Tag Archives: Aldous Huxley

10/27/20

Bill W. and His LSD Experiences, Part 1

© Christian Mueller | 123rf.com

Bill W., the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, has an acknowledged history of LSD use in the 1950s. This was when LSD was an unknown, experimental chemical, with no regulations or restrictions regulating its use. The A.A. published story of Bill Wilson and how the A.A. message reached the world, Pass It On, openly discussed Bill’s interest in LSD. It mentioned individuals who were known by or became friends to Bill—Gerald Heard, Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond—and who also happen to be important figures in the history of psychedelics. Yet by 1959, “Bill had personally withdrawn from the LSD experiments,” so that he would not compromise the future of A.A. But there is more to the story of Bill W. and LSD than what is found in Pass It On.

It began in the winter of 1943-44 when Bill and his wife Lois set out on a cross-country trip visiting A.A. groups that had sprouted up since the 1939 publication of the Big Book. According to Susan Cheever in My Name is Bill, Bill and Lois met Gerald Heard and Aldous Huxley while they were in Palo Alto, California and there was an immediate attraction between Wilson and Huxley. Heard and Huxley believed the betterment of society would come from an experiment in community and community education. Bill and A.A. were the practical application of that philosophy. Heard and Huxley invited Bill and Lois to spend New Year’s week at Trabuco College, a retreat center in the desert established by Heard to study comparative religion, and research meditation and prayer. The Wilsons returned to New York on January 22, 1944, but an important friendship was formed.

Pass It On said Bill and Huxley had an immediate rapport, one that Bill was immensely proud of. “They had much in common, although Huxley was not an alcoholic.” Huxley would later say he considered Bill to be a “modern saint” and “the greatest social architect of the twentieth century.” It was through Bill’s friendship with Huxley that Bill first heard about, and eventually decided to try LSD.

Humphry Osmond began his research with LSD and mescaline at St. George’s Hospital in London, where he was employed after WW II. In 1951, he moved to Saskatchewan, Canada to join the staff at Weybrun Mental Hospital. At Weybrun he organized the hospital as a design-research laboratory where he conducted a variety of studies into the use of hallucinogenic drugs. He was initially investigating the possibility that schizophrenia arose primarily from distortions of perception similar to those experienced by individuals under the influence of mescaline or LSD. But unexpectedly, Osmond began to see the potential of these drugs to foster mind-expanding, mystical experiences. It was during this time of experimentation that Aldous Huxley began a correspondence with Osmond and eventually asked him if he would kindly supply Huxley with a dose of mescaline.

In May of 1953 Osmond traveled to the Los Angeles area for a conference, where he provided the requested dose of mescaline and supervised Huxley’s experience with mescaline. Huxley would write The Doors of Perception (1954), which enthusiastically described his experience. He wrote: “The mystical experience is doubly valuable; it is valuable because it gives the experiencer a better understanding of himself and the world and because it may help him to lead a led self-centered and more creative life.” Gerald Heard tried mescaline in 1954 and then tried LSD in 1955. Heard felt that properly used, these psychedelics had the potential to enlarge a man’s mind, by allowing him to see beyond his ego.

Huxley and Heard would have naturally thought of what LSD could mean for Bill W., but Bill was initially opposed to giving drugs to alcoholics. In Pass It On, Osmond said: “I went down and was introduced to Bill and told him about it, and he was extremely unthrilled. He was very much against giving alcoholics drugs.” Huxley was apparently able to convince Bill of the mystical potential of LSD. Osmond reported that when alcoholics were given LSD, they reported having a new clarity of vision, a new vividness of experience. From his observations of the LSD work with alcoholics, Bill concluded LSD temporarily reduced the forces of the ego, which allowed the influx of God’s grace.

If therefore, under LSD we can have a temporary reduction, so that we can better see what we are and where we are going—well, that might be of some help. So I consider LSD to be of some value to some people, and practically no damage to anyone. It will never take the place of any of the existing means by which we can reduce the ego, and keep it reduced.

While Bill was debating the wisdom of trying it for himself, there were two other individuals taking the LSD plunge—a man and a woman who would have an important role in Bill’s exploration of LSD.

Dr. Sidney Cohen, a psychiatrist at Wadsworth VA Hospital in Los Angeles, first took LSD on October 12, 1955, reporting that the “problems and strivings, the worries and frustrations of everyday life vanished; in their place was a majestic, sunlit, heavenly inner quietude.” He immediately began doing his own research with Huxley. And on August 29, 1956 at Trabuco College, he supervised Bill Wilson’s first experience with LSD. Gerald Heard took notes; Aldous Huxley and Tom Powers, an A.A. friend of Bill’s from New York, stood by. According to Susan Cheever in My Name is Bill and the A.A. approved book Pass It On, Bill loved LSD and felt it helped him eliminate many of the barriers erected by the ego that stood in the way of his direct experience of God and the universe. It reminded him of his initial “hot flash” experience in Towns Hospital.

Betty Eisner, a psychology grad student, was Cohen’s initial research subject in 1955. As a result of her intense interest in his LSD work, Betty began meeting periodically with Sidney Cohen. A case report of her LSD experience was included in an article published in The American Journal of Psychiatry in July of 1958, “Subjective Reports of Lysergic Acid Experiences in a Context of Psychological Test Performance.” Eisner completed her Ph.D. by the end of July 1956 and was a coauthor of this paper along with Cohen and Lionel Fichman.

Eisner and Cohen began to think LSD could be helpful in facilitating psychotherapy, as well as curing alcoholism and enhancing creativity. They coauthored, “Psychotherapy with Lysergic Acid Diethylamide,” which was published in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disorders in 1958. For a time, Bill W. was an integral part of their exploration of the psychotherapeutic benefits of LSD. Eisner maintained an active interest in hallucinogens throughout her career. Cohen would eventually become a director for the National Institute of Mental Health, but was always opposed to the counterculture movement’s use of LSD. He thought it was only safe when used under medical supervision.

In Part 2, we’ll look at the time period between the fall of 1956 and early 1957, what Eisner described as a boiling pot of activity surrounding LSD and mescaline. And Bill W. was in the middle of the pot.

10/6/14

As Harmless as Aspirin?

The province of Saskatchewan seems an unlikely place to give birth to “psychedelic psychiatry”  (See Erika Dyck’s article, “Hitting Highs at Rock Bottom” and a review of her book Psychedelic Psychiatry), but it’s true. In October of 1951 a British psychiatrist named Humpry Osmond became the deputy director of a Canadian Mental Hospital in Weyburn, Saskatchewan. He immediately organized a biochemical research program in order to continue the work he had begun with hallucinogens while he was at St. George’s Hospital in London.

Not only did Osmond coin the term psychedelic, he seems to be among the first to hypothesize a chemical imbalance theory for both schizophrenia and alcoholism. Initially interested in the therapeutic properties of mescaline, Osmond noticed that mescaline produced reactions similar to schizophrenia. These findings led him to conjecture that “schizophrenia was caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain.” Oh, and he was a pioneer researcher into the psychotherapeutic benefits of mescaline and LSD for alcoholism and various mental health disorders.

Osmond heard of the discovery of lysergic acid (LSD) by Albert Hoffman and tried it himself. He discovered that LSD was more powerful than mescaline and that it produced profound changes in consciousness. By inducing a new level of self-awareness, Osmond theorized LSD could have therapeutic benefits for individuals suffering with schizophrenia. Some of his early volunteers in LSD experiments described this feeling as “a new sense of spirituality.”

According to Osmond’s co-researcher, Abram Hoffer, the idea to try LSD with alcoholics occurred one evening in 1953, when they thought that: “LSD experiences were remarkably similar to descriptions of delirium tremens, or the effects of an alcoholic ‘hitting bottom.’” They wondered if a controlled LSD-produced delirium would help alcoholics stay sober. In 1953, they gave LSD to two alcoholic patients. One person (a female) stopped drinking immediately and the other (a male) stopped six months later. Over the next ten years they tried this procedure on over 700 patients and claimed the results were similar to that first experiment. One of those alcoholics was Bill W., cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Bill’s involvement with LSD came about through his friendships with Gerald Heard, a British philosopher, and Aldous Huxley, author of the classic novel Brave New World. Bill had been a friend of Heard’s since 1944. He met Huxley through Heard. According to Pass It On, the A.A. book about Bill and the origins of Alcoholics Anonymous, it was Huxley who referred to Bill as “the greatest social architect of the century.”

Under the supervision of Humphry Osmond, Huxley used mescaline for the first time on May 5, 1953. Huxley’s short book about his experience with mescaline, The Doors of Perception, was published in 1954. Through Heard and Huxley, Bill was introduced to Osmond and Hoffman. At first, when Bill heard about Osmond’s work with LSD, he was “extremely unthrilled.” Bill was “very much against giving alcoholics drugs.” He became interested, though, when he heard Osmond and Hoffman were getting results.

Under the guidance of Gerald Heard, Bill took LSD for the first time on August 29, 1956. He was enthusiastic about his experience. He felt it helped to eliminate barriers that stood in the way of an individual’s direct experience of the cosmos and God. According to Nell Wing, then secretary to A.A., “He had an experience [that] was totally spiritual, [like] his initial spiritual experience.” Among the friends and family whom Bill convinced to try LSD was his wife Lois and his spiritual advisor, Father Ed Dowling. Watch a 1950s video of an LSD session and a discussion of its effects by Gerald Heard here.

In a letter he wrote to Sam Shoemaker in June of 1958, Bill said that he took LSD several times and had collected considerable information about it. He felt that the negative information about its “awful dangers” was far from the truth. He thought the experiments by early LSD researchers like Osmond and Hoffman showed it had no physical risks at all. “The material [LSD] is about as harmless as aspirin.” Presciently he said: “It would certainly be a huge misfortune if it ever got loose in the general public without a careful preparation as to what the drug is and what the meaning of its effects may be.”

Bill was aware of the potential dangers to A.A. that his participation in the LSD experiments could have. “I know that I must not compromise its future and would gladly withdraw from these new activities if ever this became apparent.” By 1959 Bill had withdrawn from the LSD experiments.

Despite Bill’s assertion that LSD is about as harmless as aspirin, evidence now suggests there are several potential problems with LSD. It can temporarily impair your ability to make sensible judgments and understand common dangers. So you are more prone to accidents and injuries. It may cause temporary confusion, give you problems with abstract thinking, memory and attention span.

It can also trigger panic attacks or feelings of extreme anxiety. There have been some cases of LSD induced psychosis in seemingly healthy people. Individuals with schizophrenia and depression can see their symptoms worsen under the influence of LSD. Chronic use of LSD “alters gene expression profiles in the medial prefrontal cortex.” Many of the processes altered by chronic LSD use have also been implicated in the pathogenesis of schizophrenia.

The recreational use of LSD was entirely unexpected to Albert Hoffman, the discoverer of LSD, who said:

I had no inkling that the new substance would also come to be used beyond medical science, as an inebriant in the drug scene. Since my self-experiment had revealed LSD in its terrifying, demonic aspect, the last thing I could have expected was that this substance could ever find application as anything approaching a pleasure drug.