"Humphrey Osmond, 86, Who Sought Medicinal
Value in Psychedelic Drugs, Dies"

Douglas Martin, New York Times, Sunday, February 22, p. 25.

Humphry Osmond, the psychiatrist who cohned the word "psychedelic"
for the drugs to which he introduced the writer and essayist Aldous Huxley,
died on Feb. 6 at his home in Appleton Wis. He was 86. The cause was
cardiac arrhythmia, said his daughter Euphemia Blackburn of Appleton, where
Dr. Osmond moved to four years ago.Dr. Osmond entered the history of the counterculture by supplying
hallucinogenic drugs to Huxley, who as described mystical significance to
them in his playfully thoughtful, widely read book "The Doors of
Perception," from which the rock group the Doors took its name.

But in his own view and that of some other scientists, Dr. Osmond
was most important for inspiring researchers who saw drugs like L. S. D.
and mescaline as potential treatments for psychological ailments. By the
mid-1960's, medical journals had published more than l,000 papers on the
subject, and Dr. Osmond's work using L. S. D. to treat alcoholics drew
particular interest.

"Osmond was a pioneer," Dr. Charles Grob, a professor of psychiatry
at the University of California School of Medicine, said in an interview.
"He published sone fascinating data."

In one study, in the late 1950s, when Dr. Osmond gave L. S. D. to
alcoholics in Alcoholics Anonymous who had failed to quit drinking, about
half had not had a drink after a year.

"No one has ever duplicated the success rate of that study," said
Dr. John H. Halpern, associate director of substance abuse research at the
McLean Hospital Alcohol and Drug Abuse Research Center in Belmont, Mass.,
and an instructor at Harvard. Dr. Halpern added that no one really tried.
Other studies used different methodology, and the combination of flagrant
youthful abuse of hallucinogens. the propagation of a flashy, otherworldly
drug culture by Timothy Leary; and reports of health dangers from
hallucinogens (some of which Dr. Halpern said were wrong or overstated)
eventualIy doomed almost all research into psychedelic drugs.

Research on hallucinogens as a treatment for mental ills has
reemerged in recent years, in srnall projects at places like the University
of Arizona, the University of South Carolina, the University of California,
Los Angeles, and Harvard.

Though such research was always legal, regulatory, financial and
other obstacles had largely ended it. Huxley's reading about Dr. Osmond's
research into similarities between schizophrenia and mescaline intoxication
led him to volunteer to try the drug. Dr. Osmond agreed, but later wrote
that he "did not relish the possibility, however remote, of being the man
who drove Aldous Huxley mad."

So in 1953, a day Dr. Osmond described 12 years later as " a
delicious May morning," he dropped a pinch of silvery white mescaline
crystals in a glass of water and handed it to Huxley, the author of "Brave
New World," which described a totalitarian society in which people are
controlled by drugs. "Within two and a half hours I could see that it was
acting, and after three I could see that all would go well," Dr. Osmond
wrote. He said he "felt much relieved."

Dr. Osmond first offered his new term, psychedelic, at a meeting of
the New York Academy of Sciences in 1957. He said the word meant "mind
manifesting" and called it "clear, euphonious and uncontaminated by other
associations."

Huxley had sent Dr. Osmond a rhyme with his own word choice: "To
make this trivial world sublime, take half a gram of phanerothyme." (Thymos
rneans soul in Greek.) Rejecting that, Dr. Osmond replied: "To fathom Hell
or soar angelic, just take a pinch of psychedelic."

Lester Grinspoon and James B. Bakalar in their 1979 book
"Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered" pointed out that by the rules for
combining Greek roots, the word should have been psychodelic. They also
said that even in the late 70's, psychedelic had mostly been replaced by
hallucinogenic, a vocabulary shift they said Dr. Osmond himself made.

In addition to his daughter Euphemia, Dr. Osmond is survived by his
wife, Jane; a second daughter, Helen Swanson of Surrey, England; a son,
Julian, of New Orleans; a sister, Dorothy Gale of Devon, England; and five
grandchildren.

Humphry Fortescue Osmond was born on July 1, 1917, in Surrey. He
intended to be a banker, but attended Guy's Hospital Medical School of the
University of London. In World War II, he was a surgeon-lieutenant in the
Navy, where he trained to become a ship's psychiatrist. At St. George's
Hospital in London, he and a colleague, John R. Smythies, developed the
hypothesis that schizophrenia was a form of self-intoxication caused by the
body's mistakenly producing its own L. S. D.-like compounds.

When their theory was not embraced by the British mental health
establishment, the two doctors moved to Canada to continue their research
at Saskatchewan Hospital in Weyburn. There, they developed the idea, not
widely accepted, that no one should treat schizophrenics who had not
personally experienced schizophrenia."This it is possible to do quite
easily by taking mescaline," they wrote.

Huxley read about this work and volunteered to be studied. The
research also directly inspired other scientists, Dr. Halpern said. "There
was a certain point where almost every major psychiatrist wanted to do
hallucinogen research," Dr. Halpern said, adding that in the early 1960s,
it was recommended that psychiatric residents take a dose to understand
psychosis better.

Perhaps the most famous psychedeli¢ researcher was Dr. Oscar
Janiger, a Beverly Hills psychiatrist, who.gave L. S. D. to Cary Grant,
Jack Nicholson and, again, Huxley.

Dr. Halpern said that today's understanding of serotonin, a
neurotransmitter important in causing and alleviating depression, grew out
of research into the effect of L. S. D. on the brain. L. S. D. and
serotonin are chemically similar.

Dr. Osmond's most important work involved alcoholism research, done
with Abram Hoffer, a colleague at Weyburn. Originally, they thought L. S.
D. would terrify alcoholics by causing symptoms akin to delirium tremens.
Instead, they found it opened them to radical personal transformation.

"One conception of psychedelic theory for alcoholics is that L. S.
D can truly accomplish the transcendence that is repeatedly and
unsuccessfully sought in drunkenness," "Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered"
suggested in 1979.

Bill Wilson, a co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, met Dr. Osmond
and took L. S. D. himself, strongly agreeing that it could help many
alcoholics.

As psychedelic research became increasingly difficult, Dr. Osmond
left Canada to become director of the Bureau of Research in Neurology and
Psychiatry at the New Jersey Psychiatric Institute in Princeton, and then a
professor of psychology at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. He
mainly studied schizophrenia but was disappointed he could not pursue his
research into hallucinogens, Mrs. Blackburn, his daughter, said.

"I'm sure he was very saddened by it," she said. "It could have helped
millions of people."