The Masquerade traces LSD from Cold War secrecy and CIA-linked experimentation to celebrity culture, spiritual searching, and today's political and therapeutic revival

LSD sits at the center of a modern cultural history that connects clandestine intelligence experiments, postwar psychiatry, countercultural revolt, celebrity fascination, and renewed medical interest. Mike Jay follows how a single psychedelic moved across radically different settings while repeatedly reshaping public ideas about consciousness, risk, freedom, and control. Cold War secrecy and CIA-adjacent research form one strand, while artists, musicians, spiritual seekers, and social elites drive another. The story links laboratory investigation and psychological experimentation with media spectacle, underground distribution, and moral panic. Contemporary therapeutic and political revival gives LSD a new context, but the substance's earlier cycles of promise, backlash, and reinvention remain crucial for understanding why it still carries scientific, cultural, and symbolic weight far beyond drug policy alone.