How to Change Your Mind

During this period, Osmond and Hoffer administered Sandoz LSD to
dozens of people, including colleagues, friends, family members,
volunteers, and, of course, themselves. Their focus on LSD as a window
into the biochemistry of mental illness gradually gave way to a deepening
curiosity about the power of the experience itself and whether the
perceptual disturbances produced by the drug might themselves confer
some therapeutic benefit. During a late night brainstorming session in an
Ottawa hotel room in 1953, Osmond and Hoffer noted that the LSD
experience appeared to share many features with the descriptions of
delirium tremens reported by alcoholics—the hellish, days-long bout of
madness alcoholics often suffer while in the throes of withdrawal. Many
recovering alcoholics look back on the hallucinatory horrors of the DTs as
a conversion experience and the basis of the spiritual awakening that
allows them to remain sober.
The idea that an LSD experience could mimic the DTs “seemed so
bizarre that we laughed uproariously,” Hoffer recalled years later. “But
when our laughter subsided, the question seemed less comical and we
formed our hypothesis . . . : would a controlled LSD-produced delirium
help alcoholics stay sober?”
Here was an arresting application of the psychotomimetic paradigm:
use a single high-dose LSD session to induce an episode of madness in an
alcoholic that would simulate delirium tremens, shocking the patient into
sobriety. Over the next decade, Osmond and Hoffer tested this hypothesis
on more than seven hundred alcoholics, and in roughly half the cases,
they reported, the treatment worked: the volunteers got sober and
remained so for at least several months. Not only was the new approach
more effective than other therapies, but it suggested a whole new way to
think about psychopharmacology. “From the first,” Hoffer wrote, “we
considered not the chemical, but the experience as a key factor in
therapy.” This novel idea would become a central tenet of psychedelic
therapy.
The emphasis on what subjects felt represented a major break with the
prevailing ideas of behaviorism in psychology, in which only observable
and measurable outcomes counted and subjective experience was deemed
irrelevant. The analysis of these subjective experiences, sometimes called
phenomenology, had of course been the basis of Freudian psychoanalysis,
which behaviorism had rejected as insufficiently rigorous or scientific.