Part
leading edge medical research, part utopian idealism. Before LSD burst on the scene as a fuel for wild psychedelic trips, it had an amazing yet little known history. The Psychedelic Pioneers is a documentary about this remarkable history in which a small town institution played a vital role in some of the most innovative and socially conscious projects of our era.
Beginning in 1952, cutting-edge psychiatric research used LSD to unlock the mysteries of human consciousness to treat “mental illnesses” such as schizophrenia and alcoholism. LSD promised an entirely new approach to understanding the mind, an inward passage to our truer and richer selves. But a decade later, in the 1960s, LSD was used to fuel a cultural revolution, resulting in one of the most controversial periods in history. As word of LSD’s amazing properties began to seep out of the laboratory, artists and intellectuals such as writer Aldous Huxley, architect Kyo Izumi and painter Ted Godwin began to experiment, having their first documented experiences with LSD.
The Psychedelic Pioneers tells the fascinating and controversial medical revolution of three doctors who were at the center of the controversial work with LSD: Abram Hoffer, Humphrey Osmond and Duncan Blewett.
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