Schedule I
California banned LSD on 6 October 1966; the protest was a party in the park. Federal prohibition followed in 1968, and the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 put it in Schedule I, no accepted medical use, high potential for abuse. The 1971 UN Convention exported that judgement worldwide. The point worth holding onto: scheduling did not merely criminalise possession, it made legitimate research administratively impossible, which is why the clinical literature simply stops for forty years.
Part of LSD
9 moments in this segment.
- - College LSD party. A 1966 news special on campus use. The tone of coverage flipped inside about eighteen months, from curiosity to alarm.
- - Test subjects, French television. French television filming an LSD experiment in 1966, while it was still legal almost everywhere.
- - A medical experiment, filmed. Swiss television footage of a supervised session, made in the country where the drug was invented, and where research would resume half a century later.
- - A documentary report on the controversy. Contemporary reporting from the year the argument was being had in public, before it was settled by statute.
- - Governor Ronald Reagan on LSD - 1966 (Historic Films archival). ) (1966).
- - Haight-Ashbury reports back. News from the Haight in 1967, by which point California had already banned LSD and the neighbourhood had become the story.
- - Public enemy number one. Nixon declares drug abuse public enemy number one in June 1971. The Controlled Substances Act had already put LSD in Schedule I, no accepted medical use, high potential for abuse, which is the classification that ended human research for a generation.
- - The Controlled Substances Act. The 1970 law that built the scheduling system. Placing LSD in Schedule I did not just criminalise possession; it made the paperwork for legitimate study close to impossible, which is why the clinical record simply stops.
- - The convention that made it global. The 1971 UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances exported the American schedule to most of the world, closing research in countries that had no domestic reason to close it.
