Cause/cure of the Drug Epidemic — Dr. A.E. Wilder-Smith

Evening, ladies and gentlemen. The subject is then, which we've just heard, and I'm going to read to you two short passages of Scripture which deal with this subject. You'll not understand them, why I read them at first, but you will if you don't go into a coma in the meantime.

You will towards the end. The first one I'm going to read is in 1 Kings 19, verse 11, 1 Kings 19, verse 11. God said, Go forth and stand upon the mountain before the Lord. This is God speaking to Elijah.

Behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord. But, listen carefully, the Lord was not in the wind. And after the wind, an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake.

And after the earthquake, a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire, listen carefully, a still, small voice. When Elijah heard it, the still, small voice, he wrapped his face in his mantle, and he went out and stood at the entrance of the cave.

Behold, there came a voice to him and said, What are you doing here, Elijah? Then the second word that I wish to read to you, ladies and gentlemen, is in Galatians 5. And I'm a bit ashamed to read this to you, because it's such an awful list, but I need to do it.

Galatians 5, verse 19. Now the works of the flesh are plain, immorality, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery. Now as a young man, that word disturbed me a lot, when I'd come to be a Christian, and I read that the Bible called these works of the flesh, listed them up like that, and put among them sorcery.

You know, I'd been taught that sorcery wasn't a thing that existed, sort of witch hunts and all that. But you see, I happily had a good concordance to hand. I hope you, every man-jack and woman-jack among you, I hope you all have a good concordance.

If you can't get strongs, concordance get youngs. I found it in birth. Sorcery is translated out of the Greek from the word pharmakeia. That means, you see, it's totally wrongly translated. That means it's the induction of drug trips, flipping out with drugs.

You see, you have the word in your word pharmacy, pharmacy, a place where you get drugs. Here it's the use of drugs to produce a trip, a flip out. That's what it means. And it's regularly used, of course, even today, your Indians still use it.

They take mescaline to get a religious experience. And that's what it means. And it's a work of the flesh. And it's one of those works of the flesh which keep people out of the kingdom. Idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, we all know about those, don't we?

Selfishness, dissension, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like, I warn you as I warned you before, that those who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. Now, Lord Jesus, we ask thee to open again our understanding at this evening hour, now at least all the things that have gone through our minds, we ask thee to quieten us before thee that we might hear the still small voice, and open the words of my mouth and bless the meditations of my heart and our hearts, all of us, that we may always be acceptable before thee, O thou strength and our redeemer.

The Scope of Drug Abuse and Its Dangers

Now, ladies and gentlemen, I want to talk tonight about the various forms of drugs which are abused and used by various forms of people. And I shall have to do it, I'm afraid, in rather an orderly manner, because most people just go into discussing these things and don't know the slightest thing about the principles behind them.

And I would advise you, ladies and gentlemen, if you don't take the trouble to learn the principles, don't talk, because it will surely come out, if you discuss about things you know nothing about, it will surely come out, you know, what the prophet said, that even the fool is considered to be wise if he holds his tongue.

You remember the very wise word, I think it was to Eliphaz by Job. So, I want to give you the basis of drug abuse and drugs, and then you can perhaps help other people who are caught in them, because it's one of the most dreadful things in life to see a kid, thirty years old, with a mental intelligence of about nine, unable to get off heroin.

You know, they shrivel, they have no life in them at all. And I knew one, I met him two or three months ago in eastern Switzerland, a man of thirty. He was completely shriveled on heroin, thirteen courses he'd been through with the police, and still was swallowing huge amounts of methadone and hadn't got off the drug.

Five Categories of Central-Nervous-System Drugs

Now look, the drugs that we're going to do are the ones that affect the central nervous system. I'm not going to do penicillin, I'm not going to do hormones like insulin or Stilbistrol or estrogens, or anything like that.

I mean, I'd need, as it is, to do what I'm doing tonight properly six weeks, every night three hours, and then we get through it properly. But I can only talk about the central nervous drugs, central nervous system.

I can't talk about any others, so please put them out of your mind for now. We'll have more than we can do to do those. The first type of drug is the anesthetic. Now the anesthetic is a substance like ether, or alcohol, or halothane, or barbiturates, substances like that.

And substances like that, they depress, are you listening? They depress the total nervous system, and will put you under the table if you carry on taking them. The five senses are downed, they're downed drugs.

I shall have some more to say in just a minute. The analgesics, the second one, they're the drugs which reduce or down the sense of pain. They also reduce, of course, the respiration, so that your breathing gets shallower.

They include drugs like opium, morphine, methadone, which is a substitute for morphine and heroin. And they also include, but they're not quite the same, their mechanism is action, drugs like aspirin.

You know if you've got a headache, you take a dose of aspirin, and it'll sometimes really relieve the pain. Now those are drugs then, the analgesics, which just are more specialized in their downing effect.

They're specialized on the sense of pain, sense of the respiratory system and so on. The third type of drug is very, very interesting indeed. The most prescribed drug today, perhaps on the whole market, they're the tranquilizers.

They include drugs like Valium, Librium, Chlorpromazine, one of the first ones, and Rezepine. Rezepine's not used very much today, but it used to be used as a tranquilizer and a sinker of blood pressure, get your blood pressure down if it wasn't too very high.

Now these drugs, the tranquilizers, they reduce the conditioned reflexes. Now you know what a conditioned reflex is. If you drive a car, you've learned to drive a car, and your reflexes are such that if you come too near to another car, you can't stop yourself from putting your foot on the brake, and putting the clutch out if you haven't got an automatic.

It's the conditioned reflexes which are downed. They don't touch much the other reflexes. So keep those. They're very, very interesting drugs, and much used today in mental breakdowns, much used by the psychiatrists to down a person who's had a breakdown.

Now the fourth type of drug is the analeptic type of drug, and that is the drug that ups everything. Up, up, up, all along the line. You can't sleep after them. Your appetite is downed, but all the rest, your thinking rate, they're all upped.

They're called analeptics, or wake amines, and to that group includes, that group includes the appetite depressants. You know, the things those ladies are so fond of, when they find that their figure is getting a little bit out of control, they'll take these drugs to reduce their appetite.

Now a highly dangerous thing to do, but plenty of people do it, and these drugs are used, are you listening to me? These drugs, I haven't got the analeptics here to dole out, but might be able to have thought of that.

These drugs are used to potentiate, to strengthen, to get more out of acid, LSD. They're also used to get more out of tetrahydrocannabinol, or hashish. If you find it a little bit expensive to buy your LSD, and if it's not very strong, it's not very pure, the pushers will mix them with appetite depressants.

You can step up the strength of these drugs up to ten times by putting in speed, which makes them highly dangerous, because after you've mixed the speed type of drug, which is the last category I'm going to do, you're liable to flashbacks.

That's where the flashbacks come in. Now that's the analeptic type of drug, used as a subsidiary, as a potentiator of other drugs. The last type, the bottom ones, are the psychedelic drugs, and they're called the mind expanding drugs.

Now whether they do expand the mind or not, I'm not saying, but they're known as that. They have a particular way of changing the state of consciousness, and of producing a pseudo-religious experience.

And it's this type of drug to which the Scripture refers, what the Scripture translates in that wrong translation, sorcery. That is the type of drug that's there included, and that includes LSD, acid, hashish, tetrahydrocannabinol, marijuana, psilocybin, and adenochrome.

That's just the preliminary canter, so that we know what we're talking about. And I'm going to go through all these drugs together, and show you how they affect one another and affect us. Now, perhaps you'd change the next one on, would you?

The Five Senses and the Brain’s Search for Meaning

The present age is an age of Homo sapiens, who has the biggest and best nervous system amongst all the mammals that we know of. And this nervous system is built—this is vital what I'm saying, because this will give you the key pin to the whole argument.

This nervous system is so built that when you feed facts into the eyes, and the ears, and the nose—yes, you do it with the nose too, and with the mouth, and with the general proprioception. That is the general sense of where and what you are.

Your proprioception, that is the perception of yourself. Now the perception of yourself is a very, very big operation in the body. You see, if I lean a little bit to the left, I feel that throughout my whole nervous system, and it comes up here above, and my stance is automatically corrected.

If I have a heart attack while I'm standing up, the first thing I do is I fall down, because my proprioception can't get through, and the stasis in my body to keep me standing right goes wrong, and I fall over.

It's a very, very big operation indeed. Now this system up here, the central nervous system, is built to obtain sense, purpose, concept out of all the world round about us. We're fed into our system all these things, and the brain up here makes sense of them.

That's the function of the brain, even in animals, but much more so in us. Now we're living in a time when the brain has to function to digest facts and produce sense out of them, the same as the stomach has to digest food and get energy out of it.

Now you see, we've been taught for a hundred years that life arose by chance, and there's no purpose in it. All these evolutionists believe that in the last analysis. You see, we arose by chance chemical reactions, and then natural selection, and mutations, which also chance, separated out the bits that survive best, and without the idea of a guiding hand over the lot.

The whole of evolution arose based on no telos and no logos, no purpose. Now the brain is built to extract purpose from our environment, and if there's no purpose in the environment, then the brain gets frustrated.

You understand me? I mean, my stomach, after about four hours after a meal, begins to get frustrated. It begins to make funny noises, and it begins to say, hi, a little bit more activity is indicated up there, to push down to the stomach, to get things running on an even keel again.

You see, my stomach is designed for food. Okay? My stomach is designed for food. Now if my stomach were designed for food, and there was no food in the universe, or in our world, what would our stomach feel like?

Our stomach would feel highly frustrated, and probably get holes and ulcers in it. Okay? Now we're in precisely that position with regard to the brain, and the central nervous system drugs, which I've told you about.

Because we come to the conclusion that there's no sense, and no purpose, and no love in the whole bag of tricks. And therefore people are getting frustrated, like a stomach built to digest food. In a world where there is no food, our brain is designed to find out the purpose behind things.

It's built for that. We know that. This is a fact. No arguing about it. And the evolutionists have been telling us for 120, 130 years, that there's no such thing. To find out the purpose behind things, it's built for that.

We know that. This is a fact. No arguing about it. And the evolutionists have been telling us for 120, 130 years, that there's no such thing as food for the brain. Understood? You understand me? No such thing as purpose behind this world.

If you mention purpose in biology today, that is the sin against the Holy Ghost in biology. I'm sorry it is. You mention it and try it and see. They'll either say, well the man's a fool and he's ignorant, or he's just willfully wrong.

Because you must not assume that, because a purpose, you see, obviously is outside this time-space in which we live. And if you possess, if you propose a purpose, to think that purpose would work by chance, as evolution says it does, will frustrate you to the nth degree.

How can purpose work by chance? You've got to rectify it somehow. Now you see, therefore, our central nervous system is in a state of frustration. You look at the faces. We've walked around here a bit today, my wife and myself.

And you know, we have two eyes in our heads just to watch people, and ourselves, of course, too. And when you see the faces, you know, you make you weep. What people do with themselves. And it all comes from the fact that we don't really believe that we're the apple of God's eye.

We believe really, and we're taught from childhood onwards, that it all arose by chance in a primeval soup, and the rest of it was the survival of the fittest. But there wasn't any purpose behind it. And our brain is built for purpose.

So obviously what everybody's trying to do, now they've got a stomach that's built for food, and there's no food to be had. And a brain that was built for purpose, and there's no purpose, telos or logos, on which this brain lives.

They're sure in a desperate state. And we've got up to 60 of people running to the doctors because they've got trouble. They've got trouble. They're frustrated. I actually saw a bit of the television this morning on family counseling, which, you know, I turned it off in disgust.

I'm sorry. The food that we need was just not given. It wasn't even touched. It wasn't even mentioned. It's much deeper than this shallow counseling that's been given. This is a fundamental matter. Now there are three ways in which people are trying to get over this frustration, instead of going about it the fundamental way and finding out where the purpose is.

That's the way to do it, for my life and for everybody else's. There are three ways to do it. If you're frustrated because your brain's trying to get food and can't get it, the first way is to drown it, drown the brain.

Three Ways People Attempt to Escape Frustration

You drown it and drink. You down it until you land under the table. You're in a coma then, and you've no more problems. Or, if you don't want to do that, you take heroin. Heroin's in the same category.

It just simply downs things. And you will get, first of all, a thrill if your concentration curve that I'm going to talk about—perhaps you'd put the concentration curve on, would you? If I'm going to get a real thrill, I've got to get a steep concentration curve.

I'll show you that in just a minute. But you down it. Now that's considered a very uneducated way among the intellectuals of today to get rid of your trouble. It's considered to be cheap just simply to down the whole system.

But that's way number one, method number one. Down it with alcohol, down it with opiates, down it with tranquilizers, because all three will do the same. They'll down it. The second way is, listen, is to change your consciousness, not by downing it, but by upping it, to have such high speed.

Thank you. Such high speed, consciousness of everything that's going on, step it up till you exceed the speed limit, and you'll have a new sort of experience. Sure, you do, if you don't get psychotic doing it.

But amphetamines, speed, will do it. And speed is one of the chief killers. That's just by doing the opposite, upping everything. The other way to do it, the third way, to get over this fundamental difficulty of the frustration of the mind, is to change it by expanding it into areas you've never had before.

Now we're living in a materialistic age. We believe in time, and we believe in matter. We don't believe in heaven. The world doesn't. And certainly not now. So what they do, that's religious experience, you see, one or the other.

Now, if you take a psychedelic drug, you do expand your mind into a pseudo-religious experience, and that's why they do it. They're simply absolutely frustrated with things as they stand. They see no purpose in an organ that was made for purpose, and therefore they down it, or they up it, or they'll expand it in some area they haven't got before.

Okay, is that clear? Right, now just let me, just you draw a little red line under that in the notes in your mind, and I'm going to do things in a logical and orderly manner as far as I can. Look, just draw a little red line and think this new thing, this new thought.

Drug Dependence, Dosage, and the Illusion of Relief

If you take a dose of alcohol, which is one of the ways of downing your frustration in your consciousness, if you take a dose of alcohol, ladies and gentlemen, this is not a rhetorical question. I want to see if you're comatose or whether you're not.

Take a dose of alcohol. What happens within the first 10 minutes, 20 minutes? Are you upped or are you downed? You're upped. Of course you are. You've only got to go into a restaurant. Go into a restaurant in Switzerland, you know, where all the people are very dour.

They're very hard-nosed, the people. But they're very, very realistic people, and they never say a word. Very quiet. I'm not talking about the French Swiss. I'm talking about the Zurich Swiss. Okay, the French Swiss are a bit more on the upside.

Well, no, you get them going into a restaurant and, you know, the first thing they order is a cocktail. And these state-old directors of the banks of the world, which run America, you know, quietly, they've got all the gold.

You know, they're uproarious. They're absolutely, you've never heard such voices in your life. You'd never have believed it. They're laughing at one another and shouting at one another and embracing one another and doing all sorts of things they wouldn't otherwise do.

They've got garrulous. Now you all know what garrulousness means, don't you? Thing you don't find in the Swiss as a rule. But alcohol will do it. And if you want to get out their secrets, their shop secrets, the secrets of their industry, you take them to a good dinner.

And before dinner, you give them on an empty stomach. It works better on an empty stomach. You give them a good dose of aperitif, and you've got the secrets out, unless he throws up his mouth first, because he can't stop it.

Now after they've been going on the whole evening, they say, I'm not doing this. I've got something to tell you. That's why I'm doing what I am doing. There's method in the madness. If you let them go on, especially if you make the drinks free, especially if you do that, they will drink till they get remarkably quiet.

And if the drinks are still free, they'll land up under the table. That happens regularly if he goes on to one and two in the morning. Now what's happened to them then? Are they upped or they downed? Oh, they're downed.

These you are. They're very, very much downed. So you've got to hear a drug, alcohol's drug, you know. You've got to hear a drug that's quite a good upper. Oh, it is. It loosens the most dour tongue. But it's a very, very powerful downer.

Are you listening? Any drug which does that is liable to cause dependence. Any drug which does that is liable, what we used to call, to addict, make you dependent. Once you've started doing it, there's a thrill of being put up, and then there's the easy feeling of being put down, and you can't stop it.

Now if you take a dose of morphine, say you take five milligrams per kilogram body weight, morphine, and you give it to a rabbit, you, first of all, you anesthetize his ear, nicely so it doesn't hurt him.

We're very careful not to hurt the animals in any way. We're more careful than the doctors are about hurting you. They say, come on boy, bend over, and you know, like this. It'll only hurt just for a minute.

And you say, yes, and it's done then, and you got the needle in about half an inch, you see, and then he pushes the contents into your rearward portions. Now we don't, we don't do that with rabbits. We're much too kind.

We, first of all, I'm just telling you this so you don't think that I'm one of these brutes in a white coat, you know, that takes pleasure. Oh yes, a lot of people think that. I've sent people out of my lab for plaguing animals, especially in Turkey.

I wouldn't have it. You know, they'll fix up a mouse in a cage about one millimeter away from a cat, and let that go on and see what the medicaments do in fright. No, I don't think that's, I don't think that's serious science myself.

Well now, if you give your rabbit, after you've anesthetized his ear with a little bit of isopropanol so he doesn't feel it, he doesn't notice what you're doing at all. When he gets this nice warm feeling, his concentration in the plasma, morphine, rises very, very quickly and he gets a high because you put it in quickly.

But after he's had that, what happens to him? Well, his head goes down, and his pupils change, and his respiration gets ever so shallow, so you can't see him breathing. His mouth goes blue, what we call cyanotic, because he hasn't got enough oxygen in his blood.

And if you pinch him, he doesn't notice it. You pinch his toenails until you break them. I haven't done that, of course, but you could. And he won't mention it. He doesn't complain at all. Because you see, he's in bunny's paradise.

He's absolutely, absolutely without any trouble. And he lies down there on the bench, and he couldn't care less about you, because Jack, you see, I'm all right. And he is all right, as he thinks. And what do you think the morphine's done to the rabbit?

Rabbit's very happy, but rabbit's very down. Now, if you put, that's five milligrams per kilogram body weight in the marginal vein of the ear. Now, you have 20, 50, 20 or up to 50 white mice. Nice little fellows, you know, with the red eyes.

Lovely little fellows. And you take them, and you anesthetize them, and you put into their peritoneum, into their body cavity. You put in 40 milligrams per kilogram body weight of morphine. And as soon as you put it in, do you know what those little fellows do?

They run, and they run, and they keep on running like Felix. You can't stop them from running. They'll run, and run, and run, and run, and run, and run, and run. And they won't stop running. And at the same time, ladies and gentlemen, their tail, which you don't usually see in a mouse, their tail goes right up, right over their back, and falls between their eyes.

Now, you know what your dog does when it sees a cat, don't you? Up goes his tail like a flagstaff, and there's one huge bit of ricocheting as the rockets go off, and he's after your cat, and the cat's up the tree, and he stands on the box.

But his tail is up, and his bristles are up. Now, when a tail goes up like that, it's due to inhibition of inhibition in the mouse, and that is stimulation. And the mouse is exceedingly stimulated, exceedingly stimulated.

And the tail like that is called the Straub, S-T-R-A-U-B, tail. If I want to find out in an unknown powder if there's any opiate in it, I just give a mouse a little. And if there's any opiate, opium, morphine, heroin in it, up will go his tail, and he'll start running.

So, what does the morphine do to a mouse? Up or down? Up, very much so. Now, if you take morphine to a woman who's having a baby, or morphine substitute, but they're all the same, you see, I mean, chemically speaking, minor details.

If you give it to an ordinary person, woman having child, she'll go down. Her baby will, she'll get relaxed, and the baby comes more easily. You don't give too much, because it'll depress the breathing of the baby.

And you get lots of blue babies that way, and the nurse is most surprised, because perhaps she didn't do her pharmacology homework. But the woman is put down. But in another case, sometimes you can't tell when it's going to come.

If you put in another woman, or the same woman under different circumstances, you put the same dose of morphine in, and you know she'll go into sham rage. Sham rage. She'll run around the bed, and the doctor and the nurse after her, which is a rather embarrassing situation.

You can't quiet her down. You see, she's gone up by the morphine. So you get the drug, which in the same person at different times, will sometimes produce an up effect, and sometimes produce a down effect.

And that accounts, although it doesn't explain, the highly addicting capacity of morphine and heroin. They're uppers, and they're downers, and they do work as addictors. That is, they produce the habit-forming properties of these drugs.

Now, there's one thing I need to say to you about this. If you take cocaine, and cocaine's a problem with you, cocaine, if you put it on the eye, will anesthetize the surface, and you do corneal operations on the eye with cocaine.

But the substance is also a vasoconstrictor. That is, it cuts off the circulation. It constricts like epinephrine. And if it does that, that means you can get death of the tissue on which you put it, because it cuts off the blood supply by cutting off the blood vessels.

And if that happens, of course, the consequences are very serious. But if you chew morphine, if you chew cocaine, it works just like amphetamine. That is, it puts you up. So cocaine is an anesthetic which puts you down, locally particularly, puts you down.

But it's also a very strong upper. It acts like speed. And in the Andes, the Indians, when they have to go uphill a long way and fetch down a sheep or a goat, they'll chew that stuff. And it gives them the more power, strength to walk up, and it depresses their appetite.

So they don't need food to do it. There's a useful thing in their eyes to drink it, to chew this substance. Now, if they do that, you've got a drug which is up, and a drug which is down, and you know the answer.

It's addicting, highly addicting. Have it for me. Now, if you snort it, put it in your nostrils here and snort it up, you know, say cocaine or any of the others. The cocaine cuts off the blood circulation.

And you know, when I come to people whom I suspect, I try without letting them know, looking under and see if they've got any nasal septum. Because if the nasal septum's gone, then I know what they're up to.

Because you've burned a hole in it, you see. You have to do that very carefully, otherwise people watch you try to peer up in their nostrils, you know, and they don't appreciate that little operation.

But you can find out a lot by it. Now, ladies and gentlemen, I fixed you up on one great principle, but now I'm going to fix you up properly. If you drink alcohol, say you have your aperitif in a Swiss restaurant, good strong one, you know, you're certainly up and you're certainly down.

Then you have your meal, and then they come and bring you a black mocha coffee. After you've had your meal, and they'll swallow that and gulp that down. Now they gulp it, for the reason I'm going to tell you in just one minute, to get the concentration curve going up very rapidly, and that gives them a high from their coffee.

They feel well on it. Now, after they've had their up and down from the alcohol, they now get from their coffee, oh ye Americans, lend me your ears. They then have their coffee, and they're up. When they've had their coffee, they get out a big long black cigar, or cigarettes, and they puff away at that.

Now that contains a lot of nicotine. Nicotine, you know, acts as a tranquilizing agent, but it also acts like, when you take it at first, it's a nupper. So you've taken three substances, alcohol, up and down, quite powerful.

Your coffee, well, just a little up, and because it only lasts 20 minutes, you go down again after 20 minutes. It's a nupper and a downer in effect. Then you take your cigarette, or your cigar, and you tranquilize, but there's that little clarity beforehand, which shows that it's a nupper too, for a short time.

When you do that, you've added three drugs together, which are all uppers and all downers, and you know the body summates that. And if you take three soft drugs, such as I've mentioned, alcohol, coffee, and the cigar, or the cigarette, you take three soft drugs, it adds up to practically a hard one.

Did you know that? Do you know where I learned that? I was standing outside a coffee house, a tea room, in Bern some years ago, and I saw a busload of old English ladies coming along, you know, real old English ladies with the big hats they have on their head.

And the bus driver was threading his way through the traffic in Bern, just about five o 'clock one evening. And on the side of the street, there was a big notice in English, because they do this in English to catch the people needing their fixes from England, there was a notice, tea room.

Well, I saw one old lady get her umbrella, and she reached across to the chauffeur, and she tapped him on the shoulders, and she pointed, tea room. And that was it. And that poor man had to cut right across the traffic, and park as near as he could, because they all started standing up to pour into that tea room to get their fix.

They'd, tea, you see, does the same as coffee, and they've had all the other things as well, particularly the smoking, and the result, they needed their fix. So do you. That's how it's done. You can get dependent on these things, quick as you like.

That'll fix you. The only difficulty is, when you find a person fixed, needing his fix with these things, but he needs it in morphine or something, and you need it in any number of soft drugs, don't be too hard on the man who's got caught on a hard one.

Because you've been caught on three soft drugs, which practically make themselves hard. I spoke to a man yesterday. Was it yesterday or the day before? I couldn't tell you which, being around so much.

But you know, he sat there during my lecture, and he smoked, and he smoked, and he smoked. He couldn't stop it. So I went over to him and said, Sir, you look the sort of man who'd be very sensitive. You've got a very light skin.

You look, you say, very sensitive to these things. Why do you do it? Oh, he said, it's not difficult. I've given it up so often. He couldn't stop it. On the best way to getting cancer of the lung, or getting a heart attack, because tobacco will do both.

Now, let me do another little experiment with you. This is very important. If you take a rabbit, a nice big Belgian hare, you know, one three kilogram, one that you've got to hold up when you put him in your arms.

When you quiet him down, and you put a little anesthetic on his ears so he doesn't notice it, and you put in one milligram, one milligram of Rezopin. Now, Rezopin is a tranquilizer. And it also lowers the blood pressure, but it also increases the breathing rate.

Doesn't matter about that. You put him in one milligram into the marginal vein of the ear. After 20 minutes, if you're ever so careful, you can pick him up ever so carefully, and you can turn him around on his back, four feet upwards, like that.

You try and do that to a wild rabbit and see what happens. But you can pick him up, and he'll allow you to do it. Pick him up like that. At first, he'll hold his head. And then, before the whole audience—.

I've done this before hundreds of thousands of American servicemen— it's a real experiment. It's an experiment because it brings out flashbacks, and I've done it for that reason. They don't know that, of course, but you do that privately.

It comes public when they have a flashback. You push him up like this, and you hold him up there. And within 10 seconds, his head will start to fall backwards. So loosely, that if you didn't support his head with your thumbs, he'd break his neck, probably.

It holds back so far, he wouldn't be able to breathe properly. So you just support his head a little bit with your thumbs, and you'll see his eyes then. You put the flashlights on it, the spotlights on it.

You see his eyes, he goes to sleep. And he's fast asleep, up in your arms, on his back, the four legs in the air, and his head right back, just supported by your thumbs. Now, you mustn't make any noise while this experiment's going on, because he'll pop out of that sleep.

You've never seen the quick time that he can pop out of that sleep. In a nanosecond, almost, you'd be out of it. Then you do something which is very nasty. You've got to be careful with American soldiers, because they're very kind-hearted to animals, you know.

I'm not going to hurt it, but they think it might. You just let it suddenly drop, a free-fall drop on its back, on its back. Now, before it's dropped that much, it's twisted itself around with its righting reflex, and it lands on its feet like a cat.