1943-1962

John Huston's documentary for the U.S. Army about soldiers treated for psychiatric breakdown at Mason General Hospital on Long Island after the Second World War. The Army kept it from the public until 1980. Its scenes of narcosynthesis, in which doctors interview soldiers under an intravenous barbiturate, record a drug-assisted psychotherapy that came before the LSD era.

Werner Stoll's first systematic clinical study of LSD, examining sixteen healthy volunteers and six schizophrenic patients, plus Stoll's own self-experiment. Published in 1947 following Hofmann's 1943 discovery at Sandoz, it established key vocabulary for psychiatric LSD research.

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.

A memo from anthropologist [Margaret Mead](/biographies/margaret-mead)'s papers at the Library of Congress, recording her interest in LSD and other psychedelics in the summer of 1954 and her work with [Harold Abramson](/biographies/harold-abramson)'s research team, including [Conan Kornetsky](/biographies/conan-kornetsky) and [Murray Jarvik](/biographies/murray-jarvik).

The psychologist Betty Eisner (1915–2004) recalls being the first research subject in Sidney Cohen's LSD study at UCLA in October 1955, quoting at length from the report she wrote after the session. The excerpt describes the psychological tests she was asked to take while under the drug, and her sense that they were trivial beside what she was experiencing. It is the opening chapter of her unpublished memoir, Remembrances of LSD Therapy Past (2002).

A 1955 medical film made for the drug company Wm. S. Merrell about Howard D. Fabing's experiments at Christ Hospital in Cincinnati. A 22-year-old graduate student, "Ronnie," takes 100 micrograms of LSD; the film then shows Merrell's compound MER-17 (azacyclonol, sold as Frenquel) given to prevent or reverse the effects. It belongs to the 1950s search for drugs that could block a "model psychosis."

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.

R. Gordon Wasson's photo-essay in Life magazine announcing that he and photographer Allan Richardson had participated in a Mazatec mushroom ceremony near Huautla de Jiménez in June 1955. The article, illustrated with color photographs and watercolor plates, named Roger Heim as Wasson's collaborator.

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.

The Tenth Circuit affirms dismissal of a Native American Church suit against the Navajo Tribal Council's 1940 peyote ban, holding that the First Amendment does not apply to tribal governments unless Congress extends it. The court treats tribes as sovereign nations outside the federal Constitution.

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.

A declassified Army Chemical Research and Development Laboratories report on EA 1729 (LSD-25) as a non-lethal incapacitating agent. Includes clinical studies from 1955-1960 and September 1958 field tests at Fort Bragg in which whole military units were dosed with LSD and evaluated on operational tasks; all units proved unable to perform their missions.

A newspaper report that NASA had given John C. Lilly's Communication Research Institute an $80,700 contract to study communication between humans and dolphins. It shows the space-age funding behind the dolphin research that later included Lilly's LSD experiments.

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.