PSYCHEDELICS - Sciencemadness.org

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____________________________________________________ Psychedelics
subjects assert that no words exist to describe internal events
such as those they have felt, and that even if there were such
words they would be devoid of significance unless the listener
himself had gone through the same experiences. Richard
Blum (1964) reported one man's reaction:
Really, when I first took LSD, I didn't know how to describe what
had happened. It was intense and important, very much so, but there
were no words for it. But after talking with others who had taken it,
I could see that they were talking about the same thing. They did
have words for it—"transcendental" was one—and so I started using
those words myself. An interesting thing happened to my wife. After
I gave her LSD she said very little about it. For a whole month she
hardly said a word about her experience. But then I introduced her
to some others who were taking the drug, and it wasn't more than a
few days before she started talking a blue streak; you see, she'd
learned how to talk about it from them.
This explanation describes how one learns a language that
signifies to other users that one understands and has been
through a psychedelic experience. According to Blum, the
language is shaped by the culture of the speakers—in this case
by the particular subgroup with which the LSD user is socially
affiliated and under whose auspices he has taken the drug.
This language is as much a sign of "togetherness" and "be-
longingness" as it is a device for communicating the content
of an experience. It is not unusual that a number of people
in drug subcultures become frustrated when talking with
non-users; to the individual who has never undergone psyche-
delic experience, the user's words are not understood as affir-
mations that one is a particular kind of person or a fellow
member of an important in-group.
Blum has maintained that learning the LSD language and
vocalizing the philosophy of the psychedelic subculture are
steps in the commitment of an individual to an identifiable
group. Language, in this instance, becomes a device to pro-
vide structure and to create a community of experience among
persons who have had LSD. Furthermore, whatever one ex-
pects from the psychedelics on the basis of prior information
and personal predispositions strongly influences the choice of
words later used to describe the experience itself.
The experience of being taught linguistic terminology by
members of the drug subculture is more than instruction in