Lucille Kahn

Lucille Kahn (1902–1995) was a successful Broadway stage actress who became notable in the 1950s and 1960s for her advocacy and support for efforts to expand human consciousness.

Throughout the 1950s, she played an active role in bringing together proponents of Eastern philosophy, spiritual exploration, and metaphysical development, and her home on E 80th Street in New York became an informal salon for lectures and discussions that included Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, and Bill Wilson (cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous).

In 1958, with the encouragement of Wilson and Heard, and with funding from the Eileen Garrett's Parapsychological Foundation, she helped to organize a group of intellectuals to explore clinical and spiritual potential of LSD-25.

A small dose of the drug (75 to 100 micrograms), which was at that time still legally available for research purposes, would be administered to a single subject by an attending physician, Dr. Robert Laidlaw, then chief psychiatrist at Roosevelt Hospital.

Participants in these experiments included religion editor for Harper & Brothers Eugene Exman, Buddhist scholar and Bollingen Fellow Dr. Garma Chen Chi Chang, and early civil-rights activist and educator Rachel Davis DuBois.