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Canada's Guru Of Psychedelia Dies At Age 86
Pubdate: Sat, 14 Feb 2004
Source: National Post (Canada)
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Copyright: 2004 Southam Inc.
Contact: http://www.nationalpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/286
Author: John Geiger
Note: Webpage reference is to subscriber site only.
CANADA'S GURU OF PSYCHEDELIA DIES AT AGE 86
The death of the brilliant psychiatrist Dr. Humphry Osmond, a legendary
figure in counter-culture circles and the man who coined the term
"psychedelic," is a reminder of a time when Weyburn, Sask., was the world
epicentre of LSD research.
Dr. Osmond was superintendent and director of research at Saskatchewan
Hospital, Weyburn, when, in May, 1953, he administered mescaline to the
writer Aldous Huxley.
Dr. Osmond, who imported the mescaline to Los Angeles where he was attending
a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, later wrote that he "did
not relish the possibility, however remote, of being the man who drove
Aldous Huxley mad."
His fears proved groundless, and Huxley's account of that experience, in the
form of a report to Dr. Osmond, was later published as The Doors of
Perception, which laid the foundation for the psychedelic Sixties.
Dr. Osmond invented the word "psychedelic," meaning literally "mind
manifesting," during his subsequent correspondence with Huxley.
The two men decided the existing language for describing altered states
evoked by drugs like LSD and mescaline was burdened by negative
connotations.
In 1956, Huxley sent Dr. Osmond a couplet proposing the word "phanerothyme"
- -- thymos means soul -- to replace terms like hallucinogen:
To make this trivial world sublime,
Take half a gramme of phanerothyme.
Osmond replied with a rhyme of his own:
To fathom Hell or soar angelic
Just take a pinch of psychedelic.
Humphry Fortescue Osmond was born on July 1, 1917, in Surrey, England. He
served with the rank of Surgeon-Lieutenant in the Royal Navy. After the war,
he joined the staff at St. George's Hospital, London. With a colleague named
John R. Smythies, Dr. Osmond developed a ground-breaking hypothesis that
schizophrenia might be a form of self-intoxication caused by the body
mistakenly producing its own LSD-like compounds.
The young Britons met fierce resistance from Freudians within the British
mental health establishment, and so jointly seized on an invitation to
emigrate to Canada to continue their research at the Saskatchewan Hospital.
In a follow-up article, written from Weyburn, they suggested that medical
practitioners themselves should experiment with drugs: "No one is really
competent to treat schizophrenia unless he has experienced the schizophrenic
world himself. This it is possible to do quite easily by taking mescaline."
Aldous Huxley, best known for novels such as Brave New World and Crome
Yellow, then wrote Drs. Osmond and Smythies, expressing his desire to "get
hold of a supplier of purified mescaline." He added the assurance that he
had no intention "to become a dope addict" or to induce others along such a
path.
Dr. Osmond spent more than a decade in Saskatchewan, becoming president of
the Saskat-chewan Psychiatric Association in 1958. His LSD research,
undertaken with Dr. Abram Hoffer, director of psychiatric research for
Saskatchewan's Department of Public Health, was supported by the
Saskatchewan and federal governments, and by a Rockefeller Foundation grant.
Noting that alcoholics would give up the bottle if they suffered delirium
tremens during withdrawal, one study looked at whether psychedelics could
simulate such symptoms but in a controlled setting. The findings were
encouraging.
Dr. Osmond noted the results of one study, where half of all subjects either
stopped drinking or were much improved. While "as a general rule ... those
who have not had the transcendental experience are not changed; they
continue to drink."
The CIA, intrigued by the possible application of such substances in
intelligence work, sent informants to Weyburn. Much of Dr. Osmond's work
would have been of little interest to them, however. It was largely
concerned with improving the lot of inmates at the province's psychiatric
institutions, who until that time had been kept in what amounted to medieval
lock-ups.
Under Dr. Osmond's supervision, for example, architects took LSD and would
visit hospital wards, experiencing first-hand how to better design
facilities for psychiatric patients. He later helped found a program in
architectural psychology at the University of Utah.
Dr. Osmond left Saskatchewan, becoming director of Princeton's Bureau of
Research in Neurology and Psychiatry, and later taught at the University of
Alabama Medical School and served as psychiatrist at Bryce Hospital in
Tuscaloosa, before retiring to Appleton, Wis.
Dr. Osmond died last week, aged 86.
Dr. Paul Bisbee, Alabama's director of mental health facilities, said
yesterday that despite a "prodigious intellect that spanned all areas," Dr.
Osmond "still had an ability to relate to anybody, but most especially,
patients with schizophrenia."
Richard Metzger of the counter-culture conglomerate The Disinformation
Company, hailed Dr. Osmond as a "psychedelic pioneer"
"He was interested in achieving empathy and understanding, through the use
of psychedelics, ways to become a better doctor. That's what set him apart
from someone like Tim Leary, who was more of a showbiz revolutionary or
public relations maverick."
Dr. Osmond published numerous books, including influential works such as The
Hallucinogens, with Dr. Hoffer, which appeared, appropriately enough, in
1967 -- the "summer of love." He later co-edited Psychedelics: The Uses and
Implications of Hallucinogenic Drugs.
"We are the latest of generations of experimenters who, from before the dawn
of history, in every part of the world, have sought for means by which man
could alter, explore, and control the workings of his own mind, thus
enlarging this experience of the universe," wrote Dr. Osmond in 1964. "Until
recently, however, science has shown only sporadic interest in these
matters."
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