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Introduced by Sandoz Laboratories, with trade-name Delysid, as a drug with various psychiatric uses in 1947, LSD quickly became a therapeutic agent that appeared to show great promise. In the 1950s the CIA thought it might be applicable to mind control and chemical warfare; the agency’s MKULTRA research program propagated the drug among young servicemen and students. The subsequent recreational use of the drug by youth culture in the Western world during the 1960s led to a political firestorm that resulted in its prohibition. Currently, a number of organizations—including the Beckley Foundation, MAPS, Heffter Research Institute and the Albert Hofmann Foundation—exist to fund, encourage and coordinate research into the medicinal and spiritual uses of LSD and related psychedelics.
Artists and scientists have been interested in the effect of LSD on drawing and painting since it first became available for legal use and general consumption. Dr. Oscar Janiger was one of the pioneers in the field studying the relationship between LSD and creativity. What fascinated Janiger was that “paintings, under the influence of LSD, had some of the attributes of what looked like the work done by schizophrenics.” Janiger maintained that trained artists could “maintain a certain balance, riding the edge” of the LSD induced psychosis, “ride his creative Pegasus.” Janiger coined the term ‘”dry schizophrenia,” where a person was able to control the surroundings and yet be “crazy” at the same time.’
Many artists and their surviving relatives have kept LSD artwork from this period. One patient of Dr. Janiger, bipolar and alcoholic artist Frank Murdoch, was given a controlled, experimental dose of LSD for several months as an attempt to cure his late stage alcoholism. Janiger had Murdoch paint still-lives both on and off LSD, including a Kachina doll (that he reportedly had 70 other patients also paint). Murdoch also continued to paint as an artist while on LSD, including most of his underwater paintings.
In the Netherlands, Dr. Stanislav Grof practiced “LSD Psychotherapy” in the 1980s, which included having his patients paint on LSD. Some of his artist patients painted numerous paintings while on LSD.
Beginning in the 1950s the US Central Intelligence Agency began a research program code named Project MKULTRA. Experiments included administering LSD to CIA employees, military personnel, doctors, other government agents, prostitutes, mentally ill patients, and members of the general public in order to study their reactions, usually without the subject’s knowledge. The project was revealed in the US congressional Rockefeller Commission report in 1975.
In 1963 the Sandoz patents expired on LSD. Also in 1963, the US Food and Drug Administration classified LSD as an Investigational New Drug, which meant new restrictions on medical and scientific use. Several figures, including Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, and Al Hubbard, began to advocate the consumption of LSD. LSD became central to the counterculture of the 1960s. On October 24, 1968, possession of LSD was made illegal in the United States. The last FDA approved study of LSD in patients, ended in 1980, while a study in healthy volunteers was made in the late 1980s. Legally approved and regulated psychiatric use of LSD continued in Switzerland until 1993. Today, medical research is resuming around the world.
Bernd Pulch 