As the 1950’s dawned, middle-America was moving to new suburban homes and filling them up with the shiny new gadgets and other sundry props of the mass consumption culture. But something else was going on under the surface. Under government and medical supervision, in Psychiatric sessions, on University campuses, in private laboratories, in prisons and sanitariums, there were people taking LSD.

Sometimes they knew they were taking it, sometimes they did not. Albert Hofmann and his colleagues at Sandoz laboratories had deemed LSD useful in psychotherapy sessions, and by 1949 the Swiss company was supplying America with the drug under the brand name Delysid.

results of these LSD trips were all over the spectrum. It gave some people the symptoms of schizophrenia, and it temporarily stopped the schizophrenic symptoms of others.

Sometimes the drug’s effects were frightening- a woman detained in an insane asylum who usually giggled and chattered nonsense about birds and flowers was given a dose of LSD and suddenly said in an unwavering voice: “We are pathetic people. Don’t play with us.”
The Patient went on to assault Hospital staff, and make groping advances toward the head nurse.

The first celebrity evangelist of psychedelic drugs was the British writer Aldous Huxley, best known for his dystopian Science Fiction classic “Brave New World”. Huxley had once written an essay in which he he promised, if he ever became a millionaire, to pay for research that would find an “ideal intoxicant”
(Actor’s voice for quote)

Aldous Huxley hailed from a prominent British family and was a best selling author before his 30th birthday. His first introduction to a psychedelic miracle drug wasn’t LSD, but Mescaline, a compound that occurs naturally in Peyote, which has been used by indigenous people in Mexico for almost 6 thousand years.
Huxley liked mescaline. A lot. When he took it, he felt that we he was seeing quote “What Adam saw on the morning of creation”.
And so, Huxley wrote a book, The Doors of Perception, which is still the most widely read book on psychedelic experience. Doors of Perception became part of the American zeitgeist, along with the Beat movement, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and all the secret desires and fears of the Coldest days of the Cold War era.

Psychedelics were slowly becoming mainstream. In 1957 Life Magazine even ran a special on the Psilocybin Mushroom, a naturally occurring psychedelic similar to LSD. LSD therapy was becoming big business in Hollywood; psychiatrists and psychologists were making lots of money treating movie stars and well heeled housewives.

Cary Grant, perhaps the biggest movie star in the world during the late 50’s, became so enamored of LSD that he gave a shocking interview to Hollywood reporters on the set of “Operation Petticoat” in 1959.