Summary

“History – The First Wave.” Pollan begins this chapter with a brief glimpse of Timothy Leary – notably his celebrity, and his tendency towards self-promotion and self-aggrandizement. He also references how Leary’s seemingly reckless experimentations, and public comments on those experimentations, played a fundamental role in the development of the socio-cultural believe that psychedelic drugs were dangers to individuals and to society. Pollan then contends that the story of Leary (which he says will be told in greater detail later) is also the story of how decades of research into the medicinal effects of psychedelics became buried away as an indirect consequence of Leary’s activities. Pollan then sums up the range of scientific investigations that took place all over the world in the early years of research into psychedelics, highlighting the fact that “… there were six international scientific meetings devoted to psychedelics...