One Trippy Book from Johns Hopkins University Press

Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD from Clinic to Campus is by Erika Dyck, an associate professor of history at University of Saskatchewan. She traces the history of medical experiments with lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) from the 1950s, and explains that by the1960s medical researchers were just starting to learn more about it as a good clinical tool when it was criminalized. In the early days of LSD research two Canadian scientists, Humphry Osmond and Abram Hoffer, claimed incredible advances in treating alcoholism, understanding schizophrenia, and achieving empathy with their patients using LSD as medicine. Some patients were helped only taking one dose. Dyck recounts it was the drug counter-culture of the 1960s, the “Timothy Learyism” of LSD, led to its almost complete prohibition.

Not so any more. Reporter Benedict Carey reports in the New York Times this week ('A Psychedelic ‘Problem Child’ Comes Full Circle') that Albert Hoffman, the chemist who invented LSD in 1943, “spent the latter part of his life consulting with scientists around the world to bring his ‘problem child,’ as he called the drug, back into the lab to study as a therapeutic agent.” Hoffman died last week, but now, according to Carey, “several trials testing psychedelics are in the works, thanks in part to the steady example set by Dr. Hoffman.”

Dyck outlines the history of LSD as an experimental substance, a medical treatment, and a tool for exploring psychotic perspectives – as well a recreational drug. It is interesting to note that while big drug companies and the medical establishment have embraced anti-depressants and anti-psychotics and marketed them aggressively to unwitting millions of people, LSD has been branded as belonging to a radical counter-culture and was criminalized despite having proven in some clinical trials to offer people help with their psychiatric problems. This is a fascinating book about LSD, a book in the history of medicine that shows the rise and fall of psychedelic psychiatry, and offers a corrective to the medical community to show through its history that LSD is a legitimate substance that warrants serious re-consideration and study.

It’s important to point out at this juncture that all Johns Hopkins books are printed on acid-free paper.