The War Osmond Was Fighting and the War Anslinger Was Fighting
In 1953, Humphry Osmond was treating chronic alcoholics in Saskatchewan hospitals with LSD and getting better results than any prior treatment. In 1953, Harry Anslinger was running the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and prosecuting Billie Holiday. Both men understood drugs as a policy problem. They had opposite ideas of what the policy should be.
Harry Anslinger and Humphry Osmond never met. They operated in different countries, different institutions, and, most fundamentally, different theories of what substances did to human beings and what the appropriate response was.
Anslinger's theory: substances were morally corrupting. The appropriate response was criminal punishment and aggressive enforcement. His 1937 testimony before Congress described marijuana as causing "Satanic music, jazz and swing" and inducing white women to seek relations with Black men. The framework was explicit: drugs were a threat to racial and social hierarchy, and the law was the appropriate instrument of defense.
Osmond's theory: substances were pharmacologically interesting and therapeutically promising. The appropriate response was careful clinical investigation, controlled conditions, trained guides, and the development of protocols that could reliably produce beneficial outcomes. His 1953 alcoholism trials at Weyburn Hospital produced results no conventional treatment could match: a 50% improvement rate against a 5-10% baseline.
In 1953, both men were active. Anslinger was head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, which he had run since 1930 and would run until 1962. Osmond was beginning his correspondence with Huxley and conducting the trials that would eventually be suppressed by the political framework Anslinger had built.
The framework won. When Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act in 1970, Anslinger's understanding of drugs, as moral threats requiring criminal response, was codified in federal law. Schedule I placed LSD in the same category as heroin and explicitly stated it had "no accepted medical use." This was not a pharmacological judgment. It was a political one, made by an administration that, as John Ehrlichman would later admit, understood drugs primarily as a mechanism for targeting political opponents.
Osmond's trials, and the hundred-plus other LSD studies that had been running since the 1950s, were ended. The 40,000+ patients who had received LSD treatment were the last patients to receive it for a generation.
Anslingerism won in 1970. The question of whether it was the right framework was answered, in 2001, by Portugal: decriminalization and investment in social services produced better outcomes than criminalization on every measurable dimension. The question of whether Osmond was right was answered, in 2023, by the clinical trials: MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD was found to be effective in Phase 3 trials. LSD therapy for alcohol use disorder is back in clinical trials.
The two frameworks are still competing. Osmond's is slowly winning the evidentiary argument. Anslinger's is still embedded in federal law.
Sources
- Huxley-Osmond Letters
- Hari, Chasing the Scream (2015)
- Medical History of Psychedelic Drugs, Cambridge (2007) [Source not found; under review]