Psychedelic Psychiatry: lsdfrom Clinic to Campus (review)

Abstract

I’ve lived long enough to remember the 1960s when movies such as Reefer Madness, a film about the health dangers of marijuana, were considered square, moralistic, and unscientific. Then came the 1980s, the Reagan White House War on Drugs, the crack cocaine epidemic, and seemingly everyone was concerned about illicit drug use. Now the pendulum has swung again, with calls for the legalization of ‘medical marijuana’ and the public funding of ‘safe-injection sites’ where addicts can indulge their drug habits in hygienic and non-judgmental settings.
I thought about these twists of history when reading Erika Dyck’s new book on the history of research into lsd, or d-lysergic acid diethylamide. Dyck tells the story of how in – of all places – the Prairie province of Saskatchewan, lsd became the topic of cutting-edge medical research in the 1950s and 1960s. lsd had been first synthesized in 1938 by a Swiss chemist, but after the Second World War the Britishborn Humphry Osmond and Canadian-born Abram Hoffer, two psychiatrists working in Saskatchewan, heard about the drug and were eager to see if it could be used to cure patients and explore the nature of mental illness. Osmond – who coined the word psychedelic – was fascinated with hallucinogenic drugs and introduced British author Aldous Huxley to mescaline. (Later, rock star Jim Morrison, no stranger to recreational drugs himself, borrowed the name of his band from the title of Huxley’s book, The Doors of Perception.) From their laboratories at the Weyburn provincial mental hospital and the University of Saskatchewan respectively, Osmond and Hoffer, along with other researchers, experimented with lsd as both a treatment for mental illness – usually schizophrenia – and as a pharmaceutical means of simulating the psychological experience of madness. Their examples sparked similar research in other locales in Canada and the United States, but by the end of the 1960s a backlash against their theories had set in. Both Canada and the United States criminalized lsd use, and Saskatchewan’s lsd research community ended up being marginalized by the medical establishment.
Dyck skilfully documents how shifts in political culture heavily influenced psychedelic psychiatry. Saskatchewan became a world leader in psychiatry in particular and medicine in general thanks largely to Tommy Douglas, the province’s left-leaning premier from 1944 to 1961. Douglas’s Co-operative Commonwealth Federation government, influenced greatly by the views of the pro-Soviet Johns Hopkins University historian of medicine Henry Sigerist, backed state health insurance, preventive mental health care, and the discharge of mental patients from provincial hospitals into the community. Psychedelic research too would have been impossible without the ccf government’s keen support for medical science.
Then, in the 1960s politics buffeted psychedelic research again. Thanks to Harvard University psychologist Timothy Leary, the Beatles, and others, lsd consumption not only spread, it also became associated with countercultural politics. Leary encouraged baby boomers to ‘tune in, turn on, and drop out,’ and when some did, parents, teachers, and law enforcement agencies grew alarmed. Many in the media and government blamed drug use for the campus protests, love-ins, and anti-war demonstrations of the late 1960s. As a result, even serious psychedelic researchers discovered that support for their work was rapidly drying up.
Dyck’s book is a kind of revisionist history in that she questions many of the widely held opinions about lsd, notably that it causes brain damage. She also recounts how Saskatchewan researchers used lsd to try to cure alcoholism – efforts that drew the praise of Bill W., co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. Researchers found that lsd helped some alcoholics overcome their desire for drink by providing them with the spiritual epiphany drunks sometimes have in delirium tremens without their often-fatal consequences. Dyck additionally contends that much of this early psychedelic research was conducted with patients who fully consented to be experimental subjects, which cannot be said of the shady experiments of Ewan Cameron at Montreal’s Allan Memorial Institute.
Dyck is right to emphasize the cutting-edge nature of Prairie psychedelic psychiatry, but she seems to be unaware that Jacques Moreau (de Tours), a leading Parisian psychiatrist, had conducted similar research using hashish back in the 1840s, earning...