Archival footage of a woman on LSD shows early research on the drug.
This video featurs footage of a mid-1950s housewife on an acid trip during an LSD experiment.
In the film, a researcher, Dr. Sidney Cohen, is shown interviewing, and then dosing, a volunteer at the Veteran's Administration Hospital in Los Angeles. The woman, who is identified only as the wife of a hospital employee, is in her late 20s or early 30s and appears fairly typical of her time.
"My husband is an employee here, so I volunteered," she tells Cohen, before admitting to feeling "a little nervous."
After a brief discussion, which shows that she is, in fact, normal, the woman is told to drink the acid, diluted in a glass of water. LSD was a legal pharmaceutical drug until 1966.
"Well, I think it's time for you to have your lysergic acid," says Cohen. "Drink this down and we'll be back after a while and see how you're doing."
In the early 1950s and into the '60s the Army and CIA secretly funded a lot of research to see if LSD could be used as a chemical weapon or a truth serum, says Lattin. "I call it a weapon of mass distraction," he jokes.
But Cohen was pursuing a different line of study.
"Before the term psychedelic was coined, these were called psychotomimetic drugs because they mimic psychosis," says Lattin. "They were taking the research in a different direction. They wanted to understand how it works, how the mind works and the connection between the psychotic state and a spiritually enlightened state."
