Acid Dreams by Bruce Shlain, Martin A. Lee (1986, Paperback, Revised)

This is a valuable book. For those of you that believe that something very important happened in the evolution of humanity during the “Cold War” era, and that widespread use of psychedelic drugs was instrumental in that evolution, this book is an essential read.

LSD was widely used by the mental health profession in the 1950s, and was one of the most effective treatments for alcoholism ever tried. Considerable research into the human mind was conducted and great discoveries were made in the scientific community. In a parallel universe, covert governmental agencies (principally the CIA) were conducting their own research, in hopes of creating better soldiers or achieving some method of mind control or interrogation techniques (their efforts failed miserably, of course). Find out why the real “Captain Trips” was Alfred M. Hubbard, not Jerry Garcia.

Somewhere along the trail, it hit critical mass, and the genie escaped the scientific community and ordinary citizens started tripping – for self–exploration, recreation, enlightenment, whatever you want to call it. It only took a couple of years of that before a tipping point was reached, and at that point our government, and most others, reacted as governments always do to forces that they don’t understand and can’t control – they made it illegal and drove it underground.

Did that make it explode and grow orders of magnitude faster than it would have otherwise? Who can know? And the beatniks and proto–hippies have themselves to blame in some ways, it was all too outrageous and visible to be ignored.

For whatever reasons, here we are today. The jury is still out on whatever it was that happened during that decade or two (I would describe it as the 1960s plus another half–decade each way) and whether our race has actually assimilated what we learned then.

Personally, I think that there have been certain concise, discreet moments in history when the human race truly changed, call it paradigm shifts, quantum leaps, whatever you want. And I believe that a big chunk of one of these occurred in the time between when Sputnik went into orbit and when man last walked on the moon. If you are a student of those times, or are at all interested in that aspect of the march of human evolution, do not pass up this book. You will be more knowledgeable for having read it.