Yes — Humphry Osmond, the superintendent of the mental hospital in Weyburn coined the word through his correspondence with Aldous Huxley. He had driven to Huxley’s home in Los Angeles and brought him mescaline, and they became good friends; they wrote letters frequently and visited when they could. The term psychedelic came from their attempt to find a word to capture the sensations that they felt when they had these experiences that they felt defied the existing language and vocabulary.

In 1956, Huxley wrote to Osmond saying, “To make this trivial world sublime / take half a gram of phanerothyme.” And Osmond wrote back saying: “To fathom Hell or soar angelic, just take a pinch of psychedelic.” Less than a year later, he published that in the New York Academy of Sciences, and it was entered into the English lexicon.

—Erika Dyck, The Microdose, 24 de Outubro 2022