Hollywood Hospital in New Westminster: J. Ross MacLean’s private LSD therapy program and what the records show

Hollywood Hospital was Canada’s best-known private LSD clinic. Its medical director, J. Ross MacLean, signed his papers from Hollywood Hospital, New Westminster, B.C., and a 2023 history calls it a private clinic in New Westminster that people travelled to from the United States. This guide covers what the records show about the place, Al Hubbard’s role, the patients and fees, the published claims, and how it ended.

What was Hollywood Hospital?

It began as the Hollywood Sanitorium, a private hospital for addictions and alcoholism built in New Westminster in 1919. According to a 2019 University of Saskatchewan thesis by Andrea Ens, supervised by the historian Erika Dyck, it was officially renamed Hollywood Hospital forty years later. The thesis describes a shingled building that looked more like a large house, with balconies and a garden.

MacLean was its medical director from 1954 to 1975, according to the same thesis, and a graduate of the University of British Columbia and Manitoba’s medical school (Ens, 2019). He was the public face of the place. Crossref records for the hospital’s 1961 paper list a staff built around him: D. C. MacDonald as assistant medical director, Ultan P. Byrne as director of clinical psychiatry and A. M. Hubbard as director of psychological research.

It was not mainly an LSD hospital. Ens reports that the hospital’s own 1965 report put LSD therapy at less than 1.5 percent of patient days per year; most of its work was conventional treatment for addiction and other conditions. The LSD program was simply what made it famous.

When did the LSD program run?

The sources do not agree on exact dates, and the differences matter. The publisher of a 2022 popular history by Jesse Donaldson and Erika Dyck, *The Acid Room*, dates the LSD work to between 1957 and 1968. The hospital’s own 1965 conference report was titled as experience from a seven-year study, which points to a start in the late 1950s (Ens, 2019). Ens’s patient files run from 1955 to 1973, and she writes that MacLean closed the hospital in 1975.

What was Al Hubbard’s role?

Al Hubbard is the part of the story where record and legend separate. The documented part is solid: the 1961 paper lists A. M. Hubbard as director of psychological research at Hollywood Hospital. Historians Samuel Lett and Erika Dyck describe him (1901–82) as one of the main figures in shaping the psychedelic session setting, and say that the Saskatchewan researchers Humphry Osmond and Duncan Blewett regarded him as a very skilled guide.

Hubbard was a Roman Catholic and believed spiritual or religious insight had the most power to change people. According to Blewett, as quoted by Lett and Dyck, his method used a religious setting with religious themes in pictures and music. Ens writes that he was instrumental in establishing psychedelic therapies at the hospital. His links to the Saskatchewan group are part of why the two programs are told together; see our Humphry Osmond and Saskatchewan history.

The rest is harder to pin down. Lett and Dyck mention, citing a 2021 biography, a storied past as a double agent in Prohibition-era Seattle. Ens, citing a 1985 popular history, calls him a former CIA operative, and the publisher of *The Acid Room* calls him an “ex-spy”. We found no primary record of intelligence work, so we treat these as later retellings, not established fact.

How were patients treated?

Screening came first. According to Ens, a would-be patient wrote a detailed autobiography, was interviewed by MacLean or MacDonald, and took the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, a standard personality test. Staff routinely turned down people they did not expect to benefit. A 2024 review of early trials notes the 1961 paper’s two days of preparation before a single LSD session.

The session room was designed to feel domestic. Ens describes a buff-colored room with dark green drapes and a large couch; patients wore pajamas and a bathrobe, and sessions lasted six to twelve hours. The hospital’s 1965 report, as she quotes it, called the experience “essentially an educational experience.” Therapists were largely non-directive and did not interpret what patients saw. Our guide to set and setting traces where this attention to surroundings came from.

Sound was part of the method. Lett and Dyck found that a spoken-word recording called “St. Paul’s Letter” was in common rotation from 1960 to 1967, a practice that appears unique to Hollywood Hospital. Patient files show it divided people: one patient described it as deeply moving, while a Jesuit priest found it false and said it belonged to an old-time religion that could no longer be his way to God.

Who were the patients, and what did it cost?

Patients paid their own way, and that shaped everything. A 1967 letter from MacLean, as Ens reports it, quoted $450 for a first treatment and $250 for later ones, plus a stay of five to seven days at $18.80 a day. Ens calculates that a first treatment with five days in hospital came to $544, which she converts to about $3,855 in 2017 dollars. She concludes that the fees, plus time off work, made the program largely a service for well-off clients.

The reasons people came were wide. Ens found patients seeking help with alcoholism, depression and anxiety, marriages and personal insight, and twelve same-sex attracted men who wanted to understand or change their orientation. Dyck and Marchildon describe a man back from Vietnam who applied from San Francisco in 1967, and note that files show patients discovering other concerns under the drug, from sexuality to a Holocaust survivor’s guilt.

That last group is a hard part of this history. The hospital’s 1965 report, as Ens quotes it, said few of these men achieved what staff then called a satisfactory heterosexual adjustment, while many gained insight and reduced guilt. Treating sexual orientation as a condition reflected the psychiatry of the time and is rejected today. Ens uses pseudonyms for patients, and so do we by naming none.

What did the published reports claim, and what are their limits?

The main peer-reviewed report is the 1961 paper in the Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol. A 2024 review tabulates it as 100 patients, 61 with alcoholism, treated with one LSD session after preparation, followed for 3 to 18 months, with no control group and a reported improvement in alcoholism and other conditions. We read its record, not its full text.

The 1965 report, given at a conference in Amityville, New York, was not peer-reviewed; we know it only through Ens. The bigger numbers come from marketing copy: the publisher of *The Acid Room* says the hospital ran more than 6000 supervised sessions with a claimed success rate of nearly 80%. We could not check either figure against the hospital’s records.

The limits are the same ones that dogged the Saskatchewan work. There were no randomized controls, the people judging outcomes were the people giving treatment, and patients were self-selected, screened and paying. MacLean dismissed the idea that patients might have been helped as much by other means, and argued that the sterile atmosphere of controlled trials harmed the trust treatment depended on.

The test came from Toronto. The Addiction Research Foundation ran what a 2023 paper calls the first double-blind randomized controlled trial of LSD therapy for alcoholism, launched in 1962, and found LSD was not effective. Its main results appeared in 1966. In 1967, MacLean and his research associate W. E. Wilby published a comment on that study about responsibility in research reporting. We read the record, not their argument.

How did it end?

The decline came in the late 1960s. Ens describes a staff letter from 1968 saying LSD therapies had slowed considerably that year because of fears that LSD damaged chromosomes. MacLean tried to separate “clinical” LSD from street acid in public statements, but the drug had become tied to the counterculture.

Regulation tightened at the same time. Dyck writes that Canadian regulators first considered restricting LSD in 1962, during the thalidomide scandal; doctors at first defended their right to judge drugs, but a few years later, under Senate pressure led by Senator Hartland Molson, physicians yielded. The publisher of *The Acid Room* sums up the story as media attention that brought the hospital to prominence and then its downfall. The wider legal story is in how magic mushrooms became illegal in Canada.

The hospital itself lasted longer. Ens reports that in the 1970s the Church of Scientology campaigned publicly against its treatments and supported its closure, and that MacLean closed it in 1975. Where it stood, Ens notes, the street is now lined with storefronts. Today LSD is listed in Schedule III of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act.

Where are the Hollywood Hospital records now?

Much of what historians know comes from patient files the hospital left behind. Lett and Dyck cite them as the Hollywood Hospital Archive at the British Columbia Archives, and Ens worked from a research database of those boxes held at the University of Saskatchewan (Ens, 2019). Dyck and Marchildon note that the files they reviewed were anonymized.

That is why the picture keeps changing. Each new study of the files, from patients’ own written accounts to physicians’ notes, adds detail that the published reports left out. For the province’s present-day research and law, see psilocybin in British Columbia; for the longer arc, see the history of magic mushrooms and our psilocybin timeline.

What we could not confirm

• The exact start and end of the LSD program. Our sources give 1953, 1955 and 1957 for the start and 1968, 1973 and 1975 for the end, depending on what they count.
• The text and results of the 1961 paper, the 1965 report and the 1967 reply. We read their records or second-hand accounts.
• The total number of sessions and the success rate. Both come from a publisher’s description.
• Hubbard’s intelligence background. It appears only in secondary accounts.
• The BC Archives catalogue entry for the hospital’s records, which we could not open.

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