The panels feature three leading U.S./Canadian historians of LSD and other hallucinogens.

Speakers:
Erika Dyck, University of Saskatchewan, author Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD from Clinic to Campus; editor, A Culture’s Catalyst: Historical Encounters with Peyote and the Native American Church in Canada.
Matthew Oram, author The Trials of Psychedelic Therapy: LSD Psychotherapy in America.
Lucas Richert, University of Wisconsin-Madison, author Strange Trips: Science, Culture, and the Regulation of Drugs and Break On Through: Radical Psychiatry And the American Counterculture.

Did it work?

12:00pm-1:15pm | Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences – RM 2120B

• Erika Dyck, LSD and the science of knowing
  • Are psychedelics truly returning to modern medicine, or are we having a flashback? Historically, scientists were keen to separate pharmacological substances from their organic cultural, spiritual, and healing contexts: the RCT represents the triumph of our desire to measure reaction rather than to interpret experience. But LSD and other hallucinogens invoke reactions that are not easily reducible to such scientific categorizations. Today’s return to psychedelics encourages us to revisit how we understand, interpret, measure, and ultimately treat illness—to rethink how we do science and how we measure its impact.
• Matthew Oram, LSD research and the problem of efficacy
  • LSD therapy was investigated extensively in North America from the 1950s to the 1970s without settling questions of efficacy. Skeptics argued that early positive results came from unreliable anecdotal studies that were later disproved; supporters argued that prohibition ended research before it could reach scientific maturity. In this talk historian Matthew Oram challenges both arguments while exploring the unique difficulties researchers faced in attempting to convincingly establish LSD’s clinical efficacy.
• Lucas Richert, Supple Bodies, Healthy Minds: Meditation, Yoga, and LSD Syncretism
  • Yoga and psychedelics flourished as therapeutic modalities between the 1940s and the 1970s, an era of experimentation and radical psychiatry. LSD ‘spawned a global interest in the cross-cultural dimensions of hallucinogens’ during the 1950s. In the late 1960s and afterward, yogic philosophies blended with psychiatry as ‘travelers on the hippie trail ended up in Indian ashrams’
    and generated enthusiasm for Indian religion and yoga. This talk explores how LSD, yoga, and American countercultural beliefs influenced psychotherapy in the late 1960s, generating syncretic practices that still echo to the present day.

The Rise, Fall, and Rise of LSD takes place from 2:30pm-4:00pm | 330 Student Union