How to Change Your Mind

found in the western Canadian province of Saskatchewan, of all places.
Beginning in the mid-1940s, the province’s leftist government had
instituted several radical reforms in public policy, including the nation’s
first system of publicly funded health care. (It became the model for the
system Canada would adopt in 1966.) Hoping to make the province a
center of cutting-edge medical research, the government offered generous
funding and a rare degree of freedom to lure researchers to the frozen
wastes of the Canadian prairies. After replying to an ad in the Lancet,
Osmond received an invitation from the provincial government to move
his family and his novel research project to the remote agrarian
community of Weyburn, Saskatchewan, forty-five miles north of the
North Dakota border. The Saskatchewan Mental Hospital in Weyburn
would soon become the world’s most important hub of research into
psychedelics—or rather, into the class of compounds still known as
psychotomimetics.
That paradigm still ruled the thinking of Osmond and his new, like-
minded colleague and research director, a Canadian psychiatrist named
Abram Hoffer, as they began conducting experiments using a supply of
LSD-25 obtained from Sandoz. The psychotomimetic model was
introduced to the general public in 1953, when Maclean’s, the popular
Canadian magazine, published a harrowing account of a journalist’s
experience on LSD titled “My 12 Hours as a Madman.”
Sidney Katz had become the first “civilian” to participate in one of
Osmond and Hoffer’s LSD experiments at Weyburn hospital. Katz had
been led to expect madness, and madness he duly experienced: “I saw
faces of familiar friends turn into fleshless skulls and the heads of
menacing witches, pigs and weasels. The gaily patterned carpet at my feet
was transformed into a fabulous heaving mass of living matter, part
vegetable, part animal.” Katz’s article, which was illustrated with an
artist’s rendering of chairs flying through a collapsing room, reads like
the work of a fervent anti-LSD propagandist circa 1965: “I was repeatedly
held in the grip of a terrifying hallucination in which I could feel and see
my body convulse and shrink until all that remained was a hard sickly
stone.” Yet, curiously, his twelve hours of insanity “were not all filled with
horror,” he reported. “At times I beheld visions of dazzling beauty—
visions so rapturous, so unearthly, that no artist will ever paint them.”