A Short History of Psychedelics in Psychotherapy
People have been using consciousness-altering drugs for as far back as written records go. If you dig into old texts you'll find mentions of them, drawings of mushrooms, all sorts of methods people reached for to shift their awareness and feel some kind of spiritual or psychological connection with themselves and with something larger. The modern story, where psychedelics get treated as a tool for psychotherapy, really picks up in the 1940s, around when LSD came into the picture.
Albert Hofmann synthesized LSD during that decade. He was working for Sandoz Laboratories, at the time one of the biggest pharmaceutical firms anywhere and still a substantial company. His first impression was that the compound didn't do much, so he set it aside. LSD-25 sat on a shelf. But something about it nagged at him. He suspected there were properties he hadn't caught the first time, and a few years later he pulled it back out to run more experiments.
During that work he got a tiny amount on his finger, apparently just a trace. He didn't think much of it, tidied up, put his materials away, and then the effects started to come on. That became the well-known bicycle ride: he climbed onto his bike to head home and felt the drug take hold along the way. As a chemical it is extraordinarily potent, so even a minuscule quantity produces a powerful experience, which is exactly what that trace on his skin did. He called some friends, and from there the whole thing began. Hofmann lived to roughly a hundred, and he gave the rest of his life to researching psychedelics.
Because he was a Sandoz employee, he reported what had happened. The lab produced LSD in fairly large batches and sent it out to therapists in different parts of the world. One of the recipients was Stan Grof, who went on to do more psychedelic research than probably anyone. Grof is still around, still working, these days with Holotropic Breathwork. That shipment is what launched his studies. Before the drug was outlawed, LSD was administered in clinical settings more than 40,000 times, which makes it a remarkably well-documented substance.
Around the same stretch, a connected circle of people got curious about psilocybin mushrooms and mescaline cactus. They were philosophers, artists, writers, and therapists, passing findings back and forth, mostly across Europe and the United States, with some investigation reaching into Central America and Mexico. A therapist might get hold of a particular cactus or a particular mushroom, try it personally, and then bring it into work with patients. All of this was going on while the LSD was being distributed.