LSD's arc from laboratory curiosity to cultural flashpoint gets traced through archival footage, period interviews, and news reports spanning the drug's early psychiatric promise to its banning. The film opens with Albert Hofmann's accidental discovery in a Swiss lab and follows the compound as it moves from controlled clinical experiments into the hands of researchers, artists, and eventually a mass youth movement. Timothy Leary's advocacy and the Harvard psilocybin project figure prominently, alongside government-funded studies that treated LSD as a tool for treating alcoholism and mental illness before panic and prohibition set in. Newsreel clips capture the shift in public mood, from curious optimism to alarm over bad trips and countercultural excess, ending in criminalization. The film treats the drug's scientific and psychiatric history with more seriousness than most popular accounts, letting researchers and witnesses from the era describe what they actually saw rather than relying on later mythology. It closes on the wreckage of a promising research program abandoned mid-question.