The Trip

—Author-screenwriter Gavin Lambert

C elebrities notwithstanding, the vast majority of Janiger’s volunteers were average citizens. Which has made tracking them down for the follow-up study a challenge — complicated by the fact that many have already died. With the help of a private detective and lots of Internet searching, MAPS has to date located and interviewed 40 of Janiger’s original subjects who are still living in the Los Angeles area. Janiger would like to double that number before next fall. According to Kate Chapman, the MAPS researcher who conducted the interviews, most of the subjects "had a positive experience, with no long-term harm." One exception was a man who had "a bad, bad, badtrip, and would even say that it was psychologically damaging." In his essay written shortly after his LSD session, says Chapman, this man described "an awful account of how some intensely repressed psychosexual problems surfaced to the conscious front under the influence." "In a way," says Rick Doblin of MAPS, "you hope to find nobody like that, but the fact that we did find something negative and are willing to report it will hopefully add credibility to the study. We’re trying to develop guidelines for future research, so what this tells us is that LSD shouldn’t be given in research unless there is someone with therapeutic skill present." The volunteers I spoke to all had good things, or at least neutral things, to say about their LSD experiences. Zale Parry is a still-fetching 65-year-old woman who played a major role in L.A.’s early acid days. She now lives in the San Fernando Valley, and jokes that her neighbors would probably be shocked to learn that she was once something of an acid queen. No doubt they would also be shocked to learn that the vibrant impressionistic painting of a wild artichoke in bloom that hangs on the wall above her sofa was rendered by one of Janiger’s acid-tripping artists. Parry’s late husband, Parry Bivens, a pioneer scuba diver, inventor, medical doctor, chemist and drug ex perimenter, is the man who introduced Janiger to LSD, after obtaining a mail-order supply from Sandoz Laboratories. According to his widow, he also had the distinction of being the first person on the West Coast to synthesize mescaline in a garage lab — "It was pure satin," she says knowingly. An accomplished pioneer diver in her own right, Parry graced the cover of Sports Illustratedin 1955 and worked as an actress and underwater stunt double in Hollywood, standing in for Sophia Loren and co-starring with Lloyd Bridges in TV’s Sea Hunt. She describes her two dozen acid sessions of the mid-1950s as "happy trips — joyful." She credits LSD with helping her to appreciate the intricacies and interconnectedness and beauty of life in the "underwater world." After her first several sessions, she became a volunteer babysitter for Janiger’s subjects. She hasn’t taken any drugs since then, and feels no need to try LSD again. Sixty-nine-year-old Loring Ware says that his six to eight doses of LSD in Janiger’s office opened his eyes to "the world around me, but with some of the veils taken away that I didn’t even know were there." Before those experiences, Ware was following what he felt to be an uninspiring career path as a technical illustrator. "LSD made me less happy with my job," he says. "I recognized the essential meaninglessness of my job." Subsequently, Ware switched careers and became a radio announcer. Though he hasn’t had much experience with other drugs — other than "a little pot in the 1960s" — he believes that LSD "should be incorporated into some kind of rite of passage for young people, so they enter into adulthood with an understanding of the broadness of life, instead of becoming little cogs in a machine." Ernest Pipes, 71, was one of eight Unitarian ministers who dropped acid in Janiger’s office one day in the late 1950s. Now retired and living in Santa Monica Canyon, not far from Janiger’s house, Pipes says he was disappointed with his trip only because it was nota transcendent experience. "As it turned out," he recalls, "each of us had a very different experience — some went very deeply into a state of transcendent ecstasy, others did not. I had an intensified aural and visual experience, but I was unable to surrender fully to the effects of the drug in that setting." Pausing a moment, he adds, "But I have always regretted that I was not transported more effectively into altered states of consciousness, and thus enabled to be in touch with other dimensions of reality." Pipes and his colleagues had eagerly accepted Janiger’s invitation to participate in the study. "We, as clergy, knew that one’s inner life can be altered through music and liturgy and devotional reading, a beautiful sunset or a nature walk. So when it became possible for us to experiment, we thought that professionally we were obliged to do it." Though Pipes has never tried other drugs, he says wistfully, "I’ve always wanted to try it again. Wouldn’t it be great, in the proper set and setting, to have an inward journey?" An inclination to "break wind" was inhibited by the fear that it might turn into a multi-dimensional faux pas, reverberating uncontrollably through this Riemannian cosmos!