Albert Hofmann synthesizes LSD in a Sandoz laboratory in 1943 and, on a bicycle ride home, experiences its effects firsthand. The film follows what happened next: by the mid-1950s, psychiatrists and biochemists in Canada, the United States, England, and Czechoslovakia are publishing studies on LSD as a treatment for alcoholism, addiction, and other mental illness, arguing for a brain-chemistry model of the mind over the psychoanalytic orthodoxy of the day. Researchers and subjects speak directly to camera: Myron Stolaroff describes resolving inner conflict under the drug, Ram Dass (then Richard Alpert) recalls watching his identity as professor and pilot fall away, and Timothy Leary compares the experience to looking through a microscope for the first time. Duncan Blewett notes that most of the opposition to psychedelics comes from people who have never tried them. That rigorous, clinical work gets buried in the 1960s under headlines about amateur thrill-seekers, and LSD ends the film as a substance banned or tightly controlled across the Western world.