Peaking on the Prairies

Hoffer was the son of a Justice of the Peace and he had grown up watching rcmp officers bringing people home, where his dad would conduct impromptu hearings in the kitchen. If a guest were deemed a lunatic — one well-dressed and cordial gentlemen insisted he was the Prince of Wales — Hoffer’s father would commit him to a mental hospital, from which such patients rarely returned. Back then, the treatment for schizophrenia (a fairly standard diagnosis) consisted mainly of inducing patients into comas using insulin, which caused some to die. Electroconvulsive therapy was also a common treatment technique — induced without anaesthetic, the convulsions were known to break patients’ bones. Having seen first-hand the plight of these harmless individuals, Hoffer became interested in mental illness. Later, when he became a doctor, he decided to study psychiatry because so little was known about mental disorders.

Hoffer’s English colleague, a British doctor named Humphry Osmond, had tried to get approval for using mescaline to treat schizophrenia, but was rebuffed so emphatically by English medical authorities that he vowed to move as far away from the country as possible. Saskatchewan, with its robust funding and wide-open ideology, seemed about right. Osmond met Hoffer soon after he arrived in the province, and the two psychiatrists formed an instant friendship. Both believed that the prevailing ideas about mental illness were fundamentally wrong. They hypothesized that schizophrenia was partly biochemical in origin. Osmond knew lsd, like mescaline, was a psychomimetic (madness-mimicking) drug that produced psychological effects similar to schizophrenia. He reasoned that if they could learn how to construct psychosis with lsd, they might also learn how to deconstruct it with a chemical antidote.

Osmond and Hoffer launched their studies in 1952, with start-up funding from the Saskatchewan government. One of the first tests took place in the Munroe Wing of the Regina General Hospital. Believing that the experience would help them to understand their debilitated patients, a number of doctors and nurses at the hospital volunteered to take lsd. The volunteers prepared themselves for an unpleasant day-long bout of hallucinations and paranoia, but the results were surprising. In written reports, most of the volunteers said their lsd experience provided them with moments of insight that they found both deeply affecting and difficult to describe.

Other psychiatrists from across the province soon joined the team, and chronic alcoholics volunteered to take lsd under their supervision. At the time, many psychiatrists considered alcoholism to be a character flaw — not a biochemical disease — and it was widely believed that alcoholics seldom quit drinking until they hit rock bottom and experienced all the grisly side effects of alcohol poisoning, such as the nightmarish hallucinations associated with delirium tremens. Hoffer and Osmond speculated that lsd might reproduce the psychosis associated with “rock bottom” but without the dangerous and sometimes fatal results that accompanied a serious bout of DTs.

Later, in 1955, psychiatrist Colin Smith conducted a further lsd experiment at University Hospital in Saskatoon, which had a remarkable effect on the twenty-four alcoholics involved. Follow-up surveys revealed that six reduced their drinking significantly, found jobs, and reconnected with friends and family.

Another six swore off alcohol altogether. Again, the psychiatrists were surprised to learn that none of the volunteers had reported being traumatized or otherwise scared straight by their lsd experience. Most said that they had gained new understandings of themselves and had had redemptive visions. One described a beautiful spiral staircase leading upward and a mysterious voice offering powerful insights into life.

Meanwhile, in the United States, government intelligence agents were becoming interested in psychotropic drugs. The cia was particularly keen to find a chemical can opener for the brains of enemy agents. Nazi scientists had experimented with mescaline on prisoners at Dachau, and, after the war, some of these scientists were brought to the US to work on government-funded research. The cia had been tinkering with heroin and mescaline as interrogation aids, and with lsd the spy agency believed it had finally found its longed-for truth serum.

Bundled together, these top secret experiments were funded under a program called mkultra that ran from 1953 to 1964. Though most of the program’s files were destroyed in 1973 by order of then cia director Richard Helms, the US Senate and the Rockefeller Commission later determined that mkultra involved thousands of unwitting subjects at more than thirty universities and other major institutions in the US and Canada. The experiments generally tested the efficacy of various mind-control tactics using radio waves and psychoactive drugs. In one experiment, mkultra agents secretly dosed as many as 1,500 American soldiers with lsd and made them perform simple drills and parade marches while peaking on acid.

In another experiment, labelled Operation Midnight Climax, agents rented an apartment in San Francisco and hired prostitutes, who picked up citizens and brought them back to the space. The subjects consumed drinks spiked with lsd and tried to have sex while agents filmed the proceedings through a one-way mirror. In 1953, the cia held a three-day professional development workshop in a wooded retreat at Deep Creek Lodge in Maryland and dosed people with lsd without their knowledge. One of the group members, a biochemist named Frank Olson, had a history of emotional difficulties, and shortly after the conference he plunged through a window and fell thirteen storeys to his death. (Olson was allegedly uncomfortable with his work in chemical weapons, and some believe he was murdered by the cia. The controversy was serious enough that his body was exhumed forty years later, after which the head of the medical forensic team declared that the body showed injuries “rankly and starkly suggestive of homicide.”) Another infamous mkultra covert operative was the president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron, who used electroconvulsion, paralytic drugs, and lsd to conduct brutal “psychic driving” experiments on unwitting subjects at McGill University’s Allan Memorial Institute.

A mid all this cloak-and-dagger experimentation, a mysterious cia operative named Al Hubbard decamped from the United States and moved to Daymen Island, near Vancouver, where he built a manor home on a sprawling twenty-four-acre estate, complete with an aircraft hangar and a large yacht. Hubbard was a mysterious figure. With his shaven head and .45-calibre pistol, the self-appointed “Captain” Hubbard — who had taken acid as part of his cia training — was a barrel-chested and jovial eccentric who reputedly presided over his secluded hideaway like a swell Colonel Kurtz. According to those who knew him, Hubbard was always vague about his specific duties with the cia. In any event, he arrived in British Coumbia with several million dollars, broad connections in the US security establishment, and a very non-military enthusiasm for lsd.