> "In Berkeley, as well as across the bay in Palo Alto, young people seeking a new way to live had begun using LSD to break down conventional social barriers. Until then, the drug had been available in America only to those conducting serious medical research. In 1959, the poet Allen Ginsberg took LSD for the first time, at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto. A year later, the novelist Ken Kesey was given acid at the Veterans Hospital in Menlo Park as part of a federally funded program in which volunteers were paid twenty dollars a session to ingest hallucinogens."
As far as the psychedelic movement in general, LSD was only one of several substances, such as mescaline and psilocybin, that came to popular attention via a variety of routes, such as Aldous Huxley's "The Doors of Perception" (1954), and R Gordon Wasson's 1950s-era research into traditional psychedelic mushroom use in Mexico (a research program also secretly funded by the CIA's MK-ULTRA program).
Apparently the members of the CIA's hallucinogen program used to dose each other all the time in the 1950s, until they found it would cause unpredictable behavior in some people - like a sudden attack of psychedelic-inspired moral conscience, see the Frank Olson incident for example. Sort of a 'while tripping my brains out I suddenly realized that manufacturing biological weapons was wrong!' type of story:
https://wariscrime.com/new/scientist-frank-olson-killed-by-t...