Bill W.’s LSD Therapy Sessions

Bill Wilson’s LSD sessions grew from a question rooted in his own recovery: could a drug occasion the spiritual awakening that he believed could help an alcoholic get sober? Beginning in 1956, he explored that possibility with researchers in Los Angeles. The sessions persuaded him that LSD could reliably bring about such an awakening, but his hope that the drug might find a place in Alcoholics Anonymous met strong resistance from the fellowship’s board.## Origins in a Spiritual AwakeningBill Wilson, cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous, had long connected sobriety with spiritual experience. In 1934, while at Towns Hospital in Manhattan, he received belladonna, a plant-derived alkaloid with hallucinogenic properties, and later credited a mystical experience during that treatment with helping him become sober. The idea that a drug might occasion a life-changing spiritual awakening was therefore not new to him when he heard, two decades later, about Humphry Osmond and Abram Hoffer’s work with alcoholics. His interest in LSD grew from a question already present in his understanding of recovery: might another drug help recovering alcoholics experience the kind of awakening associated with surrender to a higher power?## The Los Angeles SessionsThrough Humphry Osmond, Wilson contacted Sidney Cohen, an internist at Brentwood VA hospital who had been experimenting with LSD since 1955. Beginning in 1956, Wilson had several LSD sessions in Los Angeles with Cohen and Betty Eisner, a young psychologist who had recently completed her doctorate at the University of California at Los Angeles. Cohen and Eisner, alongside Oscar Janiger, were prominent in a loosely connected research hub centered on the university. That hub belonged to a wider network of perhaps a dozen LSD research centers in North America and Europe, whose investigators shared techniques and discoveries and sometimes drugs, often cooperatively. The available account establishes the sessions’ participants, place, and purpose, but does not describe the details of Wilson’s individual journeys.## What Wilson ConcludedWilson came away convinced that LSD could reliably occasion the spiritual awakening he believed necessary for sobriety. For him, this was not simply a claim that LSD might alter a patient’s behavior: it could produce an experience with spiritual significance, potentially echoing the role he attributed to his own belladonna experience. At the same time, Wilson rejected the idea that LSD’s value lay in making a person undergo delirium tremens. His distinction placed his view at odds with the theory that the drug worked by imitating the delirium associated with alcohol withdrawal.## The Fellowship’s RefusalWilson thought LSD therapy might have a place in Alcoholics Anonymous, but his colleagues on the organization’s board strongly disagreed. They feared that accepting any mind-altering substance would blur the fellowship’s identity and weaken its message. The disagreement exposed a tension at the heart of Wilson’s proposal: he understood a drug-mediated experience as a possible route to spiritual awakening, while the board saw endorsement of the drug itself as a threat to the organization’s standing and principles. The account does not indicate that LSD became part of Alcoholics Anonymous’s practice.## Significance in the Wider Therapy DebateWilson’s proposal belonged to a broader dispute over what psychedelic treatment was and how it should be conducted. The psychedelic model advanced by Humphry Osmond, Al Hubbard, and Aldous Huxley in 1956–1957 envisioned a single high-dose session aimed at a conversion-like experience, rather than an indefinite course of weekly therapy. It also raised questions about spiritual experience and the roles of patient and therapist that conventional psychiatry found difficult to accommodate. Wilson’s interest in LSD for recovery brought a related challenge into a fellowship whose central spiritual language was already familiar to him. His sessions thus show both why psychedelic therapy seemed promising to some early advocates and why institutions could resist it: a possible means to spiritual change was also a substance whose acceptance threatened established boundaries.