Oompa, on topic and you may find this interesting, it was emailed to me today:
http://newbillingsoutpost.com/news/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=20827&Itemid=27
AA founder's hallucinogen theory may work out
Written by Roger Clawson
Wednesday, 09 July 2008
In 1961, Bill Wilson scared his friends with a notion that might have gotten him stoned. If Wilson were alive today, he would turn over in his grave.
Recently, his dangerous idea found new traction. Or, as we say in the fellowship: “What comes around goes around … and around … and around … and around.”
Wilson, a stock analyst and Wall Street hustler, was already a sloshing drunk when the stock market collapsed in 1929. He sank deeper into the bottle, stole money from his wife, drank two or three quarts of bootleg gin a day. He had been hospitalized a number of times with the delirium tremens when an old drinking buddy, Ebby Thatcher, appeared.
Ebby had found sobriety in religion. The old boozing buddy convinced Wilson that a “spiritual experience” would break the bonds of his alcoholism.
Wilson, an evangelical agnostic, decided to give “the God business” a try. Hospitalized yet again with a near-fatal case of the DT’s and pumped full of belladonna, a hallucinogen, he saw the light, caught a whiff of God’s breath and set out to spread the word.
First, he showed an Akron, Ohio, drunk, Dr. Robert Smith, the path to sobriety. Then, the pair founded Alcoholics Anonymous.
In AA, new members learn from old timers who “share their experience, strength and hope.” For this exercise, the veteran drunk needs a good back story. Simply saying, “I found myself falling asleep while drinking beer and watching the ballgame” won’t do.
When I tell my story, I like to include accounts of robbing a train in West Texas, plotting to overthrow the government of Tonga, embezzling from both the Mafia and the Vatican, marrying a voodoo queen in New Orleans while in a blackout and Dumpster diving to buy cheap wine.
I never liked cheap wine and only dreamed of most of these exploits, but that’s the license I allow myself.
Wilson’s story improved with age as he added interesting episodes (like the LSD plot) after getting sober.
Though named one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century by Time magazine, Wilson collected his share of critics. They said he was the leader of a religious cult, a philanderer who preyed on vulnerable young women and a dope fiend.
The last of these charges resulted from his use of LSD.
Oh wow! AA’s founder dropping acid.
LSD’s history is as interesting as Wilson’s. The use of psychedelics to treat depression, schizophrenia and alcoholism showed great promise in the 1950s.
In one study, in the late 1950s, when Dr. Humphry Osmond gave LSD to alcoholics in Alcoholics Anonymous who had failed to quit drinking, about half had not had a drink after a year.
Wilson accepted an invitation to try the new wonder drug. “Eureka!” he said. “That’s it.”
He said it compared well to his belladonna/spiritual experience during his last hospitalization.
In another universe, dropping acid may have become the surefire cure for dipsomaniacs in the 1960s. This world took a different turn. LSD activist and professional nutcase, Dr. Timothy Leary, thumped the drum for a new lifestyle. Tune in. Turn on. Drop out.
Reckless youth experimented with drugs, sex and communal living. A president was assassinated. A war went sour.
Wilson was about to turn 70 and toying with the idea of providing LSD to all AA members when a desperate Congress outlawed the substance in 1965. Senility had overtaken the founder, his friends decided.
Research into the use of psychedelics to treat alcoholism, obsessive compulsive disorder, depression and other mental illnesses halted. Grants for such studies evaporated. The taboo against psychedelics lasted 40 years.
Last week the Journal of Psychology reported that the use of psilocybin, the hallucinogenic substance found in psilocybin mushrooms, may be beneficial for those suffering from cancer-related anxiety or depression.
Researchers in Baltimore gave psilocybin to 36 healthy volunteers, 60 percent of whom reported having a “full mystical experience.” After 14 months, the same percentage reported that taking psilocybin had increased their sense of well-being or life satisfaction.
Convincing America’s premier research institutions to fund or sponsor research into uses of hallucinogenic drugs had seemed impossible. Now a flurry of new proposals has surfaced.
Could it be that the dottering old Wall Street hustler and AA founder was right all along?
Time and continued research will tell.