Mid-20th-Century First Wave of Psychedelic Research

The Mid-20th-Century First Wave of Psychedelic Research was more than a succession of drug studies: it became a contest over what psychedelic experience could mean, who could guide it, and whether its spiritual and cultural dimensions belonged within science. Researchers built a North American network around clinical work, high-dose therapy, and experiments in human potential. That network carried practices beyond hospitals and universities, while the very features that made the work distinctive helped make it difficult for established psychiatry to accept.

A network of researchers and practices

In the 1950s, Al Hubbard connected research groups and treatment centers across North America, carrying LSD and practical knowledge from one site to another. He worked with Humphry Osmond and Abram Hoffer in Weyburn, met R. Gordon Wasson in Manhattan, and visited research groups in Chicago and Los Angeles, where he shared techniques and supplies with Betty Eisner, Sidney Cohen, and Oscar Janiger. His circuit also included Vancouver, where he persuaded Hollywood Hospital to dedicate a wing to treating alcohol dependence with LSD. He flew celebrities there discreetly and helped establish two other Canadian treatment facilities. The treatment became a business, but Hubbard opposed profiting from LSD; institutions charging patients more than five hundred dollars per session became a source of tension, and he spent down his own fortune supporting the work.

Hubbard’s influence traveled through training as well as supply. He guided researchers and prospective guides, helping spread a high-dose approach in which the session’s psychological and social context mattered alongside the drug. In 1955, he sought to formalize a wider inquiry by founding the Commission for the Study of Creative Imagination. Its board brought together Osmond, Hoffer, Aldous Huxley, Cohen, and other researchers, along with a philosopher and a United Nations official. Hubbard called himself its scientific director, but the commission’s significance lay less in its formal structure than in the ambitions its name announced: psychedelic research might address the capacities of healthy people, not only the treatment of illness.

A related expansion took shape in Menlo Park. After a guided LSD experience, Myron Stolaroff shared his enthusiasm with colleagues at Ampex, who began meeting to discuss spiritual questions and the possible development of healthy individuals. Don Allen and Willis Harman joined the group; Hubbard came to guide their sessions and train them to guide others. Stolaroff briefly tried, with Hubbard’s help, to remake Ampex as a psychedelic corporation, including weekly workshops and sessions for executives at a site in the Sierra. The effort faltered when the company’s general manager objected to Hubbard’s Christian images. Harman, meanwhile, brought human-potential ideas into his teaching at Stanford. In 1961, Stolaroff left Ampex and, with Harman, established the International Foundation for Advanced Study to investigate LSD’s possible effects on personality and creativity. The foundation obtained an FDA research permit and supplies of LSD and mescaline from Hubbard.

A disputed boundary between therapy and mysticism

The first wave unsettled psychiatry because its emerging therapeutic model differed sharply from both established drug research and ordinary talk therapy. Psychotomimetic theories treated the drugs as producing effects resembling mental illness; psycholytic approaches fitted them into psychoanalysis as an adjunct to talking treatment. Psychedelic therapy proposed something more disruptive: a single high-dose session intended to produce a profound, potentially transformative experience, requiring a reconsideration of the respective roles of patient and therapist. The approach could not be reduced to a drug’s effects alone. The participant’s expectations, the guide’s presence, and the setting in which the session occurred all shaped what happened.

That emphasis blurred boundaries psychiatry often sought to keep distinct: sickness and health, healer and patient, science and religion. Charles Grob later characterized the psychedelic model as applied mysticism, and argued that evaluating hallucinogens required attention not only to strict scientific methods but also to shamanic precedents. Hubbard’s practice reflected that conviction in practical form: words, objects, and music could influence a person in an altered state, making the session’s setting a resource for healing. To supporters, this offered a way to interrupt destructive patterns and open new perspectives. To critics, it risked replacing controlled investigation with spiritual enthusiasm.

The dispute was also methodological. As placebo-controlled, double-blind trials gained authority in the wake of the thalidomide scandal, psychedelics presented a difficult case: participants and guides could often tell whether the active drug had been given, and the influence of expectation and setting was hard to separate from pharmacology. Researchers were therefore challenged to demonstrate causal effects using standards designed to isolate variables, even though the therapeutic method depended on variables that could not easily be isolated. Psychedelic therapy asked medicine to assess a treatment in which the administered experience itself, rather than a narrowly pharmacological action, appeared central.

Institutional resistance and contraction

Resistance from the psychiatric establishment became increasingly explicit by 1963. Roy Grinker, editor of the Archives of General Psychiatry, attacked researchers who took the drugs themselves, arguing that their personal experiences disqualified them as competent investigators. In the following year, he criticized investigators’ conclusions as biased by their own ecstasy. Other critics objected to what they saw as an aura of magic around the drugs. The controversy was not only about whether a chemical worked; it was also about whether researchers could study experiences that drew them toward mystical interpretations without forfeiting scientific credibility.

The pressure reflected a deeper conflict between professional authority and an approach that gave unusual weight to spiritual experience, personal participation, and the therapist’s conduct. The psychedelic model challenged the familiar division between expert and patient: its proposed single-session conversion experience changed how both roles were understood. It also pushed research beyond treatment of the ill toward broader claims about creativity and human potential. By the 1970s, sanctioned psychedelic therapy had ended, leaving a break in formal inquiry and a body of knowledge that later researchers would have to recover and test again.

Afterlife of the first wave

The work did not disappear with the retreat of sanctioned research. Many underground guides traced their professional lineages to the earlier generation, including to Al Hubbard, Timothy Leary, Stanislav Grof, or Leo Zeff. Myron Stolaroff later argued that the research revival beginning in the late 1990s had developed partly from the anecdotal evidence and practices of underground therapists, as well as from first-wave studies. The boundary between university research and underground practice remained permeable: some underground guides helped train guides for university trials, and researchers at Johns Hopkins consulted them about musical practices in psilocybin sessions.

The revival also renewed the first wave’s unresolved methodological and cultural questions. Modern trials again had to contend with difficult blinding and with the entanglement of drug, expectations, guide, and setting. At a 2010 psychedelic science conference in San Jose, James Fadiman invited underground guides to meet; expecting only a handful, he found a hundred people. The gathering made visible a dispersed field that had survived outside formal institutions. The first wave’s legacy, then, was not simply a set of old experiments: it was a continuing argument over whether rigorous research could take seriously the experience, relationships, and spiritual meanings that psychedelic therapy itself treated as essential.