I was also going to add that there is some excellent further reading in the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. It is a very well-written book by a young Tom Wolfe that goes into some detail on the negative consequences of careless LSD use. I recall an anecdote in the book where a woman gulps pure LSD directly from a milk carton and has a complete psychotic break. The book also goes into interesting detail about how, in the 60's, the northeastern USA generally had a more studious interest in psychedelics, led by Timothy Leary. The western USA, led by Ken Kesey, generally saw more care-free, party-oriented experimentation.
Maybe..The Electric Kool-Aid Acid isn't the best book to start with for people who are seriously interested in learning more about the fascinating field of psychedelics. :)
Tom Wolfe's book about Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters is definitely an entertaining read, but it's not in any way related to the groundbreaking, serious research into psychedelics that's been taking place, once again, after a 30+ year hiatus due to the US government's War on Drugs, at Johns Hopkins, NYU, and other research institutions around the world, since the late 1990s.
The psilocybin research project at Johns Hopkins has, so far, given over 1000 (high) doses of synthetic psilocybin to several hundred carefully screened volunteers, and they have not yet had even one serious adverse reaction. Not even one!
Here's Michael Pollan's take on Timothy Leary's "contribution" to psychedelic research:
"...the charismatic figure of Timothy Leary looms large over the history of psychedelics in America. Yet it doesn't take many hours in the library before you begin to wonder if maybe Timothy Leary looms a little
too large in that history, or at least in our popular understanding of it. I was hardly alone in assuming that the Harvard Psilocybin Project - launched by Leary in the fall of 1960, immediately after his first life-changing experience with psilocybin in Mexico - represented the beginning of serious academic research into these substances or that Leary's dismissal from Harvard in 1963 marked the end of that research. But in fact neither proposition is even remotely true.
Leary played an important role in the modern history of psychedelics, but it's not at all the pioneering role he wrote for himself. His success in shaping the popular narrative of psychedelics in the 1960's obscures as much as it reveals, creating a kind of reality distortion field that makes it difficult to see everything that came either before or after his big moment on stage.
In a truer telling of the history, the Harvard Psilocybin Project would appear more like the beginning of the end of what had been a remarkably fertile and promising period of research that unfolded during the previous decade far from Cambridge, in places as far flung as Saskatchewan, Vancouver, California, and England, and, everywhere, with a lot less sound and fury or countercultural baggage. The larger-than-life figure of Leary has also obscured from view the role of a dedicated but little-known group of scientists, therapists and passionate amateurs who, long before Leary had ever tried psilocybin or LSD, developed the theoretical framework to make sense of these unusual chemicals and devised the therapeutic protocols to put them to use healing people. Many of these researchers eventually watched in dismay as Leary (and his "antics," as they inevitably referred to his various stunts and pronouncements) ignited what would become a public bonfire of all their hard-won knowledge and experience.
In telling the modern history of psychedelics, I want to put aside the Leary saga, at least until the crack-up where it properly belongs, to see if we can't recover some of that knowledge and the experience that produced it without passing it through the light-bending prism of the "Psychedelic Sixties." In doing so, I'm following in the steps of several of the current generation of psychedelic researchers, who, beginning in the late 1990s, set out to excavate the intellectual ruins of this first flowering of research into LSD and psilocybin and were astounded by what they found."