How to Change Your Mind

(“We waited for him like the little old lady on the prairie waiting for a
copy of the Sears Roebuck catalog,” Oscar Janiger recalled years later.)
And then it was back to Vancouver, where he had persuaded Hollywood
Hospital to dedicate an entire wing to treating alcoholics with LSD.
Hubbard would often fly his plane down to Los Angeles to discreetly ferry
Hollywood celebrities up to Vancouver for treatment. It was this sideline
that earned him the nickname Captain Trips. Hubbard also established
two other alcoholism treatment facilities in Canada, where he regularly
conducted LSD sessions and reported impressive rates of success. LSD
treatment for alcoholism using the Hubbard method became a business
in Canada. But Hubbard believed it was unethical to profit from LSD,
which led to tensions between him and some of the institutions he
worked with, because they were charging patients upwards of five
hundred dollars for an LSD session. For Hubbard, psychedelic therapy
was a form of philanthropy, and he drained his fortune advancing the
cause.
Al Hubbard moved between these far-flung centers of research like a
kind of psychedelic honeybee, disseminating information, chemicals, and
clinical expertise while building what became an extensive network
across North America. In time, he would add Menlo Park and Cambridge
to his circuit. But was Hubbard just spreading information, or was he also
collecting it and passing it on to the CIA? Was the pollinator also a spy?
It’s impossible to say for certain; some people who knew Hubbard (like
James Fadiman) think it’s entirely plausible, while others aren’t so sure,
pointing to the fact the Captain often criticized the CIA for using LSD as a
weapon. “The CIA work stinks,” he told Oscar Janiger in the late 1970s.
Hubbard was referring to the agency’s MK-Ultra research program,
which since 1953 had been trying to figure out whether LSD could be
used as a nonlethal weapon of war (by, say, dumping it in an adversary’s
water supply), a truth serum in interrogations, a means of mind control,
or a dirty trick to play on unfriendly foreign leaders, causing them to act
or speak in embarrassing ways. None of these schemes panned out, at
least as far as we know, and all reflected a research agenda that remained
stuck on the psychotomimetic model long after other researchers had
abandoned it. Along the way, the CIA dosed its own employees and
unwitting civilians with LSD; in one notorious case that didn’t come to
light until the 1970s, the CIA admitted to secretly giving LSD to an army