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An Unseen Threat – The Strange Death of Psychedelic Science

From CIA experiments to institutional censorship, this investigation tracks how ego dissolution went from medical breakthrough to taboo, and why it's still avoided in today's psychedelic revival.

A photorealistic image of a single, open, gunmetal grey filing cabinet drawer from the 1960s, viewed from a slightly high angle.

Between 1950 and 1965, a promising field of medical research produced over 1,000 scientific papers and dozens of books. In mainstream medical settings, more than 40,000 patients received psychedelic therapy. Institutions like Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the National Institutes of Health all backed this research.

Yet by 1970, the US government classified these same substances as having “no accepted medical use,” killing off decades of research overnight.

The official line blames the excesses of the 1960s counterculture. The evidence from the period tells a different story. The research was not just exploring new medicines; it was documenting an experience called ‘ego dissolution’. In simple terms, this is the dissolving of one’s sense of a fixed, individual self. This concept posed a direct challenge to the Western model of identity. The pushback was systematic because the perceived threat was broad.

To understand what happened, we have to look at the actions of the powerful institutions. Their decisions, laid out on a timeline, do not add up.

The Promise Before the Prohibition

In the 1950s, this was not fringe medicine. Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Switzerland freely distributed research-grade LSD (as Delysid) and psilocybin (as Indocybin) to any legitimate researcher who asked for them. Six major international conferences on LSD and consciousness were held, drawing senior researchers from across the world.

Psychiatrists like Humphry Osmond and Sidney Cohen were mainstream clinicians, not hippies. The defining experience they studied was ego dissolution, that sudden loss of the boundary between the self and the world. At the time, this was not seen as a dangerous side effect. It was the point. The results were compelling. Dr Osmond’s trials at Saskatchewan Mental Hospital found that over 50% of alcoholics stopped drinking after a single high-dose session that induced ego dissolution. In a 1960 review of 5,000 cases, Dr Cohen reported that depressed patients who experienced “complete ego loss” showed a 70% improvement rate.

This research was not confined to North America. Australia had Dr Lance Howard Whitaker conducting clinical trials. In France, researchers explored psychedelics but often through a different lens, framing them within “shock therapy” or “model psychosis” paradigms. This means they viewed the experience as a temporary, drug-induced madness to be studied, rather than a healing journey.

Between 1950 and 1965, six international conferences on LSD and consciousness were held, attended by leading psychiatrists and researchers.

Then, in 1965, Sandoz stopped all production and distribution. The official reason was to distance the company from sensationalist media reports and the growing black market. Fair enough, except this came a full year before LSD was made illegal in the US and five years before the Controlled Substances Act. The head of Sandoz’s pharmaceutical division, Arthur Stoll, was known to be personally concerned about the societal implications of a substance that could cause such profound changes in consciousness. Sandoz hobbled legitimate science long before any law required it. It was the first, critical step in the suppression.

A scene from the 1960s showing a corporate desk. A hand in a suit cuff places a small research bottle labelled 'Delysid (LSD-25)' into a box.
Long before any law required it, the primary supplier of research-grade psychedelics shut off the tap. It was the first, critical step in the suppression.

The Double Game – MK-ULTRA and The War on Drugs

Here is where the contradictions pile up. While the public face of government was warning about the dangers of psychedelics, the CIA was secretly running Project MK-ULTRA from 1953 to 1973. Its goal was to investigate mind control, and LSD was its primary tool.

The agency conducted non-consensual experiments on thousands of US and Canadian citizens, violating the Nuremberg Code. One notable victim was the army scientist Frank Olson, who died under contested circumstances after being covertly dosed with LSD. The stated goal of MK-ULTRA was to induce “illogical thinking, impulsiveness, mental confusion, and enhanced dependency”.

The paradox is stark: at the exact same time the government was building a case that these substances had no legitimate use, its own intelligence agency was using them as a potential weapon. When the public eventually learned about MK-ULTRA, the association between psychedelics and state-sponsored mind control became fixed. This permanently poisoned the well for legitimate therapeutic inquiry, making it easier for authorities to paint the entire field as dangerous.

In 1973, CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MK-ULTRA files destroyed. Most of what we know comes from a small cache of misfiled financial documents and testimony given to the Church Committee in the mid-1970s. This was not standard procedure. It was the deliberate erasure of evidence.

The Catch-22 of Schedule I

The final nail in the coffin was the US Controlled Substances Act of 1970. It placed psychedelics in Schedule I, the most restrictive category, reserved for drugs with a “high potential for abuse” and, crucially, “no currently accepted medical use”.

This created a perfect, self-perpetuating trap. To prove a substance has medical use, you need to conduct clinical trials. But to get approval for those trials on a Schedule I substance is almost impossible. The classification itself prevents the very research that might overturn it.

The academic world was already turning away. In 1963, Harvard’s administration fired Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, signalling a clear institutional rejection of their controversial work long before the federal ban. After 1970, federal funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for psychedelic research vanished for nearly fifty years. The systematic suppression of academic inquiry had begun.

The first new NIH grant for psilocybin research was awarded in 2021. It totalled $4 million. The annual NIH budget exceeds $45 billion.

Universities shut down their programmes. Studying Schedule I substances became, as psychiatric researcher Andrew Penn later put it, “career suicide”.

Beyond the Hippies – The Deeper Threats

The real story is that ego dissolution, as a concept, posed a threat to Western institutions on multiple fronts.

  • Psychology: Western psychology was built on the idea of strengthening the individual ego. Therapies were designed to make people more ‘well-adjusted’, not to dissolve their boundaries. Anything that dismantled the ego looked like psychosis.
  • Economics: Economic systems built on ego-driven consumerism faced disruption from experiences that reduced material attachment. Letting go of the self does not sell products.
  • Religion: Established religious institutions saw direct mystical experiences as bypassing their authority. The Buddhist concept of ‘anatta’, or no-self, directly contradicts the Western emphasis on a permanent, individual soul seeking personal salvation.
  • Science: The dominant materialist paradigm, which holds that consciousness is merely a product of the physical brain, struggled to accommodate subjective reports of unity or awareness existing outside the body.

The Buddhist concept of anatta, or ‘no-self’, stands in direct opposition to the Western idea of a permanent, individual soul. This was a fundamental philosophical conflict, and it helps explain why institutional resistance to the research was so strong.

Put simply, ego dissolution was not just a challenge for medicine, but for the entire framework of Western individualism.

International Patterns and The Information Vacuum

The suppression did not stop at the US border. The 1971 UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances, heavily shaped by US lobbying, extended the prohibitionist model worldwide. Countries with promising research programmes were pressured to conform and shut them down.

At the same time, an information vacuum was created.

The blacklisting went beyond individual journals; the American Psychological Association officially refused a request to create a new division for transpersonal psychology, a clear act of institutional rejection. Media coverage, once optimistic, fixated on danger narratives. High-profile cases where LSD use was implicated, like the Manson murders, dominated headlines, while thousands of successful therapeutic outcomes went completely unreported. A feedback loop of bad press and negative public response fuelled the moral panic that justified the prohibition.

The Legislative Cascade: From US Law to Global Prohibition

  • 1965–1966

    Sandoz Halts Research Supply

    Citing mounting government pressure and media controversy, Sandoz Pharmaceuticals ceases production and distribution of research-grade LSD (Delysid) and psilocybin (Indocybin). This move cripples the legitimate supply for scientists years before the substances are formally outlawed.

  • 1968

    First US Federal Penalties

    The US Congress passes Public Law 90-639, which introduces federal penalties for the unauthorised possession of LSD and other hallucinogens. This signals a decisive shift from state-level controls to a coordinated federal criminalisation effort.

  • 1970

    The Controlled Substances Act

    President Richard Nixon signs the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) into law. Its cornerstone is the Schedule I classification, which designates major psychedelics as having "no currently accepted medical use" and a "high potential for abuse," effectively halting most legitimate scientific research in the United States overnight.

  • 1971

    UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances

    Heavily influenced by the US "War on Drugs" agenda, the United Nations adopts a convention designed to establish global control over psychedelics. The treaty compels signatory nations to implement strict controls, effectively exporting the American prohibitionist model worldwide.

  • Early 1970s

    Global Prohibition Cascade

    In the wake of the UN Convention, allied nations including the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia align their domestic laws with the new international standard. Research hubs that had been active in these countries are shut down, consolidating the global suppression of psychedelic science.

The Renaissance and Its Limitations

Today, a “psychedelic renaissance” is underway, but the old patterns of control have simply changed shape. The new focus is on medicalisation and commercialisation. Companies lobby regulators to create frameworks that favour patentable compounds and scalable treatments that can be neatly integrated into existing healthcare models.

Profound ego dissolution is often sidelined in favour of “manageable” alterations and measurable symptom reduction. The risk is that the field will be domesticated, its radical potential neutered to fit the very systems it once challenged.

A hand-drawn organisational chart from the 1970s, pinned to a corkboard. It maps psychedelic research funding, but key decision-making boxes have been blacked out and arrows lead to question marks.
The trail goes cold by design. Key questions remain unanswered because the records are incomplete.

What Remains Hidden

Key questions remain unanswered. The specific officials within the NIH and FDA who made the pivotal defunding decisions are still not identified. The financial flows showing where the research money was diverted have never been traced.

The marginalisation of Indigenous knowledge also continues. The exploitation of the Mazatec shaman María Sabina by the American author R. Gordon Wasson is a key example of how Western “discovery” often extracts, appropriates, and erases millennia of sophisticated Indigenous practice.

The shutdown of psychedelic research was unique in scientific history. While figures like Copernicus faced fierce resistance for challenging established paradigms, no other scientific field has been made literally illegal to study. This was not just scientific disagreement; it was legislative strangulation. The gaps in the evidence are not a bug; they are the central feature of the whole affair. Until the original records surface, the full story will remain incomplete, by design.

The questions worth asking now:
Who controls which research questions are permitted? Who benefits from keeping the radical potential of ego dissolution at arm’s length? And what would science, and society, look like if we allowed the evidence to speak for itself?

Sources

Sources include: Declassified CIA MK-ULTRA documents detailing mind control experiments; US Congressional records including the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 and Church Committee findings; internal communications from Sandoz Pharmaceuticals regarding cessation of LSD production; testimonies from researchers like Andrew Penn and Stanislav Grof on career impacts; academic analyses of psychedelic medicalization from Harvard’s Petrie-Flom Center; NIH funding records showing 50-year research gap; UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances documentation; contemporary critiques of “corporadelic” influence on research directions.

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