LSD is not just a drug. It’s an emblem of the hippie movement, psychedelic rock, and the concurrent cultural shifts of the ’60s and ’70s, as well as many since. Today, it’s still used in social settings but has also expanded into clinical settings, with the FDA granting it breakthrough therapy status as a treatment for anxiety. This means it will be studied with the possibility of legalizing it for mental health purposes.
Like any substance, LSD has many facets. It’s been responsible for dark and difficult trips, light and life-changing ones, innovative music and art, and fascinating science and technology. Here are some quotes that pay homage to the many ways LSD can alter someone’s mind — and has altered society.
“The kids who take LSD aren’t going to fight your wars. … They’re not going to join your corporations. They won’t buy it.
— Timothy Leary
“Even in the less obviously creative fields of hard science, LSD can be profoundly beneficial. In fact, it played a role in the two biggest discoveries in biology of the 20th century. Francis Crick, who discovered the double helix structure of DNA with James Watson, and Kary Mullis, who invented the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), had both taken the drug and attributed some of their understanding and insights to it. Mullis has gone so far as to say: ‘Would I have invented PCR if I hadn’t taken LSD? I seriously doubt it … [having taken LSD] I could sit on a DNA molecule and watch the polymers go by. I learnt that partly on psychedelic drugs.’”—David Nutt
“LSD sometimes can open up a musician’s mind to think outside of the usual conventions, and especially outside the notion of what even constitutes music.”—Jesse Jarnow
“There are aspects to those two particular drugs [LSD and mushrooms] that the places you can go in your brain are much deeper and more healing than anything else.”
— Kristen Bell
“A lot of people use LSD to make music. It’s less of a mind-altering drug to me. … It just frees you and allows you to think outside of what you would normally write about or listen to or how you would evaluate a song that you were making.”
— Chance the Rapper
“Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important — creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.”
— Steve Jobs
“I had such an overwhelming feeling of well-being, that there was a God, and I could see him in every blade of grass. It was like gaining hundreds of years of experience in 12 hours.”
— George Harrison
“LSD burst over the dreary domain of the constipated bourgeoisie like the angelic herald of a new psychedelic millennium. We have never been the same since, nor will we ever be, for LSD demonstrated that the mansions of heaven and gardens of paradise lie within each and all of us.”
—Terence McKenna
“LSD is a psychedelic drug which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have NOT taken it.”
—Timothy Leary
