Vancouver

Vancouver was more than a backdrop in the history of psychedelic research: it was a place where research alliances formed, patients received LSD therapy, and practices traveled between distant centers. The city’s role is especially visible through Al Hubbard, whose treatment work and personal network linked Vancouver to Saskatchewan, California, and the emerging research community across North America. The book also traces a pivotal encounter in Hubbard’s Vancouver apartment, where a single session helped draw engineer Myron Stolaroff into psychedelic research.

A meeting place for research and advocacy

In 1953, after his own psychedelic epiphany, Al Hubbard invited Humphry Osmond to lunch at the Vancouver Yacht Club. Osmond was impressed by Hubbard’s wealth, connections, worldly manner, and seemingly abundant supply of LSD. The meeting began a collaboration that would help redirect psychedelic research: Hubbard argued that the powerful experience occasioned by a single high dose of LSD or mescaline could itself be therapeutic, and that the experience mattered more than the chemical considered in isolation.

That encounter connected Vancouver to work already developing elsewhere. Humphry Osmond and Abram Hoffer were conducting research with alcoholics in Saskatchewan, where the government’s support had brought Osmond to the Saskatchewan Mental Hospital in Weyburn. Hubbard moved between Weyburn and other research sites, carrying supplies and clinical knowledge. Vancouver therefore appears not as the original institutional base of the Saskatchewan trials, but as a point where a researcher and a mobile advocate met and shaped the treatment model together.

Hollywood Hospital and LSD treatment

Hubbard persuaded Hollywood Hospital in Vancouver to dedicate an entire wing to treating alcoholics with LSD. He also established two other alcoholism-treatment facilities in Canada, and the Hubbard method became a business in the country. For Hubbard, however, psychedelic therapy was a form of philanthropy rather than a way to make money. He objected when institutions charged patients upwards of five hundred dollars for a session, a disagreement that brought tension between him and some of the organizations with which he worked. He eventually drained his own fortune advancing the cause.

Hollywood Hospital also made Vancouver a destination for people whom Hubbard brought into the treatment system. He would fly his plane to Los Angeles to discreetly ferry Hollywood celebrities north to receive treatment. That sideline earned him the nickname Captain Trips. The book notes that Ethel Kennedy had reportedly been treated at the hospital; her connection to the Vancouver clinic later surfaced indirectly during the 1966 United States Senate hearings on LSD, when Senator Robert F. Kennedy defended the potential value of legitimate psychedelic research. The hearings took place elsewhere, but the reported treatment linked the hospital to the political debate.

The apartment session and a new commitment

Vancouver also figures in the private setting of Hubbard’s therapy. In March 1956, moved by Gerald Heard’s account of an LSD experience with Hubbard, Myron Stolaroff traveled to the city for a session in Hubbard’s apartment. Stolaroff, an electrical engineer and Ampex planning executive, took sixty-six micrograms of Sandoz LSD. Over several hours, his experience encompassed the planet’s history, the development of life, the appearance of humanity, and the trauma of his own birth.

Stolaroff later described the session as a profound opening. He associated it with reliving a painful birth experience that he believed had shaped his personality, as well as with a sense of human oneness and the reality of God. The experience committed him to the work. He shared what had happened with a small circle of Ampex colleagues, who began meeting to discuss spiritual questions and the possible use of LSD to help healthy people realize their potential. Hubbard subsequently traveled to Menlo Park, guided members of the group, and trained them to guide others. Vancouver was thus the site of an experience that helped carry psychedelic practice from Hubbard’s individual treatment room into a new circle of research and experimentation.

A hub in a wider circuit

By the late 1950s, Hubbard had become a traveling intermediary among North American researchers. He might assist Humphry Osmond and Abram Hoffer in Weyburn, meet R. Gordon Wasson in Manhattan, visit researchers in Chicago, or conduct sessions in Los Angeles with Betty Eisner, Sidney Cohen, or Oscar Janiger. He shared both treatment techniques and supplies of LSD, then returned to Vancouver, where Hollywood Hospital anchored his work with alcoholics. The city was one node in a larger circuit, but the hospital and Hubbard’s apartment gave that node distinct clinical and personal functions.

Hubbard’s network was built as much through relationships and practical instruction as through formal institutions. His use of pictures, music, flowers, and diamonds in treatment reflected his attention to the way a session’s surroundings could shape the experience. In Vancouver, a patient recalled Hubbard using roses during an LSD session to demonstrate how a person’s relationships could be changed through a shift in perception. Such methods helped make the treatment room a place of active guidance rather than a neutral clinical chamber.

From first-wave practice to later research

The Vancouver work belongs to a history repeatedly altered by institutional acceptance and rejection. Saskatchewan’s trials helped establish LSD therapy as a standard treatment option for alcoholics in the province, while a later replication attempt by the Addiction Research Foundation in Toronto used neutral rooms, limited therapist interaction, questionnaires, restraints, and blindfolds. Its results failed to match those from Saskatchewan, and some volunteers had terrifying experiences. The contrast sharpened the argument that the circumstances of treatment mattered, even as critics questioned the earlier claims of success.

After Sandoz withdrew LSD from circulation in 1966 and the United States government ordered research programs to stop, psychedelic work moved into less visible channels. The book traces later underground guides to lineages reaching back to figures including Al Hubbard and Leo Zeff, and describes cautious movement between underground practice and university research. Vancouver’s earlier importance lies in the concrete network it helped sustain: a hospital treating alcoholics, a meeting that redirected Osmond’s thinking, and an apartment session that drew Stolaroff toward research. Together, these episodes make the city a consequential site in the passage of psychedelic therapy from early clinical experiments into a wider, contested tradition.