Acid Trips and Chemistry focuses on three aspects of LSD: its effects, its legality, and its production. Cam Cloud spends well over half the book talking about LSD trips--good, bad, spiritual, unknowing, and otherwise. You'll find out about the most common effects on vision, hearing, time perception, linear thinking, bonding, and memory, as well as synaesthesia (the crossing of the senses). "Colors may seem to emit auditory tones, sounds may seem to have color, odors may take on qualities of color and sound. Music may become a moving, roiling inner landscape unfolding before the inner eye."A chapter that looks at LSD's effects on creativity contains some eye-opening anecdotes. Ralph Abraham, a pioneer of chaos theory, has said that he uses LSD to gain mathematical insights. "Architect Kyosho Izumi's LSD-inspired design for the ideal mental hospital won him a commendation for outstanding achievement from the American Psychiatric Association. His plan has been used in the construction of several mental health care facilities."

Cloud briefly examines the fives stages of a trip: latency, coming on, peak, plateau, and coming down. Perhaps the best chapter (and one of the longest in this short book) is devoted to spiritual experiences. Conversely, another chapter looks at the causes of bad trips, while another examines at the inexcusable practice of "dosing" an unknowing person with acid.

"Psychedelic Seeds" provides a brief look at two plants that contain chemicals similar to LSD. The chapters on synthesizing LSD give some general guidelines, but they're not step-by-step instructions. Cloud says that "the information here provides conceptual groundwork helpful in understanding the more technical presentations that appear in scientific books and journals." A ten-page glossary of chemical terms provides further guidance.