Peaking on the Prairies

Osmond met Hubbard through their mutual friend, Aldous Huxley. Osmond had become acquainted with Huxley when they both lived in England and had provided him with his first dose of mescaline, which the author used as inspiration for his book The Doors of Perception. (Huxley got the title from William Blake, and Jim Morrison later borrowed it for the name of his band.) Huxley kept in touch with Osmond and in one of his letters suggested that Osmond contact his pal Hubbard. In 1953, Osmond and Hubbard met for lunch at the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club. Osmond later recalled, “Hubbard was a powerfully built man, with a broad face and a firm handgrip. He was also very genial, an excellent host.”

At Osmond’s invitation, Hubbard travelled to Saskatchewan, where he met Hoffer and observed the work of the two psychiatrists. It was Hubbard’s theory that lsd didn’t produce a “model psychosis” so much as a different way of seeing the world, one that offers us a clearer view of ourselves and our relationship to nature. He said he wanted to introduce the top executives from Fortune 500 companies to lsd, and argued that humanity could be saved by psychedelic drugs. (The word psychedelic was coined by Osmond in a letter to Huxley.) Hubbard also wanted to start his own quasi-medical facility and in 1957 he linked up with Vancouver doctor J. Ross MacLean to open an lsd clinic in New Westminster.

The Hollywood Hospital was a stately mansion that had served for years as a detox centre for Vancouver’s more affluent drunks. It remained so, but Hubbard and MacLean also turned it into a walk-in lsd boutique. Anyone with $500 was welcome. Patients would check in, get a physical examination, fill out an mmpi psychological profile, and disclose in writing their personal histories, complete with “hang-ups.” After taking lsd, they retired to the “therapy suite,” where plush sofas, a high-end sound system, and fanciful artwork encouraged a positive experience. Providing a degree of medical respectability to the initiative, Hubbard and MacLean occasionally played therapist — but the real day-to-day therapy was handled by an itinerant adventurer named Frank Ogden.

Ogden, a barnstorming Ontario aviator with no training in psychiatric medicine, had learned about the clinic from an article in Maclean’s magazine. He thought of himself as an explorer and believed that the human mind was the ultimate frontier. Ogden, who now lives in Vancouver, recalls that he dropped everything and flew out to the clinic to see if he could get a job. “I told them I was well qualified to work as a guide into ‘inner space’ because I’d flown flying boats and survived helicopter crashes, and set a dangerous high-altitude record in a little single-engine Mooney. I told them adventure was my game.”

Ogden worked for free for a spell to prove himself and became the Hollywood Hospital’s main therapist after Hubbard quit. “Over the next eight years, I worked with more than 1,100 patients,” he says. “The majority arrived with problems and left as better people. It wasn’t always a pleasant experience for them, but nothing worthwhile is. The most difficult patients were psychiatrists and engineers. They were rigid in their thinking and they often had a hard time.”

While the hospital was named after the abundant holly trees in the area, the name was also appropriate, as it turned out, because many of the patients were celebrities — Cary Grant, Ethel Kennedy, and jazz crooner Andy Williams, among others. (Williams signed up partly because of his marital problems. He continues to perform, and says that the acid he took in Vancouver helped him understand that “the only things important to me were family, friends, and love. Maybe that’s why I’m so cool.” ) Ogden says they had a lot of local Vancouver people too. “I can’t mention their names because they’re still alive. But we had a lot of wealthy housewives from the British Properties who drank too much and were in sexless marriages. I remember one lady was frigid. I touched the back of her hand and she had an orgasm. I saw her at a social event a few months later and she joked, ‘You’re not going to do that to me again, are you? ’ ”

By 1959, Hubbard was getting impatient with MacLean. Hubbard believed that lsd should be available to everyone, rich and poor, while MacLean, who had acquired a big house on Southwest Marine Drive, preferred to treat the hospital as a lucrative private clinic. Hubbard decided to give up his share in the clinic and move to California, where he became a sort of Johnny Appleseed of psychedelia, giving free lsd to everyone from housewives to celebrities such as James Coburn, Stanley Kubrick, Ken Kesey, and the Grateful Dead. Hubbard also became acquainted with a Harvard professor named Timothy Leary, who would do more than anyone else to promote the non-medical use of lsd among young people. With his love beads, boyish enthusiasm, and rugged good looks, Leary kicked the lsd campaign into high gear. Ecstatically stoned and surrounded by avid young female fans, Leary toured college campuses urging students to “turn on, tune in, and drop out.” Abram Hoffer later wrote that he always feared lsd would become a street drug and, thanks to what he described as “the irresponsibility of Timothy Leary,” his fears were realized.

In 1966, Hoffer went to the University of California campus at Berkeley to present a research paper on the clinical uses of lsd. He says he received a polite response. Afterward, he watched Leary make a presentation — the Harvard prof was received “with wild abandon” by the students, even though Hoffer couldn’t understand what Leary was trying to say. Public health authorities were alarmed by the craze, and later that same year lsd was banned in California. By the end of 1967 — the same year the Doors’ first album was released — use of the drug was banned in every state, even when supervised by legitimate researchers. Lawmakers in Canada followed suit, and lsd was soon prohibited by most countries in the Western world. If you wanted to conduct your own experiments with lsd, you had to go looking for someone like Ringo.

Psychiatrists and biochemists never figured out exactly what lsd does to the human brain, and since the drug was banned there hasn’t been any research into the mystery. It is believed that the compound is absorbed by the body and disappears in a short period of time, but its effect on the human psyche can endure for many hours and sometimes days. Obviously, the psyche is a complicated matter. In layman’s terms, one might think of it as a structure, a rickety play fort that arises from the mud of childhood and eventually becomes a proud high-rise, containing all our accomplishments, defeats, jealousies, ambitions, biases, longings, and stored memories. This is our hard-earned “identity,” and it becomes a sort of psychic headquarters from which we interpret and evaluate the world. lsd functions like a chunk of plastic explosive attached to the main load-bearing post in our underground garage. The chemical doesn’t need to stick around. It only needs to cut one post and gravity does the rest.

What emerges from the smoke and dust of the collapsed psyche is a naked baby — the same wide-eyed infant that looms enormous in the final scene of Stanley Kubrick’s lsd-influenced film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Without the mediating structure of identity, the world becomes a terrifyingly vivid place. Music, colours, texture, taste — all suddenly regain the distracting power we’ve spent so many years training ourselves to ignore. We ignore the world so that we can take care of business. After all, how efficient would we be if we couldn’t step outside without pausing to stare in slack-jawed amazement at every tree?