POWERFUL DOSES OF LSD TREATED SASK. ALCOHOLICS

1950s Research Coined Term 'Psychedelic'

Edmonton - Saskatchewan once used LSD to treat hundreds of alcoholic
patients, and the province used to be so prominent in such research
that the word "psychedelic" -- now shorthand for an entire
counterculture -- was coined in the prairie town of Weyburn.

A recently published paper has shone new light on the trials, which
occurred over more than a decade at several psychiatric hospitals in
the province. The results not only drew interest from around the
world, including from famed novelist Aldous Huxley, but also reveal
much about how society views drug use, says medical historian Erika Dyck.

"We accept all sorts of different drugs in our society, and yet the
ones we accept and the ones we don't accept I don't think are always
mitigated by medical factors," Dyck said Thursday from the University
of Alberta.

Her paper focuses on the work of psychiatrist Humphry Osmond, who
came from London to the large mental hospital at Weyburn in 1951.

At the time, doctors thought hallucinations experienced by advanced
alcoholics helped some sufferers quit drinking. Osmond and Canadian
colleague Abram Hoffer theorized that LSD could simulate that
experience. From 1953 to the mid-'60s they tested their theory on at
least 700 patients. Other studies were conducted in Saskatoon.

The doctors found that about half their subjects had remained dry for
at least 18 months after taking a single dose of LSD that was
anywhere from 10 to 100 times the size of what is now considered a
normal street "hit."

Dyck said the doctors, instead of relying on purely physiological
means to treat alcoholics, used LSD to reach into a patient's psyche.

"At the heart of the enterprise lay a desire to produce an experience
that deeply affected research subjects to the extent that they might
change their behaviour," Dyck writes in her paper.

The LSD treatment, which many patients described as spiritual,
attracted interest from Alcoholics Anonymous, whose 12-step program
includes the recognition of a higher power.

Dyck said Osmond and Hoffer supplied LSD to one of AA's founders, who
remained supportive even after he decided to stop taking the drug.

Another of Osmond's correspondents was famed English novelist Huxley,
author of Brave New World and the non-fiction Doors of Perception.

It was in a letter to Huxley that Osmond coined the term that would
come to describe an entire decade.

"To fathom hell or soar angelic, you'll need a pinch of psychedelic,"
he wrote in the fall of 1956.

Several of Osmond's patients contacted Dyck during the course of her
research to tell her they have remained dry ever since their treatment.

"They claimed that it changed their lives," she said.

But the Saskatchewan results were soon attacked by institutions
including the Toronto-based Addiction Research Foundation. It argued
Osmond's research, in which subjects were given the drug in
comfortable surroundings and stimulated with art or music, was poorly
designed and proved nothing.

In contrast, the foundation sometimes blindfolded or restrained its
LSD test subjects to isolate the effect of the drug. It failed to
reproduce the Saskatchewan results, a finding that, combined with
growing social concern about LSD, eventually led to the end of
research into such therapy.

But Dyck argues the foundation's attempt to reduce LSD therapy to its
chemical effect missed the point. She said Osmond's treatment used
the surroundings of the drug-taker, including interaction with the
researcher, to produce a sense of ritual.

That helped create the spiritual experience that helped the patient
stop drinking.