Free Albion Dreaming by Andy Roberts Page A

that if that were the case the notoriously conservative medical establishment would try to distance itself from the drug even though it was still legal to use in a medical context. As legislation to outlaw the drug other than for medical use loomed large, a number of those working with LSD began to openly express their concerns in the medical press.
    Following Sandoz’ decision in 1966 to cease the supply of LSD, Powick Hospital’s Chief Medical Superintendent Arthur Spencer wrote a strongly worded letter to the
British Medical Journal
. Spencer railed against Sandoz, claiming that their action to terminate the supply of LSD without notice had left many patients midway through a course of treatment. A Dr. S.E. Browne wrote to the
BMJ
to point out that LSD therapy was the only form of psychotherapy available to those on a limited income. Browne wrote: “Some patients being treated with lysergic acid are, in fact, fighting for their lives; treatment has already been stopped of patients who were responding very well to lysergic acid after all possible forms of physical therapy had failed.”
    Browne’s final paragraph starkly highlighted what many have seen as the essential inequality of the laws against LSD, “What seems to me an extraordinary state of affairs is that any doctorcan (and some still do) prescribe amphetamines, the use of which is therapeutically unjustifiable because of the danger of addiction and psychosis, while a potentially life-saving drug is withdrawn.” These feelings were echoed by a trio of doctors who wrote to the
BMJ
from West Park Hospital in Surrey, who claimed: “It will be unfortunate if LSD becomes available only for ‘kicks’ and not for serious psychotherapeutic endeavour.” 30
    These pleas notwithstanding, the era of LSD psychotherapy in Britain was rapidly ending. After Ronnie Sandison left Powick, Spencer found a new source of the drug and continued working with it until the mid-1970s. A few other therapists continued work with LSD but the constant media vilification made its use as a psychotherapeutic tool increasingly unfashionable, if not professionally untenable. A CV that boasted years of LSD aided psychotherapy was unlikely to help anyone’s career in the climate engendered by the media’s vigorous defamation of psychedelic drugs. Psychiatric medicine was moving away from what it considered to be contentious, possibly unreliable therapies. The aggressive marketing of the large pharmaceutical companies was funnelling psychiatry towards a culture of prescribing other drugs for depression, anxiety and conditions for which LSD therapy had proved effective.
    Though high profile medical practitioners such as Ronnie Laing, who arguably had other agendas to pursue on the back of his personal and professional LSD use, continued to use and champion LSD, by the mid-Seventies therapy with LSD had ceased completely in Britain, its use quickly regarded as something of an archaic curio. It wouldn’t be until the first decade of the twenty-first century that the idea of LSD as a viable therapeutic tool would be taken seriously again.
    The heyday of LSD therapy in Britain had spanned fourteen years. During that time large sums of taxpayers’ money had been used to fund what amounted to a unique experiment. Throughout those halcyon years the LSD psychotherapists believed they were alone in their use of the consciousness altering drug. But Sandison and his colleagues had been unaware that another strand of work with LSD had been running parallel, but completely separate, totheirs. At the same time as the psychotherapists were using LSD to heal aberrant mental states; the British intelligence services and the Ministry of Defence were also using taxpayers’ money to fund LSD research. But rather than a tool for healing, they hoped LSD would provide them with a new weapon with which to destroy the will of combatants on and off the battlefield.

THE JOYOUS COSMOLOGY
     
He not busy being born,