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posted by janrinok on Wednesday February 11 2015, @04:38PM   Printer-friendly
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.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by CRCulver on Thursday February 12 2015, @02:20PM

    by CRCulver (4390) on Thursday February 12 2015, @02:20PM (#144111) Homepage
    While that scheduling may date from the Nixon era, possession of LSD was outlawed in 1968 [erowid.org] during the Johnson administration, some months before Nixon's inauguration.
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