close to shamanism for comfort. For so-called shrinks not entirely secure
in their identity as scientists (the slang is short for “headshrinkers,”
conjuring images of witch doctors in loincloths), this was perhaps too far
to go. Another factor was the rise of the placebo-controlled double-blind
trial as the “gold standard” for testing drugs in the wake of the
thalidomide scandal, a standard difficult for psychedelic research to
meet.
By 1963, leaders of the profession had begun editorializing against
psychedelic research in their journals. Roy Grinker, the editor of the
Archives of General Psychiatry, lambasted researchers who were
administering “the drugs to themselves and . . . [had become] enamored
with the mystical hallucinatory state,” thus rendering them “disqualified
as competent investigators.” Writing the following year in the Journal of
the American Medical Association (JAMA), Grinker deplored the
practice of investigators taking the drugs themselves, thereby “rendering
their conclusions biased by their own ecstasy.” An unscientific “aura of
magic” surrounded the new drugs, another critic charged in JAMA in
- (It didn’t help that some psychedelic therapists, like Betty Eisner,
celebrated the introduction of “the transcendental into psychiatry” and
developed an interest in paranormal phenomenon.)
But although there is surely truth to the charge that researchers were
often biased by their own experiences using the drugs, the obvious
alternative—abstinence—posed its own set of challenges, with the result
that the loudest and most authoritative voices in the debate over
psychedelics during the 1960s were precisely the people who knew the
least about them. To psychiatrists with no personal experience of
psychedelics, their effects were bound to look a lot more like psychoses
than transcendence. The psychotomimetic paradigm had returned, now
with a vengeance.
After quantities of “bootleg LSD” showed up on the street in 1962–
1963 and people in the throes of “bad trips” began appearing in
emergency rooms and psych wards, mainstream psychiatry felt
compelled to abandon psychedelic research. LSD was now regarded as a
cause of mental illness rather than a cure. In 1965, Bellevue Hospital in
Manhattan admitted sixty-five people for what it called LSD-induced
psychoses. With the media now in full panic mode, urban legends about
the perils of LSD spread more rapidly than facts.* The same was often