From the late-1940s the CIA secretly attempted to use psychedelic drugs for social control and psychological warfare. But in the 1960s, LSD escaped its captors as a new generation of rebellious youth on both sides of the Atlantic discovered psychedelics as means for expanding consciousness rather than controlling it. As Timothy Leary predicted: ‘The next war for control of this planet and beyond, has to do with the control of consciousness‘.

In 1968, an expatriate American Beat writer and two Liverpool chemistry students launched a conspiracy to illegally manufacture LSD
The hippies wanted to bring about mass psychedelic enlightenment, but their idealism was compromised by the exigencies of running an organised crime group. Their prosecution was weaponised in a culture war to uphold ‘traditional‘ values at the very time Margaret Thatcher was presenting herself as their enforcer.

I read this book in one sitting as I sheltered from the pouring rain at Bodnant Gardens in North Wales. Based on a wide range of secondary sources and easy to read, it provided a welcome way of spending a few hours whilst waiting for the weather to clear (it didn't!). The authors tell the story of a year when they assert the conditions for a working class revolution existed.
Stephen Roberts, www.thepeoplescharter.co.uk/reviews.htm