Psy­che­del­ic drug re­search breaks out of deep freeze as re­searchers head for the clin­ic with am­bi­tious tri­al plans

David Nichols en­tered grad­u­ate school in 1969 with dreams of crack­ing LSD. He was a child of the 60s, his friends drop­ping tabs and go­ing on about the vi­sions they saw – the big bang, god, in­fin­i­ty pro­ject­ed – and how it changed them in ways on­ly ma­jor life events could. Nichols was go­ing to fig­ure out how it all worked.

And then in 1970, Con­gress passed the Con­trolled Sub­stance Act. LSD, which the gov­ern­ment had stud­ied ex­ten­sive­ly for two decades, be­came a Sched­ule I drug. The dol­lars washed up. For 30 years, psy­che­delics be­came all but un­touch­able for clin­i­cal tri­als.

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