Roy Grinker

Roy Grinker was the editor of the Archives of General Psychiatry and a forceful critic of psychedelic research during the early 1960s. His interventions helped shift the debate from the promise of clinical treatment toward the credibility of the researchers themselves: if investigators used the drugs and valued the experiences they produced, Grinker argued, their conclusions could not be trusted as objective science.

Position in the Professional Debate

By 1963, leaders of psychiatry had begun publishing arguments against psychedelic research. Grinker was among the most influential voices in this opposition, using his editorial position to challenge researchers who administered the drugs to themselves and became fascinated by the resulting mystical or hallucinatory states. He contended that such involvement disqualified them as competent investigators.

The criticism was not simply about whether a drug could produce useful effects. It raised a methodological question about who could legitimately study those effects: personal experience might compromise a researcher’s judgment, while the professional authority to assess the drug could rest with those who had never taken it.

The Dispute with Sidney Cohen

The book connects Grinker’s criticism to work by Sidney Cohen, who continued to believe that psychedelics could have potential when used by responsible therapists. In 1963, Cohen reported cases of psychotic breaks and an attempted suicide, including a boy who experienced visual distortions and anxiety for more than a month after ingesting an LSD-laced sugar cube. Grinker, as the journal’s editor, condemned psychedelic research in a commentary accompanying Cohen’s article.

The association is significant because Cohen’s report did not make him an uncomplicated opponent of psychedelic treatment. He warned of serious complications from casual use and irresponsible therapy while maintaining that controlled therapeutic use might be valuable. Grinker’s editorial response placed the risks at the center of the professional debate, and the accompanying condemnation reached beyond the cases to challenge the research enterprise itself.

Criticism and Its Consequences

Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association the following year, Grinker again deplored investigators’ use of the drugs, arguing that their conclusions were biased by their own ecstasy. The book acknowledges that this concern had substance: researchers’ personal experiences could influence their judgments. But it also identifies the difficulty in the alternative. Abstinence left the loudest and most authoritative voices in the debate among people who knew least about psychedelic effects, making those effects more likely to appear psychotic than transcendent.

Grinker’s arguments thus became part of a larger reversal in psychiatric interpretation. As the psychotomimetic paradigm returned with renewed force, LSD came increasingly to be treated as a cause of mental illness rather than a possible cure. The narrative presents his role not as the sole cause of that change, but as an important instance of how professional standards of objectivity and the lack of firsthand knowledge could combine to narrow what researchers were prepared to see.