Matthew Oram. The Trials of Psychedelic Therapy: LSD Psychotherapy in America.

Abstract

According to most histories, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) is a pharmaceutical whose therapeutic potential was dashed by controversies concerning countercultural drug use and covert government research. In contrast to familiar accounts of a rapid government crackdown on the drug, Matthew Oram’s The Trials of Psychedelic Therapy: LSD Psychotherapy in America describes the conclusion of scientific research on psychedelics as a “quiet death” of gradual bureaucratic cuts (183). Psychedelic therapy is a treatment that, by definition, involves personal and contextual factors that cannot be easily controlled, and devising a placebo for a psychedelic experience is inherently difficult. Yet for over a decade funders and regulators rationalized cuts to psychedelic research by demanding that studies conform to the standard of the randomized clinical trial—a design that rose to prominence in the mid-twentieth century with the investigation of nonpsychiatric pharmaceuticals such as antibiotics (100). Drawing on fresh primary source material, both published and archival, Oram demonstrates that psychedelic therapy research did not end abruptly with the restrictions placed on LSD by the Drug Abuse Control Amendments of 1965, but instead continued well into the mid-1970s. Oram argues that understanding the drawn-out decline of LSD research in the twentieth century is essential to contemporary debates about psychedelic therapy’s revival. In addition to being relevant to recent discussions regarding LSD’s therapeutic potential, The Trials of Psychedelic Therapy provides an enduring examination of the ways in which researchers struggled to maintain legitimacy throughout a scientific paradigm shift and cultural crisis.