Emerging from the drug war dark age: LSD and other psychedelic medicines make a comeback

The return flight from Switzerland was a mix of hope and solemnity for Rick Doblin, the only American to attend the funeral of Dr. Albert Hofmann, the inventor of LSD who had just died at the age of 102. Doblin, a Harvard-educated Ph.D and founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, an organization that conducts legal research into the healing and spiritual potentials of psychedelics and marijuana, had spent his entire career trying to break through the virtually impenetrable wall of obstinacy that surrounds psychedelic compounds and their potential benefits to society.

More than anyone else in his field, Doblin is all too familiar with what he refers to as the "40-year-long bad trip" that researchers like him have faced in dealing with the fallout from the introduction of LSD and other psychedelic compounds to the Western psyche in the mid 1960s. This 40-year intellectual Dark Age, Doblin says, has been characterized by "enormous fear and misinformation and a vested interest in exaggerated stories about drugs to keep prohibition alive."

We've all heard the tales of kids jumping off rooftops because they think they can fly, of otherwise normal people taking a single hit of LSD and "going insane," and of course the all-pervasive myth of the "acid flashback." Although there were acid casualties, most were rare or aberrant tragedies, most often occurring in individuals with pre-existing mental health conditions who never should have taken LSD in the first place. Most of the tales are apocryphal at best, intentional propaganda meant to discourage use.

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