This Obscure 1960s Guide to LSD Holds Up

The 1960s psychedelic boom in the United States was driven by flamboyant characters. Countercultural icon and psychologist Timothy Leary, who coined the phrase, “Turn on, tune in, and drop out,” was fired from Harvard University for his controversial Psilocybin Project, where he used undergraduate students in off-campus psychedelic experiments. His co-conspirator Richard Alpert, who was also fired from Harvard, later became Ram Dass, the American spiritual teacher, psychologist, and author who helped to popularize yoga and Eastern spirituality in the West.

But while people like Leary and Alpert were dominating the spotlight and rhapsodizing about transcendence and esoteric psychology, another scholar in Cambridge, MA, named Lisa Bieberman was quietly working in the shadows to try to make psychedelic experiences safe and accessible for first timers. Read more: “Turning the Psychedelic Experience into a Math Problem” In February 1967, Bieberman published Session Games People Play: A Manual for the Use of LSD. A few years ago, Bieberman passed away, and a team of scientists decided to see whether her advice has stood the test of time.

Recently they surveyed more than 500 psychedelic users and guides, most of whom (86 percent) had taken psychedelics in the past year. What they found is that the respondents generally agreed with 18 out of 19 individual items of advice proposed by Bieberman in her pamphlet. The scientists published their results in the journal Psychedelics.* I spoke with study author Daniel Kruger, psychedelic researcher at the University of Michigan, about why Bieberman deserves a revival and which pieces of advice from her guide were most widely supported in the psychedelic community.

Kruger also talked about why it’s critical that the psychedelic community participate in shaping the future of psychedelic research. She was a student at Radcliffe College, which was later integrated into Harvard University. She worked with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert and was even a manager for the International Foundation for Internal Freedom, which Leary, Alpert and Metzger set up.

She was connected with them, but really departed from them in her practical, pragmatic orientation. You’ve surely heard about the antics of Leary and Richard Alpert, who later became Ram Das. You may have seen some of the books they wrote, such as The Psychedelic Experience, which was a manual based on a Western adaptation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead—not that straightforward.

There’s a lot of material that, I argue, might make more sense after people have already had a psychedelic experience, such as, “Surrender to the void.” How do you do that? Or, “Just float, turn off your mind and flow downstream.” Lisa was a pioneer of what we call “harm reduction” or “risk reduction,” before there was even a name for it, because she wanted to give people useful practical advice about psychedelics at a time when they were breaking out of the laboratory and breaking out of the more regulated professional environments that they were in. There was a whole era of psychedelic research in the 1950s and the 1960s that had a lot of promising results for the treatment of people who had substance addictions like alcoholism and mental health issues.