This is on point. I'm Megna Chacrabardi.

Turn on, tune in, and drop out.

By the time Timothy Leary uttered those famous words in San Francisco in 1967, the former

Harvard psychology professor was already well-known as the high priest of the psychedelics movement.

Leary, and the rapid expansion in the popularity of psychedelic drugs, had captured the world's

attention by the mid-1960s. In this moment, from a British documentary series called

World Tomorrow, Leary describes an LSD trip. He's seated, cross-legged on the floor, as

a child wearing a beaded necklace totals by.

There's a sense of being in communion with powers greater than yourself, and intelligence

which far strips the human mind, and energies which are very ancient. Your sense of avail

is pulled away for the first time you see how things really are. Of course, God's workshop

is very different from what we expect. People don't have that. Most of the forms of molecular

and cellular, they're quite straight. It's very hard to be prepared for this experience

specifically, except the attitude of trust, or I will be done in dealing with mysteries

and powers which dwarf your expectations.

Not everyone, though, was along for the ride. The movement to bring psychedelic drugs to

all was met with great resistance from the federal government, of course, which had first

secretly and illegally experimented with psychedelics in projects such as the CIA's MKULTRA

program. The federal government then later pivoted to viewing psychedelics as a threat

as their public use spread.

That was John Finlater, head of the Federal Bureau of Drug Abuse Control, a department

created in 1965. Researchers also expressed serious reservations. Scientists such as Dr. Stanley

...