Sir Sean Connery ‘took LSD with RD Laing’ - Irish author

AN IRISH writer has recounted how James Bond star Sir Sean Connery warned her not to take LSD because he had experienced a bad trip when he tried the hallucinogenic drug in the 1960s.

In her new memoir ‘Country Girl’, Edna O’Brien claims the Edinburgh-born actor told her how his trip with renowned psychiatrist RD Laing had unleashed a “freight of terrors”.

Sir Sean has never spoken publicly about his involvement with Laing, who famously argued that the use of Lysergic acid diethylamide had therapeutic benefits.

But the 82-year-old former 007 star’s first wife, Diane Cilento, had previously alleged that Laing persuaded him to take the powerful drug to help him deal with stress surrounding the 1964 Bond film ‘Goldfinger’.

Cilento alleged in her own memoir, My Nine Lives, that Laing, who died in 1989, gave the Bond actor a tab of pure LSD.

“No one was privy to what happened over the next six hours, but I believe that, with his enormous reserve and armouring, Sean resisted the drug,” she wrote.

“As a result, he had to go to bed for several days to recover.”

Taking LSD was legal at the time, and possession of the drug was only outlawed in Britain in 1966.

According to the Sunday Times newspaper, O’Brien describes a conversation she had with Sir Sean 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,” she is quoted 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 writes that she had “hideous” hallucinations after taking LSD which included Laing being transformed into a rat and her kitchen walls into flesh.

The author, who found success following the publication of her 1960 novel ‘The Country Girls’, claims that, as she neared the end of her psychedelic experience, Sir Sean came to see how she was faring.