This is a rather utopian take: > Mescaline was “not yet the ideal drug.” Huxley noted that “along with the happily transfigured majority of mescaline takers th

This is a rather utopian take: > Mescaline was “not yet the ideal drug.” Huxley noted that “along with the happily transfigured majority of mescaline takers there is a minority that finds in the drug only hell or purgatory.” However, he was confident that modern chemistry and physiology were capable of achieving practically anything “if the psychologists and sociologists will define the idea.” A strictly utilitarian view of psychedelics outside the currently popular area of 'treating depression and other psychological disorders' is that they are useful for helping people who struggle with geometry enhance their 3D visualization skills, and for teaching classically trained musicians how to improvise over a chord progression, and so on. As far as the 60s 'psychedelic revolution' it's rather overblown in my opinion. The acid-dropping hippies of the late 1960s seem to have become the coke-snorting yuppies of the 1980s, and in general the societal structures that existed before the 1960s still exist today, the only major noticeable change being the relatively increased participation of women and minorities in leadership positions at universities and corporations, which probably isn't attributable to psychedelic use. Other societal norms in the USA - advertising and consumerism, internal political divisions and external military aggression and widespread wealth inequality, remain basically the same as before if not actually more extreme. There's no 'ideal drug' that would solve these problems. It might be fair to say that certain scientific and technological and artistic developments since the late 1960s psychedelic era began were spurred on by the use of psychedelics in many cases, however.