Humphry Osmond, Abram Hoffer and the Saskatchewan experiments that gave us the word “psychedelic”

Humphry Osmond is the reason a word coined on the Canadian prairies is now used around the world. A historian of medicine at the University of Saskatchewan, Erika Dyck, puts it plainly: in 1957, she writes, “psychedelic” entered the English language from an asylum superintendent working in one of Saskatchewan’s provincial mental hospitals.

This guide tells that story from the sources we could read: who Osmond and Abram Hoffer were, what they did at Weyburn and Saskatoon, how Aldous Huxley and an architect named Kiyoshi Izumi came into it, why later researchers criticized the studies, and how the work ended. It closes with what links the 1950s to today’s trials. For the wider timeline, see the history of magic mushrooms.

Who was Humphry Osmond?

Osmond was born in Surrey, England, in 1917 and trained at Guy’s Hospital Medical School, according to his obituary in the BMJ. He served as a ship’s psychiatrist in the Second World War. Afterwards, at St George’s Hospital in London, he and John Smythies became interested in the idea that schizophrenia might come from a metabolic error producing something like the effects of mescaline or LSD.

In 1951 he moved to Canada, to the Weyburn Mental Hospital in Saskatchewan, where the obituary says he had research funding from the Canadian government and the Rockefeller Foundation. A 2020 review of his published letters calls him the hospital’s clinical director; Dyck describes him as a superintendent. Either way, he ran clinical research there for about a decade (Lett and Dyck, 2023).

Weyburn was not a gentle place to start. Dyck and Patrick Farrell call it one of the most notorious mental hospitals in North America. A 2025 architecture article notes that when the Saskatchewan Hospital at Weyburn opened in 1921 it was the largest building in the British Commonwealth, with long, crowded, hard-surfaced corridors.

Abram Hoffer and the Saskatoon side of the work

Abram Hoffer was the other half of the partnership. A review of Dyck’s 2008 book *Psychedelic Psychiatry* describes him as a Saskatchewan-born psychiatrist with a background in agricultural chemistry who shared Osmond’s belief that much mental illness was biochemical. Dyck’s 2005 paper places the two men in different cities: Osmond in Weyburn and Hoffer in Saskatoon.

Their first big idea was about schizophrenia, not addiction. In 1952 they set out what became known as the adrenochrome hypothesis, that a faulty breakdown of adrenaline could produce a mescaline-like substance in the body (Mills, 2010). They began with mescaline and soon moved to LSD, which was more available (Carstairs, 2010). Researchers were first drawn to LSD because it seemed to produce a “model psychosis”.

The Saskatchewan research was larger than two men. Colleagues included the psychologist Duncan Blewett and the psychiatrist Nick Chwelos, who by 1959 had written a handbook on running these sessions, based on trials at several sites in the province (Lett and Dyck, 2023). A 1964 paper on LSD and alcoholism came from Colin M. Smith, listed as deputy director of psychiatric research at Saskatchewan’s Department of Public Health.

The LSD and alcoholism studies

Weyburn had many patients with alcoholism who had not improved with other treatments. Osmond’s first theory, as the BMJ obituary tells it, was that hallucinogens produced something like delirium tremens, the most severe form of alcohol withdrawal, and that a frightening artificial delirium might push a patient to change. A 2025 review describes the same idea as an attempt to produce the “hitting bottom” of Alcoholics Anonymous literature in a “controlled” form.

What patients reported was often different. Hoffer later recalled that many patients found the experience interesting rather than terrible, and the researchers came to describe its effects as ego deflation, improved self-insight and a reordering of values (Srivastava and Gold, 2025). According to the obituary, Osmond and Hoffer treated about 2,000 people with alcoholism between 1954 and 1960 and reported that 40% to 45% had not returned to drinking a year later. Those are the researchers’ own figures, reported in an obituary; we could not check them against the original papers.

Osmond also paid attention to the room. An unpublished 1952 report with Ben Stefaniuk, studied by historians, recommended a comfortable room with a couch and artwork, close to a private washroom (Lett and Dyck, 2023). That attention to surroundings is part of the background to what later came to be called set and setting; see our guide to set and setting.

Aldous Huxley, mescaline and the word “psychedelic”

In the spring of 1953 the novelist Aldous Huxley wrote to Osmond after reading his work on mescaline. In May 1953 Osmond travelled to Los Angeles for the American Psychiatric Association meeting, stayed at Huxley’s home, and led Huxley and his wife Maria through their first mescaline experience. The two men wrote to each other for eleven years, until Huxley’s death in 1963. Huxley recounted his mescaline experience in *The Doors of Perception* (Brar et al., 2026).

They also discussed what to call these drugs. The BMJ obituary says Huxley proposed “phanerothyme”, from Greek words for “to show” and “spirit”, and sent a rhyming couplet. Osmond preferred “psychedelic”, from Greek words for mind and for showing, and answered with his own couplet: “To fathom Hell or soar angelic / Just take a pinch of psychedelic”. We have this exchange only as the obituary quotes it.

The dates depend on what you count. A review of the published Huxley–Osmond letters says Osmond coined the term in a letter to Huxley in 1956. The public debut came in 1957: the obituary says he announced it at a New York Academy of Sciences meeting, and his paper “A Review of the Clinical Effects of Psychotomimetic Agents” appeared in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences in March 1957. We read that paper’s bibliographic record, not its text. Dyck’s CMAJ essay gives the meaning as a “mind-manifesting” response. For more on the word, see psilocybin’s word origins.

Kiyoshi Izumi and the hospital designed with LSD

One of the stranger chapters involved an architect. Kiyoshi Izumi (1921–1996), born in Vancouver to Japanese immigrant parents, avoided the British Columbia internment camps and settled in Regina; in 1954 he co-founded the firm Izumi Arnott and Sugiyama (Canadian Architect, 2024). He worked with Osmond and Hoffer on a new design for psychiatric hospitals in Saskatchewan, the first of which was built in Yorkton.

To understand how patients perceived space, Izumi took LSD under the supervision of Osmond and Hoffer. In a 1970 article he wrote that “the object was to understand some of the experiences and problems of the mentally ill, so these problems could be considered in the building design.” The Yorkton Psychiatric Centre, finished in 1964, is described as the “anti-Weyburn”: smaller treatment areas, short corridors, daylit common rooms, bay windows angled to avoid night reflections, and no closets that might feel threatening.

The method drew critics then and now (Canadian Architect, 2024). The 2025 article that marked the building’s national architecture award calls the LSD experiments “a somewhat naïve attempt” to approximate patients’ minds, as well as a bold one. Dyck’s 2010 paper argues that the architect, psychiatrist and psychologist behind these designs could not hold back the wider post-war changes that were moving care out of large hospitals.

Why the studies were criticized

The main criticism is design. A 2025 review describes Osmond and Hoffer’s alcoholism work as uncontrolled, observational studies, often with a therapist present who sometimes took LSD too. Dyck’s 2005 paper concludes that the Saskatchewan researchers had failed to construct randomized controlled trials just as such trials were becoming the standard. Blinding was debated even then: some investigators argued that the drug’s obvious effects made blinding pointless, and Hoffer published a paper on double-blind design in 1967.

Other researchers ran controlled studies. One came from Toronto’s Alcoholism and Drug Addiction Research Foundation in 1966; we read its record, not its results. A 2012 meta-analysis pooled six randomized trials of LSD for alcoholism with 536 participants and found an odds ratio of 1.96 in favor of LSD (Krebs and Johansen, 2012). The 2025 review warns that those trials used unstandardized comparisons, loose outcome measures and very different therapy (Srivastava and Gold, 2025).

Hoffer’s schizophrenia theory has fared worse. A 2010 history paper argues that his diagnostic approach and his treatment theory depended on a tautology, meaning they assumed what they set out to prove. Dyck and Gregory Marchildon add a broader caution: 1950s psychedelic science relied heavily on self-experimentation and performed poorly in randomized controlled trials.

How the Saskatchewan work ended

Dyck gives two reasons. The scientific one was the missing randomized trials. The cultural one was that LSD became tied to student protest, antiwar demonstrations and the counterculture, and governments stepped in, first restricting and then ending formal research. By the mid-1960s, she writes in the CMAJ, research into LSD had come to a decided halt.

Canada’s regulatory turn began in 1962, during the thalidomide scandal, when regulators considered whether LSD should face similar restrictions. Doctors at first defended their right to judge a drug’s value. A few years later, under pressure from the Senate led by Senator Hartland Molson of the brewing family, physicians gave way. Dyck notes the irony that the leading therapeutic use was treating alcoholism. The later story of drug scheduling in Canada is in how magic mushrooms became illegal in Canada.

Osmond had left by then. He moved to head research at the New Jersey Psychiatric Institute in Princeton and later to the University of Alabama, retiring in 1992; he died on 6 February 2004 (BMJ, 2004). “The money dried up,” one psychiatrist told the obituary writer.

From Saskatchewan to today’s psilocybin trials

The alcoholism question returned decades later with a different drug and stricter designs. In a double-blind randomized trial published in 2022, 95 adults with alcohol use disorder at two US centers received psychotherapy plus either psilocybin or an active placebo. Over 32 weeks, the psilocybin group had heavy drinking on 9.7% of days, against 23.6% in the placebo group, with no serious adverse events reported among those given psilocybin (Bogenschutz et al., 2022). It is one trial, and a 2025 review notes that in psychedelic trials 80–90% of participants correctly guess which group they are in (Srivastava and Gold, 2025).

Canada is back in the registry. The University of Calgary lists a Phase 2 randomized trial of psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy for alcohol use disorder, recruiting with an estimated 128 participants and completion estimated for October 2027. The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto lists a planned Phase 2 trial for people with both depression and alcohol use disorder, not yet recruiting as of its last update in February 2026. Neither has results. For the full evidence picture, see psilocybin and alcohol use disorder trials.

Health Canada says the production, sale and possession of magic mushrooms are illegal in Canada, that no therapeutic product containing psilocybin is approved, and that clinical trials are the most appropriate way to advance research. Dyck’s 2015 essay frames the revival as an old question asked again, with better neuroscience and a different culture (Dyck, 2015).

What we could not confirm

• The patient numbers and abstinence rates for 1954–1960. They come from an obituary quoting the researchers, not from papers we read.
• The exact wording of Osmond’s 1957 paper and of Huxley’s letters. We used the paper’s bibliographic record and secondary accounts of the letters.
• The results of the 1966 Toronto controlled study. We read only its bibliographic record.
• When exactly Osmond left Saskatchewan. The sources say he spent about a decade there.

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