LSD cat

[kenzomatic]

LSD in Animal Experiments and Biological Research

After the discovery of its extraordinary psychic effects, the substance LSD-25, which five years earlier had been excluded from further investigation after the first trials on animals, was again admitted into the series of experimental preparations. Most of the fundamental studies on animals were carried out by Dr. Aurelio Cerletti in the Sandoz pharmacological department, headed by Professor Rothlin.

Before a new active substance can be investigated in systematic clinical trials with human subjects, extensive data on its effects and side effects must be determined in pharmacological tests on animals. These experiments must assay the assimilation and elimination of the particular substance in organisms, and above all its tolerance and relative toxicity. Only the most important reports on animal experiments with LSD, and those intelligible to the layperson, will be reviewed here. It would greatly exceed the scope of this book if I attempted to mention all the results of several hundred pharmacological investigations, which have been conducted all over the world in connection with the fundamental work on LSD in the Sandoz laboratories.

Animal experiments reveal little about the mental alterations caused by LSD because psychic effects are scarcely determinable in lower animals, and even in the more highly developed, they can be established only to a limited extent. LSD produces its effects above all in the sphere of the higher and highest psychic and intellectual functions. It is therefore understandable that speciflc reactions to LSD can be expected only in higher animals. Subtle psychic changes cannot be established in animals because, even if they should be occurring, the animal could not give them expression. Thus, only relatively heavy psychic disturbances, expressing themselves in the altered behavior of research animals, become discernible. Quantities that are substantially higher than the effective dose of LSD in human beings are therefore necessary, even in higher animals like cats, dogs, and apes.

While the mouse under LSD shows only motor disturbances and alterations in licking behavior, in the cat we see, besides vegetative symptoms like bristling of the hair (piloerection) and salivation, indications that point to the existence of hallucinations. The animals stare anxiously in the air, and instead of attacking the mouse, the cat leaves it alone or will even stand in fear before the mouse. One could also conclude that the behavior of dogs that are under the influence of LSD involves hallucinations. A caged community of chimpanzees reacts very sensitively if a member of the tribe has received LSD. Even though no changes appear in this single animal, the whole cage gets in an uproar because the LSD chimpanzee no longer observes the laws of its finely coordinated hierarchic tribal order.

Of the remaining animal species on which LSD was tested, only aquarium fish and spiders need be mentioned here. In the fish, unusual swimming postures were observed, and in the spiders, alterations in web building were apparently produced by LSD. At very low optimum doses the webs were even better proportioned and more exactly built than normally: however, with higher doses, the webs were badly and rudimentarily made.

http://nepenthes.lycaeum.org/Drugs/LSD/ProbChild/Chapter2.html