When Aldous Huxley Dropped Acid

Around Christmas Eve 1955, Alfred Matthew Hubbard turned Aldous Huxley on to LSD. Their meeting took place at Huxley’s home in the Hollywood Hills. Seemingly from different universes, these two figures found a curious point of convergence via lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), the hallucinogen first synthesized in a lab in Switzerland in 1938. Humphry Osmond, a British psychiatrist who’d moved to Canada in 1951, arranged the meeting, at Huxley’s request. Osmond was by then well known as a specialist in the altered states produced by LSD and other hallucinogens. A friend of Huxley’s, Osmond had given the writer mescaline—a naturally occurring hallucinogen—in 1953; that trip inspired Huxley’s Doors of Perception from 1954, a book that details the visions the drug produced. “The seminal psychedelic handbook,” as the late Todd Brendan Fahey called it in a profile of Hubbard from High Times Magazine, records in detail Huxley’s initial chemical enlightenment.

Osmond and Huxley had discussed possible neologisms to describe the impact such drugs had on the body and mind. According to Osmond’s obituary from The BMJ,

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