

Between 19, Osmond and Hoffer treated about 2,000 alcoholics with LSD and reported that 40-45 percent of them did not return to drinking after a year. However, much to Osmond’s surprise, all of the patients’ experiences on LSD were pleasant and, most importantly, transformative. Humphrey Osmond initially speculated that, by giving a high dose of LSD to individuals suffering from alcoholism, he could frighten them to the point where they would want to quit drinking. What eventually came to be known as psychedelic or psychedelic-assisted therapy was first pioneered in Canada by Abram Hoffer and Humphrey Osmond roughly a decade after Dr. However, few people know that during the 50s and 60s, scientists began to explore the potential uses of psychedelic substances, including LSD, for therapeutic purposes. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine the 60s without the freedom-loving hippie counterculture that challenged an otherwise extraordinarily conservative nation. When most of us think of LSD, we are immediately transported to the 1960s-the era of the proverbial sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. Hofmann realized that he discovered something worthy of further investigation, he could not have possibly imagined that his drug-lysergic acid diethylamide, popularly known as LSD or acid-would eventually become our best hope for solving the opioid epidemic and the global mental health crisis. He later described this altered state of mind as “a not unpleasant, intoxicated-like condition characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination.”

On April 16, 1943, a Swiss chemist by the name of Albert Hofmann accidentally ingested a drug he created five years earlier while working at Sandoz Laboratories (now a subsidiary of Novartis) and began to experience very unusual sensations and hallucinations.
