September 2007

I was administered one of the first doses of lsd from the Swiss Sandoz Company — an ampoule in a glass of water. It was a fairly stiff dose, perhaps 400 micrograms. The room was cluttered with psychologists and staff psychiatrists, and Osmond was there throughout. I soon lapsed into predictably bizarre, but pleasurable, hallucinations and delusions, such as outlandish, spontaneously growing plants in the window admixed with brilliant plaid textiles draped over the lounge furniture. Several hours into the experience, however, I began to get in touch with my reptilian, brainstem responses. Since I considered myself to be the decent product of a sleepy prairie town, this glimpse into my sexuality and possibly violent nature was a dark revelation.

Osmond realized I was going through something frightening and reassured me, saying, “I have gone through this too.” He had had experience with other hallucinogens such as mescaline and peyote. Ultimately, it was a fantastic and dislocating event that proved helpful because of the insight I gained.

These experiments were carried out weekly in the doctors’ lounge. Sidney Katz, the illustrious journalist who worked for many years with Maclean’s magazine, wrote about his lsd experience a week after mine. Aldous Huxley tried it shortly after.

Humphry Osmond became well-known as an original thinker in psychiatry despite the termination of his lsd research. He was a mentor to many and is remembered fondly.

L. Murray Cathcart, MD
Wiarton, Ontario

A Little Bit Country
Alex Shoumatoff’s essay on Russia’s villages (“A Russian Tragedy,” June) left me in a pleasant trance. My mother-in-law, an old Leningradka, used to make pilgrimages to the Pribaltika for mushrooms and berries, and she kept jars of the beautiful mountain ash berries preserved in vodka (with lashings of sugar between the layers). In winter, we feasted on these like drunken squirrels. By then, in the early 1970s, Russia’s villages had been losing population for decades, a symptom of collectivization and the lure of city jobs.

I do not believe, as Shoumatoff suggests, that alcoholism, drugs, evil scientists from the US, and even Chernobyl are responsible for the die-off of young Russians. The true answer lies in the slag heaps the article mentions — in the uninvestigated relationship between birth defects and industrial-scale coal mining, coal-powered plants, mercury poisoning, and increased pollution from petrochemicals.

These problems will never be solved, and the villages never saved, if mayors and communities continue to look for salvation in factories and industrialization. These choices exacerbate health problems and trap villages in the boom-and-bust cycle that has plagued rural populations all over the world.

Tolstoy’s voice is the most cogent in this article. It addresses the problems not just of Russia but of the entire world — millions of lives wasted in factories manufacturing “unnecessary and harmful gadgets.” If Russia can’t find another way, it will indeed lose its soul.