Better living through chemistry: an infamous New Westminster hospital is the subject of a new book

“Turn on, tune in, and drop out.”  Long before that famous phrase was linked to Timothy Leary and the use of LSD for recreational purposes, a little-known facility in New Westminster was supervising acid trips as a form of therapy.  Now, that story is being told in a new book, The Acid Room: The Psychedelic Trials and Tribulations of Hollywood Hospital.

“It was a little bit off the beaten path in some respects.  If it had been in Gastown, maybe this would be a different story, more well-known,” says Erika Dyck, a professor of history and Canada Research Chair in the History of Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan.  She co-authored the book with Vancouver writer and historian Jesse Donaldson.

Between them, J. Ross MacLean and Al Hubbard, the operators of the Acid Room, supervised more than 6,000 acid trips between 1957 and 1968, to treat everything from addiction to marital discord.

“LSD and mescaline and later psilocybin were being used in ways that weren’t necessarily controversial they just weren’t yet mainstream, and they weren’t really accepted technologies or therapies for treating addiction,” she explains.

Dyck says much like with InSite and harm reduction decades later, the Acid Room put Vancouver on the map in the field of psychedelic psychiatry.

“You know, I find it fascinating, and Jesse and I have had this conversation about the role that Vancouver has played in testing out different ideas about drug use, [that] Vancouver continues to be this kind of testing ground, this space where you see different people, reformers, advocates, coming together and really pushing us in terms of developing more creative public policy.”

Dyck says the heart of the book is based on hundreds of surviving patient records found in the BC Archives.

“I was really keen to get access to these records which were held and conducted in a private hospital, sort of off the grid in some respects, kind of during the heyday of psychedelics but here with a bunch of white-coated folks who, in their own way, were radical, but they aren’t, sort of, your typical psychonauts as you might expect.  So, I was really intrigued by the sort of contradictions that were inherently woven into this story,” she says.

“Everyone who came through this was encouraged to write their own summary of what they felt happened and in that you see a very wide variety of pathways that people took through this program.”

Word spread, and Hollywood Hospital ran afoul of the powers that be, revealing a split in psychiatry that would eventually criminalize psychedelics. And the Acid Room was the centre of that contentious debate.

“So, I think it’s nice to bring that story to the Canadian reading public and really remind us that Vancouver has this really colourful history that is more complex maybe than we think.”

Dyck adds there is a lot we can learn from looking back.

“Some of the tensions that exist in this book I think are ones that we might want to continue to wrestle with today…all of these things are very much present in the minds of reformers today and certainly psychedelic advocates.”

The Acid Room is the latest in the 49.2:  Tales from the Off-Beat series, of which Donaldson is the editor.  He also wrote the first two volumes:  Land of Destiny: A History of Vancouver Real Estate and Fool’s Gold: The Life and Legacy of Vancouver’s Official Town Fool.

The Acid Room: The Psychedelic Trials and Tribulations of Hollywood Hospital is available from Anvil Press.