The Psychedelic Lineage

Humans have used psychoactive substances for healing and spiritual transformation for millennia. The modern clinical lineage begins with Albert Hofmann's synthesis of LSD in 1938, and the first wave of research (1950s–60s) that produced over a thousand published papers and remarkable clinical results for alcoholism, depression, and end-of-life anxiety. The backlash — driven by cultural panic, the counterculture, and political pressure — shut research down for decades. The renaissance, beginning in the late 1990s at Johns Hopkins, NYU, Imperial College London, and MAPS, has produced some of the most striking results in contemporary psychiatry. This lineage raises fundamental questions about consciousness, healing, and the relationship between pharmacology and psychotherapy.