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Michael Pollan is a big reason for the resurgence of psychedelics in America.

His 2015 New Yorker article, Trip Treatment, about how psilocybin could ease existential

distress and hospice patients, triggered a national interest in the reemerging field

of clinical studies.

And as we know, the media doesn't just cover news but often shapes it, and by the time

his 2018 follow-up book to that article, how to change your mind was published, the country

was ready to consider this class of substances for a variety of treatments and mental health.

Pollan isn't the originator of psychedelic studies, nor does he claim to be.

This field never really died, though it was on temporary hiatus from the early 70s until

the mid-90s.

Compared to the thousands of research studies conducted on LSD in the 1950s, there was

only a trickle of underground non-clinical research after the Nixon administration outright

banned this class of drugs.

Professor Charles Grob, who I chatted with from my 2020 book Heroes Dose, was the first

researcher granted FDA approval to study MDMA in ayahuasca in the 90s.

In a few years later, Rick Strouseman was approved to look into DMT, the psychoactive ingredient

in ayahuasca.

...