Al Hubbard and the Mystery Captain

“Al Hubbard gave LSD to Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, and a remarkable number of Hollywood figures. His methods were Osmond's; his ambition was larger. He called himself the Johnny Appleseed of LSD.”

Alfred Matthew Hubbard defies clean description. He was, depending on who was reporting and when: a bootlegger, a rumrunner, a government informant, an inventor who held early patents on radio navigation, a uranium entrepreneur, and, most relevantly for this story, the man who gave LSD to Aldous Huxley.

Hubbard encountered LSD in 1951 through a connection with the manufacturer and became convinced, with the evangelical certainty he brought to everything, that it was the most important substance in human history. He bought large quantities from the manufacturer, obtained credentials from a Uruguayan diplomatic service that allowed him to travel with controlled substances, and began administering sessions to everyone he thought could handle and benefit from the experience.

His contact with Osmond was through the clinical network; his contact with Huxley was through the Los Angeles intellectual circle. He turned Huxley on to LSD in 1955, two years after Osmond's mescaline session, in a setting that reflected Hubbard's characteristic approach: music, art on the walls, careful attention to atmosphere, an implicit faith that the substance itself would do what it needed to do if the environment supported it.

Huxley found the LSD session profoundly different from mescaline, less visually intense, more emotionally transparent. He wrote to Osmond about it, comparing the experiences in the careful phenomenological language they'd developed together.

The correspondence that runs through Moksha includes references to Hubbard, always slightly at arm's length. He was useful, his distribution of LSD to cultural and intellectual figures created the milieu in which Doors of Perception was received, but he wasn't Huxley and Osmond's kind of careful. He self-titled himself the 'Johnny Appleseed of LSD,' which suggested an enthusiasm for scale that made Huxley nervous. Huxley was always worried about scale. He was right to be.

Sources

• Stevens, Jay. Storming Heaven (1987)
• Lattin, Don. The Harvard Psychedelic Club (2010)
• Huxley & Osmond, in Moksha (1977)