How to Change Your Mind

experiment by experiment; there is no real-world model for using a drug
to change all of society as Hubbard and Huxley determined to do, with
the result that the scientific method began to feel to them, as it later
would to Leary, like a straitjacket.
In the wake of his first LSD experience, Huxley wrote to Osmond
suggesting that “who, having once come to the realization of the
primordial fact of unity in love, would ever want to return to
experimentation on the psychic level? . . . My point is that the opening of
the door by mescalin[e] or LSD is too precious an opportunity, too high a
privilege to be neglected for the sake of experimentation.” Or to be
limited to sick people. Osmond was actually sympathetic to this
viewpoint—after all, he had administered mescaline to Huxley, hardly a
controlled experiment—and he participated in many of Hubbard’s
sessions turning on the Best and Brightest. But Osmond wasn’t prepared
to abandon science or medicine for whatever Huxley and Hubbard
imagined might lay beyond it.
In 1955, Al Hubbard sought to escape the scientific straitjacket and
formalize his network of psychedelic researchers by establishing
something he called the Commission for the Study of Creative
Imagination. The name reflected his own desire to take his work with
psychedelics beyond the limits of medicine and its focus on the ill. To
serve on the commission’s board, Hubbard recruited Osmond, Hoffer,
Huxley, and Cohen, as well as half a dozen other psychedelic researchers,
a philosopher (Gerald Heard), and a UN official; he named himself
“scientific director.”
(What did these people think of Hubbard and his grandiose title, not
to mention his phony academic credentials? They were at once indulgent
and full of admiration. After Betty Eisner wrote a letter to Osmond
expressing discomfort with some of Hubbard’s representations, he
suggested she think of him as a kind of Christopher Columbus:
“Explorers have not always been the most scientific, excellent or wholly
detached people.”)
It isn’t clear how much more there was to the Commission for the
Study of Creative Imagination than a fancy letterhead, but its very
existence signaled a deepening fissure between the medical and the
spiritual approach to psychedelics. (Sidney Cohen, ever ambivalent on
questions of science versus mysticism, abruptly resigned in 1957, only a