Los Angeles

Los Angeles was one of the most influential centers of mid-century LSD research: a place where clinical practice, celebrity publicity, and the drug’s emerging public life converged. Therapists there used gradually increasing doses to reach repressed emotions and childhood memories, while the city’s high-profile patients helped turn LSD therapy into a national sensation. That visibility brought demand, but also made the boundary between research and recreational use increasingly difficult to defend.

A West Coast research hub

By the mid-1950s, Los Angeles had become a center of LSD research loosely associated with Sidney Cohen, Betty Eisner, and Oscar Janiger. Their work belonged to a wider network: perhaps a dozen research hubs operated across North America and Europe, generally keeping in contact and sharing techniques, findings, and sometimes drugs. Los Angeles was therefore not an isolated experiment station but a lively point of exchange in a cooperative, if informal, research world.

Cohen arrived at LSD through an interest in chemically induced psychoses. After trying it himself in October 1955, however, he found an experience that did not fit his expectation of temporary madness. Its tranquillity and sense of transcendence led him to question whether the drug was best understood as psychosis-like at all. His experience echoed doubts emerging among other researchers and sharpened a central problem for the field: unsettling or unusual mental states did not necessarily amount to insanity.

Therapy and its claims

Cohen, Eisner, and Janiger incorporated LSD into weekly therapeutic sessions, increasing the dose from week to week. Their aim was to help patients gain access to subconscious material, including repressed feelings and memories of childhood trauma. The people they treated were chiefly neurotics, alcoholics, and people with minor personality disorders: patients who were generally functional and articulate, with intact egos and a desire to improve. The group also treated hundreds of painters, composers, and writers, reasoning that a drug that widened access to the subconscious might also open a path toward creativity.

The therapists reported encouraging results. Cohen and Eisner found marked improvement in sixteen of their first twenty-two patients. A later review of psycholytic therapy papers published from 1953 to 1965 estimated success rates of 70 percent for anxiety neurosis, 62 percent for depression, and 42 percent for obsessive-compulsive disorder. These were impressive figures, but few, if any, attempts had been made to reproduce the results in controlled trials. The city’s early reputation for successful therapy thus rested on promising clinical reports, not on a strong body of controlled replication.

The treatment environment was part of the question. In a separate Canadian effort to replicate the Saskatchewan alcohol-treatment results, clinicians used neutral rooms, limited interaction with patients, and extensive questionnaires; some volunteers were constrained or blindfolded. The outcomes failed to match the earlier results, and several participants had terrifying sessions. The comparison did not settle whether LSD therapy worked: it showed how much the conditions of a session could matter, while leaving open whether the drug’s effects could be cleanly separated from the therapist’s presence and the surrounding environment.

Beverly Hills, celebrity, and public demand

By the end of the decade, psycholytic LSD therapy had become routine in affluent Los Angeles districts such as Beverly Hills. Some therapists charged more than five hundred dollars for a session, even though they often received LSD free from Sandoz. Positive press accounts and celebrity testimonials helped give the treatment an unusually glamorous public face. Anaïs Nin, Jack Nicholson, Stanley Kubrick, André Previn, James Coburn, and Lord Buckley were among the artists and entertainers who underwent LSD therapy; many saw Oscar Janiger.

The best-known patient was Cary Grant, who had more than sixty sessions and publicly praised the treatment in a 1959 interview. He described the experience as having changed his sense of himself, his acting, and his relationships with women, and declared himself born again. Grant’s fame made the interview consequential beyond his own treatment: it reached a national audience and helped propel demand for LSD therapy and for LSD itself. The columnist Joe Hyams received more than eight hundred letters from readers asking how to obtain the drug, while psychiatrists told him that patients were now requesting it.

That surge marked a change in the drug’s public life. Years before Timothy Leary became notorious for advocating LSD beyond research or therapy, the substance had already begun escaping the laboratory in Los Angeles. By 1959 it was appearing on the street in some places, and researchers and therapists in Los Angeles and New York were holding sessions in their homes for friends and colleagues. The purposes of these gatherings could be difficult to distinguish from those of parties. In Los Angeles, the claim that such sessions were research had, in some cases, become tenuous.

Networks, ambivalence, and legacy

Los Angeles was also connected to the broader clinical network through Al M. Hubbard, who shared LSD supplies and treatment techniques with local therapists. He worked with Betty Eisner, Sidney Cohen, and Oscar Janiger, while traveling among research centers elsewhere in North America. His movement helped carry practical knowledge across institutions, even as the city’s increasingly informal sessions made the distinction between clinical work and nonclinical use less secure.

Cohen kept his distance from that scene. As the leading Los Angeles researcher, he became uneasy about the cultish atmosphere and the language of magic and religion gathering around LSD. Yet he was not simply dismissive of the experience’s spiritual dimension: he remained caught between its apparent clinical and mystical significance and the scientific standards he valued. His ambivalence captured the city’s larger contradiction. Los Angeles helped establish LSD therapy as a serious clinical possibility, but its celebrity culture and expanding demand also pushed the drug beyond the controlled purposes that had first given the work legitimacy.