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Ironically, LSD first emerged from the heart of the system.

  Ironically, LSD first emerged from the heart of the system. It was synthesized in 1938 by Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman in the laboratories of what would later become pharma giant Novartis and used by psychiatrists and therapists to treat alcoholism and depression. Some of its most enthusiastic early adopters worked for the CIA. In the 1950s, the agency, typically without  consent, dosed its own employees, soldiers, prisoners, and mental patients with LSD as part of an experimental mind-control program called MKUltra. Convinced that Soviet and Chinese communists had developed "brainwashing" techniques, U.S. Intelligence agencies wanted to make sure that Americans had equal or better tools. "There's a tendency, I think, to kind of push against the past and suggest that now we're doing it anew or in a fresh way. But I like the concept of renaissance that also reminds us to think about what we missed in the past," says Erika Dyck, an historian of psychedelia a...
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event may be remembered as the beginning of a new renaissance,

  But the biggest takeaway from the MAPS conference is that there's no inherent conflict between the science and spirituality of psychedelics and that a former Republican governor, a current Democratic governor, religious seekers, tech bros, and unapologetic recreational users can be allies in pursuit of the same goal. Nobody exemplifies the psychedelia of the 1960s quite like Leary, who thought that these drugs would radically alter every aspect of human society and famously encouraged his followers to "tune in, turn on, and drop out.""I believe that the revolution is a neurological revolution. It's a revolution of consciousness," Leary said in 1973 to a journalist interviewing him from Folsom Prison, where he was serving a sentence for a previous jailbreak on a cannabis charge.  States started to ban LSD in the mid '60s, and the feds outlawed it in 1968, which is often blamed on Leary. He once theorized that an enemy state might drop LSD in the water s...
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