Jordan
It is easy to imagine, given legal cannabis and pushes for decriminalization in cities across the country, that today’s approach to drugs in Canada is as permissive as it ever has been. It’s easy to imagine this, especially if you’re of a certain age and you grew up with public service announcements like this one.
Public Service Announcement Clip
This is your brain. This is drugs.This is your brain on drugs.
Jordan
But of course, that only represents a certain point in time, a time that was a reaction to the drug culture of the 60s and early 70s. Now, where did the drugs that fueled that culture come from? Here’s the interesting part. A lot of it came from a little-known medical facility in Saskatchewan where in the 1950s, Canada was leading the world in the creation and research of psychedelics. And we are not talking about research as we picture it today with massive safety-controlled trials. No, we’re talking about giving psychedelics to people struggling with mental illness. And not only that, doctors themselves and their spouses taking psychedelics at night to test them on themselves to try to understand what their patients were feeling. This was the Vanguard of what would become the acid trip movement of the 60s. And it all started in the Weyburn mental hospital with a man named Humphry Osmond.
Jordan
I’m Jordan Heathrowings. This is The Big Story. Erika Dyck is a historian of health medicine and Canadian society at the University of Saskatchewan. She is the Canada Research chair in the history of health and social justice. And importantly for our conversation, she is the author of Psychedelic Psychiatry LSD on the Canadian Prairies. And that has just been adapted into a graphic novel called Wonder Drug.
Jordan
Hello, Erica.
Erika Dyck
Hi.
Jordan
Maybe we could start with something basic to kind of situate the listeners. Tell me about the Saskatchewan mental hospital, before any of this happened. What kind of building was it? Who lived there? That kind of stuff.
Erika Dyck
Yeah. I mean, Saskatchewan’s largest mental hospital is kind of infamous in Canadian terms. Some people described it as the largest one in Canada. Some people even claimed that it was the largest one in the British Commonwealth, which I think is very much disputed. But it was one of the last sort of asylum-style buildings, designed to house people with psychiatric disorders. So we think of asylums as usually a 19th-century idea or these sort of old. Now we think of them as these Gothic, almost haunted spaces. But this one in Weyburn was built in 1921,and it opened its doors to the first few hundred patients just a few months after opening. And it sort of looms large in the local history. But of course, for our purposes here today, it also became home to some of the most internationally significant psychedelic experiments in the 20th century.
Jordan
So tell me then, who was Humphry Osmond.And why did he come to the Saskatchewan mental hospital? And when?
Erika Dyck
Humphry Osmond was a British trained psychiatrist who worked in a variety of places, including with the British Navy during the second world war, and in 1951, he came to Weyburn in Saskatchewan after answering an ad in the Lancet, which was placed there by the team working with Tommy Douglas, who was the Premier of Saskatchewan, who famously was elected Premier on a bold statement about healthcare reforms, and of course, for Canadians now, he’s become the father of Medicare. And those healthcare reforms are what created those blueprints for Medicare that’s now across Canada.
Erika Dyck
And part of the ideas around investing in health reforms was to invite or recruit leading scientists, and clinical researchers, and people who were invested in the kind of work that would help to secure those health reforms. Humphry Osmond was really curious about changing the way we think about psychiatry and how we treat different mental disorders. And so he was recruited into this position and became the Superintendent of the Saskatchewan mental hospital at Weyburn. He was there from 1951 to 1961, and during that period, this became the hay day of psychedelic research in the province.
Jordan
So what would he have found in terms of patients when he arrived there? And you know how were they being treated then, and how did he plan to change it?
Erika Dyck
There was an American survey of mental hospitals that went across North America, and prior to Osmond’s arrival, the Weyburn hospital was singled out as one of the worst ones in North America. And this is partly due to overcrowding, but also poor structural problems with the facility itself. It’s certainly not unique to the Weyburn facility, but sewage that would back up in the basement wards, closed-off vents or vents that were never connected in the first place. A lack of private spaces, which is again very common in some of these asylum facilities. But nonetheless, this was a really kind of crude place that was also not surrounded by many main urban amenities. So both staff and patients felt very isolated there. In research that I did with some colleagues, we found that about 70% of the people who were incarcerated or committed, depending on how politically you want to claim this, about 70% of the patients who went into that facility did not come out.
Jordan
So what was Humphrey’s plan in terms of research and experimentation? Because this is where it starts to get fascinating, especially for Saskatchewan in the 1950s.
Erika Dyck
Yeah. So Osmond arrived at this exciting time, according to some, where there were other researchers and sort of like-minded people who are interested not only in the socialized medicine or in healthcare reforms, but also thinking about investing in the kind of scientific and clinical research that pushed beyond the conventional boundaries of health and medicine at the time. So Osmond arrived with an interest in hallucinations and an interest in different compounds, chemicals, and psychoactive substances that can cause hallucinations and comparing that with organic hallucinations. So, for example, comparing the way that someone diagnosed with schizophrenia describes their hallucinations. Often these are auditory hallucinations, but even visual ones. And how does that compare with someone who has taken, in this case, mescaline, which is a psychoactive component of the peyote cactus, or LSD, which was first made available in the 1940s from Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company, which is de-lysergic acid diethylamide. It is a synthesis of an ergot substance. These things cause hallucinations, psilocybin coming from mushrooms or psilocybin mushrooms, rather, is another one of these examples which was also being tested at the time.
Erika Dyck
And Osmond was really curious about how these organic or synthetic substances could give insight into these pathological conditions. So if you could create a sort of empathetic experience, you could mimic the experience of schizophrenia. Maybe there was a way to gain insight into how that disorder felt, how it progressed, or how it might even be controlled or managed. This was the opening for him in terms of looking at these I’ll call them hallucinogenic drugs because it’s not until 1956 that he introduces the word psychedelic. But in the early phases of his research, he’s quite keen to understand how these substances can allow us to have a kind of different intellectual conversation or even give different vocabulary to understanding the plight of major mental disorders, particularly those with psychotic symptoms.
Jordan
Can you give me some concrete examples of what those kinds of experiments and therapies would look like, would sound like? In practical terms, what did he do?
Erika Dyck
Initially, a lot of what he did was using mostly LSD, sometimes mescaline, with professionals. And I’ll say that with a huge asterisk. So I think the recorded materials typically were focused on professionals, and that would be other psychiatrists, psychologists, perhaps psychology students, social workers, psychiatric nurses. But what I found in doing interviews and in reading between the lines and meeting other people who were involved in this time, this wasn’t always the case. Often those were some of the people who were encouraged to take these substances to try to gain insight into major mental disorders, but also friends. And this is the 1950’s so I’m just going to say it, wives. So many of these positions were held by men, but often they would take these substances with their wives and have this very intimate experience, partly as the wives explain to me, because it was very difficult to put into words the kinds of sensations people experienced when they took these compounds, these chemicals, these substances that kind of brought people out of their minds, that challenged their sense of perception, that altered reality, such that they no longer trusted the vocabulary they had at their disposal to describe what was happening. And so doing that with a trusted partner, an intimate partner, was a really useful way to try to give words and give language to the sensations that one felt.
Jordan
Yeah. I mean, I was going to ask, how would you even go about scientifically recording the results of some of these experiments? You know, it kind of seems like the ultimate example of the unreliable narrator.
Erika Dyck
You know, It’s interesting. I think that from our 2021 perspective, it certainly feels that way. And I think that’s in part because even if you or I haven’t been directly involved in randomized controlled trials, we have a sense that drugs go through these sort of efficacy experiments, and there’s a way that we understand how drugs are understood or how they’re evaluated. But if we roll back the clock a little bit and we think what was happening in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s leading up to this moment, there’s a different set of criteria in place. A very dominant form of working in psychiatric healing was through psychoanalysis. And psychoanalysts are required to go through their own therapy before they can provide therapy. So if you imagine that in that context, having your own insights, generating that kind of first-person narrative, that first-person experience was actually part of the training for many people who train through psychoanalysis, certainly, and even through psychiatry. Another thing to bear in mind in terms of a contextual piece, the 1950s are a really important decade for introducing more psychopharmaceutical products than ever before in human history. This kind of rush of interest really changes the way we think about not only seeing drugs as maybe the first portal of entry when we imagine seeking solutions for psychiatric disorders, but there’s a whole sort of landscape of experimentation that is very different, I think, leading into this period by comparison with what we see today, where we’ve really sort of streamlined that and codified things. So we see things going through a serious set of standardized trials.
Erika Dyck
But at the time, there were a lot of case reports, a lot of self-experimentation which was considered ethical, that it was more ethical, for example, to experiment on oneself before administering it to a larger population. So all of those things, I think, are really kind of cool to think about and useful reminders of the terrain that we’re working with here, that these guys weren’t by their contemporary standards, they weren’t engaged in unethical offside, completely off the map research, although I think it’s what they concluded maybe pushed them to the edges of that.
Jordan
So what do we know then in terms of results and progress from some of these experiments? Is there anything concrete? Did it just kind of advance the science in general? What happened?
Erika Dyck
Yeah, well, what I was describing with this model, psychosis, was this idea that you could use psychedelics as a psychomimetic, so to mimic something. And I think that research was useful for thinking with, but it tended to get a lot of criticism, and people argued that this wasn’t actually a true approximation of something like schizophrenia. But where the research diverged and really got a lot of results and a lot of good results I should say, and got a lot more attention was in applying it in a therapeutic context. In Saskatchewan, under Osmond’s direction and with the help of many colleagues, they really applied this directly to addictions. And if I break that down a little bit, really to alcoholism and break them down a little bit further, these were primarily male problem drinkers. That was the language used at the time, problem drinking. In addictions research what they found was that LSD, psilocybin and mescaline, created what would be akin to today’s terms, a breakthrough therapy, that this created such a sudden and dramatic intervention that it was equivalent to ten years of psychotherapy.
Jordan
Wow
Erika Dyck
That it allowed people to see outside themselves and to gain some insight and reflection on their behavior such that they generated the capacity to change that behavior. This was done sometimes in concert with the twelve-step program. So Alcoholics Anonymous is, of course, the main artery here.
Jordan
Right.
Erika Dyck
But there’s some tension there between using a non-medical program, like a twelve-step program of self-healing and self-awareness, and a medical intervention, a sort of macro dose or what people today call a hero dose of, say, LSD to bring people sort of into this sometimes a spiritual awakening, as some people describe it, but really a psychological breakthrough moment. And these models kind of conflicted with each other in some ways. But in Saskatchewan, what I find is really fascinating and in the surrounding area is that they started to work together. That members of Alcoholics Anonymous quietly and discreetly worked with psychiatrists and psychologists in Saskatchewan, to bring people into the twelve-step program by first giving them a psychedelic experience. And we know this is the case because even Bill W, one of the co-founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, participated in one of these experiments. He had to be very careful about how he described this or whether he described it publicly at all because it may compromise his position as a sober member of the twelve-step program. But he recognized that these kinds of breakthrough moments, this insight that one could develop from a fairly large dose or even a medium dose of a psychedelic, was really powerful for helping people to generate the kind of willpower required sometimes to stay with that twelve-step program.
Jordan
So why don’t we give everybody entering a big dose of LSD today, then?
Erika Dyck
Well, it has become illegal, so that’s one of the major.
Jordan
But in general, I’m curious, if it seemed to work so well and produce these kind of breakthroughs, how did it get from there to, as you point out, illegal stigmatized, etc. For today?
Erika Dyck
Yeah, I think that there are a number of moving parts here that help to explain the demise of the psychedelics. And I’ll just say quickly that I think that there are some people today who would agree with you very much that what we need to do is differently regulate or decriminalize entirely. And I mean, there’s a whole spectrum of perspectives on this, but these medicines need to be more widely available and that they are powerful. And I think there are at least two main arguments for why these substances became illegal in the late 19s 60s and into the 1970s, depending on where you are in North America. Some of it is cultural and some of it is scientific, and I would say that sort of undergirding all of that. There’s a big economical question as well. So on the cultural side, probably you and all of your listeners can readily think of people, hippies, historical avatars who represent this kind of reckless behavior, whether it’s a countercultural critique of mainstream society or political actions against the Vietnam War, all of that kind of maelstrom of the 19s 60s that gets tied up into this idea that people taking drugs were getting bad ideas. Now I’m saying it specifically to give a kind of hyperbolic expression, because I think that that’s exactly what happened. I think there was a moral panic that tied particular behaviors, attitudes, and political positions to taking psychedelics and other drugs. And of course, that’s overblown. But it certainly captured public attention. It certainly captured media attention, and I think created a bit of a frenzy that resulted in swift and bold legal actions that criminalized these drugs rather than allow them to continue in medical research.
Erika Dyck
That’s not the whole story. I think there’s another component that is really useful to think about as we imagine a future that may or may not involve psychedelics as well in a legal context. And that is that there was a lot of tension around how to experiment with psychedelics. And you’ve already raised this in your question, is it okay, ethical or otherwise, for researchers to be taking substances themselves? And as we move away from studying things by case reports or doing a kind of trial and error approach to human experimentation, as controlled trials and blinded controlled trials and ultimately randomized controlled trials increasingly move into that scientific space, psychedelics did not perform well in that context. And some people even argued that they shouldn’t perform well, that they weren’t designed to move through those phases in the same way that we might see other SSRI medications, for example. Now the bottom line to this and sorry to be so long-winded that I think there’s a real economic imperative in both sides. On the one hand, the war on drugs ushered in by Richard Nixon. Many people have critiqued this and argued that this was actually an attempt to racialize drug control and an attempt to sort of allow for economic roots for certain psychoactive substances to make it to the marketplace. We can think of tobacco, alcohol as good examples, but also a lot of pharmaceuticals. That tension also plays out in the scientific context and that certain methodologies allow for some drugs, pharmaceutical drugs, to make it to market and to prove safety and efficacy in a particular way, whereas psychedelics didn’t perform well. People on placebo, you can tell right away the placebo of peace didn’t really factor into those trials very neatly. And people argued that, in fact, it wasn’t just a pharmacological experience, that it was a combination of pharmacological reaction and the psychotherapy and the sort of setting and the mindset that was involved. But those things were not measurable in the same way through clinical trials.
Erika Dyck
And again, there’s an economic imperative here. Pharmaceuticals that you take every day make a lot more money for the pharmaceutical industry than a single dose, albeit a large dose. Even a dose that requires you to sit with a psychotherapist for 8 hours is still ultimately more cost-effective to a health care system than it is for the money-making component of it. You can see where this comes back to the healthcare reforms a little bit.
Jordan
I do, yeah. This is all so fascinating. Thank you for this history. The last thing I want to explore, though is, do you see this coming full circle at all? And I ask that because we’ve done a couple of episodes of this show recently about a trend towards illegal drugs, psychedelics, hallucinogens in treatments for depression and anxiety. I think particularly ketamine is one that’s being discussed in really small doses, but in a combination with therapy. And are we becoming more open again to this kind of solution?
Erika Dyck
Absolutely. There are a number of commentators who are now describing this as a psychedelic revival, psychedelic resurgent, psychedelic renaissance. There are lots of attempts to sort of capture that spirit of either a return of psychedelics and maybe kind of a coming together of different ideas, not necessarily just a circle, but an evolution, perhaps. And I think you’re absolutely right. I think some of the substances still carry with them such a strong stigma LSD, for example. I think depending on who you’re talking to and how old your listeners are, people might imagine seeing a frying pan with an egg sizzling on it. There were some really powerful public health ads that were spread throughout North America and certainly made their way into high schools and all sorts of educational spaces that really confirmed or sort of really planted these ideas that psychedelics were going to cause you brain damage. But I think those attitudes are starting to change and for at least two reasons. One, because much of that was actually retracted, even though that doesn’t necessarily change the way I remember the frying pan, some of those statements were retracted. But also we’ve had now almost 75 years of a sort of mental health paradigm that focuses on psychopharmaceuticals as a major component of our treatment options.
Erika Dyck
And they haven’t worked. This isn’t to say that they don’t work for everyone and they should all be thrown out, but we don’t see lowering rates of mental disorders. In fact, we see growing rates and we see a proliferation of this. At the same time that we see massive investments, economic investments in the pharmaceutical industry that seems to be getting larger as the problem continues to get larger, the problem being mental health and the burden of mental health in our society. I think that during a global pandemic we’re only seeing that rise even more. And I think people are beginning to question culturally and scientifically the utility of emphasizing or focusing on a treatment model that isn’t really producing the kinds of results that one wants. And I think that desire, that sort of cultural frustration or desire for more of a breakthrough moment and maybe a different way of understanding mental distress and pain not simply to find something to fix it, but to imagine it differently or imagine a different way of integrating mental health and healing into our lives. I think there’s a cultural appetite for that right now which coincides with an exhaustion of pandemic plus mental health disorders.
Erika Dyck
I’m a humanities scholar, so I’ll lean on the cultural side of things a little bit, but I think that our attitudes are changing as much as there’s new scientific information to again prove I’ll say that again prove that psychedelics have a place in modern medicine and we need to perhaps invest differently in how we think about evaluating risks and how we talk about risks in a harm reduction context.
Jordan
Erica, thank you so much for this. It will be interesting to see how this evolves over the next couple of years. Thanks again.
Erika Dyck
Thanks so much for having me.
Jordan Erika Dyck is the author of Psychedelic Psychiatry LSD on the Canadian Prairies.That was the Big Story. You can find us atthebigstorypodcast.ca,you can talk to us anytime on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN you can always email us thebigstorypodcast@rci.rogers.com click here!. And as always we’re in every podcast player and every smart speaker, just ask it to play the Big Story podcast. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.
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