Oscar Janiger

Oscar Janiger (February 8, 1918 – August 14, 2001) was an experimental psychiatrist and a University of California Irvine psychiatrist and psychotherapist, best known for his LSD research, which lasted from 1954 to 1962.

Janiger was born on February 8, 1918, in New York City, New York. Beat poet and author Alan Ginsberg was a cousin.

He moved to Los Angeles in 1950, setting up a private practice and later teaching at the University of California at Irvine.

As a pioneer advocate of hallucinogens, Janiger introduced LSD to Cary Grant, Aldous Huxley, and other celebrities, taking the drug 13 times himself. He was interested in the relationship between creativity and mind-expanding drugs. He said,

It really took me out of a state in which I saw the boundaries of myself and the world around me very rigorously prescribed, to a state in which I saw that many, many things were possible...

He bought the then-legal drugs from a Swiss company, Sandoz Laboratories, abandoning his research when the U.S. Government began investigating researchers in 1962. The drugs were made illegal in 1966.

In 1986, he formed the Albert Hofmann Foundation for psychedelic research, named after the chemist who first synthesized LSD.

His work pre-dated Timothy Leary's but was not recognised widely because he did not publish his data. Janiger administered the drugs in his Los Angeles office.

He had 900 people take LSD (usually 2 micrograms per kilogram of bodyweight) and recorded their experiences. The participants included celebrities, actors, writers, college students, a Deputy Marshall, housewives, attorneys, clerical assistants, counselors, medical personnel, dentists, physicians, and engineers.

A sub-study within Janiger's research focused specifically on artists and creativity. One patient of Janiger's, bipolar and alcoholic artist Frank Murdoch, was given a controlled, experimental dose of LSD for several months as an attempt to cure his late stage alcoholism (probably a less well-known purpose to his LSD experiments, but very common in the era). Janiger had Murdoch paint still lifes both on and off LSD, including a Kachina doll (that he reportedly had 70 other patients also paint).

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