Observations from my study on Vital and recent happenings in the space

*Humphry Osmond attends a peyote ceremony in 1956*

Historian Dr Erika Dyck lectured on the “ground zero of LSD research,” conducted by Humphry Osmond and Abram Hoffer at Weyburn Asylum in remote Saskatchewan beginning in 1951.

Osmond, a British expat, was observing Native American peyote ceremonies by 1956. A year later he coined the term ‘psychedelic’ in his correspondence with Aldous Huxley. Hoffer trailblazed nutritional approaches like fasting and vitamin treatments.

I studied history at university (specialising in Renaissance Florence and the Medici, cheers) so Vital’s inaugural week lay seductively inside my comfort zone. I seized the opportunity to go down a historical rabbit hole… and this zine is longer than future weekly updates will be. Stay locked for bonus history posts out of all the feverishly downloaded PDFs.

Dr Dyck recently published graphic novel Wonder Drug: LSD in the Land of Living Skies, Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD on the Canadian Prairies and Psychedelic Prophets: The Letters of Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond. The latter she painstakingly assembled from private collections and museums alongside a team of volunteers. She’s identified the first woman to take LSD, Albert Hoffman’s assistant Susi Ramstein Weber – who also served as spontaneous sitter on Albert’s first two trips.

Dr Dyck is a key contributor to The Chacruna Institute of Psychedelic Plant Medicines, an organization founded by Brazilian anthropologist Dr. Bia Labate ‘promoting a bridge between “traditional ceremonial use” and clinical and therapeutic settings.’

You can watch her regular lecture on Psychedelic History in Canada on YouTube, plus I thoroughly recommend What about Mrs Psychedelic? And a bunch more I put on this YouTube resource channel.

These five items I pulled from the week’s research are themed along Vital’s natural element-themed structure:

Air: Historical and Current Approaches

Fire: Psychedelic Therapies

Water: Spaceholding and Navigating

Earth: Medical and Clinical

Ether: Integration

Plus! Stay on the dancefloor till the end for Graph of the Week and second hand book porn

Is ‘corporadelics’ doing enough for spirit, set, setting… and society?

*A powerful spirit healing experience taking place in Newcastle, England*

The early days of LSD research are easily vilified. Spirituality is a dirty word in scientific circles right now: let alone reincarnation or astrology, both of which Stanislav Grof is quick to mention. It’s even considered unprofessional for the healer to develop a connection with the patient. 20th century Western scientists are easily cast cast as distant, privileged figures electro-shocking schizophrenics behind the asylum gates, collaborating with the CIA in return for research permits.

And now the spectre of ‘corporadelics’ hangs over LSD’s renaissance. I asked Dr Dyck what she learned about human nature from her research, that we can apply to the present.

”There’s a risk of reducing history to a cliché to push against,” she responded “or seeing history as ‘they had it wrong and in the past and we’re better now’.”

“However there’s still something that we can take from the spirit, the optimism, the motivation, the intentions,” says Dyck, “for example, a lot of people who went into these trials were designated as patients – but came through feeling they were collaborators. It pushes back against the competing model of engaging in scientific rigour, where methodology overwhelmed the need for investigating human behaviour in a more diverse way.”

Osmond, Hoffer and their in-house architect Kyoshi Yazumi (more of whom below) were revamping Canada’s mental health system as part of an ambitious pledge by Canada’s new socialist government. Their innovations included day trips outside the famously forboding asylum for inpatients, art and music therapy, and family visits, plus more autonomy for the nurses… who took LSD to ‘empathise better with the patient exprience’.

“The early researchers definitely were trying to align a health access point within a publicly funded system,” she responded, “That is certainly not on the horizon today. We see lots of competing, profit-seeking ways of turning psychedelics into something that, I would argue, are going to be less accessible.”

Alcoholics Anonymous founder Bill ‘W’ Wilson’s psychedelic use inspired Twleve-step and cured his depression

*Alcoholics Anonymous founder Bill Wilson was forced to stand down from his pro-LSD stance*

Hospitalised three times already in less than two years during the mid-30s, Wilson checked himself into hospital for rehab bearing a copy of William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience. He was given the Towns-Lambert treatment for detoxification made using deadly nightshade, henbane (both lively natural psychedelics) and morphine over a period of days.

A close converted christian friend and recovery fellow, Ebby, visited, and pressed the conversation towards Wilson’s atrocious treatment of his wife Lois. Wilson hit ‘rock bottom’ – ego death – smiled up at Kali, and, as he writes in autobiography Pass it On:

“Then came the blazing thought, ‘you are a free man!’ A great peace stole over me, and this was accompanied by a sensation difficult to describe. I became acutely conscious of a Presence which seemed like a veritable sea of living spirit. I lay on the shores of a new world. ‘This’, I thought, ‘must be the great reality.”

Wilson also experienced visions of “a chain of drunks” extending around the globe, assisting each others’ recovery. This would become Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Wilson also came to value spirituality, and etched its practice into The Twelve Steps. According to his I am Bill biographer Francis Hartigan, Wilson thought depression grew from a “lack of faith” and a dearth of “spiritual achievement.”

Vitally, he “did not see any conflict between science and medicine and religion.”

Thanks to Osmond’s work, church and community leaders were (at this stage) pro-LSD, having seen Osmond’s patients rejoin functional society. Wilson met Osmond and Hoffer in his role as an abstinence thought leader to discuss addicition in 1954. At this stage our favourite post-war sub-arctic boffins were blundering around believing LSD would prompt delerium tremens attacks that might shock drinkers out of their rut. Osmond: "We found, in fact, that this wasn't quite how it worked… not unlike Bill's experience. It gave us pause for thought. Not on the grounds of how terrifying it was, but how illuminating it was."

In 1955 Wilson took LSD under supervision from consciousness pioneer Gerald Heard and psychiatrist Sidney Cohen (who also provided Aldous Huxley’s deathbed LSD). He wrote to Betty Eisner, one of his therapy team plus an especially innovative researcher into addiction and LSD, reporting:

“Since returning home I have felt — and hope have acted! — exceedingly well. I can make no doubt that the Eisner-Cohen-Powers-LSD therapy has contributed not a little to this happier state of affairs.”

AA's narrative was that it healed through a combination of complete sobriety and the ‘higher power’ (the latter Wilson considered contactable via LSD). Psychedelics and even psychology didn’t fit with that. To fervent AA members, “Bill’s seeking outside help was tantamount to saying the program didn’t work” writes Hardigan.

In 2020, a systematic review published by Frontiers in Psychology compiling figures from alcoholism LSD treatments over many decades said, “LSD is revealed as a potential therapeutic agent in psychiatry; the evidence to date is strongest for the use of LSD in the treatment of alcoholism.”

John Hopkins stand-out Matthew Johnson began trials on psilocybin for smoking cessation in 2014, and has since racked up an 80% success rate that dwarfs other approaches. His team are also starting or planning studies using psilocybin therapy for a wide range of other conditions, including opioid addiction and alcoholism.

Bill ‘W’ Wilson caved into pressure and stopped LSD therapy in the mid-60s. Neither his depression nor drinking returned.

Women invented chill out DJing

*I couldn’t find a picture of Rose Hoffer, Hermina Browne or Helen Bonny in the 1950s so please settle for Delia Derbyshire making one of the earliest and greatest pieces of electronic music in 1962*

And their style remains the template for chill out mixes – plus MAPS therapy sessions – today.

After Abram Hoffer’s wife Rose soothed a tripping patient by changing a jarring record to an elegant Bach number, she was thenceforth delegated I/C the tunes.

Hermina E Browne, director of music therapy at New Jersey State Hospital, began testing music for effectiveness during psychedelic sessions for alcoholics in 1956. Her major innovations were to divide the soundtrack into five thirty-minute parts plus – I love this one – put the music on for half an hour, then turn it off again for the same time. Her playlist categories were:

1 Relaxing to tense

2 Very tense, disturbed with a purpose

3 Solemn, meditative, self-searching, spiritual

4 Relaxing, spiritual

5 Reconciling, restoration of confidence, feeling of hope and faith

Browne passed her findings on to E Thayer Gaston, ‘The Father of Music Therapy’ who eschewed her policy of ‘Five Moods Projected’. Instead he insisted on music ‘familiar’ to the patient. (The handbook says have them ask to change it once, stand ground gently, then cave in if they ask again).

Enter during the 1970s Helen Bonny, who considered music ‘intersubjectively verifiable’ and set out to prove it. Her Maryland Hospital is noted for using four therapists in psychedelic sessions, always including a music therapist.

Bonny’s unpublished research did so, but she’s even better known for conceiving Guided Imagery and Music, the leading form of music therapy in the prsent day.

Public opinion had a huge effect on research back then. It still does

Dyck’s presentation began with a curved ball. She pointed out that pharmaceuticals were bang on-trend during the 1950s after the successful roll-out of anti-psychotic chlorpromazine (Thorazine). This generated goodwill for tests on more ‘wonder drugs’.

However, in the early1960s the startling effects of thalidomide on pregnancy came to light. “Images of deformed children caused outcry and a moral panic over testing ethics,” plus the emerging anti-modernity movement fuelled a backlash that brought LSD – brand name ‘Delysid’ – testing to a halt in Canada by 1962. Leary was fired from Harvard in April 1962. Research was legal elsewhere, but funding and support rapidly became non-existent.

Architecture is the trippiest job

Kiyoshi Azumi built six ‘ideal mental hospitals’

Architects Henrik Bull and Erik Clough wrote chapters for Ralph Metzner’s The Ecstatic Adventure. They took part in noted creativity and problem-solving exercises under the influence of LSD during the 1960s. Architecture has arguably become the trade most closely associated with psychedelic self-improvement since.

The first modern-day architect to get turned on though was Kiyoshi ‘Kiyo’ Azumi. Commissioned to revamp Canada’s asylum buildings by Osmond and Hoffer, you can probably guess what happened after they met in 1956 under the proviso of ‘learning how the patients perceive their environment.’

A long friendship developed: the first ‘ideal mental hospital’ in Yorktown, Saskatchewan was opened in 1965, another five were built in Canada, and a further in Pensylvannia USA.

Izumi’s book LSD and Architecture specifies the following conclusions:

1 Provide as much privacy as possible

2 Minimize ambiguity of architecture's design and detail

3 Bear no intimidating features

4 Foster spatial interactions that curtail the frequency and intensity of undesirable confrontations

Izumi passed away in 1996, and Weyburn was demolished in 2009.

Kool-Aid Corner

To finish: trippy clippings, merry pranks, and psychedelic student life

Graph of the Week

The relationship between ego-dissolution and ego-inflation for experiences
occasioned by:

Classical psychedelics

Coacine

Alcohol

From: Ego-Dissolution and Psychedelics: Validation of the Ego-Dissolution Inventory (EDI) by Matthew M Nour, Lisa Evans, David Nutt and Robin L Carhart-Harris (2016)

My bookshelf weighs a ton

Notable new purchases for the occult library. Strictly second hand snap-ups only. This week: Albion Dreaming by Andy Roberts. Replaced after my first copy accompanied a close friend to his new life in NY

*Snapped up for just over UK£25, copy for sale via GF Books in Hawthorn, CA for just over US$1000, UK price £95 and up*

From the first chapter: ‘William Blake drew on Albion as a symbol of man before the Biblical fall and historian Peter Ackroyd has used the term for the title of his book charting the origins of the English imagination.

From the Sixties onwards sections of the counter culture used the term Albion to refer to their vision of a land, society and individual consciousness based on the insights offered by LSD.

Thus, Albion embodies the mythological imagination of these Isles, a state akin to the aboriginal Dreamtime, to which everyone should have access. This, then, is Albion’s dreaming.’

Andy Roberts is Britain’s answer to Erika Dyck; our national chronicler of the far out. Psychedelic Renaissance author AWAKN’s Dr Ben Sessa says:

“Andy is an anti-authoritarian, free-thinking individual who has happily nailed his colours to the weirdness mast without being lost in its sea of ethereal fluffiness.”

Indeed he’s unafraid of toppling sacred cows, like in this forensic inquisition into the Francis Crick LSD-DNA connection and his biography of disruptive-at-best prankster Michael Hollingshead. Grab his recent collection of essays from Psychedelic Press and see vids on the New Psychonaut YouTube depository.

Next issue: Dr Joe Tafur explains traditional and modern indigeneous perspectives

This blog is not affiliated to Vital beyond my study on the course. The content shouldn’t be taken as representative as it’s a personal reflection and includes my own lived experience of the sector too.

Psychedelic substances are prohibited in the UK, other countries and most US states. I do not condone their use, neither am I evangelising for, or recommending them to you. There are more qualified people you can turn to in the Resources section but if you are considering psychedelic treatments the best person to speak to is probably your own therapist, counsellor, or doctor.

Vital Study Zine Week One: The Ground Zero of LSD Research

Observations from my study on Vital and recent happenings in the space