for long-term planning at Ampex, at the time a leading electronics firm in
Silicon Valley—became “convinced that [Al Hubbard] was the man to
bring LSD to planet Earth.”
• • •
IN 1953, not long after his psychedelic epiphany, Hubbard invited
Humphry Osmond to lunch at the Vancouver Yacht Club. Like so many
others, Osmond was deeply impressed by Hubbard’s worldliness, wealth,
connections, and access to seemingly endless supplies of LSD. The lunch
led to a collaboration that changed the course of psychedelic research
and, in important ways, laid the groundwork for the research taking place
today.
Under the influence of both Hubbard and Huxley, whose primary
interest was in the revelatory import of psychedelics, Osmond abandoned
the psychotomimetic model. It was Hubbard who first proposed to him
that the mystical experience many subjects had on a single high dose of
mescaline or LSD might itself be harnessed as a mode of therapy—and
that the experience was more important than the chemical. The
psychedelic journey could, like the conversion experience, forcibly show
people a new, more encompassing perspective on their lives that would
help them to change. But perhaps Hubbard’s most enduring contribution
to psychedelic therapy emerged in, of all places, the treatment room.
It is easier to accumulate facts about Al Hubbard’s life than it is to get
a steady sense of the character of the man, it was so rife with
contradiction. The pistol-packing tough guy was also an ardent mystic
who talked about love and the heavenly beatitudes. And the well-
connected businessman and government agent proved to be a remarkably
sensitive and gifted therapist. Though he never used those terms,
Hubbard was the first researcher to grasp the critical importance of set
and setting in shaping the psychedelic experience. He instinctively
understood that the white walls and fluorescent lighting of the sanitized
hospital room were all wrong. So he brought pictures and music, flowers
and diamonds, into the treatment room, where he would use them to
prime patients for a mystical revelation or divert a journey when it took a
terrifying turn. He liked to show people paintings by Salvador Dalí and