Osmond, Humphry

The Introduction to PSYCHEDELICS, The Uses and Inplications of Hallucinogenic Drugs edited by Bernard Aaronson and Humphry Osmond, Doubleday Company 1970. Copyright Aaronson and Osmond. 

In 1956, Humphry Osmond suggested, at a New York Academy of Science meeting that it... 

PART IX. CONCLUSION Psychedelics and the Future. Humphry Osmond and Bernard S. Aaronson 461... 

In 1959 we had our first information on the psychedelic substances, through reading an article in a scientific journal by Dr. Humphry Osmond, then medical director of the Saskatchewan Provincial Hospital, in Canada (1957b). Dr. Os-... 

The writer would like to thank Drs. A. Moneim El-Meligi, Frank Haronian, Harriet Mann, Humphry Osmond, Stanley R. Platman, Hubert Stolberg, and A. Arthur Sugerman for their assistance in this study. 

My next LSD experiences were in situations that the mentally ill might face in a typical institution. These occurred at the University Hospital in Saskatoon, under the supervision of Dr. Abram Hoffer, and at the Saskatchewan Hospital in Weyburn, under the supervision of Dr. Humphry Osmond. 

In 1957 Dr. Humphry Osmond first coined the word "psychedelic" to describe the mind-expanding drugs, then familiar to only a small minority of researchers and "acid-heads." In these remarkably few years, this term—and the drugs it refers to— have become household words. Ominous headlines have warned us of their dangers, while Madison Avenue has revelled in the delights of the psychedelic sub-culture. 

The Uses and Implications of Hallucinogenic Drugs by Bernard Aaronson and Humphry Osmond... 

HUMPHRY OSMOND is the Bureau s Director of Research in Neurology and Psychiatry. The man who first coined the term "psychedelics," he is the co-author (with Abram Hoffer) of How to Live with Schizophrenia, Chemical Basis of Clinical Psychiatry, and New Hope for Alcoholics. 

In the early 1950s, researchers Humphry Osmond and John Smythies wrote a paper about the mental effects of mescaline that came to the attention of Aldous Huxley, who invited Osmond to visit him if he should be in the Los Angeles area. Huxley s wife, Maria, was initially apprehensive about such a meeting, fearing that Osmond "might wear a beard." When Osmond did go to L.A. for a psychological conference, Maria was satisfied that he was not a Bohemian or a mad scientist (he didn t have a beard), and he stayed with the Huxleys. Maria, ironically, finally asked about getting some mescaline for Aldous. Osmond s reaction to the proposal was favorable, with one reservation ... 

Humphry Osmond, an early LSD, mescaline, morning glory seed and adrenolutin researcher, proposed the word psychedelic. 

In much of the writing about psychedelics, little effort has been made to clarify the differences between LSD and mescaline effects. In The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, for example, Masters and Houston specify the agent ingested by their 206 subjects (of whom 89 received mescaline) but then seem to take ir for granted that stages and characteristics of mescaline experience will be the same as those under LSD. They noted no great differences between the effects of LSD and mescaline in the creativity studies cited in Chapter One. Aldous Huxley, writing to Humphry Osmond in December of 1955 about his first experience with LSD (75 meg.), emphasized the resemblances (and re-emphasized them later after more experiences with LSD) ... 

As for changes in time perception, consider an extreme example, the experience of Christopher Mayhew, a Member of Parliament during the 1950s who offered to take mescaline under the supervision of Humphry Osmond and before BBC cameras—surely one of the best-documented trips ever. 

Aldous Huxley was in Cambridge at the time, as a visiting lecturer at M.I.T. he was brought in as an advisor. On the day John Kennedy was elected to the Presidency, Huxley and Humphry Osmond visited Leary. Afterwards, they both agreed that Harvard would be a perfect place to conduct a study of psilocybin, but they felt that Leary "might be a bit too square, in Osmond s words. This evaluation has since caused Osmond to wonder considerably about his and others efforts to generalize personality assessment. 

When Abram Hoffer and Humphry Osmond took up the matter of mental effects in their book The Hallucinogens, they remarked that "the major difference between the mushroom effect and pure psilocybin seems to be the dryness of the scientific accounts and the richness of the accounts of self-experimentation. Probably no finer example of "richness" exists than in the descriptions of R. Gordon Wasson. 

Thought must he given to lights flashing at certain frequencies (Hubbard personal communication to Dr. Humphry Osmond, 1955 and 1956). 

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