Is This Trip Really Necessary?

This remarkable, sometimes
incoherent transcript illustrates
a phantasmagoria of fear,
terror, grief, exaltation and
finally breakdown. Its higlights
have been compressed on this
recording to make their own
disquieting points.

The time is 9:30 PM, one
hour after the participants
have eaten sugar cubes
saturated with LSD. We
hear Brian and his fellow
travellers observing their
gradual transformation.

Brian's been amusing his
friends by chewing on some
plastic flashbulbs.

Brian's mood in gradually
changing. He orders all of
his friends into another room
and closes the door.

He sits alone on the wooded floor,
             visible only by the dim light shining fron the bathroom.
                                                                 He talks to himself.

   The time is now 1 am.
Brian is unalbe to snap his fingers and terminate the trip,
                                                                       which continues.

He sobs, as his joy turns to fear.

Brian's rocky journey ended twelve hours after it is so innocently had begun. He was shattered by it.

This young man never had a bummer in some thirty-three LLSD trips. Every one of them was a delight. Everything under control. He needed only to snap his fingers and down he came, any time. But on Voyage 34 he finally met himself coming down an up-staircase, and the encounter was crushing.

The LSD trip is a pilgrimage far out beyond your normal mind, into that risky and revelatory territory which has been explored for thousands of years by mystics and visionary philosophers.

Well I never think that when I'm twenty-one, I'm twenty-one - I think of tomorrow or this minute...

And hope there's a tomorrow, 'cause I don't like what's going on in the world. I'm scared of that, more than drugs, I'm not afraid of them...

I'n just...I'm just scared you know?

We're told that perhaps a million Americans, most of them young people, have made the LSD
experience part of their lives. Is this a social menace and a cause for alarm?

I don't think so.
I see nothing less than the
speedy evolution of a new,
indigenous religion.

I'm just...
I'm just scared you know?

Everybody is...pretty uptight.

I'm just...I'm just scared...you know?

The LSD religionist knows; that the temple of worship is the human body, tha the shrine must be located, not in a public place, but in the privacy of your own home, and that the congregation cannot extend beyond your family and your closest friends...

...And then the paintings on the walls were dripping. You know...you could see the paint coming down like this, just like if somebody was hosing it off at the top and all the paint was running down onto the floor. And it was so pretty...they were running. Like they were melting! It was groovy...

It was like a... it was like a massage. It was so... it was so groovy, you can't, believe how groovy... it wasn't just water hitting you, taking a shower, soap and out you go, you know, towel off. It was just... oh wow! You know it was like... it was like... it was like a caress. You know kind of... and you could really feel the hot and the cold. You could feel hot "hot" and cold "cold", you know and... and each little drop that came out was a different one, you know... it wasn't... I don't think the water must mix inside. It must come out hot and cold or something, 'cos you could feel hot cold hot cold all over you. It was really groovy.

I guess... it was... I guess the world for it is sensual...
you know just...
your body just oh! It grooved!

For psychedelics are stimulators of ideas and feelings,
but generally this ideas and feelings would
express themselves constructively rather than
violently or destructively.

If it were possible during a riot to spray samall doses
of LSD from a helicopter into the air...
People would soon quieten...

Is this trip really necessary?