The First Wave of Psychedelic Research

The First Wave of Psychedelic Research was a fertile, dispersed period of investigation into LSD and other psychedelics, sustained by researchers, therapists, and informal networks rather than by one institution or charismatic leader. Its significance lies both in the therapeutic methods it developed and in the knowledge later researchers had to recover after controversy and cultural pressure interrupted the work. The history does not begin with Timothy Leary’s Harvard project, nor does his 1963 departure mark the end of serious research: the wave had roots in an earlier decade and extended across research centers and practices well beyond Harvard.

Origins and an Unusual Research Policy

The first LSD experience took place before this research period: in 1943, Albert Hofmann took the drug he had discovered and was left uncertain whether the experience meant madness or transcendence. He nevertheless recognized its possible importance for neurology and psychiatry. The pharmaceutical company Sandoz, where he worked, then made LSD-25—marketed as Delysid—available to researchers without charge. Its definition of researcher was broad enough to include a therapist willing to record clinical observations, opening the compound to investigation by people working in different settings and with different questions.

From 1949 to 1966, that policy helped set off a wide-ranging inquiry into what LSD might do and how its effects might be used. The resulting research was not a single coordinated program: it reached from Saskatchewan and Vancouver to California and England, and involved both formal investigators and therapists. Its openness encouraged experimentation, but it also meant the field had to work out what counted as useful evidence and what the unusual experiences meant. Sandoz’s supply policy ended abruptly in 1966, when the company, alarmed by the controversy surrounding the drug, withdrew Delysid from circulation.

A Network of People and Practices

Al Hubbard helped connect distant sites of research by carrying clinical knowledge, LSD, and practical advice between them. In the late 1950s, he might visit Weyburn, Saskatchewan, to assist Humphry Osmond and Abram Hoffer in their work with people with alcohol problems, then travel to meet R. Gordon Wasson in Manhattan or consult a research group elsewhere. In Los Angeles, he worked with Betty Eisner, Sidney Cohen, and Oscar Janiger, sharing techniques and supplies. He also persuaded Hollywood Hospital in Vancouver to dedicate a wing to treating alcoholics with LSD, and flew celebrities there from Los Angeles for treatment. Hubbard established two other alcoholism-treatment facilities in Canada; the treatment became a business, though he objected to institutions charging patients more than five hundred dollars for a session. He treated the work as philanthropy and spent down his fortune advancing it.

Hubbard’s influence traveled through personal contact as well as institutions. He visited Menlo Park, guiding members of a group that had formed after Myron Stolaroff shared his LSD experience with friends and colleagues at Ampex. Don Allen and Willis Harman joined the group, and Hubbard both led psychedelic sessions and trained members to guide others. Stolaroff recalled Hubbard as an exceptionally capable therapist. With Hubbard’s help, Stolaroff briefly tried to reshape Ampex into a psychedelic corporation: Hubbard held weekly workshops at the company’s headquarters and gave LSD to executives at a site in the Sierra. The effort foundered after the company’s general manager objected to Hubbard’s religious images. Harman, meanwhile, introduced a Stanford University course on human potential that included psychedelics.

In 1961, Stolaroff left Ampex to pursue psychedelic research full-time. With Harman, he established the International Foundation for Advanced Study to examine whether LSD could enhance personality and creativity. The foundation hired psychiatrist Charles Savage as medical director and James Fadiman as staff psychologist; Allen joined as a screener and guide. It secured an FDA research permit and obtained LSD and mescaline from Hubbard. This work extended the period’s inquiry beyond the treatment of illness, toward questions about the capacities of healthy people and the possibility of personal development.

Therapeutic Models and Professional Resistance

The field’s disagreements concerned more than how to interpret an altered state; they concerned what therapy itself should be. In 1956 and 1957, Osmond, Hubbard, and Aldous Huxley advanced a psychedelic model that challenged established psychiatric practice. Earlier models were easier to accommodate: a psychotomimetic approach treated the drug’s effects as resembling mental illness, while psycholytic practice used it as an adjunct to psychoanalysis. The psychedelic approach instead proposed a single high-dose session aimed at a conversion experience, requiring a reconsideration of the usual roles of therapist and patient.

This approach also brought spirituality and the management of the session into the foreground. Charles Grob later described psychedelic therapy as a form of applied mysticism, a formulation that crossed boundaries between religion and science, illness and health, and healer and patient. The emphasis on set and setting—on the conditions surrounding the drug, rather than on the drug alone—also made the approach resemble shamanic healing. For many academic psychiatrists, these features sat uneasily beside a profession increasingly committed to a biochemical account of the mind.

The methods of standard drug trials posed another difficulty. After the thalidomide scandal, the double-blind, placebo-controlled trial became the accepted gold standard, but participants and guides could often tell whether a psychedelic had been given. Nor was it clear how to separate the drug’s effects from the influence of the setting, the therapist, or the participant’s expectations. By 1963, prominent psychiatrists were publicly criticizing researchers who took the drugs themselves, arguing that their experiences compromised their competence and conclusions. The dispute was therefore not only about whether the treatment worked, but also about which forms of experience, therapeutic practice, and evidence the medical profession would recognize.

Rupture and Inheritance

The wave’s end was not simply the consequence of a failed scientific question. Leary’s Harvard Psilocybin Project, launched in 1960, became a prominent part of the public story, but it began amid an already established body of research. The project’s visibility and the controversy surrounding Leary helped eclipse the earlier work and the less famous group of scientists, therapists, and amateurs who had developed its frameworks and protocols. As public alarm mounted, researchers who had built the field watched with dismay as the controversy threatened the knowledge and experience they had accumulated. Sandoz’s 1966 withdrawal of Delysid made the break tangible: an unusually open supply of the drug had helped set the research in motion, and its removal curtailed that route of investigation.

The interruption did not erase the practices. Many underground guides later interviewed by the book could trace a professional lineage to Leary, Stanislav Grof, Hubbard, or Leo Zeff, an Oakland therapist who said he had processed three thousand patients and trained 150 guides. Myron Stolaroff argued that the renewed university research of the late 1990s had developed partly from the anecdotal evidence of underground therapists such as Zeff, alongside the earlier research. The boundary between underground practice and university studies remained permeable: some experienced guides helped train new guides for trials, and the Johns Hopkins team consulted underground practitioners about their use of music in guided psilocybin sessions.

That inheritance became visible at a 2010 psychedelic science conference in San Jose. James Fadiman, who had participated in research at the International Foundation for Advanced Study, announced a meeting for underground guides after giving a talk about guided entheogenic journeys. He expected a handful of attendees; a hundred arrived the next morning. The gathering did not make the dispersed practitioners a formal organization, but it revealed a shared outlook and body of practice across a field whose earlier work had been driven by exchange as much as by institutions. The First Wave thus ended as an officially supported research period, but not as a tradition: its methods and unresolved questions continued to pass between underground guides and the researchers who sought to bring psychedelic therapy back into scientific medicine.