SO NAILS

From 1959 to 1961, John Newland directed and narrated the TV show One Step Beyond, which explored the “world of the unknown.” In this rather amazing episode, Newland travels to Mexico to eat magic mushrooms. This show aired less than a year after Timothy Leary had traveled to Cuernavaca and had his first experiences with psilocybin, making Newland, along with Leary, one of the handful of high profile pioneers of psychedelia and one of the first public figures to praise psilocybin’s mind expanding properties. That this open-minded episode of One Step Beyond ever entered the homes of unsuspecting Americans is certainly some kind of landmark in the history of psychedelia.