comments:
The best source (unless you can go read the physical letters) is Don Lattin’s Distilled Spirits: Getting High, Then Sober, with a Famous Writer, a Forgotten Philosopher, and a Hopeless Drunk (University of California Press, 2012). It chronicles Bill W’s friendship with Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard. (Heard was a popular, prolific writer on philosophy and religion in the early 20th century who is virtually unknown today.) In addition to detailing Bill’s experiments with LSD and his belief that it could help suffering alcoholics who never “got” the spiritual experience (e.g., Bill said he re-experienced the “white light” of his last medical treatment for delirium tremens under the belladonna treatment), it also details his interest in Vedanta and alternative approaches to spirituality. I should also note that belladonna has been known to have hallucinogenic properties since the Roman republic.