[New post] ‘I Was a Storm of Confetti’: Michael Pollan On Why It’s a Good Idea To Lose Your Self

Hope Reese posted: "Hope Reese | Longreads | May 2018 | 17 minutes (4,468 words) On April 19, 1943, the Swiss chemist Albert Hoffmann ingested a quarter milligram of LSD to confirm that it had caused the oddly fantastical journey he had experienced the day before. To his su" New post on Longreads 'I Was a Storm of Confetti': Michael Pollan On Why It's a Good Idea To Lose Your Self by Hope Reese Hope Reese | Longreads | May 2018 | 17 minutes (4,468 words) On April 19, 1943, the Swiss chemist Albert Hoffmann ingested a quarter milligram of LSD to confirm that it had caused the oddly fantastical journey he had experienced the day before. To his surprise and delight, he was not mistaken –– the drug opened up a new window of consciousness. The discovery caught the attention of other researchers, and by the 1950s, psychedelic testing was in full bloom, yielding promising results for people suffering from neurosis, schizophrenia, and psychopathy. But as counter-cultural experimentation progressed and the drugs were taken out of the lab and into the wild –– think of Tim Leary, dubbed "the most dangerous man in America" by Nixon, and his controversial LSD experiments –– there was a backlash. According to the writer Michael Pollan, society "turned on a dime" against psychedelics. "You'd have to go back to the Inquisition and Galileo for a time when scientific inquiry was stigmatized quite the way this was," he tells me. "And it's a measure of how powerful that backlash was and how threatened powerful interests felt about what psychedelics were doing to society." Read more of this post Hope Reese | May 30, 2018 at 8:00 am | Tags: Books, drugs, interviews, Michael POllan, mysticism, psychedelics | Categories: Books, Profiles & Interviews, Story | URL: https://wp.me/p4KhvY-s6v Like Unsubscribe to no longer receive posts from Longreads. Change your email settings at Manage Subscriptions. Trouble clicking? Copy and paste this URL into your browser: http://longreads.com/2018/05/30/michael-pollan-on-why-its-a-good-idea-to-lose-your-self/ Thanks for flying with WordPress.com