The Swiss chemist Albert Hoffmann accidentally discovered the hallucinogenic properties of LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) in 1943, while conducting laboratory tests on medicinal uses of ergot. A decade later, LSD was being hailed as promising therapeutic agent for the treatment of alcoholism, schizophrenia, and autism. The Washington Post aptly referred to LSD as an “Alice-in-Wonderland drug” that could help patients retrieve repressed memories under medical supervision.

The idea of LSD — a nonaddictive drug whose temporary effects include dissociation, the collapse of ego boundaries, and emotional lability — captivated the mass media. Vivid metaphors such as “insanity chemical,” “madness gas,” “shock drug,” and “artificial insanity” appeared regularly in newspaper and magazine articles in the mid-twentieth century. LSD as a phenomenon reflected the twin dynamics of technological optimism and moral panic that threaded through the early Cold War era in the United States.

Inner and Outer Space

Indeed, just as the space race was heating up, the notion that LSD could unlock “inner space” took hold among clinicians and journalists. References to inner and outer space originated with novelist and philosopher Aldous Huxley who, following his experiments with LSD and mescaline in the 1950s, wrote “the inner world is almost as large as outer space. One has a sense of transcending the subject-object relationship and becoming one with the nature of things.” Theoretically, anyone could now become an astronaut of inner space.

In a society whose main therapeutic choices were either Freudian psychoanalysis or electro-shock treatments, the notion of finding the key to mental health in a tablet heralded a humane and efficient alternative. One writer in The Washington Post, in 1957, went so far as to proclaim that “if chemicals are responsible [for insanity], our psychiatrists may throw away their couches and start sterilizing their needles. There will be no more shock therapy and our mental hospitals will be turned over to other uses.”

Unlike previous therapies for mental illness, LSD promised to dissolve the boundary between the ill and the healthy (under experimental conditions), allowing researchers to better understand how the mentally unwell thought and felt. This empathetic orientation to the patient dovetailed with an emerging discourse of anti-psychiatry that located the problem of mental health in family and political systems rather than in the individual. For its part, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) sponsored some of the important LSD research in the quest for a truth serum or as a form of chemical/mental warfare, and the Army Corps of Engineers started LSD tests in 1955.

The Backlash Begins

Mainstream medical interest in LSD peaked in 1959 and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) launched its first investigations of LSD shortly thereafter. Harvard University’s decision to dismiss Professors Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert in 1963 for conducting unauthorized LSD experiments with undergraduate students portended a more ambivalent media and political interest in LSD. Senator Robert Kennedy, chairing the 1966 Senate investigations of LSD use, stated in his opening remarks, “suddenly, almost overnight, irresponsible and unsupervised use of LSD for non-scientific, nonmedical purposes has risen markedly [and] what was an experimental drug has become now a social problem.”

California became the first state to criminalize LSD on October 6, 1966. In 1970, the Controlled Substances Act classified LSD as a Schedule I drug in the United States. The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) ascribes this label to drugs considered to have a high potential for abuse, no legitimate medical use, and no established safeguards for use under medical supervision. Czechoslovakia was the last country legally to manufacture LSD, finally ceasing production in 1975.

Psychedelic Frontiers

Today, the United States pharmaceutical industry is worth approximately half a trillion dollars annually. As the Boomers age, and younger generations look for new approaches to health and wellness, therapeutic interest in LSD — as well as ketamine and psilocybin — is flourishing once again. The FDA released draft guidance on new clinical trials in June 2023, following a bipartisan Congressional directive.

Whether or not LSD can overcome its tricky past and its popular association with the perceived excesses of the late 1960s remains to be seen. What we do know is that LSD’s history is, to quote a Beatle, at the end of the beginning. A new era of psychedelic treatment for stress, depression, alcoholism, and addiction is on the horizon. Some people may get better, and a few people are likely to get very, very rich, as Hoffman’s “insanity chemical” cycles back into the culture.