Sean Connery `advised novelist to avoid LSD as he had bad trip with it`

London: ‘James Bond’ actor Sir Sean Connery warned an author not to take the drug Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) because he had experienced a bad trip when he tried the hallucinogenic drug himself, it has been revealed.

Irish writer Edna O`Brien said that the former 007 star advised her against trying the drug and claimed that the Scottish actor told her how his trip with psychiatrist RD Laing had a “freight of terrors”. The 82-year-old 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, had 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’. According to a leading daily, O’Brien refers to the episode in her new memoir ‘Country Girl’. 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,” a leading daily has quoted O’Brien as writing. “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,” she wrote. O’Brien, who came to prominence following the release of her 1960 novel ‘The Country Girls’, writes that, after taking LSD, she had “hideous” hallucinations which included Laing being transformed into a rat and her kitchen walls into flesh. She claims that, as she neared the end of her psychedelic experience, Sir Connery came to see how she was faring. ANI