How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

by Michael Pollan

Sandoz, the pharmaceutical company for which he worked at the time of his discovery, did something unusual: in effect, it crowd-sourced a worldwide research effort to figure out what in the world Delysid—its brand name for LSD-25—might be good for. Hoping someone somewhere would hit upon a commercial application for its spookily powerful new compound, Sandoz offered to supply, free of charge, however much LSD any researcher requested. The company defined the term “researcher” liberally enough to include any therapist who promised to write up his or her clinical observations. This policy remained more or less unchanged from 1949 to 1966 and was in large part responsible for setting off the first wave of psychedelic research—the