" Then came a big monster of an ambulance which took me from Liverpool to Watertown and delivered me to a white-coated Army staff. A young nurse volunteered to make me comfortable with a glass of orange juice, to relieve my thirst, but at the bottom of the orange juice I saw an unmistakable layer of undissolved white crystalline solids. I wasn't going to be hoodwinked by a bunch of soldiers! The juice was obviously a sophisticated cover-up for the administration of some dramatic sedative or presurgical anesthetic which was expected to render me placid and unconcerned about the medical procedures they had planned for me. I resolved to prove my masculinity and control of the situation by simply denying the white crystals their power. I would drink the whole mixture down, but I would stay awake and alert. I would be wheeled into the surgical bay as an attentive sailor who would challenge the Army surgeons with analytical perception and penetrating questions which would reveal to them the integrity of my mental status. It didn't work. The drug that rested undissolved under my orange juice was undeniably a pretty effective drug, because I succumbed to it and went completely unconscious. I have no memory of the intravenous Pentothal anesthetic that was administered to me for my surgery. And I was later told of the unprecedented half-hour I required for recovery from it. The bone infection was surgically removed, and to this day my left thumb is almost a half-inch shorter than my right. .....Eventually I healed, and had to become reoriented to military reality, but in the mean- time I had learned a couple of facts. ....The second fact was not expected at all, and it was this that started me on my career as a psychopharmacologist. I was told that the white "drug" which was undissolved at the bottom of my orange juice glass, and which had finally plopped me over the line from being an alert and defensive surgery candidate to being a comatose subject available to any and all manipulation by the operating physician, was nothing but undissolved sugar. A fraction of a gram of sugar had rendered me unconscious, because I had truly believed that it could do just that. The power of a simple placebo to radically alter my state of consciousness impressed me deeply. The contribution of the mind to the observed action of a drug was certainly real, and I decided it was possible that this contribution was a major one. Over the intervening years, I have come to believe that the mind is the major factor in defining a psychoactive drug's action. One has been taught to assign the power of a drug to the drug itself, without considering the person into whom it goes. A drug by itself can be a powder, a spoonful of sugar, without any curative value whatsoever. But there is a personal reality of the recipient of the drug that plays a major role in the definition of the eventual interaction. Each of us has his own reality, and each of us will construct his own unique drug-person relationship. The shock of the juice led explore "