This is the Kater Daily Podcast for Friday, June 24th, 2016. I'm Caleb Brown.

The history of psychedelic drugs and government regulation has been decidedly anti-science.

LSD and MDMA have shown great promise as therapies,

but the reputation of those drugs

and government prohibition prevented research for decades.

That may finally be changing.

Tom Schroeder is author of Acid Test, LSD, Ecstasy, and the Power to Heal.

Is it fair to say that the beginning of psychedelic research was Albert Hoffman's accidental consumption of

L.S.D. after he had synthesized it in a lab?

That was the beginning of the modern science of psychedelics.

There had been some philosophers and physicians who had experimented with masculine in the first part of the 20th century.

But that really never got much attention or went anywhere.

It sort of had become almost forgotten by the 40s

when Hoffman had that accidental experience during the war.

He was a research chemist at Sandos, and he was looking for a drug that was derived from a a

dry fungus that had been a scourge in the middle ages,

but that had somehow they'd figured out that it could be used for midwifery in order to hurry

contractions.

And from then on they were taking that element of the rye fungus and Sandoz was consciously looking for

related compounds that also had medical utility.

And Hoffman had this experience.

Well, first of all, he had tested this compound, LSD 25, just meant the 25th compound he had tested in the series,

...