Trip adviser

A study of psychedelic drugs mixing history with a treatise on therapeutic use passes the acid test.

I’ve begun to wonder,” Michael Pollan confesses early on in How to Change Your Mind, “if perhaps these remarkable molecules might be wasted on the young, that they may have more to offer us later in life, after the cement of our mental habits and everyday behaviours has set.”

The author, the beneficiary of a long and satisfying career and a similarly enduring marriage, is quietly considering psychedelic drugs as the remedy for a mid-life crisis.

His book unfolds in three acts. The first is an engaging, mildly revisionist history of LSD since its synthesis by Albert Hofmann in 1938, and of psilocybin since R Gordon Wasson, a Manhattan banker and amateur mycologist, discovered it for the West in southern Mexico in 1955.

Wasson’s encounter with “the mushrooms that cause strange visions” was related in 15 pages of Life magazine that year, the Western public’s first insight into the psychedelic experience. (The phrase “magic mushrooms” was coined by one of the magazine’s subeditors.) But, by then, psychiatrists and researchers – following Hofmann’s belated and accidental discovery of LSD’s psychoactive properties in 1943 – were already using it on their patients, and themselves.

It is, Pollan observes, a forgotten history, peopled by the likes of Humphry Osmond, who, in 1951, took his research on LSD and mescaline from St George’s Hospital in London to a remote Saskatchewan mental hospital, where he administered LSD to more than 700 alcoholics – about half of whom duly became sober. Osmond also provided the dose of mescaline that inspired Aldous Huxley to write The Doors of Perception.

By the mid-60s, LSD was being used in psychiatric institutions even in New Zealand. But in 1966, Hofmann’s employer,