DM Turner- The Esseential psychedelic guide

years. This story was published in Life magazine, May 13, 1957. It is an
excellent article with great pictures and a moving description of Wasson's
first mushroom voyage.
Wasson continued exploring the ethnology of mushrooms and other plant
sacraments used throughout the world, teaming up with the likes of famous
ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, and Albert Hofmann, the inventor
and discoverer of LSD. Through the Fifties and early Sixties the attitudes
regarding psychedelics throughout the world were generally positive.
Knowledge was confined primarily to the scientific and scholastic
communities, with some attention from the art and literary circles. Papers
and articles on psychedelics from this time period lack the hysteria, and the
connection of drug to sin that media introduced to the public in the
mid-Sixties.
Well, what happened during the Sixties, and how did the majority's attitude
toward psychedelics get so screwed up? Here's a simple explanation; the
U.S. government was afraid of the changes brought about by psychedelic
use. They used the physical, financial, and political forces they controlled to
spread fear and discredit the virtues of psychedelics.
None of what happened seems too surprising. It fits into the patterns that
human minds are frequently seen to operate in. The majority of the
population is still the type that resists anything new, any change
(neophobic). This mindset is continually reinforced through newspapers,
television, government, religions, schools, and the hierarchical structure of
society. All of these organizations are dominated by people with neophobic
mindsets. Most also possess the Judaeo-Christian concepts that: humans are
evil, sex is evil, we are beneath Gods, we will be eternally punished if we
disobey the rules of the church, or, heaven forbid, take a psychedelic and try
to experience an ecstatic state of happiness.
Many of the people reinforcing this mindset are not even aware that they are
spreading negativity. They are supporting what they believe is correct.
These people, convinced that the old morals are the "right way" of living,
have generated outright lies about psychedelics, feeling anything which
discourages drug use is justified. Of course, other members of these
organizations spread negative information with purely nefarious intentions,
such as political groups who instruct the CIA to sell cocaine for financing
covert military operations, and then preach that drugs are the tools of the
devil on TV.
The establishment's methods of spreading drug paranoia are numerous and
use all forms of media. Most of the population gets its information from the