Please help me squash this deceptive and dangerous misrepresentation o — Drugs

"We do not use it as a psychoanalytic tool. Our idea was to give it as a daily drug. It is our general experience that frequently the children respond to many drugs that affect the central nervous system differently than adults. This is common knowledge; at least, to those of us using drugs with children. So we were not surprised to find, in our early initial studies, that if the children were near puberty or in puberty they responded to the first dose with anxiety and disturbance, just as the adolescent boys did. But even these children could be maintained on high doses of the drug, just as the adolescent boys were, so that the drugs can be given to these children in continuing doses. What tolerance means, I dont know. Tolerance may be established in our patients. The chemical studies suggest this, and even our psychological studies indicate a slight change later on, a leveling off of response as compared to initial reaction, but the long-term reaction is still the most valuable reaction to the drug."

"The effects of mescalin or LSD can be, in some respects, far more satisfying than those of alcohol. To begin with, they last longer; they also leave behind no hangover, and leave the mental faculties clear and unimpaired. They stimulate the faculties and produce the ideal ground for a peak experience."

"...the vocabularies of several of the children increased after LSD or UML; several seemed to be attempting to form words or watched adults carefully as they spoke; many seemed to comprehend speech for the first time or were able to communicate their needs... Very few of these changes in communication had been noted previously in such a large number of children, and at such a relatively rapid rate" (1963, p. 91)."

"Comparatively large doses of LSD-25 and Sansert may be safely administered to autistic schizophrenic children for extended periods of time. Brain damage was not observed. Rather, improvement is reported."

"Although Freedman was prompted to use LSD primarily as an experimental device to study psychosis, he did mention that he was influenced to some extent by the dramatic improvement in autistic children reported by Peck and Murphy (in Abramson, 1960) and by the apparent success of Cholden, Kurland, and Savage (1955) in their work with adult mute catatonic patients. As will become apparent in the discussion of results, a partial and often transient alleviation of mutism by LSD treatment has been one of the most consistent effects reported in the children studies."

"This group of boys showed considerable: and consistent effects from medication with UML or LSD daily for two to eleven months. Their behavior, ward management, school-room adjustment and progress at home changed favorably with less acting out and less disturbed behavior. They not only needed no other tranquilizing, sedative, or antidepressant medication, but furthermore, unlike the tranquilizers which made them sleepy and groggy, they were generally cheerful and alert. Personnel and families noted the difference. Repeated psychiatric inter-views revealed a change in fantasy material which was loss bizarre, personalized or disturbing. Depressive, anxious and paranoid attitudes were focused on real objective problems. Insight was impressive. Intellectual changes, as seen in psychometric tests, indicated improved maturity, better organization and motivation with a rise in IQ which was reflected in improved school work. The Rorschach and drawing tests also showed increased maturity and control with clearer thinking. Studies of the autonomic functions were not made."

"As long as you keep getting born, it’s okay to die sometimes."

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that theres free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."

"History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts."

"As soon as a thought or word becomes a tool, one can dispense with actually ‘thinking’ it, that is, with going through the logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it. As has been pointed out, often and correctly, the advantage of mathematics—the model of all neo-positivistic thinking—lies in just this ‘intellectual economy.’ Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based. … Reason … becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced."

"Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was still scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!"

"A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. (23)"