LSD
Global History, Pharmacology, and Modern Practice
The century’s most consequential laboratory accident.
Prepublication edition v0.21 · EPUB · 331 sources
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About this volume
Albert Hofmann synthesized LSD-25 in 1938 and discovered what it was five years later, by accident, on a bicycle ride that became legend. In the two decades that followed it was psychiatry’s brightest hope, the subject of thousands of papers, before it escaped the clinic, marked a generation, and was banned nearly everywhere.
The volume follows the molecule through all of it: the chemistry and the receptor science, the Cold War misuses, the counterculture and the backlash, the quiet decades, and the current return, from microdosing studies to new anxiety trials. No substance in this series carries more history per microgram.
Synthesized from 331 sources, including Hofmann’s LSD: My Problem Child, the mid-century clinical record, the MK-ULTRA documentation, and the modern controlled trials from Basel and the MM120 (now DT120) program.
Inside the book
- IOrigins · Chapters 1 to 3The substance and its first uses, the lineages that carried it, and the ethics of writing about it at all.
- IIMechanism · Chapters 4 to 6The molecule, receptors, and dose; the brain under the influence; what doesn’t mix.
- IIIExperience · Chapters 7 to 9The arc of an experience, what it is like inside, and when it turns difficult.
- IVMedicine · Chapters 10 and 11The clinical evidence, indication by indication, read closely and without inflation.
- VPractice · Chapters 12 to 15Ceremony, clinic, and solo practice; set and setting; harm reduction; integration.
- VILandscape · Chapters 16 and 17Legal status, the regulatory moment, and the questions still open.