Spotlight: Psychedelic Sensationalism: An Analysis of the Schedule Classification of Psilocybin (Wood, 2023)
https://ejournals.library.vanderbilt.edu/index.php/vurj/article/view/5403
The importance of the social perception of different drugs in determining their eventual classification is abundantly clear. While the biochemical properties of psilocybin and other psychedelics raised few concerns, the drugs’ associations with the rebellious younger generation posed a clear threat to the American social order. Psilocybin’s importance in the hippie movement is of particular importance given the violence that hippies faced in the years leading up to the Controlled Substances Act. The persecution of hippies only intensified as a result of the Act, which supports the argument that strict enforcement of the prohibition of psilocybin had less to do with protecting the American public from the horrors of drug use and more to do with protecting the public from counterculture.