The Psychedelic Era of the 1960s was a time of cultural revolution, spiritual searches, musical invention, drug experimentation and the emergence of a new unbridled generation and progressive voices.
The psychedelics of those times had almost nothing to do with earlier periods of drug and mind-altering experimentation tabbed in history by “opium eaters” and pre-transcendentalism. And, the 60s psychedelia also has very little connection to the present “psychedelic renaissance” which is almost exclusively a clinical enterprise and has nothing to do with creating new art forms or mass cultural change.
All to say, the history of psychedelics is very much a fragmented timeline. Still, there are obvious connections between Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” (1865), the 1950s Beat Generation’s “HOWL” and the recent scientific work into consciousness, addiction, depression and transcendence, including Michael Pollan’s 2018 book (“How to Change Your Mind”.)
Old Hippies
There are still lots of people around who experienced the psychedelic days of the 1960s, including a large number who never ingested LSD or magic mushrooms, but who were permanently influenced by their “contact highs.”
And, lo and behold, there are still quite a few grayed, grizzled and wizened tripsters sprinkled among us. They’re old hippies now disguised as retired attorneys, educators and elder artists and craftspeople. They are great-grandparents who aren’t too sure they want their youngest generation of offspring to partake in their first Acid Tests or peyote expeditions right now.
Yes, the times definitely did their changin’ but not everyone seems convinced that enough has been for the better. An LSD excursion right now could easily end up in a bad trip. No one is using adjectives like “groovy” or “cool” to describe these times, are they? And saying “far out” now has a changed meaning from a generation or two ago. Do you know what I mean?
When Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychologist who transformed into the 60s leading LSD guru, told the 30,000 participants at the January 1967 Human Be-In at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park to “Turn On, Tune In (and) Drop Out,” he did not mean “go party and get stoned.” Leary was challenging a new 60s generation to escape all their past assumptions, get in touch with their deeper selves and “drop out” into a better and wide-open future.
After they ingested their first doses of LSD, The Beatles changed their music from boy-girl ballads to mind-bending oracles. Legions of music fans followed their new sounds of reversed drumbeats, sitar-laced ribbons of notes and rhythms from foreign or newly imagined places. Without LSD, there would have been no Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
“Turn off your mind relax and float down-stream,
It is not dying, it is not dying;
Lay down all thought surrender to the void;
It is shining, it is shining.” (Lyrics from “Tomorrow Never Knows,” by John Lennon recorded on the Beatles’ Revolver album in 1966.)
Marijuana was the leafy, sweet-smelling gateway to the higher and deeper explorations and realms of the Psychedelic 60s. Getting high was the quickest way for a new generation to escape a complacent, comfortable American setting of new suburbia, scholastic conformity and sleepy entertainment forms like sit-com TV, be-true-to-your-school rock n’ roll and your parents’ politics.
After you took a trip on LSD, there was no going back to the place you started — not after you got introduced to the other parts of your own mind and a new universe of sights, sounds, colors and emotions.
“One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small,” sang The Jefferson Airplane on their 1967 album Surrealistic Pillow. “And the ones that mother gives you, don’t do anything at all. Go ask Alice when she’s ten feet tall.”
Or ask The Beatles when they sing “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” or “Yellow Submarine.” These are not places your mother or father would have recognized. The music invented in the 60s psychedelic era didn’t just take over the Billboard Top 100; the music blew open the “Doors of Perception” that Aldous Huxley wrote about in 1954. When Jimi Hendrix asked, “Are You Experienced?” with his moaning wah-wah guitar and his stoney-voiced singing, you either instantly knew what he meant or you felt terribly left out.
LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) was first synthesized in 1938 by Swedish chemist Albert Hofmann. It was commercially produced by Sandoz Pharmaceuticals under the brand name Delysid. Sandoz also manufactured tablets derived from psilocybin with the brand name Indocybin.
The word psychedelic was invented by Humphrey Osmond (1917-2004.) He was a British psychiatrist who performed clinical experiments with LSD and hallucinogenic agents he discovered from older Native cultures. He said psychedelic meant “mind-manifesting.” Osmond was the man who supplied Huxley with the mescaline that led his “Doors of Perception” book.
Before the drugs were discovered by Leary in his Harvard psychotherapy research, the Sandoz hallucinogens had caught the attention of the C.I.A. and U.S. military. The U.S. Navy imported the first large vats of LSD to America just after World War II to conduct research on possibly creating a “truth serum.”
Novelist Ken Kesey, a Stanford student at the time, and future leader of the 60s Merry Pranksters (“Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”), was an unwitting subject of CIA experiments with LSD in 1960. His out-of-body experiences led to his first novel in 1962, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
Soon after, Leary was joined by fellow researchers, including higher conscious explorer Richard Alpert (Ram Dass.) They expanded their cerebral and spiritual quest into the more mystical and unknown corners of their psychedelic experiments. Leary founded the League for Spiritual Discovery and he called it a religion with LSD as its own holy sacrament.
Leary, Kesey, some of the old Beats like Allen Ginsburg and others went everywhere across the country to spread the gospel of LSD, psilocybin, mescaline and other psychedelics. Kesey and future members of the Merry Pranksters held a series of Acid Tests in San Francisco and many other cities where free LSD was given to everyone who attended. The Acid Tests included music by the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead and others. There were strobe lights, liquid light shows, day-glo paints and black light settings to augment the participants’ hallucinations.
“Lights, colors, sounds”
Taking a trip on LSD (and other psychedelics) would take a person to a euphoric state with reduced or no anxieties and an overwhelming sense of pleasure, joy, harmony, spiritual feelings and a sense of being connected to the surrounding nature, inanimate objects and all of the universe.
An LSD trip would come on slowly within about 30 minutes when many 60s experimenters would sip wine or share some marijuana. Once the “high” kicked in, the music would start sounding much more detailed and enveloping. Some objects would gain a colorful halo and the smallest detail of a flower or the corner of a piece of furniture could occupy someone’s attention for many long minutes. Touching other humans or gazing into each other’s faces was another way LSD trippers made new contacts with the greater universe.
Most people who shared the LSD experience told how the brief 4-6 hour high changed their feelings and perceptions for days, weeks and longer. Repeated LSD trips only made all the new perceptions that much more lasting. Just go ask an old hippie or look up “Wavy Gravy,” “Deadheads” or “Summer of Love” on Wikipedia.
Some of the young people who first tripped on LSD later went on spiritual pilgrimages to India and other Hindu and Buddhist lands. They followed the teachings and meditations of India’s Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and they erected settlements, an Open University and a city in Iowa in his name. Others discovered the old texts of Kahil Gibran (“The Prophet”), the poetry of Rumi, the fantasies of J. R.R. Tolkien (“The Hobbit”) and the innocent tales of “The Little Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
On his 100th birthday in 2006, Swedish chemist Albert Hofmann who was first to synthesize LSD talked about his own psychedelic experiences. “It gave me an inner joy, an open mindedness, a gratefulness, open eyes and an internal sensitivity for the miracles of creation ... I think that in human evolution it has never been as necessary to have this substance LSD. It is just a tool to turn us into what we are supposed to be.”
During the early psychedelic years of the 1960s, Owsley Stanley, a sound technician for The Grateful Dead, set up a laboratory in the Bay Area and produced five million doses of LSD from 1965 to 1967 to fuel the Acid Tests and other musical concerts and trips festivals.
It was all too much fun. In 1968, Congress voted to make LSD, psilocybin, marijuana and all other identifiable hallucinogens illegal. Both Leary and Kesey, among many others, were arrested and spent time in jail for possession of psychedelics.
The new laws did not stop the spread of LSD and the mounting waves of cultural change and political uprising that formed and defined the remainder of the 1960s.
Follow the Music
The 1960s were one of the most violent times in the United States. A thousand people were killed in the riots in Los Angeles, Detroit, Philadelphia and in the Deep South during all the race riots and Civil Rights protests. And, tragically, a president (JFK), Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated during this decade. Finally, there was the Vietnam War that claimed 58,000 American soldier deaths before it officially ended in 1975.
But, even with this bloody, bitter and beastly backdrop, the 60s also blossomed the Flower Children, barefoot hippies, three days of “peace, love and art” at Woodstock and songs like The Youngbloods’ “Get Together” and John Lennon’s “Imagine.”
There was a whole “Summer of Love” in 1967 and photos of tie-dyed hippies with flowers in their hair briefly replaced photos from the Vietnam War on the covers of TIME, Newsweek and LIFE magazines. The two-fingered “peace sign” took the place of handshakes. TV had a new show called “Laugh-In” full of jokes and insinuations about illegal smiles.
Psychedelic music and “acid rock” filled the radio airwaves. The Beach Boys paused from singing about surfing and created an anthem to the decade, “Good Vibrations.”
Besides The Beatles, The Dead and Jefferson Airplane there was Quicksilver Messenger Service, The Electric Prunes, Strawberry Alarm Clock, Ultimate Spinach, Moby Grape, Iron Butterfly, The Blues Magoos, Procol Harem and Jimi Hendrix’ Purple Haze. The Byrds sang “Eight Miles High” and meant it. Jim Morrison’s The Doors took their name from Huxley’s 1954 book and everyone climbed aboard The Beatles Yellow Submarine for a Magical Mystery Tour that featured the song, “All You Need Is Love.”
At the end of the decade the Charles Manson Family murders took place in Los Angeles, leaving seven dead victims strewn across two gruesome scenes. The soundtrack quickly changed to “Helter Skelter.” And several months later the Hell’s Angels killed a spectator at a Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Speedway in the East Bay of the San Francisco area.
More people were having more bad trips. The LSD began to be laced with non-hallucinogenics like amphetamines and animal tranquilizers. Unrelated — we must firmly believe — disco music thumped its way up the musical charts and replaced psychedelic songs. Even The Grateful Dead released a disco song, “Shakedown Street” that became their biggest singles hit.
There is a Center for the Study of Psychedelics at the University of Berkeley that is shared with Harvard University. Author Michael Pollan (“How to Change Your Mind”) teaches at the Center. He is helping to lead new efforts to delve into the world of psychedelics.
“How might psychedelics affect our relationship with death or the natural world or our understanding of consciousness?” he is asking. “What roles have psychedelics historically played in social change or religion? The possibilities for research and collaboration are endless, exciting, and will have the potential to shed fresh light on these questions and so many others.”
In other parts of today’s “Psychedelic Rennaissance” therapists, psychiatrists and others are testing and employing uses of various psychedelic drugs to address PTSD, anxiety, personality disorders and substance abuse cases.
All these clinical approaches are very far from the 1960s days in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury neighborhood, the mecca of the 1967 Summer of Love. “Haight Ashbury was a ghetto of bohemians who wanted to do anything — and we did but I don’t think it has happened since,” remembered Bob Weir of The Grateful Dead, whose “clubhouse” was in The Haight. “Yes there was LSD. But Haight Ashbury was not about drugs. It was about exploration, finding new ways of expression, being aware of one’s existence.”
Maybe once the current MAGA Bad Trip ends, we can all start digging that existence again and rejoin the chorus of “All You Need is Love.”
— Rollie Atkinson
6-17-2025
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I remember it only too well. Nothing but a gigantic subliminal urge to rebel against your parents, for no reasons whatsoever; to youthfully and arrogantly reject all laws and customs accumulated over centuries: to shed all personal accountability and responsibility; young guys faking their social activism to simply get into the girls’ pants, resulting in 50 years of flawed generations, thanks to “free love.” And the beginning of a drug culture that permeates society to this very day, costing hundreds of thousands of lives.
My most vivid memory of that ‘67 Summer of Love was to walk thru the epicenter of that glorious “era,” only to stare at the dead body at the corner of Haight and Ashbury. A young blonde girl lying face down in the gutter, overdosed and who’d drowned in her own vomit. Oh, but she had “flowers in her hair!”
(And all the hippies surrounding her? Too stoned for it to even register.)
Any honest observer looking then - and now - knows that the whole psychedelic hippie era was a CON. And an un-glamorous experiment in stupidity.
Thank God it’s over.
Last line was the best.