During the Cold War period of the early 1950s, LSD was tested as an experimental truth drug for interrogation by the United States intelligence and military community.

Under the direction of Sidney Gottlieb, the drug was used by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in cooperation with participating "colleges, universities, research foundations, hospitals, clinics, and penal institutions".

Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann first synthesized LSD at Sandoz Laboratories in 1938, while searching for medicinal ergot alkaloid derivatives, but its potential use as a psychedelic was not discovered until 1943.

In World War II, under the direction of William J. Donovan, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) experimented with cannabis as a truth serum but it was a failure.

[2]: 5–6 In the 1940s, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) began experimenting with different techniques for interrogation—one used sedatives to induce a trance state while another used two different drugs, such as an upper and a downer.

Project MKULTRA, a covert research operation run by the CIA's Scientific Intelligence Division, began experimenting with human behavioral engineering in 1953.

[2]: xix  [5] In 1976, the Church Committee reported that from 1954 to 1963, the CIA "randomly picked up unsuspecting patrons in bars in the United States and slipped LSD into their food and drink.

[7] Investigative journalist Martin A. Lee (1954–) was 14 years old during the height of the countercultural movement of the 1960s; his personal motivation for writing the book was spurred by his attempt to understand himself and the culture he was a part of during this time.

[9]: 7:23–10:42 With further research, Lee found a series of overlapping relationships involving the CIA, the Army, the scientific and psychiatric community, and literary culture as well as the Beat movement.

[9]: 11:18–12:48 Lee and writer Bruce Shlain used approximately 20,000 pages of unclassified documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act as the source for their CIA and military drug experiment material.

[13] Philosopher Duff Waring of York University called the book an "excellent addition to the history of psychedelia" and described the first part about declassified CIA files as "tightly written, first-class muck-raking.