LSD
- History Fix Podcast
- Aug 9
- 20 min read
Episode 125: How This “Wonder Drug” Cycled Its Way Through Medical, Government, and Counterculture Communities
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Dr. Alexis Turner is a historian of science at Harvard University. While pursuing his PhD, he chose to focus his studies on a particularly interesting drug known as LSD. He says in a Harvard News article by Paul Massari quote “At different times throughout its history, LSD has been a psychiatric wonder drug, a means to world peace, a distraction from political progress, and a poison corrupting the youth of the country. Intellectually, I want to know how it can be all those things—sometimes simultaneously,” end quote. Same doc, same. The story of lysergic acid diethylamide or LSD is itself a wild trip. Discovered accidentally in the 1930s, studied as a possible psychiatric wonder drug, used by the CIA in highly unethical clandestine mind control experiments during the cold war, adopted by the counterculture hippies of the summer of love, it’s viewed by some for its potential to expand human consciousness and promote peace and by others for its potential to completely destroy our society. But how can it be both? How can it be all of these things? Let’s fix that.
Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix, where I discuss lesser known true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. Before we go on this trip together, the history of LSD, I want to let you know that I did in fact put out a mini fix episode this past Wednesday over on patreon.com/historyfixpodcast called “The Seymour Scandal.” I didn’t have time in last week’s episode to explore this very juicy bit of scandalous history involving the very young princess Elizabeth Tudor, future Queen Elizabeth I of England and her stepparents Catherine Parr and Thomas Seymour. So I finally got to tell that story on Wednesday. Here’s a little teaser:
England’s king Henry VIII died in January of 1547, leaving behind his sixth wife, Catherine Parr, and his three children, Mary who was 30 years old, Elizabeth who was 13, and Edward who was 9. Free after her aged and deranged husband’s death, Catherine married her one true love, Thomas Seymour. Thomas was the brother of Henry’s third wife Jane Seymour. That also made him the biological uncle of Henry’s only surviving son and heir to the throne, Edward VI. The newlyweds’ household was a lively place of intellect and learning, with famous scholars and tutors passing through and taking up residence. Princess Elizabeth, always close with her stepmother Catherine, soon moved in with her and was tutored by the famous scholars William Grindal and Roger Ascham. But all was not as it seemed in this idyllic setting. The moment 13 year old Elizabeth walked through the grand entryway of her stepparent’s estate, she became the prey and they the predators. For Thomas Seymour had long set his sights on the child princess and he wouldn’t be deterred by age, or rank, or marriage, or scandal, or any of it. Let’s fix that.
You can listen to the full 20 minute mini fix over on patreon. Remember it’s just $5 a month to subscribe. You can also purchase that one mini fix for $3. Thank you thank you thank you as always to my patreon supporters for helping to make History Fix a sustainable endeavor, one that I can continue pouring so many hours into each week and still manage to feed my family. If this show is something you find value in, I really hope you will consider subscribing. Your money isn’t going to like Netflix or Amazon or whatever big corporation, it’s going to me. An individual, a real person, who is passionate about this mission of fixing history, correcting the narrative, and hopefully entertaining people too, and who pours a whole lot into this show. Patreon.com/historyfixpodcast, always linked in the description.
Okay, that was my spiel. I try not to do that too often but it is actually kind of important. Let’s talk about drugs! LSD, as I said in the intro, is short for lysergic acid diethylamide. It’s also sometimes just called acid. Its inception is kind of similar to that of antibiotics in that it was discovered by accident, as many great things were. Back in the 1930s, a scientist named Albert Hoffman was working for a Swiss chemical company called Sandoz. He was trying to develop a respiratory and circulatory stimulant, another source said blood thinner, maybe those are the same thing. I don’t know, I’m not a doctor, or a scientist. But he was trying to come up with that sort of medication. And he was experimenting with ergot. I have talked about ergot before you guys, a couple of times. Ergot is a fungus that grows on grains, especially rye. There is actually a fairly compelling theory that the girls who initially started like freaking out and screaming about the devil and accusing people of being witches during the Salem witch trials were suffering from ergot poisoning after eating contaminated rye bread. Revisit episode 84 for more about all that. But the reason that theory kind of works is because ergot is known to cause convulsions and hallucinations when ingested. So Hoffman is experimenting with ergot trying to make this medication which he sort of fails to do but he does accidentally make LSD in 1938. And then he sets it aside for five years. He’s like “eh, I don’t know what this is but it isn’t what I was trying to make,” and he shelves it for a while.
In 1943, he decides to try again and once again he creates what he doesn’t know yet is LSD. And in doing this this time he accidentally ingests a little bit of it. And here is what he described experiencing after that quote, “... affected by a remarkable restlessness, combined with a slight dizziness. At home I lay down and sank into a not unpleasant intoxicated-like condition, characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination. In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed (I found the daylight to be unpleasantly glaring), I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors. After about two hours this condition faded away,” end quote. Now, Hoffman must have somewhat enjoyed this experience, because 3 days later he decides to ingest LSD again, intentionally this time and like way, way more of it. He ingests 250 micrograms which doesn’t seem like much but it’s actually like 10 times more than you need to take to feel the effects of LSD. A dose of LSD is 25 micrograms which is like a few grains of salt, that’s how much that is. So dude takes 10 doses. He takes 250 micrograms and then an hour or two later, it starts to kick in. He’s still at work, by the way, he does this at work. And now he has to ride his bicycle home. He’s feeling pretty weird so he asks his lab assistant to escort him. He hopes on his bike and starts pedaling. According to Wikipedia quote “On the way, Hofmann's condition rapidly deteriorated as he struggled with feelings of anxiety, alternating in his beliefs that the next-door neighbor was a malevolent witch, that he was going insane, and that the LSD had poisoned him. When the house doctor arrived, however, he could detect no physical abnormalities, save for a pair of widely dilated pupils. Hofmann was reassured, and soon his terror began to give way to a sense of good fortune and enjoyment, as he later wrote:” [quote within a quote] “... Little by little I could begin to enjoy the unprecedented colors and plays of shapes that persisted behind my closed eyes. Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me, alternating, variegated, opening and then closing themselves in circles and spirals, exploding in colored fountains, rearranging and hybridizing themselves in constant flux …” end quote.
And so LSD was officially discovered. Now, there’s an actual holiday, a bit of a counterculture holiday, called Bicycle Day celebrated on April 19th, because that’s the day Hoffman did this LSD bicycle ride. Apparently people celebrate by doing LSD and riding their bikes or sometimes there’s like parades or just like psychedelic parties. April 19th, the very next day, April 20th, AKA 4/20 is the cannabis holiday. So yikes. Probably would have been nice if those two were not back to back. But, at the time of its discovery, LSD was in no way a recreational drug. Hoffman, having personally experienced the effects on two occasions now did not at all forsee it being used recreationally. He’s like “why would anyone do that?” But he did forsee its potential as a powerful psychiatric tool for people with mental health issues. And that’s how it started. It wasn’t what Hoffman was trying to make but after discovering what it actually did, Sandoz laboratories where he worked began to manufacture LSD for research purposes. It made its way to the US by 1949 and it started to be tested throughout the 1950s. Originally, they are thinking it could be used to model psychosis, so like to replicate what people with mental illnesses experience in order to further study and treat that kind of thing. But the people researching it soon realize that it’s not actually all that bad. It’s actually kind of enjoyable.
One researcher in particular, a psychoanalyst named Sidney Cohen first took LSD in 1955. He was expecting it to be kind of awful, he was expecting a bad trip, but he was pleasantly surprised. He reported quote “no confused, disoriented delirium.” and reported that the quote "problems and strivings, the worries and frustrations of everyday life vanished; in their place was a majestic, sunlit, heavenly inner quietude," end quote. And Cohen, after experiencing this realizes that LSD could have a lot of really helpful applications. He theorizes that it could be used in psychotherapy, as a cure for alcoholism, and as a way to increase creativity. And he teams up with author Aldous Huxley actually, who wrote the book “Brave New World,” and they start testing LSD for these purposes. Other people are testing it too. Psychiatrist Oscar Janiger gave LSD to over 100 painters, writers, and composers, he’s really buying into the increased creativity potential. Another psychiatrist named Humphrey Osmond gave LSD to alcoholics at an AA meeting who had so far failed to quit drinking. After a year, 50% of the group had successfully quit, had not had a drink since taking the LSD. To date, nothing else, no other substance, no other method or strategy has been able to duplicate that success rate. Thousands of scientific papers came out during this time about LSD, books, there are international conferences happening. It’s a big deal because it seems to have all of these really helpful applications. And it isn’t hard to get. Sandoz is handing it out to whoever wants it for research purposes.
The US government, however, specifically the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency, sees another possible use for LSD entirely. And this was all top secret for decades. Word of this did not come out until 1977 when some old documents, that were supposed to have been destroyed, were discovered and when it did, people were shocked. So, let’s go to 1953, the year the Korean War ended. This is significant because men were coming home from Korea, released prisoners of war, and they were not quite right. I mean for obvious reasons, PTSD and whatnot. But rumors were arising in the US, stoked by a New York Times article actually, that US troops fighting in the Korean War had been brainwashed. The article asserted that the men were confessing to things they had never done and also that some men refused to come home altogether, that they had been converted to Communism through some kind of mind control, brainwashing tactics. And it was the Soviets of course, the Soviet Union was to blame because they were supplying North Korea with much of its military equipment and training during the war. And this is all happening during the cold war as well so there is a lot of fear and paranoia about communism taking over the world and they start to think that the Soviet Union is capable of brainwashing people. Brianna Nofil writes in an article for History.com quote “The idea of brainwashing also provided many Americans with a compelling, almost comforting, explanation for communism’s swift rise–that Soviets used the tools of brainwashing not just on enemy combatants, but on their own people. Why else would so many countries be embracing such an obviously backward ideology? American freedom of the mind versus Soviet “mind control” became a dividing line as stark as the Iron Curtain,” end quote.
The newly appointed director of the CIA, Allen Dulles said in a speech in 1953 quote “In the past few years we have become accustomed to hearing much about the battle for men’s minds–the war of ideologies. I wonder, however, whether we clearly perceive the magnitude of the problem, whether we realize how sinister the battle for men’s minds has become in Soviet hands. We might call it, in its new form, ‘brain warfare.’ We in the West are somewhat handicapped in brain warfare,” end quote. But not for long. That same year the CIA launched a top secret project code named MKUltra, the purpose of which was to make sure that the US kept up with presumed Soviet mind control technology. So MKUltra secretly experimented with different ways to control a person's mind, hypnosis, electro-shock therapy, polygraph tests, radiation, and hallucinogenic drugs, especially LSD which also happened to be trending at the time. And this testing got super controversial because some of the people being tested did so knowingly and voluntarily but a lot of them did not. A lot of them did not give consent or even know they were subjects in a test. Nofil writes quote “From mentally-impaired boys at a state school, to American soldiers, to “sexual psychopaths” at a state hospital, MK-Ultra’s programs often preyed on the most vulnerable members of society,” end quote. They did a lot of testing on prisoners who were often willing to participate in exchange for more recreation time. They even tested their own guys, CIA guys, without their consent, slipping LSD into their drinks and just watching what happened. These experiments grew more and more elaborate as the testing went on climaxing, if you will, with a project code named Operation Midnight Climax.
This was where the CIA hired prostitutes, paid them, but also promised to get them out of trouble if ever they were to get into it for their line of work. They hired them to lure unsuspecting men into this bedroom that they had set up with hidden cameras and a two way mirror. The woman would then slip the man some LSD and they would do their thing and it would be recorded and a CIA guy would be watching from behind the two way mirror. Like, beyond unethical. But of course all of this was top secret. The CIA’s inspector general wrote in 1957 quote “Precautions must be taken not only to protect operations from exposure to enemy forces but also to conceal these activities from the American public in general. The knowledge that the Agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would have serious repercussions in political and diplomatic circles and would be detrimental to the accomplishment of its mission,” end quote. Okay, um so then maybe don’t do it? Maybe the answer isn’t to keep it a secret. Maybe the answer is don’t do it.
By 1963 somebody finally wised up and was like “this is, we can’t do this anymore, we can’t be giving people LSD without their consent, this is crazy” and the project came to an end. They had also sort of determined by then that LSD didn’t make a great mind control weapon because the effects were just too unpredictable. In 1973 a bunch of documents associated with MKUltra were destroyed but in 1977 some of them which had been overlooked during the purge were discovered and this opened the can of worms right up. People freaked out. There were congressional hearings, ex-CIA employees were brought in and interrogated. Nofil writes quote “The Hearings turned over a number of disturbing details, particularly about the 1953 suicide of Dr. Frank Olson, an Army scientist who jumped out of a hotel window several days after unwittingly consuming a drink spiked with LSD,” end quote. Most of the ex-CIA employees interrogated claimed, of course, that they couldn’t remember details of the project and most of the documents had been destroyed so there is probably still a whole lot we don’t know about MKUltra. All that craziness might honestly just be the tip of the iceberg.
What’s ironic about the US government being involved in an LSD scandal is that by 1977 when MKUltra is being investigated, LSD had been completely criminalized by the US government, specifically the Nixon administration. So let’s take a look at how it went from miracle psychiatric drug handed out freely for research purposes to public enemy number one, or maybe number two, I don’t know, I think cannabis was still number one for some insane reason, that’s episode 98. A few people were accidentally responsible for the demonization of LSD and none of them were in the CIA. Ken Kesey is a key player here. Kesey was an author, a novelist, you likely recognize him as the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest. Kesey was actually a participant in MKUltra’s testing of hallucinogenic drugs like LSD, possibly without his consent. But he wasn’t actually mad about it. He was like “that was kind of awesome and pretty life changing,” and he went on to become a huge proponent of the drug, of LSD. In the early 1960s, Kesey and his group of followers which were called the Merry Pranksters hosted parties, LSD fueled parties in the San Francisco Bay area which they called “Acid Tests.” People would come to the parties, do acid, do LSD, and then there would be like music, was a big part of it, musical performances by bands like the Grateful Dead. There was fluorescent paint and black lights and other psychedelic things, lava lamps? I don’t know. It was like this big cultural movement in the early 60s. Author Tim Wolfe wrote a book about it in 1968 called “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” I have the book, haven’t read it. But I do have it. These acid tests, Kesey’s acid tests played a significant role in the counterculture movement that would develop in the 1960s culminating with the summer of love in 1967 when a bunch of young people basically flocked to San Francisco in search of a sort of communal utopia.
But Kesey wasn’t the only LSD pusher in the 60s. Over at Harvard University, two psychology professors were conducting their own acid tests, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. These two were testing LSD on Harvard students, with consent, not like MK Ultra style. They gave willing participants, they had to be graduate students, no undergrads. They gave them LSD and also mushrooms. There is a naturally occurring hallucinogenic substance called psilocybin found in over 200 species of mushrooms that has a similar effect as LSD. So Leary and Alpert are testing these hallucinogens on students also in the early 60s. Cause, at that time this stuff was not illegal and it was readily available for research purposes. But their tests started to raise some eyebrows at Harvard, mainly because they were also tripping on acid as they were conducting these tests and studying these participants. And so people start to be like, “I’m not sure how scientifically sound this actually is. And some of their colleagues started to see it as an abuse of power and it soon escalated into a sort of scandal at Harvard. Ultimately both Leary and Alpert resigned from their positions there. Leary went on to found a psychedelic religion he called League for Spiritual Discovery, get it LSD, League for Spiritual Discovery. He also coined the phrase “tune in, turn on, drop out” during a speech at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco 1967 and used it to encourage a lot of people to use LSD. He claimed that it was the secret to world peace, the expanded consciousness that it induced. Katie Lucas writes for Clemson University quote “This speech empowered individuals from all walks of life to embrace the culture of psychedelics and detach from conventional societal norms. This led to the recreational use of LSD becoming more popular than ever before,” end quote.
When Richard Alpert left Harvard in 1963, it was front page news, front page of the New York Times. And this, some theorize, was what brought LSD to national attention. Most people had never heard of it in 1963. But this New York Times article about Alpert leaving Harvard because of the acid tests they were conducting there introduced the masses to the existence LSD for the first time. Alpert ended up going to India where he got sucked into eastern philosophy and changed his name actually to Baba Ram Dass. He wrote a spiritual book called “Be Here Now.”
So we have the youth, the counterculture, the hippies, whatever you want to call them, they are experimenting with LSD, encouraged by people like Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary, and Richard Alpert and also just like a lot of musicians and artists, the Beatles. And it’s not illegal yet so it’s just rampant in the 1960s in this subculture. But of course there were a lot of Americans, mostly conservative Americans who were very against this counterculture, free love, world peace, psychedelic drugs movement. In 1968 Richard Nixon was elected president and he ran on a law and order campaign. He was going to put a stop to what he perceived as the lawlessness of the counterculture movement. And a huge part of doing that was initiating a war on drugs. And this was all very strategic. I talk about this some in the Cannabis episode. They aren’t going after these drugs, LSD, Cannabis, mushrooms because they are inherently super dangerous. They are going after them as a way of going after other airquotes “societal problems” that they can’t openly attack. For example, Vietnam war protesters and Black people. They tie the recreational drug use to these specific groups and then by taking down the drugs, they take down the groups. I’m not making this up. I’m not being conspiratorial. They’ve actually admitted this. John Erlichman who was part of the White House Counsel during the Nixon Administration said in 1994 quote “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the [Vietnam War] or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did,” end quote. Alexis Turner adds in that Harvard News article I mentioned in the opener quote “Historically, it has been very easy to make drugs the centerpiece of a ‘tough on crime’ approach in the US. It’s deeply wrapped up in the country’s history of racist discourse. LSD users were mostly white, so the right associated it with the Beats, white poets known for hanging out with Black people. Beatniks were the ‘bad’ white people who were too close to the communities of color that threatened to infiltrate middle-class, white suburbs,” end quote.
In 1970, Congress passed the Controlled Substances Act which criminalized LSD as a schedule one drug categorized that way because they claimed it had quote “no currently accepted medical use” and a quote “high potential for abuse” just like cannabis. And so it became super illegal and anyone caught possessing it or using it gets hauled off to jail. Easy way to take out a group you can’t otherwise criminalize. You can’t arrest people for being Black or for opposing the Vietnam war or for being Beatniks. But you can arrest them for using a drug they’re partial to and that you’ve strategically identified them as users of. So, there’s motive there.
After 1977 though when all this came out about MK Ultra, the CIA using LSD in secret mind control tests, this kind of turned people away from using it recreationally. Right, they saw it initially as the drug of the counterculture but when they realized that the CIA, the US government was actually using it first, it kind of put a bad taste in their mouths. All of a sudden LSD wasn’t the drug of the counterculture, it was the drug of the man, right, the government, big brother. And there was a shift away from LSD use and towards the use of cocaine helped along by the rise of the disco scene in the late 70s. Then it came back some in the 90s.
But if you remember, all the way back to the beginning, to 1943 when Albert Hoffman took that fateful bicycle ride while tripping on way too much acid, originally LSD was seen as medicine, not a government mind control weapon, not a recreational drug, but medicine with practical applications for psychiatric patients and alcoholics. Early tests that were all but forgotten in everything that came after suggested that LSD showed a lot of promise in those areas. But the adoption by the counterculture in the 60s and the revelation of the MK Ultra scandal in the 70s all but destroyed public opinion of LSD, nails in the coffin. Not until recently has there been a resurgence of medical interest in it. And the interest has actually shifted in a slightly new direction. Yes, LSD still shows promise in treating mental health and alcoholism, but Dr. Erica Dyke suggests another use altogether in an article in the National Library of Medicine. She writes quote “Evidence is mounting that a new era of psychedelic medicine may be around the corner. Laboratories in the United States and Europe have already been conducting trials for several years. The historical context may have changed to permit these experiments, but who will champion this next phase of psychedelic science? In 1963, Aldous Huxley received LSD on his death bed and suggested that its effects bathed him in a vision of warmth and spiritual belonging, such that he could face death without fear. Palliative care has been an area identified for the potential use of psychedelics for precisely this reason; not as a treatment, but as a psychological therapy that helps people face death. Will the growing need for palliation change the context sufficiently to warrant a second look at LSD clinically? As baby boomers age, placing greater demands on end-of-life care than we have faced in the past, will they again tip the demographic scales and create sufficient patient demand for LSD?,” end quote.
New medical developments and research have, of course, piqued the interest of Dr. Alexis Turner over at Harvard University. Paul Massari writes in his article quote “While Turner is intrigued to see LSD come out from the shadows, he worries that scientists are repeating some of the mistakes of the past. “I am a little concerned that some of the current [efforts to rehabilitate LSD] rely on the ‘good science versus bad science’ distinction that got it into trouble in the 1960s,” he says. “That leads to medicalization and heavy regulation, which tends to create black markets because of the high prices that pharmaceutical companies charge for new drugs. And in this country, the people who often bear the brunt of criminalization are Black and Brown, queer, and poor.” Rather than incarcerating everyone who uses LSD or consigning the drug again to the control of the medical establishment, Turner hopes policymakers will pursue a simpler solution: decriminalization. “It’s more of an uphill battle,” he admits. “The people pursuing medicalization are pretty savvy. Their strategy takes into account the fears of the public and the misinformation around LSD. But when you consider the potential impact on social and racial justice, I believe that decriminalization is a better option in the long run. Let people purchase and use LSD safely as they choose.” end quote.
So there you have it. Lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD, a powerful hallucinogen discovered by mistake, went completely unregulated for decades, showed promise in treating alcoholism and improving psychotherapy, modeling psychosis to study mental health disorders like schizophrenia. But before researchers could really put it to any good use two very different groups adopted it first, the CIA for top secret and highly unethical mind control testing as a part of project MKUltra and the counterculture, the hippies of the summer of love, the artists, the musicians, the Vietnam war protestors, the beatniks, groups Richard Nixon’s conservative government wanted very much to quash and so by criminalizing LSD, he had an excuse to arrest them, to haul them off the streets and throw them in jail. And now it seems we’ve come full circle. Back to medical research. But has the context changed enough to allow for success this time? Dr. Erika Dyke talks about using LSD for end of life care, easing people into death without fear “bathed in a vision of warmth and spiritual belonging” as Aldous Huxley reported from his own deathbed. She talks about the growing demand for this sort of thing because of the aging baby boomer generation. Baby boomers, many of whom were young adults when LSD first came on the scene, many of whom experimented with it before it became illegal, experienced the awakening, the expansion of consciousness. In a way LSD ushered them into being. And now, now we’ve come full circle again in a totally different way. Now LSD might be just the thing to usher them back out.
Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix, I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow History Fix on whatever app you’re using to listen, and help me spread the word by telling a few friends about it. That’ll make it much easier to get your next fix.
Information used in this episode was sourced from History.com, Harvard University, Clemson University, the National Library of Medicine, Wikipedia, Smithsonian Magazine, and the Harvard Crimson. As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.
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