The counterculture was the 1960s movement of young people who rejected mainstream values, often through music, communal living, protest and drug use, including psychedelics. In Toronto its centre was Yorkville and, from 1968, Rochdale College (Henderson, 2006). In Mexico, Huautla de Jiménez had become a countercultural pilgrimage destination for people seeking mushrooms by the mid-1960s (Spiers et al., 2024).
Historians tie the movement to the end of the first wave of psychedelic research. Erika Dyck writes that LSD became linked to student protest, antiwar demonstrations and the counterculture, and that governments stepped in to restrict and then end formal research (Dyck, 2005). A 2025 study of researchers says psychedelics had left the laboratory and become a countercultural phenomenon by the mid-1960s (Barber et al., 2025).
The US listed psilocybin and psilocin in Schedule I in 1970 (Public Law 91-513). Whether the counterculture caused prohibition or simply coincided with it is still argued. Figures such as Timothy Leary, who moved from Harvard research into public advocacy, sit at the centre of that debate.
Sources
- Henderson, 2006, Toronto’s Hippie Disease
- Dyck, 2005: Flashback, psychiatric experimentation with LSD
- Spiers et al., 2024
- Barber, Gardner and Carter, 2025
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