How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics

by Michael Pollan

The idea that an LSD experience could mimic the DTs “seemed so bizarre that we laughed uproariously,” Hoffer recalled years later. “But when our laughter subsided, the question seemed less comical and we formed our hypothesis …: would a controlled LSD-produced delirium help alcoholics stay sober?” Here was an arresting application of the psychotomimetic paradigm: use a single high-dose LSD session to induce an episode of madness in an alcoholic that would simulate delirium tremens, shocking the patient into sobriety. Over the next decade, Osmond and Hoffer tested this hypothesis on more than seven hundred alcoholics, and in roughly half the cases, they reported, the treatment worked: the volunteers got sober and remained so for at least several months. Not only was the new approach more effective than other therapies, but it suggested a whole new way to think about psychopharmacology. “From the first,” Hoffer wrote, “we considered not the chemical, but the experience as a key factor in therapy.” This novel idea would become a central tenet of psychedelic therapy.