1943–1962

On April 19, 1943, the Sandoz chemist Albert Hofmann ingested 250 micrograms of a substance he had first synthesized five years earlier and shelved as uninteresting. The bicycle ride home through wartime Basel — vivid, terrifying, transformative — initiates the modern psychedelic era.

What follows in the next two decades is not yet "the sixties." It is, instead, the strange middle period in which LSD circulates almost exclusively through the laboratory, the psychiatric clinic, and the covert intelligence program. Sandoz distributes thousands of ampules to researchers worldwide. The U.S. Army and Central Intelligence Agency fund studies under cover names. Aldous Huxley takes mescaline in Hollywood and writes a book.

By the late 1950s, ethnographers and amateur mycologists begin to bridge the gap between the laboratory and the long history of Indigenous use. R. Gordon Wasson's 1955 velada with María Sabina in Huautla de Jiménez, reported in Life two years later, opens a channel through which the postwar laboratory will encounter — and very often misunderstand — much older traditions. By 1962 the conditions are in place for the cultural rupture that the next era will deliver.

This is a placeholder summary. A full description will be added later.