Looking Again at the “Insanity Chemical”

LSD on the Eve of the 1960s

Image: Book published by New American Library, January 1, 1966

The Swiss chemist Albert Hoffmann accidentally discovered LSD’s hallucinogenic properties in 1943, when he ingested a small amount of the synthetic chemical while conducting laboratory tests on medicinal uses of ergot.

By the early 1950s, LSD was being heralded as a promising therapeutic agent for severe alcoholism, schizophrenia and autism. Some thirteen years before The Jefferson Airplane released the counterculture anthem “White Rabbit,” The Washington Post referred to LSD (1954) as an “Alice-in-Wonderland drug” that enabled patients to access repressed memories and experience significant relief from distress.

The idea of LSD, a nonaddictive drug whose temporary effects include hallucinations, dissociation, loss of ego boundaries, emotional lability, and a distorted sense of time, captivated the mass media. Metaphors such as “insanity chemical,” “madness gas,” “shock drug,” and “artificial insanity” proliferated throughout mainstream newspaper and magazine headlines.

The Biochemical Model of Mental Illness

The enticing psychological and even spiritual possibilities of LSD provided a window through which society could explore the emerging biochemical model of mental illness.

As a psychotomimetic drug, LSD temporarily induced psychotic symptoms in otherwise non-psychotic patients or clinical trial volunteers. By identifying the chemical pathways of this induced psychosis and then reverse engineering antidotes, researchers hoped to find humane chemical treatments for severe emotional and mental distress.

Astronauts of Inner Space

Research on LSD and related drugs such as mescaline emerged within the early Cold War era of American technological optimism, operating in parallel with advances in space exploration and nuclear energy. Philosopher Aldous Huxley conceptualized mental “inner space” as the psychological analogue to outer space and legitimized LSD experimentation as an intellectual activity.

Equating the untapped potential of the human mind with the vastness of outer space resonated with both the increasing American interest in space exploration following the 1957 Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite and with the aspirations of a society that envisioned the universe as a “new frontier” ready to reveals its secrets. In this context, the LSD tablet became a pharmaceutical spaceship, enabling exploration of the mind in the same way as launch technology made the idea of reaching the Moon feasible. Anyone could now become an astronaut of inner space.

The Initial Promise of LSD

In a society whose main therapeutic choices were either Freudian psychoanalysis, which was expensive, time-consuming, and unreliable, or electro-shock treatments and lobotomies, the idea of finding sanity in a sugar cube seemed to herald a progressive and efficient alternative. As The Washington Post proclaimed in 1957, “If chemicals are responsible [for insanity], our psychiatrists may throw away their couches and start sterilizing their needles. There will be no more shock therapy, and our mental hospitals will be turned over to other uses.”

Unlike previous therapies for mental illness, LSD promised to dissolve the boundary between the ill and the healthy (under experimental conditions), providing researchers with insights into the mental landscape of schizophrenics and alcoholics. This empathetic orientation to the patient dovetailed with an emerging discourse of anti-psychiatry (see, for example, R. D. Laing) that viewed conditions such as schizophrenia through a political, rather than a medical, lens.

The Military and LSD

The Central Intelligence Agency sponsored some LSD research in its quest for an effective truth serum, while the Army Corps of Engineers started LSD tests in 1955. The military’s focus on LSD only increased mass media and political interest in the drug.

A purported “chemical weapons gap” between the United States and Russia provided a pretext for increased spending on such research, yet social ambivalence about military use of LSD emerged relatively early. In 1959, a Washington Post article called America’s “’madness gas” an embarrassment and juxtaposed the Cold War military’s relatively open pursuit of psychochemical warfare with America’s moral opposition to biological and chemical warfare following the First World War.

Conclusion

LSD proved to be a malleable trope and occupied center stage in American cultural politics for at least thirty years. It initially represented the triumph of rational techno-science, casting the human brain as a frontier to be explored as assiduously as we sought to go to the Moon.

However, the emerging counterculture would eventually reframe the use of psychotropics as a form of radical rebellion against a militaristic society gone mad.

Rock stars of the late 1960s were not the only ones preoccupied with LSD. The entire mid-century period is drenched in it. Indeed, the journey from mental health to warfare to, in guru Timothy Leary’s words, a “sacrament” of the “Psychedelic Revolution” and then to a Class-A felony was a long and winding one. This strange and accidental artifact of mid-century science continues to shape politics, psychiatry, and power in ways that we are only beginning to acknowledge.