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THE IDEA OF GIVING a psychedelic drug to the dying was first broached not
by a therapist or scientist but by Aldous Huxley in a letter to Humphry
Osmond, proposing a research project involving “the administration of
LSD to terminal cancer cases, in the hope that it would make dying a
more spiritual, less strictly physiological process.” Huxley himself had his
wife, Laura, give him an injection of LSD when he was on his own
deathbed, on November 22, 1963.
By then, Huxley’s idea had been tested on a number of cancer patients
in North America. In 1965, Sidney Cohen wrote an essay for Harper’s
(“LSD and the Anguish of Dying”) exploring the potential of psychedelics
to “alter[] the experience of dying.” He described treatment with LSD as
“therapy by self-transcendence.” The premise behind the approach was
that our fear of death is a function of our egos, which burden us with a
sense of separateness that can become unbearable as we approach death.
“We are born into an egoless world,” Cohen wrote, “but we live and die
imprisoned within ourselves.”
The idea was to use psychedelics to escape the prison of self. “We
wanted to provide a brief, lucid interval of complete egolessness to
demonstrate that personal intactness was not absolutely necessary, and
that perhaps there was something ‘out there’”—something greater than
our individual selves that might survive our demise. Cohen quoted a
patient, a woman dying of ovarian cancer, describing the shift in her
perspective following an LSD session:
My extinction is not of great consequence at this moment,
not even for me. It’s just another turn in the swing of
existence and non-existence. I feel it has little to do with the
church or talk of death. I suppose that I’m detached—that’s it
—away from myself and my pain and my decaying. I could
die nicely now—if it should be so. I do not invite it, nor do I
put it off.In 1972, Stanislav Grof and Bill Richards, who were working together
at Spring Grove, wrote that LSD gave patients an experience “of cosmic