I will be giving a lecture for the Royal Society of Chemistry on February 13th, 2024, about the history of LSD.
Most are familiar with Bicycle Day – when a Swiss chemist accidentally tripped balls cycling home from the lab in 1943 – and Timothy Leary’s tiresome “Turn On Tune In Drop Out mantra”. But the full history of LSD gets so much more colourful, so much more hilarious, and so much more disturbing. From CIA operatives agreeing to dose each other with “surprise acid trips”, hookers hired to spike unwitting San Franciscan civilians, how the founder of AA achieved sobriety through a mind-bending trip, and medieval peasants losing all four limbs to gangrene, the history of acid has it all…
