Matthew Oram. The Trials of Psychedelic Therapy: LSD Psychotherapy in America.
American Historical Review June 1, 2020 Claire D. Clark 2 citations
LSD research did not end abruptly with the 1965 Drug Abuse Control Amendments but continued into the mid-1970s, a gradual decline Matthew Oram describes as a 'quiet death' from bureaucratic cuts. Funders and regulators demanded randomized clinical trials—a design suited to nonpsychiatric drugs—for psychedelic therapy, which inherently involves hard-to-control personal and contextual factors and lacks a feasible placebo. Drawing on new primary sources, Oram argues that understanding this drawn-out decline is essential to current debates about psychedelic therapy's revival and examines how researchers struggled for legitimacy during a scientific paradigm shift and cultural crisis.