Discussed in this essay:

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, by Michael Pollan. Penguin Press. 480 pages. $28. 

Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change, by Tao Lin. Vintage. 320 pages. $16.

I took LSD for the first time in 1999, when I was fifteen, with half a dozen friends at a rave in a disused warehouse in West London. I was expecting something like a synesthetically enhanced Hendrix solo, melting clocks, waves of pineapple-tasting color—but it wasn’t like that. When the acid kicked in I was…