Abram Hoffer was the Saskatoon half of Saskatchewan’s 1950s psychedelic research, working with Humphry Osmond in Weyburn (Dyck, 2005). A review of Erika Dyck’s history describes him as a Saskatchewan-born psychiatrist with a background in agricultural chemistry who believed much mental illness was biochemical (Carstairs, 2010).
In 1952 he and Osmond set out the adrenochrome hypothesis, the idea that a faulty breakdown of adrenaline could produce a mescaline-like substance in the body and cause schizophrenia (Mills, 2010). They began with mescaline and soon moved to LSD, much of it in alcoholism treatment (Carstairs, 2010). He co-wrote a 1959 report on LSD in alcoholism with Chwelos, Blewett and Smith (Smart et al., 1967).
Later reviews are critical. A 2010 history argues that his schizophrenia theory depended on a tautology, assuming what it set out to prove (Mills, 2010), and a 2025 review describes the alcoholism work as uncontrolled and observational (Srivastava and Gold, 2025). Toronto’s Addiction Research Foundation challenged the Saskatchewan claims with its own controlled trial.
Sources
- Carstairs, 2010, review of Dyck’s Psychedelic Psychiatry
- Mills, 2010: the adrenochrome hypothesis
- Dyck, 2005: Flashback, psychiatric experimentation with LSD
- Srivastava and Gold, 2025, Brain Sciences
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