Albion Dreaming (6 page)

By the early 1950s, the Cold War was raging across the political landscape of the northern hemisphere. Both sides in this war of ideologies believed the other held technological secrets. Espionage rather than overt aggression was now the name of the game and intelligence gathering was being honed to a fine art. It was no longer acceptable to use physical torture to extract information. Subtler, more devious methods were required and a scientific race was on to see who could find the perfect “truth drug”.

The Nazis had used the hallucinogenic drug mescaline, derived from the peyote cactus, on captured allied agents in World War II as well as in the concentration camps. But while mescaline made interrogation subjects talk, it proved impossible to control the content of the grilling. The US Office of Strategic Services, predecessor to the CIA, had also begun a wartime search for the perfect interrogation drug. But the OSS soon discovered, as the Nazis had, that none of the drugs, even peyote, gave them the results they required.

When the CIA was formed in 1947 they redoubled their efforts to find a chemical which would act as the perfect “truth drug”. In the same year the US Navy instigated Project Chatter which revisited mescaline on this basis. Results with the drug were inconclusive and Project Chatter was discontinued five years later. The CIA’s search for the elusive drug that would loosen tongues demonstrates just how little was known in the Forties about the workings of the human mind. No such drug existed then or now. But the Cold War was a kaleidoscope of rumour and counter rumour. It was believed the Russians already possessed, or were
on the brink of discovering, the ultimate truth drug; therefore the West had to develop its own lest they fall behind in the drugs race. Whether the Russians really were exploring LSD’s potential uses during the Cold War is unclear. At the height of the Cold War, CIA psychologist John Gittlinger commented, “I’m sure they were, but if you ask me to prove it, I’ve never seen any direct proof of it.” Nonetheless, as soon as the CIA became aware of LSD and its potential as a truth drug they plunged large amounts of money into research.

Despite the CIA’s later obsession with LSD, they initially seemed ignorant of the drug. LSD arrived in America courtesy of the psychiatric profession who heard about it from Viennese doctor Otto Kauders. Kauders, in America in search of research funding, held a conference at Boston Psychopathic Hospital in 1949, where he spoke about the new experimental drug. The hospital’s research director Milton Greenblatt was keenly interested in Kauders’ account of how a barely measurable dose of LSD had convinced Hofmann he was going insane. “We were very interested in anything that could make someone schizophrenic,” he recalls. The possibility that LSD mimicked schizophrenia and psychoses greatly intrigued psychiatrists everywhere and was the key driver in the spread of LSD among the medical community during the Fifties.
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Research psychiatrist Max Rinkel, a delegate at the conference, immediately ordered some LSD from Sandoz and gave a 100 μg dose to his enthusiastic colleague Dr. Robert Hyde, who became the first person on American soil to have the LSD experience. Hyde and Rinkel tested it on a hundred volunteers at Harvard University’s affiliate Boston Psychopathic Institute, discovering it produced “a transitory psychotic disturbance”. This was in line with conclusions drawn by the Sandoz chemists and led the American psychiatrists to believe LSD could be used to induce mental illness in otherwise sane people for the purposes of objective study.

It was during the CIA’s early investigations into LSD that one of the most enduring legends about the drug was born. Before the Agency started testing the drug they contacted Los Angeles
psychiatrist Nick Bercel, the first medical professional in the USA to work with LSD, and asked him a bizarre question. What would happen, they queried, if the Russians were able to introduce a large amount of LSD into the water supply of a major American city? Bercel told them nothing would happen because the chlorine would make the drug ineffective. Although the CIA toyed with altering the chemistry of LSD to create a variant that wouldn’t be destroyed in chlorinated water the idea was soon abandoned. But the notion that terrorists could put enough LSD into a city or country’s water supply became one of the first LSD scare stories and was often repeated by the media, as we will see later in this book.

Early success with initial trials using LSD suggested to the CIA that the drug held promise. Military personnel were dosed with up to 150 μg and given a “secret”, which they were asked not to disclose. In at least one case the officer revealed all and was unable afterwards to recall what he had divulged. This was just the kind of result the CIA was looking for from a drug, and from 1953 onward they began many years of contentious experimentation with LSD. The history of the CIA’s involvement with LSD is fascinating but appears to have had little direct impact on the history of the drug in Britain. The interested reader is referred to Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain’s
Acid Dreams
, as the most comprehensive book on the matter to date.

In the early Fifties the British psychiatric and military establishment was aware of the effects and potential uses of LSD; however, the drug was still to be used on British soil. This situation was to change in September 1952 when psychiatrist Ronnie Sandison set off from England on a study tour of Swiss mental hospitals.

There are good reasons for believing that the LSD experience is a manifestation of the psychic unconscious.

R. Sandison
¹

U
ntil its closure and demolition in the closing decades of the twentieth century, Worcester’s Powick Hospital stood in the long shadow of the Malvern Hills. The Victorian hospital, originally the Worcestershire County Pauper and Lunatic Asylum, was built in 1852 to house the mentally ill from across the county. In its early years, the hospital practised an enlightened regime, encouraging patients to work in its various workshops and to play in the hospital band. The composer Edward Elgar was bandmaster there in 1879 and exercised a powerful influence over the artistic life of the hospital; from his tenure until the 1940s it was a requirement that all male nurses must be able to play a musical instrument.

Until 1907 Powick was a model of hospital treatment for the mentally ill. Then Dr. Fenton took over as medical superintendent. Fenton’s miserly ways soon led to services and treatment at Powick being determined purely by how much money could be saved. The result of this style of management was the hospital’s slow deterioration from mental health flagship to depressing and
run down institution. It was in this state that Dr. Ronnie Sandison, the newly appointed Consultant Psychiatrist found the hospital when he started work there in September 1951.
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In an interview Sandison recalled: “When I first arrived at Powick, Arthur Spencer the Medical Superintendent, said something like: ‘I’ll run the administration if you will run the clinical side of the hospital.’ That suited me perfectly.”
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With this agreement in place, Sandison and Spencer worked hard to return the hospital to its former glory. In the space of a year the hospital, its staff and systems had been overhauled and it was once again a fit place in which to treat the mentally ill. Most importantly Sandison introduced psychotherapy to the treatment regime. In doing so he set the hospital on course to be internationally regarded as a centre of excellence and, later, controversy.

Following a wartime career as a physiologist with the RAF, Sandison trained as a psychiatrist at Warlingham Park Hospital in Surrey. There he came across Freudian and Jungian analysts and decided on a career in psychotherapy. Analysts practiced Depth Psychology, a psychology of the unconscious, in which conscious recollection as well as the content of dreams is analysed for clues to the origin or stimuli of a patient’s mental health symptoms. While Freudian and Jungian analysts differed in their interpretation the principles of analysis between the two schools were similar, the technique becoming known as psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is one of the methods that fall under the wider heading of psychotherapy, and is based on the experiential relationship between patient and therapist using dialogue, communication and behaviour modification to deal with certain types of mental health issues.

Sandison became intrigued by the process of psychoanalysis while at Warlingham noting: “My colleagues regarded the utterances of psychotic patients as something to record in their notes and thus justify their continued detention in hospital. I saw them as priceless material in my understanding of madness.”
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The problem with any form of analysis was that it relied on the therapist’s ability to elicit information from the patient. Some were extremely resistant to the process and could be in analysis
for months or even years before a breakthrough was made. This meant that psychoanalysis was a time consuming and expensive treatment available to the few who could afford it. If a chemical could be found that made the patient more receptive to the therapist’s skill, then psychotherapeutic practice could be speeded up considerably. In theory, this would mean that more patients could be treated effectively over a shorter timescale.

Freud had considered this problem in 1938 speculating: “The future may teach us how to exercise a direct influence, by means of particular chemical substances, upon the amounts of energy and their distribution in the apparatus of the mind. It may be that there are other still undreamt of possibilities of therapy.”
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Freud had no idea that LSD had been synthesised that same year and would come to play a major role in psychotherapy within fifteen years.

In September 1952, at the end of his first year at Powick, Sandison accepted an invitation to join a study tour of Swiss mental hospitals. He accepted, not knowing just how important his visit would prove. Recalling the trip in 2001, Sandison remarked, “It was a journey into the unknown, but it was to have far reaching consequences both for me and the lives of many future patients.”

During the trip Sandison visited the Sandoz laboratories in Basel. He found the chemists there in a state of great excitement. Sandison “... knew nothing about LSD before (my) visit to the Sandoz labs ...” but found the chemists there to be “... absolutely a-buzz with LSD, they weren’t doing anything else at that particular time.”
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While at Sandoz, Sandison met Albert Hofmann and they discussed the effects of the drug on the small group of people who had experimented with it so far. Sandison was excited with the possibilities it offered and returned to Powick with the drug very much in his thoughts. He re-visited the Sandoz laboratories two months later, returning to England with a box of ampoules. These were a gift from Hofmann, each containing 100 μg of LSD, under the trade name Delysid. Sandison did not know it, but he was the first person to bring LSD to Britain.

At that moment in time there was, as Sandison states, “... no theoretical basis for supposing that LSD could be used as a practical
tool in combination with psychotherapy, but it was clear ... it produced a loosening of mental associations, that it facilitated the transference, and that forgotten and sometimes painful memories could be released.” The few studies that had already been done with LSD suggested the drug had potential in psychoanalysis because it improved the contact between therapist and patient, thus speeding up the process of psychotherapy. So, on his return to Powick, and after discussions with colleagues, Sandison began the clinical use of LSD, incorporating it into the psychotherapeutic regime there.
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New drugs are now extensively trialled before their use is allowed on humans. In the Fifties, this was not the case and Sandison was able to use the drug without any interference. Although some laboratory tests had been carried out on the effect of LSD on humans, use of the drug was still very much in its infancy. If LSD were to be discovered in the twenty-first century it would have to undergo years of testing on animals, followed by an equal number of years of rigorous tests on human subjects before its use would be permitted in psychotherapy. But the early 1950s were, according to Sandison: “... before the Royal College and the Committee of Safety in Medicines. ...There were no ethical committees and no concepts such as Evidence Based Medicine whatsoever. One was left to get on with it, if one felt a treatment was right.”
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Sandoz supplied LSD to Sandison free of charge until he left Powick in 1964. Dr. Harold Holgate, the company’s London-based Chief Medical Officer gave him a great deal of assistance and Sandoz asked for nothing in return, though Sandison sent them copies of his published papers out of courtesy.

The results of the first year of LSD psychotherapy at Powick were published in a 1954 paper in the
Journal of Mental Science
. This groundbreaking paper was the first article about LSD to be published in Britain and effectively set down the ground rules for its clinical use. In the paper Sandison and his colleagues Spencer and Whitelaw gave the results of the psychotherapeutic use of the drug on thirty-six patients over the course of a year.

The thirty-six patients of Sandison’s study were regarded as being: “... very difficult psychiatric problems ... all in danger of becoming permanent mental invalids, life-long neurotics or of ending their
lives by suicide.” These were individuals at the end of their mental tether, all suffering from extreme mental tension. Sandison believed that most of the thirty-six patients would have been considered suitable candidates for lobotomy.