Many preindustrial cultures used psychedelic plants to enhance practices resembling psychotherapy, an idea tested in Western psychiatry during the 1950s and 1960s. LSD and similar drugs were employed to facilitate memories, fantasies, and insights and to strengthen the therapeutic alliance, but results were inconclusive, and research largely ended when the drugs became hard to obtain. Revival of such research may now be possible with newer drugs that avoid some drawbacks of older ones. MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine) is currently of most interest; it is relatively mild and short-acting, reportedly enhancing introspection and intimacy without the perceptual changes, emotional unpredictability, or adverse reactions linked to LSD.
Psychedelic drugs have wide-ranging effects that depend on setting, personality, and expectations. For over fifteen years, hundreds of psychiatrists considered them relatively safe therapeutic agents. Psychedelic therapy for alcoholism assumes a single overwhelming experience can change lifelong drinking habits. Giving psychedelic drugs to the dying aims at reconciliation with one's past, family, and limitations. In the 1960s, Walter Pahnke conducted an experiment on psychedelic drugs' potential to facilitate mystical experience. Illicit psychedelic use continues to fuel interest in controlled, public experimentation.