Canada’s rich and complicated history of psychedelic research
It’s no exaggeration to say that Canada has become a hub for psychedelic research in 2022, but it’s not the first time significant work has been done here on this intriguing class of drugs.
In the 1950s, two humble (and perhaps unlikely) places were home to some of the earliest and most important uses and investigations of psychedelics: the prairie province of Saskatchewan and the city of New Westminster, British Columbia.
No one has studied Canada’s psychedelic past more extensively than Dr. Erica Dyck, Professor of History and Canadian Research Chair in the History of Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan.
She is the co-author of more than 60 articles and several books on the subject, including her most recent The Acid Room: The Psychedelic Trials and Tribulations of Hollywood Hospital.
Co-written with Jesse Donaldson, it tells the story of Hollywood Hospital in BC, where more than 6,000 supervised LSD trips took place between 1957 and 1975. It still holds the title of the longest running psychedelics clinic in the world.
In a recent interview with Leafly, Dyck explained how political reform and public health advances in the 1950s paved the way for research into psychedelics in Canada and what we can learn from the early investigations of these powerful compounds.
Socialism makes Saskatchewan an “ideological magnet” in the 1940s.
It was the election of North America’s first socialist government in Saskatchewan in 1944 that attracted international researchers to the province and paved the way for experiments with LSD.
Tommy Douglas, the newly elected provincial leader, had promised to make health care available to all Saskatchewan residents. (Interestingly, Canada’s national Medicare program would eventually use Douglas’ system as a model.)
Aggressive health care reforms began to unfold under his leadership.
“During the economic crisis, a lot of middle-class professionals left the province, so part of the health care reforms was a pretty intense recruiting of people in Saskatchewan and in the health field,” Dyck said in a Zoom interview.
“He ran ads in various places, trying to recruit people with a combined interest in research and reform. Saskatchewan became something of an ideological magnet for people with a research-intensive focus on healthcare reform.”
The ads drew professionals like Dr. Humphry Osmond, a British psychiatrist who had studied hallucinogenic drugs and psychotic disorders in London.
He moved to Saskatchewan in 1951 to work as the director of the Saskatchewan Mental Hospital in Weyburn, one of the most overcrowded institutions in North America.
The institution had a reputation for poor treatment, but Osmond was keen to provide patients with better quality care.
He started with Dr. Abram Hoffer, a biochemist and psychiatrist who worked for the Saskatchewan Department of Health and Human Services and shared Osmond’s enthusiasm for improving mental health care in the province.
The two experimented with LSD themselves and took it with their wives. Hoffer had been made aware of the potential of LSD by a man named Al Hubbard, an entrepreneur and early proponent of the drug, who had made it his mission to popularize it with influential people.
In Saskatchewan, Osmond and Hoffer explored two main goals, first hypothesizing that psychedelic drugs such as LSD and mescaline, the active ingredient in peyote, were psychotomimetic; that is, they produced effects resembling psychosis. They also studied the effects of LSD on alcohol use disorders and hypothesized that an experience with LSD might facilitate patient recovery.
Osmond and Hoffer held sessions at various locations across the province, and while they probably would not have met current scientific standards, the two were able to show that administering LSD to patients with alcohol use disorders resulted in improved health outcomes.
Together they administered LSD to an estimated 2,000 patients with great success. Their results showed that two years after LSD treatment, 50 to 90 percent of patients had fully recovered from the alcohol use disorder. Other researchers quickly became interested in their work and the potential benefits of this exciting new compound.
Hollywood Hospital records show patients seeking psychedelic treatment for trauma, marital disputes, and same-sex attraction
While Osmond and Hoffer were administering psychedelics to patients in Saskatchewan public health facilities, Dr. J. Ross MacLean plans for a private hospital he bought in New Westminster, BC
The facility, Hollywood Hospital, was already known for its alcohol use disorder treatment program: In 1957, MacLean merged with LSD proponent Hubbard, who at the time was the only licensed LSD importer in Canada. Soon after, Hollywood Hospital began offering LSD treatments to patients.
In addition to alcohol use disorder, patients who came to the hospital for LSD treatment attempted to overcome anxiety, depression, and even marital strife.
Despite being separated by two provinces, the Saskatchewan and New Westminster teams were well connected: “They shared a lot of correspondence, they shared supplies, and they definitely shared protocols or guidelines for dosing and how treatment rooms were set up.” ‘ Dyke said.
In writing The Acid Room, Dyck relied heavily on the hospital records, which she digitized for the BC Museum and Archives after being released from a private collection.
Compared to the use of LSD in Saskatchewan, which arose as a result of health care reform, the use of LSD at New Westminster’s Hollywood Private Hospital had more to do with financial opportunities, according to Dyck.
“It appeared that many patients were referred by social services and my impression from reviewing the files is that even though this was a private hospital, they had trouble collecting their payments,” she said.
“This was an opportunity to balance the books, but it also appealed to MacLean as a director with a vision to embrace these experimental connections.”
Patients were billed between $600 and $1,000 per treatment.
Rumors circulated at the time that celebrity patients were traveling to New Westminster for treatment at Hollywood Hospital, including actor Cary Grant and singer Andy Williams, but Dyck says she can’t find any records of their treatment.
“There were a few interesting people in there, but not the ones I associated it with from the newspapers,” Dyck said.
Hollywood Hospital was perhaps best known for its treatment of alcohol use disorders, but Dyck’s research found that patients received treatment for a wide range of trauma.
“What intrigued me wasn’t so much the star-studded power as the diversity of experiences, from people who survived the Holocaust to people trying to gain insights into same-sex attraction,” Dyck added .
Indigenous ceremonies served to combine clinical and spiritual experiences with herbal healing
At the time, researchers’ curiosity was not limited to the physiological effects of mescaline or LSD. Osmond and Hoffer were also interested in learning about the nature of indigenous ceremonies that focused on the consumption of hallucinogenic plant medicines such as peyote.
When a chapter of the Native American Church near North Battleford, Saskatchewan, Osmond and three other white scientists were recognized, they were invited to attend a peyote ceremony hosted by the Red Pheasant Band and reported to the federal government on their knowledge of the experience.
Appreciating the ceremonial setting and context, Osmond began to borrow concepts from ceremonies to be used in his treatment room, such as dimming the lights and playing music.
“You see this time of this real fascination with these intersections between spirituality, indigenous knowledge and herbal healing, but at the same time Western medicine is pushing towards these very reductionist categories,” Dyck explained.
In 1952, the first Diagnostics and Statistical Manual was published, marking a turning point in Western models of psychiatry and pathological conditions and placing a focus on individual symptoms.
At the same time, some of the first psychiatric drugs for these disorders were marketed to the public. This silo view was at odds with the experience of attending a ceremony, which might involve the use of several different plants, musical instruments, and chanting, Dyck said.
For the psychiatrists who studied them, this put psychedelics in an interesting area where they were part of the pharmacological revolution, but they also represented, according to Dyck, a different way of approaching pharmacy “that goes back to these other avenues of knowing.” ”
“This methodological tension has really created a huge gulf in terms of thinking about indigenous practices versus non-indigenous practices, and we see that bouncing through the conversations today as well.”
We must look to the past to bring psychedelic healing and research into the future
Now that researchers are studying psychedelics with the same vigor they did in the ’50s and ’60s, Dyck said there is much to be learned from history, although she does indicate that there is a tendency among researchers today to ignore the work of the past to discard .
“There’s a desire to hide it like they don’t know what they’re doing or it’s really rudimentary or crude, but I think it’s wrong to caricature the past to show that we’re better at handling things have today,” she said.
“I think many of the same questions that have plagued researchers in the past still bother us, like how should they be regulated?” Should they be regulated at all?”
Dyck also noted that psychedelics are unique in that they are the only drugs for which proponents argue that physicians and therapists working with them should have personal experience with them first.
“When we think about harm reduction language, is it safer to rely on people with personal experience to guide someone through a therapy session? Taking psychoactive substances is not part of medical school,” she said.
These are just some of the existential and methodological questions psychedelics raise for the future of psychedelics. And while she said some of the questions have been exposed in the past, they largely went unanswered.
“We can learn a lot from studying the past to see where some of the minefields that still exist in this landscape are.”
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