Bill W, LSD, and AA Spirituality

By bob k

Toward the end of 1943, the Wilsons were preparing to leave New York. Bill was tired and depressed, and very much looking forward to an upcoming cross-country trip with Lois. Alcoholics Anonymous was doing well, its membership numbers having swelled from about 2,000 in early 1941 to over 10,000 people. The trip combined a vacation for the Wilsons and a tour of some of the cities where AA had taken hold and flourished, and where grateful rehabilitated alcoholics were anxious to meet the world’s Number One sober drunkard.

Wilson’s depression began to lift almost immediately upon leaving the Big Apple. There were stopovers in Chicago, Omaha, and Denver, and then a tour of the Grand Canyon. All of these were a prelude to the arrival at Los Angeles where AA had been exploding. The growth and success of Alcoholics Anonymous had taken Bill and Lois away from the poverty of a few years earlier. There was money for hotels and for restaurants. Of course, the Wilsons were welcomed into the homes of AA members, generally the more affluent ones with larger houses with guest suites and multiple baths.

“Dave D., an AA member from Palo Alto, had been to Trabuco (College) and offered to take Bill and Lois to the retreat center and introduce Wilson to {Gerald} Heard. Now Wilson was about to meet the man he would later call ‘the best example of spirituality’ that he ever knew.” (Distilled Spirits: Getting High, Then Sober, With a Famous Writer, a Forgotten Philosopher, and a Hopeless Drunk, published in 2012, Don Lattin, p. 140)

Gerald Heard (1889-1971), sometimes called “the godfather of the New Age movement,” was an English philosopher who, in 1937, along with his friend Aldous Huxley, migrated to the United States. They

…settled in Los Angeles in the late 1930s with a group of displaced Englishmen who came to be known as the “British mystical expatriates of Southern California.” Wilson came to the west coast from New York battling depression but eager to embark on his own pilgrimage of self-discovery. Heard and Huxley had come to believe that humanity had the potential for a breakthrough in consciousness. In the three decades leading to the 1960s, they emerged as the leading evangelists of a philosophy that mixed meditation, mysticism, psychology, psychedelic drugs, and a utopian vision of an enlightened society. At the same time, their spiritual program was a utilitarian approach to living a more fulfilling life. Wilson called it “a faith that works”.

(Distilled Spirits, pp. 6-7)

Bill Wilson was impressed with Heard, and they began a lifetime correspondence. The “Brave New World” author rounded out the triumvirate of influential spiritual seekers.

In the early 1950s, Huxley came across a recently published Journal of Mental Science paper by Humphry Osmond and John Smythies, two British psychiatrists then working in Weyburn, Saskatchewan. The article explored the authors’ theory that there were biochemical similarities between mental illness and acute mescaline intoxication.

In a letter to Osmond in the spring of 1953, Huxley suggested that mind-altering drugs might contribute to the understanding of aesthetic experience and mystical enlightenment. Huxley invited the researcher to stay in his home during an upcoming psychiatric convention in Los Angeles.

In a follow-up letter, Huxley requested that Osmond bring with him some mescaline from Canada.

Humphry Osmond complied and supervised the drug trip in Huxley’s home that led to the penning of The Doors of Perception. Although the inner journey began undramatically, the man of words confessing to a lack of visual imagination, Huxley at one point turned his attention a vase containing three flowers. He later wrote about that experience.

“Neither agreeable nor disagreeable,” I answered. “It just is.” Istigkeit — wasn’t that the word Meister Eckhart liked to use? “Is-ness.” The Being of Platonic philosophy — except that Plato seems to have made the enormous, the grotesque mistake of separating Being from becoming and identifying it with the mathematical abstraction of the Idea. He could never, poor fellow, have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged; could never have perceived that what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were — a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence.”

Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

In other words, Huxley had seen God. (Pardon the expression)

With another colleague, Abram Hoffer, Osmond began to incorporate the chemical d-lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) into their research with schizophrenics at the mental hospital in Weyburn. The clinicians were “treating alcoholics as well as schizophrenics, and their interest centered on patients suffering both disorders. These were their toughest cases, for the schizophrenia seemed to impede the kind of insightful experience thought to be required if an alcoholic was to stop drinking.” (Collected Ernest Kurtz, p. 41)

The initial intention of the LSD use

…was to induce a psychic experience similar to delirium tremens, or DT’s, in the hope that it might serve to shock alcoholics out of their dependence on alcohol . . . LSD was considered as a last resort, to be tried with otherwise untreatable alcoholics… In the aftermath of the DT’s, some alcoholics with whom all intervention efforts had failed were capable of understanding the desperation of their condition and responding to treatment.

(Bill W., Francis Hartigan, pp. 177-78)

When Gerald Heard enthusiastically reported these events to Bill Wilson, he was not thrilled with the idea of giving drugs to alcoholics. AA had already had some experiences with “pill heads.” Nevertheless, whatever his deficiencies, Bill Wilson had an enormous passion for helping alcoholics. The reported successes with a very poor demographic for AA, the “constitutionally incapable,” overcame Bill’s nervousness and earlier skepticism to the point that, on August 29, 1956, at the Los Angeles Veterans Administration Hospital, the AA cofounder had his first LSD session.

Gerald Heard was there as his “guide,” and the experimental process was overseen by physician, Dr. Sidney Cohen. On another occasion, Cohen interviewed a research subject whose first ever dose of LSD had rocketed her to a state of bliss. “I wish I could talk in Technicolor,” she told Cohen.

Heard turned on Time publisher Henry Luce and his wife, Claire Boothe Luce; Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray; and William Mullendore, the chairman of the board of Southern California Edison. He also inspired Dr. Oscar Janiger, a Los Angeles psychiatrist who turned on Cary Grant, James Coburn, and Jack Nicholson. “It was the philosopher Gerald Heard who introduced me to psychedelics,” Janiger said. “He told me that the emergence of LSD in the twentieth century was simply God’s way of giving us the gift of consciousness. He believed that LSD was a device for saving humanity from Armageddon”.

(Distilled Spirits, pp. 191-92)

Wilson’s reaction to his first experience was fully positive. Osmond who had told Wilson earlier that LSD was “good news” recalled the initial trepidation at the idea of having alcoholics being assailed by “some strange chemical.”

When Wilson finally “tripped” himself in 1956, as recalled by Osmond in a 1976 talk at the Esalen Institute that Bill “likened his LSD experience to his earlier vision of “seeing this chain of drunks around the world, all helping each other.” This caused various scandals in AA. They were very ambivalent about their great founder taking LSD, yet they wouldn’t have existed if he hadn’t been of an adventurous sort of mind.

(Distilled Spirits, p. 195)

The LSD experimentation had unanticipated side benefits for Wilson. In his own words, “I am certain that the LSD experience has helped me very much. I find myself with a heightened color perception and an appreciation of beauty almost destroyed by my years of depression… The sensation that the partition between “here” and “there” has become very thin is constantly with me.” (Bill Wilson in a letter to Gerald Heard, 1957) Once more, the old Wilson enthusiasm was stirred.

Far from keeping secret his experience with LSD, AA’s cofounder judiciously but eagerly spread the word, inviting not only his wife and his secretary but also trusted friends to join his experiments… Clearly, Bill experienced no sense of shame or guilt over his activities… Bill was seeking a cure for alcoholism… a way of helping more alcoholics get sober in Alcoholics Anonymous… one more facet in his persistent pursuit of “the spiritual”.

(The Collected Ernie Kurtz, pp. 40-41)

There are two extremes one encounters in hearing the reports of the LSD use, emanating from the  mouths of untutored AA members. Some cannot divorce their minds from the LSD of bell bottoms,  tie-dyed t-shirts, hippies, and “In A Gada Da Vita.” Thus they have Wilson flying high on the “acid maintenance” program, not really ever even sober. At the other extreme, founder defenders point out that Wilson’s use of the drug was a medical experiment in a laboratory setting.

Neither tale is accurate, yet neither are these accounts fully inaccurate.

The first LSD usage was as described by Wilson apologists – experimental, clinical, scientific. But there were many other occasions where the cofounder went under the influence. Exactly how many times, even approximately, we know not. These other uses took place in a variety of locations, including private homes. One of the frustrations for the student of history is that answers are not always available.

Another story about LSD is that it was prescribed to him for depression. Wrong again, but it’s easy to see where that explanation arose, as LSD DID help him with his depression.

Little is known concerning Wilson’s personal experimentation with LSD beyond the fact that it certainly occurred. Whatever its effects upon him, there is no evidence that he ever thought his alcoholism ‘cured’ in the sense that he could again drink alcohol safely.

(Not-God, Ernest Kurtz, p. 137)

Wilson biographers cite different ending date for the LSD experimentation, from 1959 to the mid-1960s. In 1959, in a letter to Sam Shoemaker, he stated his intention to stop using LSD. Of course, it may be remembered that there are written pledges to Lois written in the 1920s that he was done with drinking. Wilson may simply have told Shoemaker what he wanted to hear, in order to avoid further recriminations. A second possibility is that he sincerely intended to stop, then later changed his mind.

The best indicator that the 1959 date is incorrect is found in the comment of the most esteemed historian to address the issue. “Bill continued his experiments with LSD into the early 1960s.” (The Collected Ernie Kurtz, Ernie Kurtz, p. 40)

“How often did Bill use LSD?” and “When did he stop?” are interesting questions, but perhaps a good deal less than my final query:

“What does it say about the founder’s view of ‘spiritual experience’ that he thought it could be duplicated through the ingestion of a hallucinogenic drug?”