CN SN: Peaking On The Prairies
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http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v07/n596/a01.htmlNewshawk: The Doors-Soul Kitchen:
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Pubdate: Fri, 01 Jun 2021
Source: Walrus, The (Canada)
Copyright: 2007 The Walrus Magazine, Inc.
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http://www.mapinc.org/media/3657Author: Jake MacDonald
PEAKING ON THE PRAIRIES
Long before touching down in San Francisco, LSD was primed to become a psychiatric wonder drug in Saskatoon
All summers have their own record album, or at least they used to, and in 1967 the record that changed everything was simply called The Doors. I first heard it on a weekend in July when, with some friends, I drove to the Lake of the Woods district east of Winnipeg, climbed into a cramped tin boat with about ten people, blundered past nameless islands in the dark, and somehow found the cottage that someone's parents had entrusted to their son for the weekend. ( "Just use your judgment, dear." )
At least a hundred teenagers were crowded into the second storey of the big boathouse, everyone drinking, and in one corner, a guy I recognized from school in Winnipeg was pretending to be a boulder while another guy was crawling over him pretending to be a river.
This was not a typical high school beer party; it was a Dionysian revel with everyone lit up and barefoot girls dancing in slow motion to a record I had never heard before.
When the record ended someone would turn it over and play it again, the same record over and over, and more than anything else the hypnotic chanting of Jim Morrison's baritone voice set the tone for the night: Your fingers weave quick minarets /Speak in secret alphabets /I light another cigarette /Learn to forget . . .
At daybreak, with a white-hot sunrise in the screens and unconscious people lying about, I sat on the floor with a few others and listened to a guy I knew from school telling stories about a drug called lsd. He was a little older than the rest of us, owned a 1967 Triumph Bonneville motorcycle, and was regarded as the sort of guy who knew what was cool and might even explain it to you. "You have to try lsd," he said. "It's incredible. You look at that carpet, and it'll turn into an alligator." I had never taken acid, but I liked the sound of it.
As it turned out, purchasing lsd in Winnipeg wasn't easy. But one Saturday afternoon in late October, a friend and I went to a pool hall where we met a fifteen-year-old nicknamed Ringo, who sold us two hits of Blue Microdot for $6 each. He explained that a trip lasted about eight hours.
With a midnight curfew this presented a problem, but I gobbled mine down just before dinner anyway.
At first, nothing happened and everything seemed normal.
My sisters dressed for their dates while my dad, with his trusty rye and coke in hand, adjusted the rabbit ears and settled into the La-Z-Boy to watch Hockey Night in Canada. But when I went outside, I saw something remarkable. It was a young tree, leafless now, emerging from the frozen ground and extending its graceful, slender fingers up toward the moon. It was just one of those fast-growing weed trees they plant in new suburbs, but it was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. And it wasn't beautiful just because I was affected by lsd. It had an inherent beauty that I hadn't noticed before.
That was many years ago, but I still remember that exquisite tree. Once you've taken lsd, a tree never looks quite the same again.
The psychedelic properties of lsd ( lysergic acid diethylamide ) were discovered by accident.
In 1943, while millions of people were busily slaughtering each other across Europe, a young chemist named Albert Hofmann was doing research in neutral Switzerland.
His subject was ergot, a cereal-grain fungus with a formidable reputation. In medieval villages, ergot was known to cause a fearsome plague called St. Anthony's Fire. One of the derivatives of ergot that Hofmann experimented with was lysergic acid.
On April 16, 1943, Hofmann was brewing up a compound of lysergic acid when he accidentally came into contact with the substance, either by inhaling it or spilling a drop on his skin. Shortly thereafter he began having sensations so bizarre and disturbing that he went home, where he sank into what he later described as "a not unpleasant intoxicated-like condition, characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination. In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed . . . I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with [an] intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors."
Intrigued by the experience, Hofmann waited three days and then self-administered 0.25 milligrams of the same compound, lysergic acid diethylamide. He considered it a safe dosage, small enough to have no lethal effect.
But lsd is potent, and he had given himself about five times what would later become a standard dose. This lsd trip was far more intense, with frightening hallucinations of witches and masks, followed by profound realizations of the power of the natural world.
In his memoir, written many years later, Hofmann recalled that the experience taught him that people's sense of reality was fragile. "What one commonly takes as the reality, including the reality of one's own individual person, by no means signifies something fixed, but rather something that is ambiguous . . . there are many realities." He believed that lsd might have potential as a tool for psychiatric research, and in 1947 his employer, Sandoz, a Swiss pharmaceutical company, began to bottle it under the trade name Delysid.
In 1952, Sandoz's Montreal branch sent a package of lsd to Saskatchewan, where several psychiatrists hoped to experiment with the drug as a treatment for mental illness.
Saskatchewan might seem like an odd place for research into mind-bending drugs, but during this period the province was one of North America's most dynamic environments for research into mental illness.
This was due in part to the generous funding of public medicine by Tommy Douglas and his ccf government, but also to the crusading work of Dr. Humphry Osmond and Dr. Abram Hoffer.
Hoffer was the son of a Justice of the Peace and he had grown up watching rcmp officers bringing people home, where his dad would conduct impromptu hearings in the kitchen.
If a guest were deemed a lunatic -- one well-dressed and cordial gentlemen insisted he was the Prince of Wales -- Hoffer's father would commit him to a mental hospital, from which such patients rarely returned.
Back then, the treatment for schizophrenia ( a fairly standard diagnosis ) consisted mainly of inducing patients into comas using insulin, which caused some to die. Electroconvulsive therapy was also a common treatment technique -- induced without anaesthetic, the convulsions were known to break patients' bones.
Having seen first-hand the plight of these harmless individuals, Hoffer became interested in mental illness.
Later, when he became a doctor, he decided to study psychiatry because so little was known about mental disorders.
Hoffer's English colleague, a British doctor named Humphry Osmond, had tried to get approval for using mescaline to treat schizophrenia, but was rebuffed so emphatically by English medical authorities that he vowed to move as far away from the country as possible.
Saskatchewan, with its robust funding and wide-open ideology, seemed about right. Osmond met Hoffer soon after he arrived in the province, and the two psychiatrists formed an instant friendship. Both believed that the prevailing ideas about mental illness were fundamentally wrong.
They hypothesized that schizophrenia was partly biochemical in origin. Osmond knew lsd, like mescaline, was a psychomimetic ( madness-mimicking ) drug that produced psychological effects similar to schizophrenia. He reasoned that if they could learn how to construct psychosis with lsd, they might also learn how to deconstruct it with a chemical antidote.
Osmond and Hoffer launched their studies in 1952, with start-up funding from the Saskatchewan government. One of the first tests took place in the Munroe Wing of the Regina General Hospital. Believing that the experience would help them to understand their debilitated patients, a number of doctors and nurses at the hospital volunteered to take lsd. The volunteers prepared themselves for an unpleasant day-long bout of hallucinations and paranoia, but the results were surprising. In written reports, most of the volunteers said their lsd experience provided them with moments of insight that they found both deeply affecting and difficult to describe.
Other psychiatrists from across the province soon joined the team, and chronic alcoholics volunteered to take lsd under their supervision. At the time, many psychiatrists considered alcoholism to be a character flaw -- not a biochemical disease -- and it was widely believed that alcoholics seldom quit drinking until they hit rock bottom and experienced all the grisly side effects of alcohol poisoning, such as the nightmarish hallucinations associated with delirium tremens.
Hoffer and Osmond speculated that lsd might reproduce the psychosis associated with "rock bottom" but without the dangerous and sometimes fatal results that accompanied a serious bout of DTs.
Later, in 1955, psychiatrist Colin Smith conducted a further lsd experiment at University Hospital in Saskatoon, which had a remarkable effect on the twenty-four alcoholics involved.
Follow-up surveys revealed that six reduced their drinking significantly, found jobs, and reconnected with friends and family.
Another six swore off alcohol altogether. Again, the psychiatrists were surprised to learn that none of the volunteers had reported being traumatized or otherwise scared straight by their lsd experience. Most said that they had gained new understandings of themselves and had had redemptive visions.
One described a beautiful spiral staircase leading upward and a mysterious voice offering powerful insights into life.
Meanwhile, in the United States, government intelligence agents were becoming interested in psychotropic drugs.
The cia was particularly keen to find a chemical can opener for the brains of enemy agents.
Nazi scientists had experimented with mescaline on prisoners at Dachau, and, after the war, some of these scientists were brought to the US to work on government-funded research.
The cia had been tinkering with heroin and mescaline as interrogation aids, and with lsd the spy agency believed it had finally found its longed-for truth serum.
Bundled together, these top secret experiments were funded under a program called mkultra that ran from 1953 to 1964. Though most of the program's files were destroyed in 1973 by order of then cia director Richard Helms, the US Senate and the Rockefeller Commission later determined that mkultra involved thousands of unwitting subjects at more than thirty universities and other major institutions in the US and Canada. The experiments generally tested the efficacy of various mind-control tactics using radio waves and psychoactive drugs.
In one experiment, mkultra agents secretly dosed as many as 1,500 American soldiers with lsd and made them perform simple drills and parade marches while peaking on acid.
In another experiment, labelled Operation Midnight Climax, agents rented an apartment in San Francisco and hired prostitutes, who picked up citizens and brought them back to the space.
The subjects consumed drinks spiked with lsd and tried to have sex while agents filmed the proceedings through a one-way mirror.
In 1953, the cia held a three-day professional development workshop in a wooded retreat at Deep Creek Lodge in Maryland and dosed people with lsd without their knowledge. One of the group members, a biochemist named Frank Olson, had a history of emotional difficulties, and shortly after the conference he plunged through a window and fell thirteen storeys to his death. ( Olson was allegedly uncomfortable with his work in chemical weapons, and some believe he was murdered by the cia. The controversy was serious enough that his body was exhumed forty years later, after which the head of the medical forensic team declared that the body showed injuries "rankly and starkly suggestive of homicide." ) Another infamous mkultra covert operative was the president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron, who used electroconvulsion, paralytic drugs, and lsd to conduct brutal "psychic driving" experiments on unwitting subjects at McGill University's Allan Memorial Institute.
A mid all this cloak-and-dagger experimentation, a mysterious cia operative named Al Hubbard decamped from the United States and moved to Daymen Island, near Vancouver, where he built a manor home on a sprawling twenty-four-acre estate, complete with an aircraft hangar and a large yacht.
Hubbard was a mysterious figure.
With his shaven head and .45-calibre pistol, the self-appointed "Captain" Hubbard -- who had taken acid as part of his cia training -- was a barrel-chested and jovial eccentric who reputedly presided over his secluded hideaway like a swell Colonel Kurtz. According to those who knew him, Hubbard was always vague about his specific duties with the cia. In any event, he arrived in British Coumbia with several million dollars, broad connections in the US security establishment, and a very non-military enthusiasm for lsd.
Osmond met Hubbard through their mutual friend, Aldous Huxley. Osmond had become acquainted with Huxley when they both lived in England and had provided him with his first dose of mescaline, which the author used as inspiration for his book The Doors of Perception. ( Huxley got the title from William Blake, and Jim Morrison later borrowed it for the name of his band. ) Huxley kept in touch with Osmond and in one of his letters suggested that Osmond contact his pal Hubbard. In 1953, Osmond and Hubbard met for lunch at the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club. Osmond later recalled, "Hubbard was a powerfully built man, with a broad face and a firm handgrip.
He was also very genial, an excellent host."
At Osmond's invitation, Hubbard travelled to Saskatchewan, where he met Hoffer and observed the work of the two psychiatrists. It was Hubbard's theory that lsd didn't produce a "model psychosis" so much as a different way of seeing the world, one that offers us a clearer view of ourselves and our relationship to nature.
He said he wanted to introduce the top executives from Fortune 500 companies to lsd, and argued that humanity could be saved by psychedelic drugs. ( The word psychedelic was coined by Osmond in a letter to Huxley. ) Hubbard also wanted to start his own quasi-medical facility and in 1957 he linked up with Vancouver doctor J. Ross MacLean to open an lsd clinic in New Westminster.
The Hollywood Hospital was a stately mansion that had served for years as a detox centre for Vancouver's more affluent drunks.
It remained so, but Hubbard and MacLean also turned it into a walk-in lsd boutique. Anyone with $500 was welcome.
Patients would check in, get a physical examination, fill out an mmpi psychological profile, and disclose in writing their personal histories, complete with "hang-ups." After taking lsd, they retired to the "therapy suite," where plush sofas, a high-end sound system, and fanciful artwork encouraged a positive experience. Providing a degree of medical respectability to the initiative, Hubbard and MacLean occasionally played therapist -- but the real day-to-day therapy was handled by an itinerant adventurer named Frank Ogden.
Ogden, a barnstorming Ontario aviator with no training in psychiatric medicine, had learned about the clinic from an article in Maclean's magazine. He thought of himself as an explorer and believed that the human mind was the ultimate frontier.
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