From LSD to AA

Members of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) are sometimes referred to as “friends of Bill”. So who was Bill?

Bill Wilson was the co-founder of AA. He died 36 years sober, pleading for whiskey on his death bed. Instead, it was another addiction that killed him, namely tobacco. A heavy smoker, Wilson suffered from emphysema and developed fatal pneumonia. He continued to smoke despite needing an oxygen tank in the late 1960s.

Given his addictions, it seems ironic that Wilson searched to cure his alcoholism with another drug. The origin story of AA is deeply rooted in Bill’s experience with LSD. 

When LSD was discovered, the psychiatric community was very interested because LSD could make a normal person psychotic. That suggested a chemical basis for insanity, so if scientists could discover the chemical imbalance, they could cure schizophrenia. 

Two Saskatchewan researchers, Abram Hoffer and Humphry Osmond experimented with LSD on alcoholics and schizophrenics. Hoffer, Osmond and their wives all consumed LSD as part of self-experimentation while treating their Canadian patients. Both these prairie psychiatrists have fascinating backstories. 

Hoffer blamed schizophrenia on a substance in the body called adrenochrome. Although psychiatrists had long forgotten about Hoffer’s adrenochrome hypothesis of schizophrenia way back in 1950, Hollywood and QAnon conspiracies recently brought the word back into fashion and public awareness. The less said about such nonsense, the better. 

Hoffer’s colleague, Humphry Osmond gave us the term “psychedelic”. 

Whilst Hoffer and Osmond were experimenting with mescaline, a naturally occurring hallucinogen found in the peyote cactus, Osmond was approached by the famous poet and playwright Aldous Huxley. Huxley asked the Canadian psychiatrist for some mescaline. How would Osmond describe the experience of taking mescaline to Huxley? Osmond didn’t even have a word to describe mescaline’s effects. 

Huxley sent Osmond a rhyme with an invented word: “To make this mundane world sublime, just half a gram of phanerothyme”. Osmond, not liking the sound of that, responded with, “To fall in Hell or soar Angelic, you’ll need a pinch of psychedelic”.

Huxley, himself, was eager to look to the drug cabinet to solve the world’s problems. In his dystopian novel, Brave New World, Huxley introduces a fictional cure-all drug called Soma which he described as having “All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.”

Back to Humphry Osmond. During this time, one of Osmond’s patients was Bill Wilson, co-founder of AA. 

Wilson used LSD in a medically supervised experiment. Under the influence of LSD, Bill claimed he experienced a spiritual awakening that allowed him to overcome his addiction to alcohol.

Bill’s spiritual interests went beyond the LSD epiphany because he believed that a 15th-century monk named Boniface and other spirits helped him write the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, which detailed the basic principles of Alcoholics Anonymous. Wilson and his wife invited guests to their house to participate in seances using an Ouija board. 

Whatever text Bill Wilson may have attributed to ghostwriters, it is clear his writing was influenced by two intellectual powerhouses: Carl Jung and William James. Bill Wilson strongly identified with some of the concepts these two men endorsed. Wilson wrote to Dr Carl Jung. He had also read “The Varieties of Religious Experience” by William James. Bill Wilson recognized how Carl Jung promoted religious conversion to deal with a drinking problem and how James had written that “the only cure for dipsomania is religiomania.”

Bill Wilson’s spiritual experience with LSD inspired the discovery of Alcoholics Anonymous and kept him sober for 36 years. However, at the end of his life, he asked for a whiskey. But the nurse never gave him one. 

“Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) is an international fellowship of support groups comprised of individuals in recovery, which offers emotional support and a structured “12-step” approach to achieving abstinence. A central concept in AA is that substance use disorders are a spiritual disease, and that recovery is a journey involving belief in a higher power, personal exploration, and acceptance.”