James Toback - Movie-Maker Speaks Out About Eight-Day Lsd Binge

Screenwriter and movie-maker JAMES TOBACK insists he's lucky to be alive after an eight-day LSD marathon left walking around with a loaded gun - planning to kill himself. THE PICK-UP ARTIST director, who also penned the screenplay for WARREN BEATTY's BUGSY, experimented with 10,000 micrograms of LSD in one sitting when he was a student at Harvard University in the 1960s. He still remembers the unpleasant out-of-body experience vividly. Toback says, "I remember every minute of the eight days that I was over on the other side. That was the only time in my life that I felt I had overstepped my boundary. "Not only could I not handle it, I didn't know there was anyone who could help me to handle it. I didn't exist anymore. "I was carrying around a loaded nine millimetre pistol for eight days and the only reason I didn't blow my brains out - which was the reason I was carrying it - was I thought, 'What happens if I kill myself and I feel this way after I'm dead?' "I found my way to the guy who synthesised LSD in Switzerland in 1938 - MAX RINKEL. He was an octogenarian practising in Brookline, Massachussetts, a few miles from where I was. "He was the only guy on earth who had the balls to give me the antidote I needed, because the chances it was gonna kill me were significant."