As a trainee psychiatrist 20 years ago, I recall hearing a senior colleague recount being given lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) in the 1950s as an experiment at work and being taken to the old Glasgow Airport to watch the planes taking off and landing. Although everything was vivid and meaningful at the time for him I did not get the impression that he gained anything of lasting value for his work as a psychotherapist from this experience in the three decades to follow.

British psychiatry's dalliance with LSD in the treatment of neurosis and alcoholism from 1953 onwards through to the mid-1960s when it fell out of favour pre-dates the widespread use of antidepressants as a treatment for neurotic conditions. It also pre-dates the opprobrium that was to attach to LSD-25 or ‘acid’ in the cultural conflicts between the establishment and the hippie generation. This conflict led to LSD's class A status in the Misuse of Drugs legislation that followed in 1971. The psychiatric story is only one aspect of this ‘popular’ history which is an excellent piece of high-quality journalism, ranging across the interests of the military and security services in Albert Hofmann's ‘problem child’ as either a weapon to disable the enemy or a ‘truth drug’ for interrogation, to much detail on the counter-cultural psychedelic movement from the 1960s up to the present.

The story presented by Roberts fits very well with Mike Jay's comment that the history of mind-altering drugs often follows a three-stage Frankenstein narrative: in the first stage the drug is discovered and celebrated; in the second it escapes from the laboratory, taking on a life of its own, and is perceived as a menace to the prevailing order; finally, in the last stage the powers that be try their best to capture and control the ‘monster’. ^{Reference Jay1} There is no doubt from the account here that the high priests of the counter-culture who advocated that all should try LSD at least once in their life wanted to overturn the fundamental values of our materialistic culture. Timothy Leary is refused entry to the UK at various points in this story and the memoranda of the customs official refusing him entry are enlightening. Also of interest is that the LSD revolutionaries wanted to go further than even Ronnie Laing would countenance and Laing refused to associate himself with distributing free LSD to a large number of young people simultaneously as a social experiment in the UK. (Laing is also mentioned as conducting LSD psychotherapy with Sean Connery who was feeling insecure after the success of Goldfinger in 1964.)

Roberts's work is a very useful addition to the literature as it complements Jay Stevens' earlier account from the USA, Storming Heaven, ^{Reference Stevens2} and also represents original research in the oral history tradition using the medium of the internet.

Albion Dreaming is not a work by a medical historian and it generously points the way to the need for more detailed scholarship on this topic, such as is starting to emerge – for example, Dr Erika Dyck's work on Canadian psychiatrists' use of LSD in the 1950s and 1960s. Similar work for the UK would be of interest.

The story remains highly topical at a time when the classification of drugs of misuse in the Misuse of Drugs act has become a political football – witness cannabis recently moving from class B to C and then back again. The disregard for expert testimony on the relative safety of LSD was as strong in the high-profile court cases of the 1960s as it is today for LSD's ranking as 14th out of 20 in the league table of drug harmfulness ^{Reference Nutt, King, Saulsbury and Blakemore3} produced by the expert panel of Blakemore, Nutt and others. Still, LSD remains a class A drug. Interestingly, the use of LSD has been declining in recent years perhaps because of the range of other psychedelics available.

My main quibble with Roberts's book is that he underplays the risk of psychiatric harm which he is right in saying has often been overplayed by the media. As a corrective, I would refer readers to the review by Abraham & Aldridge ^{Reference Abraham and Aldridge4} but otherwise commend this book as an engaging work of cultural history.