How to Change Your Mind

by Michael Pollan

  Just half a gram of phanerothyme.

  His coinage combined the Greek words for “spirit” and “manifesting.”

  Perhaps wary of adopting such an overtly spiritual term, the scientist replied with his own rhyme:

  To fall in hell or soar Angelic

  You’ll need a pinch of psychedelic.

  Osmond’s neologism married two Greek words that together mean “mind manifesting.” Though by now the word has taken on the Day-Glo coloring of the 1960s, at the time it was the very neutrality of “psychedelic” that commended it to him: the word “had no particular connotation of madness, craziness or ecstasy, but suggested an enlargement and expansion of mind.” It also had the virtue of being “uncontaminated by other associations,” though that would not remain the case for long.

  “Psychedelic therapy,” as Osmond and his colleagues practiced it beginning in the mid-1950s, typically involved a single, high-dose session, usually of LSD, that took place in comfortable surroundings, the subject stretched out on a couch, with a therapist (or two) in attendance who says very little, allowing the journey to unfold according to its own logic. To eliminate distractions and encourage an inward journey, music is played and the subject usually wears eyeshades. The goal was to create the conditions for a spiritual epiphany—what amounted to a conversion experience.

  But though this mode of therapy would become closely identified with Osmond and Hoffer, they themselves credited someone else for critical elements of its design, a man of considerable mystery with no formal training as a scientist or therapist: Al Hubbard. A treatment space decorated to feel more like a home than a hospital came to be known as a Hubbard Room, and at least one early psychedelic researcher told me that this whole therapeutic regime, which is now the norm, should by all rights be known as “the Hubbard method.” Yet Al Hubbard, a.k.a. “Captain Trips” and “the Johnny Appleseed of LSD,” is not the kind of intellectual forebear anyone doing serious psychedelic science today is eager to acknowledge, much less celebrate.

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  AL HUBBARD IS SURELY the most improbable, intriguing, and elusive figure to grace the history of psychedelics, and that’s saying a lot. There is much we don’t know about him, and many key facts about his life are impossible to confirm, contradictory, or just plain fishy. To cite one small example, his FBI file puts his height at five feet eleven, but in photographs and videos Hubbard appears short and stocky, with a big round head topped with a crew cut; for reasons known only to himself, he often wore a paramilitary uniform and carried a Colt .45 revolver, giving the impression of a small-town sheriff. But based on his extensive correspondence with colleagues and a handful of accounts in the Canadian press and books about the period,* as well as interviews with a handful of people who knew him well, it’s possible to assemble a rough portrait of the man, even if it does leave some important areas blurry or blank.

  Hubbard was born poor in the hills of Kentucky in either 1901 or 1902 (his FBI file gives both dates); he liked to tell people he was twelve before he owned a pair of shoes. He never got past the third grade, but the boy evidently had a flair for electronics. As a teenager, he invented something called the Hubbard Energy Transformer, a new type of battery powered by radioactivity that “could not be explained by the technology of the day”—this according to the best account we have of his life, a well-researched 1991 High Times article by Todd Brendan Fahey. Hubbard sold a half interest in the patent for seventy-five thousand dollars, though nothing ever came of the invention and Popular Science magazine once included it in a survey of technological hoaxes. During Prohibition, Hubbard drove a taxi in Seattle, but that appears to have been a cover: in the trunk of his cab he kept a sophisticated ship-to-shore communications system he used to guide bootleggers seeking to evade the Coast Guard. Hubbard was eventually busted by the FBI and spent eighteen months in prison on a smuggling charge.

  After his release from prison the trail of Hubbard’s life becomes even more difficult to follow, muddied by vague and contradictory accounts. In one of them, Hubbard became involved in an undercover operation to ship heavy armaments from San Diego to Canada and from there on to Britain, in the years before the U.S. entered World War II, when the nation was still officially neutral. (Scouts for the future OSS officer Allen Dulles, impressed by Hubbard’s expertise in electronics, may or may not have recruited him for the mission.) But when Congress began investigating the operation, Hubbard fled to Vancouver to avoid prosecution. There he became a Canadian citizen, founded a charter boat business (earning him the title of Captain) and became the science director of a uranium mining company. (According to one account, Hubbard had something to do with supplying uranium to the Manhattan Project.) By the age of fifty, the “barefoot boy from Kentucky” had become a millionaire, owner of a fleet of aircraft, a one-hundred-foot yacht, a Rolls-Royce, and a private island off Vancouver. At some point during the war Hubbard apparently returned to the United States, and he joined the OSS shortly before the wartime intelligence agency became the CIA.

  A few other curious facts about the prepsychedelic Al Hubbard: He was an ardent Catholic, with a pronounced mystical bent. And he was unusually flexible in his professional loyalties, working at various times as a rum- and gunrunner as well as an agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Was he a double agent of some kind? Possibly. At one time or another, he also worked for the Canadian Special Services, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the Food and Drug Administration. His FBI file suggests he had links to the CIA during the 1950s, but the redactions are too heavy for it to reveal much about his role, if any. We know the government kept close tabs on the psychedelic research community all through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s (funding university research on LSD and scientific conferences in some cases), and it wouldn’t be surprising if, in exchange for information, the government would allow Hubbard to operate with as much freedom as he did. But this remains speculation.

  Al Hubbard’s life made a right-angled change of course in 1951. At the time, he was hugely successful but unhappy, “desperately searching for meaning in his life”—this according to Willis Harman, one of a group of Silicon Valley engineers to whom Hubbard would introduce LSD later in the decade. As Hubbard told the story to Harman (and Harman told it to Todd Brendan Fahey), he was hiking in Washington State when an angel appeared to him in a clearing. “She told Al that something tremendously important to the future of mankind would be coming soon, and that he could play a role in it if he wanted to. But he hadn’t the faintest clue what he was supposed to be looking for.”

  The clue arrived a year later, in the form of an article in a scientific journal describing the behavior of rats given a newly discovered compound called LSD. Hubbard tracked down the researcher, obtained some LSD, and had a literally life-changing experience. He witnessed the beginning of life on earth as well as his own conception. “It was the deepest mystical thing I’ve ever seen,” he told friends later. “I saw myself as a tiny mite in a big swamp with a spark of intelligence. I saw my mother and father having intercourse.” Clearly this was what the angel had foretold—“something tremendously important to the future of mankind.” Hubbard realized it was up to him to bring the new gospel of LSD, and the chemical itself, to as many people as he possibly could. He had been given what he called a “special chosen role.”

  Thus began Al Hubbard’s career as the Johnny Appleseed of LSD. Through his extensive connections in both government and business, he persuaded Sandoz Laboratories to give him a mind-boggling quantity of LSD—a liter bottle of it, in one account, forty-three cases in another, six thousand vials in a third. (He reportedly told Albert Hofmann he planned to use it “to liberate human consciousness.”) Depending on whom you believe, he kept his supply hidden in a safe-deposit box in Zurich or buried somewhere in Death Valley, but a substantial part of it he carried with him in a leather satchel. Eventually, Hubbard became the exclusive
distributor of Sandoz LSD in Canada and, later, somehow secured an Investigational New Drug permit from the FDA allowing him to conduct clinical research on LSD in the United States—this even though he had a third-grade education, a criminal record, and a single, arguably fraudulent scientific credential. (His PhD had been purchased from a diploma mill.) Seeing himself as “a catalytic agent,” Hubbard would introduce an estimated six thousand people to LSD between 1951 and 1966, in an avowed effort to shift the course of human history.

  Curiously, the barefoot boy from Kentucky was something of a mandarin, choosing as his subjects leading figures in business, government, the arts, religion, and technology. He believed in working from the top down and disdained other psychedelic evangelists, like Timothy Leary, who took a more democratic approach. Members of Parliament, officials of the Roman Catholic Church,* Hollywood actors, government officials, prominent writers and philosophers, university officials, computer engineers, and prominent businessmen were all introduced to LSD as part of Hubbard’s mission to shift the course of history from above. (Not everyone Hubbard approached would play: J. Edgar Hoover, whom Hubbard claimed as a close friend, declined.) Hubbard believed that “if he could give the psychedelic experience to the major executives of the Fortune 500 companies,” Abram Hoffer recalled, “he would change the whole of society.” One of the executives Hubbard turned on in the late 1950s—Myron Stolaroff, assistant to the president for long-term planning at Ampex, at the time a leading electronics firm in Silicon Valley—became “convinced that [Al Hubbard] was the man to bring LSD to planet Earth.”

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  • • •

  IN 1953, not long after his psychedelic epiphany, Hubbard invited Humphry Osmond to lunch at the Vancouver Yacht Club. Like so many others, Osmond was deeply impressed by Hubbard’s worldliness, wealth, connections, and access to seemingly endless supplies of LSD. The lunch led to a collaboration that changed the course of psychedelic research and, in important ways, laid the groundwork for the research taking place today.

  Under the influence of both Hubbard and Huxley, whose primary interest was in the revelatory import of psychedelics, Osmond abandoned the psychotomimetic model. It was Hubbard who first proposed to him that the mystical experience many subjects had on a single high dose of mescaline or LSD might itself be harnessed as a mode of therapy—and that the experience was more important than the chemical. The psychedelic journey could, like the conversion experience, forcibly show people a new, more encompassing perspective on their lives that would help them to change. But perhaps Hubbard’s most enduring contribution to psychedelic therapy emerged in, of all places, the treatment room.

  It is easier to accumulate facts about Al Hubbard’s life than it is to get a steady sense of the character of the man, it was so rife with contradiction. The pistol-packing tough guy was also an ardent mystic who talked about love and the heavenly beatitudes. And the well-connected businessman and government agent proved to be a remarkably sensitive and gifted therapist. Though he never used those terms, Hubbard was the first researcher to grasp the critical importance of set and setting in shaping the psychedelic experience. He instinctively understood that the white walls and fluorescent lighting of the sanitized hospital room were all wrong. So he brought pictures and music, flowers and diamonds, into the treatment room, where he would use them to prime patients for a mystical revelation or divert a journey when it took a terrifying turn. He liked to show people paintings by Salvador Dalí and pictures of Jesus or to ask them to study the facets of a diamond he carried. One patient he treated in Vancouver, an alcoholic paralyzed by social anxiety, recalled Hubbard handing him a bouquet of roses during an LSD session: “He said, ‘Now hate them.’ They withered and the petals fell off, and I started to cry. Then he said, ‘Love them,’ and they came back brighter and even more spectacular than before. That meant a lot to me. I realized that you can make your relationships anything you want. The trouble I was having with people was coming from me.”

  What Hubbard was bringing into the treatment room was something well known to any traditional healer. Shamans have understood for millennia that a person in the depths of a trance or under the influence of a powerful plant medicine can be readily manipulated with the help of certain words, special objects, or the right kind of music. Hubbard understood intuitively how the suggestibility of the human mind during an altered state of consciousness could be harnessed as an important resource for healing—for breaking destructive patterns of thought and proposing new perspectives in their place. Researchers might prefer to call this a manipulation of set and setting, which is accurate enough, but Hubbard’s greatest contribution to modern psychedelic therapy was to introduce the tried-and-true tools of shamanism, or at least a Westernized version of it.

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  • • •

  WITHIN A FEW YEARS, Hubbard had made the acquaintance of just about everybody in the psychedelic research community in North America, leaving an indelible impression on everyone he met, along with a trail of therapeutic tips and ampules of Sandoz LSD. By the late 1950s, he had become a kind of psychedelic circuit rider. One week he might be in Weyburn, assisting Humphry Osmond and Abram Hoffer in their work with alcoholics, which was earning them international attention. From there to Manhattan, to meet with R. Gordon Wasson, and then a stop on his way back west to administer LSD to a VIP or check in on a research group working in Chicago. The next week might find him in Los Angeles, conducting LSD sessions with Betty Eisner, Sidney Cohen, or Oscar Janiger, freely sharing his treatment techniques and supplies of LSD. (“We waited for him like the little old lady on the prairie waiting for a copy of the Sears Roebuck catalog,” Oscar Janiger recalled years later.) And then it was back to Vancouver, where he had persuaded Hollywood Hospital to dedicate an entire wing to treating alcoholics with LSD.* Hubbard would often fly his plane down to Los Angeles to discreetly ferry Hollywood celebrities up to Vancouver for treatment. It was this sideline that earned him the nickname Captain Trips. Hubbard also established two other alcoholism treatment facilities in Canada, where he regularly conducted LSD sessions and reported impressive rates of success. LSD treatment for alcoholism using the Hubbard method became a business in Canada. But Hubbard believed it was unethical to profit from LSD, which led to tensions between him and some of the institutions he worked with, because they were charging patients upwards of five hundred dollars for an LSD session. For Hubbard, psychedelic therapy was a form of philanthropy, and he drained his fortune advancing the cause.

  Al Hubbard moved between these far-flung centers of research like a kind of psychedelic honeybee, disseminating information, chemicals, and clinical expertise while building what became an extensive network across North America. In time, he would add Menlo Park and Cambridge to his circuit. But was Hubbard just spreading information, or was he also collecting it and passing it on to the CIA? Was the pollinator also a spy? It’s impossible to say for certain; some people who knew Hubbard (like James Fadiman) think it’s entirely plausible, while others aren’t so sure, pointing to the fact the Captain often criticized the CIA for using LSD as a weapon. “The CIA work stinks,” he told Oscar Janiger in the late 1970s.

  Hubbard was referring to the agency’s MK-Ultra research program, which since 1953 had been trying to figure out whether LSD could be used as a nonlethal weapon of war (by, say, dumping it in an adversary’s water supply), a truth serum in interrogations, a means of mind control,* or a dirty trick to play on unfriendly foreign leaders, causing them to act or speak in embarrassing ways. None of these schemes panned out, at least as far as we know, and all reflected a research agenda that remained stuck on the psychotomimetic model long after other researchers had abandoned it. Along the way, the CIA dosed its own employees and unwitting civilians with LSD; in one notorious case that didn’t come to light until the 1970s, the CIA admitted to secretly giving LSD to an army biological weapons specialist named Frank Olson in 1953; a few days later, Olson supp
osedly jumped to his death from the thirteenth floor of the Statler Hotel in New York. (Others believe Olson was pushed and that the CIA’s admission, embarrassing as it was, was actually a cover-up for a crime far more heinous.) It could be Olson whom Al Hubbard was referring to when he said, “I tried to tell them how to use it, but even when they were killing people, you couldn’t tell them a goddamned thing.”

  A regular stop on Hubbard’s visits to Los Angeles was the home of Aldous and Laura Huxley. Huxley and Hubbard had formed the most unlikely of friendships after Hubbard introduced the author to LSD—and the Hubbard method—in 1955. The experience put the author’s 1953 mescaline trip in the shade. As Huxley wrote to Osmond in its aftermath, “What came through the closed door was the realization . . . the direct, total awareness, from the inside, so to say, of Love as the primary and fundamental cosmic fact.” The force of this insight seemed almost to embarrass the writer in its baldness: “The words, of course, have a kind of indecency and must necessarily ring false, seem like twaddle. But the fact remains.”

  Huxley immediately recognized the value of an ally as skilled in the ways of the world as the man he liked to call “the good Captain.” As so often seems to happen, the Man of Letters became smitten with the Man of Action.

  “What Babes in the Woods we literary gents and professional men are!” Huxley wrote to Osmond about Hubbard. “The great World occasionally requires your services, is mildly amused by mine, but its full attention and deference are paid to Uranium and Big Business. So what extraordinary luck that this representative of both these Higher Powers should (a) have become so passionately interested in mescaline and (b) be such a very nice man.”

  Neither Huxley nor Hubbard was particularly dedicated to medicine or science, so it’s not surprising that over time their primary interest would drift from the treatment of individuals with psychological problems to a desire to treat the whole of society. (This aspiration seems eventually to infect everyone who works with psychedelics, touching scientists, too, including ones as different in temperament as Timothy Leary and Roland Griffiths.) But psychological research proceeds person by person and experiment by experiment; there is no real-world model for using a drug to change all of society as Hubbard and Huxley determined to do, with the result that the scientific method began to feel to them, as it later would to Leary, like a straitjacket.