This famous couplet, written by psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond, though a product of his relationship with Aldous Huxley, brought a new word into existence, psychedelic, that could be applied to certain drugs which might induce hallucinations like psilocybin, mescaline, and LSD, and produced a more complex set of experiences than simply an imitation of psychosis. After taking mescaline in his Hollywood Hills, California, home, Huxley and visitor Osmond understood the conceptual limitations of the word psychotomimetic to capture their time under the influence and set about finding something more accurate, less pathological, and certainly open to what they especially wanted to emphasize about this new perspective: the powerfully mystical dimensions of their experiences. Out of this experiment with mescaline, of course, Huxley also wrote the influential book, The Doors of Perception. The linguistic and culturally liberating shift from pscyhotomimetic to psychedelic in the second half of the 1950s, however, is a significant and pivotal moment in the popular understandings of the power and purposes of LSD.
Osmond and other proponents of LSD, including Alfred Hubbard, the infamous “Captain Trips” who was a key proselytizer and distributor of the drug in the 1950s, and Los Angeles psychiatrist Dr. Oscar Janiger, who helped organize more recreational uses of LSD and other psychedelics with scientists and artists in southern California, contributed to the growing awareness of the drug as both therapeutic agent and gateway to mind-blowing revelations. As the good news about LSD spread from early disciples to an increasingly wide ranging network of users, various media outlets such as magazines like Time and Good Housekeeping began to bring even more publicity to the drug. In research labs and therapy sessions, dinner parties and individual experiments, LSD started to appeal to and be consumed by patients and doctors, as well as ordinary Americans and world famous celebrities. Cary Grant, for one, publicly praised the drug for transforming his life. Bill Wilson, a co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, learned of Osmond’s success using LSD as treatment for alcoholics and eventually took it himself, becoming enthusiastic after his trip about its potential to foster transcendence of the ego and a direct religious experience with a higher power.
Osmond’s research, which was done primarily at Saskatchewan Mental Hospital in the early 1950s, also came to the attention of another alcoholic in this story, undoubtedly the key figure who popularized the mash up of LSD, spirituality, therapy, and consciousness expansion in the early 1960s: Timothy Leary. Having experimented with psilocybin mushrooms in Mexico in 1960 that led to what he described as an eventful religious experience, Leary was convinced about the power of psychedelic drugs and returned after this trip to his temporary Harvard position as a lecturer in the Psychology department. He established the “Harvard Psilocybin Project,” soon to be changed to the “Harvard Psychedelic Project,” and began experimenting with Richard Alpert, an assistant professor of education and psychology, with psilocybin and mescaline to treat and rehabilitate criminals. Others came into this scene, including beat poet Allen Ginsberg and future scholar of comparative religion Huston Smith, and soon recreational use of these drugs outside of experimental and therapeutic environments grew in theory and practice. The religious implications of these recreational activities with psychedelics overtook, or at least seamlessly intersected with the psychological ruminations about the potential for criminal rehabilitation, psychiatric interventions, or behavior altering promise.
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