[2][3][4] Hoffer was also involved in studies of LSD as an experimental therapy for alcoholism and the discovery that high-dose niacin can be used to treat high cholesterol and other dyslipidemias.

[10] Critical of psychiatry for its emphasis on psychosomatic psychoanalysis and for what he considered a lack of adequate definition and measurement, Hoffer felt that biochemistry and human physiology may be used instead.

[17] Their work began attracting notoriety within professional, provincial and federal and political circles, and they were courted by the emerging movement to restrict peyote as well as Native American groups that used the substance in religious ceremonies.

Canadian scientists reported a fifty percent success rate in one study, although Hoffer speculated that it was more likely the psychedelic experience of LSD, rather than simulated delirium tremens, that convinced the alcoholics to stop drinking.

[21] At the same time, another Canadian working in Saskatoon, pathologist Rudolf Altschul, was exploring the use of high doses of niacin to lower cholesterol in rabbits and patients with degenerative vascular disease.

At such high doses niacin acts like a drug rather than a vitamin and may have side effects of intense flushing of the face and torso and, rarely, liver toxicity.

Subsequent research suggested that Hoffer's adrenochrome theory had merit as people with schizophrenia have defects in the genes that produce glutathione S-transferase, which eliminates the byproducts of catecholamines from the brain.

[24][25] Multiple additional studies in the United States,[26] Canada,[27] and Australia[28] similarly failed to find benefits of megavitamin therapy to treat schizophrenia.

[23] Psychiatrist and critic of psychiatry Thomas Szasz, author of The Myth of Mental Illness (1961), believed Hoffer's view of schizophrenia as a physical disease treatable with vitamins and self-help therapy to be "pure quackery".