Please join Don Lattin, the author of three books on the history of psychedelic drug therapy and its current revival, for an online talk and discussion about the role that LSD played in the spiritual search of Bill Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Bill W. experimented with that mind-expanding compound in the 1950s and early 1960s, both to treat his own depression and to see if it could help other alcoholics experience the “spiritual awakening” in the 12-step recovery program Wilson first popularized in the 1930s and 1940s.
The hour-long talk and discussion will begin at 5 pm (PST) on Saturday, May 30 via the Zoom platform.
It is sponsored by Psychedelics in Recovery (PIR), an emerging 12-step fellowship that offers a safe place for people to discuss the cautious use of psychoactive plants and chemicals in their own recovery from addictive behavior.
Lattin will offer a window into Wilson’s thinking via a series of private letters he wrote to his friends and mentors, including Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psychologist, and Gerald Heard, a mostly forgotten mystic/philosopher who guided Wilson on his first LSD trip in Los Angeles in the summer of 1956.
Don will draw on research and reporting he did for his book Distilled Spirits — Getting High, then Sober, with a Famous Writer, a Forgotten Philosopher, and a Hopeless Drunk (University of California Press, 2012). Lattin is also the author of The Harvard Psychedelic Club (HarperCollin 2010) and Changing Our Minds — Psychedelic Sacraments and the New Psychotherapy (Synergetic Press, 2017).
To register for Zoom details, please follow this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIldeqtrzsoHd1-rXl4D-pzRwFFfID174_x