate from my fear n it\’s just a big fog sometimes. Any
ideas? thoughts? I have been taking 5-htp as well as concerta. which
has been helping. Did you experience a feeling of what I explained to
say i was \’all out of serotonin\’? The addictions cousellors n
psychiatrists didn\’t know much about the effects of ecstasy when I
went to them. just wondering if there was actual research done now.
I partly agree with this , I just can not describe why! Its a feeling It looks.
Great and incredible post.am seriously addicted to hard drugs but always trying to quit.What happens when you have too much serotonin. How does serotonin affect anxiety.Can you measure serotonin levels in the brain.