It’s no secret that L*D, M**A and other psychedelics have the ability to cast light on the miraculous reality hidden within our psyche. Almost immediately following the discovery of L*D less than a hundred years ago, psychedelics began playing a crucial role in the quest to understand the link between mind and matter. With an uncanny ability to reveal the mind’s remote frontiers and the unmapped a
reas of human consciousness, compounds such as L*D and M**A (better known as Ecstasy) have been proven to be extraordinarily effective in treating disorders such as post-traumatic stress—yet the drugs remain illegal, out of reach of the millions of people who could benefit from them. Anchoring Acid Test are the stories of three men: Rick Doblin, the founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), who has been fighting government prohibition of psychedelics for more than thirty years; Michael Mithoefer, a former emergency room physician who became a ground-breaking psychiatrist committed to psychedelic therapy research for PTSD; and his patient Nick Blackston, a former Marine who has suffered unfathomable mental anguish from the effects of brutal combat experiences in Iraq. Tom Shroder’s Acid Test covers the first heady years of experimentation in the fifties and sixties, through the backlash of the seventies and eighties when the drug subculture exploded and uncontrolled experimentation with street psychedelics led to a PR nightmare that would set therapeutic use back decades. Meticulously researched and astoundingly informative, Acid Test is at once a moving narrative of intertwining lives against an epic backdrop, and a striking and persuasive argument for the unprecedented healing properties of drugs that have for decades been characterized as dangerous, illicit substances. "Acid Test is an absolute triumph. All the moving parts mesh into an elegant non-fiction mechanism. It's a story that people may feel they probably know too much about, made fresh, surprising and epiphanous. Rick, Michael and Nick are exemplary leading men; each flawed, each resilient and each eccentric yet very familiar and very human. This is not a freak show, but a quest, inadvertent perhaps, but a serpentine journey of surpassing complexity and beauty. "As journalism and history, it is a fabulous piece of storytelling. As a public policy book, it will have a powerful effect on Congress and the various federal agencies involved. This really sharpens the debate, and brings matters to the fore; controversy will ensue." Tom Shroder is also the author of Old Souls: Compelling Evidence From Children Who Remember Previous Lives and The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived; A True Story of My Family.
