posted February 11, 2015 #
It's a lengthy one but this New Yorker piece,
The Trip Treatment, does a deep dive on the history of psychedelics in medical treatment and the recent resurgence in investigating the usefulness of the drugs in cancer and anxiety treatments. The drugs are still classified as Schedule 1 (illegal) and sample sizes for recent experiments are extremely small so it's tough to really draw any sort of worthwhile conclusions just yet but that doesn't make the history any less interesting.
The piece is filled with a lot of great quotes - particularly from those who received the drugs in the late 60's - and some truly fascinating factoids, i.e. English psychiatrist Humphry Osmond coined the term "psychedelic" in 1957 within a letter to Aldous Huxley.
