Al Hubbard, the Johnny Appleseed of LSD

“The Original Capt. Trips.”

The scientists, therapists, and artists who experimented with LSD therapy in the late 1950s were not prepared for the likes of Timothy Leary, novelist Ken Kesey, poet Allen Ginsberg, and the assorted freaks, pranksters, con artists and runaways of the Woodstock Generation. Ken Kesey, in particular, delighted in stinging the Feds by insisting that it was Uncle Sam who first got him high, paying Kesey and others to take LSD, guinea pig-style, in certain government-funded research programs in Palo Alto and at Stanford University in the early 1960s.

It made a great story, and it happened to be true. However, the original chapter of the acid story began ten years earlier, when a former intelligence agent, rogue businessman, and general intellectual gadfly named Al Hubbard took his first LSD trip. Captain Alfred M. Hubbard, who has been dubbed the “Original Capt. Trips,” was part of a select cadre of World War II veterans who had been involved in creating intelligence institutions like the Office of Strategic Services and the CIA, and who had immersed themselves in cryptology and truth serums and interrogation drugs in the service of the war effort. (Thomas Pynchon caricatured some of this work in his novel, Gravity’s Rainbow.) Hubbard broke ranks with the intelligence community early on, but continued to share his clandestine stash of LSD with certain friends and acquaintances. This odd and extraordinary businessman is said to have arranged private LSD sessions in the late 1950s for scientists, captains of industry, members of the British parliament, UN representatives, prime ministers, and various artists. For a time, Al Hubbard settled in Vancouver, where he became Canada’s only legally licensed, FDA-approved importer of Sandoz LSD. In certain North American research circles, Al became a very popular man.

Hubbard is credited by various parties with being the man who put together the basics of the North American psychedelic therapy sessions and hippie acid tests to come—high doses of LSD, amplified music, strobe lights, and experiments with ESP. Along with Huxley, Hubbard came to believe that the more mystical or “transpersonal” experiences LSD sometimes afforded might hold considerable psychotherapeutic potential. With LSD provided by Hubbard, Canadians Abram Hoffer, Ross Mclean, and Humphrey Osmond pursued the idea of LSD as a treatment for alcoholism. In the U.S, research on LSD and alcoholism was undertaken by Oscar Janiger, Sanford Unger, and others on the West Coast.

Throughout this period, there were LSD clinics operating in England and Europe. European LSD therapists tended to use very low doses as an adjunct to traditional psychoanalytic techniques. But North American researchers took a different, bolder approach. When “psychedelic” therapy began to catch on in Canada and the United States, therapists typically gave patients only one or two sessions at very high doses. These early efforts were aimed at producing spontaneous breakthroughs or recoveries in alcoholics through some manner of religious epiphany or inner conversion experience. The only other quasi-medical approach of the day, the Schick Treatment Center’s brand of “aversion therapy,” was not seen to produce very compelling long-term recovery rates, and subsequently fell out of favor.

In this light, the early successes with LSD therapy, sometimes claimed to be in the 50-75 per cent range, looked noteworthy indeed. However, the design and criteria of the LSD/alcoholism studies varied so widely that it has never been possible to draw definitive conclusions about the work that was done, except to say that LSD therapy seemed to be strikingly effective for certain alcoholics. Some patients were claiming that two or three trips on LSD were worth years of conventional psychotherapy—a claim not heard again until the advent of Prozac thirty years later.

Adapted from The Chemical Carousel: What Science Tells Us About Beating Addiction by Dirk Hanson © 2008, 2009.

Photo Credit: http://www.declarepeace.org.uk/

Some Background on the Psychedelic Renaissance

Ecstasy, MAPS, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

The psychedelic drugs, new and old, are not only among the most powerful ever discovered, but are also tremendously difficult to study and utilize responsibly. By the mid-1990s, rumors about Ecstasy (MDMA) toxicity were everywhere. Unlike Prozac, but very much like LSD, Ecstasy not only blocks serotonin uptake, but also causes the release of additional serotonin, much the way cocaine and amphetamine cause the release of extra dopamine.

A study conducted by neurologist George Ricaurte at John Hopkins University under NIDA sponsorship seemed to show conclusive evidence of neurotoxic damage to the serotonin 5-HT receptors in the brains of monkeys given large doses of MDMA. A follow-up study of 30 MDMA users (existing users, since researchers didn’t have government permission to give MDMA to test subjects) showed 30 per cent less cerebrospinal serotonin, compared to a control group. However, the Johns Hopkins team did not have any baseline measurements for the MDMA users, and other neurologists raised technical objections about various aspects of the study, including dosage levels. As was often the case in such studies, the monkeys had been given a whopping dose, compared to the typical raver’s dose. Ricaurte insisted that the amount of MDMA consumed by a typical user in one night of raving was possibly enough to cause permanent brain damage. The government estimates that 10 million Americans have taken Ecstasy.

That would seem to be the end of the story, and a sobering lesson for today’s youth—but that is not how it turned out. A few years later, Dr. Charles Grob, psychiatry professor at the UCLA School of Medicine, received the first FDA approval ever given for the administration of MDMA to human volunteers. The result of Grob’s testing was that none of the volunteers showed any evidence of neuropsychological damage of any kind. In testimony before the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which was considering harsher penalties for MDMA possession in 2001, Dr. Grob seriously questioned the methodology of the Ricaurte studies: “It is very unfortunate that the lavishly funded NIDA-promoted position on so-called MDMA neurotoxicity has inhibited alternative research models which would better delineate the true range of effects of MDMA, including its potential application as a therapeutic medicine.” Science retracted its coverage of the Ricaurte findings.

It was eventually discovered that Dr. Ricaurte’s monkeys had been injected with amphetamine, not with MDMA—a discovery that also nullified four other published papers. Dr. Ricaurte explained that some labels had been switched, and a Johns Hopkins spokesperson called the whole thing “an honest mistake.” The basic questions about Ecstasy remain unanswered. Is there a line that separates a conceivably therapeutic dose of Ecstasy for mental ills or addictive ills from a possibly brain-damaging run of several dozen high-dosage trips? Perhaps the permanently altered receptor arrays, if they exist, don’t affect cognition or emotions in any significant way over the long run. Still, the risks of overindulgence appear to be at least potentially higher than the risks of overindulging in LSD or Ibogaine. All of the psychedelics tend to be more self-limiting than other categories of psychoactive drugs, anyway. After two or three days, even the most die-hard raver or LSD head is usually ready to take a break.

Rick Doblin and others at  the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) are now working with government investigators to pursue MDMA for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. There are reports that very low doses of LSD sometimes have an antidepressant effect. One thing we know for certain is that people on SSRI medications or MAO inhibitors report that their experiences on LSD or Ecstasy are shorter and far less powerful than is typically the case.  There appears to be some competition for receptor sites when Zoloft meets LSD. In contrast to the diminished psychedelic experience while on SSRIs, the older norepinephrine-active tricyclics like Tofranil and Norpramine reportedly serve to potentiate the LSD or MDMA experience. None of these combinations is a wise idea, due to uncertainties about the interactions.

Even DMT, which experienced trippers compared to being shot out of a cannon, has returned as a legitimate study subject. Dr. Rick Strassman, then with the University of New Mexico’s School of Medicine, received approval for clinical testing of DMT. Strassman was drawn to the subject because of the molecule’s natural occurrence in the brain (which makes every man, woman, and child in America a drug criminal, chemically speaking). He gave DMT to 60 human volunteers over a study period of five years. Strassman was primarily interested in near-death experiences and mystical experiences. None of the supervised DMT sessions evidently resulted in any detectable harm to the participants. Strassman presents his views on the medical use of DMT in his book, DMT: The Spirit Molecule.

Adapted from The Chemical Carousel: What Science Tells Us About Beating Addiction by Dirk Hanson © 2008, 2009.

Graphics Credit: http://hightimes.com/

Clinical LSD

“Psychedelic psychotherapy” makes a comeback.



“Take a tab of Sunshine and call me in the morning.”

No, we haven’t reached that point yet. But there is a growing movement among research scientists to take another look at powerfully psychoactive drugs like LSD, psilocybin, MDMA and ibogaine as treatments for a variety of illnesses.

In June, the first clinical trial of LSD since the 1970s began in Switzerland, according to the U.K. Guardian. While LSD has sparked renewed interest as a potential treatment for everything from depression to cluster headaches to post-traumatic stress disorder, the Swiss trial will focus on administering LSD in varying doses to eight terminally ill subjects. “During the course of therapy,” the Guardian reported, “researchers will assess the patients’ anxiety levels, quality of life and pain levels.”

“The working hypothesis is that if psilocybin or LSD can occasion these experiences of great personal meaning and spiritual significance,” said Professor Roland Griffiths of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, “then it would allow [terminal patients] hopefully to face their own demise completely differently—to restructure some of the psychological angst that so often occurs concurrently with severe disease.”

Griffiths recently conducted a study of the effects of psilocybin on 36 health adult volunteers, the results of which were published in the British Journal of Psychopharmacology. “When administered under supportive conditions,” Griffiths concluded, “psilocybin occasioned experiences similar to spontaneously occurring mystical experiences that, at 14-month follow-up, were considered by volunteers to be among the most personally meaningful and spiritually significant of their lives.”

Griffiths told the Guardian that drugs classed as hallucinogenic had become thoroughly demonized after the excesses of the 1960s. “As a culture we just decided clinical research shouldn’t be done with this class of compounds,” he commented. “This was partly the federal regulatory authorities, it was partly the funding agencies and it was partly the academics themselves—Leary had so discredited a scientific approach to studying these compounds that anyone who expressed an interest in doing so was automatically discredited.”

The Journal of Psychopharmacology recently published a training manual for the use of investigators who are currently studying the effects of such drugs. According to the manual, psychedelic drugs are relatively safe when administered at the proper dose by a trained medical professional. The drugs are non-toxic, non-addictive, and, except in rare cases, do not cause long-lasting psychoses.

A paper in the same journal by B. Sessa of the Psychopharmacology Unit, Bristol University, concluded:

“There are similarities between the typical traits of creative people and the subjective psychological characteristics of the psychedelic (hallucinogenic) drug experience. This phenomenon was studied in a number of small trials and case studies in the 1960s. Results were inconclusive, and the quality of these studies – by modern research standards – was merely anecdotal. Nevertheless, with today’s current renaissance in psychedelic drug research and the growing interest in cognitive enhancing drugs, now may be the time to re-visit these studies with contemporary research methods.”

In the U.S., psychology professor Charles Grob of the Harbor-UCLA Medical Centre also recently completed a clinical trial using psilocybin to treat terminally ill cancer patients.

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