Early psychedelic associated people who were not weird: - Alexander Shulgin, chemist who discovered and ate whole families of psychedelics over a long life, and who was always described as being practical, grounded, warm, and human - The CIA employees who were exposed to LSD during that era, remarkably few of whom went off the deep end - Owsley Stanley, pioneering sound engineer and production scale LSD chemist who also was not into woo-woo crap - Albert Hofmann, the guy who discovered it

The "weird" ones cherry-picked in the article didn't do much except loudly promote extravagant claims about said drugs and push their own personal brands-- They were the instagram influencers of the era, in a sense.