Letter: Experimental trip that put acid to the test
Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.Sir: I was heartened to find that you were able to devote a whole page to an appraisal of the drug LSD on the 50th anniversary of the discovery of its effects on the mind by Albert Hofmann ('Fifty-year trip for drug that epitomised the Sixties', 16 April). It is refreshing to know that Hofmann, whose laboratory I first visited in 1951, still maintains a belief in the clinical potential of LSD. However, when Steve Connor looked into current opinion in this country about the value of LSD as a clinical tool I suggest that he asked the wrong people and I feel that the record needs to be put straight.
Assisted by a small group of colleagues I first used LSD as a means of promoting and facilitating the psychotherapeutic process in 1952 and the results were written up and first published in the Journal of Mental Science (afterwards the British Journal of Psychiatry) in 1954. This was the first of a long series of papers coming from our own hospital and also from many other psychiatrists in the UK and around the world.
New drugs that have dramatic effects tend to create a lot of noise. Our work was no exception, but the problem in those early days was to find a model that could be understood by lay people. The press plumped for The Alice-in-Wonderland model, after we described episodes in which our patients regressed to childhood and felt themselves to have shrunk in size. Psychiatrists working in mental hospitals made schizophrenia their model, not very convincingly as it happened. Religious thinkers and philosophers saw the drug as inducing mystical and religious experience.
The stir created by our work was as nothing to the noise generated by the street use of LSD in the Sixties. This has no medical interest except as a social phenomenon and for the doctor who is called on to treat one of its victims. Once this had happened there was no further possibility, in my view, of the valid therapeutic use of LSD. It may be that LSD will once again play a part in the practice of psychotherapy, but not yet.
Yours faithfully,
RONALD SANDISON
Ledbury,
Herefordshire
17 April
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments