A profile in The Times of Amanda Feilding and the Beckley Foundation, with whom SAP are publishing Hofmann’s Elixir: LSD and the New Eleusis later this year:
Feilding’s fascination with consciousness started at an early age. Interested in spirituality through her Roman Catholic upbringing, she was sent aged 16 to India to visit her godfather, a Buddhist monk. She went on to study mysticism and comparative religion at Oxford University and dabbled with drugs throughout the Sixties. But her interest in the medical applications of such substances sprung from a friendship with Albert Hofmann, the Swiss scientist who invented LSD, and who pushed for the medical benefits of the drug to be investigated. Hofmann died this year aged 102, shortly before the foundation published his last book, Hofmann’s Elixir: LSD and the New Eleusis, a collection of his essays and lectures.
Feilding realised that there was no research at UK universities into hallucinogens, so she started her own. “The best way to go was to set up a foundation, get an impressive board of top scientists to see if we can get some research going,” she says. “We are very tunnel-visioned in our view of consciousness. We tend to direct our vision to technical advances, like things that have got us to the Moon,” she says. It would be easy to label her as merely a well-heeled old hippy, but for some years she has been networking with scientists, ministers, drug czars, and other academic intelligentsia.
The Beckley Foundation is now showing signs of success. Last year it scored a serious hit: the first permission to use LSD with human subjects in a scientific context in 35 years. The study – at a secret institution in the US – is investigating the effects of LSD on the brain chemistry underpinning consciousness and how it might modulate the creative process. “The study of consciousness is so central to our happiness, survival and creativity, it’s a mistake not to explore scientifically the potential benefits this compound might yield,” says Feilding.
Full article at The Times