As psychedelics return so does the story of New Westminster's Hollywood Hospital
For almost two decades the treatment facility combined psychedelics and psychiatry to treat addictions, anxiety, depression and even marital discord.
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From books to streaming service, content to social-media campaigns, psychedelics are having a flashback.
Also known as hallucinogens, psychedelics are a class of psychoactive substances that produce changes in perception, mood and cognitive processes. They were famously foundational in the turn-on, tune in and drop out world of 1960s’ hippie counterculture.
But even before party people were recreationally dropping acid (LSD), munching on magic mushrooms (psilocybin), or sipping peyote tea (mescaline), psychedelic substances were used to treat illnesses like depression, anxiety, addiction and PTSD.
One place that was using psychedelics for therapeutic purposes all those decades ago was the Hollywood Hospital in New Westminster. Named because of the holly trees out front, the hospital, a large white mansion on Sixth Street, was first opened in 1919 and was widely known as an alcohol treatment facility.
Things changed in 1957 when Dr. J. Ross MacLean bought the facility and brought in Al Hubbard, an LSD zealot of sorts. The facility would go on to administer LSD — more than 6,000 supervised trips are recorded — to treat alcoholism, anxiety disorders, depression and rocky marriages. Success, they said, was in the 50 to 80 per cent range. The facility shuttered for good in 1975.
The fascinating story of the hospital and the psychedelic psychiatry that was practised there is chronicled in the book: The Acid Room: The Psychedelic Trials and Tribulations of Hollywood Hospital, by Jesse Donaldson and Erika Dyck, PhD.
“There was a lot of innovation in this field happening for a decade or more, right here,” Donaldson, a Vancouver-based author and journalist, said on the phone. “It was interesting looking at these newspaper stories (from the 1940s and ’50s) where people were talking about psychedelic drugs in very non-hysterical language. Nowadays a lot of those conversations are coloured by years-and-years of public debate, criminalization, prohibition, and back then it was very matter-of-fact.”
Despite the reported therapeutic successes, people using in unsupervised non-medical ways caused psychedelic substances to be classified as drugs-of-abuse that had no medical value. Canada classified psychedelics as illegal substances in 1968, whereupon the message became about these drugs being bad and, if you consume them, terrible things would happen.
“When we are talking about drug use, whether it is therapeutic or recreational, we’re talking emotionally. The science is there. We know these things are safe and we know when they are properly used, they can be incredibly beneficial. But, as we have discovered in our political and social landscape, feelings are usually more important than facts for a lot of people. So, a moral panic about this is pretty easy to come by,” said Donaldson.
At the heart of this story are a few interesting and curious characters, the standout being a freewheeling, LSD packing psychedelic pioneer — and possibly clandestine government operative — Hubbard. Hubbard claimed to have turned writer Aldous Huxley on to LSD and reportedly could count the acid king Timothy Leary as one of his fans.
“He was called the Johnny Appleseed of LSD. I was like: ‘Who the hell is this guy?’ I think that in history the stories that always pop out to me are the ones where you find compelling characters,” said Donaldson about Hubbard, who had a Gulf Islands’ lab.
“Outside of the names and dates you find people who are doing interesting things or out-of-the-ordinary things, out-of-the-box things, and that to me was kind of the hook and I began to dig in.”
Donaldson then contacted Dyck, a professor at the University of Saskatchewan and an academic historian who penned the book Psychedelic Psychiatry. As it turned out, Dyck was in the midst of digitizing the hospital’s records, which had moved out of a personal collection to the B.C. Museum and Archives.
“I had always earmarked it as a story that needs its own book,” said Dyck about the New West facility. “After maybe a half-hour conversation we decided that it might actually be good that we join forces and wrote this thing together. Between the two of us, we had quite a lot of information and different access to media points and different kinds of archival records.”
As the war on drugs moves closer to a détente, this book is a fascinating reminder that decades ago these drugs were making clinical headway in health, not just making headcases, as naysayers shouted.
“They were sort of these larger-than-life characters but in some ways boring,” said Dyck about the early generation of psychedelic researchers. “They actually came across in some ways as conservative.
“People like Abram Hoffer and Humphry Osmond they were members of the American Psychiatric Association. They were trying to sort of toe-the-line, so there were these interesting kind of conservative radicals in some ways. They are inside the tent, but they are pushing.
“I was really fascinated by that kind of intrigue in that story, and they felt people like Hubbard were fascinating but potentially risky and dangerous. They felt the same thing about Leary.”
The hospital made headlines, literally, in 1959 when The Province newspaper’s Ben Metcalfe wrote a six-part, front page series on psychedelic therapy. But, for the most part, it flew below the radar.
“Maybe if it was in Kitsilano, or it had been in a place that intersected with those other kinds of sexy stories about hippies or riots or revolution that might have placed it in a different spot, but here it was in this kind of awkward place. It’s a private place in New West,” said Dyck. “It had white-coated people working in it. It looked kind of boring, mainstream, status quo.”
Despite looking boring, it was anything but for many of the patients whose records Dyck and Donaldson had access to.
“Without the individual patient stories this would be a hell of a lot less compelling,” said Dyck. “It is ordinary people like you and me, but when you look through the correspondence and patient files you see that this is life-changing for a lot of people. Certainly not everyone, but it does paint a starkly different picture than anything we’ve been told.
“This is life-changing and lasting for people. That’s the important part of the conversation that I felt needed to be amplified any way we possibly can.”
As for today’s rising popularity of micro-dosing and psychedelic resets, Dyck suggests those involved look to history to help them avoid the pitfalls of pushing too hard and too quick.
“Hopefully looking at things historically like this will help to remind us of bigger questions about the culture and the ethical components involved with psychedelics,” said Dyck. “The science is not enough. We really need to be cautious about how this moves forward by paying attention to not just getting it over a regulatory line, or not just getting it through the right trials, but we need to pay attention to safety issues.
“There are all sorts of issues that have the potential to undermine or plague the success of a psychedelic revolution … and many of them are not scientific at all. And this reminds us that we need to pay attention to culture and safety and all those sorts of things at the same time.”
“Let’s not screw this up again,” added Donaldson.
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