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Ogden, who now lives in Vancouver, recalls that he dropped everything and flew out to the clinic to see if he could get a job. "I told them I was well qualified to work as a guide into 'inner space' because I'd flown flying boats and survived helicopter crashes, and set a dangerous high-altitude record in a little single-engine Mooney. I told them adventure was my game."
Ogden worked for free for a spell to prove himself and became the Hollywood Hospital's main therapist after Hubbard quit. "Over the next eight years, I worked with more than 1,100 patients," he says. "The majority arrived with problems and left as better people.
It wasn't always a pleasant experience for them, but nothing worthwhile is. The most difficult patients were psychiatrists and engineers.
They were rigid in their thinking and they often had a hard time."
While the hospital was named after the abundant holly trees in the area, the name was also appropriate, as it turned out, because many of the patients were celebrities -- Cary Grant, Ethel Kennedy, and jazz crooner Andy Williams, among others. ( Williams signed up partly because of his marital problems.
He continues to perform, and says that the acid he took in Vancouver helped him understand that "the only things important to me were family, friends, and love. Maybe that's why I'm so cool." ) Ogden says they had a lot of local Vancouver people too. "I can't mention their names because they're still alive.
But we had a lot of wealthy housewives from the British Properties who drank too much and were in sexless marriages.
I remember one lady was frigid.
I touched the back of her hand and she had an orgasm.
I saw her at a social event a few months later and she joked, 'You're not going to do that to me again, are you? ' "
By 1959, Hubbard was getting impatient with MacLean. Hubbard believed that lsd should be available to everyone, rich and poor, while MacLean, who had acquired a big house on Southwest Marine Drive, preferred to treat the hospital as a lucrative private clinic.
Hubbard decided to give up his share in the clinic and move to California, where he became a sort of Johnny Appleseed of psychedelia, giving free lsd to everyone from housewives to celebrities such as James Coburn, Stanley Kubrick, Ken Kesey, and the Grateful Dead. Hubbard also became acquainted with a Harvard professor named Timothy Leary, who would do more than anyone else to promote the non-medical use of lsd among young people.
With his love beads, boyish enthusiasm, and rugged good looks, Leary kicked the lsd campaign into high gear. Ecstatically stoned and surrounded by avid young female fans, Leary toured college campuses urging students to "turn on, tune in, and drop out." Abram Hoffer later wrote that he always feared lsd would become a street drug and, thanks to what he described as "the irresponsibility of Timothy Leary," his fears were realized.
In 1966, Hoffer went to the University of California campus at Berkeley to present a research paper on the clinical uses of lsd. He says he received a polite response.
Afterward, he watched Leary make a presentation -- the Harvard prof was received "with wild abandon" by the students, even though Hoffer couldn't understand what Leary was trying to say. Public health authorities were alarmed by the craze, and later that same year lsd was banned in California. By the end of 1967 -- the same year the Doors' first album was released -- use of the drug was banned in every state, even when supervised by legitimate researchers. Lawmakers in Canada followed suit, and lsd was soon prohibited by most countries in the Western world.
If you wanted to conduct your own experiments with lsd, you had to go looking for someone like Ringo.
Psychiatrists and biochemists never figured out exactly what lsd does to the human brain, and since the drug was banned there hasn't been any research into the mystery.
It is believed that the compound is absorbed by the body and disappears in a short period of time, but its effect on the human psyche can endure for many hours and sometimes days. Obviously, the psyche is a complicated matter.
In layman's terms, one might think of it as a structure, a rickety play fort that arises from the mud of childhood and eventually becomes a proud high-rise, containing all our accomplishments, defeats, jealousies, ambitions, biases, longings, and stored memories.
This is our hard-earned "identity," and it becomes a sort of psychic headquarters from which we interpret and evaluate the world. lsd functions like a chunk of plastic explosive attached to the main load-bearing post in our underground garage. The chemical doesn't need to stick around.
It only needs to cut one post and gravity does the rest.
What emerges from the smoke and dust of the collapsed psyche is a naked baby -- the same wide-eyed infant that looms enormous in the final scene of Stanley Kubrick's lsd-influenced film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Without the mediating structure of identity, the world becomes a terrifyingly vivid place.
Music, colours, texture, taste -- all suddenly regain the distracting power we've spent so many years training ourselves to ignore. We ignore the world so that we can take care of business.
After all, how efficient would we be if we couldn't step outside without pausing to stare in slack-jawed amazement at every tree?
Eating, too, would be an enormous problem.
After meeting up with my similarly dosed pal that October evening in Winnipeg, we walked to a large park, where we sat like fakirs in the darkness, listening to the potent silence of the woods, listening to acorns occasionally falling to the leafy floor with a startling crash.
Eventually we decided it would be a good idea to get something to chow down on. This turned out to be not so much a bad idea as a very complicated one. Under lurid fluorescent lights, surrounded by strange people, it took enormous concentration to deal with the simple fact that the world contained something as bizarre as pizza, and that one was expected to eat it. Each bite seemed to contain so much flavour that I sat walleyed for long minutes, trying to process the information contained in a morsel of pepperoni the size of an asterisk.
lsd seems to destroy the processing system by which we interpret everyday reality.
It opens the doors, as Huxley would have it, but this can be both an exhilarating and terrifying experience. It's no fun listening to the quacking ignorance of our own opinions, suddenly realizing that so much of what we thought to be true is in fact nonsense. This is the stuff of the "bad trip," and it's such an integral part of the lsd experience that most experimenters try the drug only a few times.
During bad trips, our disgust with ourselves is projected outward, and the world can become a foul place. ( When Dr. Osmond took mescaline, he saw a child turning into a pig. ) Nonetheless, something important is going on. After the psyche disintegrates, it necessarily rebuilds.
And the reintegrated psyche takes account of what it now knows and is presumably strengthened. "I don't believe in the notion of the bad trip," says Frank Ogden. "lsd makes you face reality and deal with it."
Odgen says he took lsd only three times when he was training to become a therapist but, he says, "They were some of the most interesting and valuable experiences of my life. I learned things from lsd, and it still keeps me young in my thinking." Now a sharp-eyed and energetic eighty-six-year-old, Ogden has in his office and writing retreat a fanciful whale-shaped houseboat at the Coal Harbour marina in downtown Vancouver. He has fitted the interior with digital cameras, communications equipment, and warp-speed computer processors. Billing himself "Dr. Tomorrow," he travels the world giving talks about technology and future trends.
Ogden believes that scientific research into lsd was terminated prematurely, and he would like to see bona fide researchers get legal access to the drug. Many scientists agree.
In March 2006, Dr. Ben Sessa, an Oxford psychiatrist, gave a speech to England's Royal College of Psychiatrists arguing that lsd's potential benefits to medicine must be re-examined. It was the first time in thirty years the institution considered the issue.
A pilot study is also being planned in Switzerland. lsd will be administered to several subjects suffering from anxiety associated with advanced-stage cancer and other life-threatening illnesses. "lsd was used safely and effectively thousands of times in clinical settings," Sessa says. "No one would ask anaesthetists to forgo morphine use because heroin is a social evil. And there's no valid reason to ban lsd research."
Erika Dyck, a medical historian with the University of Alberta, has conducted the most extensive academic research into the early days of lsd experimentation and has spoken to some of Hoffer and Osmond's former patients.
Her findings suggest that many are still extremely positive about the experience. "They can't say enough about how helpful it was," she says. "lsd triggered a psychological process that allowed them to see themselves."
In January 2006, a large gathering of psychotherapists, medical doctors, academics, and, of course, aging hippies met in Basel, Switzerland, for a conference called lsd: Problem Child and Wonder Drug. The conference was ostensibly held to discuss the scientific importance of the drug, but, as much as anything else, people convened to celebrate the hundredth birthday of Albert Hofmann, the man who first experimented with lsd over half a century ago.
Bent and frail, supported by crutches and a burly Swiss guardsman, Hofmann was still bright-eyed as he walked onto the stage to thunderous applause. In a quiet voice, he told the audience he was concerned about the future of humanity. "All of life's energy comes to us from the sun, via photosynthesis and the plant kingdom.
Our lives are becoming increasingly urbanized, and I believe lsd is a means of rebuilding our relationship to ourselves and to nature."
It has been forty years since the so-called summer of love, and Aquarian dreams of basking in the sun and returning to the Garden of Eden, naked and hypnotized by the wonder of it all, seem quaint and dated. Today, even Jim Morrison sounds as corny as Rudy Vallee. But old apocalyptic visions are still in play. We're still destroying the environment and, to paraphrase Albert Hofmann, we need to hang onto any tool that will help us to see that tree.
Jake Macdonald is an award-winning journalist and the author of 2005's With the Boys: Field Notes on Being a Guy.