Not-So-Deadly Nightshade

One of the most controversial aspects of AA's history is the role that psychedelics may have played in Bill Wilson's creative process. As I discuss in the Wired piece, when Wilson experienced his spiritual epiphany in December 1934, he did so at a New York City drying-out facility. Part of his treatment there consisted of something called the Belladonna Cure, in which detoxing alcoholics were given hourly infusions of a potentially hallucinogenic drug. A recent New York Times piece gives...