the abuses and dangers of LSD, or to call out his more fervent colleagues
when they strayed too far off the path of science—the path from which the
siren song of psychedelics would lure so many.
• • •
BACK IN SASKATCHEWAN, Humphry Osmond and Abram Hoffer had taken a
very different path after the collapse of the psychotomimetic paradigm,
though this path, too, ended up complicating their own relationship to
science. Struggling to formulate a new therapeutic model for LSD, they
turned to a pair of brilliant amateurs—one a famous author, Aldous
Huxley, and the other an obscure former bootlegger and gunrunner, spy,
inventor, boat captain, ex-con, and Catholic mystic named Al Hubbard.
These two most unlikely nonscientists would help the Canadian
psychiatrists reconceptualize the LSD experience and develop the
therapeutic protocol that is still in use today.
The name for this new approach, and the name for this class of drugs
that would finally stick—psychedelics—emerged from a 1956 exchange of
letters between Humphry Osmond and Aldous Huxley. The two had first
met in 1953, after Huxley wrote to Osmond expressing interest in trying
mescaline; he had read a journal article by Osmond describing the drug’s
effects on the mind. Huxley had long harbored a lively interest in drugs
and consciousness—the plot of his most famous novel, Brave New World
(1932), turns on a mind-control drug he called soma—as well as
mysticism, paranormal perception, reincarnation, UFOs, and so on.
So in the spring of 1953, Humphry Osmond traveled to Los Angeles to
administer mescaline to Aldous Huxley, though not without some
trepidation. In advance of the session, he confided to a colleague that he
did not “relish the possibility, however remote, of finding a small but
discreditable niche in literary history as the man who drove Aldous
Huxley mad.”
He need not have worried. Huxley had a splendid trip, one that would
change forever the culture’s understanding of these drugs when, the
following year, he published his account of his experience in The Doors of
Perception.