Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD from Clinic to Campus

Introduction

Introduction In the spring of 1953, the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond made a historical journey from Weyburn, Saskatchewan, to Los Angeles, California, where he introduced author Aldous Huxley to mescaline. Osmond had moved from London , England, to Weyburn in October 1951 to practice psychiatry. Once settled in Weyburn, he began investigating the therapeutic potential of drugs such as mescaline and LSD. Huxley had heard about Osmond’s experiments with hallucinogenic drugs in Canada and volunteered to take part in the early trials with mescaline. Although Huxley identified himself as a willing participant, Osmond nervously confided to his colleague that he did not “relish the possibility, however remote, of finding a small but discreditable niche in literary history as the man who drove Aldous Huxley mad.”1 The mescaline experience inspired Huxley to write an account, published the following year, called The Doors of Perception. In one excerpt he recalled swallowing the glass of water with its swirling mixture of mescaline. Before drinking the mescaline, he carefully took stock of the familiar setting of his home and happened to fixate on a small vase containing three flowers. Returning to this scene about an hour after ingesting the drug, he observed: “At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colours. But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation—the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.” Huxley detailed his thoughts and feelings about the experience in well-crafted literary prose dotted with references to philosophy, poetry , and religion. He claimed that his response to the drug permitted him to re- flect on both simple and complex matters from a clear perspective that allowed for contemplation about the deeper and subjective meaning of life. Psychiatrists would later classify such experiences as psychedelic.2 After the fateful mescaline experiment in 1953, Osmond and Huxley developed a close relationship and corresponded regularly. In 1956, they engaged in 2 Psychedelic Psychiatry a friendly competition to come up with a word to describe the mescaline or LSD experience. Previously they had exchanged terms such as psychomimetic (madness mimicking), or hallucinogen, or phantastica, but neither of them felt that the words conveyed the appropriate sensations. After serious deliberation, Huxley forwarded his suggestion to Osmond in a clever couplet: To make this mundane world sublime Just half a gram of phanerothyme.3 Osmond responded with his own rhyming couplet: To fall in Hell or soar Angelic You’ll need a pinch of psychedelic.4 The classically trained Osmond combined the Greek words psyche—meaning mind, and delis—meaning manifest. He preferred the idea of mindmanifestation to Huxley’s term, phanerothyme, which he thought was confusing. More importantly, he enjoyed psychedelic because he felt that it “had no particular connotation of madness, craziness, or ecstasy, but suggested an enlargement and expansion of mind.”5 In 1957, Osmond explained the term psychedelic in a paper that presented some of his research findings to the New York Academy of Sciences. The publication of his paper introduced the term into the English lexicon.6 Huxley’s participation in the early trials was not only personally rewarding for him but also stimulated wider interest in psychedelic drug experimentation in Saskatchewan. Doors of Perception spread the word to readers about Osmond’s work, and it also served as an important articulation of the psychedelic experience , which most people found very difficult to describe. Osmond would later point to Huxley’s book as a way of introducing volunteers to the kinds of feelings and experiences that they might encounter while participating in the LSD trials. This book played an important literary and scientific role in the development of LSD experiments. By the mid-1950s, Weyburn, Saskatchewan, a small agrarian community, entertained a dynamic collection of researchers from Great Britain, Czechoslovakia , Denmark, the United States, and elsewhere in Canada; it became a hub of international networks for the advancement of psychedelic research. These experiments were not marginal, unethical, or unprofessional, even by contemporary standards. These LSD experiments, which made critical contributions to public health reforms and psychiatric research, became some of the largest, Introduction 3 most enduring, and internationally significant experiments in the post–World War II period. In the span of twenty-five years, however, LSD underwent a radical transformation from medical...