SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the lucy-in-the-sky-with-diamonds dept.
Beginning in the nineteen-fifties, psychedelics had been used to treat a wide variety of conditions, including alcoholism and end-of-life anxiety. The American Psychiatric Association held meetings centered on LSD. Some of the best minds in psychiatry had seriously studied these compounds in therapeutic models, with government funding.
Between 1953 and 1973, the federal government spent four million dollars to fund a hundred and sixteen studies of LSD, involving more than seventeen hundred subjects. Through the mid-nineteen-sixties, psilocybin and LSD were legal and remarkably easy to obtain. Sandoz, the Swiss chemical company, gave away large quantities of Delysid—LSD—to any researcher who requested it, in the hope that someone would discover a marketable application.
Now, forty years after the Nixon Administration effectively shut down most psychedelic research, the government is gingerly allowing a small number of scientists to resume working with these powerful and still somewhat mysterious molecules.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 11 2015, @04:48PM
Mid and late '60s rock is still a great document on the effects of LSD on humans, you can get a little bit of a trip just by listening to some of it. Similarly, bebop music from the decade starting around 1945 seemed to be about heroin. Unfortunately, the late '70s and '80s were mostly about coke.