Abstract

Psychedelic drugs once seemed synonymous with counterculture in North America. Many dubbed the 1960s the “psychedelic ‘60s” and the substances were hailed by many in the decade as having intrinsic revolutionary potential. With the official launch of the War on Drugs in the U.S. in 1971, a long-lasting moral panic around these substances began and persisted fervently throughout the following decades. Yet, today, psychedelic drugs are in the process of being reintegrated into North American popular culture and economy. This thesis argues that this seemingly radical shift is not so radical at all. Rather, it is simply a product of the specific neoliberal capitalist context in which we exist. By attending to contemporary television shows, books, films, podcasts and social media trends, this thesis investigates this shift through popular cultural discourses about psychedelic drugs. This large-scale picture of the mainstreaming of psychedelic drugs identifies how these countercultural objects are integrated into neoliberal capitalist structures and the specific conditions of possibility that arise from this hegemonic process.