LSD exploded into American popular culture in the 1960s, and this film traces its path from a Swiss laboratory to the center of a cultural argument that was still unresolved decades later. Albert Hofmann synthesized the compound in 1943, and the film visits the discovery before following it into CIA and military testing programs that treated it as a possible weapon or interrogation tool. Timothy Leary and Aldous Huxley carry it into public view, and the film sets their accounts against Tom Wolfe's, whose book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test chronicled Ken Kesey's San Francisco acid parties. Grace Slick and Ralph Metzner, who took part in the Harvard group's early LSD experiments, offer sharply different memories of what the drug did to them. Historian Jay Stephens, author of Storming Heaven, and other scholars widen the frame by pointing to hallucinogen use across earlier societies. Interviews carry most of the film, and the disagreements between subjects are left standing rather than resolved.