The strange origin story of psychedelics in Saskatchewan

The Big Story

For this Sunday's look-back episode, we're revisiting an interview from January 2022 about a psychedelic renaissance taking place in an unlikely locale.

Have a lovely long weekend!

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In the 1950s, before they fuelled the acid-trips of the '60s, psychedelics were being passed around the Weyburn Mental Hospital in Saskatchewan. And not just among the patients—as well as being given to those struggling with mental illness, doctors and their spouses were using them on themselves—for "research purposes".

How did Saskatchewan become the world's psychedelic hub? What did we learn there that would inform the rise in use and then strict enforcement of these drugs in the decades to come? And how can it help us understand why these drugs are now making a return to therapy?

GUEST: Erika Dyck, historian of health, medicine, and Canadian society at the University of Saskatchewan and Canada Research Chair in the History of Medicine; author of Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD on the Canadian Prairies

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