The Dark Ages of Psychedelic Research
The passage of the Controlled Substances Act in 1970, which placed LSD, psilocybin, DMT, mescaline, and MDMA (added in 1985) on Schedule I, effectively ended a quarter-century of psychedelic research. Between 1950 and 1970, over 1,000 peer-reviewed papers had been published on LSD alone, and psychedelics had shown promise in treating alcoholism, depression, anxiety, and end-of-life distress. The scheduling of these substances, combined with the political climate of the War on Drugs, made it nearly impossible to obtain federal approval or funding for human research.
For roughly 30 years -- from the early 1970s to the late 1990s -- almost no clinical psychedelic research was conducted anywhere in the world. The handful of exceptions included studies by Alexander Shulgin (working with novel compounds in his private lab) and a small number of European researchers who managed to obtain regulatory approval for studies with psilocybin and ayahuasca.
