LSD and Psychedelics

Lysergic acid diethylamide — LSD — was synthesised by the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann at Sandoz Laboratories in 1938. Its psychoactive effects were discovered five years later. Hofmann accidentally absorbed the compound on 16 April 1943. Three days later, on 19 April 1943, he deliberately dosed himself and rode home through Basel on his bicycle hallucinating — an event still celebrated as "Bicycle Day." For two decades Sandoz supplied LSD to psychiatric researchers as an experimental tool.

In the early 1960s it slipped the laboratory. Timothy Leary, a Harvard psychologist fired in 1963 for giving the drug to graduate students without oversight, became the public face of psychedelics. His 1966 slogan — "Turn on, tune in, drop out" — was, in one reading, an invitation to expand consciousness, and in another, a direct rejection of the American expectation that young people would take up jobs, marriages and mortgages in the order their parents had. The moral panic that followed was explicitly framed in terms of values, not only health. California banned LSD in October 1966. President Richard Nixon launched the War on Drugs in 1971, calling drug abuse "public enemy number one." LSD was placed on Schedule I of the 1970 Controlled Substances Act — the most restrictive category, reserved for substances with "no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse" — which ended legitimate LSD research in the United States for decades. The 1971 UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances extended the regime globally. Leary was treated as a major public enemy by the administration (the widely-repeated line that Nixon called him "the most dangerous man in America" has never been sourced to a contemporaneous record), and was imprisoned repeatedly; he escaped famously in 1970, only to be recaptured in Kabul in 1973.

What the panic got right was that LSD was genuinely destabilising to some users, and that unregulated distribution of a powerful psychoactive was unwise. What it got wrong was the assumption that the chemistry was the cause of the cultural revolt it accompanied. The young Americans rejecting the Vietnam War, racial segregation and their parents' patterns of life did not need LSD to do any of that. They did, however, need something to be prosecuted for, and LSD was conveniently at hand. Clinical research into psilocybin and MDMA has slowly returned in the 21st century.