This draft appears with the permission of the publisher. It will serve as the prologue of an extended critique of psychedelic doctrine. This chapter is largely the same as the version that appeared in Jacquette ed., but with the addition of the full bibliography and footnotes. In this article the history of psychoactive drugs is set in the context of the political, scientific, literary, and philosophical culture of the interwar period and shows that the cultural history of psychoactive drugs is enhanced by such context. This article investigates how the author could have managed to foresee these future events in such prophetic detail and reveals the sources that were available. The story involves the mass testing of a hallucinogenic drug on the unsuspecting inhabitants of an isolated village almost twenty years before the Pont St Esprit incident of 1951, which has been ascribed to the CIA's plans for experimental dosing of unsuspecting civilians with psychoactive drugs.

In the novel, a central character plans to use an ergot derived drug as an agent of popular religious renewal, prefiguring the New Age religious revival initiated by the popular use of LSD. It also identifies ergot as the secret psychoactive sacrament of the ancient mysteries forty years before this hypothesis became a matter of academic and scientific investigation. It remarkably predates the discovery the hallucinogenic properties of the ergot-derived alkaloid lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) by ten years. A novel published in 1933, describes the isolation of a hallucinogenic drug from an ergot-type fungus.

Lsd mein sorgenkind pdf