At least a hundred teenagers were crowded into the second storey of the big boathouse, everyone drinking, and in one corner, a guy I recognized from school in Winnipeg was pretending to be a boulder while another guy was crawling over him pretending to be a river. This was not a typical high school beer party; it was a Dionysian revel with everyone lit up and barefoot girls dancing in slow motion to a record I had never heard before. When the record ended someone would turn it over and play it again, the same record over and over, and more than anything else the hypnotic chanting of Jim Morrison’s baritone voice set the tone for the night: Your fingers weave quick minarets /Speak in secret alphabets /I light another cigarette /Learn to forget . . .
At daybreak, with a white-hot sunrise in the screens and unconscious people lying about, I sat on the floor with a few others and listened to a guy I knew from school telling stories about a drug called lsd. He was a little older than the rest of us, owned a 1967 Triumph Bonneville motorcycle, and was regarded as the sort of guy who knew what was cool and might even explain it to you. “You have to try lsd,” he said. “It’s incredible. You look at that carpet, and it’ll turn into an alligator.” I had never taken acid, but I liked the sound of it.
At first, nothing happened and everything seemed normal. My sisters dressed for their dates while my dad, with his trusty rye and coke in hand, adjusted the rabbit ears and settled into the La-Z-Boy to watch Hockey Night in Canada. But when I went outside, I saw something remarkable. It was a young tree, leafless now, emerging from the frozen ground and extending its graceful, slender fingers up toward the moon. It was just one of those fast-growing weed trees they plant in new suburbs, but it was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. And it wasn’t beautiful just because I was affected by lsd. It had an inherent beauty that I hadn’t noticed before. That was many years ago, but I still remember that exquisite tree. Once you’ve taken lsd, a tree never looks quite the same again.
The psychedelic properties of lsd (lysergic acid diethylamide) were discovered by accident. In 1943, while millions of people were busily slaughtering each other across Europe, a young chemist named Albert Hofmann was doing research in neutral Switzerland.
His subject was ergot, a cereal-grain fungus with a formidable reputation. In medieval villages, ergot was known to cause a fearsome plague called St. Anthony’s Fire. One of the derivatives of ergot that Hofmann experimented with was lysergic acid.
On April 16, 1943, Hofmann was brewing up a compound of lysergic acid when he accidentally came into contact with the substance, either by inhaling it or spilling a drop on his skin. Shortly thereafter he began having sensations so bizarre and disturbing that he went home, where he sank into what he later described as “a not unpleasant intoxicated-like condition, characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination. In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed . . . I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with [an] intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors.”
Intrigued by the experience, Hofmann waited three days and then self-administered 0.25 milligrams of the same compound, lysergic acid diethylamide. He considered it a safe dosage, small enough to have no lethal effect. But lsd is potent, and he had given himself about five times what would later become a standard dose. This lsd trip was far more intense, with frightening hallucinations of witches and masks, followed by profound realizations of the power of the natural world. In his memoir, written many years later, Hofmann recalled that the experience taught him that people’s sense of reality was fragile. “What one commonly takes as the reality, including the reality of one’s own individual person, by no means signifies something fixed, but rather something that is ambiguous . . . there are many realities.” He believed that lsd might have potential as a tool for psychiatric research, and in 1947 his employer, Sandoz, a Swiss pharmaceutical company, began to bottle it under the trade name Delysid.
In 1952, Sandoz’s Montreal branch sent a package of lsd to Saskatchewan, where several psychiatrists hoped to experiment with the drug as a treatment for mental illness. Saskatchewan might seem like an odd place for research into mind-bending drugs, but during this period the province was one of North America’s most dynamic environments for research into mental illness. This was due in part to the generous funding of public medicine by Tommy Douglas and his ccf government, but also to the crusading work of Dr. Humphry Osmond and Dr. Abram Hoffer.
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