LSD Doesn’t Care Who You Vote For

Psychedelics are tools, not truths. What they build depends on the builder.

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Mar 17, 2025

Once tied to hippies, peace, and leftist counterculture, psychedelics are now being embraced by big pharma, speculative investors, and right-leaning groups.

Though still largely illegal, psychedelic use retains its countercultural edge — but the narrative of revolutionary drugs used by outsiders is shifting.

Since prohibition began, advocates have pushed for psychedelics to be accepted not just for healing, but for pleasure, creativity, and personal growth.

As psychedelics inch towards acceptance by governments, universities, and big business, the old, 60’s inspired sense of righteous change may be dropping away.

I wasn’t there in the 60’s, but this passage about the time by Hunter S. Thompson from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas always colored my sense of what some of it was:

"San Francisco in the middle 60's was a very special time and place to be a part of. But no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time in the world, whatever it meant. There was madness in any direction at any hour; you could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that I think was the handle. That sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil."

Thompson was intensely political. He ran for Sheriff in Colorado in 1970 and lost, with his platform of decriminalizing drugs, tearing up roads and planting grass, and disarming police.

Thompson instead continued working as a journalist covering politics — often aggressively attacking right-wing figures of the time, like Republican President Richard Nixon.

That spirit — the belief that psychedelics stood in opposition to corrupt, conservative power — has long endured in psychedelic lore.

But like Thompson himself, the truth is far more complicated. Assumptions, like all Republicans are evil squares or every psychedelic user is a peace and love type, just don’t stick.

Recent research suggests these generalizations were always a farce.

Psychedelic Extremism on the Left

“You don’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” — Bob Dylan

In the 60s and 70s, the FBI was hunting a group of student organizers splintered into underground cells in major cities across America. Known as The Weather Underground, the group reportedly viewed LSD as a revolutionary new tool — using it both as a so-called "truth drug" and as a sort of ideological litmus test.

The group had stated in their publication Prairie Fire, that “Our intention is to disrupt the empire... to incapacitate it, to put pressure on the cracks,” and proclaimed to be "against everything good and decent in honky America.”

The group went on to commit armed robberies to fund bombings of the US State Department and Pentagon. The Weather Underground eventually took credit for 25 bombings and numerous fatalities before being caught and imprisoned.

Wrapped up in the counter-culture, the group even broke Tim Leary out of jail with $ 20,000 in funding from The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a group known for the mass production of LSD at the height of the psychedelic era.

Mind Control & Psychedelics

“While the Weathermen are an extreme case, the degree to which acid accentuated their militant tendencies underscores an essential truth about the drug: LSD does not make people more or less political; rather, it reinforces and magnifies what’s already in their heads.” — Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams

The Weathermen weren’t LSD evangelists like Leary, and none have openly said LSD radicalized them — but it’s possible LSD still played a role in shaping their politics.

There is a scientific basis for the idea. Psychedelics are known to increase suggestibility, openness to new ideas, and even shift belief systems.

This tracks with the psychedelic principle of set and setting — the notion that one’s mindset and environment strongly shape the nature of a trip (including the culture one trips in). That “setting” could just as easily be a commune, a therapy session, or a basement full of radical revolutionaries.

Imagine taking LSD with a bunch of Weather Underground revolutionaries and receiving a full sensory download of Marxist thought — such an event could be life-changing, for better or for worse.

Of course, with psychedelics, there are no guarantees. Often described as non-specific amplifiers, it's tough to predict exactly what psychedelics will amplify. If psychedelics can open people to new truths, they might also open the door to false ones.

All that said, explicitly giving people LSD and telling them what to think hasn’t worked out so well in the past.

The CIA spent millions learning the hard way through the secret MK-ULTRA program. The CIA thought psychedelics might work as a truth serum or mind control drug, staging reckless experiments that resulted in deaths, colossal damage to reputation, and zero success in brainwashing anyone.

The Modern Psychedelic Movement

During MK-ULTRA, CIA agents would secretly dose one another with LSD — often without consent. Strangely, these spies and bureaucrats didn’t quit their jobs to start communes or seek enlightenment in India.

Spiritual awakening, of course, was never the CIA’s goal (with a few odd exceptions), but the experiments serve as a reminder: psychedelics don’t reliably turn people into hippies — despite the lingering cultural myth.

That reputation held steady for decades until the recent boom of psychedelic research began to shift the narrative. For a while, this was a welcome change. The old stigma of psychedelics as dangerous, woo-woo drugs began to drop away.

But as psychedelics moved into the mainstream, a host of new problems began to surface.

Instead of creepy mind control agendas or an overhaul of Western society towards utopia, we now have biotech bros banging on the FDA's doors with patents and profit projections.

The future of legal, medicalized psychedelics remains unclear. MDMA failed to cross the FDA finish line last summer and ketamine is officially on the loose with a pretty mixed bag of results. Some folks say they are healed, while others pay thousands of dollars for off-label infusions without any follow-up care.

The situation is further complicated by allegations of abuse in clinical trials, a mad dash for patents, dubious data, and the pursuit of profits (8.7 billion market valuation by 2033, anyone?).

Republicans Be Tripping?

Modern psychedelics come with quite a few puzzles to be solved — many tied to capitalism, which (depending on your perspective) leans heavily toward the right.

And yet, it seems a strong possibility that Republicans will be the folks to push psychedelics across the finish line.

We now live in an alternate reality where progressives are outraged at right-wingers' sudden enthusiasm for psychedelics. A psychedelic cosmic joke.

But it’s happening.

Take the appointment of Robert F Kennedy Jr. as the US Secretary of Health — a pretty big deal in increasingly fractured psychedelic subgroups.

RFK has made his views on psychedelics pretty clear, tweeting in support of psychedelic reform. He even sent his own son to an ayahuasca retreat.

Just because RFK likes shrooms doesn't mean psychedelics will get the green light. For one, he’s not at the FDA — he’s Health Secretary. He has influence, but he won’t be fast-tracking approvals on his own.

RFK’s very public disdain for big pharma seems at odds with the current trajectory of legal psychedelics, too. Pushing through any kind of legal model without mountains of profits on the table seems pretty unlikely — although perhaps veterans could be a starting point.

The fact that a bunch of Republicans are even discussing legal psychedelics represents a shift from hippie values once orbiting psychedelics.

I wonder what Hunter S. Thompson would write now.

Would he have talked about machine elves on Joe Rogan?

The Nazi Psychonaut

The right-wing, the folks Hunter S. Thompson presumably called the "the forces of old and evil" — has actually been entrenched in psychedelics and altered states for quite some time.

Brian Pace and Neşe Devenot, members of the leftist psychedelic activist group Psymposia, have detailed how modern far-right commentators have been candid and open about psychedelic use in their paper on right-wing psychedelia.

One early example was Ernst Jünger — a decorated Nazi officer who literally invented the word psychonaut after experiencing mescaline. Meanwhile, other Nazis conducted experiments with mescaline on unwilling participants at the Dachau concentration camp.

In more recent times, notorious far-right voices like Andrew Anglin, operator of The Daily Stormer, have spoken publicly about his psychedelic use. Gavin McInnis, founder of the Proud Boys and co-founder of Vice, has even offered his listeners advice on navigating bad trips.

The founder of 8chan, Frederik Brennan, was inspired to create an anonymous message board while tripping on shrooms. The site has since been home to a significant amount of extreme right content, including being the hub for the Q-anon conspiracy theories. As Pace and Devenot point out, QAnon’s cryptic slogan — #FollowTheWhiteRabbit — borrows heavily from the psychedelic imagery of Jefferson Airplane and The Matrix.

The cast of characters and thinkers is extensive. Rather than list them all here, it seems more helpful to get to the point — psychedelics can be used by anyone for any reason at any time. They are like language or guns or AI — they are very powerful tools with the potential to express any political viewpoint.

Yes, psychedelics can be transformative — but the nature of the transformation is never guaranteed.

A stark example of this comes from a survey conducted by Bellingcat, which gathered data from 75 self-identified neo-Nazis about their conversion to nazism. Four of the participants attributed LSD as a key factor in their radicalization.

Entheogenic Politics

It's a tough pill to swallow: substances revered as sacraments, God molecules, and sacred pathways to the divine are also turning on neo-Nazis.

For many, the psychedelic journey begins with a (sometimes insufferable) messiah phase — that moment of post-trip clarity that if everyone could just take [insert your favorite psychedelic drug here], the world would be healed. People in this phase assume that if others could experience what they just had, everything would somehow fall into place. It's that old "LSD in the water supply" argument.

Graham Hancock famously declared politicians should be required to take ayahuasca ten times. And I'll admit, I do wonder what would happen if Trump, Musk, RFK, and company undertook strict dietas under the guidance of a professional ayahuasquero.

But as Pace and Deveno argue, psychedelics are politically pluripotent — meaning they are non-specific amplifiers of political set and setting.

This means dumping acid in the water supply — or giving ayahuasca to heads of state — might not lead to global awakening, but to something far more unpredictable. In highly charged political settings on all sides, psychedelics can just as easily reinforce radical ideologies as dissolve them.

There is no magic pill to make us all think alike. Psychedelics don’t radicalize everyone — but as political viewpoints polarize and intensify, they're creeping further into therapy sessions, bedroom conversations, and fuelling late-night anxiety.

The ideal environment for psychedelic transformation probably isn't a hyper-politicized and antagonistic one. Whether it is Democrats, Republicans, or the Brotherhood of Eternal Love supplying the LSD, we should remember that harm reduction begins with recognizing the setting we're in — socially, culturally, and ideologically — before we go diving into the deep end.

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