Early psychedelic associated people who were not weird:
- Alexander Shulgin, chemist who discovered and ate whole families of psychedelics over a long life, and who was always described as being practical, grounded, warm, and human
- The CIA employees who were exposed to LSD during that era, remarkably few of whom went off the deep end
- Owsley Stanley, pioneering sound engineer and production scale LSD chemist who also was not into woo-woo crap
- Albert Hofmann, the guy who discovered it
The "weird" ones cherry-picked in the article didn't do much except loudly promote extravagant claims about said drugs and push their own personal brands-- They were the instagram influencers of the era, in a sense.
Owsley moved to Australia because he was convinced a super cyclone was going to freeze all of north America and that would be the safest spot.
He also pretty much ate only 100% meat, and blamed the cancer that formed in his throat in his later years on the few vegetables his parents made him eat as a child.
The "weird" ones cherry-picked in the article didn't do much except loudly promote extravagant claims about said drugs and push their own personal brands-- They were the instagram influencers of the era, in a sense.