Seattle Mystic Alfred M. Hubbard: Inventor, Bootlegger and Psychedelic Pioneer

by Brad Holden

Seattle has a long tradition of being at the forefront of technological innovation. In 1919, an eager young inventor named Alfred M. Hubbard made his first newspaper appearance with the announcement of a perpetual motion machine that harnessed energy from Earth's atmosphere. From there, Hubbard transformed himself into a charlatan, bootlegger, radio pioneer, top-secret spy, millionaire and uranium entrepreneur. In 1953, after discovering the transformative effects of a little-known hallucinogenic compound, Hubbard would go on to become the "Johnny Appleseed of LSD," introducing the psychedelic to many of the era's vanguards and an entire generation. Join author and historian Brad Holden as he chronicles the fascinating life of one of Seattle's legendary figures.

Genres: Biography, History

144 pages, Paperback

Published July 26, 2021

About the author

Author. Historian. Finder of Old Things. When not out searching for local historical artifacts, Brad Holden enjoys writing about the more illicit side of Seattle’s past. He is a contributing writer for HistoryLink.org (an online encyclopedia of Washington state history) and his work has also appeared in Seattle Magazine and several newspapers. Holden has been profiled on KIRO and KOMO news, Seattle Refined, NPR, King 5 Evening! and various publications. His trilogy of books related to the Prohibition era are available online and at bookstores everywhere. He lives in Edmonds, WA.

Reviews

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible biography of one of those behind the scenes historical figures. If you are interested in Seattle history and LSD history this book will be a revelation.

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hubbard was a strange guy, worked in the OSS, got to be a millionaire with Uranium prospecting, and used to do travel all over the world in search of strange drugs, and who knows what the fuck else.

And i don't see any good use for psychedelic therapy either.

He basically said, he wanted nothing at all to do with the CIA that they were corrupt, and that the OSS were the good guys, but people weren't really sure if he was some type of contract agent or cut out, or loose cannon.

But he was considered the Johnny Appleseed of LSD, and created a strange high end hospital-clinic in New Westminster, British Columbia called Hollywood Hospital, and people would go there for LSD Therapy for Alcoholism, Psychotherapy, A vacation for mind melting for the rich and famous. There was some connection to Humphery Osmond and Abram Hoffer who very early on were interested if something like mescaline or lsd could give me a bad experience of going mad, and that would be simple aversion therapy for serious drunks.

Cary Grant would go there, and he once did some extraordinary creepy comment that LSD gave him the only happy moments in his life, but i think his Hollywood agents told him to never ever talk about that subject again.

Hubbard had this mansion in Downtown Vancouver and he even tried to turn one of the head priests of the downtown Catholic Parish onto LSD, like he was some madman Johnny Appleseed of LSD, as he was called.

He ran back to the states when Hollywood closed, but some never could figure out his connections or agendas.

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In 1951, Osmond and Smythies moved to Saskatchewan, Canada, to join the staff of the Weyburn Mental Hospital. At Weyburn, Osmond recruited a group of research psychologists to turn the hospital into a design-research laboratory.

There, he conducted a wide variety of patient studies and observations using hallucinogenic drugs, collaborating with Abram Hoffer and others.

In 1952, Osmond related the similarity of mescaline to adrenaline molecules, in a theory that implied that schizophrenia might be a form of self-intoxication caused by one's own body. He collected the biographies of recovered schizophrenics and held that psychiatrists can understand the schizophrenic only by understanding the rational way the mind makes sense of distorted perceptions.

He pursued this idea with passion, exploring all avenues to gain insight into the shattered perceptions of schizophrenia, holding that the illness arises primarily from distortions of perception.

Yet during the same period, Osmond became interested in the potential of psychedelics to foster mind-expanding and mystical experiences.

Huxley had initiated a correspondence with Osmond. In one letter, Huxley lamented that contemporary education seemed typically to have the unintended consequence of constricting the minds of the educated, closing students' minds to inspiration and many things other than material success and consumerism. In a letter, Huxley asked Osmond whether he would be kind enough to supply a dose of mescaline.

Osmond and Abram Hoffer were taught a way to "maximize the LSD experience" by the influential layman Al Hubbard, who came to Weyburn. Thereafter they adopted some of Hubbard's methods.

Osmond is also known for a study in the late 1950s in which he attempted to cure alcoholics with LSD. He claimed to have achieved a 50% success rate. Osmond noticed that some drinkers were only able to give up drinking after an episode of delirium tremens and tried to replicate this state in patients by giving them high doses of the drug. This came to be known as the psychedelic treatment model, contrasted to the psycholytic model that used low doses to help release repressed material from the mind which it was hoped would help the psychotherapeutic process.

Later, Osmond became director of the Bureau of Research in Neurology and Psychiatry at the New Jersey Neuro Psychiatric Institute (NJNPI) in Princeton, where he collaborated with Bernard Aaronson in hypnosis experiments. Still later, he became a professor of psychology at the University of Alabama in Birmingham.

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wiki - Hubbard

According to some accounts, Hubbard worked at various times for the Canadian Special Services, the United States Justice Department, the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives and the Office of Strategic Services.

As Hubbard told the story to Willis Harman, he was hiking in Washington State when an angel appeared to him in a clearing. "She told Al that something tremendously important to the future of mankind would be coming soon, and he could play a role in it if he wanted to. But he hasn't the faintest clue what he was supposed to be looking for."

Having read in a scientific journal about the then-obscure drug LSD-25, Hubbard felt this was something that he was destined to learn more about and to be involved with. Hubbard found a researcher who was conducting reported experiments on LSD with rats. He was able to obtain some LSD for himself. He believed in its utility for opening the human mind to deeper, broader vistas.

[Likely story!]

The confident and connected Al Hubbard invited Dr. Humphry Osmond to join him for lunch at the Vancouver Yacht Club. Osmond and his colleagues were using the drug, as well as the similar substance, mescaline, in psychiatric research and treatment at Weyburn, Saskatchewan.

Osmond later recalled that the Yacht Club "was a very dignified place, and I was rather awed by it. [Hubbard] was a powerfully-built man...with a broad face and a firm hand-grip. He was also very genial, an excellent host."

"Captain Hubbard" was interested in acquiring some mescaline, which was then still legal, and Dr. Osmond supplied him with some.

By the time Timothy Leary and his colleagues were experimenting with psychedelic drugs in the psychology department of Harvard in the early 1960s, Hubbard had obtained a supply of Sandoz LSD.

Hubbard went there to meet Leary and wanted to swap some LSD for some psilocybin, the synthesized constituent of magic mushrooms identified, and then produced, by Switzerland's Sandoz Laboratories.

The Central Intelligence Agency grew out of the post-World War II OSS, which was reputed to be one of Hubbard's employers.

Under the auspices of MK-ULTRA, the CIA regularly dosed its agents and associates with powerful hallucinogens as a preemptive measure against what was alleged to be the Soviets' own chemical technology, sometimes with disastrous results.

It is possible that Hubbard had some links with the CIA, but Humphry Osmond doubts that Hubbard would have been associated with a project like MK-ULTRA, "not particularly on humanitarian grounds, but on the grounds that it was bad technique."

"I was convinced that he was the man to bring LSD to planet Earth," remarked Myron Stolaroff, who was assistant to the president of long-range planning at electronics company Ampex Corporation when he met the Captain. Stolaroff learned of Hubbard through a mentor, philosopher Gerald Heard, a friend and spiritual mentor to Aldous Huxley.

According to Todd Brendan Fahey, Hubbard introduced more than 6,000 people to LSD, including scientists, politicians, intelligence officials, diplomats, and church figures.

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The Memory Hole

A true cipher, Hubbard was visionary, eccentric, friendly, and mysterious.

At various times, he was an intelligence agent, an inventor, a millionaire, a clinical therapist, and more.

There appear to be links between Hubbard and MKULTRA, the CIA program that researched behavior modification using LSD and other substances and techniques.

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Hollywood Hospital
Hidden (Greater) Vancouver
These days, the property at 525 Sixth Street in New Westminster barely warrants a second look. But for more than 50 years, the site—now a mixed-use commercial block featuring strip-mall staples like Subway and Save-On Foods—was home to one of British Columbia’s most famous (and notorious) private hospitals.

It was a place that attracted high-profile clientele like Andy Williams and Cary Grant—a sprawling white mansion that, by the late 1950s through the ‘60s, had become known nationwide for its pioneering work in the controversial field of psychedelic therapy.

The estate itself was previously the residence of one Charles Major (a stagecoach operator whose route ran between Barkerville and Ashcroft), and was first opened as a hospital in 1919 by Dr. E.A. Campbell. Named for the holly bushes on the property, the 55-bed facility is thought to have been home to the first formally-planted garden in mainland B.C.

Prior to 1956, it was best-known as a place for alcoholics to kick the habit, and was recognized for its innovative (if unusual) treatment approaches, including doing away with straitjackets and introducing an open-door policy for patients.

In a 1980 issue of Vancouver Magazine, former Province journalist Ben Metcalfe (who spent considerable time writing about the hospital in its heyday) described it as “an enormous, rambling, white-painted cedar and stone mansion that stood much obscured by the great holly trees for which it was named.”

And as unorthodox as Hollywood Hospital’s methods might have been in the beginning, things took an even sharper turn with the arrival of two men: Dr. J. Ross MacLean and Al Hubbard.

MacLean purchased the facility in 1956, following the death of founder Campbell; and between 1957 and Hollywood’s closure in 1975, MacLean and Hubbard supervised more than 6,000 acid trips—not just for alcoholism, but for anxiety disorders, depression, and marital discord—with a success rate of 50 to 80 per cent.

“Hubbard’s whole thing was disseminating LSD to influential people,” Russwurm explains, seated at Matchstick Coffee in Vancouver’s Chinatown. “That’s what he was best known for: just going around, spreading LSD all over North America. To him, it was like spreading the gospel. And he was quite the zealot about its benefits.”

Labelling Hubbard a zealot is hardly an overstatement. Known colloquially as the Johnny Appleseed of LSD, he had such a pervasive influence on the drug subculture of the 1950s and ‘60s that, during a Beverly Hills party for the early acid generation’s gurus, psychologist Timothy Leary turned to him and said “Al, I owe everything to you.”

Described by Metcalfe as “squat, slightly rumpled, wryly jocular, and extremely confident gnostic,” Hubbard had led a fascinating life prior to his arrival at Hollywood Hospital, including stints as a rum-runner for George Reifel and a period working for the OSS (the precursor to the modern CIA).

He had also helped ship uranium for the Manhattan Project, spent time in prison, and claimed to have personally “turned on” author Aldous Huxley.

Having taken his first acid trip in 1951, Hubbard was among the earliest North Americans to do so, and thereafter, had crisscrossed the continent attempting to sell the medical establishment on its potential.

In 1953, he convinced Dr. Abram Hoffer, head of the Canadian government’s psychiatric research facility in Saskatoon, to begin exploring the possibilities of LSD.

He also helped Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron of McGill University set up a similar program in Montreal (which, thanks to the CIA, had much more sinister results).

And in 1957, a year after MacLean’s purchase of the Hollywood Hospital, Hubbard arrived on his doorstep.

In the late 1950s, psychedelic therapy came without virtually any of the social stigma it carries today. For starters, it was legal; Hubbard—the only licensed importer in Canada—obtained his acid (known then by its more formal name LSD-25) directly from Sandoz, the Swiss company that had first manufactured it back in the 1940s

“And during the ‘50s, there was a bunch of serious research going on with pharmaceuticals in general—that was when the first pharmaceuticals came along that had any positive psychiatric effect at all. Drugs like antipsychotics and antidepressants. And LSD was part of all that.”

Hollywood Hospital charged its patients on a sliding scale; usually between $600 and $1,000 for psychedelic treatment (although some received it pro bono).

Sessions took place in a specialized Psychedelic Therapy Room, which featured Hi-Fi speakers, plants, and several visually stimulating paintings, including Salvador Dalí’s Last Supper and Crucifixion, and Paul Gaugin’s Buddha.

The sessions were as clinical as possible under the circumstances, each one being presided over by Hollywood Hospital staff including MacLean, Hubbard, and a nurse.

Notes were taken in the room, and employees were on hand both to prepare patients before treatment and to discuss the experience with them in real-time.

ach participant in what was dubbed “The Experience” was asked to draw up an autobiography, including details of childhood, family, and sexual and religious experiences, as well as reasons for wanting to take part in the process.

As MacLean wrote in a 1965 report entitled LSD-25 And Mescaline As Therapeutic Adjuvants: Experience From A Seven-Year Study, this exercise “undoubtedly orientates the patient to self evaluation, and otherwise sets the stage for much of what will be experienced. This facet of preparation is also viewed as an integral part of the total therapy.”

By mid-1959, MacLean and Hubbard were rich men. MacLean had used his largesse to purchase Vancouver’s iconic Casa Mia on Marine Drive, and Hubbard drove a two-tone Rolls-Royce, owned a fleet of airplanes, and had a lab on one of the Gulf Islands.

In Hubbard’s case, it’s unclear exactly where his money came from; Russwurm contends that it was through work as both the scientific director of the Uranium Corporation of BC and head of a company called Marine Manufacturing, while other historians have suggested that he never fully retired from clandestine government work.

But while he may have been wealthy, there’s one thing Hubbard was not: a doctor.

His credentials had in fact been purchased from Taylor University, a degree mill that was little more than a Chicago post office box.

When confronted by Metcalfe on the subject, his response was characteristically glib:

“Hell, Ben—I never had a pair of shoes ‘till I was 12 years old and left Kentucky! When would I find time to become what you call a real doctor?”

Despite its financial and medical success, the therapy conducted at Hollywood Hospital wasn’t viewed favourably by the medical establishment.

Vocal opponents included Vancouver General Hospital psychiatry head Dr. James Tyhurst, and the BC Physicians College, which threatened to withdraw the hospital’s subsidies if it couldn’t demonstrate the program’s effectiveness.

It was this demand that led to the hospital’s most high-profile moment when, in the fall of 1959, journalist Metcalfe wrote a six-part, front-page series on psychedelic therapy for the Province.

The pieces were an attempt to improve the hospital’s image, exploring the drug’s history and efficacy, and climaxing with a firsthand account of the LSD experience.

“The first men to return to Earth from outer space will have much less difficulty convincing you of what they saw than those few people who have had ‘The Experience’ with the drug LSD-25,” Metcalfe wrote in the Sept. 2, 1959 edition of the Province. “But within hours after taking the drug myself I had been there and back several times and to many other places besides.”

The series was a sensation. Even today, Metcalfe’s analysis of the drug, and the patients it affected, is remarkably levelheaded, having been written in a world before the scaremongering of the 1960s had taken hold (“toxically, it is less harmful to the body than an aspirin compound,” he notes at one point).

And even the therapeutic process—recorded by nurses and transcribed later by Metcalfe—was surprisingly progressive for 1959; after looking at his own hands and remarking “what wonderful things the hands are,” Metcalfe spent a solid six minutes weeping. “This is all repressed masculinity,” Hubbard had said, consoling him. “This is what we bury to become men.”

While its primary use was in treating alcoholics, LSD-25 was also employed for a less ethical purpose: to try “curing” homosexuality. Although, as MacLean explained in his 1965 report, this ended up having an unexpectedly positive effect: “Few homosexuals in our group have attained a satisfactory heterosexual adjustment, yet many have derived marked benefit in terms of insight, acceptance of role, reduction of guilt and associated psychosexual liabilities.”

It was during this period that Hollywood Hospital attracted its most famous guests, including Williams, Grant, and Vancouver Sun publisher Don Cromie. But for the facility, and for the drug that had become its star attraction, the moment of fame wouldn’t last.

In 1965, Sandoz stopped making the drug; in 1966, the American government made it an illegal substance, and in 1968, Canada did the same (two vocal champions were Tyhurst and University of British Columbia researcher Pat McGeer, who claimed, baselessly, before the legislature that LSD was “every bit as hellish as heroin”).

By the early 1970s, Hollywood Hospital had fallen on hard times. New Westminster City Council tried, unsuccessfully, to shut it down in the spring of 1970, and around the same time, it ran into trouble with fire inspectors over the condition of its buildings.

Without psychedelic therapy as its flagship, the hospital introduced other things, including multivitamin injections. In December of 1974, the government announced it would no longer continue providing bed subsidies, and in July of 1975, Hollywood Hospital closed its doors.

At this point, Hubbard had already gone on his way. By 1980, when Metcalfe tracked him down for a follow-up story in Vancouver Magazine, he was living a markedly different life from his Hollywood Hospital tenure, instead spending his days in an Arizona trailer park and working as a security guard.

“By then, he had blown through his fortune,” Russwurm says. “And that was largely because he didn’t believe in commercializing LSD at all. For him it was more of spiritual thing.”

[Albert Gidari · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holden's first book on Prohibition and the bootleg king of Seattle, Roy Olmstead, was a great read. In this book, he pluck's one of the most enigmatic characters out of the Olmstead story - Al Hubbard - and tells the story of a remarkable inventor, liar, innovator, untrustworthy, and largely unsympatheic character who moved from alcohol in Prohibition to LSD in the 60s! What you learn about Hubbard leaves you ambivalent about him, but wondering what could have been had he been truly a dedicated inventor.

[Jeffrey Powanda · Rating 3 out of 5]

A short, shallow biography of a fascinating raconteur and ex-convict who placed himself at the center of Seattle bootlegging, radio technology, World War II arms smuggling, and LSD research from the 1920s through the 1970s. Less than 200 pages and with plenty of photos, the book reads like a lengthy magazine profile. I enjoyed it for historical details on Seattle bootlegging and for details on Hubbard's connections with other notable people involved with LSD research, including Aldous Huxley, Humphrey Osmond, Willis Harman, Myron Stolaroff, Timothy Leary, and Ken Kesey. For a more exhaustive history of the psychedelic movement, see Acid Dreams by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the book is the afterword, which attempts to separate the myth of Al Hubbard from fact. Unfortunately, many mysteries remain. For instance, it's unclear whether Hubbard's astonishing atmospheric power generator was a practical invention or a flim-flam, but it's much more likely the latter. Holden also uncovers tantalizing clues that Hubbard may have had some involvement with the CIA's secret MK-Ultra program, despite Hubbard's vehement denials that he had anything to do with the CIA.

[Allan Cronin · Rating 5 out of 5]

An Important Biographical Work

This is a lovingly researched book on a unique historical figure. Al Hubbard was involved in bootlegging, early radio, and psychedelic research. A very nice read.