Amanda Feilding: ‘LSD can get deep down and reset the brain – like shaking up a snow globe’

The campaign to legalise LSD in Britain is gathering pace. The force behind the movement is an English countess for whom lobbying – and experimenting – has been a life’s workIf you were to close your eyes and conjure the headquarters of a 50-year campaign to legalise and license psychedelic drugs, you might well see “Brainblood Hall”. A Tudor hunting lodge, surrounded by three concentric moats and formal boxwood topiary, it appears, as you approach along its winding drive on a wintry afternoon, to be ready to whisper all kinds of curious stories. There are plenty from which to choose.The Black Prince used to hunt from a house on this site. Lewis Carroll based the chessboard landscape ofAlice Through the Looking-Glass on the watery Oxfordshire moorland that extends in all directions. And Aldous Huxley set his first novel,Crome Yellow, here after visiting for tea with Lady Ottoline Morrell in 1921.Amanda Feilding, who grew up here and returned to live in the manor after the death of her parents, is the natural heir to all of those associations. She is an eye-bright woman of 76, a spirited talker and an attentive listener, with that ingrained aristocratic habit of passing off wild and whirling eccentricity as mundane routine. For the past half century, she has led an indefatigable – and mostly frustrated – campaign to relax the prohibition on research into psychedelic compounds, particularly LSD. What long seemed a hopeless quest, a one-woman battle against the mas...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Drugs policy Science Medical research Post-traumatic stress disorder Alzheimer's Alcoholism Source Type: news