“ I don’t get high with LSD. I see people hallucinating all around me, but I don’t get high. I don’t mean to say that I got there first, but I just know that vision. You know, I find it very familiar. It’s one that I’m in most of the time. Taking LSD for me was not the most significant spiritual experience. I don’t want to put it down — it has done beautiful things for a lot of people. But for me it was just revisiting somewhere that I am anyway. I don’t think there’s any danger in LSD. I would take LSD as long as it wasn’t under medical supervision. I just don’t think there are any doctors around who could provide you with a guide. They aren’t spiritually advanced enough. It would be like…like giving somebody a diamond and then giving him a guard to prevent him from picking his teeth with it. Pot doesn’t do anything for me. Want some?
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Leonard Cohen on his experience with LSD (been there - without doing that), the spiritual ineptitude of physicians, and the ineffectiveness of marijuana in his case.
Note that Cohen, ever the gracious host, politely offers the interviewer a toke.
From “Is the World (or Anybody) Ready for Leonard Cohen?” by By Jon Ruddy. Macleans, October 1, 1966.
