October 6, 1968: The Last Day

“On October 6, 1968, the Staggers-Dodd Act made LSD possession a federal crime. Stevens ends his book here. The research program that had produced over a thousand scientific papers stopped.”

Jay Stevens ends Storming Heaven with the legislative death of American psychedelic research. The Staggers-Dodd bill, signed into law on October 6, 1968, made possession of LSD a federal misdemeanor for the first time. The Controlled Substances Act of 1970 completed the classification: Schedule I, alongside heroin, no accepted medical use.

The research program that the scheduling ended had, by 1968, produced over one thousand published scientific papers. Thousands of patients had received LSD-assisted therapy for alcoholism, depression, end-of-life anxiety, and other conditions. International conferences had been held. Journals had published systematic outcome data. The clinical evidence was not the reason for the scheduling, the reason was political, and Stevens documents its components precisely: the counterculture's appropriation of LSD as a symbol, the racial politics of the Nixon administration, the institutional desire to control what could not be controlled.

The irony Stevens leaves with the reader is that the counterculture and the government that suppressed it were, in a sense, collaborating: the counterculture's insistence on using LSD as a political symbol made it impossible for the clinical tradition to maintain its separation from the spectacle. Leary told a generation to drop out; the government told a generation they'd go to jail for it; and the psychiatrists who had spent fifteen years building a careful clinical program watched both forces converge on the thing they'd built.

Stevens wrote in 1987. He did not know that fifty-five years after October 6, 1968, Johns Hopkins University would be running Phase 3 clinical trials of psilocybin for major depressive disorder, that MDMA-assisted therapy would have completed Phase 3 for PTSD, or that Oregon would have a licensed psilocybin services program. The story he ended at 1968 turned out to have a second chapter. He documented the interruption. The resumption was still being written.

Sources

• Stevens, Storming Heaven (1987)
• Controlled Substances Act legislative history (1970)
• Davis et al., JAMA Psychiatry (2021)