Hallucinogen

   Drugs to induce hallucinations experimentally—even therapeutically— were introduced in psychiatry in the 1940s under the label "psychotomimetics" or "psychodysleptics." The prehistory: In 1845, Paris psychiatrist Jacques-Joseph Moreau (1804–1884) (called "Moreau de Tours," after the city where he began his medical studies) initiated the study of experimental psychosis through his work on Hashish and Mental Illness (Du hachisch et de l’aliénation mentale: études psychologiques). The subject rested then for many years, to be resumed again by the great Berlin pharmacology professor Louis Lewin (1850–1929) in his 1924 study Phantastica: the Sedative and Excitatory Drugs of Pleasure (Phantastica: die betäubenden und erregenden Genussmittel), where he did experimental work on opium, cocaine, and cannabis indica, among other drugs. (Lewin, who refused to convert to Christianity, never received a proper professorship and had been only "titular professor" at Berlin’s Technical University [Technische Hochschule], "honorary professor" at the time he wrote this book.)

   Kurt Beringer (1893–1949) at Heidelberg was known for writing in 1927 the classic work, his Habilitation, on mescaline intoxication (Der Meskalinrausch)—the first work on experimental psychosis as a way of studying psychopathology. In 1934 in the American Journal of Psychiatry, Erich Lindemann (1900–1974), then a resident at the University of Iowa, explained how they had used mescaline, hashish, cocaine, and Sodium Amytal on schizophrenic and psychoneurotic patients at the university psychiatric hospital. Yet, the modern era of using drugs to investigate brain function was arguably introduced in 1943 by lysergic acid diethylamide, referred to as "LSD-25," which Albert Hofmann (1906–), a chemist at Sandoz Limited in Basel, Switzerland, together with a colleague, synthesized in 1938 in an effort to find drugs that act on the uterus in the same manner as ergot. In 1943, Hofmann returned to the compound and serendipitously noted that it made him dizzy; then, curious about its brain effects, he carried out a systematic self-experiment, discovering it to be a powerful hallucinogen. Up to that point, no compound had been known in psychiatry with such an ability to transform perception. In 1947, psychiatrist Werner Stoll, the son of the Sandoz pharmacology director Arthur Stoll (1887–1971), did a controlled clinical study of LSD (6 schizophrenic patients and 16 normal controls) at the Burghölzli mental hospital (published in the Swiss Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry), and Sandoz made it available as the investigational drug Delysid, said to improve patients’ ability to recall distant memories in psychotherapy. In 1949, Gion Condrau (1919–) at the Burghölzli tried it on a wider range of diagnoses and reported in the Acta Psychiatrica Neurologia that most patients were actually quite unresponsive, unlike the dramatic effects on controls. Thereafter, therapeutic use of the hallucinogens went in two directions: as a low-dose "psycholytic" on neurotic patients; see the first therapeutic study of LSD in the United States in 1950 by Anthony K. Busch (1905–) of the St. Louis State Hospital and Warren C. Johnson (1923–) of Washington University, who concluded in Diseases of the Nervous System that "L.S.D. 25 may offer a means for more readily gaining access to the chronically withdrawn patients. It may also serve as a new tool for shortening psychotherapy" (p. 243). The other direction was as a high-dose "psychedelic"; the term was suggested in 1957 by Humphrey Fortescue Osmond (1917–2004), the superintendent of Saskatchewan Hospital in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences: "I have tried to find an appropriate name for the agents under discussion," said Osmond, "a name that will include the concepts of enriching the mind and enlarging the vision. . . . My choice, because it is clear, euphonious, and uncontaminated by other associations, is psychedelic, mind-manifesting" (p. 429). Osmond initiated the use of psychedelics on chronic alcoholics, among other patients; see the 1965 review of medical uses of LSD in Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics by Abram Hoffer (1917–), a psychiatric researcher then at University Hospital in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, who had worked with Osmond at Weyburn.

   In 1953, Osmond famously introduced mescaline to novelist Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), who remained curious about mind-transforming drugs, having featured them so prominently in his novel Brave New World (1932), a totalitarian society in which people are controlled by drugs. As the New York Times reported in Osmond’s obituary, Huxley had proposed his own term for such drugs to Osmond: To make this trivial world sublime, take half a gram of phanerothyme.

   Rejecting that, Osmond responded, To fathom Hell or soar angelic, Just take a pinch of psychedelic.

   In 1954, Herman C. B. Denber (1917–2000) of Manhattan State Hospital on Ward’s Island in New York, and Sidney Merlis (1925–) of the Central Islip State Hospital on Long Island, initiated efforts to use mescaline therapeutically. They published in Psychiatric Quarterly a clinical trial of 10 patients with various diagnoses who had taken the drug together with chlorpromazine, and then were studied electroencephalographically. "In general, anxiety and tension disappeared following the mescalinechlorpromazine injections," they reported. "Agitation gave way to complacency. The depression, where present, lifted and the mood lightened" (p. 639). They obtained supplies from the drug house Smith, Kline & French Laboratories, which apparently had mescaline in development.

   In 1965, Sandoz stopped distributing LSD-25 because of a rising epidemic of street use (yet it remains available for medical use in Switzerland at the time of the present writing). Knowledge of the ability of a chemical compound to transform brain and mind function, especially what researchers believed at the time was its ability to produce "model psychoses," catalyzed research in psychopharmacology, making LSD-25, along with chlorpromazine, one of the germinative drugs of the discipline.

   In 1964, just before the eclipse of LSD, one medical reader poetized tongue-incheek in the Journal of the American Medical Association: Give me a chalice of lysergic To quaff when day is done, That I may get a perceptual kick From my diencephalon.

   . . .

   So hey! It’s off for the visions bizarre, Past the ego boundary, For a snort at the psychedelic bar Of the new psychiatry.