Users of LSD during the 60s were not just out for a joy ride. They were the vanguard of a new race. Jay Stevens says ( Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream , xiii-xiv): “the hippies were an attempt to push evolution, to jump the species toward a higher integration.”

He elaborates: “Think of the last hundred years as a symphony, a grand orchestration of crescendos and fugues, a tangle of melodies, one of which, a very faint but haunting refrain, goes like this: we are doomed unless a way can be found to speed up evolution, to consciously push the smart monkey to a higher level, to renew the assault on the gods, which was the secret purpose of all religions . . . . Does a magic trigger exist that is capable of shooting the species forward a few increments? Is there a door in the mid we can pass through.”

The answer was “a drug,or rather a family of drugs - the psychedelics - and in particular LSD.” It was “acid” because the hippies hoped it would scorch away “that Greco-Judaic-Christian patina.” It “was the hippie sacrament, a mind detergent capable of washing away years of social programming, a re-imprinting device, a consciousness-expander, a tool that would push us up the evolutionary ladder. Some even claimed LSD was a gift from God, given to mankind in order to save the planet from a nuclear finale.”