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 supply, advising readers to "sit back and enjoy the…exciting educational experience" under such a scenario.

Leary's rhetoric, combined with hysteria over '60s youth culture, stoked fears that a psychedelic revolution had sinister implications. Perhaps LSD turned people into psychopathic killers like the Manson Family, who combined LSD with amphetamines and other drugs. In 1969, TV personality Art Linkletter started a public campaign to discredit Leary and LSD,  claiming a bad acid trip caused his 20-year-old daughter to jump to her death from a sixth-floor window, even though an autopsy failed to turn up drugs in her system.