fact, there were six international scientific meetings devoted to
psychedelics between 1950 and 1965. “Some of the best minds in
psychiatry had seriously studied these compounds in therapeutic models,
with government funding.” But after the culture and the psychiatric
establishment turned against psychedelics in the mid-1960s, an entire
body of knowledge was effectively erased from the field, as if all that
research and clinical experience had never happened. “By the time I got
to medical school in the 1990s, no one even talked about it.”
• • •
WHEN LSD BURST onto the psychiatric scene in 1950, the drug’s effects on
patients (and researchers, who routinely tried the drug on themselves)
were so novel and strange that scientists struggled for the better part of a
decade to figure out what these extraordinary experiences were or meant.
How, exactly, did this new mind-altering drug fit into the existing
paradigms for understanding the mind and the prevailing modes of
psychiatry and psychotherapy? A lively debate over these questions went
on for more than a decade. What wasn’t known at the time is that
beginning in 1953, the CIA was conducting its own (classified) research
into psychedelics and was struggling with similar issues of interpretation
and application: Was LSD best regarded as a potential truth serum, or a
mind-control agent, or a chemical weapon?
The world’s very first LSD trip, and the only one undertaken with no
prior expectations, was the one Albert Hofmann took in 1943. While it
left him uncertain whether he had experienced madness or
transcendence, Hofmann immediately sensed the potential importance of
this compound for neurology and psychiatry. So Sandoz, the
pharmaceutical company for which he worked at the time of his
discovery, did something unusual: in effect, it crowd-sourced a worldwide
research effort to figure out what in the world Delysid—its brand name
for LSD-25—might be good for. Hoping someone somewhere would hit
upon a commercial application for its spookily powerful new compound,
Sandoz offered to supply, free of charge, however much LSD any
researcher requested. The company defined the term “researcher”
liberally enough to include any therapist who promised to write up his or