Psychedelics

The documented history, science, culture and law of mind-altering substances, from ancient rites to Cold War laboratories, with the legends checked against the record.

• October 27, 1970: The Law That Put Psychedelics in Schedule I Nixon's signing remarks covered heroin and pep pills. The law he signed put LSD, peyote and psilocybin in the strictest drug category there is.
• Timothy Leary: From Harvard Lecturer to "Most Dangerous Man in America" He went from Harvard lecturer to LSD evangelist, Supreme Court winner, prison escapee and informant. Nixon's famous label tells only part of the story.
• María Sabina and the Mushroom Ceremony That Changed the West In 1955 a Mazatec healer let a New York banker join her mushroom rite. He became famous. Her house was burned.
• MKUltra: The CIA's Secret Psychedelic Experiments For twenty years the CIA tested LSD on Americans, some of them unwitting. Then it destroyed the files. Here is what survived.
• Did the Ancient Greeks Drink a Psychedelic at Eleusis? A sacred barley drink, a grain fungus and a secret kept for a thousand years: the ergot theory of the Mysteries, weighed fairly.
• Bicycle Day: Albert Hofmann and the Accidental Discovery of LSD In 1938 a Swiss chemist made a compound nobody wanted. Five years later he looked again, and rode home on a bicycle in terror.