When the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann accidentally discovered the hallucinogenic effects of LSD in 1943, he went for a bicycle ride. Commentators have repeated this legendary tale frequently in the past 70 years but Hofmann's book is the definitive text - and this new edition offers some interesting contemporary insights.

Edited by Amanda Feilding of the UK's Beckley Foundation, a charitable institution researching psychedelics as tools for medicine and growth, and translated by Jonathan Ott, the original 1979 text has been given a facelift, with translator's notes and the addition of previously unpublished essays written by Hofmann in his later years, which provide fresh context to the chemist's thoughts and philosophical ruminations of his 102-year life.

Psychedelic therapy is now a clinical inevitability. Woken from its 40-year, politically induced slumber by contemporary, methodologically robust research, this time around evidence-based medicine is on the side of psychedelic drugs. They do work, they are safe and they can have clinical uses. New research with LSD, psilocybin, MDMA, ibogaine, ketamine, ayahuasca and cannabis is springing up everywhere, from Harvard and Johns Hopkins University to University College London, Imperial College and Cardiff University. The wonder drug, which Hofmann reluctantly renamed his problem child at the end of the 1960s, has emerged from adolescence into a mature and reflective adult with a valuable job to do. Used with care, Hofmann's LSD can help patients access and resolve repressed traumatic memories. Where current pharmacotherapies with antidepressants and antipsychotics often mask symptoms and trap patients in co-dependence, psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy can get to the heart of the trauma and offer durable remission without the need for daily maintenance medication.

We are in the midst of a psychedelic renaissance but tread carefully with clinical governance as our guide. Hofmann was a conservative adventurer; embracing the spiritual potential of LSD, clear that the doctors must not be allowed to run the show, but acutely aware of the unhelpful hippie image that slowed research. With DSM-5's publication psychiatry continues itsdiscussions about restrictive medical models inadequately reflecting the human condition. Despite our over-reliance on an increasingly biological perspective, psychedelic therapy can perhaps offer a more reflective vision for the future. Contemporary neuroimaging using psychedelics is enlightening that elusive territory between cognitions and their biological substrate, offering modern confrontation of Cartesian duality. Each year the subject of psychedelic research edges ever closer to the mainstream and for those still yet to have their minds opened, this book is as good a place to start as any.