A psychedelics renaissance is emerging in America, a second wave following the first of the ’60s and ’70s. Today’s psychedelic reboot, however, leaves behind the countercultural stuff of lore in favor of professionalism, doctors’ visits, and aggressively marketed treatments for diseases of the brain.

We are in the age of psychedelic psychotropics, in which the very compounds that up until recently were perceived by the public as illicit and recreational are on their way to becoming an everyday part of the psychiatric toolbox. MDMA — first used to enhance psychotherapy in the 1970s but currently an illegal and popular party drug known as “Molly” or “ecstasy” — has won breakthrough therapy designation by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a potentially effective medication for certain psychiatric complaints. Ketamine, a staple of raves and dance parties, is now widely prescribed for treating psychiatric disorders. And psilocybin, the psychedelic substance found in “magic mushrooms,” is being researched in the hallowed halls of Johns Hopkins, New York University (NYU), Massachusetts General Hospital, and University of California, Los Angeles, as a possible cure for psychiatric symptoms.

There is little that is countercultural in this “new era,” as college students, college dropouts, war and rights protesters, underground psychotherapists and trip sitters, ravers and DJs, are replaced at the vanguard by scientists, doctors, and financiers. And in their hands, psychedelics are going through a rebranding, in which the aura of the underground is replaced by the legitimacy of conventional psychiatric pharmaceuticals.