pictures of Jesus or to ask them to study the facets of a diamond he
carried. One patient he treated in Vancouver, an alcoholic paralyzed by
social anxiety, recalled Hubbard handing him a bouquet of roses during
an LSD session: “He said, ‘Now hate them.’ They withered and the petals
fell off, and I started to cry. Then he said, ‘Love them,’ and they came
back brighter and even more spectacular than before. That meant a lot to
me. I realized that you can make your relationships anything you want.
The trouble I was having with people was coming from me.”
What Hubbard was bringing into the treatment room was something
well known to any traditional healer. Shamans have understood for
millennia that a person in the depths of a trance or under the influence of
a powerful plant medicine can be readily manipulated with the help of
certain words, special objects, or the right kind of music. Hubbard
understood intuitively how the suggestibility of the human mind during
an altered state of consciousness could be harnessed as an important
resource for healing—for breaking destructive patterns of thought and
proposing new perspectives in their place. Researchers might prefer to
call this a manipulation of set and setting, which is accurate enough, but
Hubbard’s greatest contribution to modern psychedelic therapy was to
introduce the tried-and-true tools of shamanism, or at least a
Westernized version of it.
• • •
WITHIN A FEW YEARS, Hubbard had made the acquaintance of just about
everybody in the psychedelic research community in North America,
leaving an indelible impression on everyone he met, along with a trail of
therapeutic tips and ampules of Sandoz LSD. By the late 1950s, he had
become a kind of psychedelic circuit rider. One week he might be in
Weyburn, assisting Humphry Osmond and Abram Hoffer in their work
with alcoholics, which was earning them international attention. From
there to Manhattan, to meet with R. Gordon Wasson, and then a stop on
his way back west to administer LSD to a VIP or check in on a research
group working in Chicago. The next week might find him in Los Angeles,
conducting LSD sessions with Betty Eisner, Sidney Cohen, or Oscar
Janiger, freely sharing his treatment techniques and supplies of LSD.