The consumption of LSD and similar psychedelic drugs in New York City led to a great deal of cultural innovations that formed a unique psychedelic subculture from the early 1960s onwards. Historians and other commentators have offered conflicting views on this phenomenon by using either an epidemiological approach or by giving drug users more agency. The present study sides with the latter category to offer a new social history of LSD, but problematizes this topic in a sophisticated way by understanding psychedelic drug use as a social fact that in turn produces meaning for its consumers. It analyses the multiple cultural features of psychedelia through the lenses of politics, science, religion, and art, but also looks at the utopian and radical off-shoots of that subculture. To balance this thematic approach, it historicises the subculture by analysing its early days and discussing its origins, and then by pointing to the factors that led to its metamorphosis towards the end of the 1960s. In order to give LSD consumers a clearer voice, this dissertation is based on memoirs, correspondence and interviews that are used to balance press coverage gleaned from archival collections. With this wide array of primary sources supplemented by up-to-date secondary literature, it argues that the use of LSD and psychedelics led to a rich subculture that can be explained by the inherent complexity of the psychedelic experience. In turn, the plurality of opinions regarding the meaning and purposes of the experience led to tensions and polarisations within the large subculture, as well as with other drug subcultures and outsiders leery of illicit drug use. In doing so, this dissertation contributes to the social history of illicit substance consumption and adds to the fields of urban history and the history of subcultures, and makes a case for understanding LSD and psychedelics as a unique category of forbidden drugs that differ vastly in their cultural meaning from other drugs.

La musique psychédélique britannique est née grâce à la conjonction de quatre facteurs : 1. Un contexte socio-économique et culturel extrêmement favorable. 2. La présence simultanée d'un nombre significatif de musiciens de grand talent 3. La disponibilité de drogues psychédéliques sur le territoire britannique. 4. Une série d'innovations technologiques qui ont modifié les perspectives de création sonore. Cette thèse analyse l'interaction entre ces quatre éléments et en détermine l'importance respective pour la genèse du style musical

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<p>This dissertation is a rhetorical-historiographic analysis of the emergence and dissolution of a model of therapy, one that showed promise in the 1950s as a treatment for a deadly disease (alcoholism) using a recently developed pharmaceutical drug (LSD-25). By the time this treatment model, called “psychedelic therapy,” was fully developed and ready to be tested, the rhetoric surrounding LSD in the 1960s public sphere had already turned mainstream psychiatry against the drug. Psychedelic therapy became rhetorically inextricable from the counterculture that grew out of its fringes, although its basic principles were actually borrowed from the widely-accepted Alcoholics Anonymous recovery movement. Moreover, the therapy only worked if the patient took the drug in a context designed to facilitate a particular type of experience, akin to a spiritual conversion. This method flew in the face of psychiatry’s insistence on double-blind placebo-controlled trials, which could only account for the drug’s strictly biochemical effects, regardless of therapeutic context. Through my analysis of archival sources, letters, conference proceedings, and research publications, I argue that psychedelic therapy’s failure to gain legitimacy despite its early success indicates how attributions of  rhetorical action (or lack thereof) serve to mark out the boundaries of discursive arenas. These demarcations of <em>rhetorical </em>legitimacy thus allow for disciplinary legitimacy, even while the techniques, strategies, and materials of particular rhetorical appeals circulate among disciplines and other arenas without regard for these limits of legitimate persuasion. A drug may undeniably affect a person’s behavior, but to assert that the drug is persuasive will necessarily raise questions of legitimacy that must be resolved before it can be incorporated into a set of disciplinary practices.</p>