Bill Wilson—Sidney Cohen

Bill Wilson’s connection with researcher of LSD safety and risks Sidney Cohen joined the spiritual origins of Wilson’s approach to sobriety with the emerging clinical study of LSD. Starting in 1956, Cohen and psychologist Betty Eisner guided Wilson through several sessions in Los Angeles. Wilson came away convinced that LSD could occasion the spiritual awakening he believed recovering alcoholics needed, though his hope that it might have a role in the AA fellowship met resistance from its board.

Background and Connection

In the mid-1950s, Wilson learned of Humphry Osmond and Abram Hoffer’s work with alcoholics and became interested in whether LSD could help people in recovery experience a spiritual awakening. The possibility resonated with his own account of sobriety: he credited it to a mystical experience after receiving belladonna at Towns Hospital in 1934. Through Osmond, Wilson was put in touch with Cohen, an internist at Brentwood VA Hospital who had been experimenting with LSD supplied by Sandoz since 1955.

Cohen was part of a growing research network rather than an isolated practitioner. Alongside Eisner and psychiatrist Oscar Janiger, he was a leading figure in a cluster of LSD research loosely centered on UCLA. By the mid-1950s, roughly a dozen such hubs operated across North America and Europe, commonly sharing techniques, findings, and sometimes drugs. Wilson’s sessions with Cohen thus took place within a collaborative, developing field of inquiry.

The LSD Sessions

Beginning in 1956, Wilson had several LSD sessions in Los Angeles with Cohen and Eisner. Their work was clinical in setting, but Wilson approached it with a specific question: might the drug make possible the kind of spiritual change that could support sobriety? The sessions persuaded him that LSD could reliably occasion such an awakening. His interest was not merely in the drug’s effects, but in whether those effects could serve a purpose he already regarded as central to recovery.

The experience also sharpened a distinction for Wilson. He did not consider an LSD session equivalent to delirium tremens, a comparison that had figured in arguments about the drug’s potential. His assessment supported the idea that LSD might offer a different route to a transformative experience, rather than simply reproducing a pathological state.

Conviction and Institutional Resistance

After the sessions, Wilson believed LSD therapy might have a place in the AA fellowship. That possibility brought his personal conviction into conflict with the fellowship’s institutional concerns: board members strongly opposed endorsing any mind-altering substance, fearing that doing so would blur the organization’s public identity and message. The evidence establishes Wilson’s confidence in the therapeutic promise he saw and the board’s refusal to support it; it does not show that Cohen and Wilson formed a continuing formal partnership beyond the sessions.

The relationship’s significance lies in this meeting of clinical experimentation and recovery practice. Cohen and Eisner provided the setting in which Wilson tested a possibility rooted in his own history, while Wilson interpreted the sessions through the spiritual framework he associated with sobriety. Their encounter did not establish LSD as an AA treatment, but it made the disagreement over whether a drug could assist spiritual change concrete: for Wilson, the sessions suggested it could; for the fellowship’s board, approving its use threatened the integrity of the organization’s message.