Higher than the Shoulders of Giants; Or, a Scientist’s History of Drugs

Our dopamine economy, or what historian David Courtwright has called “limbic capitalism,” is driving this change, aided by transformational technology that has increased not just access but also drug numbers, variety, and potency.

while it had never occurred to Hofmann that his discovery would become a ‘pleasure drug’, he also . . . came to regard the youth culture’s adoption of LSD in the 1960s as an understandable response to the emptiness of what he described as a materialistic, industrialized, and spiritually impoverished society that had lost its connection to nature.