The word, ‘psychedelics’, was coined by Humphrey Osmond in 1957, “connoting that they have a mind-manifesting capability, revealing useful or beneficial properties of the mind”.2 The 1950s and 1960 were a time of enormous scientific interest in psychedelic substances and therapies, including extensive Western research across anthropology, psychiatry, psychology, ethnopharmacology, and sociology as people sought to understand their role in the belief, spirituality, and practices of past and present peoples.
Social use of psychedelics began to increase and was initially embraced; ground-breaking scientific research had commenced in various institutions. Yet various controversies followed, leading to the eventual banning of the substances, suspicion, and rejection among researchers, especially in the broad science and medicine community.
In 1953 the CIA began the mindcontrol experiment, Project MKUltra, which ballooned in scope to include human experimentation, illegal drug testing, using unwitting test subjects, like drug-addicted prisoners, marginalised sex workers and terminal cancer patients – “people who could not fight back,” in the words of Sidney Gottlieb, the chemist who introduced LSD to the CIA’.3
According to the US Supreme Court (1985), there were 162 different secret projects indirectly financed by the CIA, 80 institutions and 185 researchers participated, though many didn’t know they were dealing with the CIA.4
With the closing of the project, psychedelics came to be associated with counter-culture and illegality, culminating in 1971 with the USA’s ‘War on Drugs’. Psychedelics were a symbolic talisman in the many-faceted culture wars raging around the Vietnam War, personal and sexual liberation, and vocal critics
