THE NEXT GENERATION OF MEDICINE

A Brief History of Psychedelics

Most of the common psychedelics were discovered in the 1930s, with some being synthetically developed and others being extracted from plants. Outside of the lab, their use dates back centuries in cultures around the world, from early African, South American, and Indigenous cultures, generally for ceremonial purposes.

In the 1950s, psychiatrists began experimentation with the drug and its use in the treatment of alcoholism, and it was around this time that the term psychedelic was coined, literally meaning "mind-manifesting".

Psychedelics were popularized in the Western world in the 1960 and 1970s during the "hippie" counterculture movement of those decades, when they were used for recreation, spiritual enlightenment, and meditation. In part because of their and association with anti-government ideas, various world governments responded by making these substances scheduled, or illegal.

An artist's rendition of psychedelic visuals.

Research on these substances was highly restricted. Bear in mind this was before mental health was largely recognized, and a depressed person was just as likely to have a lobe of their brain surgically removed as to have someone with whom to discuss their depression.

During the 1970s and 1980s, a brilliant chemist and pharmacologist named Alexander Shulgin personally synthesized and tested hundreds of compounds with psychedelic effects. The substances he synthesized and derived from the classic psychedelics (including mescaline) were quickly made illegal.

Eventually, psychedelic substances were so heavily restricted that their use in research was limited significantly for several decades. In 2000, when Portugal decriminalized the possession and personal use of all previously illegal substances, a new era of open-mindedness began to take hold. Subsequent research, though still restricted in most Western countries, began to shed light on the massive and potentially groundbreaking potential of these substances in medicine, psychology, and therapy.

Research from the period before these substances were made illegal and new, emerging and recent research (which can be viewed in the research timeline) has allowed pharmacologists to start to develop a strong framework of peer-reviewed research and clinical trial data to support the notion that these substances are too important to remain restricted in medicine.

So, what lies ahead?

Ideally, with further research on the more common psychedelic substances we will start to see their introduction into psychiatry and psychotherapy. The potential implications of these new therapies could be to psychiatry what the discovery of penicillin was for infectious disease medicine.