The trip of a lifetime

Aldous Huxley reported his first psychedelic experience in The Doors of Perception (1954), a bewitching little volume that soon became the Newest Testament among the happening people. One spring morning in 1953 the 58-year-old Englishman ingested four-tenths of a gram of mescalin in his Hollywood garden and waited for the visionary moment. When he opened his eyes he saw pure California neon dust. ‘I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his own creation.’

Evelyn Waugh was not alone in thinking that Huxley had gone bonkers in his American exile. (‘Huxley has done more than change climate and diet.’) He had been introduced to psychedelic drugs by the English psychiatrist Dr Humphry Osmond, a pioneer in the use of mescalin in the treatment of alcoholics (Cary Grant, among others, was prescribed LSD for his drink addiction). As Rob Chapman relates in his huge, encyclopaedic history of LSD and its cultural ramifications, Psychedelia and Other Colours, it was Dr Osmond who, in 1957, coined the word ‘psychodelic’ (mind-opening).