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.
During Chile's late 1960s and early 1970s, the ideals of the hippie counterculture often clashed with Marxist politics. Patrick Barr-Melej's cultural history traces various countercultural currents, including sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll, and the spiritual movement Poder Joven led by Argentine guru "Silo." The book shows that both traditional conservatives and Marxists derided countercultural expression, with denunciations from right-wing newspapers like El Mercurio often nearly identical to those in Communist publications like El Siglo and Punto Final, though for different reasons: the Left objected to individualism over class mobilization, while the Right saw the counterculture as un-Christian and a threat to social hierarchy.