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Zusatztext 71626121 Informationen zum Autor Tom Shroder is an award-winning journalist, editor, and author of Old Souls and Acid Test , a transformative look at the therapeutic powers of psychedelic drugs in the treatment of PTSD. As editor of The Washington Post Magazine , he conceived and edited two Pulitzer Prize–winning feature stories. His most recent editing project, Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time , by Brigid Schulte, was a New York Times best-seller. Klappentext "A book that should start a long-overdue national conversation." -Dave Barry With the F.D.A. agreeing to new trials to test MDMA (better known as Ecstasy) as a treatment for PTSD-which, if approved, could be available as a drug by 2021-Acid Test is leading the charge in an evolving conversation about psychedelic drugs. Despite their current illegality, many Americans are already familiar with their effects. Yet while LSD and MDMA have proven extraordinarily effective in treating anxiety disorders such as PTSD, they still remain off-limits to the millions who might benefit from them. Through the stories of three very different men, award-winning journalist Tom Shroder covers the drugs' roller-coaster history from their initial reception in the 1950s to the negative stereotypes that persist today. At a moment when popular opinion is rethinking the potential benefits of some illegal drugs, and with new research coming out every day, Acid Test is a fascinating and informative must-read. Foreword In 1975 I was a twenty-one-year-old college journalist, home on spring break in Sarasota, Florida, when I noticed a blurb in the local news- paper about a charismatic hippie with a pet wolf who was building himself a spectacular house in the woods near town. I decided to go out and see it for myself. I don’t remember anything about the blurb. I doubt it mentioned anything about the inf luence of psychedelic drugs in this project. But I am guessing that I inferred it, because while I didn’t much care about techniques of home building—nor would my college-student readers—I was extremely interested in the implications of the psychedelic experience. I’m looking at a taped-together, Xeroxed copy of the story that resulted from that visit. Still no mention of drugs, but there it is between the lines. I wrote about the philosophy of the young builder, a guy named Rick Doblin, just a year older than me. It was about try- ing to live authentically, guided by an inner light rather than society’s preconceived ideas; consciously working to discover and create his own destiny rather than trudging along the rutted tracks set before him. These were the kinds of notions floating around a certain subculture in those days; it was evident in the woodland home itself, with its giant, rainbow-themed, spiritually suggestive stained-glass window. Maybe we discussed psychedelics, maybe we didn't. But they were in the air. I myself was not entirely unfamiliar. Under the influence of the psilocybin mushrooms my friends and I had learned to pluck from cow dung in the rural fields not far from campus, then boil into tea and drink, I had seen the world-and myself-from a novel vantage point. It was like being able, for a few precious hours, to climb above your life and view it from on high, a perspective every bit as revealing as seeing a too-familiar landscape from the top of a mountain. Instead of indi vidual cornstalks or oak trees or buildings, you saw checkerboard pat terns of fields, serpentine forests following the course of a river, villages arrayed around ascending spires of churches. You saw, for once, how it all fit together. One experience stands out in my memory, because it is something that I have carried with me, every day since, for four decades. As the drug took effect, instead of feeling the usual lift, I grew inc...
