Brad Holden - Seattle Mystic Alfred M. Hubbard: Inventor, Bootlegger, & Psychedelic Pioneer

Published by The History Press

Charleston, SC

www.historypress.com

Copyright 2021 by Brad Holden

All rights reserved

First published 2021

E-Book edition 2021

ISBN 978.1.43967.312.6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021937187

Print Edition ISBN 978.1.46714.806.1

Notice: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. It is offered without guarantee on the part of the author or The History Press. The author and The History Press disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.

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CONTENTS

Seattle Mystic Alfred M. Hubbard tells the story of a young Seattle tech wizard who used radio technology to help Northwest bootleggers during Prohibition, then played a key role in introducing LSD to Silicon Valley. This biography of an incredible, eccentric life is truly a mindblower.

Knute Berger, editor, TV host and author of Pugetopolis: A Mossback Takes on Growth Addicts, Weather Wimps and the Myth of Seattle Nice

This is a captivating history of one of Americas most colorful charactersAl Hubbard. Holden dives into the larger-than-life history of a man whose past intersects with rumrunning, spy rings, police informants and psychedelics. Brilliantly told, Holden brings Hubbards enigmatic character to life.

Erika Dyck, PhD, professor at the University of Saskatchewan and author of Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD from Clinic to Campus

An engaging biography about the mysterious Al Hubbard, who helped pioneer psychedelic therapy and is credited by Stan Grof with developing the model of the high-dose inner-directed session to catalyze a mystical experience.

Rick Doblin, PhD, founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)

This is the remarkable story of Captain Al Hubbardinventor, con man, secret agent, uranium entrepreneur and indefatigable LSD apostlewho saw the light while high on psychedelics in the early 1950s and never looked back.

Martin A. Lee, author of Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond

When Brad Holden first stumbled on Captain Al Hubbard a few years ago, he found a crafty Seattle rumrunner whod achieved national celebrity during Prohibition. But Holden soon discovered that Hubbards second actas one of the key, hidden figures behind the psychedelic revolution of the 1960swould prove even more extraordinary. In this groundbreaking attempt to peel back the many layers of myth and mystery that surround Hubbards early life as a boy genius, bootlegger and spy, Holden lays out the epic life of a uniquely American character, a trickster who danced across the national stage for almost a half century. Holden, a dogged archaeologist of urban artifact and lore, performs an invaluable service by pulling together this compellingly readable introduction to The Captaina man whose late-in-life dream to change the world with psychedelics is still reverberating through the culture today.

Ken Dornstein, Emmy-winning producer of Long Strange Trip and author of The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky: A True Story

Through this wildly fascinating story of Al Hubbard, Holden details a huckster, dreamer and iconoclast who prototyped the next generation of eccentric Seattle tech entrepreneurs and lifestyle gurus. But Holden is getting at so much more here: a place, a time, a mentality that has gotten us to where we are today.

Thomas Kohnstamm, author of Lake City and Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?

FOREWORD

Seattle historian Brad Holden stumbled across the saga of Captain Al Hubbard while researching the story of Prohibition in the 1920s and 1930s in the Pacific Northwest. My encounter with the legendary captain came through my work as a historian of the psychedelic era of the 1950s and 1960s, when I was researching my trilogy of books, The Harvard Psychedelic Club, Distilled Spirits and Changing Our Minds.

In this fast-paced account, Holden masterfully brings together these two major chapters in the amazing life of this inventor, adventurer, con artist, LSD evangelist and agent of duplicity.

In both eras of Hubbards life, the Captain reveals himself as the ultimate double-dealer, working both sides in favor of his own self-interest. During Prohibition, he worked for both the rumrunners and the federal agents assigned to take them down. During the 60s, Hubbard was both a crusader for psychedelic spirituality and an agent of shadowy government forces in the War on Drugs, the longest and least successful war in U.S. history.

I first heard about Hubbard decades ago from Dick Hallgren, an old friend of mine and colleague at the San Francisco Chronicle, where we both spent many years working as newspaper reporters. Dick began his journalism career in the late 1950s in Vancouver, British Columbia, when Hubbard was developing a still-popular method of using LSD and other powerful mind-altering drugs as a means for psychological therapy and spiritual insight. The revelations that twenty-one-year-old Dick experienced during his sessions with Hubbard at Vancouvers Hollywood Hospital in 1959 sent this young newsman on a magical mystery tour that would place him in San Francisco for the dawn of the psychedelic 60s.

Dick worked at the Vancouver Daily Province with Ben Metcalfe, who wrote a series of articles about Hubbards work using psychedelic therapy to treat alcoholics. Metcalfes stories included his own account as a participant/journalist at the hospital, when he found himself at one with whole galaxies. Dick and Ben had their own nickname for Captain Hubbard: Doctor Always.

Later, when I was doing interviews for my books, Hubbards name kept coming up. Stan Grof, another early psychedelic researcher, met Hubbard when Grof was still working in Prague, behind the Iron Curtain. Hubbard was looking for a new supply of LSD and got some from a Czech company that was producing the still-legal drug. He showed me papers, Grof told me, from the American and Canadian government stating that he could transport any substances over the border, so Im sure the CIA was involved.

Another psychedelic pioneer, Jim Fadiman, crossed paths with Hubbard a few years later in what would later be known as Silicon Valley. Ive called Jim the Forrest Gump of the psychedelic 60s because he kept making cameo appearances at various stops along the long, strange trip. He lived with Richard Alpert, the man who would be Ram Dass, before Alpert got a teaching job at Harvard and became the legendary sidekick to Timothy Leary, the self-claimed high priest of the psychedelic movement. Jims wife, Dorothy Fadiman, dumped her old boyfriend, Ken Kesey, the founder of the acid-fueled Merry Pranksters, to hook up with Jim. Later in the 1960s, Fadiman was a research associate to Myron Stolaroff and Willis Harman, leaders of the early psychedelic and human potential movement on the peninsula south of San Francisco.