Connery advised friend to avoid LSD after a bad trip

Sir Sean Connery once advised a friend to avoid the hallucinogenic drug LSD as the James Bond star had once experienced a bad trip himself, she claims.

Irish writer Edna O'Brien said that the Scottish actor told her how his trip with psychiatrist RD Laing had a 'freight of terrors'. O'Brien refers to the episode in her new memoir, Country Girl, where she describes a conversation she had with the Bond actor in May 1970 when she was planning to meet Laing and take the drug herself.

'I had learnt from Sean Connery, with whom I had dinner the previous evening, that his own LSD trip with Laing — both being old friends from Scotland — had its own freight of terrors,' O'Brien writes.

'Yet I did not cancel the appointment. It was as if in some way I believed I could go through with it and yet escape the terrible ordeal.'

According to the Daily Mail, "Connery has never spoken publicly about his involvement with Laing, who became an icon of the 1960s counter-culture movement after he argued that LSD had therapeutic benefits. However, the actor's first wife, Diane Cilento, has previously alleged that Laing persuaded him to take the powerful drug to help him deal with stress after he appeared as Bond in 1964 movie Goldfinger."

Taking LSD was legal at the time. Possession of the drug was only outlawed in Britain in 1966.

Discuss this news here...