The acid test

When Peregrine Worsthorne was on Desert Island Discs in 1992, he chose as his luxury item a lifetime supply of LSD. He may, according to the American journalist Michael Pollan’s fiercely interesting new book, have been on to something.

Acid has a bad name these days: either a threat to the sanity of your children, or a naff 1960s throwback favoured by the sort of people who sell you healing crystals at markets in Totnes. Yet in LSD-25, psilocybin, DMT, mescaline and others we have a family of molecules with startlingly powerful effects on the human mind. They are not addictive, carry little or no physiological risk, and their association with the desire to jump out of windows has been distinctly exaggerated. They might even be good for us.

They have done much to shape the world we live in. In addition to their role in the 1960s counterculture they have a pretty large place in the history of Silicon Valley, and a seldom-acknowledged role in the formation of Alcoholics Anonymous (Bill Wilson, AA’s founder, credited the ‘spiritual experience’ that first got him sober to a trip on belladonna, and in the 1950s pressed for LSD to be used in treating alcoholics).

Yet they are very hard to pin down. ‘Set and setting’ (i.e. circumstance and expectation) profoundly influence what happens when you take them, and their effects are highly subjective. They are an ouroboros of an observer’s paradox, worming their way between the territories of cognitive science, psychoanalytic theory and the anthropology of shamanism.

What to call them? The psychiatrist Humphry Osmond minted the word that stuck (psychedelic, or ‘mind-manifesting’) in a 1956 exchange of letters with Aldous Huxley (who favoured phanerothyme: ‘spirit-manifesting’). But they’ve also been seen as psychotomimetics (simulating the effects of psychosis), psycholytics (mind-loosening; bringing unconscious thoughts to light), and (Osmond again, unsuccessfully) psychodelytics.