LSD

One molecule, from a Basel laboratory bench in 1938 to an FDA advisory panel in 2024. LSD was a legal Sandoz pharmaceutical for twenty years, a CIA weapons programme, a religion, a counterculture, a felony, and is now a Phase II anxiety drug, frequently several of those at the same time. Built partly from our Psychedelics archive, extended with the chemistry, the CIA files, the clandestine labs and the clinical revival.

A chronological documentary of 190 moments spanning 1897–2026 on Loreline.

Curated by Olivier · last updated 2026-08-22

Eras

Hofmann & Ergot, Albert Hofmann synthesised LSD-25 at Sandoz in 1938 while looking for a circulatory stimulant, decided it was useless, and shelved it. Five years later he went back to it on a hunch he never fully explained, absorbed a trace through his fingertips, and on 19 April 1943 deliberately took what he assumed was a tiny dose and cycled home through Basel. It was several times a threshold dose. The chemistry, the ergot fungus it comes from, and the man who spent the next sixty-five years watching what he made get away from him.
When It Was Medicine, Sandoz sold LSD as Delysid from 1947, gave it away free to researchers, and suggested psychiatrists take it themselves to understand their patients. For twenty years it was an ordinary pharmaceutical: a thousand papers, forty thousand patients, trials on alcoholism at Weyburn that reported results mainstream psychiatry could not replicate. Humphry Osmond coined the word psychedelic in a rhyme exchanged with Aldous Huxley, who asked for a dose on his deathbed in 1963 and got it.
MKUltra, Before it was a counterculture it was a weapons programme. MK-Ultra ran from 1953 under Sidney Gottlieb, dosing prisoners, patients, soldiers and unwitting members of the public; Operation Midnight Climax ran safe houses where prostitutes dosed clients while agents watched through glass. Frank Olson, an army scientist, was dosed without his knowledge in November 1953 and went out of a New York hotel window nine days later. Most of the files were destroyed in 1973; what is known survives largely because the financial records were misfiled.
Turn On, Tune In, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert ran the Harvard Psilocybin Project until Harvard fired them both in 1963, the last time Harvard dismissed a faculty member for cause. What followed was not research but ministry: Millbrook, the League for Spiritual Discovery, a manual adapted from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and a three-word slogan that did more to guarantee prohibition than any single piece of evidence against the drug.
Acid Tests, Ken Kesey had been a paid volunteer in a government drug study before he wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the CIA, indirectly, introduced him to it. He bought a bus, filled it with Pranksters, and threw parties where the Grateful Dead were one element among many and nobody was in charge. Owsley Stanley made the supply and built the sound system. The whole thing ran about eighteen months and set the template for everything from festivals to rave.
Schedule I, California banned LSD on 6 October 1966; the protest was a party in the park. Federal prohibition followed in 1968, and the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 put it in Schedule I, no accepted medical use, high potential for abuse. The 1971 UN Convention exported that judgement worldwide. The point worth holding onto: scheduling did not merely criminalise possession, it made legitimate research administratively impossible, which is why the clinical literature simply stops for forty years.
Orange Sunshine, Prohibition did not end supply, it privatised it. The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, Laguna Beach surfers who considered distribution a religious duty, moved tens of millions of doses of Orange Sunshine, made by Nick Sand and Tim Scully. Blotter art appeared as packaging and became the only folk-art form invented to carry a drug. In 2000 the DEA arrested William Leonard Pickard in a converted Kansas missile silo and called it the largest LSD seizure in history.
It Got Into Everything, The Beatles rebuilt pop production in one session in April 1966 with lyrics lifted from Leary. Rick Griffin drew posters deliberately at the edge of legibility. Pink Floyd lost their founder to it. Tom Wolfe fixed the era's image for everyone who was not there, and Hunter S. Thompson used it as a reporting method. Twenty years later Britain did the whole thing again with acid house, and produced its own moral panic and its own legislation. This facet is the part that outlived the pharmacology.
Clinical Research, Research restarted in the 2010s with brain imaging: under psychedelics the default mode network, the system associated with a continuous sense of self, goes quiet, and regions that normally ignore each other start talking. LSD specifically is back in trials for anxiety. Alongside the science: microdosing, popularised well ahead of any evidence and mostly failing to beat placebo in controlled trials. And in 2024 the FDA rejected MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD, which is a useful reminder that the renaissance is not a straight line.

1897 - Ergot, drawn from life. Claviceps purpurea, the rye fungus, in Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen of 1897, forty-one years before Hofmann synthesised LSD-25 from its alkaloids. This is one of the few genuinely period images the origin story has: ergot poisoning burned through medieval Europe as St Anthony's Fire, causing convulsions and hallucinations, centuries before anyone isolated why.
1943 - LSD (the molecule) (1943). Lysergic acid diethylamide, the most potent psychedelic known, active in millionths of a gram.
1954 - Aldous Huxley (1954). Aldous Huxley, author of The Doors of Perception (1954).
1955 - Model psychosis. A 1955 research film using LSD to induce what psychiatry then called a 'model psychosis', the theory being that if you could produce schizophrenia chemically for an hour, you could study it. The theory did not hold, but it funded a decade of work.
1955 - Testing an antidote. A 1955 film testing Frenquel against LSD. The search for a blocker was partly clinical and partly military: an antidote implied the possibility of a weapon.
1955 - Osmond and Mayhew on television. Humphry Osmond gave a British MP mescaline on camera for the BBC in 1955. Osmond also coined the word 'psychedelic', mind-manifesting, in a rhyme exchanged with Aldous Huxley.
1955 - British Politician Christopher Mayhew in Humphry Osmond's Mescaline Experiment (1955). British Politician Christopher Mayhew in Humphry Osmond's Mescaline Experiment, Humphry Osmond, who coined the word "psychedelic".
1956 - The housewife on LSD. The most-circulated piece of footage from the clinical era: a 1950s hospital session, filmed straight, the subject describing the room as beautiful. Whatever else it is, it is a record of the drug being handled as ordinary medicine.
1958 - Effects on troops. American footage from 1958. Both militaries eventually concluded the drug was useless as a weapon: too unpredictable to aim.
1958 - Ergot: the parasitic fungus. A 1958 medical film on ergot, the rye fungus LSD is derived from. Ergot poisoning, St Anthony's Fire, burned through medieval Europe causing convulsions and hallucinations centuries before anyone isolated why.
1960 - R. Gordon Wasson - The Hallucinogenic Fungi of Mexico - Lecture
1960 - Humphry Osmond (1960). Humphry Osmond, who coined the word "psychedelic" (1960). This photograph dates from 1965.
1960 - MKUltra (1960). The CIA's covert Cold-War program that dosed unwitting subjects with LSD in search of mind control.
1961 - Aldous Huxley on Mescaline - Interview (1961). Aldous Huxley on Mescaline - Interview, The novelist whose 1954 mescaline memoir The Doors of Perception gave the West its language for the psychedelic experience.
1964 - British Marines on LSD. UK military footage of troops dosed on exercise, losing the ability to hold a formation and laughing at their own radio. The British tested it as an incapacitating agent.
1965 - Ken Kesey (1965). Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters (1965). The subject dates from 1965; this photograph was taken in 2009.
1966 - College LSD party. A 1966 news special on campus use. The tone of coverage flipped inside about eighteen months, from curiosity to alarm.
1966 - Test subjects, French television. French television filming an LSD experiment in 1966, while it was still legal almost everywhere.
1966 - A medical experiment, filmed. Swiss television footage of a supervised session, made in the country where the drug was invented, and where research would resume half a century later.
1966 - Dr. Timothy Leary, Harvard 1966: LSD - Methods of Control. "turn on, tune in, drop out", whom Nixon called "the most dangerous man in America".
1966 - The Dead at an Acid Test. Footage from 1966. The Grateful Dead were the house band for Ken Kesey's parties before they were a band with records.
1966 - LSD Love Pageant Rally, Haight-Ashbury - Oct 1966 TV News (archival). LSD Love Pageant Rally, Haight-Ashbury, Oct 1966 TV News (1966).
1966 - A documentary report on the controversy. Contemporary reporting from the year the argument was being had in public, before it was settled by statute.
1966 - Governor Ronald Reagan on LSD - 1966 (Historic Films archival). ) (1966).
1966 - Timothy Leary - Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out (1966). ).
1966 - Acid Test, Los Angeles. The Watts Acid Test era, when Kesey's Pranksters took the format south.
1966 - The Acid Test Graduation. October 1966: Kesey staged a 'graduation', the idea being to move beyond the drug, days after California's ban took effect.
1966 - Dr. Timothy Leary - Interview on LSD (1966). Dr. Timothy Leary - Interview on LSD, Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychologist turned psychedelic prophet.
1966 - Timothy Leary Speaks on Narcotics (AP Archive). ) (1966).
1966 - Timothy Leary vs. David Susskind - LSD Debate 1966 (archival). Timothy Leary vs. David Susskind, LSD Debate 1966 (1966).
1966 - Acid Test - Pigpen, Ken Babbs & Neal Cassady 1966 (archival). Acid Test, Pigpen, Ken Babbs & Neal Cassady 1966 (1966).
1966 - Dr. Timothy Leary - LSD Interview, Merv Griffin Show 1966 (archival). Dr. Timothy Leary, LSD Interview, Merv Griffin Show 1966 (1966).
1966 - Acid Test Graduation - San Francisco 1966 (archival). Acid Test Graduation, San Francisco 1966, The last of Kesey's Acid Tests, October 1966, days before California's LSD ban took effect.
1966 - Ken Kesey: 'The Acid Test' - 1966 (archival). Ken Kesey: 'The Acid Test', 1966 (1966).
1966 - Ken Kesey - Acid Test Graduation Interview 1966 (archival). Ken Kesey, Acid Test Graduation Interview 1966 (1966).
1966 - Acid Test Graduation - Film & Photos 1966 (archival). Acid Test Graduation, Film & Photos 1966 (1966).
1967 - LSD News Reports - 1966-1967 (archival). LSD News Reports, 1966-1967 (1966).
1967 - The Farthest Frontier - 1966: Mental Health and LSD (archival). The Farthest Frontier, 1966: Mental Health and LSD (1966).
1967 - Ken Kesey at the Acid Test Graduation - 1966 (archival). Ken Kesey at the Acid Test Graduation, 1966, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.
1967 - Neal Cassady Explains the Acid Test - 1966 (archival). Neal Cassady Explains the Acid Test, 1966 (1966).
1967 - Haight-Ashbury reports back. News from the Haight in 1967, by which point California had already banned LSD and the neighbourhood had become the story.
1967 - A psychedelic dream, 1967. British Pathé's contemporary footage of swinging London, filmed while it was happening rather than remembered.
1967 - Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr.: The World of LSD - 1967. (1967).
1967 - Human Be-In 1967 - Golden Gate Park, San Francisco (archival). Human Be-In 1967, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, The "Gathering of the Tribes" in Golden Gate Park, January 1967, where Leary first said "turn on, tune in, drop out".
1967 - Hippies Gather on Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco 1967 (archival). Hippies Gather on Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco 1967 (1967).
1967 - Lysergic Acid Diethylamide - 1960s LSD Drug Scare Film (Periscope). ) (1967).
1967 - Timothy Leary Speaking at UCLA - January 18 1967 (archival). Timothy Leary Speaking at UCLA, January 18 1967 (1967).
1967 - Human Be-In - Golden Gate Park, January 14 1967 (archival). Human Be-In, Golden Gate Park, January 14 1967 (1967).
1967 - The Haight-Ashbury - 1967 TV News Reports (archival). The Haight-Ashbury, 1967 TV News Reports (1967).
1967 - Summer of Love (1967). The summer of 1967, when a hundred thousand young people converged on San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury (1967).
1967 - 1967 Summer of Love Footage - Hippies of San Francisco (ITN archival). ) (1967).
1967 - LSD-25 - 1967 (educational anti-drug scare film). ) (1967).
1967 - Haight-Ashbury Hippies Parade - 1967 (Footage Farm archival). ) (1967).
1967 - 1967 Seattle Hippie Be-In (newsreel archival). ) (1967).
1967 - Summer of Love 1967 - KTVU Fox 2 (archival). Summer of Love 1967, KTVU Fox 2 (1967).
1967 - The Human Be-In (1967). The "Gathering of the Tribes" in Golden Gate Park, January 1967, the counterculture's coming-out (1967).
1967 - Human Be-In - Polo Field, Golden Gate Park, Jan 14 1967 (archival). Human Be-In, Polo Field, Golden Gate Park, Jan 14 1967 (1967).
1967 - Haight-Ashbury 1967 (1967). The San Francisco district that became the capital of the hippie movement.
1967 - San Francisco's 1967 Summer of Love - CBC Documentary. (1967).
1967 - San Francisco During the Summer of Love - 1967 (archival). San Francisco During the Summer of Love, 1967 (1967).
1967 - Effects of LSD on the Mind - 1960s (Huntley Film Archives). ) (1967).
1967 - Human Be-In - Full Program, Golden Gate Park, Jan 14 1967 (archival). Human Be-In, Full Program, Golden Gate Park, Jan 14 1967 (1967).
1967 - 1967 Human Be-In - Rare San Francisco Film (archival). 1967 Human Be-In, Rare San Francisco Film (1967).
1967 - Report on Hippie Culture in Haight-Ashbury - Nov 1967 (AP Archive). ) (1967).
1967 - Beyond LSD - 1967 (psychedelic scare film). ) (1967).
1967 - The Human Be-In - Short Film 1967 (archival). The Human Be-In, Short Film 1967 (1967).
1968 - LSD: Lettvin vs. Leary - 1968 debate (archival). LSD: Lettvin vs. Leary, 1968 debate (1968).
1968 - Grateful Dead - Free Concert on Haight Street, SF, March 3 1968. (1968).
1968 - Love-In - 1968 (British Pathé). No title. Love-in Austrian Style, Vienna, Austria. C/U woman's head covered with paper flowers at a "Love-In" dance / disco. C/U hippy man wearing square specs and daisies on his head. C/U man wearing fake moustache and cowboy hat. C/U two men one with feathers in his head. C/U of big flower on girl's chest pan up to two girls smiling. C/U girls' legs, pan to heads covered with streamers. Various shots hippies bobbing on the dance floor. C/U man dancing, he has "LSD" written on his sailor hat. C/U girl's back,…
1968 - Late 1960s Haight-Ashbury Hippie Community, San Francisco (Kinolibrary). ) (1968).
1968 - LSD: Worth the Risk? - 1968 anti-drug filmstrip (archival). LSD: Worth the Risk? 1968 anti-drug filmstrip (1968).
1968 - 1968: The LSD Panic and the War on Acid (archival report). ) (1968).
1969 - John Bleibtreu and Humphry Osmond Interview. "psychedelic" in 1957 and gave Aldous Huxley his first mescaline.
1969 - The Grateful Dead (1969). The house band of the Acid Tests, whose live improvisation became the sound of the psychedelic scene. The subject dates from 1969; this photograph was taken in 2016.
1969 - Grof at Esalen. Stanislav Grof in 1969, having by then run more LSD sessions than almost anyone alive. He kept working after prohibition by replacing the drug with breathing.
1970 - Garcia on Wolfe. Jerry Garcia on The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe's 1968 account of Kesey's bus, the book that fixed the era's image for everyone who wasn't there.
1970 - Timothy Leary (1970). Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychologist turned psychedelic prophet (1970).
1970 - LSD and the Hallucinogens - 1970 (anti-psychedelic scare film). ) (1970).
1971 - Ram Dass (1971). Ram Dass (Richard Alpert), the Harvard-professor-turned-guru (1971). The subject dates from 1971; this photograph was taken in 2024.
1971 - Public enemy number one. Nixon declares drug abuse public enemy number one in June 1971. The Controlled Substances Act had already put LSD in Schedule I, no accepted medical use, high potential for abuse, which is the classification that ended human research for a generation.
1971 - Focus on LSD. A 1971 educational film made as the research era was closing, the tone already shifting from clinical curiosity to warning.
1973 - Becoming Ram Dass - Full Lecture. (Richard Alpert), the Harvard-professor-turned-guru.
1975 - LSD blotter art (1975). The illustrated paper tabs that carried doses of acid, and became an underground art form (1975). This photograph dates from 1982.
1975 - The Army explains itself. A press conference on the US Army's own LSD programme, separate from the CIA's, and larger in the number of soldiers involved.
1975 - Colby before the Senate. CIA Director William Colby testifying in 1975 as the Church Committee opened up the agency's domestic programmes.
1979 - Mission Mind Control. A 1979 network documentary broadcast two years after the Senate hearings, when the scale of what the CIA had done was still landing on the public.
1983 - An Evening with Albert Hofmann (1983), interviewed by Will Nofke
1984 - The Controlled Substances Act. The 1970 law that built the scheduling system. Placing LSD in Schedule I did not just criminalise possession; it made the paperwork for legitimate study close to impossible, which is why the clinical record simply stops.
1988 - Garcia on the Acid Tests. Jerry Garcia describing what the Acid Tests actually were: not concerts, but rooms where the band was one element among many and nobody was in charge.
1988 - 1980s News Report on the Acid House Scene in England (archival). 1980s News Report on the Acid House Scene in England (1988).
1988 - Late 1980s UK Rave - Second Summer of Love (Kinolibrary archival). ) (1988).
1988 - BBC News on Acid House - 1988 (archival). BBC News on Acid House, 1988 (1988).
1988 - A Trip Around Acid House - World in Action, 1988 (Granada documentary). ) (1988).
1989 - Ram Dass - The Practice of Being Here Now
1989 - 1989 UK Outdoor Rave, Acid House - Summer of Love (Kinolibrary). ) (1989).
1989 - 1989 Summer of Love Daytime Rave - Acid House (Kinolibrary). ) (1989).
1990 - BBC News South East: Acid House Rave Party Report - 1990 (archival). BBC News South East: Acid House Rave Party Report, 1990 (1990).
1992 - The rave/ecstasy era (1992). The late-1980s Second Summer of Love, when MDMA and acid house filled warehouses across Britain (1992). The subject dates from 1992; this photograph was taken in 2008.
1993 - Hofmann interviewed, fifty years on. Albert Hofmann in 1993, half a century after the accident. He synthesised LSD-25 at Sandoz in 1938 looking for a circulatory stimulant, shelved it as useless, and came back to it five years later on a hunch he never fully explained.
1993 - Dr. Humphry Osmond - 50 Years of LSD. "psychedelic".
2000 - Getting high: the whole arc. A long-form history of the drug from laboratory to street.
2001 - The Chemical Generation - Acid House Documentary. (1988).
2001 - I Love 1988: Acid House Music and Raving (BBC). ) (1988).
2002 - Hofmann's Potion - Albert Hofmann LSD Documentary
2006 - A hundredth birthday in Basel. Hofmann's centenary symposium, attended by researchers who had spent decades unable to legally study the compound he made.
2006 - Albert Hofmann's 100 Years - Closing Speech in Basel
2006 - Albert Hofmann 100th Birthday, Basel. 1938 and, on 19 April 1943, took the first deliberate dose and rode his bicycle home into history.
2007-09-06 - Remembering San Francisco's Summer of Love. 1967, when a hundred thousand young people converged on San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury.
2009 - Bear. Owsley Stanley, the Dead's soundman, who made the LSD that supplied the entire San Francisco scene and built the sound system it was heard on. His product was famously and unusually pure.
2009 - Inside a lab. What clandestine LSD production actually looks like, a chemistry that requires real skill and almost no space.
2011 - Magic Trip - Ken Kesey & the Merry Pranksters (full documentary). ) (1964).
2011-10-24 - Magic Trip - Ken Kesey's Merry Band of Pranksters (trailer). ), The restored footage of the Merry Pranksters' 1964 cross-country bus trip.
2011-12-16 - Aoxomoxoa. Griffin's Grateful Dead artwork, and a title that reads the same in both directions.
2013-04-28 - Rick Griffin and the poster era. The Fillmore and Avalon posters, lettering deliberately pushed to the edge of legibility, on the reasonable assumption the reader had taken something.
2013 - What the imaging shows. The finding that made the field: under psychedelics the brain's default mode network, the system associated with the sense of a continuous self, goes quiet and normally separate regions start talking to each other.
2013 - Alex Grey. The painter whose anatomical, luminous figures became the visual shorthand for the experience, reproduced on more festival banners than gallery walls.
2013 - Sacred Mirrors. Grey's series, and the chapel he built to house it.
2014 - A pictorial history of blotter. Blotter art is the only folk-art form invented purely as drug packaging: perforated sheets printed with images so a dose became a collectable.
2014 - The band on what happened to him. Pink Floyd on Barrett, and on the discomfort of having built a career partly on his absence.
2014-07-20 - The Summer of Love (British Pathé). ) (1967).
2015 - Carhart-Harris. Robin Carhart-Harris at Imperial College, who ran the first modern brain-imaging studies of LSD, the first time anyone had looked directly at what the drug does to a living brain.
2015 - What Does LSD Do to Your Brain? | BBC Earth. What Does LSD Do to Your Brain? (2015).
2016 - Psychedelics: Lifting the Veil | Robin Carhart-Harris | TEDxWarwick. Psychedelics: Lifting the Veil, neuroscientist Robin Carhart-Harris.
2016 - Orange Sunshine. The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, Laguna Beach surfers who became the largest LSD distribution network in the world, believing they were performing a religious duty.
2016 - When Laguna Beach was the LSD capital. How a small California beach town became the centre of a global supply chain, and what the federal response did to it.
2016 - The blotter museum the DEA has not raided. Mark McCloud's San Francisco collection of thousands of sheets of blotter art, legally fraught, since much of it is or was active.
2016 - What Happens to Your Brain on LSD? | SciShow. What Happens to Your Brain on LSD? (2016).
2016 - LSD's Long, Strange Trip - Retro Report (The New York Times). ) (2016).
2017-03-12 - The Second Summer of Love. Twenty years after the first: acid house, warehouse parties, and a British moral panic that produced its own legislation. The chemistry had changed but the shape of the reaction had not.
2017-06-15 - Summer of Love - American Experience (PBS promo). ) (1967).
2017 - Nick Sand. Sand in his own words. He was the first person to synthesise DMT in quantity and spent decades underground and in prison.
2017 - Tim Scully. Scully, who built the equipment as much as the chemistry, and who was later given clemency.
2017 - Stanislav Grof: Psychedelics and the Future of Humanity | MAPS. Stanislav Grof: Psychedelics and the Future of Humanity (2017).
2017 - The story of psychedelic rock. How a chemical experience got translated into recording technique, backwards tape, modal drone, saturation, and the studio as a room to get lost in.
2017-06-22 - Looking Back at the Summer of Love - KPIX/CBS Bay Area (archival). Looking Back at the Summer of Love, KPIX/CBS Bay Area (1967).
2017-07-18 - Summer of Love - American Experience, Chapter 1 (PBS). ) (1967).
2017-07-25 - The Sunshine Makers. Nick Sand and Tim Scully, the chemists behind Orange Sunshine, who between them made tens of millions of doses and went to prison for it.
2018 - Breakthrough designation. The FDA granting breakthrough therapy status to psychedelic-assisted treatment, the moment the renaissance stopped being a fringe argument.
2018 - The chemistry, actually explained. A retrosynthesis of lysergic acid. The molecule is difficult enough to make that for decades the world's supply came from a handful of people who could do it.
2018 - The problem child at seventy-five. Hofmann called his 1979 memoir 'LSD: My Problem Child', a chemist watching the thing he made escape into a world he did not choose for it. He died in 2008, aged 102.
2019-02-01 - Hunter S. Thompson on acid. Thompson, who used the drug as a reporting method and wrote the definitive account of the moment the wave broke and rolled back.
2019-06-01 - Dr Robin Carhart-Harris - Psychedelics and Brain Imaging
2019 - Rick Doblin. Doblin founded MAPS in 1986 with the explicit long-term aim of making psychedelic therapy legal medicine, and spent thirty-five years on the regulatory path.
2019 - The evidence, checked. The awkward finding that controlled microdosing trials mostly fail to beat placebo, and that the placebo effect here is itself substantial and interesting.
2019 - Prof. David Nutt - Psychedelics and the Neuroscientific Enlightenment
2019-10-15 - LSD Gets Another Look - Retro Report (PBS). ) (2016).
2020 - Structures that stopped talking in infancy. On the connectivity changes, and the argument that the experience is less an addition than a temporary removal of filtering.
2020 - Oregon. 2020, the first American state to do either.
2020 - 2-Minute Neuroscience: LSD. (2020).
2020 - The silo, according to Pickard. His own account of the bust, and of what the DEA's numbers did and did not mean.
2020 - What the first researchers actually found. Historian Erika Dyck on the Canadian trials, a body of work that was neither the miracle its advocates claimed nor the fraud prohibition implied, and which was abandoned before the argument could be settled.
2020-07-04 - Captain Trips. Al Hubbard, a former OSS operative and uranium millionaire, personally dosed thousands of people through the 1950s including clergy, executives and politicians, the least likely evangelist the drug ever had.
2021-04-01 - Aldous Huxley's Psychedelic Experience
2021 - David Nutt. Nutt, who was sacked as the UK government's chief drugs adviser for saying in public that the harm rankings were not evidence-based, and who went on to run psychedelic research anyway.
2021 - Microdosing. Sub-perceptual doses taken on a schedule, popularised well ahead of any evidence, largely through Silicon Valley.
2021 - How it is actually made. The production chain from ergot alkaloid to finished doses, the step that turned a laboratory curiosity into something that could reach millions of people.
2022-04-01 - MK-Ultra: The Cold War Experiments Hidden by the CIA (BBC Reel). ) (2019).
2022-04-13 - The Doors of Perception. Huxley's account of a mescaline afternoon, published 1954, which gave the era its vocabulary and a band its name. He asked for LSD on his deathbed in 1963 and his wife administered it.
2022-04-19 - Bicycle Day, reconstructed. On 19 April 1943 Hofmann deliberately took 250 micrograms, a dose he assumed was cautious and which is in fact several times a threshold dose, and cycled home through Basel with his assistant. NO FOOTAGE OR PHOTOGRAPH OF THAT DAY EXISTS: it happened in a laboratory and on a road, in wartime Switzerland, with no camera present. The only primary record is Hofmann's own written report. This is a modern reconstruction, included because the event has no images of its own.
2022-05-24 - Leary, Alpert & The Harvard Psilocybin Project
2022 - How psychedelics change the brain. A public-science treatment of where the neuroscience actually is, as opposed to where enthusiasts claim it is.
2022 - Poisoner in Chief. Stephen Kinzer on Gottlieb and the programme, and on how thoroughly the record was destroyed before anyone thought to ask for it.
2022 - Two hundred and fifty million doses. The scale the underground reached, a production run larger than most pharmaceutical products, run out of houses.
2022 - Syd Barrett. Roger Waters on Pink Floyd's founder, who took a great deal of acid, stopped being able to function, and was quietly removed from the band he named. The counterculture's clearest casualty.
2022-10-27 - Tomorrow Never Knows. The Beatles, April 1966: tape loops, a Leslie-cabinet vocal, and lyrics lifted almost directly from Leary's adaptation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Pop music's production techniques changed permanently in one session.
2023-04-17 - The Flying Eyeball. Griffin's 1968 Hendrix poster, the most reproduced single image of the psychedelic poster era.
2023 - LSD as an anxiety drug. MindMed's clinical programme, LSD specifically, rather than psilocybin, returned to trials as a treatment for generalised anxiety.
2023 - The FDA writes the rules. The agency's first draft guidance on running psychedelic clinical trials, which is what a field looks like when it is being normalised.
2023 - Where the science stands. A long conversation with Carhart-Harris on mechanism, therapy and the gap between the two.
2023 - Amanda Feilding - LSD Revealed | Beckley Foundation. Amanda Feilding - LSD Revealed (2023).
2023-08-16 - Summer of Love: The Psychedelic Revolution of 1967 (documentary). Summer of Love: The Psychedelic Revolution of 1967 (1967).
2024-01-13 - The Human Be-In, San Francisco - 14 January 1967 (HistoryPod). ) (1967).
2024-04-19 - The Summer of Love. 1967: a hundred thousand people arriving in a neighbourhood of a few thousand, most of the arrivals broke, and a media apparatus covering it as a spectacle.
2024-06-08 - The Complete Summer of Love Story - Both Sides (documentary). The Complete Summer of Love Story, Both Sides (1967).
2024 - Tracking the supply. The modern chain, which is smaller, more distributed and much harder to police than the Brotherhood ever was.
2024 - Does it actually work?. A careful public accounting of what the microdosing studies do and do not show.
2024 - Psychedelics and Empathy | Rob Malenka | Wu Tsai Neurosciences. Why are psychiatrists taking a fresh look at MDMA? Recently, there's been growing excitement in the scientific community about revisiting the potential medical benefits of psychedelic drugs that have been off limits for decades. Scientists are discovering or rediscovering applications of psilocybin, LSD, MDMA, and other compounds for treating people with depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
2024 - The FDA says no. In 2024 an FDA advisory panel rejected MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD over trial-design and conduct concerns, and the agency followed. A reminder that the renaissance is not a straight line.
2024 - What the rejection meant. Coverage of the decision and its effect on a field that had been assuming approval was imminent.
2024 - Erika Dyck: Psychedelic Prophets - The Letters of Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond. (2024).
2025-05-13 - The convention that made it global. The 1971 UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances exported the American schedule to most of the world, closing research in countries that had no domestic reason to close it.
2025 - Pickard. William Leonard Pickard, whose 2000 arrest in a converted Kansas missile silo was described by the DEA as the largest LSD seizure in history. He served twenty years.
2025 - How that record was actually built. The studio mechanics behind it, the point at which the studio itself became an instrument.
2025-12-22 - How Owsley 'Bear' Stanley's LSD Shaped the Grateful Dead's Sound. 's purest LSD, and engineered the Grateful Dead's sound.
2026-02-10 - The Trips Festival 1966 - Birth of the Counterculture (documentary). The Trips Festival 1966, Birth of the Counterculture (1966).
2026-03-24 - The LSD Labs That Changed Music - Owsley Stanley & the Grateful Dead
2026 - Still being asked about. MK-Ultra back before lawmakers in 2026, one of the few Cold War programmes that has never stopped generating hearings.
2026-06-30 - Full MKUltra Hearing: CIA's MKUltra Program Probed by Lawmakers. (2025).
2026-06-30 - Tom O'Neill on the CIA's MKUltra Mind-Control Program (C-SPAN). ) (2019).
2026-06-30 - House Oversight Panel Probes the CIA's MKUltra Program (PBS NewsHour). ) (2025).

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