1950-1970 / Academic Article

A New Approach

Osmond and Smythies argue that schizophrenia involves a naturally occurring adrenaline derivative chemically close to mescaline. Hosted here is a fair-use excerpt: their case that mescaline intoxication reproduces the symptoms of acute schizophrenia, the biochemical note on how a disorder of adrenaline's transmethylation could form such a compound, and their resulting hypothesis and discussion.

Rinkel and colleagues at Boston Psychopathic Hospital administered microgram doses of LSD tartrate to normal volunteers and schizophrenic, depressive, and paranoid patients. They reported the drug reliably produced thought disorder, hallucination, and depersonalization resembling clinical schizophrenia.

I. Effects in Former Morphine Addicts and Development of Tolerance During Chronic Intoxication

Harris Isbell and colleagues at the NIMH Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Kentucky, gave LSD daily for up to eighty-five days to former morphine addicts to measure tolerance and compare effects to psychosis. They found rapid tolerance to both physiological and mental effects, which disappeared upon discontinuation.

Osmond surveyed psychotomimetic agents and proposed new terminologies, settling on "psychedelic, mind-manifesting" as his choice. This paper put the word into circulation among psychiatrists, coining the term still used today.

Foundations for a Combined Therapeutic Technique

Luisa G. de Álvarez de Toledo's paper to the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association in Buenos Aires on September 10, 1957, setting out a method for combining LSD sessions with psychoanalysis. Case reports by Alberto E. Fontana and Francisco Pérez Morales follow. It is one of the earliest attempts in Latin America to fit LSD into psychoanalytic treatment.

Side Effects and Complications

Sidney Cohen surveyed researchers at the VA Neuropsychiatric Hospital who had administered LSD or mescaline to nearly 5,000 subjects across more than 25,000 doses. He found no cases of serious prolonged physical harm and quantified low rates of suicide attempts, psychotic breaks over 48 hours, and other adverse effects.

The first scientific identification of Salvia divinorum, published in Harvard's Botanical Museum Leaflets. Wasson reports ingesting the Mazatec 'leaves of the Shepherdess' at two ceremonies in Oaxaca in 1961-62, attended on the second occasion by Albert Hofmann and his wife.

The founding issue of The Psychedelic Review, published in June 1963 by Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzner's International Federation for Internal Freedom. Hosted here are the issue's unsigned Editorial and Statement of Purpose, which set out the journal's program and explain its choice of the word 'psychedelic.' The issue's bylined articles, by Gerald Heard, R. Gordon Wasson, and Alan Watts, are described in the front matter but not reproduced.

A Chilean psychiatrist's report on harmala alkaloids, ayahuasca-related beta-carbolines, and comparative human experiments with harmaline and mescaline at the University of Chile.

Banisteriopsis caapi

A Colombian Amazon ethnographic study placing Tukano use of Banisteriopsis caapi, or yajé, within a wider cultural system of mythology, ritual, symbolism, perception, and social knowledge.