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It’s a little-known fact that Aldous Huxley, famed author of the counterculture classic The Doors of Perception, was introduced to mescaline by a psychiatrist practising in Weyburn, Saskatchewan.

At the time, it was not unusual for psychiatrists to experiment with drugs. In fact, during the early 1950s, the relatively new chemical technologies, such as mescaline and LSD, were hailed by some as the new dawn of medicine, and Saskatchewan was its shining sun. The province’s social reforms centred on health care — mental health in particular — and, led by Tommy Douglas’s social democrat government, it drew progressive health care practitioners and psychiatrists from around the globe.

Psychedelic Psychiatry is a focused account of both the history of LSD on the Prairies and its role in the creation of a new kind of medical practice. The book offers an intriguing amalgam of the cultural, political, juridical, and medical impact of the early days of the drug’s research and use.

Author Erika Dyck is a professor and Canada Research Chair in History of Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan. Her accessible, slim volume chronicles the rise of psychiatric medicine and its increasing association with pharmacology through the story of the two Saskatchewan psychiatrists who, with a research agenda that ranged from the medical to the mystical, spent a good part of their careers fascinated by the possibilities of LSD.

The drug’s promise included its potential therapeutic usefulness in helping alcoholics beat their addiction (for which it was much prescribed — alcoholism having only recently been recast from its previous social role as moral scourge). Hopes also rested on the biochemical model it suggested for understanding serious mental health mysteries such as schizophrenia, and even on its role in more medically dubious endeavours like consciousness-raising.