For a person of his time, that only puts him in the bottom 99% of open-mindedness.
People used to think sniffing ether, taking absinthe or breathing nitrous was incredibly profound. Until enough people did it that the evidence was underwhelming.
Michael Pollan's _How to Change Your Mind_ has a good overview of the attempted scientific research. Early research was tainted by overzealous experimenters, then research was banned for a long time, and recent studies have only been approved for serious conditions, like treatment-resistant depression.
The real problem is that creativity, the long-term generation of valuable ideas, is basically un-measurable. Scientific studies of "creativity" exist, but they all pull the ol' research switcheroo by measuring something easy to measure, rather than the kind of creativity that matters.
So, don't expect good scientific evidence of improved creativity, from any treatment, ever. That's as true for substances as for, say, whether to write on paper or at a computer. Most novelists swear by one or the other, but there's no feasible scientific study you can do to decide which produces objectively better novels. Same for whether meditation improves creativity.
(If you want to get into this line of research, start with meditation rather than psychedelics. It's much easier to get approved.)
For making your own plans about how to maximize your mental output, all you can really do is ask people whose works impresses you (and who are willing to talk about such things) what works for them, and then try those things to see if they work for you too. Being careful to compare the results side-by-side some time later, to reduce bias.
LSD is ... frankly, in my experience, a lot of bullshit. I've done enough of it in my youth to early adulthood to be annoyed I wasted those brain cells instead of thinking about interesting problems. I've also never seen anyone who it improved; mostly it seemed to increase people's self-regard.
Put it another way, invention and new ideas haven't exactly increased since Albert Hoffman's big idea. You'd expect there to be a lot more cool stuff if this were really true, as there are certainly a whole lot of people who have tripped balls in the last 50-60 years.
> "Several years ago, when I was ill, Heinlein offered his help, anything he could do, and we had never met; he would phone me to cheer me up and see how I was doing. He wanted to buy me an electric typewriter, God bless him—one of the few true gentlemen in this world. I don't agree with any ideas he puts forth in his writing, but that is neither here nor there. One time when I owed the IRS a lot of money and couldn't raise it, Heinlein loaned the money to me. I think a great deal of him and his wife; I dedicated a book to them in appreciation. Robert Heinlein is a fine-looking man, very impressive and very military in stance; you can tell he has a military background, even to the haircut. He knows I'm a flipped-out freak and still he helped me and my wife when we were in trouble. That is the best in humanity, there; that is who and what I love."
There are multiple ways to be an asshole, and so maybe we should say Heinlein sounds like an asshole, but by many accounts was kind to those who knew him well.
“An armed society is a polite society” is one that's floated often today among those pro-gun.
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
I've encountered people that take these as him being a fascist, asshole or prick. Personally, I agree with him on both counts, and consider most people to be lack contributions to the human race for their lack of desire to learn and become competent, or for their inability to learn. If that makes someone an asshole, so be it.
Heinlein has struck me as an asshole over the years. It's like his defining personality trait. I find PKD much more likeable.
Perhaps humans are complicated creatures and everyone has their bad moments.
I'm certainly not defending Dick's actions, but, I do think it is somewhat unfair to his memory and to yourself to hear about two (certainly very bad) instances and then decide unequivocally that he was just an asshole rather than a troubled man with good and bad qualities.
The one thing I'd say in defense of this quote is that it's from 1967. LSD had only been in major counter-culture circulation for a few years and a lot of the public advocates were people like Huxley and Leary who had produced documentary work on acid, but not major art. To a surprising degree, Heinlein was simply unlucky: acid-derived art got going right as he dismissed it.
Pet Sounds and Revolver were 1966, admittedly, but I'm not sure how well-known their association with LSD was at the time. The really famous and overt psychedelic music like Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, and the Woodstock scene in general mostly hit its stride in 1968-1970.
Over in non-academic writing, The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test was 1968, the same year the Whole Earth Catalog got started. Fear and Loathing was 1971. P.K. Dick wrote about LSD in Palmer Eldritch in 1965, but didn't actually try it until much later. Zelazny's work has psychedelic overtones and one in-story LSD scene, but he was just getting started in '67. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is pretty much the only major piece of acid-derived fiction I can think of by 1967.
Obviously, Heinlein was wrong. But I'd be interested whether he ever followed up on this; the acid-droppers started outdistancing the squares almost immediately after he said it.
> I know of no work of art, essay, story, discovery, or anything else of value created as a result of LSD. When the acid-droppers start outdistancing the squares in any field, I’ll sit up and take notice.
Heinlein wrote some decent novels but I keep coming across pretty closed-minded, strong opinions in quotations of his. Many great musicians were known to have had LSD inspire their creations. The Beatles, Coltrane, the Beach Boys to name a few. Some of Huxley's work was influenced by it, and the biochemist Kary Mullis credits it with helping him develop the PCR method for DNA sequencing.