From laboratory to street
LSD, or lysergic acid diethylamide, was first synthesised in 1938 by the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann at Sandoz. Its effects on perception became known to Hofmann in 1943. In the 1950s it was studied by psychiatrists, some of whom hoped it could help treat conditions such as alcoholism or provide insight into mental illness. Government agencies, including the American Central Intelligence Agency, also experimented with it, an episode that became public only later.
Writers added a cultural dimension. Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, published in 1954, described his experience with mescaline and encouraged readers to think of drugs as a route to altered awareness rather than only as a medical or criminal matter. By the early 1960s such ideas had reached a wider audience of students and artists.
Leary, Kesey and the spread of LSD
Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert conducted psychedelic research at Harvard in the early 1960s, and both left the university in 1963 after controversy over their methods. Leary went on to promote LSD as a tool for personal transformation, and in January 1967, at the Human Be-In in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, he urged the crowd to “turn on, tune in, drop out.” The line was his, though the exact meaning was always debated.
On the West Coast, the writer Ken Kesey and his circle, the Merry Pranksters, organised the Acid Tests in 1965 and 1966. These were parties combining music, lights and LSD, with the Grateful Dead as a regular band. At the time LSD was still legal, and the events turned the drug into a group experience rather than a private or clinical one. Tom Wolfe later described this scene in a book discussed in the article on New Journalism writers.
The effect on art and design
Psychedelic ideas gave visual artists a new vocabulary. The clearest example is the poster work for San Francisco venues such as the Fillmore and the Avalon Ballroom. Artists including Wes Wilson, Victor Moscoso, Rick Griffin, Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley used swirling lettering, saturated and clashing colours and borrowed Art Nouveau and Victorian images. The posters were sometimes hard to read, which suited an audience that was expected to work at decoding them. The wider story of psychedelic rock posters is part of the Summer of Love and is told elsewhere on this site.
Other forms followed:
- Light shows at concert halls, in which oil and water, coloured liquids and film projections were thrown on the walls behind the band.
- Album sleeves and record packaging, of which the Sgt. Pepper album is the most famous 1967 example.
- Underground comics, and later fashion and interior decoration.
- Experimental film, where multiple projections and hand-painted imagery echoed the effect, a link explored in the piece on the underground film movement.
Music changed as well. Longer improvised pieces, studio effects, Indian instruments and unusual song structures appeared in the work of bands from San Francisco to London. It is fair to say that not all psychedelic music was made under the influence, and many musicians said as much. The label described a style as much as a practice.
Ideas about consciousness
Behind the art lay a loose set of claims: that ordinary perception is only one of many possible ways of seeing; that drugs could reveal hidden layers of the mind; and that modern society had narrowed human awareness. Writers borrowed from Eastern religion, mysticism and psychology, and interest in Buddhism and Hindu teachers grew in the same years. Advocates often described their experiences in spiritual terms. Medical authorities and many parents argued that the drug was unpredictable, and reports of panic, disorientation and hospital admissions appeared in newspapers. Both the enthusiasm and the warnings were often exaggerated, and evidence at the time was limited.
The legal crackdown
As use spread beyond research settings, lawmakers responded. At the federal level, the Drug Abuse Control Amendments of 1965 had already tightened rules on certain drugs, but possession by individuals was not at first a clear crime. In 1966, Senate hearings examined LSD, with legislators and witnesses debating its dangers. Sandoz, the manufacturer, stopped supplying the drug for research that year, and the Food and Drug Administration restricted access to what had been available for studies.
California made LSD illegal on 6 October 1966, and the date is sometimes marked by San Francisco’s counterculture with a gathering in the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park. Other states soon passed their own laws. A federal measure in 1968 made possession a misdemeanor, and the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 placed LSD in the most restrictive category, Schedule I. Those later laws belong to the period after 1967, but the direction was clear from 1966. The legal changes also ended most legitimate research in the United States for decades, a point later researchers often raised.
Prohibition did not end use. Underground chemists, one of the best known being Augustus Owsley Stanley III, supplied large quantities in the Bay Area, and police operations against such networks became more common during 1967 and after.
A short, intense moment
By the end of 1967, enthusiasm for the movement had cooled in the places that created it. The Haight-Ashbury district was overcrowded, and some who had celebrated the drug began to warn about its risks or move away from it. The imagery lasted longer than the optimism, turning up in advertising, television and design well into the 1970s. In that sense the psychedelic era left a lasting visual and musical legacy, even as its larger claims about transforming society remained unproven.