LSD – The Wonder Child by Thomas Hatsis presents a masterful history of the blossoming psychedelic research in the 1950s. The narrative uncovers an era previously not explored, with most commentators focussing on the 60s and 70s. From the MKUltra mind-control experiments by the CIA to psychiatrists exploring the psychedelic world with newly found molecules, Hatsis takes us on a journey through the early years of LSD.

Summary Review of LSD – The Wonder Child

Author: Alex Criddle is an independent researcher, writer, and editor. He has a Masters in Philosophy where his thesis was on the nature of healing in the psychedelic experiences. He’s worked as a researcher at a clinic doing ketamine-assisted psychotherapy and as a psychedelic integration guide. His writing and contact information can be found at https://alexcriddle.com

Introduction

This is perhaps the best book on psychedelic history that I have read. Hatsis is a master of narrative, subtlety, and weaving stories together in an informative and incredibly readable way. It’s hard to do justice to this book in a review or summary because of the immense number of historical events and people that Hatsis utilizes in constructing his narrative. I’ll nonetheless do my best.

He makes a compelling case for the 50s being an incredibly important and understudied decade with respect to the development of psychedelic research and culture.

Chapter 1 – Pharmacies of Fairyland: Victorian Psychedelia

  • Begins by recounting Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell’s experience with Peyote in 1896 which was one of the first Western “poetic” experiences recounted.
  • However, Dr. John Raleigh Briggs gave peyote its first “bummer” review in the 1886 Medical Register
  • James Mooney, an anthropologist who first sent Mitchell the peyote, wrote the first favorable review of it.
  • It was Mitchell who sent some of the peyote buttons to William James, however they must have been stale because James reported nothing but becoming violently sick for the day after ingesting them.
  • It was the book The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy by Benjamin Paul Blood (1874) that led to William James’ famous experiences with altered states and nitrous oxide.

Chapter 2 – Mother’s Grain: A Brief History of the Ergot Fungus

  • The first reference to ergot that we have comes from 6th century BC, where it is reported as causing sickness in two forms: convulsive and gangrenes
  • Hippocrates would recommend ergot to suppress postpartum haemorrhaging.
  • Prior to the 1600s, Norwegian women figured out how to suppress the negative gangrene of ergot and amplify its visionary properties.
  • There are people who have tried to link the Salem Witch Trials with the ergot fungus, but Hatsis concludes that it was probably not ergot at play in these cases.
  • The idea for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde arose from Robert Louis Stevenson’s injection of ergotine to try to treat his tuberculosis.

Chapter 3 – A Peculiar Presentiment: Birth of the Wonder Child

  • April 16, 1943 – Albert Hofmann‘s company had declared LSD 25 uninteresting five years prior and was supposed to be completely discarded, but Hofmann had a nagging feeling that he missed something with this particular molecule so, completely against protocol, he created a new batch.
  • During which he had a weird feeling characterized by dizziness and an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures and colours.
  • He worried that despite his meticulouslessness regarding the sterility of his lab he wondered if he had absorbed some of the chemical and so three days later  he ingested a small amount. This became bicycle day. 
  • The 1938 Sandoz animal studies with LSD failed to show anything substantial, but the 1943 ones were more successful because they knew what they were looking for: nuance.
  • Dr. Gion Condrau gave LSD to 30 psychiatric patients and 7 “normal individuals.” A single line in his results guided the LSD paradigm for the next decade: “The disturbances in perception, consciousness and personality, were less marked in the psychotic patients  than in the normal subjects and the LSD intoxication was milder.”

Chapter 4 – Delysid: Seeking a Model Psychosis

  • In the beginning of the 40s there were barely 3000 psychiatrists in America. By 1956 there were over 15,000. They kept “discovering” “conditions” in the average person. The mildest of idiosyncracies could be turned into some form of psychosis.
  • Biochemist Johann Thudichum had been right back in 1884, despite his colleagues criticising him (they thought the brain was a single giant molecule), but Thudichum called it a “chemical soup”.
  • In 1946, Euler found norepinephrine that rouses the body to action. This led to a new possibility–if the brain had endogenous chemicals then could exogenous synthetic agents influence perception? And what if madness is the result of an imbalance of chemicals? Could synthetic chemicals fix this balance?
  • Dr. Max Rinkel informed his research with negative logic. He figured if he could reverse how LSD worked (since it induced psychosis) he could reverse mental illness or psychosis in the same way.
  • Histamine provided acute relief from anxiety and tension in psychotic patients. But Rinkel said it was a bandaid on a problem while we should try to understand the psychotic from within (what LSD provided).
  • In the first experiences of Delysid at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital under Rinkel’s care, everyone was having morbid experiences and ideas. There weren’t the happy, dreamy feelings that were typically described at the time.
  • Another study, around the same time was conducted by Drs. Anthony Busch and Warren Johnson at St. Louis State Hospital. In this trial Group A had 21 psychotic patients and Group B had 8 psychotherapeutic patients.
  • Group B experienced what was typically seen in the 1950s, that LSD unlocked the Freudian unconscious and so Busch and Johnson posited that LSD could serve as a tool for shortening therapy.
  • Enter, Humphry Osmond working at the Weyburn Medical Hospital. He was interested in mescaline mimicking psychosis. He hypothesized that (called the M-Factor theory) a structurally similar chemical to mescaline or LSD might cause psychosis.
  • Humphry thought that adrenochrome was the most likely canditate for an endogenous psychosis-producing chemical.
  • Like any researcher would, he tried out adrenochrome on himself in front of doctors. He appeared to have behavior similar to schizophrenics.
  • He was intrigued and gave it to Hoffer who gave it to his wife, Rose. Both were in a depressed state for a few days that eventually wore off.
  • Rinkel hypothesized that adrenochrome’s byproduct, andrenoxine, caused the psychosis. After tests, this theory was proven incorrect as well.
  • Sociologist Kiyo Morimoto, working alongside Robert Hyde, did a study seeing how people’s behaviour worked and condensed it into four categories: away, against, toward, with. All it showed was the similar results of other studies. LSD was clearly different. So much depended on the doctor, the patient, and the setting.
  • Dr. Juliana Day noted how important the role of the therapist was. She suggested that the therapists had two obstacles. First, they needed to supress their own feelings of helplessness, anxiety, and distance in the face of a patient having a bad reaction. Second was to never interrupt the patient or volunteer. So many did. She said “here was just the experience the doctor wished to record–a subject with an impressive reaction to the drug effect. Yet, he attempted to interrupt the drug effect.”

Chapter 5 The Great Lips: An Intentional Approach to Set and Setting

  • In the first study of LSD at Powick Hospital, Dr. Ronald Sandison gave patients 25 micrograms of LSD while gradually increasing the dose two or three times a week (after easing them into it with Pentothal). Most of the patients ended up taking LSD over 40 times. He decided that the “material of value” only came through after the 4th or 5th session.
  • The original 36 patients grew into 90. 55% recovered and stayed well. 12% showed no improvement. And 33% showed “various degrees of compatibility with normal life.”
  • Sandison noticed that there were 3 types of LSD experiences:
    • generalized non-specific images, coloured patterns, and other hallucinatory experiences of the non-personal kind.
    • experience of archaic, impersonal images of the collective unconscious.
    • majority of patients relived or recalled birth trauma.
  • E. Ball, the chief nurse in the same hospital, had a different approach. He didn’t use a warm-up drug like pentothal. He also used a concept called “integration” which was virtually unheard of at the time. This led to the addition of Margot Cutner in 1955. She was  a Jungian analyst.
  • She was the first to show that the subconscious material wasn’t just chaotic that came up during an LSD trip but that it had a relationship to the psychological needs of the patient. She thought that LSD was a decoder-ring for trauma.
  • Dr. Joyce Martin at Marlborough thought LSD could be used as gay conversion therapy. He was part of the Arrested Development School, thinking that everyone went through a homosexual phase and some people had trauma that kept them in that phase for the rest of their lives.
  • Hatsis, the author of the book, says that the insights from the fantastic fifties are not found in the numbers, tables, and statistics. They are from the individual stories of those treated with LSD.

Chapter 6 – Mind Fields: Weaponizing LSD

  • Intelligence reports in the 50s had claimed that Josef Stalin was stockpiling as much raw material as possible to create LSD. (This turned out to be completely untrue).
  • In 1948, authorities arrested Jozef Mindszenty on charges of treason. During a sensational trial, he admitted to many crimes people thought he hadn’t committed. Some CIA memorandum said that an “unknown force” had rendered Mindszenty “zombie-like”. The CIA thought it was because of LSD. What they didn’t know was that he had been tortured for 5 weeks. They thought authorities used LSD to get a confession. This was what led to the justification of MKUltra.
  • Dr. Robert House in the 1920s was using scopolamine and morphine as a “truth serum”. Patients coming out of anaesthesia would remember things or have their guards dropped. The problem was the number of fatal overdoses that occurred.
  • In 1945, the OSS turned their eyes to “Project Paperclip” and mescaline. They found info about a mescaline-based brainwashing experiments in concentration camps such as Dachau. Mescaline could make people divulge secrets, from sexual habits to anti-Nazism. This Dachau-mescaline discovery opened the door to 600 Nazi scientists being pardoned and employed by the government.
  • In 1946 General Leslie Groves was worried that foreign influence could infiltrate the program (she directed the Manhattan Project).
  • US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, before the war ended, turned down OSS requests to bring German scientists into the government but he was overruled because staffing Nazi war criminals “was justified as necessary to the continuing war against Japan.”
  • In August 1952, after the Navy’s CHATTER program (1947-1952) had tried using various drugs the CIA had a project codenamed Bluebird trying to use mescaline for mind control, but it didn’t work. So they sent agents across the world to find stronger mind drugs.
  • In late 1951, they had heard that Politburo (communists) had got 50 million doses of LSD from Sandoz. This, of course, was false but they sent agents to Sandoz and made a deal for 100 grams of it a week and for Sandoz to tell them if any other country wanted LSD.

Chapter 7 – Academic Espionage: Lucy in Disguise with Doctors

  • Some argue that the CIA was after global mastery with these drugs. Thomas Hatsis disagrees and suggests it was more out of paranoia than anything.
  • To figure these drugs out the CIA decided it should ask the experts.
  • One of the first tapped was Charles Savage. He was happy to receive government funding, but might not have been the best to start with. He was a true intellectual and unconcerned with the opinions of his overseers.
  • He wanted to study the Euphoric nature of the drug to see if it could help depression.
  • Savage was open about how the drug operated and what to expect. He shared freely while others like Rinkel and Hyde were conservative in their descriptions.
  • Another early CIA researcher was Nicholas Bercel, who had a private psychiatric clinic, they tasked him to find quantity needed to dose a city–a task that ultimately proved futile.
  • Both Robert Hyde and Harold Abramson received money from the CIA to do secret testing. Hyde to study the effects of LSD on patients, nurses, volunteers, CIA agents, and himself.
  • Researcher Paul Hoch was the first to attach the term psychomimetic to both mescaline and LSD. Hoch was giving LSD to 100 patients. None of whom had good experiences or ever wanted to take it again.
  • The first “LSD” death came under his watch. Although it wasn’t LSD that caused it. They gave him 5 injections of substances they didn’t know what they were and one of them ended up killing them.
  • The CIA funneled money into research grants through the Fund for Medical Research, Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, and the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation.
  • The academic world, sometimes knowingly and other times not, helped provide badly needed answers to pressing national security problems in the shortest possible time.
  • One of the few who refused to participate with the CIA was John Lilly.
  • Later in life, many MKUltra researchers apologized for their reckless behavior.

Chapter 8 – Enlightened Operatives: The Blood of Patriots

  • Hatsis outlines two distinct groups who worked with LSD for MKUltra
    • Ones like Hyde, Hoch, and Abramson – independent researchers that the CIA trapped for one reason or another. They had already been working with LSD and accepted large funds.
    • Ones that worked with LSD and had direct employment with the government.
  • The CIA decided that the best way to give LSD was unknowingly and undetected–and they had to find citizens to test this on. The best ones to try it on were the mafiosi, barflies, and sex workers.
  • Morgan Hall (AKA George White) opened an apartment in Greenwich, New York to lure sex workers and alcoholics to dose them with LSD in 1953. In a letter to Gottlieb about his time in the apartment White said that it was “fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American lie, cheat, rape and pillage with the sanction of the all-highest?”
  • On November 18, 1953 a team of biological warfare scientists arrived to a cabin in Maryland to meet writers, authors and lecturers. It was a ploy by Gottlieb who spiked their drinks with LSD. One fellow, Frank Olson grew frightened and yelled at his colleagues. He felt like he ruined the experiment and turned in his resignation.
  • Olson took several trips with others participants to New York to see Harold Abramson who later claimed that Olson confided that he believed the CIA was continually drugging him.
  • On November 23, Olson fell to his death from the 13th-floor window of his room with Lashbrook. Police said it was a suicide. After Olson’s death the CIA’s LSD studies froze for a moment, but Director Helms reopened the studies on the unwitting, opening a new house for George White in San Francisco.
  • In 1959, William Creasy wanted war without death so he told the Army Chemical Corp to develop a stronger mind drug. They introduced quinuclidinyl benzilate “BZ” – a superhallucination. It was significantly too strong and lasted for days to weeks. BZ could also be deadly if taken too much. But it also could be released in the air unlike LSD. LSD was the stepping stone to BZ.
  • During the 50s LSD was given to ~1500 military doctors, agents, soldiers, etc.

Chapter 9 – The World Where Everything is Known: Maria Sabina’s Gift

  • In ~1902, Maria Sabina and her sister, Ana, tried the “Little Saints” (mushrooms) around the ages of 5-8. The girls heard voices say, “We shall protect you. Whenever you should want for anything, come to us and we shall bestow.”
  • The sisters ate the mushrooms day after day and learned the secrets of the Little Saints.
  • In 1910 Maria Sabina’s sister Ana was taken by a mysterious illness. Maria pleaded with the Little Saints for a cure. She fed her sister three mushrooms while she ate “thirty plus thirty”. She met the seven Principal Ones who knew everything there was to know about the world. They asked what she wanted to become. Maria replied with “I wish to become a saint.” The Principal Ones gave her the Book of Wisdom, which told her anything she needed to know.
  • This book taught her to cure Ana first, and countless others afterwards.
  • On June 29, 1955 Gordon Wasson and three others show up seeking after the mushrooms. Sabina sits vigil for them and gives them the mushrooms. While sitting with them she had visions of big cities where the foreigners came from instead of her familiar landscapes.
  • In 1956, Wasson came back with Roger Heim, Guy Stresser-Pean, and James Moore. Although Moore was only there to bring the sacred mushrooms back to the CIA to see if they could be used for mind control. (The CIA bankrolled this trip)
  • Sabina gave the Little Saints to these people.
  • Somehow the Little Saints knew about Moore’s intentions. First, they tried to crash the Cessna he was on, but the pilot landed on the side of a mountain. He was stranded in an isolated mountain village, we don’t know what happened there, but he was miserable from it. Once he hit Huautla de Jimenez, the Little Saints hit him with explosive diarrhea. That was followed by excruciating itching. For some reason the insects loved Moore. No one else on the team had any of this happen with them. During the experience, Moore hadn’t had any of the fantastic visions his companions had either. He just felt distorted. Moore tried to find a weapon. By the end of the experience no one liked Moore.
  • After Sabina gave the Little Saints to the foreigners the second time they stopped talking to her.
  • Both Moore and Heim brought samples of the mushrooms back. Moore’s wouldn’t grow but Heim’s grew perfectly fine.
  • In July 1957, Hofmann tried psilocybe mexicana for the first time. Eventually he would isolated the active ingredient he called “psilocybin.”

Chapter 10 – Voices from Behind the Veil: ESP and LSD

  • Rosalind Heywood, a parapsychologist, had numerous experiences that fell under Charlie Dunbar Broad’s view that there is an underlying telepathic connection present in all humans or “the Mind at Large”.
  • Scientists derided electrical engineer Guglielmo Marconi, for stupidly thinking that invisible pulses could be sent, felt and remain undetected through the air. He later won a Nobel Prize for this thing we now call “wifi”.
  • Around 1952 Heywood wanted to test the powers of extrasensory perception (ESP) with altered states of consciousness. So she found herself in the office of Dr. Wilhelm Mayer-Gross taking mescaline under his care.
  • The setting was likely a bland doctor’s office, but the set, Heywood’s mind, had been primed for mystical experiences from previous ESP encounters.
  • She had an incredible array of colors, shapes, and patterns, meeting the Divine Mother (who she said was nothing like what madness felt like, like most doctors assumed the experience was).
  • Heywood asked him what he was trying to figure out. Mayer-Gross replied with what goes through the mind of a schizophrenic.
  • Heywood tried to find that place. She focused her mind and found a corner of the universe that was a cold, lifeless landscape where “grey veiled figures” existed. “The Lost” she called them.
  • A few days later Heywood had the first recorded flashback in history. The Divine Mother’s presence appeared in her kitchen. All the scientists clamored after her experience.

Chapter 11 – To Soar Angelic: Birth of the Psychedelic Renaissance

  • In March 1953, Aldous Huxley told his wife, Maria, that they should ask this Canadian psychiatrist working with mescaline, Humphry Osmond, over to stay. Huxley was the one that sought out Osmond to do mescaline, not the other way around as Michael Pollan claims in How to Change Your Mind.
  • May 5, 1953 Osmond proceeded with the experiment with Huxley. Huxley had hoped for visions of colours, shapes, landscapes of heroic figures, and symbolic dramas, but all he got was an experience wrestling with “the idiosyncrasies of his mental makeup, the facts of his temperament, training and habits.“
  • He left for his study and picked up a tome on Sandro Botticelli. From there his experience became magical.
  • Osmond followed Huxley around asking him questions about spatial relations, time, and madness. Meanwhile Maria saw the transcendental value of the mescaline experience and asked about the metaphysical aspects of it. But Huxley was stuck in the medical model.
  • Both Huxley and Osmond had numerous ideas for future experiments and forged a lifelong friendship bonding over the paranormal and psychedelics.
  • Huxley soon had a first draft of The Doors of Perception which he sent to his friend Joseph Banks Rhine, the father of parapsychology. Huxley’s interest in parapsychology continued to grow, particularly after Maria had experiences of spontaneous prevision under hypnosis.
  • Huxley secured himself a spot speaking at the APA’s annual meeting on May 12, 1955–the only non-scientist to speak.
  • He gave a very different interpretation of chemicals like LSD and mescaline than most were used to hearing, appealing to the early visions of Mitchell and others, suggesting that the current mental climate wasn’t conducive to these types of experiences anymore.
  • May 25, 1955 Huxley’s speech had reignited the debate concerning just what these chemicals were. Leading Osmond to come up with a few different names: psychephoric (mind-moving), psychelytic (mind-releasing), psycheroxic (mind-sharpening), and his favourite, psychedelic (mind-manifesting).

Chapter 12 – The Vitalist Heretic: Critics of Chemical Mysticism

  • Robert Charles Zaehner was the premier scholar of Zoroastrianism. He mastered a dozen ancient languages and was also considered the top scholar of mysticism and ancient mystical practices.
  • Zaehner had never thought to take a chemical drug and thought that the true mystical experience couldn’t be self-induced through chemicals. It could only be done through rigorous contemplative practice.
  • On December 3, 1955 Zaehner, under the watch of John Smythies, among others, ingested .4 grams of mescaline. His experience came late, just like Huxley’s, but Zaehner also fell blunder to the classic mistake–fighting the experience.
  • In the days prior to Dec. 3, Zaehner was uneasy about doing the drug. He had nightmares of the chemical being fatal or making him permanently mad. He refused to lose control of himself and also reported having a strong resistance to the drug after taking it.
  • The doctors showed him books of art and asked questions and Zaehner found everything funny, laughing uncontrollably.
  • Afterwards he reported that the experience felt “anti-religious” and that he had only transcended into a “world of farcical meaninglessness.”
  • After the release of The Doors of Perception, Huxley recieved mixed reviews, both extremely positive and extremely negative. However, Zaehner was perhaps the biggest critic. He loathed both Huxley and Huxley’s book. Zaehner’s critiques were thus:
    • Huxley’s “perennial philosophy” did not account for differences in traditions and was not consistent with ancient mystics.
    • Zaehner recognized three kinds of mystical experiences: the theistic (connected to Abrahamic God), monistic (states of awareness that transcend time, space and self), and panenhenic (feeling at one with nature). He saw Huxley’s experience as nothing like a theistic experience and wasn’t absorbed into a deity and so his experience must have been closer to that of a manic.  He simply had a bizarre experience.
    • Zaehner’s biggest problem was that it was full of “vitalism”, and replaced God with an informal and vague principle of eternity. Huxley had quoted Christian terms and Christian mystics but did not make a single reference to God, just of an age-old Gnostic God that is inward. This was a cheap god for both Zaehner and Jung. Huxley was a heretic.

Chapter 13 – Altar at the Center of the Universe: Psychedelics as Sacred Medicine

  • June 17, 1954, an Alice Bourverie called Dr. Andrija Puharich, saying she had a paranormal investigator, Harry Stone, channeling Egyptian gods and afterwards mentioned a drug that would stimulate one’s psychic faculties.
  • Puharich was interested in psychical phenomena after sending out feelings of calmness and peace to an aggressive dog that had corned him, to which the dog responded well.
  • Bouverie sent him a drawing of a mushroom, Amanita muscaria, which Puharich tested on 37 volunteers. By 1955 he was using LSD in his studies as well. He created a Round Table Foundation where he tested psychic phenomena. In one test, they contacted Maria Sabina with a Ouija board who told them where Amanita muscaria was growing in Maine, even though it wasn’t known to have grown there.
  • This group fell into Huxley’s list of people who might fund Osmond’s work. Puharich met with Huxley and Stone in a meeting where Stone correctly arranged ten blocks matching ones hidden behind a cloth.
  • Meanwhile, Osmond had inserted himself in a legal battle between the Canadian Government and the Native American Church arguing that they had rights to use peyote as a sacrament despite the government viewing it as a dangerous drug. (They were worried the Native American Church was using it to hold all-night orgies).

Chapter 14 – Scoundrels and Explorers: Eternity in an Hour

  • Huxley and Osmond were struggling to find people to fund Osmond’s research. But as their hope was waning, Osmond received an invitation to have lunch with Alfred Matthew “Al” Hubbard.
  • Al Hubbard thought that mescaline and LSD were weapons for healing the sickness in human soul.
  • Hubbard had smuggling experience from his days during the prohibition era and in helping the Allied forces give supplies to Great Britain before the US joined the Second World War.
  • In January of 1955, Huxley took his second dose of mescaline with Gerald Heard and Al Hubbard.
  • The following month Maria Huxley succumbed to cancer, Aldous was largely accepting of it, citing his mescaline experiences as comfort.
  • Heard viewed psychedelics as the best remedy to reinvigorate and bring the old mysteries into the present day for two reasons:
    • LSD and mescaline remove distractions and allow for deep reflection
    • Psychedelics overturn the paradigm that the world is separated and compartmentalizable.
  • Myron Stolaroff, soon after hearing Gerald Heard gush about LSD tried it under the watchful eye of Al Hubbard. There Stolaroff realized Heard was right. LSD was the answer. He left his jobs to work with Hubbard.

Chapter 15 – Something Different than Madness: Hollywood, Popular Media, and LSD

  • In October of 1955, Dr. Sidney Cohen tried LSD for the first time. The feeling of arriving at contemplation of eternal truth was comforting for him. Afterwards he recognized and recorded the importance of the surrounding situation and setting was to the LSD experience.
  • It was said of Cohen that he was “a rock hard researcher who did not tolerate fools.” But soon after reading The Doors he fell in with Huxley and Hubbard, speaking of revelation rather than in clinical terms.
  • Cohen’s experiences inspired Mortimer Hartman to start up an LSD therapy practice.
  • Hartman narrowed LSD therapy down to two approaches:
    • the Freudian early childhood memory and
    • the Jungian transcendence of space and time.
  • Hartman ended up giving LSD to Betsy Drake who promptly told Carey Grant to “go fuck yourself”. Grant tracked down Hartman and eventually took LSD himself and was “born again.”
  • Hartman also ended up giving LSD to Jack Nicholson, who later married Sarah Knight and wrote the movie script for The Trip based on his LSD experiences.
  • Despite the media attention surrounding Carey Grant saying that prior to LSD Grant was a misogynistic jerk and after LSD he was nice, this was not the case as his future ex-wives would detail.
  • In 1959 Sidney Cohen planned to give LSD to Clare and Henry Luce. Clare was a two-time congressperson and the first female ambassador to Rome. She was a the face of American conservatism in the 50s. However, at the time Cohen planned to give them LSD their marriage was crumbling.
  • Henry Luce had an experience of talking to God who told him that America would be just fine while on LSD. Henry later became the spokesperson for conventional values of Middle America: country, church, capitalism, and party.

Chapter 16 – The Madonna and the Gingerbread Man: LSD, Psychotherapy, and Alcoholics Anonymous

  • In 1955, the psychologist-in-training Betty Eisner tried LSD for the first time and despite harrowing experiences, remained interested in it.
  • It was common  practice for doctors to take LSD with their patients during group sessions, but Eisner preferred to stay lucid. She would stare into the eyes of her patients and communicate with the person during their experience.
  • In 1935, a year after hitting rock bottom with alcoholism, Bill Wilson turned himself over to God and spirituality, recovering from his alcoholism. It was during 1935 that he founded Alcoholics Anonymous saying that sometimes spiritual experiences do release people from alcoholism.
  • In 1956 Wilson tried LSD for the first time, after resisting it for a number of years, and found the experience to be incredible and of potential benefit to those struggling with alcohol addictions.
  • Treating alcoholism with LSD was not a guarantee like he and Hubbard hoped at the incredibly high doses that Hubbard was keen on giving.
  • Other doctors, such as Eisner and Cohen preferred psycholytic therapy, lower dose treatment in conjunction with therapy.
  • Eisner’s success rate at treating alcoholism dwarfed Hubbard’s success. She was more concerned with helping the patients work through and integrate the insights and mapping the conscious terrain.

Chapter 17 – An Intellectual, Fun Drug: A Strange Fraternity

  • Dr. Keith Ditman, a Jungian, had a regular correspondence with Aldous Huxley. He had coauthored two studies on LSD with Sid Cohen.
  • Ditman worked at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute’s Alcoholism Research Clinic and ran studies on LSD and alcoholism. He gave his patients no psychotherapy, but they had access to music and art, things that were uncommon in most clinical settings.
  • One of the volunteers in his study was the famous Alan Watts. Watts initially was convinced by Zaehner that no chemical could induce a genuine mystical experience. That all changed after his LSD encounters facilitated at the Langley-Porter Clinic.
  • Dr. Oscar Jangier, after trying LSD in 1954, submitted a novel study where he gave volunteers LSD and then left them alone with no testing or prodding in homes rather than hospitals.
  • A number of Jangier’s volunteers were artists as he was interested in the relationship between psychedelics and art.
  • Max Rinkel had previously done a study on psychedelics and art working with the artist Hyman Bloom. He studied how the artist was affected by LSD while Jangier was interested in how LSD affected the art. He had artists paint before, during, and after an LSD experience.
  • Al Hubbard joined Jangier in giving LSD to colleagues and friends. Jangier’s goal was to reproduce the ritual created by the Greeks and Eleusis.

Chapter 18 – The Fall: The Tragedy of Timothy Leary

  • During the summer of 1960, Timothy Leary rented a villa in Cuernavaca, Mexico where he and friends tried mushrooms for the first time. He came back to Harvard with many ideas, one of which was discovering new circuits of the brain using drugs to learn how to re-activate experiences without drugs.
  • That fall Leary sent a request to Sandoz for psilocybin which they promptly sent him. Soon after, Aldous Huxley was lecturing at MIT and he and Leary tried psilocybin together.
  • In January of 1961, Leary was giving the drug to an increasing number of students. One of which was Allen Ginsberg who ended up stripping naked and dancing around. Rumors swirled that he was having orgies and Harvard did not like the publicity so they seized all of his drug supplies.
  • Leary became quite reckless, giving mushrooms to anyone who wanted it without telling them much about it, just asking them to write before and after the experience. Leary also did not believe in having a guide.
  • Only two negative experiences are recorded under Leary’s care, Ralph Metzner and an unnamed woman, however Leary never reported them, leaving guesses to how many negative experiences were had under his care.
  • Nearly everyone disagreed with Leary’s approach–Hubbard, Cohen, Eisner, Ditman, Harman, and Stolaroff among others.
  • However, Leary ran two major psilocybin studies at Harvard: Concord Prison and Marsh Chapel.
  • The Concord Prison experiment, in March 1961, was hopeful that psilocybin could reduce the recidivism rate, which hovered around 70%. Leary claimed it was successful, however Rick Doblin has shown that Leary falsified the data.
  • The second experiment, the Good Friday Experiment, occurred in 1962 which Leary ran while violating university protocol, something that led to his firing in 1963.
  • Sometime in the winter of 1961 or the spring of 1962, Leary tried LSD for the first time. Metzner and Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) were scared by Leary’s reaction, which ended up inflating his ego to psychopathic levels according to his drinking buddy.
  • Leary started an organization called the International Foundation for Internal Freedom (IFIF) where research houses would be opened to explore the mysteries of the psychedelic states.
  • The first house was in opened in Zihuatenejo, Mexico. Soon after it opened the group was deported for operating a business on a tourist visa. In June they relocated to Dominica from which they were soon expelled from. Finally they found a place on Antigua, an island in the Caribbean from which they were soon deported from as well. Leary claimed this was “religious persecution”.
  • Soon after Leary accepted an estate in New York from William Hitchcock, the vice president of Lehman Brothers.
  • Millbrook was the name of this last attempt of Leary to show the world what his studies were. In reality, the giant estate became a dump and haven for junkies.
  • When told that the government was working to make LSD illegal he said that the government should license and educate people to supervise work with these medicines, something he also said during the hearings before the government committee looking into this. Something that was absolutely not happening on his estate.
  • Leary was pulled over on his way to Mexico in Laredo, Texas where they found cannabis, for which he was arrested.
  • On July 15, 1965 the Drug Abuse Control Amendments were signed into law making LSD a Schedule 1 Drug.

Chapter 19 – A Far-Gone Conclusion: Resurrecting the Renaissance

  • Ralph Metzner and Ram Dass’s work Birth of a Psychedelic Culture calls the 1960s the founding years of psychedelia. The 60s were rather, the tumultuous teenage years of psychedelia with the founding years being in the 50s.
  • No one referred to LSD as a “problem child” during the 1950s.
  • Hatsis says that the true origins of psychedelic culture are found in the 50s with Juliana Day paying attention to the setting, Ronald Sandison focusing on LSD therapy, Maria Huxley telling her husband to focus on the Clear Light of the Tibetans. This is when ideas of set and setting, psychedelic therapy, and psychedelic mysticism were swirling within the cultures of every discipline.
  • Of course there is the dark side, Hatsis notes, of MKUltra, but not every person affiliated with the project had ill will.
  • Hatsis also suggests that we remember the 50s and the insights gained there, using LSD to explore the cosmos again and continue the groundbreaking medical work that was done in the 50s.
  • He’s tried to show in all his published work that the “psychedelic” experience changes depending on the time, culture, and needs of the person using the substance. The reason they are used across cultures and come back into the minds of people is because they work.