The story of psychedelics and the Grateful Dead is a secret American through-line between the 1950s and the present, an always-radical and ever-changing counterculture that continues to have a transformative impact on life in America. Uncovering the hidden history of the biggest psychedelic distribution system the world has ever known, Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America animates an alternative America with the narratives of utopian homesteaders and self-taught black market chemists, spiritual seekers and pranksters, graffiti artists and government-wanted hackers, entrepreneurs and pioneering DJs, and much more.

As psychedelic research moves into the mainstream for the first time in decades, Heads builds on extensive new first-hand accounts from many never-before-interviewed subjects to tell the complete story of how tie-dye became part of the American fabric, a continuous cosmic yarn that weaves one of the 20th and 21st centuries' most misunderstood subcultures into the nation's history.