August 29 in A.A. History

In 1886, T. Henry Williams [right] was born in South Woodstock, Connecticut. In the 1930s, he and his wife, Clarace, hosted meetings of the Oxford Group at their home [left] in Akron, Ohio. This location served as a meeting place for early members of Alcoholics Anonymous, who referred to themselves as the Alcoholic Squad of the Oxford Group. At the end of 1939, they began meeting separately as an independent A.A. group.

In 1956, Bill W. first took LSD in California under the guidance of Gerald Heard, a British-born American historian, science writer, public lecturer, educator, and philosopher. Heard had introduced Bill to Aldous Huxley, an English writer and philosopher, as well as to British psychiatrists Drs. Humphry Osmond^* and Abram Hoffer, who were working with schizophrenic and alcoholic patients in Canada. At that time, LSD was believed to have psychotherapeutic potential, with research being funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Academy of Sciences. Osmond and Hoffer aimed to induce an experience similar to delirium tremens (the DTs) in the hope of shocking alcoholics away from alcohol. Bill took LSD with Heard and Huxley. 
    Among those Bill later invited to experiment with LSD, and who accepted, were Nell Wing, Father Ed Dowling, Sam Shoemaker, Lois W. (a reluctant participant), Marty M., and Helen W. They participated in these experiments in New York under the medical supervision of a psychiatrist from Roosevelt Hospital. The experiments would also have significant repercussions within Alcoholics Anonymous, yet Bill continued his LSD experiments into 1959 and possibly into the 1960s.

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^*Osmond coined the term “psychedelic”—from the Greek ψυχή (psyche, meaning “mind”) and δῆλος (delos, meaning “manifest”)—in a letter to Huxley in April 1956.

Today in A.A. History—August 29–September 1

	In 1991, the 34th International Conference of Young People in Alcoholics Anonymous (ICYPAA) took place in at the Hilton San Francisco [right: c. 1971–73] in San Francisco, California [far left: registration form; near left: one bit of swag from the event].