Acid Dreams

Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: the CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond, originally released as Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD, and the Sixties Rebellion, is a 1985 book by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, in which the authors document the 40-year social history of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), beginning with its synthesis by Albert Hofmann of Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in 1938. During the Cold War period of the early 1950s, LSD was tested as an experimental truth drug for interrogation by the United States intelligence and military community. Psychiatrists also used it to treat depression and schizophrenia. Under the direction of Sidney Gottlieb, the drug was used by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in cooperation with participating "colleges, universities, research foundations, hospitals, clinics, and penal institutions". LSD was tested on "prisoners, mental patients, volunteers, and unsuspecting human subjects".In the mid to late 1950s, many intellectuals began experimenting with LSD. Alfred Matthew Hubbard introduced Aldous Huxley to the drug in 1955 and Timothy Leary began taking it in 1962. By 1963, LSD had escaped the laboratory and became popular as a legal recreational drug with the emerging counterculture. Lee and Shlain argue that LSD influenced the social movements of the 1960s. The Free Speech Movement began in 1964, followed by the wide availability of street acid in 1965, the birth of the hippie movement in 1966, and the growing antiwar movement associated with the New Left. In response to queries by journalists about a "massive, illegal domestic intelligence operation" by the Nixon Administration, government hearings were held in the 1970s. Investigations by the Rockefeller Commission (1975), the Church Committee (1976), and a release of declassified documents under the Freedom of Information Act in 1977 which led to new Senate hearings that same year, uncovered information about LSD experiments for the first time. The book is divided into two parts, with the first part of the book based on many of the public hearings, reports, and declassified files. Part one, "The Roots of Psychedelia", discusses the pioneering research by the intelligence, military, scientific, and academic community. Part two, "Acid for the Masses", discusses the hippie movement and the effects of LSD on the counterculture. Since its initial release in 1985, the book has received mostly positive reviews. A revised edition was published by Grove Atlantic in 1992, with a new introduction by essayist Andrei Codrescu.