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How historical, social, and cultural forces shaped the psychedelic experience in midcentury America, from CIA LSD experiments the Harvard Psilocybin Project

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1 The Experimental Psychosis Movement
Chapter 2 LSD, the CIA, and the Military
Chapter 3 From Psychotomimetics to Psychedelics
Chapter 4 Experiments In Set and Setting
Chapter 5 Psychedelics, Creativity, and Culture
Chapter 6 Psychedelics Go to Silicon Valley
Chapter 7 The Psychedelic Controversy
Chapter 8 American Trip
Chapter 9 LSD and the 1960s
Chapter 10 The Future of Set and Setting
Bibliography
Notes
Index

About the Author

Ido Hartogsohn is Assistant Professor in the Graduate Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Bar Ilan University.

Reviews

"Hartogsohn's book is a seminal contribution to his discipline and the larger issue of extrapharmacological factors shaping drug effects."
–Frontiers in Pharmacology

"American Trip presents a timely and invaluable guide to the crucial lessons that twentiethcentury psychedelic history provides for the current psychedelic renaissance, and to using set and setting as a strategic tool for ensuring the healthy integration of psychedelics into society."
– Rick Doblin, Executive Director of MAPS

"In clearly and rigorously exploring the single most consequential idea in psychedelic studies — the notion of set and setting — American Trip not only insightfully reframes the many histories of LSD, but offers a humanistic and reflexive alternative to the often simplistic discourse of today’s growing psychedelic industry."
– Erik Davis, author of High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies

"American Trip guides its readers through the reflexive arts and sciences of set and setting used to study psychedelics, beckoning towards an intense pluriverse, full of beguiling guises, strange twists, and thricetold tales.
– Nancy D. Campbell, Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; author of OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose

"In this landmark book, Hartogsohn enlarges the traditional parameters of set and setting by including the larger socialcultural matrix. This expanded definition provides a more sophisticated understanding of how nondrug factors determine the nature of any psychedelic drug experience."
– Rick Strassman, MD, Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry, University of New Mexico School of Medicine and author of DMT: The Spirit Molecule

"American Trip amounts to a sociological enlightenment of our drug culture. Hartogsohn’s vibrant book shows how 1960s America made psychedelics do what they did and suggests that these wondrous molecules will do something altogether different in other times and places.
– Nicolas Langlitz, Associate Professor of Anthropology, New School for Social Research; author of Neuropsychedelia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research since the Decade of the Brain