Erika Dyck, Ph.D.
Historian; Canada Research Chair in the History of Medicine; University of Saskatchewan
The leading historian of psychedelic medicine, whose research recovered the suppressed history of LSD therapy in Saskatchewan in the 1950s and 60s — the world's first large-scale psychedelic therapy program.
Biography
Erika Dyck is a medical historian and Canada Research Chair in the History of Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan. Her scholarship has focused on recovering and contextualizing the history of psychedelic medicine with archival rigor, making her the most authoritative academic voice on the early history of LSD and psilocybin therapy before prohibition.
Dyck's foundational research uncovered the remarkable history of psychedelic therapy conducted in Saskatchewan in the 1950s and 1960s under psychiatrists Humphry Osmond and Abram Hoffer — arguably the world's first large-scale therapeutic LSD program, which treated thousands of patients with alcoholism and produced some of the best pre-prohibition treatment outcomes in the historical record. Her 2008 book Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD from Clinic to Campus is the definitive historical account of this period.
Osmond and Hoffer's Saskatchewan program was contemporaneous with but largely independent of the California and East Coast research that most popular histories focus on. Their results — including Bill W. of Alcoholics Anonymous' consultations with Osmond about LSD's potential — are documented in Dyck's archival research with a precision that activist-oriented popular histories of psychedelics rarely achieve.
Dyck has continued expanding her historical research to examine how drug policy, stigma, and cultural context have shaped the suppression and revival of psychedelic research, and she regularly advises contemporary psilocybin researchers on historical context. Her work provides the current research renaissance with the historical grounding to understand what was learned and what was lost during the prohibition era.
Organizations
Why They Matter to the LearnShrooms Community
The Saskatchewan LSD program Dyck recovered from the archives contained evidence of therapeutic effectiveness — including for alcoholism — that was simply ignored rather than disproven when prohibition came. Recovering this evidence strengthens the scientific case for contemporary research and demonstrates that the idea of psychedelic-assisted therapy has a much longer validated history than most practitioners know.
Legal Context
For the legal landscape where Erika Dyck, Ph.D. operates, see psilocybin laws in International.