How to Change Your Mind

exerted a powerful effect on the kinds of experiences people had and that
one of the best ways to avoid a bad session was the presence of an
engaged and empathetic therapist, ideally someone who had had his or
her own LSD experience. They came to suspect that the few psychotic
reactions they did observe might actually be an artifact of the
metaphorical white room and white-coated clinician. Though the terms
“set” and “setting” would not be used in this context for several more
years (and became closely identified with Timothy Leary’s work at
Harvard a decade later), Osmond and Hoffer were already coming to
appreciate the supreme importance of those factors in the success of their
treatment.
But however it worked, it worked, or certainly seemed to: by the end of
the decade, LSD was widely regarded in North America as a miracle cure
for alcohol addiction. Based on this success, the Saskatchewan provincial
government helped develop policies making LSD therapy a standard
treatment option for alcoholics in the province. Yet not everyone in the
Canadian medical establishment found the Saskatchewan results
credible: they seemed too good to be true. In the early 1960s, the
Addiction Research Foundation in Toronto, the leading institute of its
kind in Canada, set out to replicate the Saskatchewan trials using better
controls. Hoping to isolate the effects of the drug from all other variables,
clinicians administered LSD to alcoholics in neutral rooms and under
instructions not to engage with them during their trips, except to
administer an extensive questionnaire. The volunteers were then put in
constraints or blindfolded, or both. Not surprisingly, the results failed to
match those obtained by Osmond and Hoffer. Worse still, more than a
few of the volunteers endured terrifying experiences—bad trips, as they
would come to be called. Critics of treating alcoholics with LSD concluded
that the treatment didn’t work as well under rigorously controlled
conditions, which was true enough, while supporters of the practice
concluded that attention to set and setting was essential to the success of
LSD therapy, which was also true.

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