Alcohol and Drugs History Society

United States Narcotic Farm 1935-1975

Nancy Campbell, Historian of Science, and Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rensalear Polytechnic Institute co-edited with filmmakers J.P. Olson and Luke Walden The Narcotic Farm: A History of Photographs, Abrams: New York, 2008. This book is an offshoot of the 1 hour documentary film "The Narcotic Farm" completed last Fall by the two filmmakers and broadcast on various public stations over the last seven months. 

The film is not available for purchase at this time, but people are encouraged to ask their local PBS station to air it. It is distributed to public TV by NETA and is available for all public TV programmers. People are asked to contact the filmmakers through the film website to find out how to preview the film.

LSD in Britain (book)

Andy Roberts, Albion Dreaming: A Popular History of LSD in Britain (London: Marshall Cavendish, 2008).

Albert Hofmann and LSD

The New York Times remembers scientist Albert Hofmann and LSD here.

LSD treatment for alcoholism in Canada (article)

Erika Dyck, "'Hitting Highs at Rock Bottom': LSD Treatment for Alcoholism, 1950-1970," Social History of Medicine 19/2 (August 2006): 313-329.

American culture and LSD in the 60s and early 70s

Edward Rothstein discusses the impact of LSD on American culture in the 1960s and early 1970s in an essay occasioned by the death in April 2006 of the Swiss chemist Albert Hoffmann at age 102. Hoffmann discovered LSD in 1943 and later wrote a book in which he called it his "problem child." For more, see here.

Allen Ginsberg and the 'politics of ecstasy'

An essay by Tobias Peterson for Popmatters entitled "Allen Ginsberg: The Politics of Ecstasy" can be found here.

'My 12 hours as a madman'

Sidney Katz, a veteran journalist who worked at both the Toronto Star and Maclean's, passed away this week at the age of 92. Lauded as a ground-breaking writer who pursued some of society's most controversial issues, his most celebrated piece might be "My 12 hours as a madman" from the Oct. 1, 1953 issue of Maclean's. Reproduced here in full, it was hailed this week as "the first detailed, first-person account in a general magazine of the effects of LSD."

'You're either on the bus or you're off the bus'

Dreams of getting author Ken Kesey's original psychedelic bus, Furthur, back on the road again have hit a pothole. The Kesey family is looking for a new sponsor to finance restoration work and a TV documentary after breaking things off with Hollywood restaurant owner David Houston, who had hoped to raise $100,000 to restore the bus made famous in Tom Wolfe's 1968 book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Find the full story here.

Conservative review of Timothy Leary's biography (review)

Jesse Walker (managing editor of Reason), "The Acid Guru’s Long, Strange Trip," American Conservative, November 6, 2006, reviews Timothy Leary: A Biography by Robert Greenfield (Harcourt, 689 pages). For more, see here.

Tripping your way to sobriety

Erika Dyck, an assistant professor at the University of Alberta, Canada, researches and teaches the history of medicine.

Recently, she studied a series of LSD tests of alcohol-addicted patients carried out in the 1960s in Saskatchewan. The tests were done by British psychiatrists Humphrey Osmond and John Smythies.

She told ABC News that two-thirds of the alcoholics stopped drinking for at least 18 months after receiving one dose of LSD, compared to 25 percent who stopped after group therapy, and 12 percent after individual therapy.

According to Dyck, even Alcoholics Anonymous endorses the LSD research.

Read more here.