Lost Souls Delivered: The Political Life of LSD in the 1950s and 1960s

Abstract

As the recent resurgence of scientific interest in psychedelic medicine has grown, debates about research protocols, safety, efficacy, and regulations have become increasingly acrimonious. This has disappointed investors, researchers, and patients alike, many of whom greeted the most recent wave of research with great optimism, bolstered by the sense that the earlier demise of early psychedelic research in 1970 was brought about by a combination of poor science, irrational public hysteria, and policymakers’ lack of technical understanding. With modern scientific advances and better political messaging, the reasoning goes, the contemporary path to medical psychedelics should be a no-brainer. That that path is becoming less clear has come as something of a surprise to many. It probably shouldn’t. This dissertation tracks the rise and fall of LSD research in the United States from 1949 – 1970, concluding that the moral panic about LSD that sealed psychedelics’ fate in the late 1960’s was brought about, not in spite of scientists’ best efforts to educate the public and policy makers about medical uses of LSD, but because of those efforts. By using a wide variety of historical sources, including archival material, government documents, cultural objects, and oral histories, I trace the development of three key research programs in the first decade of LSD’s scientific life in the United States. Chapter two is devoted to the initial creation of military research into LSD’s potential use as a chemical weapon and psychotomimetic. Chapter three focuses on two adjacent research programs that, through a shared interest in Freudian psychoanalysis, explored LSD’s possibilities for therapy and its possible connections to the creative process. Chapter four then turns to the use of LSD as a tool in the developing field of neuropsychopharmacology, where it was used to help understand hormones and chemical pathways in the central nervous system. By focusing on the differing institutional needs and professional commitments of each of these groups of researchers and illuminating the ways that these differentially shaped research questions and experimental approaches, I argue that scientists developed profound professional and personal disagreements about LSD in the first decade of their research. While these disagreements were fundamentally political and contested from the outset, the became especially salient with changing approaches to clinical trial research that culminated in the Kefauver-Harris Drug Amendments of 1962. Following these amendments, and in response to the burgeoning underground market in LSD that preceded their passage, scientists pushed for increased regulatory control of LSD that they nonetheless hoped would keep it available for scientific research. In doing so, however, they emphasized the drug’s dangerous nature and the need to keep it out of the public’s hands until further research could be performed. In the process, their arguments contributed to the growing sense that LSD and other drugs were too dangerous to be of scientific value and too easily synthesized by the public to make control realistically feasible. Rather than ignoring scientists, in other words, the public and policymakers because they listened to scientists. LSD was outlawed for all use, including medical research, in 1970.