Jarnow designates the 1950s as the initiation of a “psychedelic renaissance,” when psychedelics escaped the laboratory to spread their special pixie dust through American culture. Later, early in the twenty-first century, they returned to the laboratory, when the government again approved laboratory trials. He suggests taking a look at the last half of the twentieth century if one wants to learn how psychedelics changed American society. He describes how for three decades the Grateful Dead and their Deadhead followers provided the space that connected psychedelics to the mainstream narrative, visible evidence both of the drugs’ catalytic potential and inherent dangers. Calling his book an ethnographic comic book history, he describes how psychedelics--the actual substances--appeared and circulated in the bohemian centers of San Francisco and New York, the complex secret society that emerged, the shadow economics that came into circulation, and new sacred practices. Annotation ©2016 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)