Virginia Wright on Psychedelics and the Culture Wars (Interview Archive)
Back then, plenty of people were paying close attention to these substances. The ones drawn in tended to be people who already knew what the compounds could do and treated them with real respect. That's actually where one of the old fault lines in psychedelic use starts. At some point the knowledge spilled out beyond that smaller circle, and the question of who should have access turned into a genuine argument.
Timothy Leary is the figure people reach for here. Call him the troublemaker of the movement if you like. His view was that these substances should go out broadly, to anyone, with no gatekeeping. Not everyone agreed, and the disagreement hasn't gone away. One camp holds that compounds this strong belong in careful hands: the shaman, the therapist, the physician. The other camp says a person owns the choice of what goes into their own body, and if someone wants the experience, that's their call to make.
On the question of physical danger, psychedelics don't pose much. LSD, mushrooms and psilocybin, even ayahuasca with its fast and heavy onset, mostly move through the body without doing lasting physical harm. Ayahuasca, for what it's worth, comes from combining two separate plant materials. The real weight of these drugs sits elsewhere. What they do psychologically can be overwhelming, because they reach straight into consciousness.
Go back to the 1940s and '50s and you find a different mood entirely. The drugs were in use, they were passed around, researchers studied them. Time Magazine and the educated public spoke about them with optimism. The comparison people reached for was penicillin: just as antibiotics had transformed physical medicine, psychedelics were supposed to do something comparable for the mind. Life Magazine carried that hopeful tone too. The press stayed friendly right up until the drugs got pulled into the political fights of the next decade.
The '60s cracked a lot of things open. Civil rights, women's rights, environmental causes, the push to end the war in Vietnam, gay and lesbian rights, all of it rising at once and colliding with the political order that was already in place. Drugs were threaded through every part of that upheaval, and once the articles turned, they turned hard.
Compare it to what's been happening with marijuana lately. The lid has come off, and people are recognizing that the damage done by prohibition outweighs the damage done by the plant itself. Psychedelics are getting caught up in that same shift. They remain potent, they shouldn't be taken casually or without preparation, and they were swept into the culture wars right alongside everything else.
Richard Nixon once called Timothy Leary the most dangerous man in America. Think about the timing. The country was deep in Vietnam, and there were far more genuinely dangerous people around than one advocate for acid. Still, the belief took hold that the drugs themselves were behind a good share of the trouble.