Throughout the 1950s and 1960s psychedelic drugs were a mainstream feature of American academic and medical society, and were widely used to treat things like depression. Between 1950 and 1965, some 40,000 patients were prescribed LSD therapy for neurosis, schizophrenia, and psychopathy.
However, in the late 1960s the ‘Timothy Leary moment’ – in which Harvard accademic Timothy Leary founded a psychedelic religion based on LSD called the League for Spiritual Discovery and coined the phrase “tune in, turn on, drop out” – led to a backlash in which psychedelics were made illegal, even in medical use, and forced underground for decades.
But today psychedelics are having an extraordinary renaissance. A sea-change in attitudes is rapidly building momentum towards mainstream acceptance of the role of psychedelics in human development, as has been documented in bestselling books such as Michael Pollan’s 'How to change your mind' and Kotler and Wheal’s 'Stealing Fire'. An estimated one-in-ten (32 million) Americans use psychedelics on a regular basis, and they are as widely used as in the 1960s boom era.
