Fifty years have passed since the first ESPD symposium was held in San Francisco in 1967. That seminal conference was intended to be the first in a regular series, but followup symposia were never held due to changing political and cultural circumstances. The symposia were not staged, but work in ethnopharmacology continued, and there have been significant discoveries made in the last 50 years. This lecture will discuss some of the more significant ones, and will speculate as to the future of psycho-ethnopoharmacology in the coming decades.