Part I: The Promise
The drugs weren’t called “psychedelics” at the beginning; that term
wasn’t introduced until 1957. In the same way that Sandoz couldn’t figure
out what it had on its hands with LSD, the researchers experimenting
with the drug couldn’t figure out what to call it. Over the course of the
1950s, this class of drugs underwent a succession of name changes as our
understanding of the chemicals and their action evolved, each new name
reflecting the shifting interpretation—or was it a construction?—of what
these strange and powerful molecules meant and did.
The first name was perhaps the most awkward: beginning around
1950, shortly after LSD was made available to researchers, the compound
was known as a psychotomimetic, which is to say, a mind drug that
mimicked psychoses. This was the most obvious and parsimonious
interpretation of a psychedelic’s effects. Viewed from the outside, people
given doses of LSD and, later, psilocybin exhibited many of the signs of a
temporary psychosis. Early researchers reported a range of disturbing
symptoms in their LSD volunteers, including depersonalization, loss of
ego boundaries, distorted body image, synesthesia (seeing sounds or
hearing sights), emotional lability, giggling and weeping, distortion of the
sense of time, delirium, hallucinations, paranoid delusions, and, in the
words of one writer, “a tantalizing sense of portentousness.” When
researchers administered standardized psychiatric tests to volunteers on
LSD—such as the Rorschach ink blots or the Minnesota Multiphasic
Personality Inventory test—the results mirrored those of psychotics and,
specifically, schizophrenics. Volunteers on LSD appeared to be losing
their minds.
This suggested to some researchers that LSD held promise as a tool for
understanding psychosis, which is precisely how Sandoz initially
marketed Delysid. Although the drug might not cure anything, the
resemblance of its effects to the symptoms of schizophrenia suggested
that the mental disorder might have a chemical basis that LSD could
somehow illuminate. For clinicians, the drug promised to help them
better understand and empathize with their schizophrenic patients. That