So did Leonard Pickard, though his route was far more circuitous and involved detours into the darker recesses of the human psyche.
Hofmann suffered a fatal heart attack at his home in Basel in 2008. Dead at 102, he’d recently topped an international list of the world’s 100 greatest living geniuses.1
Leonard read Hofmann’s long, adoring obituary while sitting alone in his cell. He was seven years into a life sentence for manufacturing Hofmann’s “problem child.” The modern world’s first psychonaut commanded universal veneration. Pickard’s reward was jail, forever.
From Dr. Hofmann’s Swiss laboratory to the corner of Haight & Ashbury, LSD-25 took a circuitous route over the two decades before its re-discovery during San Francisco’s Summer of Love, and Leonard Pickard’s induction into the acid underground. Before winding up a Flower Power staple, acid required the help of the US government to complete its 10,000-mile journey from Basel to the Bay.
While agreeing that Dr. Hofmann’s discovery was indeed astonishing, his bosses at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals could find no practical use for the substance. Nevertheless, they tried to market it in post-war America under the brand name Delysid. The best that Sandoz salesmen could tell their customers was that LSD-25 seemed to do a pretty good job of mimicking schizophrenia. Thus, initial consumers were mostly psychiatrists.
Freud and Jung were still the major role models for the new sciences of psychology during the late 1940s. Unlike the rest of human biology, brain chemistry hadn’t advanced much beyond that of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. By mid-twentieth century, surgeons understood quite well how a heart, liver, spleen or lung functioned, but they knew precious little about the central nervous system. Any mucking about in neuropharmacology was viewed by the general public as one step above voodoo.
Postwar spies, politicians, and the Pentagon held a different view about Delysid. Chartered in 1947 as the Cold War heir to World War II’s Office of Strategic Services, the newly-created Central Intelligence Agency saw real promise in LSD.
“CIA had a mandate to monitor any advances in science, technology and medicine, as it does today,” said Leonard Pickard.
The spy agency became Sandoz’s biggest customer during the early 1950s. For the next 20 years, working hand in hand with the Department of Defense, the CIA oversaw scores of experiments. Under a half-dozen code-word operations ranging from MKDELTA to MKOFTEN, the agency dabbled in all sorts of neurotransmitter necromancy. The best-known was MKULTRA, and its star biologic was LSD.
The CIA theorized that Delysid, mescaline,2 and similar hallucinatory drugs could disorient and/or disable US enemies. Failing that outcome, the early spymasters conceived of LSD as a truth serum that might force spies to blab their secrets and/or act against their will.3 Over the next twenty years, after dosing hundreds of test subjects, the agency jettisoned both theories . . . but not without collateral damage.
The most notorious early acid victim was believed to have been Frank Olson, a forty-three-year-old bacteriologist who worked on a clandestine germ warfare project for the Pentagon and the CIA. On the evening of Nov. 28, 1953, Olson supposedly leapt from a twelfth-story window of the Statler Hotel in New York City while loaded on LSD.
The first official story claimed a clinically depressed Frank Olson committed suicide. The second, offered up during a Congressional inquiry twenty years later, maintained that he flew out the window in an acid-induced trance. While admitting no culpability, the US government paid a $750,000 out-of-court settlement to Olson’s heirs. President Gerald Ford publicly apologized to his widow and family.
The third and most recent claim, embraced by Olson’s two surviving sons, is that the CIA permanently silenced their father after he threatened to expose the Pentagon’s biological warfare program. In the 2017 documentary Wormwood, filmmaker Errol Morris4 theorizes Olson was assassinated for his dissent, and that LSD’s only role was that of convenient scapegoat.
While the CIA tried exploiting the worst effects of LSD, early psychonauts outside the government concentrated on the best. Humphrey Osmond and Abram Hoffer, a pair of Canadian physicians, used Delysid to treat schizophrenic patients with limited success. When they switched to treating chronic alcoholism, however, they achieved an astounding 55 percent cure rate.5 In dozens of studies that replicated their methods over the next decade, other clinicians reported similar results. For the first time, it appeared Western medicine had a potential weapon with which to battle addiction.
Popularizing their findings was another matter. The medical establishment refused to listen.
One of acid’s earliest champions wasn’t a doctor at all but, rather, the celebrated novelist Aldous Huxley. The British-born Huxley’s popularity peaked in 1932 with the publication of his dystopian classic, Brave New World. The book made him famous but, as with so many celebrated authors before and after, Hollywood promised to make him rich. He moved to California in 1937 to cash in as a screenwriter.6 Over the next fifteen years, Hollywood disillusioned Huxley. The money was great, but the lifestyle was vapid. He was nearing sixty before he first treated ennui with hallucinogens.
In 1953, Huxley met Dr. Osmond at a scientific conference in LA. A lifetime of literary pursuit had left the author with few answers about the meaning of life. Osmond suggested mescaline. Following his experience, Huxley famously maintained that “the doors of perception”7 had opened for him. His account of that first trip bore the same name: The Doors of Perception (1954)8 quickly became a seminal psychonaut text.
In a subsequent exchange of letters, Huxley tried to articulate for Osmond what mescaline had revealed for him. He coined a description in rhyming couplet:
To make this trivial world sublime, take half a gram of phanerothyme.9
Osmond responded with a couplet of his own:
To fathom Hell or soar angelic, just take a pinch of psychedelic.
Osmond’s description stuck. For the remainder of the Eisenhower era, Osmond and Huxley were twin beacons of the psychedelic vanguard, but a third psychonaut soon joined their ranks, spreading the gospel further
