When the Sackler Brothers studied LSD
One of the stranger episodes from the 1950s golden age of psychedelic therapy, and what it tells us about the history of technology
My book Tripping on Utopia turned one year old earlier this month, and I am finding myself thinking less and less about the history of psychedelic science — my main historical preoccupation for upwards of five years now. I tend to be on the obsessive side, as writers and researchers go. The reason for this is that I greatly enjoy the experience of digging into archives and finding things that, if not new, exactly, had more or less been forgotten since they were created. There is a lot of this sort of thing in the papers of psychedelic researchers from the 1940s through 1960s, which is what made the process of researching the book so fun.
But the truth is that publicizing a book — as opposed to researching one — has little room for enthusing about weird things you found in an archive. It’s about building up a streamlined narrative about what your book’s about and why a reader in a bookstore should care. In the case of Tripping on Utopia, the press coverage was pretty clearly focused on Margaret Mead and her hitherto unknown role in the early days of psychedelic science. My editor intuited this long before me, and as a result he suggested cutting around 50,000 words from my manuscript that took us too far afield from Mead-world.
This was the right move: it made the book far more readable. But it also meant leaving a lot of strange and interesting things on the cutting room floor.
Like, for instance, the fact that Raymond Sackler — co-founder of Purdue Pharma, the infamous company responsible for creating and marketing OxyContin — was in the room during the very first scientific presentation about LSD in the Western Hemisphere, when a psychedelic researcher Max Rinkel spoke about LSD at a 1950 psychological conference.
Here’s a page from the transcript of the Q&A showing Sackler and one of his collaborators at the time, Dr. Co Tui, questioning Rinkel about this unfamiliar new compound:
And with that as a prologue, here is an excerpt from my rough draft of Tripping on Utopia which explores what, exactly, is going on here. It is a window into one of the earliest public scientific debates about LSD in history, and a glimpse of an alternate reality where the Sackler Brothers got famous for marketing legal psychedelics, as opposed to legal opiates.
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First, do no harm would prove to be a distinctly challenging principle for anyone involved in the testing of psychedelic drugs.
Yet in the context of psychiatry 1949, it is important to remember how shockingly harmful the existing treatments could be. In a world in which lobotomies were still routinely practiced, a world in which the concept of patient consent did not even exist, drug regimens that seem unethical today could actually be portrayed — quite truthfully — as beneficent improvements on the existing standard of care.
An ambitious young physician, named Arthur Sackler, who in 1949 had been newly elevated to the role of director of Creedmore Sanitarium on Long Island, exemplified both the idealism and the blond spots of this new postwar generation of drug researchers.
Sackler and his two brothers, Mortimer and Raymond, were proponents of a novel treatment for mental illness known as insulin therapy. The Sackler brothers genuinely believed in insulin’s potential to alleviate the suffering of the mentally ill and, above all, to replace lobotomies, which they abhorred. The brothers were, however, also acutely aware of the potential profits to be made from these breakthroughs. Later in the 1950s, by developing the concept of direct-to-physician medical marketing, the Sackler brothers fueled the perception of a dawning age of wonder drugs — while simultaneously capitalizing on Cold War anxiety by marketing the anti-anxiety medication Valium as a cure-all for modern neuroses.
The youngest of the three brothers, Raymond, happened to be in the audience at the 1950 American Psychological Association meeting during what was probably the first public scientific presentations about LSD in North America. Here, as Dr. Max Rinkel described preliminary results from the ongoing LSD trials taking place at Boston Psychopathic, two worlds collided. In his book Empire of Pain, Patrick Radden Keefe documents how the Sacklers spent the early 1950s working together at a psychiatric hospital on Long Island called Creedmoor. In this period they had become become increasingly frustrated by the failure of existing treatments for schizophrenia, and above all by the violence and unpredictability of electro-shock therapy.
What if the body could be jolted into a similar state, they wondered, by the injection of hormones or histamines?1
In the Q&A after his APA talk, Max Rinkel attempted to link the Sacklers’ hormone research to his own LSD work. He noted that histamine was found in ergot, the raw material from which LSD was also derived. Perhaps the Sacklers and the team in Boston were studying two sides of the same coin.
A close colleague and research partner of the Sacklers, Dr. Co Tui, asked: “I mean, is it a form of drug intoxication? Is it a type of cocaine poisoning?”
“I think it is different from cocaine poisoning,” Rinkel replied. “No other chemical or drug is known to me that would bring about such definite mental changes, with only traces of a chemical given by mouth, as is the case with L.S.D.”
“What were the physical manifestations?” asked Raymond Sackler. “Were there any?”
There were few, Rinkel explained. It was powerfully effective on the mind, but, as Albert Hoffman had discovered, the physical symptoms were little more than dry mouth and clammy hands.2
A reporter for the magazine Collier’s claimed, in an article that appeared in the same month, that the Sacklers had found the physical causes of mental illness in “the relationship of the endocrine glands.” Another article from that year proclaimed the Sacklers’ theory to be “as revolutionary, and almost as complicated, as Einstein’s relativity.” Now the path was supposedly clear to cure mental illness via the use of experimental drugs. Rinkel’s presentation of the LSD research he was conducting with Hyde, Meadow and their colleagues seemed to be part of this breakthrough. Although the Sacklers never became central figures in psychedelic science, their publication record in the late 1950s and early 1960s shows that they did in fact ultimately purchase experimental samples of LSD and published several studies on the results.
The most prominent of these concluded, characteristically, "the present evidence of a stimulatory effect on the adrenals by the hallucinatory drug LSD-25 parallels and adds support to the Sackler et al hypothesis.” In other words, the Sacklers saw LSD and its strange effects as yet more proof for their theory that mental illness was caused by hormonal or histamine imbalances.
In the end, though, there was no mysterious hormone in the body responsible for psychosis, no magic bullet cure for schizophrenia or any other disorder.
There were, instead, partial treatments for highly specific symptoms. The Valium that the Sackler Brothers made millions selling in the following decade did not cure anxiety. Indeed, habitual Valium use can cause rebound anxiety, worsening the problem it was meant to treat.
But for a few tantalizing years, another future beckoned.
Now back to 2025. I have been thinking about this episode lately because the Sacklers are again in the news, having, last week, agreed to pay a staggering $7.4 billion dollars as part of the opioid settlement against Purdue Pharma.
The “Sackler interlude” in early LSD research is also on my mind because of what it can tell us about the risks of rapid publicity and financial upside in any intellectual field. It’s not that greedy, evil people will invade the industry and do greedy, evil things. It’s that in the history of science and technology, very talented people with truly beneficent motives find themselves course correcting toward other goals when presented with a rapid path to power or financial gain.
I really liked the way Ezra Klein described this dynamic in 2023 - here I’m quoting from a transcript of his podcast:
Putting aside the question of what recognized illnesses and maladies you can help people fix, we have these substances that cost functionally nothing in terms of how much it costs to grow psilocybin-containing mushrooms or synthesize L.S.D., and we can routinely induce experiences that people count as among the most meaningful of their entire lives.
And that’s a pretty remarkable thing to keep locked up. I find it kind of astonishing.
And it’s not that there aren’t risks. But you can go base jumping legally. You can legally be a base jumper. But you cannot legally take a tab of acid, and sit in your room, and listen to music, and have a sublime musical experience. It just actually strikes me as a very strange way. We let people take all kinds of risks in society.
Now, the thing that worries me a lot is the financial land rush here — the number of companies trying to patent it, the number of companies trying to distill these into even more potent and powerful and usable and maybe even appealing forms.
[…] The amount of money going into very potent edibles and much more potent strains, and packaging, and formats that are much friendlier to kids in any kind of user, it’s fine if you’re somebody who has a fair amount of self-control around these things. But people do get addicted. People say pot isn’t physiologically addicting, but people very much get addicted. And the most money is made on the people who buy the most of them.
There are certain breaks in psychedelics that make it a little less likely to go down the same route. But I worry about the amount of money being spent on trying to figure out ways to basically get around the fact that it’s actually really hard on the body and the mind and you develop tolerance to trip a lot. If you get into a situation down the road where the money is made by people who have an out-of-control relationship, that could be very psychologically damaging to people.
So I think there’s a lot of promise here, and I think there’s a lot of peril here.
This is the dynamic I was trying to explore in Tripping on Utopia, and its one playing out yet again in the field of psychedelic therapy in the 2020s.
But it’s also something readily observable in the world of AI research, which I’ve been an interested observer of ever since my wife Roya Pakzad first began working on issues of AI and human rights around 2016.
As a historian, I’m frequently struck by how well-meaning and sincere historical actors are, as manifested not just in their public actions but in private records like diaries or letter to loved ones. I’ve found that this is even true, indeed, perhaps especially true, of the figures who end up with controversial legacies.
What comes across clearly in the story of psychedelics in the 1950s (and, I think, in the ongoing saga of OpenAI and the other AI labs) is that when ambitious people with idealistic motives come into a new source of power, that idealism can rather quickly become something else.
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Weekly links
• “Ötzi, a 5,300-year old “Iceman” with the oldest known body art on a mummy, may have been inked primarily for therapeutic reasons, rather than just aesthetics. While it’s natural to wonder why the Chancay took such pains with their work, their motivations remain a mystery” (from “Mummies’ Ancient Tattoos Come Under Laser Focus,” New York Times)
• “Cardano was arrested by the Inquisition in 1570 after an accusation of heresy by the Inquisitor of Como, who targeted Cardano's De rerum varietate (1557). The inquisitors complained about Cardano's writings on astrology, especially his claim that self-harming religiously motivated actions of martyrs and heretics were caused by the stars... [Sir Thomas] Browne critically viewed Cardan as: ‘that famous Physician of Milan, a great Enquirer of Truth, but too greedy a Receiver of it.’” (from the Wikipedia page for Girolamo Cardano)
• “When one now looks at the darkness of the sun and the moon, one should think that … it is contrary to their nature, and proclaims to us a great wickedness performed on earth” (a 17th century commenter on climate change, from “Who to Blame for Early Modern Climate Change?,” History Today)
The Sacklers’ mentor at Creedmoor was an elderly Freudian psychiatrist, Johan H. W. van Ophuijsen, who claimed that Freud himself had once told him: “I am sure that within the near future all those disorders which we treat with psychoanalysis will be cured by endocrine treatment” (as quoted in Harry Henderson, "Salvage: New Hope for the Insane," Collier's, v125 #20, May 20, 1950.)
All quotes from the preceding four paragraphs are in Max Rinkel Papers, Box 2, Folder 66, Discussion, American Psychiatric Association Meeting (Detroit), May 1950, Countway Library, Harvard.