Albion Dreaming by Andy Roberts - LSD shaped British society and culture since the early 1950s

LSD history in Britain is framed through Andy Roberts' book Albion Dreaming, spanning the drug's introduction in the early 1950s and its wider cultural aftershocks. The narrative connects multiple institutions and subcultures: medical hopes that LSD could treat mental disorders, intelligence and Defence interest in using it for interrogation and military contexts, and countercultural celebration of acid as a route to spiritual experience and sensory transformation. Roberts positions LSD as politically contested and enduringly hard to categorize, noting that governments condemned it while its influence continued to evolve across decades, with this edition presented as revised and expanded from the original 2008 publication.