In 1953, during his Hollywood exile, Aldous Huxley ingested four-tenths of a gram of mescaline and waited to see what would happen. When he opened his eyes, he recalled, “I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his own creation”. In other words: pure California neon dust. Huxley was 59. In his bewitching The Doors of Perception, he argued that certain drugs could provide us with a necessary benediction – a breathing space. The rock band the Doors named themselves after Huxley’s book and he was included on the Sergeant Pepper album sleeve. In 1966, three years after Huxley’s death, LSD was criminalised as part of the United States’ so-called “war on drugs”. Johann Hari argues that the war had by then already reached draconian and mo