The controversy surrounding the use of LSD as an adjunct to psychotherapy for alcoholics in Saskatchewan has not been explored by social or medical historians. From 1950 to 1967, Saskatchewan psychiatrists developed new treatments for chronic alcoholism by using LSD on themselves, on volunteers and finally on patients. Despite early success and praise, the use of LSD in psychotherapy was later condemned by the media, the general public, the medical profession and eventually the federal government and was discontinued after being banned in 1967. The reasons for the ban were far-reaching and diverse. LSD was exploited by the counter-culture for "kicks" and was later abandoned by pharmaceutical companies because of the negative reputation lay-professionals and the media had bestowed upon its therapeutic use. As it turned out, legitimate LSD research became too clouded in controversy to survive the 1960s as researchers failed to convince the masses that the drug did not pose a threat to the well-being of society. In many respects, the LSD controversy can be seen as more of a moral panic than a scientific debate. Nevertheless, the LSD controversy provides a unique and much needed look into the history of medicine from a social perspective, illustrating that social values often have more impact on medical research than empirical validity. As recent evidence suggests, the psychotherapeutic potential of LSD -- as developed by Saskatchewan psychiatrists -- has not been forgotten. Indeed, a renewal of interest in LSD research has surfaced in several U.S. states as American psychiatrists are discovering, once again, that LSD can be a valuable psychiatric research tool.

The controversy surrounding the use of LSD as an adjunct to psychotherapy for alcoholics in Saskatchewan has not been explored by social or medical historians. From 1950 to 1967, Saskatchewan psychiatrists developed new treatments for chronic alcoholism by using LSD on themselves, on volunteers and finally on patients. Despite early success and praise, the use of LSD in psychotherapy was later condemned by the media, the general public, the medical profession and eventually the federal government and was discontinued after being banned in 1967. The reasons for the ban were far-reaching and diverse. LSD was exploited by the counter-culture for "kicks" and was later abandoned by pharmaceutical companies because of the negative reputation lay-professionals and the media had bestowed upon its therapeutic use. As it turned out, legitimate LSD research became too clouded in controversy to survive the 1960s as researchers failed to convince the masses that the drug did not pose a threat to the well-being of society. In many respects, the LSD controversy can be seen as more of a moral panic than a scientific debate. Nevertheless, the LSD controversy provides a unique and much needed look into the history of medicine from a social perspective, illustrating that social values often have more impact on medical research than empirical validity. As recent evidence suggests, the psychotherapeutic potential of LSD -- as developed by Saskatchewan psychiatrists -- has not been forgotten. Indeed, a renewal of interest in LSD research has surfaced in several U.S. states as American psychiatrists are discovering, once again, that LSD can be a valuable psychiatric research tool. / Arts, Faculty of / History, Department of / Graduate

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.

Not available / text

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Ohio University, November, 2008. / Abstract only has been uploaded to OhioLINK. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [256]-287)

Thesis (Ph.D.)--McMaster University, 2005. / Supervisor: David Wright. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 272-306). Also available online.

Unlike their European predecessors in the experimentation with hallucinogens and aesthetics who undertook it as an exotic tradition brought from afar, many Latin American and North American authors turned to visionary practices and substances (cannabis, peyote, psilocybin mushrooms and ayahuasca, among others) as a main element of their own cultural heritage and territory. Though commonly restricted to the specific category of "psychedelia," the narratives in this corpus from the 20th century only acquire their true depth once included within a much vaster realm, that of visionary traditions, mostly originated in non-Western sources --with exceptions among divinators, witches and sorcerers in Europe -- both in the Old World of the Orient and Africa, but particularly in the New World, in America. Problematically blurring use and exchange value, the 20th century seized these substances as sources of forbidden pleasures which alienated laborers, while their prohibition generated immense fortunes that destabilized democracies throughout the continent, motivated violence, and funded mafias, guerrillas and paramilitary groups. Yet, visionary plants and practices spread with a transcultural power that even today allows for the survival of ethnic groups and traditional knowledge long hidden, while also feeding urban consumptions that generate innumerable subcultures, time and again misunderstood as a sign of decadence. In this dissertation these "underworld" practices are also manifestations of something prior and parallel to the birth of a culture of mass consumers: they mark an encounter between Indigenous, Afro, rural and mestizo influences in the voices of authors who contributed to culture from the margins of very hierarchical and racist societies, and assumed a leading role in their intellectual debate, capturing its mixtures, dark humor, conflicts and transculturations via writing and films. Initially marginalized in the low worlds of taverns, destitute neighborhoods, crime, prisons and prostitution venues, hallucination and hallucinogens--simultaneously a colonial anathema and a sacred pre-Columbian ritual of transcendence--survive and thrive, passing on to the urban minorities of artists and thinkers I will examine in this dissertation, now even including synthetics like Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD). Late Avant-gardes between the 1950s and 1990s--beatniks, counterculture, yippies and Chicanos in the US, the Onda generation and the "jipitecas'' in Mexico, and the "nadaístas'' and the Cali group in Colombia--partially rescued this knowledge, but, above all, its consumptions, preserving some of them as an original heritage within their metaphysics, politics and aesthetics, and as a core part of many of their ideological and secular inquiries. Banned and misconstrued by the viceregal, republican, national and transnational elites, both in the colonial past, and in the contemporary moment of an hemispheric circuit -- within the geopolitics of Nixon‘s War on Drugs -- visionary and hallucinogenic uses continue shaping much of the cultural panorama of America today. The variety of films and texts observed in this project gives a measure of the true heterogeneity of Latin American and US authors of the 20th century: In their works we reconnect a fracture that divides not only two, but many worlds, while it makes possible, for once, to conceive the simultaneous reality of them all.