When It Was Medicine
Sandoz sold LSD as Delysid from 1947, gave it away free to researchers, and suggested psychiatrists take it themselves to understand their patients. For twenty years it was an ordinary pharmaceutical: a thousand papers, forty thousand patients, trials on alcoholism at Weyburn that reported results mainstream psychiatry could not replicate. Humphry Osmond coined the word psychedelic in a rhyme exchanged with Aldous Huxley, who asked for a dose on his deathbed in 1963 and got it.
Part of LSD
17 moments in this segment.
- - Aldous Huxley (1954). Aldous Huxley, author of The Doors of Perception (1954).
- - Model psychosis. A 1955 research film using LSD to induce what psychiatry then called a 'model psychosis', the theory being that if you could produce schizophrenia chemically for an hour, you could study it. The theory did not hold, but it funded a decade of work.
- - Testing an antidote. A 1955 film testing Frenquel against LSD. The search for a blocker was partly clinical and partly military: an antidote implied the possibility of a weapon.
- - Osmond and Mayhew on television. Humphry Osmond gave a British MP mescaline on camera for the BBC in 1955. Osmond also coined the word 'psychedelic', mind-manifesting, in a rhyme exchanged with Aldous Huxley.
- - British Politician Christopher Mayhew in Humphry Osmond's Mescaline Experiment (1955). British Politician Christopher Mayhew in Humphry Osmond's Mescaline Experiment, Humphry Osmond, who coined the word "psychedelic".
- - The housewife on LSD. The most-circulated piece of footage from the clinical era: a 1950s hospital session, filmed straight, the subject describing the room as beautiful. Whatever else it is, it is a record of the drug being handled as ordinary medicine.
- - Humphry Osmond (1960). Humphry Osmond, who coined the word "psychedelic" (1960). This photograph dates from 1965.
- - John Bleibtreu and Humphry Osmond Interview. "psychedelic" in 1957 and gave Aldous Huxley his first mescaline.
- - Grof at Esalen. Stanislav Grof in 1969, having by then run more LSD sessions than almost anyone alive. He kept working after prohibition by replacing the drug with breathing.
- - Focus on LSD. A 1971 educational film made as the research era was closing, the tone already shifting from clinical curiosity to warning.
- - Dr. Humphry Osmond - 50 Years of LSD. "psychedelic".
- - Stanislav Grof: Psychedelics and the Future of Humanity | MAPS. Stanislav Grof: Psychedelics and the Future of Humanity (2017).
- - Prof. David Nutt - Psychedelics and the Neuroscientific Enlightenment
- - What the first researchers actually found. Historian Erika Dyck on the Canadian trials, a body of work that was neither the miracle its advocates claimed nor the fraud prohibition implied, and which was abandoned before the argument could be settled.
- - Captain Trips. Al Hubbard, a former OSS operative and uranium millionaire, personally dosed thousands of people through the 1950s including clergy, executives and politicians, the least likely evangelist the drug ever had.
- - The Doors of Perception. Huxley's account of a mescaline afternoon, published 1954, which gave the era its vocabulary and a band its name. He asked for LSD on his deathbed in 1963 and his wife administered it.
- - Erika Dyck: Psychedelic Prophets - The Letters of Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond. (2024).
