University of Virginia Library

Pspiderdelic?

Wilhelm Moll, Director of the Medical Library at
the University, sent the following article with this
note attached: "Shortly after reading your interesting
interview with some unnamed students on drug
use I came upon an item in the October 16 issue of
the Canadian Medical Association Journal on 'Spiders
and LSD.' This clipping may be of some interest
to prospective or present users." We agree with Mr.
Moll. -ed.

Spiders and LSD

Some readers are probably already aware of the
work of Groh and Lemieux on spiders' webs under
the influence of drugs (the spider gets the drug, not
the investigator), but in case others have not it may
be worth referring briefly to their latest publication
in International Journal of Addictions, 3:41, 1968.

These two authors from Quebec City have been
working for four years on the effects of giving drugs
to spiders on the web they spin. Since the spider
cannot survive without its web, spinning a web must
be an integral function of the central nervous
system. Hence agents affecting central nervous functions
should do something to the web, and indeed
they do.

The authors gave various psycho pharmacological
agents to spiders and found that in general large
doses were needed to change the geometry of the
web. But when they came to use LSD-25, they
found that a notable effect could be achieved with
fractions of a microgram. Apparently spiders, like
hippies, take their LSD on sugar, but not all spiders
respond well to it. The authors found that Aranca
diademata, if taken from the Island of Montreal, was
an excellent test subject, while species collected
from other areas were not nearly so useful. Normally,
the web is in the form of an orb with the animal
sitting in the centre. But when the spiders got
0.4-0.6 g of LSD, 26% stopped web building altogether
(human users may become as feckless), and it
took weeks to get them back to normal. During this
period they had to be hand-fed to be kept alive.
Giving a higher dose increased the percentage of
abnormal webs. On a single low dose, those that
continued to build, built bigger (mind-expanding
effect?) and three-dimensional webs instead of two-dimensional
ones (life takes on a new dimension). If
the dose was repeated, they eventually built a grossly
abnormal and pretty useless web. The curious
feature was that they built webs resembling those
built by spiders given blood serum from catatonic
patients with untreated schizophrenia.

As the authors say, analogies between spiders and
humans are dangerous, but one cannot help being
impressed by this work and inclined to think that
what is bad for spiders may be bad for human
behavior patterns also.