coloring of the 1960s, at the time it was the very neutrality of
“psychedelic” that commended it to him: the word “had no particular
connotation of madness, craziness or ecstasy, but suggested an
enlargement and expansion of mind.” It also had the virtue of being
“uncontaminated by other associations,” though that would not remain
the case for long.
“Psychedelic therapy,” as Osmond and his colleagues practiced it
beginning in the mid-1950s, typically involved a single, high-dose
session, usually of LSD, that took place in comfortable surroundings, the
subject stretched out on a couch, with a therapist (or two) in attendance
who says very little, allowing the journey to unfold according to its own
logic. To eliminate distractions and encourage an inward journey, music
is played and the subject usually wears eyeshades. The goal was to create
the conditions for a spiritual epiphany—what amounted to a conversion
experience.
But though this mode of therapy would become closely identified with
Osmond and Hoffer, they themselves credited someone else for critical
elements of its design, a man of considerable mystery with no formal
training as a scientist or therapist: Al Hubbard. A treatment space
decorated to feel more like a home than a hospital came to be known as a
Hubbard Room, and at least one early psychedelic researcher told me
that this whole therapeutic regime, which is now the norm, should by all
rights be known as “the Hubbard method.” Yet Al Hubbard, a.k.a.
“Captain Trips” and “the Johnny Appleseed of LSD,” is not the kind of
intellectual forebear anyone doing serious psychedelic science today is
eager to acknowledge, much less celebrate.
• • •
AL HUBBARD IS SURELY the most improbable, intriguing, and elusive figure
to grace the history of psychedelics, and that’s saying a lot. There is much
we don’t know about him, and many key facts about his life are
impossible to confirm, contradictory, or just plain fishy. To cite one small
example, his FBI file puts his height at five feet eleven, but in
photographs and videos Hubbard appears short and stocky, with a big
round head topped with a crew cut; for reasons known only to himself, he