The post 6 Legends in the History of Psychedelics appeared first on Psychedelia.
Albert Hofmann
The Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann might have been forgotten in the annals of history if not for accidentally ingesting a substance he’d synthesized five years earlier. Hoffmann first synthesized LSD in 1938, but it wasn’t until 1943 that he realized its incredible power. Read more about Hofmann and the creation of Bicycle Day, in honor of the first intentional acid trip, on Page 56.
Aldous Huxley
Huxley, a prolific writer for nearly 50 years, became a literary legend with his novel “Brave New World” in 1932, but it was “The Doors of Perception,” detailing his experience with mescaline 21 years later that helped bring psychedelics to the forefront of society.
Ken Kesey
Kesey wrote the iconic American novels “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Sometimes a Great Notion,” but he’s often remembered as the subject of another writer’s masterpiece. Kesey was the central figure of Tom Wolfe’s nonfiction book “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” as he and the Merry Pranksters hosted LSD parties throughout the West Coast.
Timothy Leary
You must be doing something right to be deemed the “most dangerous man in America” by Richard Nixon. Though Leary had more than his share of detractors — including many in the psychedelic research field — his influence on the 1960s counterculture is impossible to refute.
Terence McKenna
When McKenna died in 2000, the New York Times wrote that he “combined a leprechaun’s wit with a poet’s sensibility” and regaled his life experiences and influence on drug culture, particularly for his expertise in psilocybin. It was a notable obituary at a time when the War on Drugs was still very much alive. McKenna had published five books by the time he died — each worth revisiting for modern psychonauts and mycologists. His younger brother, Dennis McKenna, is still active in ethnopharmacology, including sitting on the board of directors for the Hefter Research Institute, a nonprofit promoting research of classic hallucinogens.
Owsley Stanley
Stanley is known as the first private individual to manufacture mass quantities of lysergic acid diethylamide, producing more than 5 million doses of LSD between 1965 and 1967. But Stanley was also a talented audio engineer who constructed the Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound for the band’s 1974 world tour. He also helped design the Dead’s iconic skull and lighting bolt logo.