Al Hubbard

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Captain Alfred Matthew Hubbard (born July 24, 1901 in Kentucky , † August 31, 1982 in Casa Grande , Arizona ) was an early advocate of LSD as a stimulant for increasing creativity, problem-solving and changing social awareness. When the substance was still legal, he is said to have introduced LSD to up to 6,000 people from business, art, science and technology, including the writers Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard, and the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson . This earned him the nicknames " Johnny Appleseed of LSD" and "Captain Trips". As a devout Catholic and conservative, however, he rejected the Timothy Leary approach and the hedonistic lifestyle of the hippies .

Life

Alfred Matthew Hubbard was born in a poor hillbilly family in Kentucky; allegedly he made it through the third grade at most and did not receive his first pair of shoes until he was twelve. During Prohibition , he hired himself as a taxi driver and alcohol smuggler in Seattle, which earned him 18 months in prison.

According to unsecured information, he is said to have smuggled certain weapons into Canada via San Diego , USA, as an agent of the OSS war intelligence service .

He then moved to Vancouver , became a Canadian citizen and founded the charter boat company Marine Manufacturing , which made him a millionaire. Soon after, he became scientific director of the mining company Uranium Corporation of Vancouver. In this position he is said to have supplied the Manhattan project with the necessary uranium . At the age of 50, Al Hubbard was a millionaire, owned a fleet of planes, a thirty-meter yacht, a Rolls-Royce and Dayman Island, a private island off the coast of British Columbia .

In 1951, Captain Al Hubbard, always walking around in paramilitary uniform, with a hard-cut and .45 Colt revolver, first read about LSD in the Hibberd Journal . As a mystic and conservative Catholic who believed in the existence of angels, the substance immediately piqued his interest. At the age of almost 50, Hubbard got his first LSD experience from the British psychiatrist Ronald A. Sandison. In a vision he saw the origin of all life and his own generation: “I saw myself as a tiny something with a spark of intelligence in a large swamp. I saw my parents having intercourse. "

Al Hubbard recognized the potential of the substance and, thanks to his contacts and private fortune, acquired one gram of Sandoz -LSD (brand name "Delysid") in Switzerland and another gram of Spofa-LSD (brand name "Lysergamid") in Czechoslovakia. The total amount corresponds to around 20,000 applications (“trips”) of 100 micrograms each.

With this inventory, Al Hubbard wanted to change the consciousness of the elites and thereby gradually change society. Soon after his psychedelic "enlightenment", he contacted the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond , inventor of the term "psychedelic", and agreed to work together. First and foremost, the aim was to treat alcoholics who were resistant to treatment by means of a chemically induced Damascus experience.

Gradually, Hubbard made contact with other representatives of psychedelic research, including Abram Hoffer , Gordon Wasson , Oscar Janiger , Sidney Cohen and Betty Eisner , and shared his treatment experiences and his private LSD stores with them. In 1955 he introduced the writer Aldous Huxley to LSD and the "Hubbard Method". He also founded the Commission for the Study of Creative Imagination , on whose board he appointed Osmond, Huxley and the philosopher Gerald Heard .

Between 1951 and 1966, the year when LSD was first banned, Hubbard is believed to have introduced the psychedelic to an estimated 6,000 people.

meaning

Hubbard room

Long before Timothy Leary coined the concept of set and setting , Al Hubbard had already designed the so-called “Hubbard Room” or the “Hubbard Method” from his own experience. The “Hubbard Method” requires a treatment room that looks more like a cozy home than a sterile clinic room. Instead of white walls and dazzling neon lamps, there are pictures, carpets, candles, ethnological folk art and selected music. The feel-good atmosphere should steer the LSD experience in a positive direction.

Hollywood

Hubbard's network also included therapists from the Los Angeles area who a. dealt with the treatment of Hollywood stars and asterisks. The Los Angeles group around Sidney Cohen, Betty Eisner and Oscar Janiger advocated so-called psycholysis . In the psycholytic, ie “mind-loosening” model, low doses of LSD or psilocybin (25 to 150 μg) are administered in order to release repressions. The psychiatrist Oscar Janiger, who treated artists like Anaïs Nin , Jack Nicholson and James Coburn with LSD, said of Hubbard and his LSD deliveries: "We waited for him like a little old lady for the Sears-Roebuck catalog." ("We waited for him like the little old woman for the Sears roeback catalog .")

The case of Cary Grant , who was treated with LSD by Mortimer A. Hartman in the Psychiatric Institute of Beverly Hills and was the first Hollywood great to go public with it, is particularly well known .

Silicon Valley

Al Hubbard's relationships also reached into a commercial and innovative environment at Stanford University , known as Silicon Valley since 1971 . For example, Hubbard helped electrical engineer Myron Stolaroff, deputy head of strategic planning at Ampex , get his first LSD experience. Ampex was one of the first technology groups and a leader in the development of magnetic tapes for sound recording, image transmission and data storage. Stolaroff had come to Al Hubbard on the recommendation of Gerald Heard. Sixty-six micrograms left a euphoric impression on Stolaroff, who then tried to introduce some colleagues and friends at Ampex to the LSD.

Together with Al Hubbard, Stolaroff organized group meetings at which LSD was discussed and used as a means of developing human personality and creativity. In addition to some Ampex engineers (including Don Allen), Willis Harman, professor of electrical engineering at Stanford, took part in these meetings. In the following year, Harman offered the course “The Human Potential”, which he concluded with a seminar on psychedelics. Harvard graduate James Fadiman learned about the Stanford seminar and shared his own psychedelic experience on site. Fadiman came into contact with Myron Stolaroff through Harman.

Stolaroff had since resigned from Ampex and founded the International Foundation for Advanced Study (IFAS) together with Harman in Menlo Park . Fadiman and Don Allen worked for the foundation as guides ("trip companions"). Hubbard acted as a consultant and LSD supplier for IFAS. Among the clients included in the next six IFAS years, about three hundred and fifty people from science, research ( SRI International , Hewlett-Packard ) and teaching (Stanford, Berkeley ), including Bob bag (US Venture Partners, S Tanford U niversity N etwork ) the Whole Earth Catalog editor Stewart Brand and the two mouse inventors Doug Engelbart and William English .

Fonts

  • Al Hubbard et al .: The Use of LSD-25 in the Treatment of Alcoholism and Other Psychiatric Problems . In: Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol 22 (March 1961), pp. 34-45.

literature

  • Michael Pollan : Change your consciousness. What the new psychedelic research teaches us about addiction, depression, fear of death and transcendence , Verlag Antje Kunstmann , Munich 2019, pp. 180–200, ISBN 978-3-95614-288-8 .
  • Wayne Glausser: LSD - Kulturgeschichte von A to Z , Nachtschatten-Verlag, Solothurn 2018, pp. 128–129, ISBN 978-3-0378-8551-2 .
  • John Markoff : What the Dormouse Said. How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry , 2005, ISBN 0-670-03382-0 .
  • Jay Stevens: Storming Heaven. LSD and the American Dream , 1989.
  • Martin A. Lee; Bruce Shlain: Acid Dreams. The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties and Beyond , pp. 43-49, Grove Press: 1985/1992, ISBN 978-0-8021-3062-4 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Acid Dreams: Psychedelic Pioneers: The Original Captain Trips .
  2. ↑ Michael Pollan: Change Your Consciousness, p. 181.
  3. ↑ Todd Brendan Fahey: The Original Captain Trips in: High Times , November 1991.
  4. ↑ Todd Brendan Fahey: The Original Captain Trips in: High Times , November 1991.
  5. ↑ Michael Pollan: Change Your Consciousness, p. 184.
  6. ↑ Michael Pollan: Change Your Consciousness, p. 184.
  7. ^ "LSD and mescaline could help to solve the most important problems of our time". Retrieved March 2, 2019 .
  8. ↑ Michael Pollan: Change Your Consciousness, p. 180.
  9. ↑ Michael Pollan: Change Your Consciousness, p. 188.
  10. ↑ Triptikon: Cary Grant on May 16, 2018th
  11. ^ John Markoff: What the Dormouse Said. How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry , pp. 24-28.
  12. ↑ Michael Pollan: Change Your Consciousness, pp. 192–194.
  13. ↑ Michael Pollan: Change your consciousness, p. 194.
  14. ↑ Michael Pollan: Change Your Consciousness, pp. 195-200.
  15. ^ John Markoff: What the Dormouse Said , pp. 24-28.
personal data
SURNAME Hubbard, Al
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hubbard, Alfred Matthew (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American advocate for LSD
DATE OF BIRTH July 24, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH Kentucky
DATE OF DEATH August 31, 1982
Place of death Casa Grande , Arizona