Karry Mullis who is credited with the invention of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) has said he got the idea while on LSD. PCR has allowed huge advances in DNA technology including DNA matching in crimes

I mean, who was the first recreational user of psychedelics in the 20th century and how did that spread? Did that spreading have anything to do with the counterculture? or did the counterculture help precipitate the spreading? Would the counterculture have happened devoid of psychedelics? What was the cause and what was the affect?

Some interesting questions, none of which I have the answers to.

I think when we look back at the sixties, its a little bit too easy to say that the mass misuse is what led to the crackdown. In the follow up study that I did to the Good Friday experiment, Timothy Leary was the faculty sponsor in 1962, and it was about helping people who were religiously inclined to see if psilocybin would help them have mystical experiences. I did a follow up study 25 years later and I talked to the various people in the middle 80's, and what I learned from them is that they remembered their mystical experiences from psilocybin before, they still considered them valid, and they said there was a link between the unitive sense of connection; a little bit of their loss of fear of death, a little bit of empowerment, that led them to do work in social justice movements. Some talked about the civil rights movement, others talked about the environmental movement, some talked about the anti-war movement, the women's rights movement. So I think it's when psychedelics went right was the main reason that there was the crackdown and the reason that psychedelics went wrong was kind of the excuse; "We've gotta protect these people who are having these bad experiences, killing themselves, going to hospital emergency rooms", and there was a lot of that. At the same time though I think it was this association of people who were inspired by this sense of connection and the implications of that to challenge the status quo...

The CIA had it long before the hippies. they actually used to dose each other by surprise so that they could get used to the effects in case the Russians started to use it as an interrogation tool, etc.

This is something that I have wondered about for some time. Though correlation does not imply causation, I think that they are at a minimum, correlated. Whether or not psychedelics "spawned" counterculture is a different story all together. Maybe it was the other way around or maybe it was all just coincidental.

If you [OP] are speaking of the enlightening of the American mind by means of LSD, lets not forget that LSD has not always had the most positive of consequences...Syd Barret and the like.

I suppose to answer this question, you first need to consider what happened first, either somebody did LSD and told his friends how awesome it was (we know it was legal for a bit for use in counseling), or some free thinker shared tales about how enlightening it was when taken outside the context of counseling. Because in the beginning it was either used in counseling, or it wasn't. I mean, who was the first recreational user of psychedelics in the 20th century and how did that spread? Did that spreading have anything to do with the counterculture? or did the counterculture help precipitate the spreading? Would the counterculture have happened devoid of psychedelics? What was the cause and what was the affect?

Some interesting questions, none of which I have the answers to.

Where is the evidence for this? Despite the answer to this question...so what? What does that say about how the counterculture began?

Here is the entire book Acid Dreams online, including pictures of some of the CIA agents involved and the entire bibliography.

Where is the evidence for this? Despite the answer to this question...so what?

The OP initially pointed out how the use of psychedelics in the '60s effected the art and music of the time. I'd like to point out that this is non-trivial. The arts are ubiquitous in our culture, and have an effect on the minds of the masses. Artists at places like Disney were dropping acid, then making art for the next generation to grow up on. This is in addition to the new insights made in science and technology as a result of psychedelic experimentation. I dont think it's an exaggeration to say that the mass use of entheogens in that time period sent a sort of evolutionary shockwave through our whole civilization.