In last week’s blog, Ed Prideaux told us everything we know (and don’t) about Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder (HPPD), visual snow syndrome, and flashbacks. In part 2, he addresses ways to deal with the distress of having HPPD and ways to reduce the risk of developing it in the first place.
The real “problem” with HPPD is distress: anxiety, depression, isolation, panic, and the unhelpful coping mechanisms people can develop to overcome these (alcoholism and drug dependency are sadly common among HPPD patients). Remember, this distress is what technically defines HPPD.
Many people live with significant visual changes and do not find them distressing – rather, they may be sources of enjoyment, “free trips,” artistic inspiration, or purposefully leaned into as part of spiritual or occult practice. The world looking different doesn’t necessarily mean you have a problem.
If you’re currently experiencing HPPD, though, overcoming the distress should probably be your first priority. Speaking crudely, once the distress is overcome, the visuals can more or less “take care of themselves.” With less distress, there is less fixation. With less fixation, there is less noticing. With less noticing, the visuals are less noticeable. They may rapidly normalize, filter in the background, and can disappear unexpectedly with time.
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How Can We Address This Distress – and Bring the Visuals Down?
Medication and clinical help: Many in the HPPD community have found relief in the use (especially in the short-term) of medications including Lamotrigine and Klonopin. They can bring visuals and anxiety way down, though some report their symptoms getting worse. They can always bring side effects, too, so some caution is advised.
Healthy lifestyle changes: Many HPPD patients report the decline and resolution of their symptoms – or otherwise acceptance and returning to “normal” life after avoiding further drug-taking, exercising regularly, cutting out processed foods, or trying specific elimination diets.
NotingTriggers: Pay attention to your triggers and act accordingly. Visuals and other HPPD symptoms can surface in response to:
Fatigue
Stimulation, including caffeine
Anxietyand stress
The nature of the environment: visuals are more apparent in the dark, on blank surfaces, in enclosed rooms, and in environments where people had their original psychedelic experiences
Specific foods
Fixation and attention, including staring at blank surfaces and an anxious tendency to look out for visuals
Intoxication with other drugs, especially cannabis
You should also pay special attention to how your condition manifests beyond visuals, in particular, if you are experiencing Depersonalization/Derealization Disorder. More than visuals, it’s often the case that people’s distress comes from DP/DR, and a rich body of literature and therapeutic approaches have been explored for this condition.
Community: You can seek community from others, such as groups on Facebook, or the forums at HPPDOnline.com, r/HPPD, or r/visualsnow. However, tread cautiously around spending too much time on these forums. They can be extremely negative, and cause people to spiral and fixate on their perceptual changes.
Mindfulness meditation: The stress reduction and relaxation effects of meditation are well-established; many report breaking the cycle of visual fixation through learning to hone their attention.
Cognitive techniques: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) may be useful for accepting and reframing perceptual changes. Challenging the internal beliefs triggered by HPPD could reduce both distress and the visuals – in particular, the beliefs that patients are “brain damaged,” “weird,” “isolated,” or a “casualty.”
Psychedelic integration: Introspection, journaling, and (if you can find and afford it) specialist, psychedelic-informed counseling can be helpful. In particular, you may benefit from exploring the particular details and events of what may have caused HPPD to originally materialize.
Somatic approaches: Certain somatic/bodily therapies have proven helpful for people with Visual Snow Syndrome. This includes the use of acupuncture, muscle relaxation techniques, neck massage, and specific dietary interventions.
Reframing: It may be helpful to learn that many people are not troubled by their perceptual changes. Again, they can be just a “thing” – how one sees now – that’s different, and not necessarily bad. Other people actively enjoy their perceptual changes or view them in a spiritual way, such as glimpsing auras, having broadened the possibility of the mind, or in seeing the intrinsic shakiness of ordinary experience.
Without a deep, embodied grounding for your reframing, though, it can be hazardous. Make sure the frame is not just “in your head,” but truly held across your entire mind and body in a felt way. Don’t gaslight yourself into enjoying your perceptual changes if they are actually disturbing you.
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How Can One Reduce the Risk of Developing HPPD When Taking Psychedelics?
There is reason to suspect that the immediate period after a trip – say, one-to-five days – is important.This is because the brain is still neuroplastic and affected by psychedelics for up to a week (or longer) after the trip. And HPPD may be understood as a problem of “resetting” one’s brain back into its ordinary perceptual categories after the shock of a psychedelic experience.
If you want to avoid HPPD, what matters is ensuring that your perception re-transitions to its prior sober state safely. In this one-to-five day period, it may be advised, then, to:
Sleep well.
Avoid cannabisand further drug-taking. Some people report that their HPPD was “kicked in” by a subsequent drug experience.
Process the psychedelic experiencethrough dedicated integrationpractices, such as journaling, contemplation, meditation, and inquiry. Speaking very crudely – and because HPPD may well be a “network disorder” involving cross-connected mixtures of perception, emotion and cognition – it may be that failing to integrate the experience may cause the energy to remain and be reactivated, including in cognition and possibly in perception (especially if the right triggers are also hit).
Keep stress and anxiety to a minimum.
Re-embodiment, or reconnecting to body sensations. Practices may be recommended, including through mindfulness meditation. This may help to reduce the risk of dissociative disorders like Depersonalization/Derealization as well.
Reduce screen use. Focusing on screens may cause a disembodying effect, as well as holding back the psychological energies activated by the psychedelic experience.
Avoid triggering environments, such as places that are enclosed or rich in blank surfaces, and try not to self-induce visuals through staring and fixation. If someone wants to be extra careful, they may wish to avoid the place where they had their psychedelic experience. “Training” the brain in hallucinatory ways of seeing while it’s neuroplastic may cause lingering changes once neuroplasticity is reduced and stable categories are reaffirmed.
Important Questions to Ask Before Having an Experience
Have you optimized your set and setting? HPPD seems to be more likely after bad trips or challenging experiences – the likelihood of which strongly depends on how people organize their set and setting. In particular, stress and trauma going into a psychedelic experience may be a trigger for HPPD experiences, even at low dose (and microdose) levels.
Have you experienced some unusual visuals before? HPPD patients may have had a higher-than-normal experience of certainvisual oddities, which are rare parts of normal perception. In particular, phenomena like visual snow, halos, after-images, floaters, and colors in the dark may suggest an underlying tendency in perception that could be triggered by a psychedelic drug to be more intense.
Have you tested your drug? If so, what drug are you taking? HPPD may be more likely with Novel Psychoactive Substances (NPSs) and Research Chemicals (RCs) with more unpredictable, less-researched, and possibly neurotoxic effects. Adulterants in street drugs may also have neurotoxic and other risky properties.
It seems that long-acting psychedelics like LSDare more likely to cause HPPD. While LSD may have certain advantages over other psychedelics subjective to each user, someone very conscious of developing HPPD (at least compared to other risks) may wish to avoid LSD in favor of a shorter-acting psychedelic.
How often are you tripping? Taking lots of psychedelics frequentlyis likely to be correlated with a higher risk of developing HPPD. This can be explained in a number of ways:
A higher likelihood of having a bad trip
Activating a latent genetic susceptibility
More likely to over-excite relevant perceptual circuits
More “re-training” of perception in hallucinatory ways of seeing
Less time in which to integrate properly one’s experiences, and a possibility of a “cascade” of neuroplasticity from taking psychedelics while still in a neuroplastic state
Do you have experience of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Complex PTSD, Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), or Attention Deficit (Hyperactivity) Disorder (ADD/ADHD)? While there has not been research on the relationship of HPPD to these conditions, reviews of online forums directly and indirectly suggest a relationship. People with Visual Snow Syndrome seem to experience these conditions more than average based on rough overviews, and people with these conditions may independently report certain visual changes similar to HPPD. Ifthere is a relationship between HPPD and these conditions, the connection may occur through tendencies towards disembodiment, hypersensitivity, overstimulation, and dissociation, all of which may have visual components – and may be amplified by psychedelic experience.
For more, this article’s tips, advice, analysis (and more) is also featured in a more in-depth HPPD Information Guide, which can be freely downloaded from the Perception Restoration Foundation’s website, where a more direct guide for those struggling with HPPD is also hosted. Owing to the tentative nature of our HPPD knowledge base, the PRF invites any and all comments and criticisms for the Guide at info@perception.foundation, and any worthwhile amendments will be quickly published.
Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder, or HPPD, is among the more mysterious, debilitating, and under-researched possibilities of psychedelic drug-taking. As enthusiasm around psychedelics and their possible benefits continues to grow, it’s imperative that researchers, user populations, and clinicians look closely at HPPD and other possible hazards.
HPPD is little-known among clinicians, and many reporting these experiences have trouble finding informed help. Treatments – pharmacological, psychotherapeutic, and somatic – are out there, and by reports, have proven useful for some, but no controlled trials have been performed to gauge their true effectiveness.
In this article – intended as an exercise in harm reduction, raising awareness, and ensuring true informed consent before people ingest psychedelics – we’ll outline the current knowledge base around HPPD, including indications of the gaps and where future research may prove useful. This article’s tips, advice, and analysis (and more) is also featured in an in-depth HPPD Information Guide, which can be freely downloaded from the Perception Restoration Foundation’s website, where a more direct guide for those struggling with HPPD is also hosted.
The HPPD Basics: What is it?
Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder is a DSM-5 listed condition in which people experience lasting, distressing changes to their perception after taking psychedelic drugs. There are two types: Type-1, in which people experience episodic (usually sudden) “flashbacks,” and Type-2 (the more commonly reported), in which people’s everyday perception is altered.
These perceptual changes may be married with shifts in cognition, mood, and somatic experience, and further research is required to understand how they relate. HPPD can last anywhere from weeks and months to several years – some people live with its perceptual changes for decades. In up to 50% of HPPD patients, the changes may spontaneously remit within five years.
The perceptual changes are wide-ranging, but most constellate around a stable set of experiences also reported in other conditions: Visual Snow Syndrome (VSS), migraine with aura, manic episodes, epilepsy, anxiety disorders, brain injuries, and also as experienceable features (under the right conditions) of normal, healthy perception.
This implies that HPPD likely sits on a continuum with other disorders and ordinary perception. Further research is required to understand HPPD’s role in this continuum, the possibly unique contribution of psychedelics in affecting symptoms, and the kinds of treatments people with HPPD would benefit from versus other disorders.
Visual snow: When the field of vision is coated with small, grainy dots like the static of a detuned TV
Haloes and starbusts: When objects have a bright “halo” or “aura” ring around them, or concentric colored rays around light sources
Trails: When an object moves, a trail of faint replicated images follows it
After-images: When the outline or silhouette of an object is seen on a surface after looking away
Enhanced hypnagogia, or the semi-visionary state experienced between waking and sleep
Intensified floaters: Most of us have seen “floaters,” which are the small squiggly lines and shapes that sometimes appear in our vision. With HPPD, these floaters can become more visible, disturbing, and irritating
Blue Field Entoptic Phenomenon: The appearance of tiny bright dots moving quickly along squiggly lines in the visual field, especially when looking into bright blue light such as the sky
Changes to size and depth perception: Things can seem smaller, at-a-distance, expanded, or possessing a two-dimensional quality
Assorted psychedelic-style effects: Fractal kaleidoscopic and geometric patterns, faces, “breathing” walls, moving, “wavy” or shaky text, flashing and strobing lights, closed-eye visuals, enhanced phosphenes
Complex pseudohallucinations
Other, non-perceptual symptoms are reported, too:
Physical effects, such as head pressure, acute neck pain, unequal pupil sizes, muscle twitches
Tinnitus and ringing of the ears
More intense dreams
Auditory changes
Confused and unclear thoughts, including brain fog, trouble processing information, memory loss, dyslexia, and the onset of stammering
Depersonalization/Derealization Disorder (DP/DR), in which people feel detached from their bodies and the world stops feeling real
Psychosis
Anxiety, depression and panic
Note, to be diagnosed with HPPD, these changes must prompt distress – which they do, in many cases. They can disrupt people’s everyday function – relationships, work, operating heavy equipment, driving, navigating the day-to-day, and beyond – and cause anxiety, panic attacks, depression, and suicidal thoughts in high numbers of clinical patients. Many report a strong degree of isolation and loneliness, and the disorder is also strongly-correlated with dissociative experiences like Depersonalization/Derealization Disorder (DP/DR).
How Common is HPPD?
We don’t know. It seems that developing perceptual changes after taking psychedelics is not necessarily that uncommon; the distressing, intrusive kind that manifests in HPPD is likely a real but minority experience.
A 2011 survey of 2,455 users of psychedelics (via Erowid) found that up to three-fifths of psychedelic users reported lingering changes, 25% in ways that were seemingly permanent, and 4.2% in ways so distressing that they could prompt seeking clinical help. The latter is suggestive of diagnostic HPPD.
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What Kinds of Psychedelics Are Implicated?
Practically every psychedelic, but some more than others: LSD, psilocybin, ayahuasca, 2-CB, ibogaine, etc., but also related (but not classically psychedelic) drugs like MDMA, cannabis, dextromethorphan (DXM), datura, ketamine, salvia, and diphenhydramine (DPH) have been implicated.
In anecdotal reports and the existing literature, it seems that LSD is the leading cause of perceptual changes compared to other kinds of drugs. Whether this is because LSD has been historically the most commonly-used psychedelic or there is something special to the LSD experience or its effect on neurophysiology is unclear. Short-acting psychedelics like DMT seem to be less implicated.
Some report that, after heavy use of classic psychedelics, their HPPD developed suddenly after the use of research chemicals like 25-i-nBOME, which is often mis-sold as LSD; HPPD is also reported in particular among users of synthetic cannabinoids. Cutting agents in street MDMA, including synthetic cathinones (“bath salts”), may make HPPD more likely.
Can Non-Psychedelic Drugs Create These Perceptual Changes?
At the same time, compared to other drug classes, it seems that psychedelics (in particular, LSD) provide a higher risk factor for developing these perceptual changes. It may also be that HPPD patients report different kinds of visuals (perhaps more psychedelic ones), or more cognitive and emotional changes (as with psychedelics’ powerful psychoactive effects), compared to non-psychedelic groups.
Is HPPD the Same Thing as Flashbacks? Aren’t Flashbacks a Myth?
It’s complicated. The “flashback” describes a particular kind of experience in which people feel they truly re-live a prior psychedelic state: something that is real and can happen, and is what people may experience in Type-1 HPPD. Most cases of Type-2 HPPD, though, will likely not be true examples of flashbacks in this way.
To give a brief overview, the idea that psychedelic drugs could cause lasting changes in perception was noted from as early as 1954 – 15 years before the notion of the “flashback” was ever coined. A number of authors in the first wave of psychedelic research from the 1950s to the early 1960s reported patients experiencing a wide range of complications after their drug experiences – including what sounds like standard HPPD – but also states that blur more into psychosis and the experience of complex pseudohallucinations. They noted that some patients were acutely re-living their trips.
The “flashback” label was coined by author Mardi J. Horowitz in 1969, and used for many years afterwards, including by Dr. Henry Abraham, who first developed the psychiatric diagnosis of HPPD. Perhaps contrary to what we’d expect, authors in the “flashback” literature were at pains to emphasize the complexity, variation, and need for further research in explaining the phenomenon, as well as noting that many (some surveys suggested the majority) did not find their experiences distressing.
The Flashback Problem
Unfortunately, the idea of the flashback was later sensationalized by journalists and prohibition activists, who tied the idea to certain marked untruths: that the drug can be “stored” in the spine or fat cells, make people legally insane, or otherwise cause major brain damage.
The flashback idea also had some conceptual problems, which is perhaps to be expected from the first attempts at describing a new phenomenon. With some critical exceptions, authors were bound by a consensus that post-psychedelic visuals and flashbacks were re-experiences of the visuals glimpsed in the psychedelic state – as if the drug had not properly worn off, perhaps as a matter of lasting changes to neurological function. The notion that HPPD is a “re-experiencing” has also become one of the core criteria of the current DSM-5 diagnosis.
As noted earlier, though, identical perceptual phenomena can be experienced both through non-psychedelic drug classes, and as part of experiences in which drugs played no necessary role: other kinds of neuropsychological conditions, or otherwise as a feature of normal perception.
In contemporary literature, some authors have noted that many patients experience visual effects that never manifested in their trips – though this isn’t the case for everyone. Those who are “reliving” their trips may be described plausibly as experiencing flashbacks.
The idea of the flashback is also not unique to psychedelics – in particular, it’s used as a descriptor for experiences of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), in which people can feel “flung back” to the original trauma in quasi-visionary states. This implies that the psychedelic “flashback” may not be a distinct phenomenon for some (or most) cases: rather, that it’s an example of a psychedelic drug-induced traumatic flashback, where the real issue is trauma (not drugs per se).
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How Do We Explain What’s Going On?
Since authors first noticed that psychedelics can cause lingering changes in perception, a variety of different hypotheses have been pursued to explain what’s going on. The HPPD experience will likely involve a complex, multi-factor origin that varies from patient to patient.
Could psychedelic experiences alter neurophysiological function?
HPPD’s leading neurophysiological hypothesis, introduced by Dr. Henry Abraham, relates the condition to a “disinhibition” of the visual cortex. Drugs like LSD decrease, or “disinhibit” the filters of the brain’s visual cortex, so visual noise that would otherwise be filtered out may remain in the field of vision. HPPD occurs when these filters do not return to their pre-drug state. This may make HPPD akin to a form of “visual tinnitus” (and tinnitus is also experienced as a symptom).
This disinhibition is linked to reductions in alpha waves in the brain. A neuroimaging study by Abraham (2001) suggested that alpha wave frequency increases with HPPD patients versus controls. The role of an objectivealteration to visual perception was lent support by 1982 and 1988 studies executed by Abraham, in which he found both non-HPPD LSD users and HPPD patients had decreased ability to discriminate color differences and light sensitivity during dark adaptation, with HPPD patients reporting further decreased ability.
There could be a role for neuroplasticity, or neurons’ ability to change and reform in response to experience. This may be explained in the context of a “Bayesian Brain” model, similar to the REBUS and entropic brain hypotheses introduced by UCSF’s Robin Carhart-Harris: by shaking the “snowglobe” of our nervous system’s categories of perception through a psychedelic experience (or psychoactive changes altogether), it could be that those categories donot settle as before. A neuroplasticity model may explain why, in some cases,further psychedelic experimentation can reduceor eliminate HPPD presentation. It may underlie also why teenagersare especially vulnerable, as they have more plastic, developing brains.
LSD’s long durationmay explain why the drug is so associated with HPPD – that is, with more hours of seeing abnormal visual changes, the brain is more likely to reprogram itself than with shorter-acting drugs. Smokeable DMT, for instance, isn’t particularly-associated with perceptual changes, while longer-acting ayahuascais.
Synaptogenesismay also be involved. As described by Samuel Štancl, “Psychedelics induce strong synaptogenesis, or the creation of new synapses, resulting in high synaptic density. EEG scans show less inhibitory activity in the visual cortex both in people on psychedelics and in people with HPPD.” This means that electrical currents are being enhanced in the visual cortex by increased synaptic connection. This also underwrites why pruning excessive synapses through pharmacological treatments like lithium – or even exercise – may be useful.
What about psychological factors?
A 2018 paper by Halpern and Passie suggested that challenging drug experiences, including intense reactions of panic, dysphoria, anxiety and trauma, may be associated with a higher likelihood of developing HPPD. This is more likely for psychedelic use in uncontrolled settings.
Recall, HPPD often co-arises with Depersonalization/Derealization, a dissociative reaction in which people feel disconnected from their bodies and immediate environments. This is suggestive of anxiety and trauma. Drug-free anxiety and depersonalization are independently-associated with similar, if not identical, perceptual changes. Somatic cognitive changes, including head pressure and brain fog, are also associated with anxiety. Challenging and traumatic drug experiences may therefore induce elevations of anxiety, which has its own uncharted pathway towards many changes, including perception.
In the historical flashback literature, there was tentative evidence that visual phenomena could be experienced as matters of attention, hypnotization, and placebo suggestion. The role of trait absorption – or a person’s tendency to become occupied by mental imagery and internal experience, including daydreaming, fantasy and hypnagogia – has also been discussed by authors as a possible personality determinant of HPPD likelihood.
What’s more, there are case reports of people altogether resolving their distress and visuals through targeted psychotherapies without pharmaceuticals: in particular, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) to target the destructive internal beliefs people formed around their condition (“I am brain damaged,” “I’m a weirdo,” “I’m a freak,” etc.), including in combination with relaxation techniques. The sense of isolationmay also be addressed through the therapist leaning into their owncapacity for abnormal visual phenomena, and experiencing them with the patient – something that resolved one person’s HPPD.
Psychedelic researcher Stanislav Grofexplained and resolved his patients’ cases of HPPD through psychodynamic therapies. He interpreted HPPD as a problem of the psychedelic surfacing unconscious material that needed to be re-integrated through additional encounter experiences, including with psychedelics and breathwork.
Could HPPD patients simply be noticing more stuff that previously filtered into the background?
Yes, at least for some patients. Phenomena like visual snow, after-images, tinnitus, and floaters arenot necessarily uncommon, even among “normal” people. As a possibly overlapping mechanism with anxiety and fixation, it may be that somepeople with HPPD are noticing perceptual features that had previously been filtered into the ignorable background of their experience.Halpern and Passie found that HPPD patients were possibly more likely to have experienced visual oddities before they took drugs.
This led Krebs and Johansen to recommend re-attributing some HPPD experiences to Somatic Symptom Disorder, whereby people fixate and ruminate on normal somatic experiences and perceptions.
This is unlikely to be exhaustive, because many HPPD patients report florid and extreme visual changes that plausibly could not have been ignored before; it will also have limited applicability to those whose visuals are distinctly psychedelic and are experiencing Type-1 HPPD. It’s possible, too, that histories of such visual experiences implyavulnerabilitythat has been activated or catalyzed by drug experiences.
Part 2 of this article, focusing on harm reduction, will be posted shortly!
This article’s tips, advice, analysis (and more) is also featured in a more in-depth HPPD Information Guide, which can be freely downloaded from the Perception Restoration Foundation’s website, where a more direct guide for those struggling with HPPD is also hosted. Owing to the tentative nature of our HPPD knowledge base, the PRF invites any and all comments and criticisms for the Guide at info@perception.foundation, and any worthwhile amendments will be quickly published.
With the emergence of more and more psychedelic religions, many people are finding themselves in a situation where proving that their religion is sincere is the difference between being able to practice their religion legally or not. Could an International Psychedelic Religious Survey be the answer?
My lord, I suspect an incredible secret has been kept on this planet: that the Fremen exist in vast numbers – vast. And it is they who control Arrakis.
-Duncan Idaho, David Lynch’s “Dune” (1984)
To expand and clarify religious freedom and liberty in the United States and abroad, it is sometimes necessary to seek court rulings. One of the missing pieces of evidence that would prove helpful in most psychedelic religion cases is a reliable data set evidencing the demographics and statistics behind the world’s psychedelic religions. How many religious groups exist? How many members are there? What type of sacraments do they use? How to quantify communities that may not have stable membership? And more? I have gone looking for a reliable resource but have not found one yet. Indeed, I have spoken with some of the lead legal practitioners in this area, and they also lament the absence of this data. And the concern is not limited to lawyers. My friend, Brad Stoddard, Ph.D., a professor of religious studies, points out additional challenges in defining and applying metrics, including:
Some people will identify as spiritual but not religious.
Some people are likely to identify as neither religious nor spiritual but will still engage in practices many would consider religious or spiritual (the so-called “nones”).
Many Native Americans reject the category of religion as something that misrepresents their traditions. They also reject the categories of entheogens and psychedelics as they relate to sacraments like peyote and San Pedro. The politics of labeling these groups “religious” is tricky.
Beyond the U.S., even today, wide groups of people don’t have a category in their native language that corresponds to Western definitions of religion or spirituality, so assessing psychedelic religion in, say, rural India, would be almost impossible without extensive ethnographic surveys.
So, this gave me an idea. I would like to propose that some ambitious Ph.D.-types consider undertaking (as a Ph.D. thesis?) an international survey. For purposes of this article, I call it the International Psychedelic Religious Survey, but it could have a variety of different names. What is important is that the survey be conducted under scientific principles that could withstand court scrutiny, and that the data it procures answers the right sorts of questions.
Our new 12-month certificate program, Vital, begins April 19th. Registration is closed, but sign up for the waitlist for next year’s edition now at vitalpsychedelictraining.com!
Why are Psychedelic Religions Secret?
Psychedelic religions are not mainstream, and they are dogged by the omnipresent threat of allegation of criminality. It is therefore natural that psychedelic religious groups and their adherents stay mostly out of public scrutiny. There is justifiable fear of social stigma and risks to liberty, amongst myriad downstream repercussions. But these same forces that keep the psychedelically-inclined underground also serve as a shackle for things to remain so. The existence, nature, and populations participating in the world’s psychedelic religions is not well-documented. Some are out in the open, but most are not.
Why a Survey?
The importance of having numbers and an understanding of the types and varieties of psychedelic religions is helpful in court cases. This sort of data could be especially important in aiding the defense of persons criminally charged for their participation in psychedelic religious practice. Such data could also inform legislatures and other policy makers, increasing their awareness of (and possibly, sensitivity to) psychedelic religions. Indeed, the information could be useful to the United Nations, and could help the UN Office on Drugs and Crime with policy reform.
Similar to how a census counts a population and derives statistics, psychedelic religions might benefit from being counted. My suspicion is that revelation of the true demographics of psychedelic religions is apt to be a lot like Frank Herbert’s Dune – like the Fremen, the numbers of people who participate in psychedelic religions is secret and vast. When it comes to psychedelic religion, there persists popular ignorance and misunderstanding that have dampening effects on how these minority psychedelic religions are treated. Having data, even if it be anonymous, reflecting that these minority religions are not nearly as small as they appear helps to give these religions presence. From presence can flow understanding.
Consider that most psychedelic religions do not behave like more broadly accepted mainstream religious organizations. Out of fear, most psychedelic religions do not have billboards, do not evangelize, do not have television or radio ads, do not seek public donations, etc., and for similar reason, most do not fight court fights. Litigation is often prohibitively expensive, and minority religious groups trying to fly under the radar tend not to have financial means. A survey could provide synergy by which these minority religious groups could gain collective leverage. A survey could change the conversation about psychedelic religions with backed statistics and data. A survey might even move public policy focus away from chemical structures (the metric law enforcement uses) toward purpose and effect (the metric psychedelic religions use). Courts are not presently accustomed to the argument of “it is not how you get there that matters, it is that you get there,” but a reliable data set could further the point.
The Importance of Court Admissibility
If you are sitting in a criminal defense chair, charged for psychedelics but claiming religious exemption, the burden is on you to educate the judge and jury on the nature, basis, and supposed validity of your defense. The probability that the judge and jury are going to be well-educated about psychedelic religion is low. Your burden to come forward with credible, persuasive, court-admissible evidence supporting your psychedelic religion defense is made that much more difficult and necessary.
The key is court admissibility. To have a jury or a judge consider data, it needs to be admissible. It also needs to be relevant and authenticated. The most compelling and relevant evidence is meaningless if a court will not admit it. Hence, the need for a scientifically-run survey that considers all the details: who will gather the data, how that data will be gathered, what form of survey will be used, what questions would be posed in the survey, the types of answers permitted, etc. The survey will also need to be verifiable and be able to demonstrate things like chain of custody, all encapsulated in a report that can be admitted within a hearsay exception or over a hearsay objection.
Why International?
Religion is not national. Indeed, the First Amendment to the United States Constitution would find the notion of national religion abhorrent, and no court in the United States could rule a religion “un-American.” Rather, at most, a court could rule an organization altogether not a religion, or a person’s observation thereof insincere, but a court could not weigh the merits or values of a religious group. Rather, under Constitutional principles, court inquiry is limited to examination for the trappings of things commonly associated with religion – concepts like contemplation of the imponderables of existence itself, contemplation of the source of all things, the nature of spirit, etc. Neither nationality nor nation of origin are relevant points of inquiry.
Pragmatically, it is a lot harder to claim religious exemption when the court knows nothing about, has had no life experience with, and is questioning the validity of your religion or the sincerity of your practice. The benefit of having a court-admissible survey demonstrating that you are far from alone, but are acting in conformity with possibly millions just like you, is manifest. Likewise, one of the greatest challenges that many of us entheogen lawyers are hoping to crack is the multi-sacramental conundrum, or the wholesale legal transcendence of relevance of sacrament. Along with the many holes in appellate precedent, there is no high-level appellate decision that has affirmed multiple psychedelic sacraments as acceptable religious practice. But that case can be made, and it can be made better with better evidence.
Although the United States Constitution contemplates a variety of religious expression, it would still be dangerous in court to ignore that Abrahamic lineage dominates in the United States. Statistically, it is more probable that the judge and jury in any psychedelic religion case will be most familiar with concepts of a revelatory religion that is manifested in scriptural texts, and whose members meet in some form of congregation and group worship, employing scripted prayers and relying upon faith. Many psychedelic religions look like this. Many do not. And getting that point across in a meaningful fashion to a court can make the difference between winning or losing a psychedelic religion case. An International Psychedelic Religious Survey can help demonstrate that minority adherents in one country may not be as minority as they seem, when taken in a global context, and could likewise reveal trends in the spread of psychedelic religions around the world.
Content and Manner of the Survey
The precise execution of the survey is admittedly at the edges of most lawyer’s skill sets. I imagine this project calls for a Ph.D. or aspiring Ph.D. theology student, or a professor excited to take on one of the most significant projects of their career (not to mention perhaps a couple qualified statisticians). I also offer that while we won’t do the survey ourselves (again, not our skill set), I and fellow entheogen attorneys, Greg Lake, Ian Benouis, and Dan Peterson are happy to contribute, particularly regarding framing survey questions that would be helpful for court admissibility. Brad Stoddard, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Religious Studies at McDaniel College, is also available to assist and welcomes contact. Anyone interested in picking up the mantle and running with it is invited to reach out to any of us. My friends and I hope this article inspires one or more of you to take on this very important task.
Prolonged negative body image will often lead to depression and anxiety, and unfortunately for many people, can lead to body dysmorphia or an eating disorder. Could psychedelics help reframe one’s relationship with their body?
These conditions primarily impact women, and now more of them are coming forward to share how psychedelics are helping them leave a constant cycle of dissatisfaction, body dysmorphia, and the accompanying anxiety, depression, and stress. They explain how the use of psychedelics helped them develop a new relationship with their eating disorders and improve their self-image.
While large-scale studies are (currently) scarce, the anecdotal evidence of these shifts is powerful.
“The first time I sat with a hero’s dose of magic mushrooms, I realized I could put my eating disorder down and never carry it again,” shares Francesca Rose, who is now an eating disorder recovery advocate. “It finally clicked: my eating disorder was not part of me. It wasn’t even mine. It all made sense. I was free from my eating disorder. I no longer needed to control food or my body to feel safe or worthy.” Having her life changed through the use of psychedelics and being on the recovery path for 13 years, this psychedelic-assisted shift is part of what led her to add her current work; supporting other women with eating disorders along their healing journeys.
For many women, talking about their insecurities is still seen as a taboo, weakness, or shameful. Yet finding a supportive space to speak of one’s challenges, plus engaging in embodied experiences – including psychedelic sessions – can offer a gateway to healing. Rose’s work also includes leading embodiment practices via yoga and conscious dance. By helping women speak of their struggles and reconnect to their bodies, she aims to break these stigmas.
Adding in the intentional and safe use of psychedelics can allow women to reconnect with their bodies and cultivate a gentler relationship with themselves. Rose says, “An eating disorder is unconsciously employed as an attempt to feel protected in the world and to even give a sense of meaning and identity. The internal world is fractured and the eating disorder is a way to try to stitch things together, even if it’s an unsustainable method. When we are journeying with psychedelics and engaging in post-journey integration, people can find they rely less on the eating disorder because there is a general sense of ease in the world and more internal wholeness. We can get in touch with our essence, and connect with our inherent worth, belonging, dignity and divinity. Psychedelics can help us embody pride and self-acceptance. We can connect to love, and feel our capacity to give and receive love.”
To have a better understanding of these conditions, we need to first comprehend body image. For most women, it’s not as simple as liking or disliking their own bodies. Body image is complex, and can include a combination of our feelings, beliefs, and perceptions of how our body looks to us and others, the understanding of what it can do, and its estimated size.
Body image issues can start as early as 5 years old. Changes to our physiques kicked off by puberty can deepen our dissatisfaction. Culture also exerts a huge influence on the way we view ourselves. The way society sees gender, the color of skin and hair, and countless other things can also impact the way a person thinks and feels about their physical appearance.
Body dysmorphia is a psychological disorder characterized by an excessive concern for the body, causing the person to overvalue small imperfections or even imagine imperfections. This creates a negative body image and lowers self-esteem. It can drive possible eating disorders and problems in social, professional, and personal lives. Both men and women may experience body dysmorphia and eating disorders, though women are three times more likely to have their lives affected by it.
In the United States, approximately 30 million people suffer from some type of eating disorder. Of these 30 million, 70% do not have the assistance of a specialized professional. As a consequence, anorexia nervosa, one of the most common eating disorders, has a 5.9% mortality rate – one of the highest rates within mental health conditions.
The Potential of Psychedelics in Building a Positive Body Image
Eating disorders are notoriously challenging to treat relative to other mental health disorders. Traditional treatments, such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), have a remission rate of about 45%, a relapse rate of about 30% within one year, and can be hard to follow. Now, some experts and researchers are considering psychedelic therapy as an alternative, and are analyzing the potential benefits of this treatment.
“Eating disorders typically develop as maladaptive coping mechanisms when internal resourcing is overwhelmed by what’s happening in a person’s life,” says Lauren Taus, a California-based therapist who offers ketamine-assisted sessions. Taus and other therapists who contributed their perspectives for this piece say that psychedelic therapy can alleviate the symptoms that are normally associated with these conditions, such as depression and anxiety, in ways that traditional therapy fails to achieve. As Dr. Adele Lafrance points out in this article for EdCatalogue, psychedelic therapy has “the potential to alleviate symptoms that relate to serotonergic signaling and cognitive inflexibility, and the induction of desirable brain states that might accelerate therapeutic processes.”
Taus shared an example of her own work with psychedelics as an alternative treatment that helped her with many of her challenges, including her eating disorder: “My experience with empathogens has invited me to see how much conflict was warring inside of me. I saw all the pain of my personal history, and all that was beyond my control in my family system. Fundamentally, these psychedelics invited me to directly process what was beneath the surface. I accessed great grief, rage, and fear while opening to deep levels of love and compassion for myself and everyone else. I understood my parents and the choices they made, so I could forgive them. I also sourced the willingness, desire, and strength to fight for myself – and my life.”
Listen to Lauren Taus in her episode, “Wellness Through Yoga, Meditation, and Psychotherapy here.
So what is it about psychedelics specifically that can facilitate profound breakthroughs like Taus’? For starters, they can positively impact the Default Mode Network (DMN), which handles communication between brain regions. This region appears to be hyperactive in some mental health conditions, including depression, anxiety, and OCD. And certain hallmarks of eating disorders, such as the poor cognitive flexibility seen in many anorexia nervosa patients, may also be related to an overactive DMN. Studies such as “Rethinking Therapeutic Strategies for Anorexia Nervosa: Insights From Psychedelic Medicine and Animal Models” indicate that psychedelics lower the activity in this area, and, by doing so, allow us to create new thought patterns, giving us a fresh perspective on life, the world, and ourselves.
Another way that psychedelic psychotherapy can be effective is by helping a person understand the true source of their feelings of dissatisfaction. A 2013 analysis of why eating disorder therapy fails reveals that a patient’s resistance stems from the disorder’s “ego-syntonic” nature. Ego-syntonic means that the ego’s demands and aspirations drive many of the disorder’s behaviors, feelings, and values. Psychedelic substances can offer a temporary dissolution of the ego, allowing the possibility of transformation, healing, and change of certain behaviors, thought patterns, or addictions.
Taus explains that “Psychedelic assisted psychotherapy supports embodied change where traditional psychotherapy often stays in the realm of cognition and intellect. A person, for example, may come to understand with depth and clarity their patterns in therapy, but still struggle to shift them.” For example, a woman might know that purging is a harmful behavior that leads to feelings of shame. “She may even know exactly why and when it all started, but still she may not be able to stop. Psychoactive substances can create experiential shifts that more efficiently translate into internally-led and sustained behavioral change. The job of the therapist is to provide a safe container for the exploration and a good relational context for a person to make sense of the experience and to anchor in the good that comes from it.”
It’s important to highlight that the use of psychedelic substances on their own does not work as a magic bullet and treatments must be done alongside psychotherapy and/or other healing modalities such as journaling and yoga. A holistic approach seems to be the most effective path to long-term healing for women with eating disorders and body dysmorphia.
Ketamine, ayahuasca, MDMA, and psilocybin are the four psychedelics that have been the focus of the majority of the latest research for the potential treatment of eating disorders. Let’s take a look at how each one could help with eating disorders:
Ketamine:
Ketamine is a non-classical psychedelic that can alter consciousness for a short period of time. This synthetic compound’s antidepressant qualities have been researched for treating severe depression, PTSD, and OCD.
Ketamine can be administered through IV, injected, taken orally, or it can be insufflated (blown into a body cavity, such as the nasal passages). The dose is titrated according to weight, with the understanding that everyone metabolizes the medicine differently. Ketamine is known for its dissociative effects, such as feeling like things are moving in slow motion or that you are separated from reality, with objects looking different and other characteristics that can be seen in this study.
“With regards to ketamine, the dissociative experience can translate into more joy in embodied experience. Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP) creates a break from the ordinary mind and a loosening of the belief systems that eating disorders are so rigidly held by. From a scientific perspective, psychedelics interrupt the default mode network, which governs self-image, memories, beliefs, and patterns.” says Taus. “The drug essentially creates an opportunity to reorganize the brain into a system that is more supportive for good living. Ketamine also results in increased neuroplasticity, which creates a golden hour opportunity for potent therapy work with a client 24-48 hours after a KAP experience.”
Ayahuasca is a fermented herbal drink that contains dimethyltryptamine (DMT), one of the most potent psychedelic drugs known for its role in shamanic or religious ceremonies. The brew has been utilized as a sacred ritual by various South American Indigenous tribes for at least 1000 years. Journeyers frequently claim mystical and transcendent visions that lead to self-discovery.
The ayahuasca experience has the ability to favorably affect behavior, stimulating self-reflection and increased awareness. Studies suggest that drinking it can aid in the treatment of anxiety, addictions, and depression, as well as eating disorders by also shifting body perceptions.
MDMA, another laboratory-created compound, has a physiological effect that alters people’s behavior such as openness. MDMA boosts serotonin levels while also upping oxytocin, dopamine, and other chemical mediators, resulting in feelings of empathy, trust, and compassion. The substance also has an effect on the way people process trauma and emotions for a period of several hours.
In clinical settings, MDMA is taken orally in capsules. The patient first takes a full dose (75-125 mg) and has the option to add a second dose about 2 hours into the session. An MDMA session will typically last between 6 to 8 hours.
MDMA causes an increase in prefrontal cortex activity, which is important for information processing, and a slowing in the amygdala, the part of the brain that is key in processing memories and emotions associated with fear. The key therapeutic benefit of MDMA is its capacity to excite the brain, allowing it to create and store new memories. Patients become more emotionally flexible and capable of exploring challenging memories during psychotherapy sessions, which often leads to long-term changes in how they react to emotional changes.
Psilocybin is a substance generated by more than 100 different mushroom species around the world. Psilocybin is said to have the best safety profile of all psychedelic substances. The fungi could be useful in the treatment of eating disorders by targeting the brain’s serotonin imbalance and therapeutically shifting the person away from symptom-focused treatment. This could establish changes in self-worth and self-compassion.
Aside from that, the efficacy of psilocybin therapy in the treatment of OCD shows how it could be useful in the treatment of eating disorders, as obsessive thoughts and compulsive and obsessive actions are also common hallmarks of eating disorders.
Reclaiming Ownership of Your Body with Psychedelics
Psychedelics can help women see their eating disorder as a coping mechanism and not as part of their identity. Once they embody this insight, they can also slowly start to replace bad habits with healthier and kinder new habits. They can rewrite the inner narrative of lies and self-limiting beliefs about their bodies.
Once more, there is a need to emphasize the importance of integration, relationships, and a holistic approach alongside other therapeutic methods and modalities. Change comes with time, effort, and consistency, especially when deconditioning behaviors that have been a big part of our lives for many years.
When asked about how long it takes for those changes to fully take place, Rose points out that “Eating disorders and addiction are transformational experiences that hold enriching value. Indeed, the word, ‘transformation’ means change or conversion. When thinking about recovery, it is not about stopping or restricting a behavior but rather allowing it to change and transform, taking us along for the ride so that our beliefs, feelings, thoughts, behavior, and action take a new form. Grounded, sustainable change does not happen overnight.”
“For me, recovery is about inner personal and spiritual growth, and incremental daily, positive changes. My experience with eating disorders and addiction has led me to believe that they offer lessons and advantages, transforming me into more of who I truly am: alive, free, appreciative, and connected.”
Although more research is still needed to better understand the safety and efficacy of psychedelic medicines and therapy in the treatment of eating disorders, the promising results we’re seeing show that this is a worthy goal to pursue. Stories such as Rose’s and Taus’ are just two among many other women who have experienced transformational change thanks to these compounds.
“With the support of therapy, community, spirituality, and relationships, I no longer judge my body, or effort to dominate her,” says Taus. “My experiences with plant medicines have supported me in understanding my body as a perfect part of nature, and in much the same way that I don’t complain about the shape of a leaf or a wave, I accept – even appreciate – the parts of me I’ve historically struggled with.”
“The power of psychedelic-assisted therapy is in its experiential quality,” she says. “When knowing meets feeling and understanding, we can galvanize the courage and strength needed to shapeshift our lives and reconstruct ourselves.”
With the power dynamics inevitably involved in psychedelic therapies and underground facilitation, can consent truly be established? And what can we learn from past abuse?
On behalf of all the survivors of psychedelic guide abuse, or abuse under any other non-ordinary states of consciousness such as hypnosis, meditative states, or other forms of induced or spontaneous trance and non-consensual shaktipat, I write this piece to elucidate how consent is not as simple as asking beforehand in a preparation session, or reiterating before the client “goes under/in.”
We need to begin by defining our terms, and understanding what we mean by consent is the first step in unpacking this issue.
Consent: permission, choice freely given with full acknowledgement of context, circumstances, possible consequences, and with full agency.
Consent is not only about the event/action/behavior itself in the moment, but the consequences of it, and the context within which those consequences unfold. For example, if a person is abused, psychologically tortured in a session, or touched in a way that triggers past trauma, then the fallout of that – as well as what resources and needs arise in the recovery process – have to be taken into consideration as well.
If the guides/facilitators, therapists, and other space-holders do not know about spiritual emergence/y as the deepest traumas come to the surface, then they will potentially hospitalize folks, call them crazy, and then de-validate any of the grievances they may bring up about the guide abuse – when in fact, it was them that induced the state of emergency in the first place, and therefore it is their responsibility to have proper resources and support in place for these inevitable openings.
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These questions need to be asked to assess the power dynamics and ability or inability to give consent under certain conditions:
Is it truly possible to give consent if:
We are in trauma states (The 4 Fs: Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn)?
We are under the influence of entheogens or in other non-ordinary states of consciousness?
We have a history of violation of consent (rape, assault, abuse)?
The guide/facilitator is in an authority position?
We are less privileged due to race, gender, socioeconomic status, etc. (power dynamics)
Is consent truly consent if the aforementioned conditions are present?
Methods of Manipulation and Control
Another way to begin to protect ourselves and others from abuse within these vulnerable spaces is to understand more deeply some of the methods of manipulation and control that abusers use to coerce their victims.
These are the tactics that abusers use to prey upon the vulnerability from our trauma – AKA overriding consent.
Playing the victim themselves, to elicit the Fawn Response: By saying that they are the ones in need or the vulnerable one, they elicit caring and compassion from their victims, thus creating a false sense of security and intimacy, as well as being seen as innocent.
Pointing the finger at the other, saying they are the crazy one; gaslighting: They say that someone else is the crazy one to de-validate any grievances or anything that might be heard about them or their work from former clients who were harmed.
Repetition of narratives, AKA brainwashing: This is an actual technique used by lineages of guides and torturers to break down and break open peoples’ psyches so that they will be receptive to whatever narratives they want to implant.
Cues/post-hypnotic suggestions to activate certain feelings, thoughts, and behaviors: Similar to brainwashing, some abusers use cues to manipulate the victim’s actions.
Claiming that you are not trying or working hard enough: This is the victim-blaming portion of the protocol, where the abuser says if you just let go more, take more, break down your resistance/ego more, then you will be able to heal, creating a gatekeeper effect.
Romanticizing the pain and suffering they cause as for for our benefit: They will say things like, “This is for your healing” or “This is your warrior training” or “The universe/ancestors want you to do this.”
It’s like the opposite of false memory implantation – using actual memories and vulnerabilities against their victims to take control and exert power over them. They know where it hurts and how to take advantage of those wounds for their own benefit. And how do they know the vulnerabilities? Because they are your therapists too! They know all of your wounds, trauma, and history because you have come in good faith to them for healing, and instead, these vulnerabilities are used against you.
This perspective – the veil lifting and seeing things as they are, Shadow and all – may seem bleak or hopeless, but in fact, it is the opposite. It is the opportunity to create safer, more effective psychedelic therapies, facilitators, and guides, which can allow us all to feel like this renaissance is truly an evolution of consciousness, and not the Wild West; its reckless charlatans and gurus leaving wreckage in their wake as they burn though the souls of their victims.
How Do We Persevere?
So what are the implications here? How do we vet and refine our discernment to weed out the psychopathic and sadistic? Is it even possible to ask for consent or to properly give it under these circumstances? Is that the end of the story? So consent isn’t truly possible in these cases?
Of course not, no. What this means is that we need trauma-informed guides, facilitators, and space-holders, who are well-versed in spiritual emergence/y, and who are as close as possible to the same level of privilege as their clients; which means we need more guides of color, more access to training, more BIPOC representation in the media and at conferences, and more financially-accessible and ethically-held medicine spaces.
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And we need to check power and privilege, and understand trauma history and how to work ethically with trauma survivors. We need to implement peer-support in medicine guiding/facilitation and not hierarchy systems, which lends itself to overt or covert power-dynamics and the abuses that manifest from that. Also, we need to create accountability structures though independent bodies that are not beholden to economic, legal, or political pressures, which can protect the survivors from incriminating themselves when reporting abuse. There are many organizations that are often driven by agendas for funding and research, and have silenced concerns for decades. Survivors are through being silenced, and are now part of the solution for creating safer, more effective protocols and standards. Let their voices be heard, and help to create a safer, more ethical psychedelic movement.
Jon Dennis, Esq. looks closely at what Oregon’s Measure 109 really says, and provides a possible framework for the fair treatment of religious-use sacrament.
Oregon’s Psilocybin Services Act, aka Measure 109, is currently undergoing a reputational makeover. Although primarily advertised to voters as “psilocybin therapy,” clinical use of psilocybin is only one of the many modalities of psilocybin services that may soon be permitted in Oregon. Nearly all of the media reporting on M109 have echoed the messaging of the M109 electoral campaign, creating a narrative that Oregon voted to legalize “psilocybin therapy.” But now that people are beginning to write and speak about M109 in a more careful and nuanced way, many are surprised to find out that the psilocybin law passed in Oregon allows people to take psilocybin for virtually any reason. If there is still any doubt about whether M109 is a “therapy” program, Tom Eckert, one of the chief co-petitioners of Measure 109 and now the chair of the Oregon Psilocybin Advisory Board (“OPAB”) (as well as a practicing therapist), said in a recent interview that “The idea [of M109] is to create safe space under the facilitation of licensed professionals to explore [the psilocybin] experience for personal benefit.” According to Eckert, taking psilocybin under M109 is “about your consciousness and using psilocybin however you really want to, whether it’s creative, spiritually, or for a therapeutic benefit.” This means, of course, that psilocybin may be used pursuant to religious or spiritual exercise. It means that psilocybin churches might soon become commonplace in Oregon. The intersection of M109 and religious liberties is an important and complex topic that so far has received very little attention during the meetings of OPAB and its 5 subcommittees. Religious exploration is already a large part of this so-called “psychedelic renaissance,” and all signs point to religious use of psychedelics becoming more prevalent over time. Because the “Oregon model” of psychedelic services has become one of the leading models in psychedelic policy reform, it is paramount we build religious protections into the model. In response to public comment, the Oregon Health Authority (“OHA”) recently published the following statement:
Q: Can the psilocybin services be offered within a ceremonial or religious context?
A: Yes, if psilocybin services take place at a licensed service center and is otherwise compliant with statute and rule requirements.
In other words, OHA intends to allow the religious use of psilocybin if performed in accordance with Oregon’s regulatory framework for psilocybin. The preceding sentence constitutes pretty much everything we know so far about how Oregon intends to address religious practice under the measure. This is particularly concerning in light of the fact that OPAB has many complex issues to still resolve, and it must issue its final recommendations by June 30 – meaning there are only 15 hours of full OPAB meeting time remaining. Time is running out for Oregon to create thoughtful and nuanced policy on this matter of great importance. Fortunately, serious conversations about religious practice are about to begin. The February 2 meeting of the Equity Subcommittee and the February 3 meeting of the Licensing Subcommittee and the Equity Subcommittee will address religious use.
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What is Essential to a Religious-Use Framework?
When considering what a religious-use framework might look like under M109, I identify six elements that are essential:
It must permit a broad range of religious practices and ceremonies without unnecessary interference from the government. Protections should accommodate practices and beliefs ranging from traditional Indigenous practices to contemporary Western, Eastern, and neo-shamanic religions that incorporate psilocybin into their practices;
It must create a pathway for religious practice that is affordable to marginalized communities;
The regulations should allow special rules around the growing, storing, handling, and testing of psilocybin mushrooms that reflect the view common in many entheogenic communities that the mushrooms themselves are sacred objects worthy of reverential treatment;
The regulations must provide meaningful oversight of and accountability for religious practitioners, particularly in:
Screening new members;
Disclosing risks/obtaining informed consent;
Preventing abuse; and
Ensuring that religious practice is conducted in a safe manner;
Given the Oregon constitution’s protection of both the religious and the non-religious*, the regulations must not give preferences to “religious” over “non-religious” organizations or individuals. Accordingly, the criteria for who may operate within the “religious framework” should be framed in terms of sincere practice relating to one’s deeply-held values, beliefs, and convictions, rather than affiliation with a religious organization;
It should be simple enough to administer that it does not cause a substantial burden on OHA.
With these considerations in mind, I have taken the liberty of drafting a proposed model regulatory framework for how religious practice could be protected under Measure 109. My proposed framework may be found here:
I am actively seeking stakeholder feedback. Please email me with questions or comments. To execute this project well means compiling and assembling a wide range of stakeholder input, so please do reach out.
One of the fundamental assumptions underlying the model is that if religious-use privileges are only affordable to a small subset of the population, it might actually be better to not grant special religious privileges at all. Perhaps the most iniquitous aspect of M109 is that access to psilocybin will be unaffordable to a lot of people. Luckily, as we will see, religious use privileges can be structured in a manner that creates new pathways to affordable access. Several key features of this framework may be aided by some explanation.
Peer-Support Assistance
Measure 109 requires that all psilocybin be purchased, possessed, and consumed “under the supervision of a …facilitator” (Section 57 (2)). The measure does not otherwise describe what that supervision should look like, which leaves open many possibilities. Currently it appears that Oregon is poised to require that the majority of assistance given to clients must be provided by paid facilitators, who are prohibited from taking psilocybin while serving as a facilitator. If this is the case, even if Oregon adopts liberal rules that require lower amounts of paid facilitation, I estimate that a “cheap” group session, offered by a nonprofit, will not be available for less than $500 per person, including the costs of psilocybin. This is inequitable. We can do much better. Luckily, Indigenous and other religious and spiritual communities have substantial history and experience using plant medicines as sacraments in ceremony. They provide clear proof that ceremony can be safely conducted without the need for paid facilitators who abstain from fully participating in the ceremony. Accordingly, religious communities who operate under M109 should have the option to provide their own peer-support assistance through community members that have been certified by their community as being qualified and capable to provide that assistance. Reasonable minds could disagree about how much the state should regulate that certification. Regulation could be enacted to encourage the slow and sustainable growth of these organizations and to ensure that the clients who provide peer-support assistance are familiar with and oriented to the community in which they intend to serve. Successful implementation of this system will require relationship-building within each community, and the regulations could require that a client be involved with a community for a period of time (which could be defined by a minimum number of ceremonies attended) before they begin providing peer-support assistance. Or the regulations could simply trust the community to responsibly manage itself, particularly in light of the fact that its licensure could be lost if it behaves irresponsibly.
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The freedom to exercise one’s religion means little if paywalls keep most people out. However, if peer-support assistance is allowed, it could avoid having to pay unneeded facilitators to “supervise” ceremonies. The number of facilitators that are needed to safely supervise a ceremony may vary by community, but well-organized communities could conceivably conduct ceremonies safely with only one facilitator present. By reducing the number of facilitators that must be on hand for a ceremony, we drastically reduce the cost of the ceremony. Additionally, many entheogenic religions do not permit people into their ceremonial space who have not consumed at least some amount of their sacrament. The idea in some communities is that the presence of people who are on a different vibrational wavelength (i.e., who have not partaken of the sacrament) fundamentally prevents participants from receiving certain religious benefits. Facilitators are prohibited from taking psilocybin while serving as a facilitator, so allowing facilitators to supervise from outside the ceremonial space is the only option if this view is to be respected. This could be safely done if peer-support assistance were permitted by clients who are participating in the ceremony. This permits a higher degree of self-governance and self-reliance, which is healthy. This peer-support assistance model was inspired in part by the practices of the Church of the Holy Light of the Queen (“CHLQ”). CHLQ is the Santo Diame church who successfully sued the federal government for the right to use Daime (which some people call ayahuasca) in their religious practices.** In their 25 years of practice, it is my understanding that CHLQ has never had a safety situation which they were not able to safely manage internally. For people interested in learning more about that, I interviewed Padhrino Jonathan Goldman, the spiritual leader of CHLQ, on Episode No. 6 of Eyes on Oregon.
Religious Manufacturing Privileges
The religious manufacturing privileges contemplated by the framework are severalfold: 1) Religious communities are granted permission to grow mushrooms in a less-regulated (i.e., far less expensive) manner than is required of standard manufacturers; 2) Religious growers may grow the species of mushrooms using techniques and substrates that are consistent with their beliefs and convictions, provided that products are safe; 3) Testing of religious products is not required, unless indicated by a client’s adverse medical reaction; 4) Religious products may not be delivered to a service center that is not a religious service center; and 5) Religious growers are under a duty to provide safe products and avoid creating nuisances and other environmental hazards. The policy considerations behind the proposed religious manufacturing privileges are two-fold: 1) it gives communities the option to offer very low-cost products (mushrooms are famously cheap to grow); and 2) it creates space for Oregon plant medicine communities who believe that the mushrooms themselves are sacred and must be handled with reverence. Product safety can be maintained without the need for expensive laboratories. Unlicensed, unregulated mushroom growers – many of whom grow in their basements or closets using improvised laboratory equipment – currently create the bulk of consumer psilocybin products. This matters because it serves as a counterpoint to the concern that “under-regulated” manufacturing operations pose a threat to public health or safety. In truth, reports of adverse reactions to unsafe psilocybin products are exceedingly rare, particularly in light of the amount of mushrooms being eaten nowadays. While the idea of permitting a religious or spiritual community to have homegrown sacramental mushrooms might make some people uncomfortable, it’s worth remembering that you can buy myceliated grow kits for gourmet mushrooms virtually everywhere, and society allows that practice without question. Moreover, the practice of a religious or spiritual community handling its own sacrament in accordance with their beliefs and convictions is a practice that predates Oregon statehood.
Oregon is required by M109 to consider the costs of testing to the client when deciding its testing rules, and testing may not be more onerous than is reasonably necessary for health and safety (Section 96 (7)). Moreover, testing standards must be different for different “varieties of psilocybin products” (Section 96 (1)(d)), which could presumably include mushrooms grown for use in religious ceremony. Relaxed testing rules for religious products will help the state achieve its statutory mandate of striving for an affordable system, while also respecting practitioner beliefs. While this could create greater imprecision in dosing, this is the current state of things in our existing unregulated market, and people safely manage that imprecision.
Affordability
In addition to providing meaningful autonomy of religious practice, the combination of peer-support assistance and less-regulated religious manufacturing and testing starts to get us close to an affordable system. If all three are adopted, a lower and more satisfying price point begins to emerge. The costs for services may even be as low as the combination of one facilitator’s time that is spread across multiple clients (or which may be donated by volunteer facilitators), low-cost products sold by a nonprofit manufacturer, and overhead costs of running a nonprofit service center. To drive costs lower still, OHA could adopt a progressive fee structure that permits nonprofit service centers and manufacturers to pay a little less than their “fair share” of the program’s fees. Additionally, onsite manufacturing centers could possibly create a direct manufacturer-to-client sales pipeline that might allow entheogenic service centers to avoid the application of that pesky tax rule, 280E (which disallows tax deductions or credits attributable to businesses that “traffick” controlled substances). This appears to be allowed under M109, as sales by manufacturers must be either “to or on a premises” licensed as a manufacturer or service center (Sections 53 (1)(a) and (2)(a), and Section 57). With all of these cost-savings measures in place, it is foreseeable that a psilocybin ceremony under M109 could cost well under $50 per participant. That’s still too expensive. But it’s considerably better.
Participation in reciprocal exchange programs should be required of all who engage with the M109 program, from clients to testing laboratories. Involvement with a reciprocal exchange program is important because the programs help minimize the harmful impacts that extraction of cultural and natural resources have on the Indigenous plant medicine communities who have stewarded plant medicines for centuries or longer. It also helps ensure that Indigenous knowledge and wisdom do not become lost or forgotten. The proposed model framework requires entheogenic practitioners to have an unspecified level of involvement in a reciprocal exchange program, and an annual public report of that involvement. This doesn’t punish bad actors for negligible involvement, but it provides social incentives for people who can demonstrate meaningful participation.
Discipline of Entheogenic Practitioners
Because this framework gives entheogenic practitioners a considerable set of privileges, it also creates a reciprocal set of duties to use those privileges safely and responsibly. To achieve this, the proposed framework borrows language from the Oregon law that protects the religious use of peyote. In order for religious use of peyote to be protected in Oregon, the use must be done “in a manner that is not dangerous to the health of the user or others who are in the proximity of the user (ORS 475.752(4)).” Oregon should adopt the same standard for psilocybin religions who operate under the measure. Ultimately, if a religious practitioner engages in conduct that is unsafe or irresponsible, the practitioner risks losing their special religious privileges, as well as their general psilocybin licensing. Given the significant financial and personal investment that will go into opening any psilocybin business in Oregon, this provides powerful incentives to operate within the bounds of the regulatory framework.
Conclusion
In conclusion, if we think of M109 not in terms of “therapy” vs. “not therapy,” but rather (as Tom Eckert put it), a “safe space under the facilitation of licensed professionals to explore [the psilocybin] experience for personal benefit,” it appears the best way for Oregon to reduce the most harm to its people is to invite all beneficial use of psilocybin to come and operate within the relative safety of the M109 container. This includes religious use. The model framework proposed herein would create a type of partnership or alliance between religious practitioners and OHA. In exchange for paying licensing fees and submitting to administrative oversight, religious communities who use psilocybin gain mechanisms of accountability*** and the freedom to practice with substantially less fear of criminal repercussions. However, in order for entheogenic practitioners to accept Oregon’s invitation, the M109 religious container must not be unduly restrictive in what it allows, and it must be affordable. If these interests can be balanced, psychedelic religious practice could soon find its way out of the shadows of the underground and into the full light of day. The following is my presentation from the February 3 Oregon Psilocybin Licensing Subcommittee Meeting. Bob Otis of the Sacred Garden Community also presents.
*See, e.g., Meltebeke v. Bureau of Lab. & Indus., 322 Or at 147. (Oregon’s constitutional religious protections “extend[] to religious believers and nonbelievers alike.”) This also avoids giving nonreligious clients a financial incentive to seek religious services from a religious provider, which is important. For more information about the inappropriateness of confusing religious and non-religious containers of psychedelic use, see Matthew Johnson’s article entitled “Consciousness, Religion, and Gurus: Pitfalls of Psychedelic Medicine.” **It’s worth noting that Oregon regulatory agencies have already granted religious exemptions to religious organizations that use controlled substances. See the Oregon Board of Pharmacy’s 2008 letter to CHLQ.
***The need for greater mechanisms of accountability in psychedelic communities is described in horrifying detail in a new podcast series called Cover Story, which is produced by a collaboration of New York Magazine and Psymposia.
“Education is not the filling of a pot, but the lighting of a fire.” – William Butler Yeats
The interest in psychedelics as a therapeutic tool is growing at a rapid pace, both by individuals looking for better solutions outside the current medical regime, and by practitioners looking for new and better ways to help their patients.
Even though regulatory systems lag behind, a paradigm shift in healthcare is clearly under way. The demand for safe, ethical, and effective treatment and integration is growing exponentially. Now more than ever, it is vital that educated, informed practitioners are ready and equipped to provide care when called upon.
After enrolling over 9,000 students in our eLearning platform and graduating over 500 in our eight-week, 47-hour program, Navigating Psychedelics, we’ve heard a lot about what people want and need from an in-depth training program – and also, what isn’t being offered out there. Our students have told us that training can be overly prescriptive, rigid, and clinical, with logistical hurdles and barriers to acceptance.
That’s where Vital comes in. Our new 12-month certificate program fills gaps in the current landscape of psychedelic training – both in course content and structure – and takes a holistic, experiential, and reflective approach to psychedelic practice and integration.
Here’s how Vital is different:
A truly inclusive training program. Vital welcomes students of all backgrounds – licensed or unlicensed clinicians, medically-trained healthcare professionals, legacy operators, and integrative wellness practitioners. All previous experience, informal learning, and formal training will be considered when reviewing applications.
A drug agnostic approach that equips practitioners with the knowledge to work with clients who use or are interested in exploring a range of psychedelics. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to psychedelic therapy, and the potential benefits are not limited to a handful of substances.
A holistic curriculum balanced between clinical and scientific research and protocols, while also focusing on philosophical self-reflection, transpersonal psychology, Indigenous traditions, and somatic approaches to healing trauma.
An opportunity to learn from and interact with world-renowned researchers at an economical scale.
A modular and malleable curriculum with finance and scheduling flexibility, designed to accommodate a global student population.
An open forum on harm reduction that encourages honest discussion on personal experiences with substances in a safe space.
Vital at-a-Glance:
Vital was created by Psychedelics Today Co-Founders Joe Moore and Kyle Buller, M.S., LAC, and a team of people dedicated to helping others master the elements of psychedelic practice and contribute to the healing of the world. The culmination of over 15 years of work in psychedelic practice, the first Vital cohort of 100 students kicks off on “Bicycle Day,” April 19th, 2022.
Course content is packaged into five core modules, covering: psychedelic history and research; clinical therapies; the art of holding space; medical frameworks; and integration theories and techniques. Each comprehensive module spans between seven to ten weeks of specialized lectures led by guest expert teachers as well as more intimate study groups facilitated by our instructors.
The best teachers are those who show you where to look, but don’t tell you what to see.
-Alexandra K. Trenfor
World-Class Teaching Team:
Over the years, Psychedelics Today has developed relationships with a humbling number of leading researchers, historians, clinicians, and bright minds working in research and application, advocacy, spiritual practice, and patient care. We’ve assembled some of the very best to work with Vital students, including:
Ben Sessa, M.D. Chief Medical Officer at Awakn Life Sciences, licensed MDMA and psilocybin therapist, academic writer, and psychedelic psychopharmacology researcher.
Ayize Jama Everett, M.A., M.F.A. Fiction writer, practicing therapist, and Master’s of Divinity who teaches a course called “The Sacred and the Substance” at the Graduate Theological Union.
Richard Schwartz, Ph.D. Developer of the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model, adjunct faculty of the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
We believe that no amount of learning from clinical studies, reading textbooks, or listening to an instructor can make up for first-hand experience with holotropic states. Furthermore, we believe openness and sharing of experience validates clinical evidence, helps inform research and the approach to patient care, and helps undo stigma and misguided perceptions caused by the war on drugs.
Throughout the course, students will be challenged to deepen their personal understanding of psychedelics and reignite their transformation by attending one of six experiential retreats (in either the United States or abroad). Stay tuned for more details on dates, locations and pricing.
While the deeply experiential nature of the course supports the growth of practitioners, the course is also designed to equip participants with the knowledge they need to establish a psychedelic-informed practice from the ground up. For coaches, facilitators, mental health and complementary health practitioners, Vital provides a thriving community of specialists to support their mission.
Promoting Equal Access and Career Development:
Fair access to psychedelic medicine begins with fair access to essential education. In addition to flexible payment plans for all students, we’ve committed to provide scholarships for 20% of students from each cohort, sponsoring up to 100% of tuition to support their mission.
Scholarships are awarded on a case-by-case basis, and are reserved for people who:
Are in demonstrated financial need
Identify as BIPOC
Identify as LGBTQIA+
Are military service members/veterans
Serve marginalized or geographically underserved communities
At the end of the program, graduating students receive a certificate in Psychedelic Therapies and Integration. CE credits will be offered, but stay tuned for more details.
Full details on scholarships and credits are in the extended course brochure, available on the Vital website.
Program registrations are open now, and close at midnight EST on March 27th. Acceptance will be offered based on eligibility and order of submission (with priority to students receiving scholarships). Once all seats in the initial cohort are filled, subsequent approved students will be placed on a waitlist and invited to join the course when a spot becomes available. Interested students are encouraged to apply as soon as possible. Apply here.
Gathering as professionals in psychedelics has taken on new meaning. It’s more – a lot more – than just networking now.
In early December, Horizons: Perspectives on Psychedelics (an annual conference often referred to just as ‘Horizons’) re-emerged from the proverbial ashes of COVID-19; a pandemic that led to the dismantling of social connectivity and a general feeling like we were moving with momentum. With the pandemic came distance: social distance, emotional distance, and psychological distance. We stopped going to work together, we stopped learning together, we stopped moving and growing together. Reconvening at Horizons was therefore much more significant than just attending a regular conference.
Pandemic or not, the Horizons conference already played the role of a psychedelic sandbox where the psychedelic community convenes each year – a place where we get to see how widespread the community really is, and where each conversation is an opportunity to learn from our peers. It is a place where we can learn together, cry together, break bread together, and dance together. It is a place where we can be our most authentic selves, see others, and be seen. And it is a place where difficult conversations are encouraged to be had.
I heard a colleague explain that at other conferences, we are often introducing psychedelics to a new audience that sometimes lacks the capacity to grasp the shadow of psychedelic therapy. Contrarily, Horizons seeks to shed light on our shadow. It seeks to broaden our collective dreams of what is possible in the psychedelic space while learning from our past. By having those difficult conversations in front of 2,000 people, we get to grow collectively – as a community, and as a movement. And this year’s Horizons, more than ever, was an opportunity to rebuild a sense of collective effervescence.
Collective Effervescence
Sociologist Emile Durkheim coined the term “collective effervescence“as a “shared state of high emotional arousal related to intensification of emotions by social sharing, felt in religious and secular collective rituals, irrespective of their content (joyful feasts or sad funerary rituals), which empowers the individual.” Essentially, collective effervescence occurs when there is a shared sense of engagement with something bigger than the self, warranting a personal sense of empowerment. In developing the Perceived Emotional Synchrony Scale, psychologists Anna Wlodarczyk, Larraitz Zumeta, and their fellow researchers determined that some of the key conditions for collective effervescence to emerge are a “shared attention on one or more symbolic stimuli” and a sense of “intentional coordination or behavioral synchrony among the participants in a given gathering.” Ultimately, they argued that “the relevance of emotional synchronization in collective gatherings [is] conducive to strong forms of social identification, particularly the overlapping of the individual with the collective self.”
Our new 12-month certificate program, Vital, begins April 19th. Registration is closed, but sign up for the waitlist for next year’s edition now at vitalpsychedelictraining.com!
By blurring the lines between the individual and the collective self, Wlodarczyk and her colleagues suggested that a sense of collective effervescence ultimately “pulls humans fully but temporarily into the higher realm of the sacred, where the self disappears and collective interests predominate.” It is no surprise that a conference discussing the ethics and future of the psychedelic movement would incite a collective effervescence so strong that a perceived sense of emotional synchrony may occur, where there is indeed a “co-present other” that becomes closer and closer to a perceived sense of self.
This is how I want to see the psychedelic movement evolving and growing, with the collective interest dominating a sense of self. The uniqueness and radicalness of this movement will only come from our ability to enter into this shared sense of togetherness, and into a “higher realm of the sacred” and not to bypass it. How can we do this?
“Shadow work” is a term those in the psychedelic movement have heard countless times. In psychedelic healing, shadow work is not about eradicating the shadow. Rather, it is about shedding light on it and getting to know it deeply, so that when it shows up, it is not unfamiliar. By working with the shadow, we become better equipped to handle what may come up as a result of trauma. If we do not have a safe space to have these conversations, to be held in our confusion, and to be educated on our blind spots, then how can we move forward? How can we call ourselves a revolution if we are not rethinking the way we engage with our work each and every year?
Horizons is a place where we learn about cutting edge research in science and in the clinic, new models for approaching business, and cultural matters. But more importantly, it’s an opportunity to converge as a community and reflect on the previous year together, shedding light on our blind spots and engaging in shadow work to build a sense of collective effervescence and a unified goal. While there were many great presentations this year, three in particular really encapsulated all of this.
Doing the Work with Laura Mae Northrup
Without a doubt, the most impactful talk of the weekend for me was from marriage and family therapist, Laura Mae Northrup, who, in light of recent events, spoke about sexual misconduct in the psychedelic space. Shivers ran down my spine as she powerfully proclaimed these words into the microphone: “Mental health clinicians self-report engaging in sexual violations with their clients at rates of 7-12%. We don’t have data on corresponding rates of psychedelic therapies, but we have no reasonto believe it would be any less than our non-psychedelic counterparts.” She spoke with conviction, with grace, and emotion. She had us all in tears, reflecting on the very real fact that the clinicians who are at a higher rate of sexually abusing their clients are male clinicians who were sexually abused as kids.
Northrup highlighted that we are in a cycle of abuse; that healing trauma is painful, and without doing so effectively, we will continue to cause harm to others. She did not name names, and she did not stand on that stage building a pedestal for herself (regardless of how compelling it seemed, as she noted). Instead, she served her community and said what needed to be said. If there was one takeaway from her powerful talk, it was that “we need to heal ourselves.” She took what was frantically scrambling around everyone’s minds and hearts, and put it into powerful and sensical words. She made it make sense.
Tears continued to flow down my face as Horizons founder Kevin Balktick approached the podium, applauding Northrup for the outstanding courage it took for her to get on that stage and speak from her heart. He then declared that sexual abuse and misconduct should not be a “women’s issue”; that it always has, and certainly should be, a men’s issue as well.
Eradicating the Promise of a “Miracle Cure” with Juliana Mulligan
The second presentation that captivated my attention was from ibogaine treatment specialist, Juliana Mulligan, who spoke of her experience of being sent to jail for using heroin, being thrown on the streets in the middle of Bogota, Colombia, and finally seeking refuge in what she was told was a miracle “cure” for opioid dependence. She then shared her own horrifying journey of getting off of opioids by going to an ibogaine center that did not have the proper protocols in place.
She brought about gasps in the crowd when she told us that the clinic did not have a heart monitor and that they gave her twice the safe dose of ibogaine – certainly enough to kill anyone, she clarified. When the clinic noticed her abnormal EKG readings and decided to seek professional and medical help, she was refused by three hospitals largely due to a lack of understanding on how to handle her situation, being overwhelmed with patients, and not believing that someone her age could be having a heart problem. Finally, when the fourth hospital almost turned her away, she had her first of six cardiac arrests due to her high dose of ibogaine. She explained that she remembers very little about her experience on ibogaine, but that she woke up with a tiny fraction of the usual opioid withdrawal symptoms, the feeling of a huge weight lifted from the guilt and shame of years of substance use, and a newfound clarity around her life’s mission.
Despite her experience at this ibogaine clinic, Mulligan has not turned her back on the promise of ibogaine in treating opioid dependence. In fact, she has dedicated part of her career to ensuring that people are equipped with the tools and knowledge on how to choose an ethical and effective ibogaine clinic – something she realized was necessary due to the many vulnerable people who don’t know what to look for when choosing an ibogaine clinic. Often, people do not take the time to learn about the proper protocols needed to provide this treatment, with many acting out of desperation in an attempt to “fix” their issues as quickly as possible. Her main point was to remind us of the dangers of selling ibogaine as a “miracle cure,” and how damaging it can be for people to have the idea that Ibogaine will fix their issues overnight.
Speaking Softly in Recollection with William Leonard Pickard
Finally, ex-convict William Leonard Pickard held us all in a state of awe as he eloquently and captivatingly shared his story of spending 21 years in prison for allegedly producing 90% of the United States’ supply of LSD. He spoke softly, and took long pauses between his sentences, his descriptive tone allowing me to truly visualize the scene where a CIA agent pointed a rifle at his forehead while uttering, “I’m going to blow your brains out.” He told us about the violence that occurred in prison, and how he became desensitized to fights and killings while he would quietly sit and eat his lunch. He showed us photos of a prison cell, and told us about how he fell in love with American Literature, and that without that – coupled with deep meditation, he may have not survived.
Pickard reminded us all why we were sitting in that room and why we need to change the way psychedelics have been viewed since the 1970s. The majority of the people in that room are privileged enough to never experience going to jail for psychedelics, and getting a glimpse into that reality reminded us why rewriting the psychedelic script in America is critical.
Composting Emotions into Inspiration
In exploring rituals where collective effervescence is powerful, Wlodarczyk and her team discuss the way in which both positive and negatively valenced rituals ultimately lead to a shared sense of emotion and heightened well-being. Indeed, what truly comes through in these rituals is “the creation of a positive emotional atmosphere in which grief, sadness, anger, and fear are transformed into hope, solidarity, and trust.”
Contextualizing these experiences –sexual misconduct in psychedelic healing, the wrongful advertisement of ibogaine as a miracle cure, and the harsh realities of the drug war and the American justice system – provides our collective community with the opportunity to transform these emotions of grief, sadness, anger, and fear into a shared sense of solidarity. We were provided with the opportunity to compost these moments of disappointment and turn them into something productive, where the unified goal of ethically bringing psychedelics to modern American lives empowers each and every one of us, both on a collective and individual level. This is how we can heal and move forward as a collective movement.
These three presentations are simply a glimpse into the moving stories that were told on that stage. The breadth of content shared allowed us the opportunity to reflect on what the world could look like once we systematically dismantle the war on drugs, and what is effectively involved in doing so: the clinical trials for which researchers have put their careers on the line, the endless volunteer hours that policy makers and lawyers have been putting toward changing legislation, the repairing of relationships with Indigenous communities through the work of the Native American Church and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the importance of doing our own work in order to help others heal from their trauma, and the dangers of presenting psychedelics as a magic bullet.
There are many pathways to attain psychedelic healing. Horizons provides a space for the entire range of themes that ought to be considered in bringing psychedelics to the modern world. In order to achieve this goal, we must do so collectively. We must reimagine what it means to be successful, and we can only do this by building a collective sense of self. To do this, we must continue to have these conversations, processing fear and anger into hope and solidarity. If we want to see the psychedelic movement radically change the world we are living in, we must face the music by continuing to have these difficult conversations and seek to elevate collective effervescence.
Our understanding of the brain in the 1800s was quite different from what we know today – and pretty weird, too.
You can’t throw a tab of LSD without hitting a story about psychedelics these days. While psychedelics are going through a scientific renaissance, 150 years ago, the field was a circus of misinformation and racism. Occasionally though, through that potpourri of misguided madness, it nailed some concepts that still hold up today. Granted, future scientists will most likely write an article clowning the state of psychedelics in the early 2000s to today, but let me be the first to start that vicious cycle by highlighting some of the more ridiculous concepts people believed in the 19th Century.
While there may have been many ethnographic studies of psychedelics dating back to the Bronze Age, the concept of modern neuroscience is a fairly new field. In the 1880s, the interest in neuroscience formed from humanity’s attempt to explain mental illness and addiction through scientific terms as opposed to supernatural spirits possessing bodies. Some neuroscientists in the 19th century believed a person’s cognition, along with predisposition of behavioral traits was rooted in neuroanatomy, which some believed was reflected in the physical structure of the skull. The idea that chemistry played a role in brain functionality was a novel concept that didn’t have much support in the scientific community in the early 1880s. In fact, the closest thing science got to neurochemistry was in 1809, when Johann Christian Reil soaked a brain in pure alcohol for a week just to see what would happen (if you’re wondering, it got really hard and took on the texture of shoe leather).
To first understand the state of neuroscience in the 1800s, we must first comprehend the state of science at the time, and it was bonkers.
Cell Theory, Darwin, and Phrenology
The idea that all living organisms consisted of cells and that all cells originated from pre-existing cells (cell theory) proposed by German physiologist Theodor Schwann in 1839 was revolutionary. It shifted the deeply-held religious belief that life originated supernaturally, and instead, emerged from biological means. It sounds trivial now, but society took a collective seat and came to the realization that each person was a community of cells working in unison to create a ‘Bob,’ Connie,’ or ‘Karen’ (and of course, all those Karen cells wanted to see the manager shortly after being created).
Twenty years after the world recovered from Schwann’s cell theory, Darwin dropped The Origin of a Species, giving birth to the concept of evolution, a radical idea that once again shifted humanity’s focus away from divine creation and more closely towards the modern worldview we hold today.
Science in the 1800s was also notoriously racist. Many people used Darwin’s evolutionary theory to justify hateful pseudoscience that revealed the most vile aspects of humanity. While he was able to consciously remove himself from the 19th century racism that prevailed in science at the time, most could not. Franz Joseph Gall constructed the basic ideologies of phrenology in 1808, which was a belief that a person’s mental aptitude could be determined by bumps and ridges in a person’s skull — evidence Gall believed was the pressure of the neuroanatomy of the brain on the skull. More specifically, he believed a person’s behavior was localized in different compartments in the brain — a total of 28 areas to be exact. Things like ‘the firmness of purpose,’ ‘love of poetry,’ and even a place in the brain that’s responsible for a person’s tendency to murder, Gall insisted, could be determined through cranial anatomy.
When phrenology emerged in Europe in the 1800s, most scientists discarded the idea since its foundations were based on faulty neuroanatomical information. Gall was tossed out of Austria for proposing such an obviously absurd idea and eventually ended up in France, where even Napoleon Bonaparte ridiculed his concept of phrenology. When the rest of the world seemed to collectively reject phrenology as the pseudoscience it truly was, it found a home in America — because at that conflicted time, obviously it would.
With abolitionist movements spreading across the country along with the social underpinnings of what would be known as the Civil War, phrenology was used as a “scientific” reason to justify slavery in America and the overall disgusting treatment of Indigenous people as land continued to be removed from tribal territories. However, phrenology did have its fierce opponents, like John P. Harrison, editor of the Western Lancet, a peer-reviewed medical journal that caught the attention of Southern political leaders when it was introduced to America (and is still in print today). With the assistance of books like Phrenology Vindicatedby Charles Caldwell and Crania Americana by Samuel Morton, political leaders had the “scientific” backing to make absurd claims like Africans were neurologically designed to be enslaved and Indigenous Americans were biologically a different species than white people — which made stealing their land a natural process ordained by God.
Amongst the incendiary nature of science during the 19th century, the unlikely emergence of psychedelic neuroscience occurred — and like all things in the 1800s, it was undoubtedly a product of its time. That’s a nice way to say it was sometimes wrong and mostly racist, but interestingly enough, it got some things right.
Neuroscience can be defined as the objective study of the brain and the central nervous system. The first neuroscientist to analyze the effects of psychedelics was Germany’s Louis Lewin in his book, Phantastica. Although it was officially released in 1924 when Lewin was 74, it contained his collected psychedelic research that took place in the late 1800s. Among the many drugs he categorized, he decided not to call psychedelics “hallucinogens” since not all substances elicit a hallucinatory response. “Phantastica” was the word he decided on, along with other equally interesting names like “Inebriantia” for drugs like alcohol, and my personal favorite, “Excitantia” for substances like caffeine and nicotine.
Lewin was never really a scientific rock star in his time though, mostly because he refused to renounce his Jewish heritage in 19th-century Germany – racism and anti-Semitism in the scientific community at this time went hand-in-hand. However, Lewin did get the props he deserved in psychedelics when Paul Henning of the Berlin Botanical Museum named peyote Anhalonium Lewiniiin Lewin’s honor.
Around the time Lewin came on the scene, most people were describing psychedelics in a subjective manner, wrapped up in pseudo-science and religious mysticism. People weren’t tripping because of psychedelic-induced neurological activity — evil spirits possessed the taker of the psychedelic, which meant evil behavior was soon to follow. Metaphysics, with its focus on the nature of human consciousness and existence, was rapidly growing in the 1800s. Lewin believed that describing psychedelics in metaphysical terms would ruin what we could potentially learn from them. His research was wholly focused on dispelling the pseudoscience that surrounded psychedelics, yet Lewin fell into the trap of anointing psychedelics with otherworldliness with his idea that an invisible force called ‘vital energy’ surrounded all living things. Lewin believed this vital energy governed all chemical, mechanical, and physical properties of each person and that psychedelics had the ability to interrupt this energy. He also believed a person’s resistance to psychedelics was dependent on the strength of their vital energy.
This wasn’t the first time Lewin would take an L in his neuroscientific research of psychedelics. When assessing the capability of certain psychedelics on the brain, he assumed (1924, p. 8) that black people naturally had a higher recovery rate than whites:
“We may take it as a fact that Negroes have greater recuperation powers than white people. This is due not to climatic conditions but to certain innate qualities possessed by them.”
In his writings, he didn’t seek to prove this theory — it was just taken as matter-of-fact; another symptom of the 19th century. Lewin also insisted Indigenous people knew of their own racial inferiority, which is why they self-medicated with psychedelics:
“The Indians of South America are said to have an intuitive appreciation of their own defectiveness, and to be ever ready to rid themselves of such melancholy feelings by intense excitement, i.e. through kola and similar drugs” (p. 2).
Still somehow, Lewin believed psychedelics ‘form bonds in people of all walks of life’ (p. 7). He realized the diversity of people was so great that a one-size-fits-all explanation of human physiology and psychology in regards to psychedelics wouldn’t suffice. Likely influenced by Darwin’s The Origin of Species, Lewin made a strong case for the adaptations of organisms to a variety of external influences like psychedelics. He believed a skilled anthropologist could trace the development of culture directly to the availability of psychedelics, an idea shared 100 years later in Terence McKenna’s Food of the Gods. Lewin was also one of the first scientists to see the health benefits of psychedelics, mostly based on accounts of Indigenous people taking them for mental health.
In the 1800s, a small but prevailing idea amongst scientists was that psychedelics created a “trip” by activating ductless glands in the body to secrete hormones into the endocrine system. Lewin thought the theory was BS and instead theorized that psychedelics excite certain “brain centers” to “transmit agreeable sensations” (p. 3) through the chemistry of the substance. He basically described what we now know as psychedelics acting as serotonergic agonists that bind to mostly 5-HT2A receptors in the brain — an original theory Lewin established nearly 50 years before the discovery of serotonin.
Lewin’s assumption that psychedelics hit specific cortical regions through something like the serotonin system was remarkable, but only because he made other successful guesses like recognizing that every chemical study on the brain up to that point was conducted ex vivo, or on a dead brain, and that in vivo neuro research conducted on a living brain may have chemicals that were not present or didn’t transform into something else upon death. He also knew about the brain’s need for oxygenated blood and suggested that psychedelics may affect this process. Neuroscience had to wait 100 years for Lewin’s idea to be tested with BOLD (Blood Oxygen Level Dependent) brain imaging through MRI.
When it came to theoreticals, Lewin had a few. One of his notable ones was the idea of a toxic equation, which is a loose formula that dictates everyone has a certain resistance to the effects of psychedelics based on their neurophysiology and overall physiology. On the surface, it sounds like a reasonable idea, but digging deeper, it gets a bit irrational. His general belief was that people built up a resistance to psychedelics due to parts of the brain weakening and not being able to process these substances. There’s still no proof of this over a century later though, and in 2021, Dr. Ling-Xiao Shao conducted research that pointed to the opposite. Psilocybin actually strengthens dendritic density in the brain and repairs neurons that have atrophied due to stress and depression. Lewin also believed cells had ‘will-power’ and when a person takes a psychedelic after not taking it for a long time, the memory of the ‘agreeable sensation’ is just too strong to resist and that’s how people become addicted again (p. 18).
Learning From the History of Psychedelics
Unfortunately, psychedelic neuroscience research didn’t really catch on in the 19th century, mostly because civilization almost collapsed due to a global opioid addiction that crippled nearly every economy and led to prohibition in the early 1900s. The bigotry and racism of the 19th century confined Louis Lewin’s research of psychedelics into a box that takes a lot of ethical unpacking to fully absorb.
The origin of neuroscience is shrouded in poorly constructed science and whacky ideas which were specifically designed to marginalize groups of people from the discussion of who could be considered human. It has a dark past, but with a more defined scientific method and newer ideas, the future of psychedelic neuroscience is whatever we make it. In every natural system, diversity is the key defining factor for the progression of that system. These ideas aren’t mine or even new — Darwin wrote several books on this. This same need for diversity also applies to psychedelic neuroscientific research. History shouldn’t serve as an obstacle for the exponential amount of discovery that can be revealed if we all work together. We will get there.
Some commentary on recent events and long-standing issues in psychedelia.
The psychedelic world had a major shake-up in the past few weeks. A few popular teachers in the space had some pretty serious accusations leveled at them by Will Hall, who has previously been on our podcast here and here.
You can read Will’s article on Mad in America here. He had further things to say in this article on Medium.
I’ve been hearing rumors and firsthand accounts related to the accused for a few years now and have been working internally and with allies on the best approach for dealing with it all.
It’s not talked about a lot, but sex and psychedelics are closely linked (drugs and sex generally, for that matter). Think about the sexual liberation that boomed in the 1960s and is still seen in parts of the Burning Man and EDM culture today. Think about how powerful feelings of love and connection can be while on any number of mind-altering substances, and how easily they could morph into something more sexual.
Perhaps you’ve never experienced it, but regularly in psychedelic therapy sessions, sexual feelings do arise and can create challenging dynamics for both the client and therapist to navigate. What does someone in a fragile mind state, dealing with a maze of conflicting emotions and energies, do with an affectionate or sexual feeling they may suddenly have? What does the therapist do? How does either person know they can truly trust the other? This all leads to a big question many may not want to consider: Is it possible to totally divorce sexual feelings and ideas from psychedelic sessions?
I’d suggest that no, it isn’t possible. Psychedelics unleash all sorts of energies without any bias or filter, so why would sexual energy be exempt?
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I believe that psychedelics can be transformative for mental health, religious practice, spirituality, physical healing, creativity, celebration, rites of passage, and even for the development of planet-saving technology — and this is an abbreviated list. Psychedelics are extremely powerful things that can serve as near miracle cures and beautiful spectacles, but unfortunately, they can also be used as weapons.
For a long time on the podcast (and in day-to-day life — sorry, friends), I’ve complained about how I’ve unintentionally taken on the role of the “Psychedelic Police.” Because of my many years in the psychedelic world and my perceived expertise, many folks have divulged negative or abusive stories about what they’ve experienced in underground (and occasionally aboveground) situations. I shouldn’t complain about this, since it’s an honor to be so trusted, and some stories may have helped me side-step traps Psychedelics Today could have fallen into.
It is frustrating though, and puts me in a tough spot.
Due entirely to the drug war, there are serious legal and financial consequences for bringing such things to light on behalf of someone else. What if the story isn’t entirely true? What if it is, but can’t be proven? What if proving it relies on multiple people admitting illegal activity and they’re not willing to do that? I could be hit with cease-and-desist letters, defamation lawsuits, or just be perpetually dragged into court for any number of things. Lawyers are expensive and what’s right doesn’t always win. Without ruining my reputation and finances, and possibly destroying my best tool for bringing positive impact to the psychedelic space (this very website), I have little recourse. We have developed some ideas about the next best steps, but it is hard to know with certainty if we are doing the right thing. So I do what I can, which never feels like enough. I anonymize these stories and turn them into generic ethical warnings, encouraging people to do their research and be as safe as possible.
At the Horizons Conference in 2019, Dr. Carl Hart suggested that immediately ending the drug scheduling system would be an amazing first step in resolving a range of harmful consequences from the war on drugs. Others have proposed that a state-by-state or region-based decriminalization similar to what we’ve seen over the last few years in Oakland, Oregon, and Denver would be the ideal starting point (especially from the perspective of political expediency). Whichever side of the solution you land on, I think we can all agree that we need to fix our laws around controlled substances and plants.
Given that facilitators and guides work with substances that are federally illegal, there could be massive consequences for someone participating in underground work who is apprehended by law enforcement for any reason. For both the facilitator and the participant; consider the attention to detail needed to ensure you’re protected from liability, the knowledge and support systems needed to be able to handle serious medical cases, and the amount of apprehension and secrecy necessary to maintain anonymity for all involved. Add in the complications of how differently an action can be perceived by different people in different mind states, and this almost creates an incentive structure to sweep things under the rug — a bypassing of anything perceived as a threat to the overall good. People who could force change can be, and often are banished from communities for asking the “wrong” questions.
Since so many people are forced to operate in an underground capacity, it makes sense that these problems exist. And they will continue to exist if we can’t have open and honest conversations about what we’re experiencing, and start working together to figure out how to answer so many of these complicated questions within the confines of the drug war.
How do we talk about sex and psychedelics?
What are the appropriate ways to deal with sexual energies and consent in situations where people consume mind-altering substances in situations with clear power dynamic differentials?
How do we report issues of abuse to local leaders and elders?
Will they fight for us?
Do they have any teeth?
What capacity do they have to investigate?
Does the victim have any legal ground?
Will law enforcement toss out reports due to drugs being involved?
What if other senior leaders become complicit in a cover-up surrounding their colleagues?
At what point should leaders step down and elevate new leaders?
Is restorative justice even possible if the victim or perpetrator doesn’t feel safe or supported enough to come to the table?
While some acts are inexcusable, we have to be honest with ourselves and understand that good people make mistakes; bad people can be anywhere; and while it’s easy to blame the individual person, bad policies and dysfunctional systems incentivize bad behavior and can scare good people into silence.
Ending the destructive and racist drug war in the US and internationally would improve safety and transparency in vulnerable spaces that often don’t have much of either. When the legal status of underground work is improved, frameworks for safety can be established, and abusers simply won’t be able to get away with bad behavior to the same degree they can today. When we can be more open, people will be safer, and practices can be improved more rapidly.
Ending the drug war is an enormous undertaking, and while there aren’t clear steps on how to accomplish such an incredible feat, many in this field are working tirelessly to do what they can.
The best thing I can do is to use my voice at Psychedelics Today; creating courses, podcasts, and articles that help normalize psychedelics as part of everyday, contemporary life; shed light on under-discussed topics; and give voices to people who aren’t well-known in the space.
I will continue to do my best to address these tough questions around abuse. I hope you’ll join me.
What is the ‘Anima Mundi’ and how can it help us understand psychedelic experiences?
This is part of our column ‘Psychedelics in Depth‘ which defines and explains depth psychology topics in the context of psychedelics.
Once upon a time, people saw nature as vividly alive, full of gods, spirits, and beings that existed beyond the realm of human culture. Nature was ensouled, and the earth was animate. In the tradition of depth psychology, this concept is known as the Anima Mundi: the Soul of the world. In this article we will explore the interplay between psychedelics, the earth, and the spirit of place.
Can psychedelics put us in touch with a more-than-human intelligence that emanates from the earth itself? Do certain places carry particular energies or “souls” which psychedelics might allow us to perceive? Finally, what role can psychedelics play situated at the crossroads of nature and culture, especially in this time of dire ecological collapse?
Ask yourself: have you ever felt immersed in some ineffable communication with an aspect of the natural world during a psychedelic experience? Have you ever felt uneasy upon setting foot in certain places, yet unable to say why? Have you ever felt a powerful sensation upon visiting an ancient redwood grove, a stone circle, or one of the earth’s many sacred sites?
Truth be told, there is an extremely high likelihood that most long-time users of psychedelics would report at least one instance of the natural world having a profound influence on their trip in ways that defy rationality.
But before we go any further, a story.
Land Memory and Psychedelics
I work as a psychedelic therapist with MycoMeditations, a legal psilocybin retreat based in Jamaica. I’m fortunate to get detailed insights into a vast array of psychedelic experiences on an almost weekly basis.
During one retreat, a woman shared about a repetitive vision she had during her trips. She explained how, on each mushroom journey, she heard a certain kind of “tribal music”—drumming and singing in an incomprehensible language. During her third and highest dose, she found herself near a campfire glimpsing the “people” responsible for this ecstatic sound. She described them in detail, especially their uniquely pointed heads. She had no explanation for this.
As it happens, the Taino, the Indigenous people of Jamaica and the wider Caribbean, practiced what is known as “cranial shaping,” a method of elongating the skulls of their newborns. This practice, done by many Indigenous peoples of the Americas, was a distinguishing cultural marker of the Taino, who lived in greatest numbers on Jamaica’s south coast—exactly where MycoMeditations happens to be based.
In fact, the very stretch of coast where our retreats occur, an area now called Treasure Beach, is known as an archaeologically rich zone for Taino pottery, confirming this region as one of, if not the most significant ancient centers for the Jamaican Taino population.
As a colleague informed me, guests having visions of “pointy-headed people” was not something new to her. She was utterly unfazed by this seemingly inexplicable synchronicity.
What do we make of this? Despite mounting research, there is still a healthy dose of mystery lingering about these plants and molecules. To discard her experience as meaningless, or simply ‘coincidence,’ either briskly diminishes its significance and robs her of potential avenues for meaning-making—the very antithesis of psychedelic therapy and integration—or reveals something concerning about the practitioner themselves.
No psychedelic facilitator worth their salt attempts to dictate the meaning behind someone’s experience.
Depth psychology would have us take seriously these moments of exchange between the human psyche and the living earth, and encourage us to lean into these liminal crossroads of perception. For if myth and medicine tells us anything, it is that the most fertile ground for growth is where our domesticated understanding of life ends and the wild unknown of the forest begins.
The Anima Mundi and the Ensouled World
Yet, why is it that the idea of a tree or a river or a gust of wind having something to say to us is so unsettling? Why is the notion of an ‘inanimate object’ having some claim on our senses so confronting to the modern Western psyche?
Author and professor of history, Theodore Roszak, who coined the term ecopsychology (along with counterculture, interestingly enough,) wrote in his book Voice of the Earth, “If we could assume the viewpoint of nonhuman nature, what passes for sane behavior in our social affairs might seem madness. But as the prevailing reality principle would have it, nothing could be greater madness than to believe that beast and plant, mountain and river have a ‘point of view.”
To believe that the natural world has a point of view, or is ‘ensouled’, as archetypal psychologist James Hillman explored in his book, Re-Visioning Psychology, is to understand that rocks and waterfalls contain an equally relevant quality of psyche that allows for avenues of communication between our two seemingly disparate beings.
The idea that the world itself has a Soul, and is therefore an animate, even conscious being, is one of the most radical notions within the depth tradition. Carl Jung deemed this old idea the Anima Mundi: a concept with rootsgoing far back into esoteric religious and mystical traditions such as hermeticism, gnosticism, kabbala, and of course countless Indigenous traditions across the world.
Tracing European culture’s disconnection from this ancient notion of the ensouled earth, Jung wrote in his Collected Works Volume 11, “The development of Western philosophy during the last two centuries has succeeded in isolating the mind in its own sphere and in severing it from its primordial oneness with the universe. Man himself has ceased to be the microcosm and eidolon [image] of the cosmos, and his ‘anima’ is no longer the consubstantial scintilla, spark of the Anima Mundi, World Soul.”
The research on psychedelics’ capacity to dissolve the ego and increase one’s connection to nature places these substances in direct conversation with the climate crises, which could be seen as an equally, if not even more valuable benefit of psychedelics.
Embracing the notion of the Anima Mundi can help us navigate and integrate psychedelic experiences that blur the culturally constructed lines that our society would have us believe separates humanity from the living earth.
In this regard, the Anima Mundi and depth psychology asks us to question many pillars of European thought, specifically the legacy of Enlightenment thinkers like René Descartes, whose work marked a decisive turning point by cleaving apart any remaining threads of pagan belief, which connected European consciousness to the living earth.
The Research: Nature-Relatedness and Psychedelics
If generations of ceremonial plant medicine use by Indigenous people across the globe was not sufficient evidence, current research shows us that psychedelics can foster a greater sense of connectedness to the natural world. A 2019 study by Kettner et al. concluded that a sense of “nature relatedness was significantly increased 2 weeks, 4 weeks, and 2 years after a psychedelic experience”, and that the frequency of lifetime psychedelic use was positively correlated to a baseline sense of nature relatedness in healthy participants.
Concluding their research, Kettner et al. wrote: “With the loss of self-referential boundaries being a defining characteristic of ego-dissolution experiences under psychedelics, as well as experiences of awe in nature, it may be that the loss of perceived boundaries between the self and the other may in turn facilitate an expanded perception of self/nature continuity or overlap, reflected by increased feelings of nature relatedness.”
This discussion of “self/nature continuity or overlap,” invokes and calls into question the legacy of Descartes mentioned above. Indeed, it places these types of psychedelic experiences squarely in the other corner from centuries of Western philosophy and worldviews. In the age of global climate collapse, the implications of this research cannot be understated.
Current research on psychedelic medicine’s potential to treat many intractable mental health issues is invaluable, to be sure. As a mental health professional, I could not be more thrilled. Yet, the research on psychedelics’ capacity to dissolve the ego and increase one’s connection to nature places these substances in direct conversation with the climate crises, which could be seen as an equally, if not even more valuable benefit of psychedelics.
Defining Anima and Animism
Many Indigenous traditions embrace what anthropologists called an “animistic” way of perception, and have woven it into their cosmologies, ceremonies, and the very fabric of their cultural belief systems. The personification of plants and places within certain Indigenous traditions, especially terms like “madre ayahuasca”, “grandfather peyote”, or “La Pastora” (one of the many Mazatec names for Salvia divinorum) plainly acknowledges that there is more going on within the earth than an “inanimate” accumulation of minerals and dirt.
From my own time spent with Indigenous peoples from many different cultures, as well as years of formal academic study in anthropology, religion, and depth psychology, this is one of the clearest messages that I’ve received: the earth does indeed have something to say to us, if only we can remember how to listen.
Indigenous ways have always been relevant to depth psychology because of this very understanding, that the earth is undeniably ensouled, living, sentient, and worthy of respect. Psychedelics can play a crucial role in helping many people remember this humble fact, and guide us down a path which, at heart, requires a style of listening, reverence, and attention which our culture has quite painfully forgotten.
Anima Mundi for Facilitators: Relationship to Place, Grief and Soul
Now would be a reasonable time to ask how any of this applies to actually working with people navigating and integrating psychedelic experiences.
To start, establishing some form of relationship to the actual land where one’s work takes place is the bare minimum. Learn about the Indigenous people of your particular place, who they are and were, and any Indigenous place names you can manage to dig up; even better if you can learn it in person from their living descendants, and cultivate a relationship with them.
The story shared at the beginning of this article would have not meant much to me if I were ignorant of the Taino people and their particular practice of shaping their skulls. Uncovering the untold story of the land, its ecological and geological timeline, and especially its history of human migration, colonization, and modernization, must factor into a holistically grounded relationship with a place.
Sitting with the raw story of a place often leads one down the dark stairwell of grief. This is a good thing. But it is wise to be prepared for it, and to know how to support others who may find themselves immersed in a story whose weight might be much more than they can bear. Grief, however, can be one of the most profound gateways to feeling, and therefore to the Soul. Psychedelic experiences which bring one face to face with land-grief are important because they are emanations from the place itself. One could say that it is one of the earth’s many attempts to speak to human beings—a process which we have conditioned ourselves to largely ignore.
Finally, cultivating one’s own relationship to the natural world, to the unique curvature and temperament of a place, will inform what occurs when the mists of the otherworld begin to encircle one’s perception. Personally, before any psychedelic journey, I offer some tobacco, and ask permission from whatever ancestors called that place home. You wouldn’t just wander into someone’s house without knocking first. There are many reasons for doing this, the least of all being that it’s simply polite.
Closing Thoughts on Anima Mundi and Psychedelics
Psychedelics can provide a key to unlocking our culturally fractured and traumatized relationship to the natural world, and its indwelling Soul, the Anima Mundi. Psychedelics have the capacity to dissolve the ego and open one to experiences of awe in nature, which in turn help a sense of greater nature relatedness take root.
As individuals, we need awe-inspiring encounters with the Anima Mundi which crack open the ego and reveal the Soul. As a culture, we are in dire need of a renewed sense of reverence and respect for the more than-human-world, which psychedelics may be able to instill in our increasingly adrift society. And as ensouled beings, we need deeply personal, Soul-level encounters with something greater than ourselves, which help us remember how to listen to the language being sung all around us.
The other road, I’m sorry to say, is bleak.
The poet-philosopher Goethe knew this when he wrote, “And so long as you haven’t experienced this: to die and so to grow, you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.”
About the Illustrator
Martin Clarke is a British Designer and Illustrator from Nottingham, England. Specializing in branding, marketing and visual communication, Martin excels at creating bespoke brand identities and striking visual content across multiple platforms for web, social media, print and packaging. See more of his work here.
Microdosing TikTok is a vibrant community of everyday people researching and experimenting with microdosing for mental health, and finding support in the process.
What if I told you that the microdosing movement has taken TikTok by storm? Or that TikTok wasn’t just a place for dancing or kids, but a community connecting people in a unique way? Now a cultural force, TikTok has even been invaded by psychedelics, specifically the microdosing movement. And I was there to see it unfold.
When people said I should join TikTok, I politely told everyone the same things you probably think right now. It was for kids, it was for dancing, it was too conservative for people like me mainly because I am the founder of a cannabis company. And of course, who needs another social media app in our already connected world? But during quarantine I (like many) eventually caved, and I found myself trying to make sense of an app that truly felt like another world.
At first, every word I tried to say was censored and I found myself unable to even post about my own business or much of anything outside my dog. I learned the sophistication level of TikTok’s algorithm is part of its beauty and design, and because it’s a Chinese-based company it is skilled at censorship. And don’t get me wrong, censorship is prevalent on all social media apps, but TikTok is inarguably the most strict.
Author Olivia Alexander’s viral microdosing TikTok that put her on the ‘FYP’ for the first time and connected her to a vibrant community.
As a cannabis social media influencer, I’ve dealt with my fair share of getting ‘deleted’ (when an app deletes your profile) and eventually lost 1.5 million followers on Instagram in 2017. On TikTok, I couldn’t find anything to talk about that was both authentic to me and interesting to the audience. Then one day I tried something new, I told my mental health story about being bipolar and how microdosing completely transformed my life. Given the level of censorship, I didn’t say or show much, just a photo series of myself along my journey. You could see the changes, the impact, and the joy in my face. That’s when it happened—I got my first taste of the FYP.
That’s the ‘For You Page’ in TikTok lingo. The app explains the FYP as “a curated feed of videos from creators you might not follow, but TikTok’s algorithm thinks you will like based on your interests and past interactions.” Once I made it to the FYP, I had my first bonafied ‘hit’ and two things were obvious: The first was that microdosing had slipped through the cracks of TikTok’s censorship algorithms, and the second was that the audience craved more.
It’s hard to describe what happens on TikTok when your video lands on the FYP. To be honest, in the past 15 years of being on social media, I have never seen or felt anything like it. The views, comments, and follows piled up—fast. I was in sheer disbelief that I had stumbled upon something that people wanted to know more about that also wasn’t censored by TikTok. In the months to come, I would be connected to a community I could never have imagined in my wildest dreams.
Our new 12-month certificate program, Vital, begins April 19th. Registration is closed, but sign up for the waitlist for next year’s edition now at vitalpsychedelictraining.com!
Why Choose TikTok for Microdosing Info and Community?
The TikTok community, much like I was, is mentally ill, yet at the same time disillusioned by the mental health system; they’re also desperate for healing, while being courageous and hopeful. I was excited to tell my story—despite being a relative newcomer to psychedelics—I’m farther along on my microdose journey than most TikTokers, and I wanted to use this new, powerful platform to share what I’ve learned. Over the next few months I began to contribute pieces of short form content daily from ‘How I Got Off Pharmaceuticals’, to my viral recap of microdosing with LSD for 30 days, to my mother’s microdosing journey.
Was it that microdosing—the act of ingesting 1/10th to 1/20th of a psychedelic substance for enhanced mood rather than classic psychedelic effects—was so new or was it that the psychedelic movement had successfully evaded TikTok’s strict censorship policies?
If you saw the TikTok hashtag #microdosing, which had 60 million views until it was removed in mid-August, 2021, you probably witnessed the broad spectrum of people and their reasons for microdosing. TikTok is a place where people with authentic stories and interesting lives thrive; where you don’t need to be a celebrity to be an influencer, you can just be you. Mental health TikTokers regularly show off their meds, spill revelations from therapists, and share both their traumas and explorations in healing. Microdose TikTok heavily intersects with mental health, fitness, and wellness TikTok. Even with censorship of the microdosing hashtag, the community has continued to evolve and share microdosing content. In the world of ‘the Tok’, there’s an ever evolving lexicon created to skirt the app’s advancing censorship. So soon #microdos or #mycrodose will replace #microdosing like #ouid replaced #weed.
What you’ll find in certain communities of TikTok is that you are encouraged to be yourself, which is unlike other social media platforms where a more polished version of yourself is rewarded. The people who use and create content on TikTok—referred to as ‘creators’—are as unique as the algorithm itself. And unlike other social media apps, these creators can see a quick rise, thrusting them into the spotlight, allowing them to share their journey and experiences with thousands of people seemingly overnight.
One of the most beautiful things I have found at the intersection of microdosing and TikTok are the vibrant people who tell their stories. The bravery it takes to share your life online is often overlooked by people who don’t do it or look down on social media. It’s a compelling array of stories and personal experiences that could be such a benefit to the psychedelic and scientific communities, especially at a time when microdosing research is so desperately needed.
There’s something about TikTok’s design that makes you feel instantly seen, heard, and validated, and connects you with others in an authentic way. It’s why I believe the work of psychedelic and microdosing creators is so effective and special. Being seen and heard is an important and valuable part of the healing and integration process that’s built right into the platform.
The first person I ever saw cruising the FYP was Veronica Ridge, a hair stylist who shares her story of microdosing for ADHD with candid and endearing videos that her husband Patrick Ridge, also a well-known content creator with 16 years of sobriety, often joins. Veronica’s content about microdosing was endearing and approachable; even though she was microdosing for different reasons, seeing her content made me feel less alone. I was excited to see someone else normalizing microdosing.
Next I discovered TikTok’s microdosing mom (TikTok loves moms), Coach Kathleen who has over 130K followers. Coach Kathleen, a long time coach who focuses primarily on CEOs and executives, told me she went to TikTok after seeing the speed in which users go viral. Since then, she has garnered tens of millions of views on the app. In one of her largest videos, she explains how psilocybin affects the brain’s ‘default mode network’ that has a whopping 8 million views.
Coach Kathleen’s educational content and frequent ‘lives’ (specifically microdosing Q&A’s) are much needed support to the TikTok microdosing community. Live is another feature that drives authentic conversations and page growth for creators. It allows users to get to know creators on a much more intimate level. Creators who activate these features often see their communities blossom way beyond what they imagined their reach could be.
There are also athletes and coaches like CoachJeremy305, who has over 875K followers and who has been a long time fixture on the FYP page sharing how microdosing has aided in his fitness and wellness journey. He often encourages his audience to avoid alcohol and frequently posts psychedelic legislation updates.
Another creator, HolisticHustle, who calls herself “a crunchy mom with depression” has over 60K followers, shares her microdosing and parenthood journey. She focuses a fair amount of her content at the intersections of microdosing, motherhood, and healing her own generational trauma.
While some will write off TikTok as another social media app, I truly believe that would be doing a disservice to everyone. Believe it or not, TikTok has become a cultural mecca and there is so much to learn about people and community on this app. With the culmination of the mental health crisis, opioid epidemic, and of course the COVID-19 pandemic, people needed a virtual space where they feel safe to share, and TikTok has been the answer for a lot of people.
“TikTok has influenced my microdosing journey in the most positive way. Just following you and watching your lives has helped me tons!” Zenia, a 37-year-old mom of three kids who had resigned from her job to run an online business in order to spend more time with her children, tells Psychedelics Today. “Hearing how open and real you are about your journey and experiences made me want to do my own research and create experiences through my own journey.”
“It took me a while and lots of research to start my journey because it was such a new concept to me, but I’m glad I did!” Zenia continues. “I have really felt at home knowing that there is a huge community out there going through what I’m going through.”
This content is serving so much more than likes and views to the creator. It’s carrying microdosing to people who desperately need to know there are other alternatives, and giving them a place to share their microdosing experiences within a community. On TikTok, we see ourselves in the popular creators and feel hopeful for a new therapeutic tool, like microdosing. Plus, TikTokers, like many, are terrified to even speak to their doctors about psychedelics, but are completely out of traditional pharmaceutical options. So by finding community on TikTok, they find hope, access, and most of all, people just like them being transformed in a way they dreamed of for themselves.
“I discovered microdosing [on TikTok] in January of 2021. In the fall of 2020, after almost a year of unemployment and the utter failure of my romantic relationship (epic implosion), I decided it was time for me to go off of the anti-anxiety/anti-depression pill I’d been on for the past three years. By the end of the year I wanted to learn more about how I might holistically begin to heal myself and by chance, I saw a TikTok where you’d discussed your journey with mental health, pharmaceuticals and microdosing popped up and I thought the universe must have heard my heart because this was exactly what I was looking for,” Jen, a 38-year-old project manager from NY tells Psychedelics Today. “I went through all of the videos and consumed the information like a fire. I looked up the Microdosing Institute, reached out to Psychedelic.support, spoke to and described microdosing to my personal support circle of family and friends (and urged them to do their own research), found a support group online and based in my region and reached out on Instagram to find my own healer who could act as a guide. By February, I had all of the resources to begin my first journey and so I did at the end of March.”
Microdosing and TikTok Are the Future: Will the Psychedelic Community Join?
Over my time on TikTok I have been able to come to a unique understanding of the sheer magnitude and scale of the future surrounding the psychedelic space as an industry and the mental health crisis it will be meeting. I sit up late at night and worry about the time it will take for real progress and access for the countless people who endlessly direct message me for help. I feel hopeful for the clinical trials on psychedelics, for FDA approval of these drugs as medicine, and for the legalization of psychedelics because Gen Z and Millenials are not the generations of the past.
We want to be part of the future where entheogens are regulated and accessible. We want to appreciate, know, respect, and understand Indigenous practices. We wish we could talk to our therapists, psychiatrists, and psychologists about alternative treatments. We will fight for a future where universal health care covers psychedelic therapy. But for now, we are struggling with mental health—and with the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s new people arriving to the struggle everyday. We’re dealing with despair, isolation, and the side effects of antidepressants for the first time in a broken and overloaded system, and we need help wherever we can get it.
In the unlikeliest of places I have seen and felt a snapshot of humanity that was simply unexpected. A place built so perfectly imperfect, like humans themselves, that even with censorship and sophisticated algorithms alike it could not be stopped or suppress the needs of the people. And it’s my greatest hope that progress, unity, science, Indigenous and modern culture can coexist for the greatest success for all. In the race for the golden ticket of the burgeoning psychedelic industry, TikTok has shown me what’s really at stake—our mental health and wellbeing. I hope more clinicians, researchers, leaders, and companies in the space take on the challenge of joining the rest of the community.
The cultural storm and human need for psychedelics can’t be stopped or slowed down because of the sheer speed of social media, and the psychedelic community can do the important work during this digital age on an app where the impact can be truly astounding.
This next chapter of the psychedelic renaissance will not be televised, it will be on TikTok and I hope the psychedelic community will pay attention.
About the Illustrator
Martin Clarke is a British Designer and Illustrator from Nottingham, England. Specializing in branding, marketing and visual communication, Martin excels at creating bespoke brand identities and striking visual content across multiple platforms for web, social media, print and packaging. See more of his work here.
Understanding what spiritual emergence and spiritual emergency are, how they differ from psychosis, and how to integrate them as a psychedelic traveler or practitioner.
This is part of our ongoing series on transpersonal psychology and how it can help us understand psychedelic experiences. Check out part 1, ‘What is Transpersonal Psychology?’ here.
In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in the therapeutic potentials of psychedelic substances within both clinical and non-clinical settings, with many seeking out psychedelics and plant medicines for spiritual purposes and attempts at self-healing. Psychedelics have the ability to catalyze immense shifts in our understanding and perceptions of reality as well as the potential to bring forth that which is latent within the psyche. Although the sudden eruption of psychic content or change in ways of seeing the world is at the core of psychedelic healing, it can be a destabilizing process that occasionally triggers a type of unintended psychological distress known as “spiritual emergency.”
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What Is Spiritual Emergency?
The term “spiritual emergency” was introduced to the field of transpersonal psychology by psychiatrist Stanislav Grof and his late wife, psychotherapist Christina Grof, in the 1980s to refer to a kind of spiritual or transformative crisis in which an individual could move towards a greater state of integration and wholeness. In their groundbreaking book on the subject, Spiritual Emergency: When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis, the Grofs describe spiritual emergency as “both a crisis and an opportunity of rising to a new level of awareness.”
Intentionally constructed as a play on words, the term “emergency” indicates crisis, all the while containing within it the term “emergence”, pertaining to the process by which something becomes known or visible, implying that both—crisis and opportunity—can arise. The Grofs thus differentiate between a spiritual emergency and the more gradual, less disruptive process of spiritual emergence.
Compared with spiritual emergency, the process of spiritual emergence, sometimes referred to as ‘spiritual awakening’, consists of a slower, gentler unfoldment of psychospiritual energies that does not negatively affect an individual’s ability to function within the various domains of their life. Thus, spiritual emergence is a natural process of attuning to a more expanded state of awareness in which individuals generally feel a deeper sense of connection to themselves, others, and the world around them.
Conversely, cases of spiritual emergency usually share many characteristics with psychosis, and as such are often misunderstood and misdiagnosed. However, spiritual emergencies differ from psychosis in that they are not suggestive of long-term mental illness, and provide individuals with an opportunity to use their woundedness to go deeper into themselves and find healing.
The fact that the concept of spiritual emergency is not known and widely accepted beyond the context of transpersonal psychology is partially bound up with an age-old argument that has long permeated Western science and culture. In culture at large, spiritual and mystical-type experiences have long been ridiculed and pathologized, being considered delusional and reflective of mental illness. Dominated by materialist approaches to consciousness and mental health, Western science generally lumps spiritual crises together with psychosis, attributing their origins to biological or neurological dysfunction and treating them on the physical level. However, in the context of transpersonal psychology, spiritual experiences are considered to be real and integral to the evolutionary development of the individual.
Inherent to the Grofs’ concept of spiritual emergency is their holotropic model that revolves around the central tenet that we have an innate tendency to move towards wholeness, possessing within us an “inner healing intelligence.” Similar to the way the body starts its own sophisticated process of healing when we injure ourselves physically, the psyche possesses its own healing intelligence that takes place unseen within us. Just like fevers fighting off infections, spiritual crises can be understood as the psyche’s way of signalling that imbalance needs to be overcome as it moves toward a state of greater integration.
Although experiences of spiritual emergency are highly individual, they all share in the fact that the typical functioning of the ego is impaired, and the logical mind is overridden by the world of intuition. Scary and potentially traumatizing, spiritual emergencies can be interspersed with moments of fervent ecstasy in which an individual believes that they have special abilities to communicate with God or cosmic consciousness, giving way to a temporary messianic complex.
Conversely, a person might become possessed by a potent feeling of paranoia, feeling that the universe is conspiring against them, or they may feel detached from material reality, only connected to this realm through a fine, ephemeral thread. Happenings and material objects might become imbued with symbolic, other-worldly meaning. For some it means spirit possession, compulsive behaviors which lead them to forget to eat and sleep, or a soul-crushing sense of depression that makes them choose to isolate themselves from others.
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Spiritual Emergency Triggered By Psychedelics
Although states of spiritual crisis can come about spontaneously, they can be triggered by emotional stress, physical exertion, disease, near-death experiences, childbirth, meditative practice, and exposure to psychedelics, among other things.
Psychedelics, in particular, have the ability to trigger spiritual emergencies in that they rapidly propel a journeyer from one state of consciousness to another in a mere matter of hours. If an individual is not adequately prepared, these sudden encounters with the numinous can be incredibly destabilizing and have challenging, unintended impacts.
Furthermore, psychedelics can activate parts of the psyche, throwing us off balance by rapidly bringing forth material from the unconscious that we need to integrate. The Grofs expand on this further in their book, Stormy Search for the Self: A Guide to Personal Growth through Transformational Crisis, writing, “Occasionally, the amount of unconscious material that emerges from deep levels of the psyche can be so enormous that the person involved can have difficulty functioning in everyday reality.”
According to Kyle Buller, Co-Founder and Director of Education here at Psychedelics Today, M.S. in Clinical Mental Health, and certified Spiritual Emergence Coach, psychedelics and engaging in spiritual and contemplative practices can make individuals more prone to spiritual emergencies. “Psychedelics and plant medicines open us up to new ways of seeing the world, and this new way of being or seeing can be destabilizing for some,” he says.
Additionally, Buller explains that those with existing traumas or underlying mental health disorders are more at risk for spiritual emergency-type experiences. “I come back to Grof’s notion that psychedelics are ‘non-specific amplifiers of mental or psychic processes,’” he explains. “If someone is already dealing with a lot and difficult content is brought to the surface and amplified, they might not be able to contain it without a proper set and setting or support.”
In the context of psychedelics, spiritual crises can occur when there is an expansion of consciousness that happens without adequate containment. For that reason, most spiritual emergencies triggered by psychedelics don’t occur in the context of clinical studies, but rather through recreational use, self-exploration, and even ceremonial use. Arguably, within plant medicine ceremonies, there are clear parameters that contain the experience as it is unfolding, however, upon leaving the container of the ceremony, most individuals go back to their normal, everyday lives, and this shift can be challenging.
Research fellow at the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London, Jules Evans, detailed his experience of a psychedelic-induced spiritual emergency in his self-published, Holiday From the Self: An Accidental Ayahuasca Adventure. In Evans’ case, he went to the Peruvian Amazon to participate in an ayahuasca retreat.
Although Evans gave it careful consideration and had a positive experience at the retreat, once he began travelling back to Iquitos, he found himself feeling disconnected, and moreover disorientated. As the days passed by, an eerie and intense feeling of doubt around his sense of reality washed over him. In an article recounting his experience he writes, “When I got texts from loved ones, I thought my subconscious was constructing them. I felt profoundly alone in this fake reality.”
Evans had previously spent time studying ecstatic experiences academically, and was partially familiar with the concept of spiritual emergency, helping him to not “freak out.” However, for most of us, that isn’t the case and when spiritual crises start to unfold, not knowing what is happening can plunge us into a deep state of fear and terror.
Another reason why those who experiment with psychedelics are more prone to spiritual crises is the lack of cultural support. Buller places emphasis on the need for adequate cultural containers, suggesting that the fact that psychedelics and plant medicines are not accepted by dominant culture poses another hurdle for integrating these experiences.
“When a person has a profound experience, where do they turn or seek support? Does the cultural cosmology around them embrace these types of experiences and if not, how does that exacerbate one’s difficult experience?” Buller says.
In Western culture, we have lost the cultural frames and mythological maps that could usher us through intense experiences of psychospiritual opening, a process which we need to go through at times. Reflecting on this subject in a 2008 paper, medical anthropologist Sara Lewis, explored how Westerners are at increased risk for experiencing spiritual crises and psychological distress following ayahuasca ceremonies due to what she describes as a “lack of cultural support.”
Spiritual crises have been suggested to resemble instances of ‘shamanic illness’ as experienced by shamanic initiates in certain Indigenous cultures. Compared with those in Indigenous communities, however, Westerners lack community resources and guidance to contextualize experiences produced by psychedelic plant medicines, and often fear becoming mentally ill as a result.
Distinguishing Between Psychosis and Spiritual Emergency
The Grofs suggest in their book, Spiritual Emergency, that mainstream psychiatry and psychology make no distinction between mystical states and mental illness, tending to treat non-ordinary states with suppressive medication rather than recognizing their healing potentials.
For psychedelic practitioners and integration providers working with those experiencing psychological distress after a psychedelic experience, evaluating whether the individual is a danger to themselves and others, and determining personal or family history of mental health disorders can be incredibly helpful in understanding whether the phenomenon is a psychotic break or a spiritual crisis. An additional indicator is understanding how a given individual relates to their spirituality, ascertaining whether it brings them a sense of hope. Further, it is useful to rule out any form of neurologic or physical disorder that would impair normal mental functioning such as an infection, tumor, or uremia.
Another crucial factor is the client’s ability to understand the phenomenon as an unfolding psychological process that they can navigate internally as well as cooperatively with the mental health provider, being able to differentiate to a substantial degree between their internal experience and consensus reality.
In a 1986 paper on the subject, the Grofs caution, “It is important to emphasize that not every experience of unusual states of consciousness and intense perceptual, emotional, cognitive, and psychosomatic changes falls into the category of spiritual emergency.” Further highlighting that the concept of spiritual crisis is not intended to counter traditional psychiatry, but rather offer an alternative to those who are able to benefit from it.
Thus mental health practitioners looking to learn how to distinguish between spiritual emergency and psychosis must learn there is a fine line between the two which often makes it difficult to discern. While there is a tendency for traditional psychiatry to pathologize mystical states, the Grofs jointly warn of the dangers of “spiritualizing psychotic states”, placing emphasis on the need to use proper discernment around a given individual’s experience.
Speaking to the subject, Buller offers advice, “I would encourage a combination of open-mindedness and critical thinking. For many mental health professionals, this concept is going to push against most of our training, however, we need an open mind to explore this area and do our best to listen to the experiencer.”
In a culture where spiritual issues are not easily understood, spiritual crises can be incredibly isolating and shameful in that the person undergoing them feels that they cannot open up and share about their experience with others for fear of being labeled as “crazy.”
Reflecting on people’s reluctance to share about these types of challenges, Buller offers, “I think this highlights some distrust in the current system around these types of experiences.” He adds, “It also makes me wonder how many people may be struggling with difficult experiences and aren’t reaching out for help because of fearing what might happen if they disclose their experience to a mental health professional.”
For those undergoing a spiritual emergency, it can feel comforting to know that they are not alone in their struggle, and that many other people have been through similarly challenging experiences. It is also helpful to remember that the crisis is part of the healing process, and that it too will pass.
One resource is the Spiritual Emergence Network (SEN), founded by Christina Grof in 1980, or its global sister project, the International Spiritual Emergence Network (ISEN) which provides practical advice for navigating spiritual emergency as well as offering a specialized mental health referral and support service for those seeking help. Additionally, for those merely looking to learn more about the subject, Psychedelics Today offers a free webinar called, “Spiritual Emergence or Psychosis,” which explores some of the research around psychosis and spiritual emergence.
When experiencing a spiritual emergency as a result of psychedelic use, it is important to factor in set, setting, and integration, just as one would factor those components into an intentional psychedelic trip in the first place. In terms of ‘setting,’ the person experiencing the spiritual crisis should seek out a non-judgemental space in which they feel safe and supported—whether that be with a mental health practitioner or in the hands of family and friends.
Beyond the environment, ‘set’ refers to our mindset and the way we frame the experience. Because there is a conceivable amount of stigma surrounding spirituality, cultivating one’s mindset means understanding that there is nothing ‘wrong’ with the person experiencing a spiritual emergency, and that the difficulty may very well be a crucial stepping stone on their personal path to healing.
Lastly, meaning-making in the context of psychedelic integration is of paramount importance as it allows individuals to take the crucial step of transforming negative experiences into something of value, which could take anywhere from a couple of months to the rest of their lives.
When working with someone experiencing a spiritual emergency, it is important to take a destigmatizing and non-pathologizing approach. Recognizing this, Stanley Krippner, psychologist and parapsychologist, wrote in a 2012 paper, “The naming process is one of the most important components of healing.” As such, mental health practitioners working with those experiencing psychological distress after a psychedelic experience need to be mindful in how they frame what is happening.
Spiritual Emergency Beyond the Scope of Transpersonal Psychology
While the Grofs’ concept of spiritual emergency was undoubtedly ahead of its time, there is still room for growth and maturation, and some suggest it may be helpful to use different terminology around the concept.
David Lukoff, professor of psychology at Sofia University and licensed psychologist specializing in the treatment of religious and spiritual crises, was influenced by the Grofs’ concept of spiritual emergency early on in his career, and has partially used the concept to inform his work in co-authoring new diagnostic category of “Religious or Spiritual Problem” included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) 4 and DSM-5.
Lukoff suggests that although the term spiritual emergency, which is well-known in transpersonal psychology, is not used or necessarily accepted in mainstream circles, spiritual and religious issues are now becoming understood through different terminology.
“I think Stan and Christina nailed the concept, but as soon as you use the term ‘emergency’ in the healthcare field, it implies the worst case scenario in which a person might need hospitalization,” Lukoff tells Psychedelics Today. “The more neutral term ‘problem’ is now used within psychiatry as a result of the DSM category that I helped author, and the term ‘struggle’ is now used within psychology.”
Further, Lukoff emphasizes that he has seen a major shift, even though it is still a minority, in psychology and psychiatry programs on the coverage of religion and spirituality. “I know that the transpersonal world doesn’t always pick up on this, but there is a real renaissance within the healthcare field in which more attention is being heeded to religious and spiritual strengths as well as problems and struggles,” he says.
“There are definitely times when spiritual issues can become crises or conflicts, however, it is also true that for the majority of people their religion and their spirituality are sources of strength, more often associated with positive coping,” shares Lukoff.
In his early 20s, Lukoff experienced his own LSD-induced spiritual crisis in which he believed that he was a reincarnation of Buddha and Jesus, manifested in his present form to unite the peoples of the world. In part, Lukoff attributes his career trajectory as a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology to the psychosis-like transformational crisis he experienced early on.
Reflecting on his own psychedelic-induced spiritual crisis, Lukoff offers the view that careful preparation goes a long way in being able to mitigate the potential negative effects of psychedelics. Even so, it is important not to trivialize or reduce psychedelic-induced spiritual crises to conjectures about “bad trips.” Spiritual crises need not merely be the product of challenging psychedelic experiences as they can be similarly triggered by potent positive experiences.
Spiritual Crisis and The Future of Psychedelic Healing
Psychedelic healing is not linear. It is not as simple as popping a pill and being miraculously cured. Rather, it is a messy process which sometimes involves psychospiritual distress that is integral to the healing process. As medical and mainstream interest in psychedelic substances continues to expand, and more and more people have these kinds of experiences, it is imperative that psychedelic practitioners develop literacy around the concept of spiritual crisis, as well as develop frameworks to help individuals contextualize their challenging experiences.
With increased awareness and use of psychedelics, are practitioners ready to deal with some of the transpersonal experiences that clients will bring to them? Buller emphasizes the need for diverse and nuanced perspectives as we move forward into the psychedelic renaissance.
“While I appreciate the trauma focus and narrative in psychedelic research, I worry that we might end up reducing everything down to psychological terminology, discrediting a person’s experience,” he shares. “What happens when someone has an entity encounter in a psychedelic experience? Do we just reduce that experience down to a possible traumatic event in someone’s life or write it off as unreal because we have a mechanistic understanding of what that experience is?”
Moving towards the future, it is important to remain open-minded, and take holistic approaches that interweave multiple narrative frameworks, including that of transpersonal psychology, through which people can understand and make meaning of their experiences, including the potential for spiritual emergencies and their transformational—yet difficult—outcomes.
Psychedelic VR—or virtual reality claiming to give users a psychedelic trip—is here, but is there any truth to the claims? And theoretically, how would it work?
A few years ago I took five grams of psilocybin mushrooms and went to the E3 video game expo in Los Angeles only to be lost in a world of virtual reality. It’s not something I would suggest for everyone, unless you want to spend the rest of the day wondering if cosplayers are just regular people from the future.
There’s an untethered prism of technological potential that has been emerging from VR in the past decade. However, you’re reading this because you want to know if a person can have a psychedelic trip while in VR. The short answer is ‘no,’ and any VR company that makes these claims is not being truthful. The long answer is—definitely not right now, but the more neuroscience and technology advances, the closer we will come to having a psychedelic trip exclusively in virtual reality. I’ll explain one of those ways, but first how did we get this far with virtual reality?
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A Brief Rundown on the History of VR
Let’s get the definitions straight. Virtual Reality (VR) is the complete immersion within an artificial world usually through a headset. Augmented Reality (AR) is the addition of virtual components to reality, like an email notification that appears in your vision, usually through glasses. Mixed Reality (MR) is the combination of VR and AR that brings together the digital and real world. An example would be a real-world object that is QR-coded so a person can see a virtual image emerging from the object when wearing mixed-reality glasses. Microsoft HoloLens is pioneering this technology. Finally, there’s Extended Reality (XR) that’s a blanket term that combines VR, AR, and MR.
When was Extended Reality invented? The history is debatable—was it the Ancient Greeks that constructed theaters and used the science of acoustics to mimic reality on stage, or should we go back to cave dwellers and their ‘subterranean cyberspaces’ they crafted filled with imagery that replicated the outside world? Let’s skip a few centuries, past Sir Charles Wheatstone’s 19th century stereoscope and Ivan Sutherland’s ‘Sword of Damocles’ machine of the 1960s, and go straight to Thomas Furness’ VCASS (that is, Visually Coupled Airborne Systems Simulator) built in 1982. It was astronomically expensive, and the technology alone filled up several rooms with computers. However, it was the first VR headset to fully immerse the user in an interactive artificially-manufactured world.
Aside from a few Hollywood films like “Lawnmower Man” and “Johnny Mnemonic” in the early ‘90s, VR didn’t really explode into mainstream culture like it was intended to. By 1999, the VR industry was deceased. Not like it laughed itself to death, but the world laughed the technology out of existence. It would take another decade and a 17-year-old named Palmer Luckey to invent the Oculus Rift, the current standard for virtual reality. Now, every VR headset available on the market is built on Luckey’s binocular LCD innovation.
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The Neuroscience of Psychedelic VR
You’re a virtual reality history buff now, so let’s talk about the capabilities of the technology and why all claims that it can induce a psychedelic trip are misleading and erroneous—if not outright lies.
Currently, the only way we know a psychedelic trip can happen is through direct interaction with 5-HT2A neural receptors. When a person ingests psychedelics, those substances sit in these receptors. The molecular neuroscience of this process is largely unknown, and psychedelics can also induce other neurological changes like thalamic afferents and shifting cerebral blood flow between cortical regions. We’re still trying to understand why this happens, but the one consistent occurrence is the excitement of the 5-HT2A receptors in the brain.
That should be the end of the story, but you guys want to dive deeper in the rabbit hole—so let’s do it.
I spoke with neuropharmacologist and founder of Psychedelic Support, Dr. Alli Feduccia, about the possibility of inducing a psychedelic trip exclusively through VR—without the interaction of 5-HT2A receptors. She said while it’s highly unlikely, it’s theoretically possible through what’s called ‘neural oscillations.’
Neuroscience discovered some neurons and even entire regions can be activated through neural oscillations, which is the synchronization of activity in certain regions of the brain. For example, when a person speaks you understand them better when you look at their face to receive visual information (happiness, sadness, etc.), which aids the auditory information (what they’re actually saying) that’s being processed in your brain. Those two sensory inputs (auditory speech and visual facial cues) are coupled as a neural oscillation.
It’s been proposed that oscillations also reflect changes in the excitement of neurons from these sensory inputs. Excitement from these neural oscillations mostly show dendritic synaptic activity in the brain—the place where serotonin receptors reside. The synaptic activity seen through this neural oscillation is a ‘ping-pong’ effect bouncing between pyramidal cells (the brain cells that process serotonin) and inhibitory interneurons (neurons that assist the activity of pyramidal cells). Theoretically if any extended reality device can create a collection of sensory inputs (visual, auditory) and vestibular inputs (balance, direction) to create a ‘transient evoked’ (a response to discrete stimuli) or a ‘steady-state evoked’ (response to periodic rhythmic stimuli) neural oscillation that would be strong and complex enough to excite certain brain regions responsible for psychedelic trips like the medial prefrontal cortex—then we would be able to see technology like VR induce a psychedelic trip.
All of this sounds like it’s possible only because I explained it to be understood. In reality, neural oscillations from an exogenous stimuli like VR that would activate a cortical region like the prefrontal cortex to excite the 5-HT2A receptors and induce a trip is a scientific and technological process that hasn’t been invented yet. In fact, we aren’t close to having even the fundamental understanding of these systems to begin the research and development of technology that would be capable of doing this. It would be like creating the Deathstar and all the technology inside entirely from cardboard. Oh, that’s happened already? Well I take that back.
When I spoke with @Trippy, the largest psychedelic community in the world (1.7 million followers and counting), about the potential of creating a psychedelic trip through technology, the curator said,“It’s impossible to deliver or duplicate an authentic psychedelic experience utilizing only technology. Humanity finds a sense of comfort in believing we can quantify or recreate all things. We have an unending desire to control things outside our understanding.”
The long and short of it is, there are a lot of VR companies out there that want you to believe they have invented a way to have a psychedelic trip through digital means. This could be the result of overzealous writers dropping extraordinary headlines and less about the CEOs of the VR companies that are represented. Everyone wants a good story, especially when you’re in the market of garnering investor interest for a capital raise.
A company that was brought to my attention is the Los Angeles-based VR company TRIPP (not to be confused with @trippy). Judging by the name one would easily believe the company is rooted in the psychedelic experience. Even their site suggests that for only $19.99 you can “start TRIPPing”. When I reached out to the company with a few questions (the first being, “Why do you think TRIPP works?”) the PR department sent me this:
“TRIPP does not elicit a psychedelic experience, nor does it act as/mimic a serotonergic agonist. TRIPP is simply a digital tool to help you manage stress and your emotional well-being. We don’t make claims on therapeutic efficacy.”
Certainly not the response many were hoping for—considering in June 2021, CEO of TRIPP Nanea Reeves told TechCrunch: “Many people that will never feel comfortable taking a psychedelic, this is a low-friction alternative that can deliver some of that experience in a more benign way.”
We’re not picking on TRIPP, there are far more dubious claims from individuals that suggest they have the technology to put the brain in altered states. Right around the VR craze in the mid ‘90s, Stanley Koren came out with the ‘God Helmet,’ a device that claims it can give the wearer a feeling of otherness, similar to the subjective effects of DMT and ayahuasca.
Through oscillations of low magnetic fields, the God Helmet allegedly disrupts the communication between the left and right brain lobes, which gives a person the perception of another ‘godly’ presence. There’s only one problem: No one has fully been able to replicate Stanley Koren’s claims with their own God Helmet study.
None of this is meant to degrade VR’s therapeutic use, which has been proven in clinical studies. For instance, Hunter G. Hoffman’s 2004 ‘Snowworld VR’ study showed patients can withstand pain longer in a tranquil virtual environment, the first evidence in history that VR changes brain activity during painful procedures.
VR is not an alternative that can deliver a psychedelic experience. If there’s one thing from this article to take away, it’s that. In the future, however, this statement has the possibility of turning around, and judging by the advancements in neuroscience along with an array of psychedelic research being unraveled, it will most likely be untrue. But for now, we’re still a long way to go before VR will give you a psychedelic trip.
Everything you need to know about Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious and how it can help us process, navigate and guide psychedelic journeys.
This is part of our column ‘Psychedelics in Depth‘ which defines and explains depth psychology topics in the context of psychedelics.
A boundless sea rises to engulf the land. A solitary ship floats delicately on its churning surface. On the boat there are two figures, rapidly bailing out water from the deck, while a pair of animals look nervously over the edge. Out of the water bursts forth a massive tree, lifting up the boat in one of its thousand limbs, rescuing the people and the animals from the murky abyss below. The moon blocks out the sun, an eagle soars across the sky, and all falls into darkness…
Dream, psychedelic vision, or ancient myth? Can you tell the difference?
If you answered no, that’s because this outlandish sequence of events cannot possibly be based in objective reality, and therefore must be subject to interpretation. Who’s to say what any of it means—for now it remains a tapestry of evocative images containing infinite avenues where we might create meaning.Perhaps only the dreamer, journeyer, or culture of origin is truly capable of this, since an image’s deeper meaning can only become clear when its context is provided.
What is clear, however, is that the images which emerge in dreams, psychedelic states, and myths share themes in common, which is a foundational principle of depth psychology.
While the patterns or images themselves might be considered ‘archetypes,’ the question of where they come from is our main concern in this article.
Did that story above seem somehow familiar? Did it remind you of other stories you’ve heard before, once upon a time? Jung and other depth psychologists would likely say that they emerged out of the ‘collective unconscious,’a foundational concept in depth psychology.
The idea of the collective unconscious is perhaps one of the most unique and enduring concepts of Jungian and depth psychology. The very question of its existence caused the never-healed split between Freud and Jung, which marked one of the most significant moments in the history of psychology.
To embrace the reality of this mysterious, timeless realm is to embrace the notion that there are indeed regions of consciousness that we cannot, and will not, understand by our usual ways of knowing.
In this regard, the collective unconscious opens the way to the unknown, which psychedelics can, gracefully or otherwise, escort us into closer communion with. It could even be said that modern Western culture’s long standing fear and stigmatization of plant medicine, psychedelics and altered states of consciousness is an intense fear of the unknown projected onto the plant, pill or powder in question.
Psychedelics can ferry us across the river into the storehouse of repressed human experiences that modern culture has sought to obscure, dilute, or completely ignore. This can look like vivid encounters with death, powerful reminders of humility or sobering wake-up calls that break us out of whatever psychological trance state we all seem to occasionally fall into.
Despite all of our technology and scientific discoveries, to this day the collective unconscious remains as mysterious as the dark side of the moon.
What Is the Collective Unconscious?
According to Jung in his Collected Works, Volume 8, the terrain of the collective unconscious “contains the whole spiritual heritage of mankind’s evolution, born anew in the brain structure of every individual,” and can seem “something like an unceasing stream or perhaps ocean of images and figures which drift into consciousness in our dreams or in abnormal states of mind.”
In other words, the collective unconscious is a universal aspect of the human experience—something akin to a genetic heritage of the psyche, composed of primordial images and which express themselves symbolically through dreams and myths across time and space.
In his later writings, Jung used the term‘objective psyche’to refer to the collective unconscious because of a refinement in his thinking and a desire to steer his work away from focusing on overtly social phenomena like collective projection or groupthink. While this was a facet of Jung’s work, the true scope of the collective unconscious far surpasses this domain.
Additionally, there exists the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious, the difference of which is important to understand and explore.
The personal unconscious contains all of the unique aspects of your personality and psyche which have been repressed, such as difficult memories, traumas, and behaviors you’re not even aware of. The personal shadow, according to Jung, is composed of all the aspects of your personality which fail to neatly conform to your ego’s idea of who you are, which is called your ‘persona’. Unless these shadow aspects are consciously faced and integrated (often called ‘shadow work’), they inevitably tend to be projected outward. But more on that another time.
The collective unconscious is a different beast entirely, and refers to regions of the psyche far beyond the personal repressed material described above. Nearly all of Jung’s most evocative concepts, such as complexes, archetypes, anima/animus, and shadow arise from or are connected to the collective unconscious. By its very nature, the collective unconscious is unknowable and imperceivable to us by our usual methods of perception.
Over the course of his life and work, Jung postulated different ideas as to what this infinite realm might be and what its purpose could be for humanity. His work contained within The Red Book expresses his personal journey of delving into his own uncharted depths through cryptic prose and evocative, semi-religious artwork.
What is clear is that the collective unconscious remains an elusive concept, and that any discussion of it requires a healthy dose of mystery and wonder. Because it is ineffable and eludes full definition, the collective unconscious remains something beyond our ability to fully control, manipulate, and know—actions which, from a depth perspective, all emerge from the ego. And perhaps it should remain so.
“Psychedelic substances don’t cause specific psychological effects. Although they increase energy levels that activate psychological processes, which allows one to consciously experience otherwise unconscious content, they don’t give rise to specific experiences or content. The content that arises from the unconscious during a psychedelic session, like the content that arises in a dream during sleep, is what is available in the unconscious at the time. What emerges can naturally vary, then from session to session for each person, and can certainly vary from person to person.”
Psychedelics cause a “lowering of the threshold of consciousness,” according to Jung, meaning that they bring one into closer contact with the unconscious. Another way of looking at it is that unconscious material bubbles up to the surface during altered states of consciousness, leading to the vast array of reactions that psychedelics are known to evoke. From this perspective, the unconscious material rising to the surface is emerging both from the personal and the collective unconscious.
The ego has a hard time believing that anything could be beyond its realm of knowledge and control. Experiences of fear, which can often infuse the onset or peak of psychedelic experiences, can be seen as the ego’s response to losing its grip on psychic control. As we plunge ever more deeply into the waters of the unconscious, fear is the ego’s alarm system, signaling that it’s well-maintained boat appears to be going down. Yet this descent, as we know from some of the world’s oldests myths and ceremonial traditions, is where real transformation begins, and as any psychedelic guide worth their salt will tell you, the best course of action at this point is to surrender, breathe, and go within.
What actually happens within the psyche while immersed in a powerful psychedelic experience can be interpreted from a variety of perspectives, as decades of psychedelic literature and multidisciplinary studies demonstrate. But like most great mysteries, psychedelics create more questions than they can possibly answer.
From a depth perspective, however, one could say that psychedelics catalyze the emergence of previously repressed psychic material which arises from both the personal and the collective unconscious —a sentiment expressed by many before. Stanislav Grof deemed psychedelics ‘abreactives,’ meaning that they bring to consciousness whatever material which has the most emotional charge.
Because psychedelics can open one’s psyche to experience aspects of the collective unconscious, various archetypes, images, complexes, and energies can be personally experienced, leading to profound moments of catharsis, healing, insight, and what Jung called, ‘numinosity’: overwhelming feelings that burst forth when one is confronted with the power of transpersonal images, archetypes, and experiences. In other words, a full-blown mystical experience.
The implications of understanding the psychedelic experience through a depth psychological lens cannot be overstated, and helps us better understand what Grof meant in his famous axiom: “Psychedelics are to the study of the mind what the telescope is for astronomy and the microscope is for biology.”
The Collective Unconscious and Psychedelics For Psychedelic Facilitators
If you are a psychedelic therapist or facilitator seeking to integrate a depth psychological approach into your practice, it is important to never overlook the significance of the unconscious and the critical role that it plays in psychedelic work. This means expecting the unexpected, listening for the deeper, unconscious threads in a client’s process, and always approaching this work from a place of humility and caution. One could say that the essential function of psychedelic therapy, from the beginning of preparation, through the dosing session, to post-trip integration sessions, is essentially one long process of integrating material from the personal and the collective unconscious.
Depth psychology will inevitably require you to learn to speak two languages at once, as you keep one foot grounded in the world of ego consciousness, persona, and outer objective facts, while maintaining another firmly rooted in the world of symbol, metaphor, myth, and subjectivity. Becoming literate in this dream language takes time, practice, and a dedication to your own inner work as well.
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It’s important to remember this challenging stance requires letting go of dogmatic perspectives, beliefs and certainties, as well as cultivating a certain level of humility and openness. Never forget that each time your client is venturing into psychedelic space, they are venturing into the unknown. The role of the guide or psychedelic therapist is to be a light along the way, to clear the path as much as possible, and to point the journeyer in the right direction as they bravely step into their own star-lit darkness.
The enduring message of depth psychology, however, is that those stars, and that darkness, are not yours alone. The inner world is not an empty void of nothing, but a fertile space utterly saturated with meaning, the comprehension of which can take a lifetime. The collective unconscious belongs to the collective heritage of humanity, is passed down to us in myth over countless millennia, and is remembered in our dreams and visions.
Perhaps this is what Joseph Campbell meant when he famously said, “And where you had thought to be alone, you shall be with all the world.”
About the Author
Simon Yugler is a depth and psychedelic integration therapist based in Portland, OR with a masters (MA) in depth counseling psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. Weaving Jungian psychology, Internal Family Systems therapy, and mythology, Simon also draws on his diverse experiences learning from indigenous cultures around the world, including the Shipibo ayahuasca tradition. He has a background in experiential education, and has led immersive international journeys for young adults across 10 countries. He is passionate about initiation, men’s work, indigenous rights, decolonization, and helping his clients explore the liminal wilds of the soul. Find out more on his website and on Instagram , Twitter (@depth_medicine) or Facebook.
About the Illustrator
Martin Clarke is a British Designer and Illustrator from Nottingham, England. Specializing in branding, marketing and visual communication, Martin excels at creating bespoke brand identities and striking visual content across multiple platforms for web, social media, print and packaging. See more of his work here.
Raising children requires a lot of patience, compassion and energy, which is why parents like me turn to microdoses of LSD.
My introduction to LSD happened in 1997 at Penn State University. Phish’s Lawn Boy CD acted as the soundtrack and de facto tour guide for that trip. It was such a fantastic experience that I crammed seeing dozens of Phish concerts on psychedelics into my college curriculum. The acid ignited my senses and soothed my soul; worries about my future and body fat percentage faded and I could live in the moment; one with the music. Then late one night in 2004 atop a muddy mountain in Coventry, Vermont, Phish momentarily ended and a new era of my life began.
I met a man. We fell in love. Swept up in the fairytale romance, I was blissfully unaware that my freewheeling, psychedelically enhanced Phish festival days were being replaced with the crushing realities of juggling a job with family life and childcare concerns. For years I feared that I would never find balance without making myself—or my husband and kids—miserable. Luckily Phish and LSD still play an important role in improving my life, though in much smaller doses. So how does a modern mom—between work, cheer practice, swimming lessons, and PTA meetings—find time to start microdosing lysergic acid diethylamide?
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How Does One Become a Microdosing Mom?
In 2009, I was too busy working long hours at a weekly tabloid magazine, planning my wedding, and buying a house to care that Phish reunited. During the next few years, life changed so rapidly in such a short amount of time that I lost sight of my own needs and could feel the light inside me dimming. I got married in October and was pregnant by Christmas. Those were happy days, but just a week before my daughter’s first birthday (and the day before my own birthday) my father died undergoing heart surgery.
The day after his funeral, I dropped my one-year-old off at my mother-in-law’s house in an utter haze before heading to my first day of work at a brand-new celebrity weekly magazine. Quietly sobbing in a bathroom stall during lunch and panic attacks before editorial pitch meetings became my normal routine, while everyone I loved told me that the demands of the job would be the best way for me to get through my grief. I wanted to believe them. Instead, I felt sadder and meaner to those closest to me as they reminded me that I was no different or special than any other working mother. My doctor gave me a lecture on my weight gain and a Prozac prescription.
For years, I self-medicated with too much cannabis and wine and popped Prozac. I quit it all to get pregnant again. My second daughter was delivered in distress at 31 weeks. She weighed just two pounds. I was too scared to celebrate her birth and fell deeper into depression. Today she’s a strong-willed, fearless five-year-old and I love her more than words can express. The entire NICU experience left me with severe PTSD, which I had no time to truly treat because I had to get back to my magazine job. I spent just two hours a weekday with my girls and half that time I couldn’t wait to put them to bed because I was too mentally drained and depressed to find any joy in the motherhood journey.
When I got laid off a year later, I felt relief for a brief moment before the anxiety, despair, and depression of not having a steady income crept back into my brain. Of course, there is no time to properly deal with those feelings when you’ve got a teething toddler and curious kindergartner. I desperately wanted to be a better mom, but some days all I could do was prop them up with snacks and the Disney channel and weep silently in the next room. I know I’m not the only parent that experiences this.
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Could Parenting and Psychedelics Go Hand in Hand?
“When you’re a trauma survivor, you think you’ve healed and then you have children and they just push you into your shit,” Pepper Wolfe, a New York-based yoga therapist and wellness coach tells Psychedelics Today. “After my first was born I was struggling with postpartum [depression] and then my mom was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She died when I was six months pregnant with my second and I could not snap out of it. No amount of meditation, yoga, talk therapy, or breathwork made me feel better. I was hitting a wall, not getting better.”
While Wolfe, who is also a licensed social worker, recalls feeling short-fused and super-triggered by normal childhood things, like tantrums and messy meals, I flashback to my own experiences with my young daughters. “I fell apart and was not the mom I wanted to be,” Wolfe tells me. Her dark days could be my dark days. And then, while cleaning her basement she found a long-forgotten stash of magic mushrooms. She took them. “And it was powerfully transformative in my perspective, my reactivity, my patience, and how I felt my body,” says Wolfe. “It was like the lightness came back.”
While that was a full-on trip, Wolfe says that she has since learned how to use psychedelics “in a more disciplined, formal way,” which has helped her to be a better parent by healing her past wounds. “I found that things that I had been working on for years in talk therapies, these issues were just clearing up, these blocks were being removed, and I was having new insights.”
Curiosity got the best of me once I noticed microdosing being discussed as a sort-of-Hail-Mary-miracle in my Phish-loving parents’ social media group. I recalled the bliss of tripping at a show immersed in the sounds and lights and energy. Though I have no desire to melt my face off and then attempt to make patty melts for family dinner, I did wonder if microdosing could be the key to calming my short-fuse and lack of patience for the nitty-gritty of parenting.
I am still in awe of the fact that a tiny bit of LSD helps me to be the mother I’ve always imagined I’d be. I can’t say the same for Prozac.
Obviously, taking a do-it-yourself-at-home approach to dabbling in psychedelics is not for everyone. I’ve used cocaine in conjunction with Weight Watchers to lose 100 lbs., so I may be a little crazy, but I’m also open to experimentation for the sake of self-improvement. That’s how I ended up asking a friend to “get me some Lucy.” I skipped the shrooms and went right for the chemical because I have never been a big fan of psilocybin—it gives me intestinal distress, that is, if I could even chock them down, which for me, is a bad way to begin a trip. Plus, I’ve always preferred the smooth climb to the peak and comedown cycle of an acid trip as opposed to the continuous up and down sensations I experience on psilocybin-containing mushrooms.
A Microdose Experiment
My friend showed up with a little, inconspicuous bottle and said, “This is such a small amount, I can’t charge you.” He left with a carton of eggs from our backyard flock. I stood, alone, in my kitchen looking at that tiny drop encased in amber glass. No one was home; I had hours alone ahead of me. I thought back to that night at Penn State and all of the Phish shows where I felt carefree. Yearning to feel some iota of that joy again, I touched the tip of the dropper to my tongue. Must be a microdose, right?
Twenty minutes later I was at the grocery store, giggling about cheese names and wandering around the glossy stacks of apples and pears in produce. I patiently waited with a smile on my face to pay for the manchego. Back home the living room curtains rippled and dewdrops glistened like chunky metallic glitter on each blade of grass in the backyard. Giggling uncontrollably, I realized this might be more than a microdose.
An acid trip can last anywhere from eight to 12 hours on average. When my husband walked in, I informed him of my microdosing misjudgment. We laughed and he promised to get the kids off the school bus and handle homework duty. I asked Alexa to “play Phish songs” and danced while dusting the house, enjoying the burst of energy. As the sun set on that evening, I began to come down but still had energy to run around the backyard helping my girls catch and release fireflies. I felt genuinely connected to them for the first time in as long as I can remember.
Brad Smith* had a similar experience. The father of two tells me that microdosing LSD “continues to bring me to a more open and understanding place in my daily life, which includes dealing with my two toddler boys. Empathizing with a struggle they are enduring that I would have considered trivial previously, has helped me to better communicate and provide for them.”
Remember, the whole point of microdosing for me was to get mentally healthy and happier without actually hallucinating. Since that day, I’ve learned 10 micrograms works best for my body—I spent a week experimenting while my daughters were on vacation at their grandma’s farmhouse. And I can honestly say that microdosing has made me a better parent by easing my depression and making me more approachable. Plus, I’m more active, aware, and available to my girls both emotionally and physically. I delight in playing games and crafting with them and even have the energy to race around the backyard playing Freeze Tag. I am still in awe of the fact that a tiny bit of LSD helps me to be the mother I’ve always imagined I’d be. I can’t say the same for Prozac.
What The Experts and Other Microdosing Parents are Saying
Much like my own experience misjudging a microdose, it’s a common occurrence. Adam Bramlage, who hosts a microdosing course for DoubleBlind Mag and is the Founder and CEO of Flow State Micro, explains to me that the very first thing a person needs to do is dial in their dosage. “It’s important to remember that a very small amount of LSD—especially in liquid or even paper form—can be very, very strong,” says Bramlage. “It is important for parents to start low and go slow—that’s somewhere between 5 or 10 micrograms. Once they find the ‘sweet spot,’ which is the dose that they feel but doesn’t have that classic psychedelic effect, they can experiment with protocols.”
Bramlage recommends microdosing a few days in a row to properly start the process. The Stamets protocol—either five days on and two days off or four days on and three days off—is a popular approach. For beginners, Bramlage usually recommends the Microdosing Institute protocol, which is one day on and one day off. He says, “There is a 48-hour effect to psychedelics, even in small doses. We call it the afterglow or the halo effect. If starting specifically with LSD, which can be considerably stronger than psilocybin in small doses, the user wants to make sure they have the right dose; having the day off will let them see how it’s affecting them.”
According to Bramlage, the Fadiman protocol, which is one day on and two days off, is “a great one for parents because again you’re getting the day off, which is the afterglow, and then the second day off, you’re getting back to baseline so you can notice a difference.”
He speaks from experience. As a single dad with shared custody of a 7-year-old daughter and a 12-year-old son, Bramlage says that microdosing LSD “helps increase my energy and stamina throughout the day. It seems to block that default grumpy old man that overreacts to the spilled milk. It puts you in a flow state and when you’re more in the moment and not thinking about other things you can be more present. It allows people to live in the moment instead of worrying about the future or ruminating over the past.” Who couldn’t benefit from that?
Wolfe says she has a lot of friends that “microdose on LSD and are having a lot of peak experiences, flow states, and great work performances. And I just kept thinking, ‘I just want to be a better parent. I want the generational trauma to stop with me. I don’t want to make my wounds their wounds.’ And for me, that’s what psychedelics did.”
Microdosing for Parents: Not a Miracle Cure for Everyone
Of course, microdosing doesn’t work for every parent. Oregon mother of five, Ashleigh Stevenson*, didn’t see any benefit from trying microdosing. “I was looking to improve my mood and allow me to be a more present parent to my crew, which includes 2-year-old twins,” she says. After getting no relief from magic mushroom capsules, she moved on to LSD. “But it still didn’t do anything for me. I knew it wouldn’t make me trip or anything like that, but it didn’t make me feel any happier or at peace with my crazy home life. I just felt more anxious, like what is wrong with me? Why won’t this work?”
She’s not alone. Washington D.C. native Leo Greene* is disappointed in his microdosing experience, too. “I’m normally a pretty happy-go-lucky guy. But the pandemic and being home with the kids nonstop for like a year really put me in a difficult place, and I struggled not to default back to yelling. Parents in my social circle were raving about finding their joy and having the energy to chase their kids around the National Zoo,” he shares. “So I tried [microdosing] a few times, and what a letdown. I felt nothing, nada, zilch.” Though Greene says, he is open to continued experimentation. “I will keep messing around with the dosage and hopefully find one that works for me. My kids are the best, and I want to be my best as a dad for them.”
Due to restrictive drug policies, placebo-controlled studies on psychedelics are few and far between. Despite that, the Imperial College of London managed to conduct the largest placebo-controlled trial on microdosing psychedelics, although it was ‘self blinded’ meaning participants did it all themselves. The results suggest that the benefits of microdosing may be the result of the ‘placebo effect’—or all in our minds. In other words, we might be creating our own microdosing euphoria more so than the LSD. During the study, 191 participants followed online instructions on incorporating placebo control into their microdosing routines to observe whether it can improve cognitive function and psychological well being. There was significant improvement of all psychological outcomes for the microdose group, however the placebo group—who had no idea they weren’t taking the psychedelic—also experienced nearly equal improvements.
However, that doesn’t stop many parents from having very positive effects, like Oregon native Danica Aria* who is positive that microdosing LSD makes her a better mom, too. “I don’t think it’s hindered my parenting skills but rather helps bring me more patience and calmness to many scenarios that would normally stress me out. I wish other parents would know the beneficial qualities hallucinogens can provide,” she says.
Bramlage believes that day is coming. “We have long known that LSD has been an amazing chemical and agent for change,” he says. “I believe that psychedelics and microdosing are the secret to saving our society and that all starts with re-educating people. We need to break the myths down, to tell the truth—let parents know that there are amazing potential benefits and uses for LSD.”
Until then, you can find me hanging out with my friend Lucy whether I’m at home getting crafty with my kids or at Phish shows surrendering to the flow.
*Name has been changed
About the Author
Amy L. Hogan delights in writing about celebrities, cannabis, psychedelics and sometimes even witches for both print and digital media. In 2001, she received her Bachelor of Arts degree from The Writers Institute at Susquehanna University. She resides on the East Coast with her husband, two daughters, three cats and a chicken named Fluffhead.
Phencyclidine or “angel dust” is a misrepresented psychedelic intertwined with a history of racism and police brutality. But efforts to rehabilitate this drug are met with scorn.
This is the second part of a two-part series on why the psychedelic scene ignores PCP. Check out Part 1 here.
PCP, a drug that also goes by the names “angel dust” and “dipper” among others, remains one of the most stigmatized and misunderstood psychedelics around. However, there is little scientific evidence to suggest that PCP is any more dangerous than any other drug. Alcohol, ketamine, LSD and acetaminophen (Tylenol) can all be just as hazardous if used recklessly.
Much of what people think they know about PCP is shaped by outdated media scare stories and urban legends, not actual evidence. (For more on the science, history, discovery and true dangers of PCP, read Part 1 of this series.) Yet the psychedelic community largely ignores PCP while pushing for the legalization of drugs like MDMA and psilocybin.
One aspect of PCP that cannot be ignored is how this mythology directly plays into the militarization of law enforcement and the proliferation of police brutality. The specific demonization of PCP is not only unwarranted, the stigma can be more deadly than the drug.
PCP was discovered in the 1950’s and was used clinically as an anesthetic for about a decade before being replaced by ketamine—a closely-related drug that offers the same pain-killing benefits with less hallucinations. Sometime in the ‘60s, PCP made its way onto the streets of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, then spread across the nation. In its wake, horrific stories of users gouging out their eyes or withstanding storms of bullets followed.
Strangely, illicit PCP use has largely been restricted to the U.S. “It has failed to gain traction anywhere else on the planet,” according to an analysis byVICE. Its popularity has waned since the ‘80s, and PCP use remains largely constrained to cities like Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. But for much of the ‘70s and into the ‘90s, PCP was the panic drug du jour.
In 1977,Time Magazine described it as “A Terror of A Drug” while in 1980 the Chicago Tribune warned its allure was the “Sniff of Madness.” In 1982 the Los Angeles Times pegged it as a “Modern-Day Plague,” according to historian Jacob Taylor’s thesis,PCP in the American Media.
“It’s kind of like a part of police lore, this substance that people take that makes them immune to pain and unreasonable and gives them superhuman strength,” Hamilton Morris, a chemist and documentary filmmaker who has done films about both the positive and negative aspects of PCP, tells Psychedelics Today. “It’s almost designed to terrify law enforcement.”
The stark reputation of PCP soon became a justification for police violence, as the idea spread “that users of the drug, once on a violent rampage, were almost impossible to stop,” Taylor reports. “Police spoke of being thrown around ‘like ragdolls,’ and of needing six or more officers to physically restrain one intoxicated individual. Most notoriously, several incidents were documented in which arrestees high on PCP broke free of handcuffs by simply tearing apart the steel-link chains.”
There’s really little actual evidence to back up these claims. A 1988 analysis in theJournal of Clinical Psychopharmacologylooked at 350 studies of PCP and only found three instances of violence, leading the authors to conclude, “PCP does not live up to its reputation as a violence-inducing drug.”
Furthermore, these tales of super human strength may sound familiar: The “negro cocaine fiends” of the early 20th century were an invented media legend used as an extension of the Jim Crow South to demonize Black people. Similar stories of bloodthirsty cocaine users with hyper-strength impervious to bullets were instrumental in banning cocaine and heroin under the Harrison Tax Act.
The specific demonization of PCP is not only unwarranted, the stigma can be more deadly than the drug.
Phencyclidine and Police Brutality
There are echoes of that history in how PCP is perceived by law enforcement today. And the reputation of this drug making users into frenzied killers has real world consequences, especially given that PCP is a cheap drug “linked to urban zones of poverty, unemployment and high crime,” as VICE reports. “In other words it’s a drug linked to inequality, and groups of people who are more likely to be excluded from the mainstream economy, with housing and employment problems, such as the Black community.”
Police officers commonly use fear as an excuse for lethal force—and this defense often works. In the shooting of Philando Castile, officer Jeronimo Yanez of the St. Anthony, Minnesota Police Department, told jurors “I was scared to death. I thought I was going to die,” according to thePioneer Press. Yanez was not convicted. And the “I-feared-for-my-life narrative” is only multiplied when a strange, infamous drug is introduced.
“When you really think about what that does to the psychology of law enforcement, it’s a terrifying idea,” Morris says. “If they genuinely believe that someone has superhuman strength, that means they can kill you easily. If you believe that the people who use this substance have superhuman strength, that’s a justification for excessive lethal force.”
This is exactly what has happened on numerous occasions, even in recent history. On March 23, 2020, Rochester police approached Daniel Prude, who was naked and having a mental health episode. Officers placed a ‘spit hood’ over Prude’s head, a mesh bag designed to prevent spitting and biting. They then pressed his face into the ground for two minutes, suffocating the 41-year-old man.
A year later, the New York State Attorney General announced the seven officers involved in the case would not face any criminal charges—their lawyers argued that PCP had killed the man, not their actions. A medical examiner’s report listed the death as a homicide, but noted that PCP in Prude’s system contributed to his death.
Of course, just a few weeks after Prude’s death, George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis by officer Derek Chauvin under similar circumstances: suffocation while being pressed into the ground. In fact, one of the other officers, Thomas Lane, can be heard asking Chauvin if Floyd might be on PCP. Floyd later tested negative for the drug, but methamphetamine and fentanyl were found in his blood. So Chauvin’s defense emphasized that these drugs must have killed Floyd—not the fact that his knee was on Floyd’s neck for 9 and a half minutes. A jury did not agree and convicted Chauvin of two counts of murder and one count of manslaughter.
The case of Laquan McDonald is another rare case in which a police officer was convicted of murder for killing an unarmed civilian. In October 2014, McDonald was walking away from Officer Jason Van Dyke when he was shot 16 times in the back. Van Dyke wasn’t charged until over a year later when dashcam footage was released via a judge’s order.
During the trial, a pharmacologist named James Thomas O’Donnell testified that McDonald was “whacked on PCP,” which had been found during an autopsy. But jurors weren’t convinced and found Van Dyke guilty of 16 counts of aggravated battery with a firearm and second-degree murder.
Typically, however, when PCP is involved, that isn’t the case. In 2016 Terence Crutcher was shot dead by officer Betty Jo Shelby in Tulsa, Oklahoma. An autopsy showed “acute phencyclidine intoxication” and also the presence of TCP, a similar drug to PCP. A jury found her not guilty.
“Psychedelic enthusiasts were conspicuously silent when Van Dyke used PCP as justification for his savagery,” Dr. Carl Hart, a neuroscientist and professor of psychology at Columbia University wrote in his most recent book, Drug Use For Grownups. “We also didn’t hear a peep from them when Betty Jo Shelby, a white Oklahoman police officer, evoked the ‘crazy nigger on PCP’ defense to justify her killing of unarmed black Terence Crutcher.”
But PCP doesn’t actually have to be involved, either. The most famous example is likely from March 1991, when Rodney King was yanked from his vehicle and savagely beaten by four Los Angeles police officers. One of them yelled, “He’s dusted!” but King later tested negative for PCP—only alcohol was in his system.
However, during the trial, a “drug expert” declared the officers were “justified” in their belief that King was under the influence of PCP, according to the Chicago Tribune. The officers were acquitted, although two were later sentenced to 30 months in prison by a federal court.
‘Non-Lethal’ Weapons And PCP
One particular PCP-related incident fundamentally changed policing in America. In 1977, 35-year-old biochemist Ronald Burkholder was naked in the streets of Los Angeles, high on PCPy (also called rolicyclidine), a PCP analogue in the class of arylcyclohexylamines. Burkholder was allegedly climbing a sign pole, came down and tried to grab LAPD sergeant Kurt G. Barz’s nightstick. After a struggle, Barz shot Burkholder six times. Because he was naked and unarmed, the case drew considerable controversy, including from the ACLU.
According to Morris, this case and other police murder incidents “produced enough social pressure on law enforcement that they started to carry tasers and pepper spray,” Morris says, adding, “You can actually trace the history of non-lethal incapacitating agents being used by law enforcement to PCP.”
“Cops wanted some kind of tool that would allow them to subdue folks high on PCP without having to lay hands on them. The Taser did the trick,” journalist Matt Stroud reported forOneZero. According to Taylor, some police departments “experimented with ‘grabbing-sticks,’ nets, water-cannons, sound-wave guns, bean-bag guns, and, in a surreal example from New York City, mace-spraying robots … It created a culture of fear among police which must have had a lasting, negative impact on their work.”
“As Americans, when we participate in racism, I think we use at our disposal whatever tools are available. And sometimes PCP can be used as one of those tools.”
With a new market, many companies soon filled the gap, often openly advertising so-called “less-than-lethal” weaponry using PCP as a selling point. “A lot of companies would market to law enforcement non-lethal equipment, like tasers, stun guns, there were nets, and they would really play up the fact that these are for people that are intoxicated on PCP specifically,” Dr. Jason Wallach, a neuropsychopharmacologist who has studied PCP and related chemicals, tells Psychedelics Today. “Anytime they can sell using fear, companies will.”
Encouragement came from the federal government as well. For example, a 1994 bulletin from the National Institute of Justice advertised oleoresin capsicum—that is, pepper spray—and flat out quotes a police sergeant saying, “When confronting subjects under the influence of PCP … ‘OC is the best option short of a lethal weapon. If we did not have pepper spray, we would have to use lethal force. Having OC is another tool to use at the lowest possible level versus impact weapons, which won’t work anyway on subjects under the influence of PCP,” implying that people on PCP are impervious to bullets.
Even today companies market misinformation about PCP to sell something. Lexipol, a Texas consulting company that provides training to police departments, has a blog post on its website from 2016 titled, “5 safety tips for cops when dealing with a subject high on PCP.” It contains multiple urban legends, such as suspects breaking free of handcuffs or that PCP can be absorbed through the skin, an echo of the fentanyl touch myth that persists in the media today. It even suggests drugging people: “allow medical providers, if available and authorized, to use sedative medications to chemically restrain the patient.”
But describing these tools as “less-than-lethal” is just a euphemism—they can and do kill. A 2017Reuters investigation documented 1,005 deaths from tasers, in which 9 out of 10 involved unarmed people. The news organization was able to obtain 712 autopsies, reporting: “In 153 of those cases, or more than a fifth, the Taser was cited as a cause or contributing factor in the death.”
Tasers also don’t reduce police shootings. An eight-year study of the Chicago Police Department by the National Bureau of Economic Research, for example, noted that, “Police injuries fell, but neither injury rates nor the number of injuries to civilians were affected. There is no evidence that Tasers led to a reduction in police use of firearms.”
PCP is uniquely treated among drug users and law enforcement. Even drugs that are somewhat similar to PCP are not given the same level of stigma. But in the end, drugs are often just used as an excuse for racism and over-policing in America—the chemical itself is irrelevant.
“As Americans, when we participate in racism, I think we use at our disposal whatever tools are available. And sometimes PCP can be used as one of those tools,” Hart tells Psychedelics Today. “I don’t think that PCP is special in that way or anything like that.”
People who care about ending the drug war or generally reforming drug policy should be aware of the history of racism and police brutality that has played into PCP’s reputation as a dangerous drug. Like any drug, PCP can be abused. But what actually makes drug use dangerous often has more to do with prohibition than any intrinsic nature of a chemical. And police overwhelmingly benefit from the power dynamics of prohibition, meaning they have a deep investment in this mythology.
“It’s not really about PCP, of course,” Morris says. “The bigger issue is the way that we assign certain values to drugs as pharmacological determinism, and what the medical and political outcomes of that can be in terms of prison sentences, in terms of law enforcement’s behavior.”
This is why PCP should probably be more centered in the conversation about psychedelic drug reform. The efforts to decriminalize drugs shouldn’t just focus on the substances people think are safe or socially acceptable, but focus on ending the systems that inflict suffering on minorities and low-income communities.
“The main most important thing is for people to know that pharmacologically, [PCP] is not that dissimilar from ketamine,” Hart says. “And the sort of narratives that we tell ourselves about it has less to do with pharmacology, and more to do with these social sort of issues. I just hope that they’re not fooled by those cop stories any longer.”
About the Author
Troy Farahis an independent science and drug policy reporter that lives in Southern California with his wife and two dogs. His work has appeared in National Geographic, The Guardian, VICE, WIRED and others. He co-hosts the podcast Narcotica and can be found on Twitter @filth_filler or on his website troyfarah.com .
Stigma against PCP or “angel dust” contradicts the science of this misunderstood psychedelic. But, will the psychedelic community ever look at phencyclidine favorably?
The retro schlock horror of cannabis turning teenagers into murderous sex fiends is nothing but laughable today. The same Reefer Madness applied to psychedelic drugs like LSD or psilocybin “magic” mushrooms is also rightfully judged to be an absurd relic of the Nixon era. Even attitudes on heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine have slightly relaxed—sure, these drugs can be highly addictive, but few believe they turn you into a bloodthirsty monster.
Yet one narcotic still remains in the public consciousness as nothing but a lethal menace that will drive users into fugues of brutal rage: PCP.
Ever since its arrival on the black market in the 1960s, PCP, or phencyclidine, has been saddled with a reputation of extreme violence, cannibalism and superhuman strength. Urban legends of “angel dust” consumers breaking squad car doors off their hinges or bursting from handcuffs persist—despite the fact that scientific evidence for PCP causing any such behavior is non-existent, to put it lightly.
Like many other demonized drugs, such as ketamine or MDMA, PCP has a long history of therapeutic use. And PCP is a psychedelic, too, not just a dissociative anesthetic. But while drug policy reform advocates are pushing the Overton window when it comes to so-called “classic” psychedelics, PCP is notably left out of the conversation. But why?
“I am deeply disturbed that there is a deafening silence from the psychedelic community while fellow drug users continue to be brutalized as a result of PCP-related misapprehensions,” Dr. Carl Hart, a neuroscientist and professor of psychology at Columbia University wrote in his most recent book, Drug Use For Grownups. But he acknowledges a likely explanation: “Drawing attention to the fact that PCP is also a psychedelic might jeopardize the reputation, and thus the availability, of other psychedelics.”
PCP could be seen as another example of “psychedelic exceptionalism,” in which certain drugs are seen as “better” than others because they are used by certain people and not others. For example, the Decriminalize Nature movement has taken the U.S. by storm, loosening laws against “plant medicine” like ayahuasca, ibogaine and mescaline cactus, not to mention psilocybin fungi. But these laws—which have passed in at least seven cities, including Oakland, Ann Arbor and Cambridge—exclude other plant medicines like opium, coca leaf, khat and more.
The same narrow-mindedness or lack of political scrutiny could be said about PCP, according to Hart and other experts, such as Dr. Jason Wallach, a neuropsychopharmacologist and assistant pharmaceutical sciences professor at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia. Wallach has closely studied PCP, ketamine and related drugs like 3-MeO-PCP, publishing numerous reports on this class of drugs (known technically as arylcyclohexylamines), including a textbook chapter devoted to dissociative anesthetics.
“I don’t see anything about PCP that makes it inherently more dangerous than other dissociative drugs, like ketamine, for example,” Wallach tells Psychedelics Today. “I think the stigma around PCP is almost exclusively of the media’s creation.”
Understanding how that myth of PCP was created—and how the power structures it serves persist today—is essential for anyone who truly cares about drug policy reform.
Like many drugs, the profound psychoactivity of PCP was an unexpected discovery. On March 26, 1956, a medicinal chemist named Dr. Victor Maddox was developing various compounds for Parke-Davis and Company in Detroit, Michigan. Maddox showed one molecule, which he temporarily named GP 121, to his coworker, Dr. Graham Chen, who said it was the most unique compound that he had ever examined. This was phencyclidine, or PCP.
Structurally, PCP resembles a stupor-inducing drug that is produced in Corydalis cava flowers called bulbocapnine, which was used by the CIA in the agency’s Project MKUltra mind control experiments. Chen dubbed PCP a “cataleptoid anesthetic” and began giving it to animals. Some of the cats he injected with PCP would remain in a state of rigid, fixed posture for 24 hours, while a wild rhesus monkey became so calm it allowed researchers to jam their fingers in its mouth without biting.
Following further testing in animals, a Dr. Edward Domino revealed that PCP was much less toxic than opioids and human trials began around a year later. By 1963, PCP was patented and sold as a drug with the brand names Serynl and Sernylan, which come from the word “serenity.” (Not exactly the word most people associate with PCP today.)
“As patients were anesthetized with PCP, it became obvious that the drug, when properly administered by an anesthesiologist, was indeed very safe, far safer than most anesthetics that were then available,” Domino wrote in the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs in 1980. But there was a problem. Some patients experienced “the sensation of feeling no arms or legs and being in outer space,” Domino wrote.
The side effects of PCP—hallucinations, delirium, confusion—were too much for many clinicians. Chemists quickly cooked up an alternative and in 1962, chemistry professor Calvin Stevens presented a new drug to the world: ketamine. PCP was voluntarily withdrawn from the market in 1965.
“PCP and ketamine are chemical cousins,” Hart tells Psychedelics Today. “So if you’re going to classify ketamine as a psychedelic thing, you have to classify PCP as a psychedelic.”
Yes, ketamine and PCP are very similar in nature. But while ketamine is heralded as the latest “breakthrough drug” for treating mental health—which it very well could be—PCP is still considered by some to be the “most dangerous drug.” But how dangerous is it really?
For Brian, who lives in the Washington, D.C. area, PCP was like “the boogie man.” He was familiar with stories of people taking it and stripping naked in the street, so he’s not sure what finally motivated him to try it. But a friend with sickle cell anemia was dipping cigarettes in liquid PCP—what locals call “the dipper”—and said, “If this guy has fucking sickle cell anemia and he’s not scared, I can’t let him go out by himself. So I hit it too.”
Brian, whose real name is not being used, says the first thing he noticed was ringing in his ears like an alarm going off in the distance, followed by a feeling of being immersed in water. On the phone, he made a warbly sound, like batteries dying in a cassette tape deck.
“It feels fucking odd and awkward,” Brian says. “But once you come down, it’s like clarity out of the chaos. I just descend it to a single cell organism and feel in tune with every fucking thing.”
Brian says he’s had multiple, profound psychedelic experiences on PCP. “I’ve literally had moments where I definitely feel that my fucking heightened crown chakra just exploded,” he says. “It actually exploded to a different consciousness, where I was an observer of myself.”
However, Brian, who has also used DMT and mushrooms, is first to admit that it’s “not all peaches and cream,” as he puts it. Several times, he says he’s woken up in the hospital. “It’s more chaotic, and more traumatizing and more negative than it has been positive,” he says. “But those positive times have been extremely fucking groundbreaking.”
Filmmaker and chemist Hamilton Morris has tried to show both sides of this drug. In fact, Morris says PCP was behind the entire genesis of his drug documentary series on Viceland, Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia. Morris recalls arguing with an executive producer about the show’s content, who said, essentially, “Well, you have to admit that some drugs are bad.”
Morris tells Psychedelics Today that he responded, “No, I don’t have to have to admit that at all. And he said, ‘Well, what about PCP? You couldn’t possibly say that PCP is good.’ And I said, certainly I could make the case that it’s not what people think it is. And that was sort of the origin of the show.”
Episode two, “A Positive PCP Story”, aired in 2016. It features Morris as he journeys across the U.S. to speak with PCP chemists, both clandestine and legitimate, as well as people like Timothy Wyllie, a British author, a founding member of the Process Church of the Final Judgment, and artist who illustrated sacred landscapes while under the influence of phencyclidine.
In contrast, Morris also interviews people who have struggled with PCP addiction, as well as Christ Bearer, a rapper who attempted suicide on PCP after amputating his penis. Christ Bearer survived his attempt, but now says he’s “proud” of what he did.
“He felt his penis had a negative impact on his life, and cutting it off allowed him to focus on his art,” Morris told The Guardian. “If he stands by it and thinks his life is better as a result, does that really mean he did something bad?”
Horrific self-amputation stories aside, it’s clear that PCP tales like these are anomalies. It doesn’t take much Googling to find almost identical stories involving alcohol. But few people are worried about booze driving people to such violence. Yet, when it comes to PCP, stories like this tend to rise to the top.
“What you shouldn’t do is then try to extrapolate that and say, ‘This is a normal response with PCP,’” Wallach says. (Side note: Wallach and Morris are friends. Wallach appears in the “Positive PCP Story” episode, and in 2014, Morris and Wallach published a scientific review of dissociative drugs, including ketamine and PCP.) “There absolutely have been horrible things that have happened while people were intoxicated. But you could say the same thing about any intoxicant, including ethanol. There’s no good, solid evidence that PCP has a higher propensity to cause this type of response.”
Morris has himself sampled PCP, both by snorting the hydrochloride salt and smoking the freebase. “My experiences with it were, on one hand, unremarkable,” Morris says. “Given that this is a substance that is almost exclusively associated with psychosis and adverse responses of one kind or another, the major takeaway for me was that whatever supposed problems are associated with this drug are not intrinsic problems of PCP. The problems [are] associated with poverty, lack of control over the dosing, black market distribution patterns, mental illness, and so on.”
Will the psychedelic community ever come to terms with PCP like it has other synthetic psychedelics like MDMA, LSD or ketamine? Similar horror stories and misperceptions have plagued these drugs in the past, but today most people recognize the medicinal and (relatively safe) recreational value of psychedelics. PCP seems to remain a hold-out.
“I think it’s certainly something that has been ignored partially because of its association with impoverished people who have no connection to the counterculture, really,” Morris says. “Maybe the biggest issue of all is that this is a substance that middle upper class people don’t use. So in order to really change people’s minds on a large scale, it’s often the case that people have to have direct experience with the substance.”
However, the people I spoke to for this article didn’t seem optimistic that the stigmatizing attitudes toward PCP would change any time soon.
“That sort of myth is too important to opinion makers in our society, including law enforcement, including some people who are trying to distance their favorite drug away from something like PCP,” Hart says. “PCP does not have an advocate. It’s bad enough you don’t have an advocate, you need to have a powerful advocate. And I don’t see PCP having such an advocate.”
Morris agrees perceptions about PCP have been hard to change, even after the success of his TV show. And even the most adventurous psychedelic startups probably won’t want to investigate the scientific, therapeutic value of PCP, although analogs of the drug gacyclidine (a PCP derivative) are being trialed for tinnitus treatment.
“I don’t predict anyone will advocate for that in the near future. But you never know,” Morris says. “It’s just another one of many instances of a substance that has a reputation that has been sculpted, not by any intrinsic property of the substance itself, but by the social framework in which it’s used.”
Troy Farahis an independent science and drug policy reporter that lives in Southern California with his wife and two dogs. His work has appeared in National Geographic, The Guardian, VICE, WIRED and others. He co-hosts the podcast Narcotica and can be found on Twitter @filth_filler or on his website troyfarah.com .
Sacred psychedelic plant medicines are increasingly entering the Western mainstream, but is it cultural appropriation?
From the medicinal and ceremonial use of mescaline-containing plants by the Indigenous peoples of Mexico thousands of years ago, to the brewing of ayahuasca by several Indigenous groups in the Amazon today, entheogens have been a part of the cultural heritage of these communities in ways that Western society is just starting to understand.
Because there are significant differences in the ways these plants have been used historically and the way Western society is integrating them, let’s take a brief look at both approaches.
Indigenous Uses of Sacred Plant Medicines and Traditions
Various Indigenous cultures have used medicinal plants with psychoactive properties for hundreds of years including the Mazatec and Huichol of Mexico, Native North Americans, tribes in Africa, and Indigenous groups in the Amazon. The uses of these plants vary from culture to culture, but have a few commonalities when it comes to their healing purposes. For most, there is a general belief in their sacredness and spiritual properties.
“Plants, in general, have been used for ceremony, food, and utilitarian purposes. Sacred plant medicines were always used in ceremonies and never used for recreational purposes. Plants were placed on this earth to heal humanity as I understand it,” Belinda Eriacho, Native American Healer, tells Psychedelics Today. “In my own experiences, these sacred plant medicines have helped me to heal intergenerational trauma, to find peace with deceased loved ones, and to look at my own life and improve many areas of [it].”
When it comes to ayahuasca, Indigenous peoples from Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, and Ecuador have used the brew in their sacred rituals for many years. It served and continues to serve as a basis for the establishment of different spiritual traditions by these peoples. They hold the vine in high regard and believe it can facilitate the perception of the complexity of the natural world and human creation.
Similarly, the consumption of peyote in sacred rituals allowed the Huicholes and the Tarahumaras of Mexico to come into contact with divine beings or ancestors and to cure various diseases. To this day, peyote has also been adopted by several Native American peoples. They see peyote as a gift from the creator, and a direct communication channel with the “Great Spirit”.
These cultures have preserved rituals and sacred medicines but have also gone through extreme hardships in order to do so. Many Indigenous spiritual practices in Mexico were severely persecuted and banned during the Spanish Inquisition, and hundreds of thousands of natives were brutally murdered. Many other Indigenous communities in the Americas faced the same barbarities during colonization, having their codices destroyed and much of their ceremonial knowledge lost.
Western Uses of Plant Medicines
In the Western world, the use of psychedelic plant medicine can also be traced for thousands of years. A few examples are The Eleusinian Mysteries, the most famous of the secret religious rites of ancient Greece that involved ceremonies with psychoactive plants. Furthermore, Indigenous peoples of Siberia and the Sámi people of Northern Europe used Amanita Muscaria mushrooms in their sacred traditions.
Many medicinal plants have found their way into numerous products that the pharmaceutical industry sells today to treat a variety of diseases and health conditions, from aspirin derived from willow tree bark, to the current growing interest in entheogens for therapy and the possibility to revolutionize global mental health.
Scientists have been carrying out research for decades on psychedelic plants for their chemical properties and pharmaceutical potential. In this model of Western medicine, science seeks to understand these substances simply as chemical compounds detached from their ethnobotanical origin.
Adapting the uses of sacred psychedelic plants to Western medicine brings the advantage of making them accessible to people who can benefit tremendously from their properties on a global scale. In recent years, research into psychedelics has demonstrated their potential to address disorders that have proved difficult to treat including depression, anxiety, chemical dependency, and post-traumatic stress disorders.
But in reality, there is a suspicion that dominating the market is more important than addressing the mental health crisis. For instance, we are currently witnessing a debate on whether it’s ethical for companies such as COMPASS Pathways to try and monopolize the psychedelic industry with their patent strategy.
Additionally, in the past few years, the New Age spirituality movement has merged with positive psychology and the wellness industry, bringing many to seek healing, transcendental experiences, and self-improvement through entheogens. For many, these plants are the catalyst of positive life changes and are also revered with respect. However, there is concern that some are engaging in ceremonies so often that “spiritual bypassing” is now a recurring theme in psychedelic community discussions.
“I find it interesting how often I hear stories of people doing ceremony [using sacred plant medicines] every weekend. In many indigenous cultures, you were blessed to have one ceremony in your lifetime,” says Eriacho. “I would suggest that if individuals are finding that they need to use these plant medicines every weekend then (1) they are not taking the time to fully integrate into the experiences shown to them, and (2) these plant medicine(s) are not working for them.”
This high demand and constant search are not without negative consequences. Issues related to cultural appropriation, sustainability, and the commercialization of spirituality are often ignored by Westerners while engaging in such frequent ceremonies and spiritual tourism when they should be taken into greater consideration.
What Is Cultural Appropriation?
To understand the meaning of “cultural appropriation”, we need to understand the meaning of “appropriation” and ”culture” on an individual basis. We can define culture as the set of practices, symbols, and values that a specific group shares. For example, tattoos are an important symbol for many Indigenous cultures, as they are an essential part of the historical constitution of the groups to which they belong.
On the other hand, appropriation is the act of taking for oneself a certain element without the owner’s consent. So cultural appropriation would be the action of adopting elements of a culture to which you don’t belong without consent. An important detail to remember is this becomes problematic when it involves a power relationship. For example, it’s cultural appropriation when a culture which has historically been suppressed and marginalized has its elements stolen and its meanings erased by another culture that has dominated it.
Cultural appropriation contributes to the maintenance of structural racism in our society and the continuity of different stereotypes about cultures. But we must not forget that individuals appropriating a culture are just symptoms of a much larger problem. A capitalist system that aims for profit and uses extractivism (the exploitation of natural resources on a massive scale generating significant economic profits for a powerful few) to transform a community’s culture into a product but does not value the people whose culture it belongs to, is the real problem that needs addressing.
In the context of medicinal psychedelic plants and fungi, cultural appropriation may manifest itself in different ways. An example was the bioprospecting (the practice of searching for botanical miracle cures) of psilocybin mushrooms out of their Oaxacan context at the end of the 1950s by R. Gordon Wasson. And more recently, cases of “neo shamans” offering ceremonies they label “authentic” without years of experience and a real understanding of the cultures to which these ceremonies belong, are also examples of cultural appropriation.
The Answer? Awareness, Balance and Respect
There is a growing tendency to commodify these substances without giving back to the communities who have held this knowledge for centuries at their own risk. For example, who is really benefiting from expensive retreats in the Amazon jungle? Additionally, the development of new treatments with synthetic derivatives of these substances will reach the market through pharmaceutical patents without properly recognizing traditional knowledge.
For Indigenous people throughout the world, the commercialization of their spirituality is just one of many daily challenges embedded in larger societal struggles. Western engagement with Indigenous spiritual traditions often contributes to a false romanticization of these communities’ situations; it can even feel like an erasure of the injustices that they have experienced in the past, and continue to experience to this day. Indigenous people have to fight daily for the preservation of their lands, their languages, and their cultures. In fact, many continue to be murdered for standing up for their rights. As psychedelic enthusiasts, we have the responsibility to bring awareness to these dynamics.
“While psychedelic plant medicines still have most of their potential still to be taped into for the benefit of society, contemporary psychedelic studies are at risk of replicating harmful colonial behavior with the territories and communities from which the plants originate,” writes anthropologist, Paloma David, in her forthcoming publication, “Decolonizing Psychedelic Studies: The Case of Ayahuasca”. “A decolonial approach is essential to the current renaissance as failing to recognize indigenous perspectives as equally valuable to the discussion in the appropriate use of these substances only contributes to deepening the colonial wound in which these plants are interwoven.”
Will psychedelics be reduced to high-class wellness, healthcare, or self-optimization products that are only accessible for those who can afford the steep price tag while the people that carried this traditional knowledge are excluded from the market? As we are about to enter the era of psychedelic capitalism, it’s important for us to remember that balance can be achieved if we acknowledge that respect is crucial for any relationship.
We need to look at what we are doing when it comes to sacred plant medicine, how we are doing it, and what impact our actions have on other communities around the world. There needs to be an effort to educate ourselves in order to comprehend Indigenous paradigms, and the effect of their loss of languages, land, culture, and knowledge. As we begin to better understand spiritual identity and sacred reciprocity, we can start making an effort to no longer let Indigenous peoples and their cultures be seen as resources to be harvested.
“Through my lens as a Native American woman, when we are ill or when we seek balance in our lives through ceremony, we often look to our plant relatives for healing,” says Eriacho “There is a ritual or practice of utilizing these sacred beings. Before the plant is harvested, we are mindful about how much will be needed, and then explain to the plant why it is needed and for whom. This is done out of respect for the plant in exchange for its life. We offer tobacco, cornmeal as an act of appreciation. This is referred to as sacred reciprocity. We need to be respectful and reverent of these sacred plant medicines.”
So how can we protect and develop traditional ceremonies in a way that is useful and respectful of Indigenous communities? And how can we prevent the so-called psychedelic renaissance from exclusively benefiting non-Indigenous Western entrepreneurs?
When I speak to Paloma David about how we can move forward in a respectful fashion, she says, “Firstly, by being culturally humble in actively listening to Indigenous voices who are authorities on the use of psychedelic plant medicines and actively including them in the conversation on the appropriate use of these substances.”
“By being aware of our own cultural biases. By understanding that people’s making-sense of an ayahuasca experience is highly dependent on their cultural background, religious beliefs (or the lack thereof), and personal psychology.” David continues, “And secondly, by avoiding the harmful reproduction of colonial dynamics of appropriation, epistemicide and exploitation in which the Amazon rainforest and Indigenous knowledges are interwoven.”
Reflecting on these ethical dilemmas can offer us models for understanding and solving this continuing harmful and extractive economy. Another solution might be pointing out paths for fair and reciprocal reparation agreements with Indigenous communities.
More importantly, considering these issues make us question the colonial and racialized Western mentality that contributes to the continued delegitimization of Indigenous communities and their knowledge so we all can at least start asking ourselves: What are the true costs of our healing?
About the Author
Jessika Lagarde is a Brazilian storyteller, Earth and climate activist, and Women On Psychedelics co-Founder. Women On Psychedelics is an educational platform that advocates for the end of the stigmatization around women’s mental health and substance use, and the normalization of the use of psychedelics for its therapeutic potential and healing capacities. Jessika’s environmental work and psychedelic path have made her more aware not only of the crisis of our planet but also of how human disconnection is a direct cause of it. All of her work is informed in taking action in a way that serves the Earth and our human collective, in hopes of mobilizing inner healing towards outer action.
Our regular legal contributor explains why the DEA denied the ayahuasca church Soul Quest’s religious freedom exemption application, and how the DEA may be overstepping its role.
To explain what happened between the DEA and Soul Quest, we first need to step back and start from the very beginning. Our story begins with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), a sub-agency of the US Department of Justice, itself an agency of the Executive Branch. The DEA serves as legal gatekeeper of scheduled substances under the Federal Controlled Substances Act, including ayahuasca which contains dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a Schedule 1 substance. Although Schedule 1 substances are generally forbidden, their manufacture and use are permitted for licensed scientific research and as sacrament in sincere religious practice. In fact, there are United States Supreme Court cases that have recognized the First Amendment protected use of psychedelic substances, such as ayahuasca and peyote, in religious practices.
Against this backdrop, the DEA asserts jurisdiction over access and importation of Schedule 1 substances. For religious users, the DEA requires all religiously inclined importers, manufacturers, and users of Schedule 1 substances to first seek DEA exemption (meaning: acknowledgment and permission) before being allowed to import or to access such drugs. The DEA even published an exemption application and requires all parties seeking exemption to provide a raft of data, substantial disclosures, interviews, among other requirements, signed and sworn under oath, attesting to the possession and use of Schedule 1 substances.
In an effort to comply with the DEA Soul Quest Church of Mother Earth, Inc. submitted a request for religious exemption to use ayahuasca as a sacrament in 2017. It wanted to assure its congregants and officiants would be protected from further and future investigation and interdiction by the DEA, which posed a continuing threat of intervention and prevention of Soul Quest’s ayahuasca importation.
Under attorney letterhead, Soul Quest’s request sought exemption from application of the Controlled Substances Act in its totality—in other words, Soul Quest was seeking the ability to import, possess, manufacture and administer ayahuasca, all on premise of religious freedom:
“…request for a religious-based exemption by Soul Quest Church of Mother Earth, Inc., d/b/a, Soul Quest Ayahuasca Church of Mother Earth Retreat & Wellness Center (“Soul Quest”) to the provisions of the Controlled Substances Act, 21 U.S.C. § 801, et seq., specifically as it pertains to the ritual use by Soul Quest of ayahuasca for its sacramental activities. Soul Quest asserts its eligibility for such an exemption, pursuant to the United States Supreme Court’s decision in 0 Centro Espirita Beneficente Uniao Do Vegetal v. Gonzalez, 546 U.S. 418 (2006) (“Gonzalez”), and the provisions of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, 42 U.S.C. §§ 2000bb, et seq., (“RFRA”).”
In support of its First Amendment and Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) rights, Soul Quest provided a variety of organization records and information, including bylaws, articles of faith, dietary provisions, mission statement, safety and security protocols, among other requirements. Several church members also sat for extensive interviews with DEA agents.
The DEA’s Denial of Soul Quest
Disappointingly, albeit not surprisingly, the DEA took the better part of four years to come to a decision: application denied.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”
It is important to make a clear distinction here that the First Amendment does not grant religious freedom. Rather, it acknowledges its preexistence. The US Constitution presupposes religious freedom existed before nationhood and that the innate right would be forever protected from government intrusion through the guarantee provided for in the First Amendment. In this sense, the First Amendment is a brake on governmental regulatory power. But this does not mean the government cannot regulate. It can. But, when those regulations intersect religious belief or practice, the borders of Constitutional right can sometimes be ambiguous and require a court ruling. That is where the Federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act comes into play. It assures that the burden is always on the government to prove that its religion-impacting regulation serves a compelling governmental interest and is being enforced by the least restrictive means. To this end, the DEA’s denial letter actually does a fine job of summarizing the RFRA standard. But for reasons explained a little further below, the DEA is misinterpreting its position in the RFRA analysis flow:
“According to RFRA, the “Government shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion” unless the Government can demonstrate “that application of the burden to the person (1) is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest and (2) is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.” 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb-1; AG Memorandum at 3. To establish a prima facie case for an exemption from the CSA under RFRA, a claimant must demonstrate that application of the CSA’s prohibitions with respect to a specific controlled substance would (1) substantially burden, (2) religious exercise (as opposed to a philosophy or way of life), (3) based on a belief that is sincerely held by the claimant. 0 Centro, 546 U.S. at 428. Once the claimant has established these threshold requirements, the burden shifts to the government to demonstrate that the challenged prohibition furthers a compelling governmental interest by the least restrictive means. This “compelling interest test” must be satisfied through application of the CSA to the particular claimant who alleges that a sincere exercise of religion is being substantially burdened. Id. at 430-31.”
Soul Quest is in litigation with the DEA over the exemption denial and is challenging the DEA’s determinations, seeking to enjoin the government agency’s continuing interdictions of its religious practices. Whatever facts the DEA disbelieved or questioned will ultimately be put to a judge (if the case survives to an evidentiary hearing).
Not only does Soul Quest get to challenge the DEA’s application of the facts, but Soul Quest also gets to challenge how the DEA applies the law. In this regard, any psychedelic religious group would be right in thinking to attack the process. That is, just because the DEA says it gets to decide what a religion is, does not necessarily mean the DEA actually has that authority. Likewise, just because the DEA says its policy of wholesale refusal to grant importation exemption is the “least restrictive means” does not mean it is.
In other words, a psychedelic religion seeking to challenge the DEA’s assumptions should not simply let the DEA dictate or frame the issues. Why? Because the DEA has it wrong. Let’s walk through the analysis.
Imagine you just asked (not applied – just asked) for exemption. The DEA, under its current policies, would presuppose it is not dealing with a religion or a religious group. [Why?] The DEA would deny the exemption. [Why?] The DEA would request you fill out its forms. [Why?] Provide a raft of data. [Why?] Sit for interviews. [Why?] The DEA requests this on the premise that it is going to determine, amongst other things, if your group is a religion. [Why?] And the DEA will also determine if your practice is sincere. [Why?]
Consider this: The DEA investigates and makes its own determination on the validity of religion and the sincerity of its practice. If the DEA determines, as it did in Soul Quest’s instance, that your group is not a religion, or it determines your practice is insincere, it will deny you the exemption. But, from where does DEA, a police agency, derive this power? In what statute or appellate decision is the DEA’s espoused belief that it has the right to investigate and to certify religion in the United States found? Doesn’t the First Amendment demand that the DEA presume the religion is valid and its practitioners sincere? Wouldn’t anything less be an affront to the guaranteed protection of fundamental freedoms accorded by the First Amendment?
If imagination helps context, consider if the issue were Catholics having to prove both Catholicism and the sincerity of its practice to a police officer, as a precondition to import or to consume Eucharist wafers. This would be abhorrent to the First Amendment, would it not? Next, imagine that the same police officer approved Catholicism, but still denied the Eucharist because he found your practice of Catholicism insincere (your transgression: not being at Mass last Sunday). A police agency preventing access to Eucharist because of the officer’s arbitrary assessment would even more offend the First Amendment, would it not? Yet, this is present DEA policy. What’s worse, the DEA does this with no objective standards.
Readers must understand, the DEA absolutely has a role to play in the nation’s drug regulatory scheme. It likewise does properly involve itself in scheduled substance importation and tracking. In this context, contact between the DEA and religious groups engaged in the importation of psychedelic sacrament is neither unexpected nor unwelcomed. For example, pharmaceutical companies and medical practitioners are well acquainted with the paperwork and practices that come with the importation and storage of scheduled substances. But those are, compared to assessing religion, very mechanical and objective functions for the agency. Religion is far too ephemeral and Constitutionally protected for a police agency to engage without clear parameters and metrics. And that is the point, even assuming the DEA were authorized to assess religion, it would still need objective metrics, of which it presently has none. In the absence of objective standards, its decisions on religion would be (and are) subjective and applied unequally.
Even if somehow the practice of DEA religious assessment were deemed First Amendment compliant, the DEA would still then have to contend with the Equal Protection and Due Process clauses of the Constitution, two places where subjectivity combined with government intrusion have not fared well. If the DEA does not have published objective standards, then every investigation it conducts into religion is by definition subjective. In every one of those cases, the decisions will be made (and presently are being made) by field agents with no training in religious practices or theology—cops arbitrarily approving and disapproving religions.
This may seem odd, but the DEA being mired in the religion question is a little not its fault. The DEA was created by President Nixon to assist in enforcement of the new Controlled Substances Act, but it was never given instruction or authority over religion. Making matters more complicated, although it sets many of its own policies, the DEA answers to the United States Department of Justice (USDOJ), and neither have ever put forth a cogent and logical policy on religious exemption. The favorable ayahuasca cases, especially the 2006 case, Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao Do Vegetal, 546 U.S. 418 (2006), caught the DEA off guard, but it never put in the time to work through the problem.
There is a single solution that solves both the problem of helping the DEA to avoid having to act as religious police and helping to arrive at the true least restrictive means to effectuate the DEA’s legitimate governmental interest of preventing diversion of controlled substances outside of the comprehensive regulatory scheme established by Congress. And, no, total prohibition as the DEA advocates is not the solution. Rather, the DEA should abandon its entire exemption policy.
Instead, the DEA should reduce its religious assessments to no more than requiring an attestation of religious intention and sincerity of belief, signed under oath and under penalty of perjury (the DEA could still mandate inspection of storage facilities and other non-religious aspects). The attestation would include details like: name, address, phone number, and other neutral data, much like what pharmaceutical companies or medical professionals provide.
Under this practice, the DEA’s need to track and verify would remain satisfied. Upon exchange of the attestation, the DEA should release the sacrament to the applicant. If the DEA has doubts, it then can refer cases to the US Department of Justice for its exercise of proper discretion, including possible investigation. If things are found inaccurate from the attestation, USDOJ would remain free to charge the parties involved (plus charge a bonus felony for the false attestation). Such an arrangement would keep the DEA out of religion, while still enabling the agency to function. Plus, attestation is a far less restrictive means than the DEA’s current policy of wholesale refusal.
A simple attestation policy (coupled with the DEA’s normal investigatory functions) is what RFRA requires—a burden on the government, not on the religion. Such a practice follows the proper flow of a RFRA analysis: It presupposes religious practice, places the burden on the government to prove otherwise, protects the individual religious right even during the investigation, and only resolves in favor of the government if the government proves its case as RFRA requires.
Will Soul Quest or any other psychedelic religious group argue these points to a court engaged in reviewing DEA policy? We will have to wait to see. Since there are a few psychedelic religion cases pending in various US courts at the moment, perhaps the time is coming.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
-C.G. Jung
This is the first article in a series called Psychedelics in Depth, in which we will explore the many ways that depth and Jungian psychology intersect with the many multicolored permutations of the psychedelic experience.
Our intention is to provide readers with a foundational understanding of the depth psychological tradition, define important terms like shadow or archetype, and explore how this way of interfacing with the psyche can inform psychedelic work for both facilitators and psychonauts alike.
There is a high likelihood we may encounter a mythical beast or two along the way as well. Thanks for being here. Onwards.
When you think about psychology, what images come to mind? A person laying down on a couch, talking about their mother? A man with a thick European accent, cryptically jotting down someone’s dreams? Ink blot tests? Cigars?
Believe it or not, all of these clichés come from the tradition of depth psychology. Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, who’s work we will examine later, were both depth psychologists. But before we get any further, let’s take the advice given to young Alice during her first bleary steps into Wonderland, and begin at the beginning.
What Is Depth Psychology?
Traditionally, depth psychology was any method of psychoanalytic work which focused on the unconscious. Today, the term “depth” is often used as a shorthand for the various permutations of thought influenced by Carl Jung, which can include everything from mythology, to archetypal astrology, to Internal Family Systems Therapy.
Despite Jung’s enduring association with the term, “depth psychology” was actually coined in the early 20th century by one of his colleagues, the Swiss psychoanalyst Eugen Bleuler, who also coined the term schizophrenia.
Depth psychology differs from other schools of psychology (behavioral, cognitive, humanistic, etc.) in that it takes the unconsciousas the primary driving force on our behaviors and emotions. Because it is itself unconscious, the unconscious cannot be known by our usual, logical, and rational ways of “knowing.”
Therefore, depth psychology employs the use of symbols, images, and metaphors to translate the language of the psyche, which historically was approached through dreams and patterns in mythology. Working with myth is one of the hallmarks of the “depth approach,” and clearly distinguishes this field of psychology from others.
Yet it is important to remember that in depth psychology, symbols and images are always used to describe something “as if,” and not as literal representations. This is one of the most important tenets of depth psychology: Images and symbols are used by the psyche to reference something deeper and likely unknown, yet something that our psyche yearns for us to discover. In true depth psychology, there is always space for the unknown.
The etymological roots of the word psychology can be understood as “the way into” or “the study of the soul.” Depth psychology emphasizes this ineffable notion of the soul, and continually places this unknowable facet of the human experience at its core. What this means in practical terms is a focus on the most important and vexing issues which have accompanied humanity since the dawn of time: birth, death, love, loss, mystery, purpose, growth, decay, and the meaning of it all. The very things which make us human.
Who Is Carl Jung?
Carl Gustav (C.G.) Jung (1875-1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist who helped shape psychology into the discipline we know today. His method of understanding the psyche, which he termed analytical psychology, forms what is now popularly called “Jungian psychology.”
For many years, Jung was slated to become Sigmund Freud’s “crowned prince” and protege, but their paths diverged in 1912 over disagreements as to the reality of the ‘collective unconscious,’ which Frued summarily rejected. Jung’s insistence that there is an ancient, unknowable, species-wide repository of psychic information which informs the human experience flew in the face of Freud’s increasingly dogmatic theories, which focused on sex and pleasure as the driving forces behind all human behavior.
This break led Jung into a long period of introspection which he termed his “confrontation with the unconscious,” during which he delved deep into his own psyche and imagination. Eventually, this process resulted in his detailed map and terminology of the psyche, his practice of active imagination, as well as The Red Book, and the recently published, Black Books.
Jung employed a variety of terms to describe his understanding of the psyche and all of the mysterious dynamics he observed within his patients (especially those suffering from severe schizophrenia), and within himself. Concepts such as the collective unconscious, archetypes, the shadow, anima, synchronicity, individuation, and the Self, are all terms that Jung coined and wrote about extensively. They are also topics we discuss in our course that explores psychedelics and depth psychology, Imagination as Revelation: The Psychedelic Experience in the Light Jungian Psychology.
Yet again, it bears repeating that these terms are to be understood as mere symbols or points on a map, referring to places or dynamics within the psyche that our conscious mind struggles to grasp. Jung himself said, “Theories in psychology are the very devil. It is true that we need certain points of view for orienting… but they should always be regarded as mere auxiliary concepts that can be laid aside at any time.”
Depth Psychology and Popular Culture
While the mainstream psychological establishment has eschewed the work of Jung for many decades, his legacy informs our collective imagination and culture in profound ways, perhaps more than any other figure in the history of psychology.
Mythologist Joseph Campbell drew deeply from Jung’s work, and based many of his ideas of The Hero’s Journeyon Jung’s theories. George Lucas consulted with Campbell while creating Star Wars, arguably one of the most significant film series of all time. The poet Robert Bly mentions Jung throughout his book Iron John, which paved the way for the body of work that is now called “men’s work.” Jungian analyst and author Clarissa Pinkola Estes, in her enduring text, Women Who Run With the Wolves, worked directly with Jungian concepts to address aspects of the feminine psyche.
Any reference to ‘archetypes’ or something being ‘archetypal’ plainly invokes Jung and his work on these illusive, yet omnipresent patterns of being. The shadow, or ‘shadow work,’ which has become something of a buzzword in psychedelics in recent years, conjures Jung as well. We have a whole course that examines Jung’s concepts of the shadow, the difference between the ‘Golden’ and ‘Dark’ shadow, and other related issues called, Psychedelics and the Shadow: Exploring the Shadow Side of Psychedelia.
Similarly, Jung also coined the term ‘synchronicity,’ which could be defined as a meaningful coincidence, and was a phenomenon that captivated him for decades. Lastly, any reference to ‘the collective,’ harkens to Jung’s notions of the ‘collective unconscious,’ which is a foundational aspect of his psychological model, and which we’ll address in our next article in this “Psychedelics in Depth” series.
Despite all of these enduring contributions, Jung still remains somewhat of a marginal figure. There are a multitude of reasons for this, a major one being that his theories escape empirical measurement, and eventually lead one outside the rational-materialist worldview we now call “science.” Mention Jung’s name in most mainstream psychology degree programs and the odds are you will be met with skepticism.
Subversion and marginality have arguably always been at the core of depth psychology. Dreams themselves exist at the margins of our consciousness, and can often direct our attention to marginal areas of our psyche which we would rather not see. Concepts such as the anima/animus, which imply that every male has inside him a female soul (and vice-versa), directly subverts our culture’s basic understanding of gender. Archetypes reveal to us that our personal life story is not a unique, singular event, but rather, connected to a greater chain of human experiences.
Lastly, depth psychology’s pervasive insistence on the reality of the soul can be seen as a revolutionary act within a culture that seeks to actively deny the very existence of such a thing. The consequences of this denial can be seen within every great historical, interpersonal, and environmental tragedy perpetrated upon people and the planet across time.
Therefore, the significance of depth psychology extends far beyond the confines of the therapists’ office or the university lecture hall, and stretches out into the old growth forests, indigenous communities, and inner cities across the world.
Depth psychology is not just a school of psychology, but a lens through which to intimately perceive and meaningfully engage with the wider world.
Depth Psychology and Psychedelics
Depth psychology offers an immensely useful framework for approaching psychedelic work, both as a facilitator and a psychonaut. Stanislav Grof, pioneer of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy and transpersonal psychology and one of our biggest influences here at Psychedelics Today, described the role that psychedelics play as a psychic “abreactive,” meaning that they bring to the surface whatever unconscious material has the most emotional charge. Seen from this lens, psychedelics, which often work directly with unconscious material, could therefore be seen as part and parcel to the larger field of depth psychology.
Interpreting the variety of imagery and experiences that psychedelics can evoke can easily be aided by a grounding in basic depth psychology, especially understanding the interplay between image, archetypes, and complexes. Facing and integrating one’s shadow is a central aspect of both Jung’s work and using the psychedelic experience for personal growth and healing.
Many worthwhile books have been written on the interplay between psychedelics and depth psychology, including Grof’s body of work, Confrontation with the Unconscious, and much of the work by Ann Shulgin,Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzner. Yet the interplay between depth psychology and psychedelics offers immense potential in the realms of research, therapeutic methodology, and integration—more so than I believe has been fully realized.
The history of psychedelic research is almost inseparable from the tradition of depth psychology. Stanislav Grof, mentioned above, as well as other early psychedelic researchers, approached their work from a depth psychological lens. Because of certain cultural shifts over the 20th century, current psychedelic research prioritizes quantitative and statistical analysis which can often overlook the highly personal and emotional aspects of the psychedelic experience.
Yet, depth psychology requires us to return to the real, troublesome, subjective experiences of the individual as its primary territory of work, and for this reason offers one of the most valuable lenses from which to view the psychedelic experience. Because, just like human beings, no two psychedelic journeys are alike, since they are in essence reflections of the multifaceted and endlessly mysterious inner world of the brave souls who dare to explore their own uncharted depths.
About the Author
Simon Yugler is a depth and psychedelic integration therapist based in Portland, OR with a masters (MA) in depth counseling psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. Weaving Jungian psychology, Internal Family Systems therapy, and mythology, Simon also draws on his diverse experiences learning from indigenous cultures around the world, including the Shipibo ayahuasca tradition. He has a background in experiential education, and has led immersive international journeys for young adults across 10 countries. He is passionate about initiation, men’s work, indigenous rights, decolonization, and helping his clients explore the liminal wilds of the soul. Find out more on his website and on Instagram , Twitter (@depth_medicine) or Facebook.
About the Illustrator
Martin Clarke is a British Designer and Illustrator from Nottingham, England. Specializing in branding, marketing and visual communication, Martin excels at creating bespoke brand identities and striking visual content across multiple platforms for web, social media, print and packaging. See more of his work here.
How do you draw the line between a healthy escape and a dissociative disorder? And could dissociative psychedelics like ketamine play a part?
We live in a deeply interconnected world. From our ecosystems to our societies, the Earth is made up of living things held in dynamic relationships. We as humans are deeply woven into this fabric. But sometimes, all this connection can be too much to hold. Whether from acute trauma, overstimulation, or constant societal stress, our bodies have built-in intelligence that allows us to dissociate or disconnect from our current experience when we’ve reached our saturation point.
On the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic, the question of how we cope with and heal from traumatic experiences has been front of mind. I spoke with somatic practitioner, Claudia Cuentas, MA, MFT, and Psy.D., psychologist, ketamine specialist and founder of KRIYA (Ketamine Research Institute), Raquel Bennett, to discuss the psychology of dissociation, what happens when it becomes a disorder, the healing power of escapism, and where psychedelics like ketamine fit into the conversation.
Raquel Bennett, who has been studying therapeutic ketamine since 2002 and who teaches the Masterclass on Ketamine in our Navigating Psychedelics for Clinicians and Therapists course, put it this way: “There are different kinds of dissociation or disconnection, including dissociation from your body or bodily sensations; dissociation from your thoughts or awareness; and dissociation from your biographical history, identity, or sense of self.”
Claudia Cuentas explained it another way. “Dissociation is a physiological self protective response, and it is activated when the body feels saturated or overwhelmed by an input or by too much information at once. That information can come from an internal or external stimulus. Dissociation is our bodies’ ability to remove its attention from the present and take a break, pause and/or, hopefully, recalibrate back into presence. Children do it all the time. That gazing and daydreaming is self-regulating. It is an amazing regulatory system we have.”
While they may look the same from the outside, many experts say that dissociation is different from absent mindedness. Many of us can relate to driving home and not remembering the drive, or checking out during a meeting because we are distracted by something going on in our personal lives. Dissociation is a common experience, and not necessarily a cause for concern. The question is: Is dissociation or the dissociation patterns you have developed to cope with internal/external stressors interrupting your ability to enjoy life?
On top of this, the pressures of modern life can almost be too much to bear at times. We are inundated with unlimited newsfeeds and chaotic information overload in a way that no generation has ever been. What are embodied creatures like us meant to do with the realities of systemic injustice, climate catastrophe, and economic collapse, on top of personal concerns like relationships, mortgages, and health issues?
In response to these pressures, we’ve normalized a culture of disconnection. Checking out of life may become a habitual way of coping with the strain of daily life: binge watching TV or scrolling on social media. Gaming out. Numbing with drugs or alcohol. Swiping on Tinder. These are activities that put us in passive roles and don’t require our engaged presence or participation.
Tuning out itself isn’t necessarily problematic. When it comes as a response to overstimulation, it serves a purpose and then the person can return to present awareness naturally when they feel ready. However, this disconnection can sometimes happen involuntarily or becomes a default way of moving through life. Often, chronic dissociation comes as a result of acute or ongoing trauma.
For people living with dissociative states, this disconnection from one’s body, mind, emotions or identity can be distressing and have a major impact on relationships and quality of life. They may experience depersonalization (feeling as though they don’t control their body, thoughts or emotions) or derealization (a disruption in one’s perception of reality, as though the world is unreal, hazy or flat).
Dissociation can show up in a lot of ways: tuning out during a difficult conversation, personality changes, forgetting major memories or stretches of time, difficulty staying present during sex, or feeling unaware of one’s own body. Sometimes these episodes begin in response to overstimulation or an event that triggers traumatic memory or association.
I asked Cuentas how these disorders happen, and how they might be addressed.
“At times, we may feel that life is not that safe or that the present is not that safe. This is especially true when there has not been an ability to heal, digest and process past trauma and understand why an experience was so frightening or difficult. People don’t want to feel present because if they do, they will be overwhelmed by sensations associated with pain, sadness, overwhelm. The body sends a signal to the brain through the nervous system, and the brain and/orr the body disconnect from the present reality. So the mind says, I am going to release attention from the whole system so that you are here… but not here. I am going to keep you safe.. This way, you don’t have to feel the pain you have gone through.”
“Dissociative diagnoses arise when we are using this way of coping as an unconscious default,” she adds. “Sometimes people struggle because they aren’t feeling like themselves. Maybe everything is numb. Or they feel like they are witnessing a facade of somebody else. Most of the time, dissociative diagnoses are connected to intense, deep, unaddressed trauma from very early on stages of life.”
This questionnaire is a useful tool for distinguishing between normal and problematic dissociative experiences.
Could Somatic Practices & Dissociative Drugs Like Ketamine Be The Path Back?
According to Cuentas, the way to alleviate dissociative disorders is to increase one’s tolerance over time for sensations that may be uncomfortable or overwhelming, essentially moving through the trauma at a pace that’s comfortable and tolerable to the individual.
“We have to get beyond this self-protection mechanism that kicks in automatically. So how do we decode the experience to relieve the body from the automatic response in order to enjoy the present? If you keep unconsciously self protecting to not feel the pain, then you’re missing everything– joy, love, intimacy, all your senses. You turn off your ability to sense comfortable or uncomfortable experiences, like enjoying a sky full of colors, feeling the softness of your skin, hearing a song and go, ‘wow, I like that’. It’s numbing, and the person may not, at times, even realize.”
Finding pleasurable ways to exist in one’s body is an essential part of processing, healing, and moving through trauma. Many trauma therapists work with a particular focus on the body, known as “somatic” practices. This is essential because, although the mind can check in and out through dissociation, the body carries the load of a lifetime of experiences. Cuentas’ work focuses on the use of embodied approaches, like art, dance, music, drama and storytelling as healing modalities for families and communities.
Psychedelic substances may offer another path to doing this work. Part of the theory around why psychedelics help with trauma is related to capacity building. By promoting states of openness, they create opportunities for people to re-engage with painful or traumatic experiences and form new relationships to these memories.
Psilocybin and MDMA have received the most press in recent years, but ketamine has held a steady role as one of the only legal psychedelics clinicians can currently offer. It’s common to hear people speak about ketamine as a dissociative. I asked Bennett her thoughts on this classification.
“When you take ketamine, you may be dissociated from your body; in other words, the signals from your sensory input organs may be temporarily muted,” she says. “However, when ketamine is utilized in a physically and psychologically safe setting, people tend to be keenly aware of or connected with their own thoughts and internal images.”
The dissociation felt with ketamine is more physiological than psychological. I asked Cuentas to expand upon this. She explained that, based on a somatic perspective, it seems like ketamine temporarily disconnects the body and the mind, whereas the coping mechanism of dissociation can often disconnect people from their own consciousness as well.
“Seems like Ketamine can turn the body off so the mind doesn’t have to negotiate how to to keep the body safe or what to do with the body’s intense signals of stress, which are common during or after traumatic experiences,” says Cuentas. “So for a period of time, it may not have to navigate the usual intensity and discomfort. If this happens, the mind is released from its usual concerns/stressors, and its attention can possibly concentrate on other sensations or realms of awareness.”
“As the body experiences numbness or dissociation, it is still tracking the experience, but not reacting. When a body is affected by an anesthetic like Ketamine for therapeutic uses, it will put the body in a highly suggestible state,” Cuentas adds. “From a somatic perspective, there is a window of time as a person is coming back to feeling their body again— that is the moment of doing a lot of processing. I believe this is possibly the most effective way to work with ketamine. Whatever happens in this window of reconnection between unconsciousness and consciousness or body awareness, will be recorded in the body. You would have to be intentional because whatever you introduce in that state can have a great impact on your psyche.”
Feeling good is an essential part of our healing.
Returning To Safety From Dissociative Disorders
Dissociation is the human body’s way of trying to achieve safety. As we are unlearning automatic responses that don’t serve us, the need for a sense of safety is still present. How do we develop a sense of safety within ourselves when we can’t guarantee it in our external environment? Therapists refer to resourcing—tools that help people develop a higher tolerance for discomfort. In this way, we can stay in the present moment longer without needing to dissociate.
Especially for people from marginalized communities, creating microcosms of safety, even temporary ones, can be essential practice for dealing with life. These pods of comfort can come from affinity spaces, keeping a close inner circle, getting immersed in something you love, and for some people, exploring altered states.
In pursuit of safety, a natural response to triggering scenarios is to remove oneself from further harm. However, safety can’t necessarily be achieved in a societal context which is inherently unsafe for many people in our communities. Some people may feel they always have to be shut down or running to escape harm. For these folks, there is an even greater need for networks of support and practical tools that grow the ability to stay present. It can be empowering and freeing to stay present through a practice of pleasure, feeling the body’s sensations, and finding what feels positive and safe in the here and now.
When Dissociation Can Be a Positive
For those of us not dealing with chronic dissociation, the question to ask is whether we are habitually checking out from the present moment and if so, what shifts in these habits might help us have a more fulfilling quality of life. Perhaps instead of relying on screens or substances to wind down, we could incorporate activities that invite pleasurable presence: music, dance, breath work, meditation, meals, or the company of a loved one. It helps to view this as something to practice, rather than something to be good or bad at.
On the other hand, escapism isn’t always a bad thing. There is agency in choosing when and how to turn off the outside world for a while. In order to absorb the benefits of this freedom, dissociating needs to be something that is consciously chosen, rather than an automatic stress based response.
In some ways, escapism is a combination of dissociation and resourcing. Tuning out on purpose, or even altering one’s perception, can offer a healthy way to find rest and recovery from the concerns of daily life. It can also help us to remember what it is like to feel good and build capacity for pleasure. Feeling good is an essential part of our healing.
Grammy nominated singer Jhené Aiko often writes songs about the use of cannabis and psychedelics as medicine. As a mixed race woman of color, she poetically contrasts the peaceful haze of altered states and the harsh realities of the world outside.
She says it well in her hit, “Tryna Smoke”:
Life’s no fairytale, I know all too well/ Gotta plant the seed sometimes /Then you let it grow
Inhale, exhale some more/ Heaven in Hell/ If you know, you know/ That sh*t is beautiful
You gotta just let it go/ Spark up a blunt and smoke
Similarly, in her song “Bed Peace”, featuring Childish Gambino, she sings:
Yeah, what I am trying to say is/ That love is ours to make so we should make it
Everything else can wait/ The time is ours to take so we should take it
We should stay right here/ We should lay right here’Cause everything is okay right here
Conclusion: Dissociation Is Complex
Dissociation is multifaceted. It can signal trauma, offer temporary respite from trauma, and potentially even a path to healing trauma.
Altered states of consciousness, whether from known dissociatives like ketamine, or other substances, give us an opportunity to choose when and how to leave our physical realms and return. They shift our awareness of our spirits, minds and bodies, and often create pleasurable sensations and new insights along the way.
Cuentas closes our conversation by reminding me that the intentions we bring to these experiences are important. “You are recording information in your subconscious/psyche. So what do you want to put there?” she asks.
We can’t necessarily make the world safer today. So there is power in creating microcosms of the world we are dreaming forward. In creating a practice of pleasure and joy, we’re able to fill our spirits like a well to draw upon during difficult experiences. Perhaps eventually, as these micro-moments of safety and resourcing find their way into our embodied realities, they will spread like mycelium and we will create a world that is less traumatizing to begin with.
This article was updated on July 19, 2021 to reflect changes by one of the sources.
Rebecca Martinez is a Xicana writer, parent and community organizer born and raised in Portland, Oregon. She is a co-founder of the Fruiting Bodies Collective, an advocacy group, podcast and multimedia platform addressing the intersections between healing justice and the psychedelics movement. Rebecca served as the Event & Volunteer Coordinator for the successful Measure 109 campaign, an unprecedented state initiative which creates a legal framework for psilocybin therapy in Oregon. She is also the author of Edge Play: Tales From a Quarter Life Crisis, a memoir about psychedelic healing after family trauma, spiritual abuse, and police violence. She serves on the Health Equity Subcommittee for Oregon’s Psilocybin Advisory Board as well as the Board of Advisors for the Plant Medicine Healing Alliance.
Keeno Ahmed-Jones shares her experience trying to instill anti-racism values at a major psychedelics institution, and how difficult it proved to be.
As progressive and inclusive as the psychedelic renaissance purports itself to be, there are continuing issues around understanding, respecting, and making efforts to expand equity and inclusion in psychedelic spaces. Without an honest recognition of how systemic issues are manifesting in the burgeoning psychedelic industry, the psychedelic renaissance will inevitably fail to help our world heal from painful, ongoing social injustices.
In October of 2020, MAPS Canada became the subject of these issues when an Open Letter and Call to Action was published. The authors, Keeno Ahmed-Jones and Ava Daeipour, detailed their efforts to help MAPS Canada implement ethical, socially conscious and culturally sensitive policies and move towards equitable access to psychedelics. These efforts were subsequently obstructed by the organization.
In this interview, we hear from Keeno Ahmed-Jones about her experiences that led to the Open Letter and Call to Action. She shares details of her professional background in education advocacy and policy work, and how it helped inform her endeavors at MAPS Canada.
*Note to reader: This interview took place in March of 2021. In the weeks that followed, a second Open Letter was written addressing further issues with the MAPS Canada board. In the past three months, three members of MAPS Canada’s board have resigned.
Sean Lawlor: Can you describe how you came to work for MAPS Canada?
Keeno Ahmed-Jones: I moved to Canada in 2018, after being in New York for over 20 years. My professional background is in K-12 and adult education; I’ve worked in public service for a long time, including for major governmental organizations. My first exposure to systemic stratification in the context of educational opportunities was during my tenure at the New York City Department of Education, which, at the time, served 1.2 million school-aged students. I then served for several years advising the Board of Regents and leadership at the New York State Department of Education on programs and policies for adults and out-of-school youth. When I came to Vancouver, my birthplace, I knew of the research that MAPS was doing on MDMA, saw there was a chapter here, and was interested in seeing how I could contribute to their efforts as a volunteer.
Given my background, I started volunteering on the policy committee, but when I saw that they were well situated, I asked if there was a diversity committee. One thing that was very notable to me upon attending the first general volunteer meeting was the lack of people of color in attendance; out of the 40-plus people there, I was one of three in the room from a racialized background. And so, when I found out that there wasn’t an active diversity committee, I started one, which I co-led with another woman, Ava Daeipour, who ended up helping me write the open letter and call to action sent to MAPS Canada. The letter brought into high relief a lot of the issues that I think are endemic not only for MAPS Canada as an organization, but really… you hear the term “psychedelic renaissance” bandied around, and I think that psychedelic renaissance really needs to raise the bar, based on my experiences at least.
SL: Specifically in terms of diversity?
KAJ: Diversity is one element. But beyond that, I think MAPS Canada really had the opportunity to become an exemplar of an organization and, unfortunately, instead of listening to people such as myself trying to inform and educate them on how to become a twenty-first century organization centered on anti-racist values, collective liberation, and the tenets of cultural humility, they really actively resisted that.
I understand their advocacy for psychedelics, but I think there is an essential question that MAPS Canada and other organizations in this space need to ask, which is beyond diversity. “Is the playing field equal?” Every organization, non-profit or not, loves to talk about “corporate social responsibility,” and publicly place those statements front and center, especially in the wake of Black Lives Matter and the gaping inequalities that came to the fore in 2020. The pandemic illuminated a wide chasm that exists between the haves and the have-nots. And the murder of George Floyd compounded that reality into vivid detail for a lot of people that didn’t understand the traumas that people of color have had to endure—and I want to specifically forefront Black and Indigenous folks who have lived under the yoke of that oppression in North America.
But, beyond the logistical hurdles around regulatory frameworks and proselytizing about legalizing psychedelics—and I do understand the passion and advocacy for that—when it comes to eventual access to these novel MDMA and other psychedelic treatments, some key questions need to be answered. Who’s going to be first in line to receive these treatments? Who’s going to be administering them? Who’s going to be doing the integration work? I’ll venture to guess that the clinic up the street from my old office in New York City charging $4000 for a course of ketamine sessions is not within reach for the vast majority of people.
SL: For folks who are less familiar with the situation, would you be willing to share more about what happened at MAPS Canada, and your experience in the wake of the open letter?
KAJ: I came to my volunteer role from a background where my work was mediated via a policy lens, with a lot of value placed on collaborative and community-based approaches. Gaining diverse perspectives and working within a framework that ensured equity and inclusion was critical because in my work, decisions had the power to materially impact very marginalized people who were already struggling and in need of fierce advocates. And one of the things I came to value through those experiences was being on the ground with people knee-deep in those efforts, including people living those stories of struggle. I find that kind of work not just a calling, but a privilege.
At MAPS Canada, I did not see those conversations happening, frankly—internally or externally. There seemed to be no interest nor engagement. So, one of the things that I started to advocate for early on was introducing a JEDI (Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) framework, and talking about collective liberation—which were both in various stages of implementation at MAPS in the US, so I thought that both would be relatively easy to adopt. But I was basically told: hold the phone; we are not about collective liberation, and MAPS Canada is not a “save the whales” organization. It was incredible to hear someone actually say that to my face.
After living in New York City, I think I had a bit of a mythologized vision of what life would be like in Canada, to be in a community that I thought had a better, more compassionate understanding of racism and colonialism. And I quickly found that was very much not the case. Rather, it’s been more problematic, because a lot of people are under the delusion that Canada is a post-racial society. Of course, that myth is quickly debunked if you look around, whether that’s at the overrepresentation of Blacks in the prison population, the deplorable treatment of First Nations in the healthcare system, racial inequities in school suspensions, police surveillance, wage inequities, I could go on.
So, while MAPS Canada released quasi-apologetic statements after the open letter came out about having limited staff, and claims about suffering from the affliction of being white with blind spots, and so on [Psychedelics Today tried to find the links to these statements but could not]… a huge part of what occurred, and what is happening across the psychedelic domain, comes down to worldview. It’s a values decision. And, as far as boardrooms of nonprofits and for profits, white voices, most of them male, are what is valued.
And so, instead of true coalition building, stepping down from that pedestal to engage in critical dialogue around equity, access, and reciprocity, there’s a Gollum effect taking place, a sort of metastasizing hunger for the psychedelic gold ring, if you will. There are the pandemic Instagram photos of these same folks in Costa Rica scoping out places for retreat centers, or multinational corporations looking for real estate in the downtown eastside of Vancouver to open for-profit clinics.
Photo provided by Keeno Ahmed-Jones.
SL: Thank you for sharing all that. Once you put out the open letter, was there any change or acknowledgement? I know there was a lot of exposure around it, but do you feel that it was heard?
KAJ: Well, materially, has there been any change? Not to my knowledge. I know that a lot of declarations have been made, not only from MAPS Canada, but other organizations in this space that are adjacent to MAPS Canada. I feel like when an organization goes through a bit of a public relations debacle, like MAPS Canada did, the propensity is to do damage control. And when you have an all-white board, for example, attempts are made to diversify that board. But just because you now have a brown or black face on your board, that doesn’t really mean anything. The proof is in the pudding, as they say.
I think there needs to be a radical reimagining of what this “psychedelic renaissance” looks like. Many of these organizations have constructed these top-down, colonial projects with extractive ideologies, have conflicts of interest and undisclosed public/private partnerships, and lack accountability and transparency. Those are major concerns that need to be addressed first and foremost, prior to thinking about whether your organization is diverse enough.
SL: So, the open letter was published in October 2020; what has your focus been? Are you still working in this psychedelic renaissance?
KAJ: I am, and thank you for asking that question. A lot of people have asked me that. I think one of the most brilliant things about the open letter was the support it received from all around the world—including Indigenous activists in Canada, the US, and the Global South. I’ve been in conversation with some of them, including in Canada, who shared their interactions with people in leadership at MAPS before and had less than stellar experiences, and so just did not want to engage.
I do have a project that’s in motion, which I hope to share soon, interwoven with the themes of psychedelics, social justice, mental health, and drug policy. And I am working with grassroots activists, practitioners, and other bright lights in the space envisioning sustainable models of self-determination and new ethical frameworks.
SL: I look forward to this project when the time comes to announce it. Last thing I want to ask: As you can probably tell, I am a white person working in the psychedelic field, and I want to keep getting more involved. Looking at the reality that there is a disproportionate amount of white people in this work, what would you suggest white folks in this movement do in order to help change these issues?
KAJ: I love that question and think it’s a good one. Taking the step to educate myself has always been a core tenet of my approach and what I recommend to others. There are so many resources out there on anti-racism. Read books about the colonization and history of the Americas authored by Black and Indigenous authors. Examine issues around white fragility. I think those are solid building blocks.
Being able to sit in that container of self-examination is really important—apart from the psychedelic journeys—because I think a lot of people go to that as a shortcut. But entheogens are not an antidote for racism. MDMA is not some sort of cosmic equalizer.
I think we need to think more holistically about understanding privilege, being in community, and doing a lot of listening. “Why is this space not more diverse?” I think that’s a huge question in these spaces. Why are the people attending these community meetings not representative of this city I live in? Is there something unwelcoming about this space?
I think it has to be a slow, gradual approach. It’s not going to happen overnight. There needs to be trust-building, community-building, and a lot of listening. That really takes time, intention, and effort, and I think it begins with an in-depth examination of privilege. These are deep assumptions and beliefs that people have held onto that have to be challenged.
Psychedelics Today reached out to MAPS Canada for a comment on how the organization has been moving forward since the Open Letters were published and the work (if any) that it is doing to be a more inclusive institution. Their Board Chair, Eesmyal Santos-Brault, provided us with this statement:
MAPS Canada has made significant changes in the past six months to its leadership, board of directors, governance, accountability reporting, and operational structure, and this work is ongoing. As part of this, we are undertaking the work of creating new codes of conduct, ethics, and practice for all current and future board members, staff, and volunteers. Our current diversity committee, which consists of eight volunteer members (all of whom represent a wide spectrum in terms of age, and self-defined gender, sexual orientation, ethnic background, racial identification, indigeneity, spiritual beliefs, ability, and more) are leading MAPS Canada’s work to articulate and embed our commitment to equity, justice, diversity, inclusion, and reconciliation within the structures of our organization and all that we do, beginning with a new Terms of Reference drafted by the committee in November, 2020. This work is ongoing, and we look forward to sharing our progress in these areas with all stakeholders and the public in the coming weeks and months.
This piece was updated on July 28, 2021. In the original article it said that three members of the MAPS Canada Board had resigned in the past two months, it has been changed to three months.
Sean Lawlor is a writer, certified personal trainer, and Masters student in Transpersonal Counseling at Naropa University, in pursuit of a career in psychedelic journalism, research, and therapy. His interest in consciousness and non-ordinary states owes great debt to Aldous Huxley, Ken Kesey, and Hunter S. Thompson, and his passion for film, literature, and dreaming draws endless inspiration from Carl Jung, David Lynch, and J.K. Rowling. For more information or to get in touch, head to seanplawlor.com, or connect on Instagram @seanplawlor.
Defining transpersonal psychology, exploring its history, and examining how it relates to psychedelic experiences.
Transpersonal psychology, the branch of psychology that concerns itself with the study of spiritual experience and expanded states of consciousness, has often been excluded from traditional psychology programs. However, as we traverse the reaches of the psychedelic renaissance and interest in the healing potential of non-ordinary states of consciousness continues to grow, understanding transpersonal psychology is of growing importance.
What Is Transpersonal Psychology?
Sometimes transpersonal psychology is referred to as “spiritual psychology” or “the psychology of spirituality” in that it is the branch of psychology that concerns itself with the domain of human experience that is not limited to ordinary, waking consciousness, transcending our typically defined ego-boundaries. As a discipline, transpersonal psychology honors the existence and latent wisdom contained within non-ordinary experiences, concerning itself with unravelling the implications of their meaning for the individual, but also for the greater whole. It attempts to combine age-old insights from ancient wisdom traditions with modern Western psychology, trying to encapsulate the full spectrum of the human psyche.
Prior to the inception of transpersonal psychology, the idea that psychologists should study spirituality was unheard of. Compared with traditional psychological approaches, transpersonal psychology takes a non-pathologizing approach to spiritual experience and non-ordinary states of consciousness.
Reflecting on the origins of the discipline, psychedelic researcher and author, Dr. James Fadiman, offers, “Transpersonal psychology, in its simplest definition, is concerned with understanding the full scope of consciousness, primarily within the human species, but not limited to that which can be described easily by Western science, religious or mystical traditions, nor by Indigenous categorizations.”
“Unlike the rest of psychology, it has not attempted to use the trappings of scientific method to make it more acceptable,” Fadiman adds. “As a result, it has often been identified pejoratively as part of the “new age” counterculture, since it freely investigated states of consciousness and approaches to personal growth and development that were not being looked at by the other psychologies.”
Although Fadiman is generally more well-known for his pioneering work in microdosing, he was one of the prominent figures in shaping the early transpersonal movement. Together with psychologist Robert Frager, Fadiman co-founded the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in 1975, now known as Sofia University.
Transpersonal psychology was formally launched in 1971 by psychologists Abraham Maslow and Anthony Sutich. It emerged as a “Fourth Force” within psychology, with the other three forces being cognitive behaviorism, psychoanalytic/Freudian psychology, and humanistic psychology.
In the 1950s, American psychology was dominated by the schools of cognitive behaviorism and Freudian psychology, however, many felt that these approaches to understanding the human psyche were limited and this growing dissatisfaction led to the birth of humanistic psychology. Humanistic psychology was closely linked to the transpersonal movement in that it was also founded by Maslow and many of the same individuals.
No longer a psychology of psychopathology, humanistic psychology concerned itself with the study of healthy individuals, focusing on human growth and potential. One of Maslow’s main qualms with behaviorism was the limitation of applying animal models to human behavior as this approach would only serve to illuminate the functions that we share with given animals. As such, he felt that behaviorism did not serve to enhance our understanding of the higher functions of our consciousness such as love, freedom, art, and beyond. Additionally, Maslow felt Freudian psychoanalysis was lacking due to its tendency to reduce the psyche to instinctual drives and draw on models of psychopathology.
Humanistic psychology attempted to take a holistic approach to human existence, concerning itself with self-actualization and the growth of love, fulfillment, and autonomy in individuals. Despite the popularity of the discipline, and the new “Human Potential Movement” that spawned around it, Maslow and others felt that there were some critical aspects lacking in humanistic psychology. Namely, the acknowledgement of the role of spirituality in people’s lives.
In 1967, a working group including the likes of Abraham Maslow, Anthony Sutich, Stanislav Grof, James Fadiman, Miles Vich, and Sonya Margulies met in Menlo Park, California with the aim of developing a new psychology that encapsulated the full spectrum of human experience, including non-ordinary states of consciousness. In this discussion, Stanislav Grof suggested the new discipline or Fourth Force should be called “transpersonal psychology.” Thereafter, the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology was launched in 1969, and the Association of Transpersonal Psychology was founded in 1972.
Despite the formal beginnings of transpersonal psychology in the middle of the twentieth century, the movement has its conceptual roots in the early work of William James and Carl Jung, psychologists who were mutually interested in the spiritual reaches of the human psyche. Touching upon the relevance of Jung’s contributions to the field in his book Beyond the Brain, Dr. Stanislav Grof, one of the founding fathers of transpersonal psychology and pioneer in the field of psychedelic research, described Jung as, “The first representative of the transpersonal orientation in psychology.”
William James, father of American psychology, is also perceived to be one of the founders of modern transpersonal thought, making the first recorded use of the term “trans-personal” in a 1905 lecture. However, James’ use of the term was more narrow than the way it is used today. Not only did James’ philosophy contribute to the development of transpersonal psychology, his early experimentations with psychoactive substances, in particular nitrous oxide, have also added substantially to the psychology of mystical experiences and the scientific study of consciousness.
Reflecting on his experience in The Varieties of Religious Experience, James wrote, “Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.” It is these very forms of “entirely different” consciousness that transpersonal psychology concerns itself with.
Understanding the Nature of Transpersonal Experience
The term transpersonal literally means beyond (trans) the personal, and as such, transpersonal experiences are those which serve to evaporate and transcend our ordinary, waking consciousness. Although transpersonal experiences are sometimes induced spontaneously, they can also be brought on by contact with nature, engaging in contemplative practices like meditation, sex, music, and even by difficult psychological experiences. They can take place in a variety of forms, whether it be a spontaneously induced mystical state, out-of-body or near-death experience, a unitative state elicited by psychedelics, or even an alien encounter experience.
Transpersonal experiences are inherently transformative in that they usually serve to broaden our self-conception, often providing us with a broader cosmological perspective. Take for example, the experience of ego death, or ego-dissolution as it is referred to in the scientific literature, a type of transpersonal experience that can be triggered by the use of psychedelics. In the ego death experience, the ordinary sense of self fades into an experience of unity with ultimate reality or “cosmic consciousness.”
Such experiences are both fearful and enlightening, but are thought to be one of the reasons why the psychedelic experience is so transformative for so many people. Viewed through the transpersonal lens, ego death tends to be understood as a beneficial, healing process in which an individual is able to let go of old ego structures that are no longer of service, making space for new, more integral ways of being.
Transpersonal experience is not limited to the world as we know it to exist in everyday reality. In a transpersonal experience, one might find themselves projected out of their body, viewing remote events in vivid detail or having encounters with entities from other dimensions. Describing the nature of such states in their book Spiritual Emergency, Stanislav Grof and the late Christina Grof, suggest that they include elements that western culture does not accept as objectively real, such as deities, demons, mythological figures, entities, and spirit guides. As such, they write, “In the transpersonal state, we do not differentiate between the world of “consensus reality”, or the conventional everyday world, and the mythological realm of archetypal forms.”
Such experiences facilitate a sense of harmony and meaning, connection and unity, and self-transcendence which are associated with positive effects such as heightened feelings of love and compassion. However, that is not to say that transpersonal states always have positive consequences, as they can also be incredibly destabilizing and have the ability to cause psychological distress, often referred to as a “spiritual emergenc(y)” in the transpersonal literature.
Science, as it stands today, is limited in its purview. Mainstream science and psychology is largely dominated by materialist approaches to consciousness and mental health. Within the materialist paradigm, matter is considered primary to consciousness, which is believed to be an accidental by-product of complex arrangements of matter. According to Fadiman, “The problem for mainstream psychology has been the unmeasurable core of transpersonal’s interest, namely, human consciousness.”
Fadiman suggests that mainstream psychology has become more and more “scientistic.” That is, it has become dogmatic in its belief that science and the materialist reductionist values that underlie it are the only way of objectively understanding reality. “Psychology is more concerned with statistical significance than personal utility, and its subject matter now includes a remarkable amount of research with animals, where their consciousness can be most easily ignored,” he shares.
Fadiman reflects that transpersonal psychology’s interest in the nature of consciousness and states of consciousness that extend beyond personal identity makes it “at its very best, the ugly stepsister that one leaves at home when going out to join material sciences parties.” Sharing an example of this, Fadiman pointed to the American Psychological Association’s refusal to grant accreditation to a transpersonal graduate school.
“This was not because of the quality of its dissertations which were rated quite highly or for the span and variety of its courses nor because of the financial status of the institution,” Fadiman continues. Rather, “It was turned down solely on the basis of its fundamental subject matter.” In essence, it boils down to the question of materialism, as many transpersonal psychologists believe in some form or another that consciousness cannot be explained by processes of the brain alone.
Almost all indigenous cultures who have used psychedelics for hundreds perhaps thousands of years report that as one’s consciousness expands beyond the perimeters of the identity, that there are other beings, other realms of existence which are met, often across cultures with identical descriptions.
—James Fadiman
Further, Grof describes the dominant scientific perspective as “ethnocentric” in that “it has been formulated and promoted by Western materialistic scientists, who consider their own perspective to be superior to that of any other human group at any time of history.” However, he suggests that transpersonal psychology, on the other hand, has made significant advances in remedying the ethnocentric biases of mainstream science through its cultural sensitivity towards the spiritual traditions of ancient and native cultures, the acknowledgement of the ontological reality of transpersonal experiences, and their value.
The Relevance of Transpersonal Psychology in the Psychedelic Renaissance
The resurgence of interest in the medical, psychological, and transformational benefits of psychedelics has naturally generated increased awareness of transpersonal states and their value for the health of the human psyche. When it comes to the study of spirituality and non-ordinary states of consciousness, transpersonal psychology has long paved the way, validating the veracity and psychological benefits of such states. As such, it offers itself as an important reservoir of knowledge when trying to understand the healing potentials of psychedelics within therapeutic contexts, but also when trying to understand their broader socio-cultural implications.
In spite of not being widely recognized, transpersonal psychology has long led the scientific endeavor to understand the totality of the human psyche through its embrace of non-ordinary states of consciousness that have hitherto been dismissed as “psychotic” or merely “hallucinations” by mainstream science. Fadiman explains that transpersonal psychology continues to take seriously and without judgment the results reported by individuals working with psychedelics. “For example, almost all indigenous cultures who have used psychedelics for hundreds perhaps thousands of years report that as one’s consciousness expands beyond the perimeters of the identity, that there are other beings, other realms of existence which are met, often across cultures with identical descriptions,” says Fadiman.
The conceptual frameworks of the dominant model are inadequate when it comes to understanding non-ordinary experiences, including those elicited by psychedelics. As such, Fadiman suggests that, “As we continue to develop more accurate maps of inner space, it is likely that transpersonal psychology, with its emphasis on subjective as well as objective observation will continue to play a prominent role.”
This article was updated on July 19, 2021 to correct the years the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology and Association of Transpersonal Psychology were founded.
About the Author
Jasmine Virdi is a freelance writer in the psychedelic space. Since 2018, she has been working for the fiercely independent publishing company Synergetic Press, where her passions for ecology, ethnobotany, and psychoactive substances converge. Jasmine has written for Psychedelics Today, Chacruna Institute for Plant Medicines, Lucid News, Cosmic Sister, Psychable, and Microdosing Guru. She is currently pursuing an MSc in Spirituality, Consciousness, and Transpersonal Psychology at the Alef Trust with the future aim of working as a psychedelic practitioner. Jasmine’s goal as an advocate for psychoactive substances is to raise awareness of the socio-historical context in which these substances emerged in order to help integrate them into our modern-day lives in a safe, ethically-integral, and meaningful way.
A review of The Nature of Drugs: History, Pharmacology, and Social Impact (Synergetic Press, 2021), a collection of eight lectures given by the “godfather of ecstasy” Dr. Alexander Shulgin.
And so begins one of the best classes you’ll ever take…
“Most of you have already been exposed to drugs, and most of you will personally decide if you wish to become exposed again in the future. The goal of this course is to provide specific information concerning drugs, as to their actions, their risks, and their virtues. And that’s really what my role is, I’m a seeker of truth. I’m trying to find out what’s there. I am not an advocate for nor an advocate against drug use. I have my own personal philosophies that have no business in here. You’ll find that I am quite sympathetic with a lot of drugs that people say are evil and bad. But in truth, I want you to have enough information that you can decide for yourself whether this is something that’s your cup of tea, quite literally caffeine, or whether it is something you wish to stay out of.
“I’m going to have a theme for this whole course called “warts and all.” Namely, what is known about drugs, what is to be found out about them, what do they smell like, what do they taste like, what are the goods, what are the bads. Why is it so bad to use drugs? Why is it occasionally so good to use drugs?”
—Alexander Shulgin, The Nature of Drugs: History, Pharmacology, and Social Impact
The Nature of Drugs: History, Pharmacology, and Social Impact by Alexander Shulgin is out now with Synergetic Press.
What’s beautiful about this work—a volume of the first eight lectures from Alexander “Shasha” Shulgin’s popular course on drugs at San Francisco State University—is that for those of us who never knew Sasha, or only saw him briefly, it’s a window into a beautiful soul. Like Robert Sapolsky, he’s one of those extraordinary teachers of science who brings so many layers to the experience of how science actually works. Through his anecdotes and asides, he does away with science as a function of perfect observers, removed from their subjects with ideal impartiality and presents a messy system of egos, funding priorities, ‘novelty’ and blind groping towards the Truth.
Many of us know Dr. Alexander Shulgin through the landmark books he wrote with his wife Ann, PIKHAL and TIKHAL, which are a mix of autobiography, love story, and drug syntheses. Even more of us know him through his beloved compound MDMA, which he popularized and made famous. But this book, The Nature of Drugs: History, Pharmacology, and Social Impact, shows another side: a teacher of phenomenal worth.
I’ve been studying drugs for twenty years, but Sasha Shulgin’s lectures to his students still gave me new insights on almost every page. He has a way of making the complexities of pharmacodynamics accessible by turning the human body into a bathtub. He talks about how the water gets filtered, how it goes down the drain, and how that makes a difference in the drugs you take. The understanding he imparts of how drugs work is invaluable.
But what feels so special is the glimpses you get of the alchemical man himself. In these lectures, occurring in the Year of our Reagan 1987, he makes clear his opposition to the War on Drugs. The students taking his course might not have expected a year-by-year rundown of the increasing crackdowns since 1980, but that’s what they learned. And if you sit yourself in their seat as you read this book, imagine being a student in Reagan’s Amerika learning about the Drug War from a white-haired chemist who admits in the first lecture, out of the 250 known psychedelic compounds, to have tried about 150 of them.
But he doesn’t look like Hunter S. Thompson. He looks like a tall kindly man with his pretty wife in the front row taking notes. He approaches chemistry as a ‘sacred art’. He rails against ‘holding laws’ that are simply used to hold people that the police don’t like the look of. He drops jokes constantly and calls his scribbled diagrams of molecules ‘dirty pictures’. I like to imagine myself in this classroom and I wonder if I would have been sharp enough to figure out that this was one of the greatest underground chemists of all time.
There’s a clue near the end, while he’s talking about his own history in industrial research and playing one of his imagination games with his students:
“Take, for example, how you define new sweetening agents, agents that you put in coffee that make coffee taste sweet. How would you go about finding them? It’s your job. You’re hired and you are working for Monsanto. “Find a new sweetening agent. We want to knock Nutrasweet off the market.” How are you going to find it? You’re right now at the nitty gritty of research; your task is to find a new sweetening agent. Here are our leads. Here are five materials that do cause sweet tastes, but this is too toxic, this has a bitter aftertaste, this one takes fifteen minutes to come on, this one causes cancer, and that one causes teratogenesis. We can’t use them. But we need one because we’re losing the market. Saccharine is not going to be available much longer. How do you find one?
“Well, my philosophy, that people would cringe at, is to put a damp finger into it and taste it. [Laughter.] That to me is the heart of how you find a sweetening agent. Well, what if it’s going to cause cancer of the jaw? Okay, then you come down with cancer of the jaw, but you’ve found a sweetening agent. [Laughter.] So you have risk and you have reward.”
This was the same method he used to test MDMA when he first synthesized it a decade before these lectures. Unfortunately, only three months earlier, the feds had banned MDMA by putting it into Schedule 1. They also passed the Federal Analogues Act that would be used as a wide club against any “substantially similar” molecule (a phrase that makes him shake his head. “Is the taillight structure of a 1986 Pontiac “substantially similar” to the taillight structure of a 1984 Chevrolet?”). Despite these crackdowns, his wife in the front row would go on to lead an untold number of therapists into an alliance with MDMA and its chemical cousins like 2C-B. And their books PIHKALand TIHKAL would document a beautiful love story, fertilized by his psychoactives. He knew that the drugs that interested him couldn’t be found by testing them in animals. As an alchemist, he knew you had to stick your finger into it and taste it for yourself.
In his first lecture, he shares with the students,
“My first experience with morphine was with a wound I had during WWII and I was going into England. I was about three days out of England on a destroyer and was below decks and we were playing cards and killing the time until we got into England. I was on morphine pretty much all the time because this was one hell of a painful thing. And I was dealing with one hand, I learned to deal with one hand, and the guy in sick bay would come by and say, “Is your thumb still hurting you?” “Yeah, probably a little bit more than it had before. Whose deal?” You know, the next thing you’re dealing cards. The pain is still there. It’s a beautiful, powerful tool to treat pain because the pain is there, but it doesn’t bother you.”
As he doesn’t reveal in the first lecture, in 1960 Sasha first tried mescaline while a young chemist at Dow Pharmaceuticals. He said of the experience, “I understood that our entire universe is contained in the mind and the spirit. We may choose not to find access to it, we may even deny its existence, but it is indeed there inside us, and there are chemicals that can catalyze its availability.’’
Chemicals can also catalyze profitability. The next year, he created Zectran, the first biodegradable pesticide. Dow could sell it by the ton. And as he said to his class—most likely with a wink and a Groucho Marx smile, “And industries love things they can sell by the ton.”
With his success, Dow was content to leave him alone in his lab, puttering around and doing just the kind of things he wanted. It was a chemist’s dream. And this dreamer dreamed up novel psychedelics.
As Hamilton Morris lovingly laid out, Sasha began with a simple modification to the mescaline molecule. He added one carbon to a side-chain and it became the psychedelic amphetamine that he called TMA. He continued experimenting and produced TMA-2 through TMA-6. The last one eventually went on to become a moderately popular psychedelic in the US and Japan.
As an alchemist, he knew you had to stick your finger into it and taste it for yourself.
1963 marked the beginning of the end for the cushy Dow years: Sasha synthesized DOM (his PIHKAL entry here). By 1966, with LSD illegal, this psychedelic amphetamine started appearing on the street under the name STP (Serenity, Tranquility, and Peace). It earns its name. Shulgin himself said on 4 mg, “It is a beautiful experience. Of all past joys, LSD, mescaline, cannabis, peyote, this ranks number one.”
But the effects of DOM can last much much longer than LSD. You might have been enjoying the merry-go-round, but eventually you want to get off and let the world stop spinning. At 5 mg, he wrote, “The experience continued unabated throughout the night with much tension and discomfort. I was unable to get any sleep. I hallucinated quite freely during the night, but could stop them at will. While I never felt threatened, I felt I knew what it was like to look across the brink to insanity.”
Unfortunately, just in time for the Summer of Love, some underground chemist dosed a batch at 20 mg of DOM per pill. On top of that high dosage, the full effects can take two hours to kick in and so it’s easy to imagine redosing because you don’t think it’s working. In Golden Gate Park at the huge and historic Human Be-In, thousands got way too high in trips that could last for three days. Within a year, the feds made DOM illegal and when Dow figured out the mind behind the molecule, they kindly showed Dr. Shulgin the door.
He went to his home laboratory in the hills outside Berkeley, California, and became a gentleman scientist in the vein of Ed Ricketts. But instead of the sea, Shulgin peered into the mind. He kept his Schedule 1 license by being useful to the DEA and funded himself with consultations and teaching. In plain sight of the authorities, he tinkered with hundreds of psychedelics—including the rediscovery of MDMA.
From this unique perspective, the students in Sasha’s class got to learn about two of the trickiest problems in pharmacology and sociology:
How do you define ‘drug’?
How do you define ‘drug abuse’?
He begins, “Philosophy aside, what is a drug? The FDA has given a marvelous, marvelous, long legal definition that goes on for four paragraphs”. He continues to gently mock this FDA definition until he shares a better explanation from Professor Samuel Irwin: “A drug is any chemical that modifies the function of living tissue, resulting in physiological or behavioral change.” But Shulgin takes it farther:
“I would make the definition looser yet, and considerably more general. Not just a chemical, but also plants, minerals, concepts, energy, just any old stuff. Not just changes in physiology or behavior, but also in attitude, concept, attention, belief, self-image, and even changes in faith and allegiance. “A drug is something that modifies the expected state of a living thing.” In this guise, almost everything outside of food, sleep, and sex can classify as a drug. And I even have some reservations about all three of those examples.”
Cue the laughter. In these transcripts, you often see [laughter], and you know the transcribers are probably underreporting it. It makes you want to listen to the original tapes. Those lucky kids, getting to learn about ingestion methods from one of the great alchemists of the century. Sasha teaches on how we metabolize these drugs, how they sequester to different tissues, how we form bad habits with them and how we form good habits with them.
“If you can drink modestly, if you can use tobacco modestly and have a choice, have freedom of choice, and choose to do it and you have a good relationship with it, and it applies to alcohol, it applies to tobacco, it applies to LSD, it applies to heroin—there is nothing intrinsically evil about any of those drugs. Drugs are not intrinsically evil. In fact, we are going to get into the question of what is drug abuse. The problems that are bothersome with the definition of the word “drug” are nothing compared with the ones that are to be faced with the word “abuse.””
He even had a collection of definitions of ‘drug abuse’. From his huge consumption of articles, essays and public talks, you can imagine the different versions collected in his files, like species of beetles pinned in a collector’s cabinet. He found they fell into “the four operative words: what, who, where and how.”
What a drug is…
a particularly lousy definition because drug abuse is linked directly to the shape of the molecule itself.
Who’s giving the drug…
following Szasz, if drugs from a doctor is drug use and if self-medication is drug abuse, then doctors stand between you and your drugs like priests did between you and God before the Reformation.
Where is the drug obtained…
according to Dr. Jerome Levine at NIMH, drugs from “illicit channels, and/or in medically unsupervised or socially unsanctioned settings.”
“I personally believe, most strongly, that in the improper use of drugs lies their abuse. Dr. Irwin has phrased it thusly: “[Drug abuse is] the taking of drugs under circumstances, and at dosages that significantly increase their hazard potential, whether or not used therapeutically, legally, or as prescribed by a physician.
…
“People use drugs, have always used drugs, and will forever use drugs, whether there are physicians or not…
“Any use of a drug that impairs physical or mental health, that interferes with one’s social functioning or productivity is drug abuse. And the corollary is also true. The use of a drug that does not impair physical or mental health or interfere with social functioning or productivity is not drug abuse. And the question of its illegality is completely beside the matter.”
And the Freedom Fighter in him isn’t slow to point out how these definitions are used to harm people in the real world via the War on Drugs. Plus, the sly wizard mentions the recent banning of MDMA as a textbook example of the misuse of drug abuse.
What a prof. He defines terms, rambles on to fascinating asides and uses brilliant metaphors. And of course, he made no secret of his dislike of midterms, finals and grades. He’s the kind of cool teacher who takes a Socratic poll on what kind of final to have and finally decides to make it an essay question where you have to disagree with him.
Buy The Book: The Nature of Drugs
All these lectures give the portrait of a courageous, beautiful soul. And with this book, the course is only getting started. There’s another volume still to be published where he will drill down into the various categories of drugs.
Anyone interested in psychoactives should get this book and support the further compiling of Dr. Shulgin’s work. If you’ve ever spent $30 on any of his chemical creations, helping out by buying the book seems only fair. And you get to own a lovely portrait of someone whom we are very lucky for having lived and having taught.
The two have an intimate conversation that spans from how Carhart-Harris’s work began, how his theories, like the REBUS model, took shape, and what other applications psilocybin may have for treating mental, spiritual, and physical health conditions.
The interview has an interesting twist because Wing participated in an NYU trial of psilocybin for major depressive disorder and experienced full remission from a recurrent battle with depression after his first dose of the magic mushroom compound. Wing shares a lot of his first hand experience with Robin Carhart-Harris on how the trial he participated in changed his mood state and mindset, and what the possible neurochemical changes felt like subjectively.
Court Wing: Is this, in any way, in the arc of what you expected to see when you started out this research?
Robin Carhart-Harris: Wow. Hmm… Maybe it is. Or… no it’s not. No. [laughs] I mean, after a few years, you start to realize the therapeutic potential, or I did.
Initially, it was like, psychedelics are fascinating tools… Powerful tools to revolutionize our understanding of the mind and the brain. That’s what drew me in. And then I was like, “Oh, and the therapeutic application is actually very compelling.” Once I caught onto that (and this was probably sort of midway through my PhD in the late noughties, you know, late 2000s). Then, I remember, Ben Sessa was trying to get a psilocybin for alcoholism study going at Bristol, where I was doing my Ph.D. We had meetings with seniority, who basically weren’t interested in our idea. And then I said, “Leave it ten years,” and we’ll be able to do this research. I think someone said once, “You overestimate what you can achieve in a year and underestimate what can be achieved in ten.”
That rings true. The changes in a decade have been colossal so it’s been beyond expectations, really.
CW: Personally, it’s hard not to feel a great deal of gratitude for the work that you’ve all done. As you know, I went through the NYU psilocybin study for major depressive disorder a year ago. And [now I’m in] total remission. I mean, just so unexpected. And I read the research, I saw the reports, I read the review paper of the neural mechanisms, which actually was the first thing that truly excited me because I had lost track of the prefrontal cortex atrophy and seeing words like neurogenesis, synaptogenesis, dendritic arborization; it’s like, that’s part and parcel of what I had been studying in things like chronic pain for the last ten plus years. But to go through it and to feel a physical absence of the depression; I don’t have a better term for it. Like a missing burden.
Anyways, what type of data were you seeing [early on] that made you want to pursue this on a study level? Because it’s one thing to hear about this stuff occurring anecdotally, but then to [say], “Boy, there’s enough traction there that I think we really have something”?
RCH: Yeah, yeah. I think if we rewind to the end of the 2000s or even earlier, mostly in terms of mental health data, it was abstract. It was the work done in the 50s and 60s that we looked at as a historical curiosity.
It wasn’t enough to put that and Indigenous use in [a] healing context. It wasn’t enough to put that together in my mind and think, “Oh, this is really compelling.” So a few things made the difference. And I think sometimes you need to (even though I’m a scientist, and I shouldn’t say this, in a way), you do sort of need to see things with your own eyes. And what made a big difference for me was doing our own brain imaging research.
Taking healthy volunteers, looking in their brains and seeing things that were suggestive of an antidepressant effect, and then listening to them say, “I feel lighter. I feel unburdened.” And then thinking, well, now this seems really tangible. And that makes sense in the context of Roland [Griffiths]’s work in healthy volunteers, and Charlie Grob’s work in end-of-life anxiety.
So then we started piecing things together for a UK Medical Research Council grant. And that got through. And the reviews were remarkably good. I don’t know, but I imagined some fellow researchers in this space were allowed to review our proposal and did us a favor, because the reviews across the board were top marks. And I think, then the UKMRC were in a difficult situation, because [they thought], “How do we reject this when everyone’s saying this is really top quality research that they’re proposing?” And actually, we proposed a double blind randomized control trial then in 2012 that we couldn’t complete until 2021 because of the difficulties of actually doing the research. We ended up doing that open label trial that was published.
But I would say, a turning point for me was the first patient in our TRD [Treatment Resistant Depression] trial. She just responded remarkably. She visibly became a different person from heavy, head down, minimal eye contact, tearing up when starting to open up, no smiles—gosh, no, just frowns. And then, after the treatment, the warmth and the color and the smiling and a beautiful smile came on her face. And it was just a wonderful, beautiful thing. It’s such a privilege to be able to do that for someone. And that was a massive turning point. It was like, “Oh, my goodness, this really works.”
CW: Yeah. It’s startling, trying to describe to people the one-day turnaround quality of this. And I think it’s actually very much undersold, because I told the researchers, Dr. Stephen Ross at NYU and my facilitators afterwards. You know, I went through the MADRS scores, which you are now more than familiar with [laughs], and at the end of the session, one of the facilitators [asked me], “So how do you feel?” And I’m like, “Oh, good.” And then I did a deeper scan, like reflexively, and I was like, “Good.” Like, I could tell it was gone. And I was like, “That fast? Honest to God, that fast?” And they’re like, “Well, we’ll know when you’re unblinded.” But in retrospect, if I had been given the chance to take the original MADRS evaluation again, my scores would have gone higher. Because now in the absence [of depressive symptoms], I can tell how much more severe they were. It’s a strange thing.
One thing that you’ve said a couple times here, and perhaps it’s a figure of speech, but I believe there’s a somatic quality to it. And since you brought up the fMRI studies, you mentioned people discussing feeling lighter, feeling unburdened, like there’s this description of the condition that has this feeling of extreme heaviness or being bogged down. So there’s some aspect that involves this interoceptive quality where there’s obviously slower reaction times and things like that, but what do you think is operating there? Because I remember, in the fMRI studies, you guys were a little bit surprised by seeing the type of changes in blood flow that were going on. I believe, [you] expected one thing and instead ended up with something else. Do you have any thoughts to that area?
RCH: Yeah, yeah. I’ve often thought (and experience has endorsed this view) that we often intuit mechanisms through our language, the way we’re describing the experience, and whether or not there’s some kind of priming effect or not. Maybe it is [priming], but also, I’m not sure it really matters, when ultimately you do the research and see that it’s endorsed. But the analogies that you’re used to hearing today (the popular ones, or the well-used ones) around heaviness and being bogged down; it’s all weight related. There’s heaviness, there’s weight. You know, you get bogged down. So there’s a gravitational pull to the depression, which means it pulls you in and you can’t get out very easily. And I think (I’ve got to intuit, because we don’t know yet, but) it’s something to do with synaptic weighting, and that certain circuitry gets weighted. If we really zoom in on a very low level, it’s probably the synaptic weighting certain connections belonging to certain circuitry associated with heavy introspection. [They] get heavily weighted in depression.
What happens? Well, that’s another fascinating question, and maybe a different question. But let’s just say that that’s the character. On a descriptive level, that’s the character of chronic depression and a depressive episode is that you get stuck. Literally, you get stuck in a certain sort of dynamic configuration because that heavy synaptic weighting is the reinforcement of that.
RCH: Yeah, it’s very relevant. In people’s people’s mind’s eyes, they can imagine a landscape. And in a depressive episode, you literally have a depression in that landscape. And if you imagine a ball being able to move in this landscape, and that being your mind at any given time, then in a depression, the ball is spending a disproportionate amount of time in the depression in that landscape. It falls in very easily, [and it’s] very difficult to get it out. And so what psychedelics are doing is just pushing up that depression and flattening the landscape.
CW: Right. I’ve heard the ski slope analogy. So either we have fresh powder that’s either filling up the depression, or we have some sort of artificial means like a snow plow that’s smoothing everything out. So if we were to just roughly characterize the nervous system as biasing towards efficiency, even if that depressor, that enemy energy minima is more efficient, it’s not necessarily more effective anymore in our daily lives. At some point, it was the 2A adaptation toward some high priority event, but now it’s become maladaptive… I listened to that lecture byAndrés Gómez Emilsson of QRI [Qualia Research Institute]. There’s this discussion of criticality with the mind and with a depression. It’s almost, to some degree, like an event horizon, almost. Right? The pull is so strong, it’s very hard to get out of there. So why is it, once that landscape is flattened, as these new neural connections in the functional connectivity are occurring, why does it resort into a better, healthier connection? I mean, if this quality of openness is being promoted, why are we defaulting back to something that’s more useful, something that’s healthier, something that’s more, I guess, effective, as well as efficient?
It’s one of the issues with doing psychedelic research. [It’s] almost by saying, “I’m a psychedelic researcher,” [that] you’re seen as somehow a lesser scientist.
-Robin Carhart-Harris
RCH: Yeah. I actually do think that the fresh covering of snow is a good analogy. So if you’re born into this world, and you haven’t been affected by life in any particular way, you have a very smooth, fresh ground of snow there. And I suppose, what’s happening with the psychedelic experience; I mean, this is very mechanistic, and is not putting much on the therapeutic component and so, that’s a little dangerous to put it all on, like, “The brain resets.”
CW: Sorry. Yeah, well, the intent makes a huge difference. That’s clear.
RCH: It does. And so, you could have the snow falling, and you can manipulate things in a way that potentially could even reinforce certain circuitry. But that doesn’t happen, because the contextual; the environment in which you have the psychedelic experience is nurturing in the way that it should be for a newborn coming into the world: You’re not trying to heavily indoctrinate them or drive them in any particular direction, other than to care for them and just say, “You are safe, and I will hold you as we move through life.”
But you know, things could go in a horrible direction there. Horrible kinds of things could happen that could start to reinforce a certain shape to the snow. And so anyway, I think it’s a mix. It’s a mix of the fresh falling of the snow [and] shaking the snow globe, [which] is the one [metaphor] that I came up with personally. But the fresh falling of the snow is like an old neuroplasticity analogy. And there is something called the plasticity paradox, which says that plasticity, in and of itself, isn’t necessarily healing, but if the plasticity comes and is utilized in a positive way (and so in the context of psychedelic therapy, it’s utilized and honest in a therapeutic way), then you have the magic sauce.
And so I like to say these days in as many interviews as I can [is] that psychedelic therapy is fundamentally a combination treatment. It’s not just shaking the snow globe. You could shake the snow globe in someone already psychologically unstable, and when the snow settles, it might not be a great picture. But you shake the snow globe in someone who’s ready for this to happen, and it happens in a perfectly nurturing, supportive environment, then the snow is going to settle. I think you can feel quite confident that the snow is going to settle in a healthier way.
CW: Do you think beyond just the psychiatric applications, which seem quite vast still—I mean, honestly, the smoking cessation and cocaine addiction early results… are just completely astonishing—but do you think there are lateral applications? Obviously, I’m quite invested in the changes that are possible, I think, for chronic pain of a potentially non-nociceptive type, but even for nociceptive chronic pain. I have to give credit here to Dr. Brendan Hussey. I saw his presentation on your REBUS model back in July with a MAPS Canada Journal Club, and he had an amazing slide deck. And, I, myself, personally, had a very deep revelation on March 6th, which was the day after I went through [psilocybin-assisted therapy] (March 5th [was] my dosing day) where it’s like, all of these things suddenly opened up where it’s like this can change this whole picture here. Once I saw Brendan’s work describing yours and I had a visual, [I realized] the REBUS model completely overlies the descriptions for the last decade and a half of what’s going on in chronic pain, in terms of how a pain neurosignature is formed. Have you thought about it at all? I think it’s like, beyond psychological.
RCH: Well, that’s fascinating. Maybe there’s some things there that I don’t know that I could learn. We are planning a chronic pain trial in fibromyalgia with psilocybin therapy.
It’ll start at the end of this year at Imperial. I’m moving to UCSF, but that trial will carry on with the money that I was lucky enough to bring in.
[It relates to] the REBUS model in the sense that the precision weighting is exactly what we’re talking about here. Assumptions are heavily weighted. Certain assumptions—you might call them pathological assumptions, you might even call them adaptive assumptions, defensive assumptions—deserve a bit of compassion, because the body of [the] mind is doing its best to try and stabilize things in a way. So in a sense, depressive episodes, eating disorders, image disorders, chronic pain, they’re often the body and the mind trying to do their best defensive strategies. But we’d rather not have them, you know? And then that takes some bravery, doesn’t it?
Perhaps this is most acute in something like anorexia, where the [adaptation] is so maladaptive, it’s killing people often. It’s ego-syntonic for the sufferer, meaning they don’t see themselves as suffering, like, “This is good, this is working.” And so, it’s adaptive, maladaptive, it depends how you look at it, but to most eyes, it’s maladaptive. But it takes bravery, because [people think], “Oh my goodness, you’re going to take away this thing that I need?” like in an addiction. Like, “I’m not ready to give this up, I need this!”
You know, and there’s sort of irony there: “I’ll die without it.” It’s like, “No, you’ll die with it.” But that’s the sort of pivot, isn’t it? And again, it brings us to the requirement. Sometimes, actually, a conscious decision needs to be made to let go, both in the experience itself, but also the decision to have the treatment in the first place.
CW: You spent the better part of a week, pre-publication [of the “Psilocybin vs. Escitalopram for Depression” trial], going through this long explanation of how someone should look at a study as both proposed and then executed, and then how the results are interpreted, and how a journal can also interpret those things. But you took it upon yourself, I think, slightly unusually, to kind of let people know: Really go to the tables, go to the appendices, that’s where you’re going to see the striking numbers. And there’s been many expert reviews saying, “Well, okay, they were wise to in fact not do an adjusted comparison, because then it doesn’t account for the random chance possibility that it’s just a statistical anomaly,” right?
At the same time, honestly, I met someone who also went through the same trial I went through up at Yale, [being treated for] 26 years of major depressive disorder and [then experiencing] full remission. We couldn’t stop going on about the MADRS [depression rating] scores. I understand the QIDS [depression symptomatology scale] one, and now there’s a little buyer’s remorse in there about like, “Ahh, why [did we choose] this one [for the psilocybin vs escitalopram study]? Why this one [QIDS]?”
RCH: [laughing] I know.
CW: And there’s been some criticism that in the prereq, if I’m saying it correctly, where there was kind of one expected outcome that was supposed to be measured, and they [New England Journal of Medicine] were saying there is one way that was registered with the US boards and another way with the UK boards, and that, in the paper itself, it didn’t actually discuss those things. But it doesn’t feel like you guys were pulling a dodge or anything like that. And I think even if people just look at the QIDS remission and response rates and the secondary outcomes; I mean, I am trying not to fanboy all over the place, but it’s so commensurate with what happened for me and what other people have described.
RCH: Yeah. It was a very interesting experience. We certainly didn’t in any way, or could be accused of pulling a dodge. I would say one way to look at how all of this has gone is that we played it so straight, and so the miss on the primary has to be reported because it was pre-registered ahead of the trial to be the primary.
Do we regret choosing the QIDS as the primary? Well, of course we do. And now we understand. Actually, and this could be sort of sour grapes, speaking to a bias in favor of psilocybin, but I do believe it’s not a great measure. And you just have to look at that forest plot that I’ve now pinned to my Twitter page, to see that it’s an anomaly. It looks like a false negative. And I think the right interpretation is that it’s likely to be a false negative and these two conditions do separate.
So we played it very straight. Was it bad luck? Well, if you believe that the ground truth is that psilocybin is the better treatment, and that hasn’t come through because of the miss on the primary, then yes, it’s bad luck. And so part of the effort in trying to get ahead of the messaging was just that; to try and keep people closer to the results themselves, and to say, “Look at the results in some detail.” And that’s quite unusual, I think, for researchers to do.
RCH: They’re often more wanting people to hear their narrative. And I was sort of, in a sense, saying, “Look beyond the narrative (because it wasn’t our narrative, it was the editor of the journal), and look at the results. And you decide.” I felt that we were made to spin the results in a way that misled the reader, that didn’t accurately represent the results. And that bothered me. So I felt I had to communicate to people early on, and I couldn’t say it at that stage, because I couldn’t reveal the results.
So all I was saying to people was trying to explain the nature of the stats, and then say, you know, if there’s anything you do here, just look at the results in detail, and go to that supplementary appendix. The way we were treated in terms of not being allowed to include that forest plot, what’s the agenda there? Hiding results? It’s very questionable. And I’ve stopped short of getting conspiratorial about it, but it’s almost like, “Well, let’s move that out of the way, and, you know, lift this one up, it’s missed on the primary.” And there was so much more to see.
It was an unusual experience. And it felt like the power of [the] deep establishment wanting to frame things a particular way, like, “Nothing to see here. Carry on, everything’s as usual everybody. SSRIs are for everybody.” I don’t know.
CW: It certainly wasn’t your first rodeo. It’s not as if you were fresh to letting results out or doing deep, intimate work with a well-received theoretical basis, right? And yet, they’re almost acting like, “Well, these young fellows, what a nice idea they have,” or something like that.
RCH: Yeah, [it’s] one of the issues with doing psychedelic research. [It’s] almost by saying, “I’m a psychedelic researcher,” [that] you’re seen as somehow a lesser scientist.
And the deep establishment has that position on things. I actually think there’s some published work on this where people have looked at the opinion of scientific peers on those who declare whether they’ve had a personal psychedelic experience or not, and it does transpire that peers view people disclosing their personal uses as suggesting that they’re a weaker scientist in some way. And that’s kind of frustrating, but it is what it is.
But there are some very high standards that we’re being assessed by here, standards that haven’t always been in place. As SSRIs have developed and got through, there’s been a lot of scandal and bad practice in terms of the data on SSRIs. So playing it very straight as we did, and, in a sense, underselling the results, I’m kind of okay with, because I know in time, the truth will [come] out. And the whole area has been getting so excited and expectations are so high that a little bit of moderation at this stage with this particular trial is probably a good thing. So I sort of accept it somewhat reluctantly, in terms of the way the paper was framed. But it got into the New England Journal of Medicine.
CW: Yes it did.
RCH: And that was really important.
CW: And even if it was a moderate, conservative, staid description of the results, the results were like: It [psilocybin] was just as good as our standard of care [SSRIs] right now. And the appendix; that’s why I wrote the Op-Ed for Psychedelics Today, just to say, look, he’s been telling us, and anyone who’s gone through this, that went into full remission, can say this is not even remotely close to the same thing. I almost wonder if the quality of remission that we’re discussing between the SSRI and psilocybin, if, internally, it’s two different types of remission? Because I’ve been on the other stuff, and this is not that. It isn’t.
RCH: The one result that’s most impressive is probably the remission rates. What we’re seeing with the escitalopram (and this probably reflects a more general rule) is improvement in symptom severity, but not reliably into remission. I think that’s it. If remission is ultimately what you want with a treatment, which of course it is—to be free of the disorder—then you’re much more likely to achieve that (twice as likely to achieve that) on the most conservative measure on the trial with the psilocybin.
CW: I think [on] day two of the study, there [were] approximately (depending on which score you used), something like 25 to 30 plus people [who] had stopped being depressed on day two. I truly envied the fact that you guys were running a two-dose study, because it did seem like, from my perspective, even though things had gotten remarkably better [for me], that a second dose would have made a big difference.
RCH: What time point, Court, do you think a second dose would have made [the] most sense?
CW: I think you guys have got it right on the money. Honestly.
I think three weeks. It’s like you have that first week where you’re just kind of in this freefall, like, “My God, is it really this simple?” And then starting to incorporate it in the following week, you know, kind of like, “Is this stable?” Probably doing a lot of reality checking. And then [you’re] just waiting for that ghost of the previous condition to kind of re-emerge. And then by week three, you’re now actually starting to incorporate all this and it’s like, “I have more questions.” I keep regretting the time I didn’t spend under the eyeshades. [laughs]
Honestly, you know, at a certain point, there [were] things [I was] so compelled to talk about, you know? I wasn’t psychedelically naive. 25 plus years earlier, someone had led me on a set-and-setting transpersonal session with [a] high-dose [of] LSD, and that had been remarkable, honestly, for years. But this was… the psychological material that emerged, it’s like, I had no idea [that] the things that came up were going to, and so a second session, like, by week three, it’s like I had formed enough around what had occurred in the first session. It could have been five weeks and that would have been fine.
But I think if you’re talking about things in the course of treatment, like say, spatial summation vs. temporal summation, I think to kind of maintain that intensity level for that neuroplasticity to really gel, usually you need novelty and intensity. And I think Andrés Gómez Emilsson could probably argue this quality of valence. I think three weeks seems just about right. I don’t know. I’m thinking of Ros Watts, and she’s like a bodhisattva on the planet, I swear. Every time I hear her voice, it’s so calming and reassuring. But I think in the three week period, beyond that, you start to get almost lonely for your therapist and the session, if that makes sense. So, you know, it’s just like, “Ah, good. I finally got to go back to that thing again.”
It’s an extraordinary time [considering] what’s just happened with the MDMA and PTSD studies. And I think that’s about their spread there, too. They have three sessions. And I think (don’t quote me on this) it’s something like three weeks apart.
RCH: Right, okay. Maybe we intuited things the same way.
CW: Yeah.
RCH: It’s a promising time.
CW: Yeah, it is. I’m sorry, we’ve come to time and I don’t want to chew up any more of yours. You’ve been very generous. And just once again [nervously laughs]… See, I used to be very reactive. When I’d say things like this, it was impossible not to get choked up and I’m kind of struggling to be a good representative here, but honestly, it’s [holding back tears]… quite a life.
RCH: Yeah, I hear you Court.
CW: I took mine [psilocybin-assisted therapy] 10 days before the lockdown in New York City. I can’t imagine… I’ve been inside with my boys for a year. I can’t imagine what would have happened if it had been the placebo…
Anything in closing? And also I should [mention], Kyle and Joe, and now Michelle, at Psychedelics Today, were extraordinarily welcoming. They’ve created such an incredible community with so much information there, and really a very broad spectrum. This brings in a very large tent of people. But any final thoughts to offer or anything that’s emerged from the studies in terms of like, lateral effects that have surprised you or anything like that? I’m fascinated to see what else is going to be changed by this quality of openness being enhanced. Because that really, that’s so many things besides just like, no longer being locked in iterative rumination. It’s a whole spectrum of life possibilities and cultural assumptions.
RCH: Yeah. There’s a lot of other measures in the paper, the secondary measures. The REBUS model has a focus more on the relaxing of the top-down, but when you talk to people, often the pertinent statement is, “The things that came up.” I think that’s an important space to get a better handle on in the future. What is that? You know, what is that mechanistically, “The things that come up”? I’d love to understand that better. I mean, I’m mechanistically minded, so I tend to go there.
But it’s been wonderful to chat to you and I very much am moved by what you told me. And I’m so pleased that you’ve had the experience that you’ve had, and it’s helped you as it has. It’s wonderful to hear that. It makes it all worthwhile, what we’re all doing.
This interview has been edited for clarity and grammar.
About the Author
Court Wing has been a professional in the performance and rehab space for the last 30 years. Coming from a performing and martial arts background, Court served as a live-in apprentice to the US Chief Instructor for Ki-Aikido for five years, going on to win the gold medal for the International Competitors Division in Japan in 2000 and achieving the rank of 3rd degree black belt. In 2004, Court became the co-founder of New York’s largest and oldest crossfit gym, and has been featured in the New York Times, Sunday Routine, Men’s Fitness, and USA Today. He is also a certified Z-Health Master Trainer, using the latest interventions in applied neuro-physiology for remarkable improvements in pain, performance, and rehabilitation. You can find out more on his website: https://courtwing.com .
The psychedelic space has an abuse problem, but how do we resolve it? Community accountability and transformative justice can help.
In the past few years, the global psychedelic community has weathered countless ruptures as patterns of problematic behavior have come to light. While calls for accountability have been increasing, we have yet to establish frameworks and processes that support it. Such are the challenges of a decentralized, citizen-powered movement: It is as diverse and situational as the psychedelic experience itself, and accountability is not a one size fits all process. The ways we approach massive, powerful institutions often look very different from the ways we approach those in our immediate social groups.
We have seen sexual assault in underground healing environments and leaders aligning with sexual predators. We’ve witnessed the shameless commodification of ceremonial practices and silencing of voices championing equity and diversity. We can also be sure that more issues are just around the bend. They are bound to surface as the movement grows and we attempt to create practical systems for accountability that can keep up with this rapid expansion.
The mainstream paradigm of accountability is rooted in the legal system. It is centered around the concept of penalty—simply put, if someone breaks the law or a societal contract, they will be punished, often by being removed from community or being made to experience the same pain and suffering they have caused. Justice is seen as a contract between the individual and the state, and harm is defined by legal institutions. It can be static, rigid, and lacking nuance. Among the many issues with this punitive model is the simple fact that the needs and experiences of survivors and those impacted are often an afterthought. In addition, punishment does little to prevent further harm, rehabilitate the person responsible, or address the underlying conditions which contributed to the event.
If we don’t dedicate ourselves to a new vision of accountability while the psychedelic movement is still relatively small, the fallout and damage could be much greater. We are in a world where cancelling and punishing people is our main choice for dealing with harms. If we want to be a culture built on the cornerstones of healing and relationship, we will need to find ways to embody these values in our approach to accountability.
By modeling clear, compassionate, and dialogue-based systems for accountability, we can prevent the invasive seedlings of harm from growing into weeds which choke out the entire garden of psychedelic healing.
The Opportunity
It’s high time for us to circle up, from our smallest pods to our largest public forums, and form agreements on how we are going to show up as a movement to destigmatize and create safer access to psychedelics. What are our core values, and how do we bring them to life? How do we, as a global community, intend to prevent and respond to situations of harm and abuse? We need to define our agreements and put them into practice at home. Whatever we create together in the microcosm will determine what takes shape in the large scale later on.
In the past few years, I have been involved in many behind-the-scenes conversations where I have been earnestly warned about problematic individuals and organizations in the psychedelic scene. I have been given firsthand accounts of behaviors ranging from ethically questionable to outright violent and predatory.
Perhaps this secretive dynamic is a reflection of the social contract around psychedelics. While the space is splintered, we share a broad collective cause—one that is just beginning to gain legitimacy in the eyes of the government and general public—and thus, we have a call to protect one another. This is a community which generally understands the potential legal and reputational ramifications of outing anyone who is a part of the psychedelic underground for bad behavior. But are we more loyal to the movement for psychedelic access itself, or the people who have been harmed within it?
Over and over, when I hear these accounts, the same questions arise for me:
Have we brought these concerns to the person in question? Is mycelial, grapevine-style dialogue the best way to establish safety amongst ourselves? There must be a better way forward which could actually interrupt patterns of damage and promote reconciliation. I fear that our current non-confrontational approach allows problematic behavior to continue due to our own unwillingness to address it head on.
In addition, each person with this insider knowledge must now carry the burden of sorting out what to do with it. Should I warn everyone I know? Should I approach the person directly? How do we get to the truth of a situation, and at what point (if any) should these truths be made public? Who gets to decide? When should someone be muted, removed from a position of leadership, or barred from participating in community? How do we set terms for their reentry?
These are difficult questions that we need to explore together and within ourselves. Though it is more laborious and does nothing to satisfy our own sense of self-righteousness, there are ways to address problems without calling someone out, cancelling them, or permanently destroying their reputation. The challenge is that each situation is different, so developing a formulaic approach for an entire movement is impossible.
It’s no secret that psychedelics are going mainstream. We have an opportunity to set the tone and shape the culture of this movement by how we conduct ourselves amongst one another, how we cultivate community and how we organize our institutions and advocacy efforts. By modeling clear, compassionate, and dialogue-based systems for accountability, we can prevent the invasive seedlings of harm from growing into weeds which choke out the entire garden of psychedelic healing.
Recently, North Star, a new psychedelic nonprofit, launched the first widespread code of ethics for psychedelic practitioners and organizations, based on input from 100 stakeholders in the field. The seven principles in the North Star pledge are:
Start within
Study the traditions
Build trust
Consider the gravity
Focus on process
Create equality & justice
Pay it forward
These values can serve as guiding lights and a first step toward a culture of accountability. The problem with voluntary creeds like this one is that they are mostly symbolic in nature. Without a clear way to vet those who are self-associating with the pledge, there is no way to know whether someone’s public commitment is deeply rooted or performative. We don’t actually know what an individual or an organization is made of until they have been involved for a while and have been given space to act, connect, contribute, and most likely, be under a little pressure.
Ultimately, the nature of accountability is relational. The act of uncovering messy truths and the challenging processes of responsibility often happens at kitchen tables and park benches, not board rooms and convention stages.
Fortunately, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. The psychedelic community may be new to the justice discussion, but leaders from other disciplines such as Emergent Strategy, mutual aid networks, and prison diversion programs have spent many years engaging with the messy, daily practice of addressing and repairing harm. We would be wise to learn from these leaders. If we do, the psychedelic field will be better off for it.
What Is Accountability?
The basis of accountability is simple: When damage has been done, there is a healing process that needs to take place. At its most basic, accountability is a cycle of harm, recognition, and repair.
But before we can talk about holding one another accountable, it’s essential that we each develop the practice of holding ourselves accountable. It’s hard, lifelong work to take responsibility for our actions and their impacts; it requires us to labor through our own barriers to receiving critique. Only once we get past our own denial, fragility, and excuses can we reach a place of acknowledgment and growth. While reconciliation isn’t always guaranteed, self-responsibility can open the door to remaining in community after harm has been caused. This long-term work rarely happens in isolation—it happens in our homes, partnerships, friendships, professional collaborations, and within the larger movements we champion.
Accountability takes many different forms.
Self-accountability, which is about as sexy as steamed kale, begins with identifying our values. It asks each of us to recognize that we live in an interconnected world in which our actions have immediate and indirect impacts. Once we have clarified our value system, we must then cultivate the practice of tracking whether or not our behavior is aligned with these values. But we all have blind spots; this is why we need community.
Interpersonal accountability can be enticing. On one hand, there’s some primal part of us that feeds off of scandalous news when someone in the community goes rogue. There is an impulse to see folks who are doing damage taken down; perhaps witnessing these takedowns makes us feel superior. Maybe punishment creates an illusion of safety, or at least, demonstrates that the community has boundaries and agreements we can all lean on. The responsibility here is to ensure that before we expend energy confronting others about their behavior, we check ourselves. We need to ask: “Am I the best person, and is this the best time, to call this person in? Is there inner work that I am responsible for at this moment? And importantly, am I ready to participate in a process without doing further damage?”
Then there’s institutional accountability—the fantasy we can’t seem to get enough of. Mainstream media publishes pieces vilifying Compass Pathways and ATAI Sciences, and we eat it up and express our outrage on comment threads and podcasts. Perhaps this is because it is easy to see large corporations as faceless, evil monsters to rail against. But again, we have to go deeper—who is leading these organizations? What worldviews and assumptions are they operating under? What wounds might be beneath the problematic behaviors we love to hate? And importantly, what are the ugly parts within ourselves that are so uncomfortably reflected in their behaviors?
Within a movement like the psychedelic resurgence, accountability becomes a long term process of choosing to stay in relationship. We set out to do this while understanding that as flawed humans, we will certainly hurt one another and we need clear agreements, safety parameters, and systems for repair. While it isn’t always safe or possible to keep people in community who have done harm, it is a pursuit which can create more opportunity for long-term healing than the scorched-earth mentality of punishment and eradication.
When reimagining the idea of safety within community, there are two terms that are often used interchangeably: restorative and transformative justice. While they are related, they have key differences.
The United Nations Working Group on Restorative Justice (RJ) defines it this way: “A process whereby parties with a stake in a particular offense resolve collectively how to deal with the aftermath of the offence and its implications for the future. In essence, we seek to repair the harms caused by crime and violence.” The process seeks to restore the conditions that were present before a harm took place. RJ efforts often work in tandem with local judicial systems. Check out these firsthand accounts of the accountability process from Restorative Justice Victoria.
Transformative Justice (TJ) goes even deeper. It seeks to address the context in which harms occurred and, through a community-centered approach, catalyze long-term shifts in the very fabric of society. This can serve to not only prevent harm, but to create conditions that lead to healing and thriving, as well.
For years, transformative justice efforts have been a part of the movement toward building healthier, more intact communities and reducing the reliance on policing as our only means of creating safety. It is a holistic approach which focuses first on resourcing the victims/survivors of harm, who are often erased within the punitive justice system. Rehabilitating the person responsible is a secondary consideration, in the spirit of prevention. In addition, it holds an eye toward the source and root cause of the harm, rather than treating individual situations as isolated incidents. This enables us to make systematic shifts which can ultimately ripple outward and help reshape the culture of our communities as a whole.
Transformative justice understands that the harms we inflict upon one another are the downstream effects of larger dysfunctions within our society. They may stem from a culture shaped by scarcity, disconnection, domination, and generational trauma. In order to truly prevent harms from repeating, we have to transform the underlying issues and the belief structures that uphold them.
Interrogating our community standards and assumptions, strengthening interdependence, and addressing the root causes of harm are at the heart of transformative justice.
Benefits of the Transformative Justice Approach
Enables intervention before small harms and patterns escalate into major problems
Centers the needs and experiences of survivors or those impacted
It enables all involved to increase their capacity for clear communication, generative conflict, and ownership of responsibility
It creates opportunity for the person who has done harm to reflect on and understand the impact of their actions
It requires an actionable plan for repair
It cultivates greater safety, resilience and trust within the community
Limitations of Transformative Justice
Accountability processes sometimes happen months or years after an incident has occurred
Defining repair is much harder when death or major damage has occured
Results are slower and more systemic (we have to be invested in the long view)
Confrontation can be extremely uncomfortable
Those who are confronted cannot be coerced into accountability processes
Making amends doesn’t often have a clear timeline or resolution
Community involvement over time is required
Potential Misuse of Transformative Justice
People who aren’t committed to their inner work may harness the language or tools of accountability in an attempt to control situations or deflect culpability
People may repeat serious harms over time and rely on the optics of transformative justice to save face when held accountable
Those invested in upholding existing power structures may discourage efforts toward transformative justice, as it is rooted in systemic change
What If We Are All Responsible?
There is a tempting, self-righteous satisfaction in punishing or cancelling people we view as problematic. Part of why punitive systems exist within our society is because they allow us to rely on a convenient binary. When we frame complex situations in right/wrong, good/bad, or involved/not involved, we get a free pass to look the other way. Effectively, we absolve ourselves of the nuanced and laborious process of conflict transformation.
Community based approaches to healing can have major benefits, but they require work. If the goal of accountability is to interrupt cycles of harm and create long term vitality in our communities, we must also work to create healthier systems at the root level. This reimagining takes all of us. In an interview with the Barnard Center for Research On Women, Esteban Kelly, co-founder of AORTA (Anti-Oppression Resource & Training Alliance), put it this way:
“[Transformative justice] distributes the culpability a bit. Which isn’t to say it is even, but everyone holds some amount. What environment enabled the silencing to go on, such that this pattern was able to continue until a crisis? What allowed things to escalate? What were the subtle hints around male supremacy, sexism, white supremacy, or different forms of class power that gave people hidden messages that this was acceptable or that we’re not going to intervene?”
Steps of Accountability in Transformative Justice
Transformative justice acknowledges that there are no quick fixes to complex problems. Calling someone in is a first step, but there is no way of knowing how they will respond. Given the complex dynamics which can often lead to damaging behavior, it is possible that someone will refuse to participate in peacemaking efforts. If they are willing, however, a loose framework can look this way:
Identifying the harm: A problematic behavior or pattern is identified, either by the individual, someone affected, or the surrounding community.
Calling in: The person in question is called in. (Learn about the differences between calling in and calling out here.) If you are called in, it may take some time to wade through your initial reaction and emotional activation, but ultimately, see if you can receive the call to accountability as a loving act. You are being invited to change a behavior instead of being rejected because of it.
Taking responsibility: Feeling badly or saying sorry isn’t enough here. True accountability requires that we take responsibility for our actions and identify where we had freedom of choice when we may have felt we had no options.
Commitment to repair: The person responsible dedicates themself to repairing the harms that were caused.
Clarifying agreements and actionable steps: Ideally, those impacted will be involved in the decision making process around what repair should look like. The more specific you can be, the better. For example, if the person responsible is in leadership, do they need to be asked to step down from their platform for a set period of time? If someone has harmed another person in the community directly, do they need to help cover the cost of healing services?
Following up and ongoing relationship: This is where the rubber meets the road. Change takes time, and the process is not linear. To fulfill agreements and develop new habits, people need to be held in community while also keeping those who have been harmed safe.
The above model is not a hard and fast formula, but more of a roadmap through common situations. Sometimes, harm is so deep and shattering that basic steps toward repair may seem simplistic. For example, what if someone dies during an underground medicine retreat or a clinical trial? Worse, what if there are efforts to conceal or rewrite the narrative of what has happened? When facing situations where loss of life has occurred, the family of the deceased must be heard and empowered to define what efforts toward repair feel supportive on their own terms.
But, what if the person in question refuses to accept responsibility? What if the survivor or person impacted has no interest in being a part of an accountability process? Can Transformative Justice principles still serve when the process is less tidy?
I spoke with Esteban Kelly about his perspectives on creating a culture of accountability within movements. In addition to being a co-founder and worker-owner of AORTA Co-op, he also spent fifteen years as a volunteer member of Philly Stands Up!, a community-based transformative justice collective which worked directly with people who caused harm in sexual assault situations. Through PSU!, Kelly amplified the lessons of transformative justice to help local communities navigate scenarios of interpersonal harm and healing.
“If someone won’t be accountable, we are not going to do something coercive, contribute to call-out culture, or publicly shame them. We ask survivors, please don’t do a public take-down of this person; we’re not calling to cancel people. Instead, we might suggest that communities mute them or say they should not be platformed, but we ultimately want to draw people back into networks of trust. We want to direct resources and coaching to them so they are more capable of the change those around them know they need.”
Developing Muscle Memory in the Accountability Process
Accountability is a process, not an end point we arrive at. It requires acknowledging and taking responsibility for the harm that’s been caused, making amends however possible, and taking steps to change behavior so the harm does not continue. This requires that we develop skills in introspection, communication and sitting with discomfort. It requires us to ask, “What are the actions I can take to make things as right as possible, given that I can’t go back and undo what was done?”
Theoretically, these practices could transfer seamlessly into the psychedelic community. Is this a utopian vision, or is there hope for a lasting, truly just psychedelic movement that doesn’t self-destruct during its ascent? That depends on how committed we are to the process of change, first within ourselves and our immediate circles. Kelly offers up the long view:
“This rhythm of theory, action, and reflection has to be iterative and constantly evolving. What are we trying to do at a societal level if we can’t even figure it out in our own communities? These small exercises are maps and instructions for how we can reprogram things at a larger scale.
“Transformative justice doesn’t really make sense until you are involved in testing it out and applying it in the laboratory of your life. Testing it out in low-stake situations will help these concepts make sense. Then, when the going gets tough, you have muscle memory to handle more difficult scenarios.
“There’s a certain role that everyday facilitators and community organizers can play. Right now, that is where the gap is. So, how can we rise to the occasion ourselves to take these skills that seem professionalized and translate them into everyday skills? Transformative justice is not about running social services through non-profits and institutions. Those may be effective for other things, but there’s something else that can happen in a less codified way, in these intimate TJ settings, and that’s the change we’re trying to achieve.”
In other words, change begins at home. We’ve got to redefine justice on a personal level and learn to be accountable for ourselves and our immediate circles before we’re ready to make institutional change. Here are a few places to start:
Accountability: What Each Of Us Can Do Right Now
Invite mentors and elders into your life
Commit to a practice of brutally honest personal reflection
Get in touch with your body. Notice what comes up when you feel guilty, ashamed, threatened, accused, or misunderstood. Notice these emotions in minor situations and develop tools for managing them
Practice rupture and repair cycles in personal relationships
Learn how to apologize effectively
Develop capacity for uncomfortable conversations
Ask your peers for feedback
Create a culture of radical honesty & authenticity in your relationships
Practice following through on your commitments
Enlist a specific set of trusted “tough love” peers to be in close proximity and call you in when needed
How do we choose the right people to be our inner circle of accountability? Kelly lays out some considerations.
“It might not be your best friend. It might be your coworker, sibling, or neighbor. It’s more about the quality of the relationship than the quantity of people. Who do you share a depth of trust with? Where are the spaces in your life where you can receive direct feedback? The broken conditions of the world can feed into our ideas of victimization and defensiveness.
“When you’re activated, you may not be able to really hear critique. But who can, despite all of this, hang in there through the worst of the hurdles you put up; to have compassion for your human experience and essentially bear hug you into accountability? Who can say: ‘Yes, you can scream, cry, yell, etc. I’m able to hear your initial round of deflection and excuses. I may or may not validate them. But now that that’s off your chest, can you get to a place where you’re able to listen? It may be weeks or months later, but I’ll be here as a support person.’”
Healing For Our Descendants
The theory of transformation is one thing; the embodied, lived experience of it is something else entirely. As many of us can attest, the cosmic downloads we receive during a psychedelic experience may be profound, but the real magic happens as we integrate these insights into our lives. The same is true for accountability: Documentaries, books, and philosophy of change are solid starting points, but they carry with them a call to integrate this new knowledge meaningfully into our lives.
Integrity begins within ourselves, then expands into our relationships, our networks, and ultimately, as an extension, perhaps even the global community. Just as raindrops fill a stream, streams feed into rivers, and rivers become the ocean, it’s impossible to separate the individual from the collective.
How long might it take to really see a shift we envision? When will accountability, rather than punishment, be the norm?
“Realistically, we probably need another… fifty years of actively changing.” Esteban tells me. “Keep in mind, we don’t just suddenly ‘REACH SCALE’. Society changes through gradual, and sometimes speedy, transformation, but even that takes time to take root.”
Fifty years! In the psychedelic context, when we talk about the medicine of ancestral healing, we’re not just talking about healing backwards in time. We’re also healing for our descendants. We have the opportunity to pass along a heritage more healed and intact than what we’ve inherited. Healing our ancestral lines while we’re still living will likely take our whole lifetimes; this is a beautiful, fundamental expression of accountability. We are taking what we’ve been given, understanding its roots and working to transform it.
We not only need each other, we also need to trust and be trusted. We can acknowledge the windows of opportunity before us, but let’s commit to the long path and remind one another of the healing vision and our deep belonging when the noise gets too loud or our shadows come out to play.
Rebecca Martinez is a Xicana writer, parent and community organizer born and raised in Portland, Oregon. She is a co-founder of the Fruiting Bodies Collective, an advocacy group, podcast and multimedia platform addressing the intersections between healing justice and the psychedelics movement. Rebecca served as the Event & Volunteer Coordinator for the successful Measure 109 campaign, an unprecedented state initiative which creates a legal framework for psilocybin therapy in Oregon. She is also the author of Edge Play: Tales From a Quarter Life Crisis, a memoir about psychedelic healing after family trauma, spiritual abuse, and police violence. She serves on the Health Equity Subcommittee for Oregon’s Psilocybin Advisory Board as well as the Board of Advisors for the Plant Medicine Healing Alliance.
What is “moral injury” and how might psychedelics help?
Moral injury refers to the biopsychosocial-spiritual suffering stemming from participating, witnessing, or learning about events that transgress one’s deeply held moral beliefs (Litz et al., 2009; Shay, 2004). Moral injury is not a new construct, and the idea of a “soul wound” has long been evident in the writings of Homer and Plato. However, over the past 15 to 20 years, the term moral injury has resurged as a focus within the field of clinical psychology and psychiatry. At the same time, psychedelics are similarly experiencing a renaissance. Is this mere coincidence or an indication of a deeper underlying process at play? How might psychedelics hold promise for healing moral injury?
Moral injury is not a psychiatric diagnosis (Farnsworth et al., 2017; Jinkerson, 2016), but it can include feelings of guilt, shame, anger, disgust, and sadness, thoughts of personal regret and systemic failures, and avoidance and self-handicapping behaviors (Ang, 2017). Considered to be more “syndromal” than “normative” moral pain, moral injury is associated with significant impairment in relational, health, and occupational functioning as demonstrated by poorer trajectories in these areas (e.g., Maguen et al., 2020; Purcell et al., 2016).
Although the two often co-exist, moral injury is distinct from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). While PTSD is largely rooted in and characterized by fear-based conceptualizations (i.e., focus on life threat, victimization) and symptoms, moral injury is rooted in perpetration, complicity, and betrayal and characterized by moral emotions (guilt, shame, spiritual conflict). Largely studied in the context of military experiences (see Griffin et al., 2019 for review), researchers have bifurcated morally injurious events into transgressions (by others and self) and betrayal (Bryan et al., 2016; Nash et al. 2013). However, morally injurious events are not limited to certain people or contexts, but rather range widely (e.g., killing in combat, deciding which COVID-19 patient gets a ventilator in resource-poor settings, witnessing police violence against people of color, being ordered to break rules of engagement, institutional betrayal in sexual assault cases) (e.g., Badenes-Ribera et al., 2020; Smith & Freyd, 2013; Litam & Balkin, 2021).
In my professional experience, those who experience moral injury stemming from transgression they themselves committed (either through action or inaction) can often carry deeply painful thoughts of “being a monster” and often engage in various forms of self-punishment and isolation in order to “protect others from themselves.” Most often, self-forgiveness feels like “letting oneself off the hook” for what was done, which is unacceptable. This deep sense of accountability, of course, reflects the actual inherent goodness and strong moral compass within the individual. Those who have experienced betrayal and transgression by others may find it especially difficult to trust people, carrying deep existential wounds about the goodness of humanity. However, most often, those struggling with moral injury have experienced all three of these types of wounds to various extents.
Moral injury is in essence a social wound, predicated on the morals and values constructed and shaped by communities and society (Scheder, Mahapatra, and Miller, 1987; DePrince, & Gleaves, 2007; Litam & Balkin, 2021). But how does one heal a social wound? Evidence based treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a related ailment, yield underwhelming efficacy especially in veterans, with up to 60% not experiencing meaningful improvement (Steenkamp, Litz, & Marmar, 2020). One reason for this may be that these approaches are not adequately addressing moral injuries within traumatic stress responses. Interestingly, the mental health field generally tries not to discuss morals, and yet it is clear that trauma and suffering are inextricable from morality. The false assumption of moral neutrality is deeply damaging and has allowed the mental health field to largely bypass the “moral” nature of trauma, war, and discrimination.
Relatively antithetical to current PTSD treatments, individuals struggling with moral injury need the moral violations acknowledged and held, rather than cognitively restructured away. Even in our approaches to healing, the Western mental health field places high value on the role of the individual as both the source of the problem and the solution, rather than the collective or society. In other words, it’s an individual’s “problem” and it’s on them to do the work to “heal themselves.” Much of current research is an exemplar of this through attempts to pinpoint just what’s wrong in the person’s biology, thinking, or feeling that leads them to be this way rather than searching for and acknowledging the larger truth that often trauma is a form of societal abandonment.
Thus, moral injury has been shied away from at least in part because it requires us to collectively acknowledge and take responsibility for the traumas that happen and their moral roots. Indeed, more often than not, those with transgression by self-related moral injury withhold these experiences from the therapist out of fear of moral judgment. People are often unsure if the person can confront and hold the truths of war and the dark side of humanity without restructuring it away. The same is often true for transgressions by others and betrayal related to racial trauma. However, to heal moral injury necessitates that we carry our share of the weight by confronting the social responsibility we have for each other. In other words, to move through moral injury, a society must actively incorporate and care for their individuals.
Individuals struggling with moral injury need the moral violations acknowledged and held, rather than cognitively restructured away.
Indeed, a recent groundbreaking study in warriors from Turkana, a non-Western, small-scale society, showed the robust buffering effects of having explicitly moral-affirming cultural norms, social responsibility, and integration (Zefferman & Matthew, 2021). This is in line with recent efforts to incorporate community healing ceremonies into treatment for veterans. For example, Cenkner, Yeomans, Antal, and Scott (2020) found a ceremony in which veterans shared testimony on their moral injury with the general public significantly decreased depression, and improved self-compassion, spiritual struggles, personal growth, and psychological functioning. These findings provide preliminary evidence of the healing potential of communitas for moral injury, which is where psychedelics come in.
Psychedelics may create the opportunity for individuals to connect with the prosocial sense of communitas inherent in us all. Psychedelic compounds including empathogens (e.g., MDMA), classic psychedelics (e.g., psilocybin, LSD, ayahuasca), and dissociatives (e.g., ketamine) may provide both the context and content needed to treat moral injury. Psychedelics have the ability to “reopen” critical windows to feelings, thoughts, perceptions, and sensations previously blocked by the ego’s well-intended presence (Brouwer & Carhart-Harris, 2020). Psychedelics induce interactive neural and neuromodular effects across whole brain systems (Carhart-Harris & Friston, 2019), which translate to a context in which rigid patterns of thinking, relating, and feeling are relaxed, allowing for more psychological flexibility (Davis, Barrett, & Griffiths, 2020).
Beyond providing the flexible ego-relaxed context, psychedelics may also “naturally” generate the content for treating moral injury and PTSD. Unlike evidence-based therapies, psychedelic-assisted therapies use non-directive approaches and although there is certainly preparation, there is no way to “enforce” what material is covered during dosing sessions. Despite this, evidence across numerous studies reveals psilocybin and other classic psychedelics consistently incline users toward confronting traumatic material and salient autobiographical memories, which relate self through past, present, and future (i.e., self-definition, expectations) (Camlin et al., 2018; Gasser et al., 2015; Malone et al., 2018; Watts et al., 2017). This is representative of the innate healing wisdom within each person. Much like how the body’s cells know what to do when a physical wound happens, the psyche on psychedelics appears to be naturally directed to the wound, toward confronting suppressed traumatic material, and limiting self-other concepts in need of healing.
There has been no empirical investigation to date into the use of empathogens (e.g., MDMA) or classic psychedelics as a treatment for moral injury. However, MDMA has been extensively studied as a treatment for PTSD, with very promising efficacy in reducing symptoms in combat veterans (Mithoefer et al., 2018). Announced this year, Drs. Amy Lehmer and Rachel Yehuda at the Bronx VA will be conducting a study using MDMA to treat moral injury in veterans (Lehmer & Yehuda, 2021). MDMA holds much promise for healing moral wounds in those who served, likely through its empathogenic qualities. Of particular relevance to military populations, MDMA may facilitate moral injury recovery through increases in self-other forgiveness and self-other compassion. It may help those suffering from moral injury disclose the experiences and get unblocked from beliefs about deserving to suffer and the unacceptability of forgiveness.
To elucidate this point, I spoke with John*, a Special Operation Forces post-9/11 veteran who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. John has also used psychedelics to treat his moral injury and PTSD.
John shared, “MDMA has allowed me to pull back from how I view the actions I took during war. I now see what I did as reactions to my environment based on the limited insights I had in a moment. The military created me, created my wolf mindset. I see now that I was just operating from how they made me. It’s given me the ability to see myself from a distanced perspective, and I can more accurately see cause and effect without judging myself. I used to view these experiences with just endless pits of guilt and shame, and now I see myself and what I did with much more compassion and forgiveness instead.”
Classic psychedelics may also provide unique benefit for moral injury through the opportunities of mystical experiences and ego-dissolution. Unlike MDMA (Holze et al., 2020), classic psychedelics can induce mystical and ego-dissolution experiences, which can include feelings of boundlessness, oneness with the larger world and reality, a sense of being eternal, and feelings of sacredness (Griffiths et al., 2008; James, Robershaw, Hoskisn, & Sessa, 2019). These experiences can foster a sense of personal meaning or purpose, often depleted in the wake of moral injury, and may offer an alternative felt sense to “feeling damaged or bad.”
The ego-relaxing effects of default mode network disruption may allow for the concept of self and others to be examined and redefined to integrate broader, more complex (e.g., “I’m a father, soldier, caretaker, friend”) versus singular organizations (e.g., “I’m a soldier”). Specific traumatic and morally injurious events can be “de-centered” or “de-weighted” from a person’s identity (Bernsten and Rubin, 2006); which could be considered akin to being able to do parts work (e.g., Jungian archetypes, Internal Family Systems). Relatedly, there is a strong body of evidence showing the effect of classic psychedelics on fostering prosocial affect and cognitions typically impoverished in moral injury such as self-other forgiveness, self-compassion, and connection (Carhart-Harris et al., 2016; MacLean et al., 2011; Pokorny et al., 2017; Preller et al., 2020; Wagner et al., 2017).
Classic psychedelic induced ego-dissolution and noetic experiences (e.g., oneness) may also aid in restructuring the “self” by highlighting our true connectedness with others, the natural world, and spirituality previously hidden by psychic pain. So often, those with moral injury report having lost their faith because what happened, or having their faith turn into solely a source of self-condemnation. Spirituality is often shied away from or at best, selectively present in the mental health field despite substantial ethical guidelines suggesting otherwise. The ubiquity of spirituality in psychedelic experiences will hopefully serve as a catalyst for the mental health field to fully incorporate this essential healing ingredient moving forward. Indeed, mystical and ego-dissolution experiences are consistently shown to be critical for positive treatment outcomes (e.g., Carhart-Harris et al., 2018; Griffiths et al., 2016; Haijen et al., 2018; Roseman, Nutt, & Carhart-Harris, 20118; Ross et al., 2016), suggesting the extent to which “I” can become “we” or “one/all” is important for alleviating psychiatric suffering. It also therefore stands to reason that both individual and group psychedelic-assisted therapies may be of particular benefit to moral injury. One could even imagine the therapeutic potential of complementing psychedelic assisted therapies with community liturgy approaches like those described above.
Consistent therapy and ritualistic medicine sessions with psychedelics has given me the ability to rise out of the grip that guilt and shame had on me. I no longer feel like I don’t deserve to have a good life.
Although there has been no investigation on moral injury to date, there is some converging supportive evidence for classic psychedelics. In gay-identified long-term AIDS survivors who had lived through many potentially morally injurious events in the 1980s and 1990s, psilocybin-assisted group therapy significantly reduced demoralization, a form of existential suffering characterized by loss of meaning, hopelessness, and poor coping (Anderson et al., 2020). Half of the sample reported reductions in demoralization of 50% or greater by the end of treatment. In people with substance misuse, psilocybin and ibogaine increase acceptance of past behavior and self-other forgiveness and reduce guilt, respectively (Bogenschutz et al., 2018; Heink, Katsikas, & Lange-Altman, 2017). Similarly, psilocybin induces realizations of being a “good person” in people with treatment resistant depression (Watts et al., 2017). These findings hint at the potential of classic psychedelics to change relationships to past wrongdoings and heal existential wounds, but experimental evidence is needed.
When asked about possible differences across types of psychedelics, John shared:
“I’ve used psilocybin, LSD, and ayahuasca for the strict purpose of working on myself. These medicines have allowed me to perceive myself, my actions/behaviors as part of the collective whole of humanity. They’ve created a sense of being a super-organism of humanity! When I got back from war, I didn’t belong. I didn’t know this world, I had been in war for five years, all of my adult life to date. I knew I wasn’t really welcome… people didn’t know what to do with what I had been through so I didn’t talk about any of it. I did go to therapy and got cognitive therapy. It helped, but honestly, it barely scratched the surface. There was a level of being blocked that I just couldn’t break through and I just couldn’t get past the shame. But, as I’ve continued to work with psychedelics, I’ve been able to experience my ego dissolve, I felt integrated with all others, even stretching beyond humanity and merging with all forms of life and matter. The lasting guilt and shame from the harm that I caused people because of my actions and inactions has shifted to a more understanding and forgiving stance. War still pops into my mind within the first minutes of waking every morning, but consistent therapy and ritualistic medicine sessions with psychedelics has given me the ability to rise out of the grip that guilt and shame had on me. I no longer feel like I don’t deserve to have a good life. I can see my badness, but I can see my goodness, too. I still have the number of harms I’ve done in my head, but I am focused now on living a full life, doing enough good helping others that maybe one day will balance out that number.”
The rising trend of both psychedelics and moral injury suggest a communitas evolution. The symbiotic renaissance is evidence that society is increasingly tiring of the false perception of individuality. Acknowledging the ineffable truth of our interconnectedness and interdependence on each other for safety and wellbeing is the path to healing—for moral injury and for all of us.
In sum, I leave you with these questions: If moral injury is a social wound, is depression not also a social wound? Is addiction not a social wound? How might reworking the current psychiatric model to legitimize the moral fallout of trauma change the way we understand and treat psychic pain?
*John is a pseudonym as the veteran wishes to remain anonymous.
*Even though this article speaks to the benefits of those with moral injury using psychedelics, it is no way advocated that such individuals should seek to self-medicate. In sharing his story, John* would like to make it clear that he is not advocating for others to self-experiment as he did, rather, his aim is to spark interest in researchers to find more data on this in hopes of providing relief for others.
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About the Author
Dr. Amanda Khan is a licensed clinical psychologist in private practice in California and researcher at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). She specializes treating trauma, PTSD, and anxiety and depression and offers depth work, evidence-based treatments, and post-psychedelic integration. She has worked as an independent contractor on MAPS MDMA-enhanced psychotherapy for PTSD clinical trials for the past four years. Dr. Khan is trained ketamine-assisted psychotherapy and will serve as psilocybin therapist on the phantom limb UCSD clinical trial in the Fall. She is also currently enrolled in the MAPS MDMA Therapy Training Program. Dr. Khan serves as Chair for the Moral Injury special interest group for the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS). She writes for Medium and Stress Points, and regularly gives talks and workshops on moral injury as well as working with gender and sexual orientation diverse people. In her spare time, she eats a questionable amount of tahini and enjoys hiking with her partner.
A former NAVY SEAL struggling with PTS and TBI is granted ibogaine and 5-MeO treatment in Mexico by an anonymous donation through VETS, and returns home with more than he could have ever imagined.
Whoever paid for me… thank you.
It was the most profound weekend of my life.
I didn’t expect too much. I guess I anticipated that this would be like most of the other “cutting edge” treatments for my traumatic brain injury and post traumatic stress: pretty cool, it’d help a bit, I’d be grateful, but that’d be about it.
But here I am, two weekends from my treatment, struggling to find the words to accurately convey how transformative this was for me—how transformative it will be for any of us who are willing to let go, really. I keep typing things and then erasing them, thinking I must sound like a crazy person—some wild-eyed zealot who’s just too far-out to relate to. But then I think… this is the most far-out thing I have ever experienced in this life and whatever crazy talk I throw at you won’t be crazy enough to cover what went down.
In other words: I expected a firecracker and I got about six pounds of C4.
I guess I’ll just stop struggling for adjectives and “as ifs” and just tell you my story. Keep in mind please, as I do, that I can’t stand hippie, new age bullshit, and while I grew up in the church, I’m not particularly religious.
So yeah… joke’s on me.
We’re first introduced to the rest of the group via Signal secure text messaging. I’m stoked to see that a classmate of mine from BUD/S, whom I hadn’t seen in almost 20 years, is going to be there, but the other guys I don’t know. Everyone seems a little held back, but that’s to be expected considering the circumstances.
We meet in San Diego on Friday afternoon for lunch, which is to be our last meal for the day, as we need to be in a fasted state for the ibogaine treatment that night. Little did I know that it would be pretty much the last thing I’d eat until lunch on Sunday.
After an uneventful drive of several hours, we arrive at the treatment house in Mexico and everything kicks into gear as a smoothly-functioning operation. The facilitators arrange the spaces, the doctor and his medical staff take urine samples, do EKGs on all of us, start IVs, and lay out some pretty impressive medical support gear for what I imagined to be a fairly low-risk event.
A photo by the author of where the Ibogaine session took place.
**Quick aside here: when I signed up for this, I thought it would be beneficial, sure, but as I started doing the preparatory work that I was sent by the organization, weirdly, things started coming up. Family issues. Relationships. Parts of me and things I’d seen and done that I’d buried out of shame or disgust. They said, “The medicine would start working before you take it,” and it really did. So by this point, I was open to something a lot more than what it appeared to be on the surface. So back to our story….
Evening approaches, and we gather around the fireplace. There’s an air of solemnity, but I can tell not all of us are bought in. Or maybe just none of us are at 100% yet. Most of us are pretty closed off, if still willing. It’s just kind of a SEAL thing, I guess.
We write down what we want to leave behind, and we take turns burning our paper in the fire. It’s quiet except for the crackle from the flames, and then the doc passes out our ibogaine doses (measured for our bodyweight) in little wooden bowls. It feels like a sacrament.
Solemnly, we take our medicine, and one by one, the facilitators lead us upstairs to be saged and smudged as a cleansing before moving to our mattresses. Curiously, the cleansing has a gravitas and weight to it that crumbles and dismisses all the shallow and thin echoes of spirituality in yoga studios and SoulCycles across Los Angeles. I receive it with humility.
Settling in on our mattresses, it’s dark. Only flickering candles and the fading light from the sun just below the ocean’s horizon remain to illuminate the room. The medical staff move quietly through, attaching heart monitor leads and O2 clips on our fingers and chests. Once they complete their tasks, I pull my eyeshade down over my eyes and lay back to wait.
Hyper-attentive to my mind and body, several times over the next half-hour, I think, “Is this it?… No… not yet…”
And then it comes.
Uber-detailed and realized visions flood my mind’s eye. They’re nightmares in 4K. I’ve never seen anything with the detail and clarity through my physical eyes that I’m experiencing now. I am completely in a dream yet 100% in my body. Unknowable machines possessed with alien intelligence build and fold out of the space like fractals from some dark pit. Strange visions that make no sense. A nightmare buzzing, like the sky is being chainsawed apart, howls with a clearly defined shape (shape?!) above my head. There’s a loud talking, without cadence or expression, just behind my left ear. It never ceases or pauses and I understand not a word. I open my eyes under the eyeshade and immediately I’m in fields of stars. I close them and I’m back in an alien, machine hell. They told us that if it gets to be too much, raise your eyeshade and you can come out of the visions, but I keep my eyeshade on. I want all of what the medicine has for me.
I begin to dry-heave. I feel hands around me, holding me in a sitting position. The retching is violent and back-to-back, four, five, eight times. Soon I’m laying down again, fighting the urge to vomit. The visions add strange, expressionless, soulless people standing and sitting around me. Again, they’re alien; there is nothing human about them. It must be hours that I try to make sense, assign meaning, figure out the visions, until, worn out, I give up. Just let them come, I think, and I let go.
Innumerable hours pass, or is it minutes? I try to move my arm and my leg, and while I can, nothing’s coordinated. It’s as if I’m operating a crane, and while I can pull one lever at a time, I can’t make the arm do anything resembling a smooth or efficient motion. I really need to piss but can’t conceive of trying to stand right now.
At some point during the night, six, seven, eight hours later, the “visionary stage” ceases, my mind quiets, and the literal nightmare I’ve been in ends. I’m in a trance-like state now, apparently what they refer to as the “contemplative stage.”
Bullshit.
All I’m contemplating is how tumbled and empty I feel. I still need to piss but can’t move. Unfocused, I feel like I’ve had a hard reset and I’m in the BIOS of the motherboard. Everything is in two-toned, 8-bit graphics. I pull off the O2 monitor and scrape off the eyeshade. I close my eyes but don’t sleep. At some point, I notice the sun rise.
A photo of where the author’s Ibogaine session took place.
Several hours later, I look around the room. All of us are glued to our mattresses in various interpretations of a full-body rictus. No movement.
Sometime later in the afternoon, around three or four I’d guess, I get up and make my way to the restroom and then downstairs. I manage to grab a banana off the counter (which takes a couple tries) and slide down to the floor and eat it. Judging from the expressions on the faces of the staff, I must look like shit… and it appears that they’ve seen this before, or maybe even experienced this themselves.
One of the facilitators comes to me, brings me to the couch, and does some “energy work” on me. I’m too worn out to resist the hippie bullshit… and surprisingly, it helps. A lot. Even though they had no meaning to me, I manage to write down my visions (not that I’ll ever forget them), then make it back upstairs to my mattress.
Several hours later, we attempt dinner. I don’t know how much the other guys manage to get down, but I think I get about two spoonfuls. There’s very little movement and lots of agonized expressions around the table.
Back to bed we go in silence, and in the dark of Saturday night or perhaps the wee hours of Sunday morning, my trance fades and I fall asleep.
When I wake on Sunday morning, I feel like a fever broke in the night. You know the feeling: You’re worn out, exhausted, but you know it’s over. The sickness is gone, leaving only relief.
Still weak, but ravenous, I make it downstairs and as my greedy hands begin to shove food towards my mouth, the facilitator kindly tells me that I still need to be in a fasted state for the 5-MeO-DMT, which we’ll be doing in a few hours.
MORE psychedelics?! I honestly don’t feel up for it. I don’t really want any more than what I’ve just experienced, but I’m in this for the whole enchilada (food metaphors? Fuck, I’m hungry) and I’m committed to following the whole program. I can tell I’m not the only one with hesitation though.
As the rest of the guys make their way downstairs, we gather again around the fireplace and the staff talks us through what’s going to happen next. One of the other guys expresses his doubts about the 5-MeO-DMT, and the facilitator reassures us that this is nothing like the ibogaine. It’s complementary, she says, a nice bookend to what we just experienced. “Hope they’re not matching bookends,” I think.
As she finishes with the brief, the two SEALs there helping out (who had gone through this before) offer a few words: “It’s like a deep dive in the ocean. You’re down 150 feet and it’s beautiful and quiet, and the water pressure is intense, and you’re at peace… but then you look over, and there’s a deep, dark abyss. If you have it in you, go down there. That’s where the jewels are.”
I think we all make up our minds at this point to go all the way, no matter what it feels like.
The staff gives us the order we are to go in and I’m number three of five. They tell us to go wait our turn by the pool, and mention it’s helpful to write what we’re feeling, so I grab my journal and head out to find a private spot by one of the fire pits around the pool. I begin to write, awkwardly, my muscles still not in agreement with my head yet, and I manage to stain the top of a clean page with: “I don’t I.” Frustrated that my hand, brain, and intentions all seem to be separate entities, I try again. This time, slowly, I write:
Ibogaine was a nightmare in 4K that I couldn’t stop or wake up from. I could make no sense of it then or now. I think I had expectations for the medicine as much as I tried not to. I have no expectations of 5-MeO. None whatsoever. It will be what it will be.
I start to put the pen down… but pause… and write:
I feel… different
It’s true. Something’s subtly very different. I write again:
I feel… present
Shocked into an introspective silence, I look inward and feel a clean openness in my soul, like all the accumulated and stored entanglements of my life have been quietly discarded, and I now only recognize they had ever been there by their absence.
Kind of stunned, I sit there with myself and savor the feeling. I haven’t felt this… free since I was probably about twelve. And as I rest in this quiet, subtle peace, awestruck… I hear our first 5-MeO guy scream from the house 50 meters away.
As my turn arrives, I’m led into the house by one of the SEALs helping out. Up the stairs, I’m smudged and saged again, and led into the room. It’s kind of sacred. Candles. Music. The doctor and facilitators have really set the space and I can feel it. Speaking in hushed tones, they sit me up on the single mattress covered in a spotless white sheet, and almost in whispers, describe what’s about to happen. The doctor shows me the vaporizer, inscribed with a medical caduceus, and the three doses of toad venom I’m about to encounter. “The profound from the humble,” I think, and then I’m inhaling the “handshake dose,” just to familiarize me with the process. Easy enough, and with no effects to speak of, I pull my eyeshade over my eyes and we move on to the first real dose. I inhale again as the doctor instructs me, holding for a count of ten, then exhale and fall backwards as instructed.
Only just as I begin exhaling, the world explodes. Gorgeous fractals in vivid primary colors, more detailed and distinct than anything my eyes have ever viewed fills… my field of vision? No… my field of consciousness. I can barely feel that I have a body. Bliss suffuses all of me (what is “me”?) and all I feel is love. I remember what the SEAL downstairs said—that if you can handle it, go deeper. Since I’m able to have these thoughts, I figure there must be room left, so I clumsily signal for another dose. Halfway in my body, I’m pulled to a sitting position and again feel the vaporizer against my lips. Drawing deeply and holding, I hear the doctor count down from five. Far away, he whispers, “Exhale…”
…and I die.
No, really. I die. And here is where words begin to fail.
I feel my body atomize and it’s GONE. I’m in a blackness that is teeming, but warm. Infinite. It’s gentle, but I sense that the gentleness, while truly the essence of this Consciousness, is not all of it, and the power… there is no word that can convey the awesome power of this place. It is infinite possibility. And I? I am a speck, a tiny ripple, a wavelet upon an Ocean so vast and deep, how could I have ever thought; how could I have forgotten that I am no less separate from this great Consciousness than a wave is seperate from the Ocean? How can a ripple be apart from the sea? I am no longer “me,” but still completely “I.” And I remember whatI am.
I feel a scream coming from deep, and it happens—from somewhere I scream, and I hear it as an observer. But here’s the weird(est) thing. Time has no meaning here, and as I hear this scream, I know that this scream is not just from “now.” It’s from five years ago, and 20, and from when I was two, and from when my parents divorced, and from Afghanistan, and from yesterday. The linear time we live in has condensed to a singularity and this scream is from my now, my past, and probably my future.
I don’t know time, space, or have any ties to what I used to know. There is only existence returned from whence I came, and then, at some point in time or space…
…I walk through the Gates of Heaven.
(If you’re still with me, believe me, I know how this sounds.)
Hands around me, bright light more beautiful than anything I have ever seen, and the purest love, acceptance, grace, and right-ness permeates my existence. The greatest feeling I have ever experienced or could possibly imagine is dwarfed by this feeling. I pull my eyeshade off, and with pure wonder and without the slightest insincerity, think, “Are we dead? Are all of you angels?” I lay there on the mattress, alternately weeping with the sorrow of what we’ve lost and laughing with the realization of what we are, and I whisper, “I am born.”
I will never be the same. I wish I could convey more of this experience to you but words are useless. Ibogaine reached deep inside of me and wrapped up all my trauma and sorrow. It wrapped it up in a dark, wet, moldy, wool blanket and when I screamed, it all came out. I walk around every day in awe, feeling this, seeing with new eyes. I didn’t learn anything, I just remembered.
My brain works now too. It’s the strangest thing. Words flow. Thoughts sizzle. Synapses fire and I can discuss, read, think, and elucidate in ways I haven’t been able to in at least 15 years. I feel smart again. All the TBI had made things slow and fuzzy, but these medicines lit up all the lobes, cortices, stems, and folds of my brain and shocked them back into activity (not a scientific analysis, of course). It was starter fluid for my grey matter.
My relationships are healing. My dad and I are reconciling. He’s so happy. So am I.
I’ve been reading everything I can get my hands on regarding this therapy and the history and use of psychedelics (I prefer the newer term, “entheogens” these days—it means to “create the divine within”).
These are not drugs. This is powerful, powerful medicine and it has the potential to do enormous good. These are sacraments that require much of you and will bring you what you need and are prepared for.
It is not the molecule, but the door that it opens.
To my benefactor: thank you. I’m going to do my part to take this newfound remembering and make the world better, and bring it to as many people as I can. And the most unexpected, beautiful realization? The Brotherhood that we fight with, for, and next to—the ones who scar us and scar with us are also the ones healing us. What an amazing thing!!!!
I never thought I’d be signing off like this, but….
Defining sacred reciprocity, exploring the historical use of psychedelics, and establishing ways to give back to the communities who have lost the most holding this ancient wisdom.
Nature exists in a dynamic balance of interconnected relationships and exchanges. When more is taken than returned, the results are depletion, imbalance and system collapse. Many of us in the Global North have the advantage of enjoying psychedelics simply by purchasing them or receiving them as a gift. We are no longer in direct relationship with their roots or required to know where they came from, who grew them, or how they were sourced and produced. We do not bear the historic or contemporary burdens carried by those for whom entheogens are integral to their way of life.
The psychedelic movement is surging, in part because many of us have had the privilege of direct, life-altering experiences with these substances. These medicines, whether grown or synthesized, give generously, often in the form of healing, wonder, reconnection, play and illumination. But they don’t exist in a vacuum. Thankfully, they also offer the capacity for openness—and this unlocks a door to a more nuanced and responsible conversation about where our medicines come from and the impacts of our participation in what has become, for better or worse, a global market.
Just as being good stewards on this Earth requires us to know the stories behind our food, clothing, fuel and devices, we also have a calling to ask deeper questions about psychedelics. What don’t we know about the places, cultures, ecologies, peoples, and complex histories associated with the healing modalities we venerate? In asking these questions, we can uncover practical and meaningful ways to contribute to a culture of reciprocity, sustainability and integrity, toward the benefit of all. Then we can begin to see how this reciprocity lays the groundwork for collective healing.
Sacred reciprocity offers an opportunity to help restore balance to a presently imbalanced system of extraction amidst the global expansion of psychedelics.
Reciprocity requires an exchange of value, to be sure—but it should be a meaningful contribution to which we bring our whole selves, rather than simply a bill that we pay.
What Is Sacred Reciprocity?
Sacred reciprocity is the heartfelt exchange, gratitude, and acknowledgment for everyone and everything that sustains us. In psychedelics, it is a call for those who consume plant medicines to give back meaningfully to the communities and lineages who have preserved these medicines for generations. Indigenous communities bear the impact of the expansion, along with, in many cases, oppression from local governments.
The concept of sacred reciprocity comes from the Quechua word, ayni. Quechua is the Indigenous language of the ancestral peoples of the Andes, specifically Peru. Ayni is a principle of receptivity and gratitude, marked by a lifestyle of giving back in an inhale-exhale type relationship with the natural world.
Even those who consume only lab-based substances can participate in sacred reciprocity through a number of practices detailed here.
The History of Indigenous Psychedelic Use
Here’s a quick and dirty history lesson.
So, where and from whom do our medicines come? What is their traditional use? The following list is by no means exhaustive, and it’s important to remember that many entheogens are found throughout multiple continents and their practices vary between lineages. Additionally, much history has been lost and erased through the process of colonization. We recognize the unnamed groups and honor their heritage from which modern life has been severed.
Psilocybin
Psilocybin-containing mushrooms are sacred to many indigenous communities in Mexico, especially in the mountains of Oaxaca.
Psilocybin mushrooms have confirmed Indigenous roots in Central America, most notably the Mazatec people of Oaxaca, Mexico (recall the oft-told tale of Maria Sabina and R. Gordon Wasson), as well as the Mixtec, Nashua and Zapotec peoples.
It has been theorized that ancient Greeks used a combination of psychedelic mushrooms and ergot fungus in their ceremonial brews. Evidence of ceremonial mushroom use has also been found in Africa, with Algerian cave paintings dating back 9,000 years and psilocybe mushrooms found in Central Africa and South Sudan.
Modern Mazatec people have spoken of the “Hippie Invasion” of the ‘60s and the way the commodification of sacred mushrooms reshaped their communities. Learn more about Mazatec Perspectives on the Globalization of Psilocybin in this article from Chacruna Institute.
Ayahuasca
Ayahuasca, also called caapi, yajé, or yagé, is a ceremonial drink made from the stem and bark of the Banisteriopsis caapi vine and the leaves of Chacruna (Psychotria viridis) or other botanicals. It was first formulated by Indigenous South Americans of the Amazon basin, particularly modern day Brazil, Peru, Colombia and Ecuador. In 2010, a 1,000- year old bundle of shamanic herbs with ayahuasca was found in a cave in Bolivia. Ceremonial use for the Shipibo-Conibo people does not always include chacruna leaves, which contain DMT.
While the Shipibo people are the most well-known tribe associated with ayahuasca medicine, close to 100 distinct Indigenous groups use ayahuasca. The global expansion of ayahuasca tourism (and the Western emphasis on visions and DMT) has led to overharvesting, deforestation, violence, non-Indigenous owned retreat centers and competition between shamans.
In addition, deforestation in the Amazon has reached record highs, which has a global impact on climate instability. Yet, a 2020 study found what many First Nations people have often said and may seem obvious: Collective Indigenous property ownership reduces deforestation and protects human rights, as well as cultural and biodiversity.
Peyote
Peyote is sacred to many Native American and Mexican communities. It contains mescaline.
Peyote is a sacred cactus native to what is now known as the American Southwest, Mexico and Peru. With a human-plant relationship dating back 10,000 years, this ceremonial cactus has been used in rites of passage and annual pilgrimages by Native American and Mexican Indigenous groups for millennia and is inseparable from cultural heritage for many tribes, including the Wixaritari, Raramuri, Yaqui and Cora peoples.
Peyote contains mescaline, a psychoactive substance also found in Huachuma (San Pedro cactus). For the last century, Indigenous groups have fought convoluted government policies, environmental degradation, private land ownership, poaching, mining, and urbanization.
The Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative is a collaborative effort to preserve peyote and ensure the survival of this sacred practice for generations to come. Learn more here.
Huachuma
Known as the grandfather of entheogens, Huachuma (which came to be known as San Pedro after the Spanish Invasion) is a cactus native to Peru and Bolivia. Its use can be traced back 4,000 years. With roots in the Andes, this medicinal plant is associated with the Chavín culture, which laid the foundations for the Inca civilization. Stone temple slabs dating back to 1,300 B.C. show a figure holding a huachuma cactus.
Huachuma contains mescaline, and while it is legal in the United States to grow the cactus for ornamental purposes, consuming mescaline is illegal. Because it grows so much faster than peyote and is more widely available, conservation and Indigenous rights advocates recommend that those who feel called toward a relationship with mescaline choose huachuma rather than peyote. In this way we can preserve peyote in solidarity with the Native American communities for whom it is a sacrament.
Rapé
Tobacco is one of the oldest and most important shamanic medicines in the Americas. It is impossible to separate Indigenous history in the Americas from the ceremonial use of tobacco, known as Mapacho. Rapé (also called Hapé or Rapéh) is a form of sacred Amazonian snuff tobacco. It is made by combining dried tobacco leaves (Nicotiana Rustica) with sacred tree ash and other botanicals and grinding it into a dust-fine powder. Blends are distinct from tribe to tribe and the shamanic process of making rapé can take several weeks. It is known for its grounding and stimulating qualities.
Tobacco is not prohibited in most of the world the way other entheogens are. However, this open legal market has created other concerns. In recent years, an explosion in global interest in rapé has resulted in many white-owned “shamanic supply” businesses popping up online, selling rapé and other Amazonian medicines on web stores and Instagram. It is wise to dig deeper when companies claim they are in partnership with local tribes or have a “trusted source.” Keep in mind that “a portion of proceeds returned to the tribes” and “mutually beneficial relationship” are undefined and potentially exploitative claims and fair trade practices aren’t always readily enforced.
Kambo
Kambo, also known as toad medicine, is a controversial ritual. Historical use of kambo is very different than the modern practice. Hunters in the Matsés tribe of Peru would coat their blow darts with the frog poison, believing that this purified the animal they shot. They would then bring the animal back to their village to be sacrificed and eaten. Kambo is quite different than other Indigenous medicines; the modern practice, as Westerners know it, seems to be a new invention. The first human use of Kambo (for sharpening the skills of hunters) was documented in 1925 by French missionaries. It was popularized in the 1980’s, by investigative journalist Peter Gorman, and numerous patents were also filed at this time.
Sourcing kambo involves first extracting the peptide-rich poison from the body of the Giant Leaf Frog (Phyllomedusa bicolor). This is done by catching the animals and then stressing them so that they secrete their poison, either by stretching their limbs or holding them over a fire. A stick is then used to scrape the gluey secretion from their skin and save it for later use. This biological material is shipped around the world to practitioners who promote it as a detoxification and immunity-building medicine.
Kambo practitioners burn holes in the skin of their clients and then apply the frog secretions to the wounds. The purging and immune response which follows is believed to cleanse the user of ailments and negative energies.
The Giant Leaf Frog is currently threatened by climate change and habitat loss (though it is currently listed as “Least Concern”). Furthermore, patenting kambo is yet an example of bioprospecting, which is a common practice in the incredibly diverse rainforests of the world and has major impacts on the Indigenous communities from which these molecules are sourced.
Ibogaine
Ibogaine comes from the root bark of the iboga shrub, which is native to Gabon in central West Africa. It has been used for centuries by people of the Bwiti religion as a rite of passage and initiation. The preservation and expansion of the Bwiti tradition and iboga medicine has a complex history involving French occupation, displacement, intertribal violence, religious suppression and political marginalization.
Medicalization of ibogaine began in the late 1930s, with decades of intermittent but promising research into its potential to treat substance use disorders, particularly opiate addiction. Its legal status remains complicated and restricted in many countries.
Global enthusiasm about iboga’s healing potential has created problems not unlike those faced by Indigenous Americans with peyote, such as difficulty sourcing medicine for their traditional use and ongoing political struggle to protect their practices.
Wild iboga is currently endangered in Gabon due to poaching, climate change, illegal export to satisfy international demand, urbanization and habitat degradation. As an alternative, iboga can be grown sustainably in greenhouses and farms, and advocates also point to the option of using semi-synthetic ibogaine from the voacanga tree instead.
DMT
DMT has been called the spirit molecule. This powerful, naturally occurring entheogen is concentrated in modern ayahuasca brew, thanks to the presence of chacruna leaves. It is also produced endogenously by a variety of plants, fungi and animals, including toads, salamanders, rats, shrubs, seeds and amanita mushrooms. Some have theorized that the human body even produces DMT at birth and death, and it has been found in the urine of people experiencing schizophrenia and other psychoses. DMT is structurally similar to LSD.
Due to conservation concerns, many in the movement advocate for the use of synthetically derived DMT to avoid contributing to habitat loss and extinction as interest and demand for this medicine grows.
LSD
Ergot fungus growing on rye. LSD is derived from ergot.
While tiny squares of paper blotted with synthesized LSD and printed with cartoon characters may seem the farthest thing from nature, it was first discovered by Swiss chemist, Albert Hoffman, working with ergot, a fungus that grows on rye.
Lab-Made Companions
Synthesized compounds such as LSD, MDMA, ketamine, 2C-B and others need not be excluded from the list of substances deserving of our gratitude. When we partake with intentionality, the journeys give generously back to us. Sacred reciprocity can be viewed as an essential element of psychedelic experience, regardless of the catalyzing substance.
Qualities of Sacred Reciprocity
Now that we have some context for the historical and contemporary issues surrounding entheogens and psychedelic medicines, let’s look at some guiding lights for giving back meaningfully.
Relational Reciprocity
Sacred reciprocity comes with the humble energy of the ask. To seek consent not only from the medicine itself, but also the elders and medicine keepers, is to set aside one’s own agenda in the interest of the larger good. Are we willing to take no for an answer? This is a nuanced question and cultural considerations are different with every entheogen and context. For example, partaking in ayahuasca may have different steps for accountability than partaking in home grown mushrooms. This is why moving at the speed of trust and cultivating lasting relationships is a responsible approach.
Proactive Sacred Reciprocity
Rather than an afterthought, sacred reciprocity can be woven into the entire psychedelic process, from decision making and intention through to integration and daily life. Think ahead and be intentional with how you want to give back. Involve your peers in this shared effort as well, and watch a culture of integrity bloom and flourish before your eyes.
Practical Reciprocity
When we talk about reciprocation, it’s important to focus on impact over intention. How does this action directly benefit the people, ecologies, and futures we seek to support? This is why we recommend backing organizations without intermediaries so that good intentions are not lost in translation.
Grateful Sacred Reciprocity
Every great medicine journey begins with gratitude. Whether in a deeply healing or rambunctiously festive environment, pausing for a few breaths or words of gratitude can have major impact on the ways we relate to the substances we consume, what we bring to the experience, and what we come away with. Thank the medicine, yes— but also thank the ancestors, wisdom keepers, protectors, ecologies, and chemists!
Humble Reciprocity
Readiness to listen and learn is a powerfully healing force. The forces of colonialism, which could have wiped out these medicines completely, are rooted in ideas of superiority and entitlement. Unwinding these attitudes is a process that comes full circle within the very medicine spaces that have been protected for generations.
The concept of ayni is one rooted in a living, dynamic relationship. If we fall into a guilt-driven, transactional mindset of repetitively taking and repaying, we begin to lose the heart of ayni. Reciprocity requires an exchange of value, to be sure—but it should be a meaningful contribution to which we bring our whole selves, rather than simply a bill that we pay.
Informed Sacred Reciprocity
Recognizing the true history of entheogenic medicine is a tough pill to swallow. We all benefit from the sacrifices of Indigenous groups who have preserved their heritage in the face of colonialism, genocide, religious persecution, criminalization and exploitation. Medicine work calls us to awareness. Awareness calls us to relationship. Relationship inspires action. This is a healthy cycle of responsibility that can have far reaching benefits for global healing, if we’re willing to engage with it.
Understanding also enables us to spread knowledge and context within our communities and gradually shift the culture at large.
Multi-faceted Reciprocity
Reciprocity considers the interconnected social, economic, ecological and spiritual factors at play within the global expansion of psychedelics. Offerings of gratitude seek to edify multiple facets of the movement—for example, financially resourcing native communities hit hard by COVID-19 and spreading awareness of entheogen conservation issues among your social circle are tangible ways to give back.
Committed to Sacred Reciprocity
To step into a reciprocal relationship with entheogens means stepping into the right relationship with the Indigenous communities where they originate. It is difficult to imagine an ethical way to consume psychedelics while ignoring the ongoing struggle of the very groups who have shared them with us.
Commit to supporting indigeous survival, thriving and self-determination. This includes the return of power, agency and resources to the original people of the land. The common psychonautic reprise that “we are all one” and desire to “stay out of politics” becomes difficult to justify while directly enjoying the traditions these people have made sacrifices to defend.
Complex global issues are at play here, so nuanced and open-ended relationships are the name of the game. We have to let go of short term solutions and quick fixes. This is a process of unlearning as much as learning—but the alternative is an old story in which we in the Global North unconsciously repeat the harms of the past in more subtle, but equally detrimental ways.
Commit to learning and honoring the lineage and preservation of medicines you consume (studying and sharing this article is a solid start).
Financially support Indigenous-led organizations* The Indigenous Reciprocity Initiative, hosted by Chacruna Institute, offers a directory of community-determined projects which you can support directly. Check it out here.
Use medicines sparingly. These substances are powerful, limited and rapidly declining. Consider ways to spread out your journey work, and make the most of each experience through self-responsibility, preparation and integration.
Grow your own medicines and choose medicines that can be sustainably grown or produced.
Dig into your own Indigenous history. Get into relationship with your ancestry through family, food, research, community and focused journey work. Solidarity reaches deeper when it hits close to home.
Advocate for drug policy reform and work to understand systems of oppression in your community.
No money? Use what you have.
Volunteer time. Many organizations and projects could use help with web-based marketing, fundraising and awareness efforts.
Talk with loved ones about sacred reciprocity.
Cultivate practices that are good for the Earth and its ecosystems in your diet, travel, and consumption habits.
Do journey work specifically focused in prayer for Indigenous protection and thriving.
Commit to the path of interconnectedness. Embrace systems thinking over simplistic solutions.
*The Chacruna Institute makes an important point here: “It is vital that members of the psychedelic community help support Indigenous groups and the traditional ecological knowledge they practice. Many organizations and individuals have a genuine desire to help, but struggle to find ways of connecting directly with local communities. Sometimes, the only option is donating to massive non-governmental organizations (NGOs) based in Western countries. Many who care about the environment and its interdependency with Indigenous lives are aware that money given to large NGOs often fails to reach the people on the ground due to the large infrastructural costs needed to run these organizations. Yet, small grassroots groups doing the most impactful work often labor to connect with people wanting to offer direct support through donations. For this reason, Chacruna has created the Indigenous Reciprocity Initiative of the Americas.”
Conclusion
With so many converging forces in the psychedelic movement, it is refreshing—audacious almost—to envision a community-led path forward that isn’t shaped by “corporadelics” or pharmaceuticals. The culture of sacred reciprocity is a first step toward healing the traumas of the past and present. The potential of the psychedelic resurgence multiplies when we embrace the inherent value of our roots and the lives that sustain this medicine.
Sacred reciprocity is a worthy cause. It requires humility and dedication. There lies before us a chance to live out a new story—one that our descendants will no longer have to spiritually bypass in order to fully enjoy their trip.
Rebecca Martinez is a Xicana writer, parent and community organizer born and raised in Portland, Oregon. She is a co-founder of the Fruiting Bodies Collective, an advocacy group, podcast and multimedia platform addressing the intersections between healing justice and the psychedelics movement. Rebecca served as the Event & Volunteer Coordinator for the successful Measure 109 campaign, an unprecedented state initiative which creates a legal framework for psilocybin therapy in Oregon. She is also the author of Edge Play: Tales From a Quarter Life Crisis, a memoir about psychedelic healing after family trauma, spiritual abuse, and police violence. She serves on the Health Equity Subcommittee for Oregon’s Psilocybin Advisory Board as well as the Board of Advisors for the Plant Medicine Healing Alliance.
Taking a deep look at what Measure 110 did and didn’t do in Oregon, and speaking with one of the measure’s Chief Petitioners, Anthony Johnson, on the future of drug policy reform.
“There’s never been a better time to be a drug policy reform activist,” says Anthony Johnson, a Chief Petitioner of Oregon’s Measure 110. Amid a sea of despairing headlines, it’s refreshing to hear a streak of optimism, especially from someone who has been working in public service for over twenty years.
Measure 110, also known as DATRA (the Drug Abuse Treatment and Recovery Act), received 58% of the Oregon vote in November. Similar to Portugal’s drug approach, the measure decriminalized the personal use and possession of all drugs. In addition, it allocated cannabis tax dollars and prison savings to pay for expanded drug treatment and other vital services. This progressive policy was passed alongside Measure 109, which created a legal statewide psilocybin therapy program.
Measure 110 was implemented statewide on February 1st, 2021. Addiction recovery centers and services must be available in each of the state’s 16 coordinated care organization regions by October, 2021.
What Measure 110 Does:
Removes criminal penalties for low-level possession of drugs. The amounts are as follows:
Under 1 gram of heroin
Under 1 gram, or fewer than 5 pills, of MDMA
Under 2 grams of methamphetamine
Under 2 grams of cocaine
Under 40 units of LSD
Under 12 grams of psilocybin
Under 40 units of methadone
Fewer than 40 pills of oxycodone
Allocates $100 million in state funding to expand behavioral health, addiction, recovery, housing, peer support and harm reduction services and interventions.
Establishes an Oversight and Accountability Council, made up of people who have direct lived experience with addiction, along with service delivery experts.
Reduces the criminal penalty for larger amounts of drugs from a felony to a misdemeanor.
Replaces the misdemeanor charge for small possession (which held a maximum penalty of 1 year in prison and a $6,250 fine) with a fine of $100. This fine can be waived by completing a health screening within 45 day of receiving a citation.
Nearly eliminates racial disparities in drug arrests, according to an independent analysis.
The Measure Does Not:
Legalize or create a regulated supply of drugs.
Change the criminal code related to drug manufacture and sale.
Change the criminal code for other crimes which may be associated with drug use, such as theft and driving under the influence.
I spoke with John Lucy, a Portland-based attorney focused on cannabis and business law, to clarify. He explained that Measure 110 covers all controlled substances, Schedule I through IV. The defined amounts in the bill language were provided for the more well-known drugs. So in short, Measure 110 really does make simple small possession a Class E violation for most drugs (with some A misdemeanors for larger quantities of the drugs listed that don’t meet commercial drug offense guidelines).
To be more specific, substances such as GHB (Schedule I and III), 2C-B (Schedule I) and Fentanyl (Schedule II) are now all class E violations, subject to the new $100 citation.
Why Measure 110 Matters for Racial Justice
The Oregon Criminal Justice Commission (OCJC) is an independent government body which is responsible for research, policy development and planning. In 2020, the Secretary of State released a Racial and Ethnic Impact Report, which explored the potential impacts of Measure 110. The findings make it easier to understand why Oregonians voted overwhelmingly in favor of this measure.
According to analysts, Measure 110 is slated to:
Prevent 8,000 arrests.
Reduce drug convictions of Black and Indigenous Oregonians by a whopping 94%.
Save between $12 million to $48.6 million from ending arrests, jailings, and convictions.
Also noteworthy are the more systemic solutions that could come from this measure. According to the OCJC’s report:
“This drop in convictions will result in fewer collateral consequences stemming from criminal justice system involvement, which include difficulties in finding employment, loss of access to student loans for education, difficulties in obtaining housing, restrictions on professional licensing, and others,” the report says, adding: “Other disparities can exist at different stages of the criminal justice process, including inequities in police stops, jail bookings, bail, pretrial detention, prosecutorial decisions, and others.”
Q & A with Anthony Johnson on Current and Future Drug Policy Reform
The three chief petitioners of Oregon’s Measure 110. From left to right: Haven Wheelock, Janie Marsh Gullickson, and Anthony Johnson.
I spoke with Chief Petitioner of Measure 110, Anthony Johnson, about the treatment-not-jails approach and where he hopes the drug policy reform movement will go next.
Rebecca Martinez: It’s a little late, but congratulations on the passage of 110. What a huge accomplishment!
Anthony Johnson: It’s a step in the right direction. Oregon took a big sledgehammer to the failed drug war. But I would say there is still more work to be done around the criminal justice element, making sure that harm reduction, treatment, and recovery programs are fully funded. And there’s still more work to be done expunging past criminal offenses that people have suffered from.
RM: Do you foresee new organizations being formed under this measure, or will the funding go to expand existing ones?
AJ: Right off the bat, at least with the initial funds, it will go to groups like Central City Concern and Bridges to Change that set up sober housing living situations and want to expand their programs so they can help people find places to live, get job training and experience, and be able to move on with their lives. Programs like that can expand. There could be rural organizations that understand there are places in Oregon where people have to travel hours to receive drug treatment. Groups could get funding for mobile units and meet people where they are. And then we have organizations like Outside In, who may want to expand the ability to provide NarCan, or fentanyl-testing supplies so that lives can be saved.
So in the short term, it will be organizations that are already up and running, doing good work and have experience applying for these types of funding sources. Over time, I could see new organizations established based upon lessons learned and the needs of the community.
Navigating Psychedelics for Clinicians and Therapists starts up again on May 20th. Reserve your seat today.
RM: When it comes to drug testing [as in checking for purity, not to be confused with urine drug testing], is this something we currently have in some form, and if not, is it legal and allowed under this new program?
AJ: Right now, organizations can get funding to expand programs to test drug supplies. There are organizations working today in Oregon that provide test strips so people can test their own drugs and make sure they are not fentanyl. I’m unaware that this conflicts with federal law if a group is just supplying testing equipment. It’s a little different than say, a safe consumption site where there is a violation of federal law happening on site. It’s more like, “Here’s your kit,” and you’re on your way.
When we talk about the interplay and all these issues of impact, I want to highlight one point, and I believe we did this effectively during the campaign. I hope this can reverberate all throughout Oregon: When people talk about drug policy changes, ultimately it is not about the drugs. It is about the people. Our loved ones. No matter where you live, who you are, you have family members using drugs, most likely illegal drugs, but definitely legal drugs, be it alcohol, tobacco, or prescription drugs.
Knowing the truth about these drugs, treating them without stigma so that when people who do have an issue, they’re willing to come forward and there are resources available to them. Ultimately, what do you want for yourself or a loved one? How do you want to be treated? Do you want them arrested, put in jail, fired, given a scarlet letter “F” labeling them a felon for the rest of their lives so they can’t get certain housing opportunities? Or do you want them treated with dignity and provided resources if they need help. Remember that the majority of drug users actually don’t need help and can lead productive lives.
When mainstream media stories are written, headlines are going to be as inflammatory as possible. The photo’s gotta be needles and lines, razor blades, if they can they throw some guns in the picture too, but that’s not a realistic representation of life in America. As we move forward, we want to be compassionate, empathetic, end the stigma, and treat people how we want to be treated.
When people talk about drug policy changes, ultimately it is not about the drugs. It is about the people.
RM: I have two immediate family members who have been incarcerated. Is there a pathway to ending sentences for people who are serving time for substances that are no longer illegal? Or, is it: “What’s done is done”?
AJ: Something could be done about it, for sure. And we were able to accomplish some of this work with cannabis. We could have something passed that provides a study saying, “Who is in prison for these substances that are now decriminalized?” Or, “The offense was reduced from a felony to a misdemeanor and their prison time should be reduced and they should be let out.”
For whatever reason, there’s often some reluctance around that. I don’t quite understand it. The way I see it, when we legalize cannabis or drug possession, voters and society are recognizing that the state has made a mistake. Cannabis shouldn’t have been illegal in the first place. These small amounts of drugs should not be a felony or a misdemeanor. So, why are people in prison and why do people have criminal records when the state made the mistake?
It will take further legislative changes to accomplish this. We still have such a huge stigma around drugs. Cannabis has taken 25 years. It may be due to coronavirus and other concerns, but really there’s been no movement on further decriminalizing drug possession yet.
RM: What do you want to see moving forward?
AJ: What I want to see, what I’m working for and will continue advocating for, is automatically expunging old convictions. Automatically releasing people from prison. Following Measure 91 [Oregon’s Legal Marijuana initiative, on which Anthony was also Chief Petitioner], one of the most proud moments of my activist career was reading an article on OPB.org in which a man said he cried tears of joy because his cannabis delivery conviction could finally be expunged from his record, after following him for 30 years of his life.
Now, six years later, I am still proud of that, but I am struck that we didn’t go far enough. He was in a position to hire an attorney, pay the court fees, pay for the filing. [But] expunging your criminal record should not depend on your ability to hire an attorney. The law is the law. It should just be off everybody’s record. It should not be based on how much money you have or whether you know how to jump through legal hoops.
RM: Have you heard interest from people in other states who want to create models designed after 110? Given what you know now, what would be the dream model that you believe could be pushed through in more progressive states?
AJ: I have been in touch with people interested in enacting similar policies, and even city or countywide changes where statewide is not feasible. The cannabis movement did the same thing with local efforts. I definitely support anything that moves the issue forward. I became an activist over 20 years ago and I definitely see a key change in where we are and we are definitely going to move forward in other states. My dream model would be largely based in Oregon.
Now, the possession limits of what you decriminalize should be examined and should be realistic around peoples’ usage. One of the critiques I heard a lot from addiction doctors was that the possession limits we decriminalized in Measure 110 were, really, too low for a lot of users.
Even potentially, so long as someone is not selling, [general possession] could be decriminalized. Automatic expungements of past offenses and early prison release, and I think there should be funds allocated for treatment, harm reduction and recovery for those who need it.
This should be looked at as an extension of our healthcare needs. States should also be looking into studies into the medicinal benefits of various psychedelics, be it psilocybin mushrooms or MDMA. Slowly but surely, we are getting research moving forward at the federal level, but it is really up to the states to move these things forward.
In the future, something like 109 and 110 could be combined.
Explore the shadow side of psychedelics in this learn-at-your-own-pace course.
AJ: I support anything that moves the issue forward and educates people. My one caveat [about Decrim Nature and the Plant Medicine Healing Alliance] is I don’t want anybody to possess larger amounts of these drugs [in Oregon] than what Measure 110 allows, believing they are okay under state law because of a city resolution. A city cannot make something legal that the state has made illegal.
This is a problem with not having a city court, and this is something I look at when we are planning future drug policy reform measures. Cities that have their own city court, such as Columbia, Missouri where I went to undergrad and law school, can pass a measure and force the city prosecutor and police to keep that case within city courts and not send it to county or state [court], or refer it to the feds. So in these places, you can actually change the law [at the city level].
The city can’t make, say 28 grams of psilocybin mushrooms legal if the state says 12. It could be de facto legal, if the district attorney chose not to prosecute people, but DA’s change and it may not always be that way. [It’s then up to] local police discretion… it could be “lowest law enforcement priority,” but they could still arrest you.
RM: If it is on the discretion of the police, is it worth putting resources into these city-based resolutions? The last thing any of us wants is blood on our hands or anyone having a brush with the law because they thought they had legal protection when they didn’t.
It is imperative for all advocates to do what they can to be open. Lowest law enforcement priority measures are symbolic measures. If you are not actually changing the law, people can still be arrested and convicted. There could still be a lot of good out of that, but we need education that helps people realize this doesn’t actually change the criminal code. It’s up to advocates to make sure people know the truth of the matter. We don’t want to do harm. That said, if anything is moving the issue forward, I tend to support it. My focus is on changing the law, but I support anything that’s chipping away at the drug war. We should be honest about the pros and cons.
We want to let science, truth, and common sense guide us. We need to be truthful about what a lowest law enforcement priority measure does.
Expunging your criminal record should not depend on your ability to hire an attorney. The law is the law. It should just be off everybody’s record.
RM: What would you say to those who are pro-psychedelics who are new to the idea of broader drug policy reform?
This is something I’ve battled within cannabis legalization, which I’ve been involved in for over 20 years. Early on, and still to this day, there was cannabis exceptionalism. People had the attitude of, “Don’t arrest us [cannabis users]. Arrest these other people who use heroin, or meth, or these other drugs.” And now we’re seeing the same thing with psychedelics.
In the end, I believe people need to do their best to be empathetic to the situations people are born into, how they’re raised, the traumas they go through, and the drugs that are used. If you were born in a different city, state, whatever… you may have used different drugs than what you use today.
When I first told people in cannabis activism that I was working on 110, they were like, “You’re not going to decriminalize meth, right?”
Bottom line is: Arresting and convicting people, whatever the drug is… it’s counterproductive. Throwing someone in jail and taking away their education, housing and job opportunities is not good for them or society. We have to set aside our feelings about drugs because we believe some substances are better than others and that [certain] people should be treated better than others. We all have circumstances and hardships. No matter the drug of choice, arresting, criminalizing and stigmatizing them is a counterproductive policy.
We always need to come back to that. We need to appeal to people’s compassion and empathy. We cannot arrest and jail our way out of people using drugs.
RM: You make an important point. You’re touching on the question of: What does punishment do to us? Does it move us closer or further from the society we want to have?
We have to change the conversation. Imagine the headlines you’d see if other drugs caused the consequences we see with alcohol. Car accidents, death, abuse, other accidents, all these bad decisions people make… if that was another drug, just imagine the headlines, every day. People committing crimes, getting in wrecks with alcohol in our systems. But for better or worse, it is accepted in our society.
But if someone came to you and said they used alcohol and thought they needed help, that is [also] totally acceptable in society. And it should be. That’s where we want to get with all drugs. No matter the substance someone uses. If people seek help, they should get the help they need. Ultimately, we need to end the stigma. It’s difficult when even people within drug policy reform have their own stigmas around certain drugs. I’m a different advocate in 2021 than I was in 2000. Everyone has their own journey, but I definitely see the light at the end of the tunnel.
We got a strong majority of the vote [in Oregon]. Drug decriminalization got a higher percentage of the votes than Jeff Merkeley, who is a very popular senator! This is more popular than we think. We’ve got to thank Dr. Carl Hart, who is braver than most, for paving the way.
I believe in ten years, in this discussion around decriminalization, stigma and use, we’re going to be in a much better place than we are now. It’s not just electoral victories, it’s conversations we have publicly like this one, conversations with our friends and family, we can just chip away at it.
I’m actually very hopeful. Drug policy reform is two steps forward, one step back. But as scary and maddening and the world can be, I’ve never been more optimistic about what we can do. I’m proud that Oregon’s been playing our part and other states are following suit.
I believe in our lifetime we are going to end the drug war.
Rebecca Martinez is a Portland, Oregon-based writer, parent and community organizer. She is a co-founder of the Fruiting Bodies Collective, an advocacy group, podcast and multimedia platform exploring the intersections between healing justice and the psychedelics movement.
Rick Doblin and Bia Labate debated Jeffery Lieberman and Keven Sabet on whether or not psychedelics should be legalized, and the results may surprise you.
Last week, we received an invite to attend an early screening of the newest debate in Intelligence Squared US’s online debate series: “Should Society Legalize Psychedelics?” Being immersed in the world of Psychedelics Today, it seems like we’re constantly involved in various similar conversations around legalization, decriminalization, benefits and dangers, and the less-discussed idea of drug exceptionalism. So while I was curious to see how a question like this would be handled by a more mainstream outlet, I also wondered if they’d get it right. When I saw who would be involved, I knew this would be worth watching.
Arguing for the motion to legalize psychedelics were Rick Doblin, Founder & Executive Director of MAPS, as you likely know if you’re on this site, and Bia Labate, anthropologist, drug policy expert, and executive director of Chacruna. Against the motion were Jeffrey Lieberman, former President of the American Psychiatric Association and Chair of Columbia University’s Department of Psychiatry, and Keven Sabet, three-time White House drug policy advisor, president and CEO of Smart Approaches to Marijuana, and author of Smokescreen: What the Marijuana Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know. What instantly caught my eye was psychedelic legend Rick Doblin going against a three-time White House drug policy advisor (i.e. “The Man”), and I wanted to see exactly how Doblin would choose to wipe the floor with him. But this was a debate, and debates don’t care solely about facts, which to me, is exactly what makes them so interesting.
After a brief and somewhat cringeworthy performance by “psychedelic comedian” Sarah Rose Siskind (which felt very odd to me—if we’re taking this seriously, why are we starting it out with bad jokes about drugs?), moderator John Donvan came on and asked us all to cast a vote before the debate started. We’d be casting another one after the debate, and the winner would be declared by calculating which side’s numbers increased more, or really, which side won over more of the undecided voters.
I personally feel that this is a very nuanced topic that probably can’t be answered with a simple yes or no, but decided to vote “yes” anyway.
The debate started and right away, I noticed a classic juxtaposition between Doblin and the Against Legalization team: Lieberman and Sabet wore black sportcoats and white collared shirts with crisp, stylized hair, while Doblin looked to be wearing a Hawaiian shirt, hair as out-of-control as always. Lieberman looked to be sitting in a professional office with hundreds of journals and important books proudly staged behind him, while Doblin looked like someone dug a chair out of the piles of papers in his office and placed him on it shortly after waking him up. The For Legalization team argued passionately, with a more freestyle tone drawing from personal stories, while the Against Legalization team spoke more slowly and seemed to have more prepared statements (Lieberman seemed to be reading off a script several times).
Screen shot of Rick Doblin of the “For Legalization” team at the Intelligence Squared debate.
The opening round consisted of each participant getting a few minutes to make as many points as they wanted. Doblin started out by listing what he believed his opponents would agree with him on, and introduced the idea of “licensed legalization,” where the ability to use drugs legally would be handled the way a driver’s license allows you to drive a car (and would therefore be taken away with abuse or misuse). Labate focused on the prevalence of drug use throughout all of history, the racism and failure of the drug war, and how “the sky didn’t fall” when other countries have legalized drugs.
From the Against Legalization team, Lieberman made it clear that while he has plenty of experience with psychedelics and absolutely sees a benefit, they should be decriminalized only and studied for therapeutic use. He also called out MAPS’s mission statement, saying that their effort to develop cannabis into prescription medicines is a “ruse” to get around prohibition, and posited the idea that the gateways to creativity and spirituality people experience were maybe just the drugs fooling them. Sabet performed pretty strongly here, saying that the historical use Labate talked about couldn’t be further from what would happen if the US legalized psychedelics, which he imagines as stereotypically US as possible, with Super Bowl-level mass commercialization, major lobbyists promoting their agendas, and the rich getting richer off of an addiction-for-profit model. He also said that opioids and alcohol kill more people than all illegal drugs combined, partly because they’re legal and therefore used more.
Round two was more of an open discussion with Donvan moderating. Some good points were made by the For Legalization team: decriminalization means impure drugs; classic psychedelics are not addictive; there actually is a lot of ceremonial use already in the US; commercialization doesn’t mean a psychedelic boogeyman is going to create addictive psychedelics; and decriminalization is not freedom and still comes with fines.
Meanwhile, the Against Legalization team didn’t seem to grasp why decriminalization wasn’t enough, but made some great points about how legalization doesn’t always mean purer and better (look at tobacco and cigarettes), and if we haven’t gotten this stuff right in all this time, why would we suddenly get it right when it comes to the legalization of psychedelics? Much time was spent on the need for scientific proof over tons of anecdotal stories. The open discussion showed some heat, and also exposed some debater flaws, like Lieberman rambling to the point of me entirely missing his point and Labate not realizing when her time was up and talking over everyone several times.
Screen shot of all the debaters and moderator from the Intelligence Square debate, “Should Society Legalize Psychedelics?”
Round three went back to each participant making closing statements for two minutes. Doblin spoke passionately about how much he and his wife have benefited from regular MDMA use, and said opponents shouldn’t let the fear of overcommercialization from “Big Psychedelic” spoil something so many could benefit from. Labate talked about how the US is the “land of freedoms” (which I laughed out loud at), and we’re going to look back on this time in shame, saying that a lot of what had been said against psychedelics was based on fear, a false narrative, and science’s attempt to control everything. Lieberman said that this would be a very dangerous social experiment, and then spent an odd amount of time talking about Prometheus and Frankenstein.
Sabet, on the other hand, really killed it here, spending a good chunk of his allotted time reading a quote from Robert Corry (one of the writers of Amendment 64 on Colorado’s 2012 statewide ballot that permitted recreational sales of cannabis), who fully regrets what he has done after seeing the massive commercialization of the industry. He ended by echoing his main point again: “It’s one thing to advocate for decriminalization, ending the war on drugs. It’s another thing to advocate for the commercialization and normalization,” saying that this would create an industry that cared only about profits, to the detriment of everyone’s health and safety.
The pre-recorded debate ended, and those of us who were able to attend the sneak preview were then sent to a live check-in with all the participants. Here, huge points that were missed in the debate were finally made. Doblin asked Sabet if he’s so against big corporations getting rich off drugs, does that mean he’s OK with cartels getting rich instead?
Labate pointed out that the time people were the most reckless with alcohol was during prohibition. Lieberman hurt himself by making it clear that he felt medical use and recreational use have to be completely separate, and the same drug couldn’t be used for both. Sabet made his same points again, but hurt my view of him a bit by making sure to have the cover of his book prominently displayed twice in his background (I’ve never been a fan of shameless plugs).
My favorite parts of the debate were in this live session. The first was when Founder and Chairman of Intelligence Squared US, Robert Rosenkranz, joined in and made Doblin’s point about money even stronger: If something is bought, that means someone is selling it, so why does the amount of profit and who it’s going to matter so much to Sabet? It can go to corporations and be regulated, or go to criminals and stay unregulated. Which is better?
Labate also shut down Lieberman in extraordinary fashion. Lieberman had already established himself as being extremely focused on science, studies, and needing proof for everything, but also had a really odd moment where he was certain he had more psychedelic experiences under his belt than Doblin. I cringed at this, thinking, “Really? You’re arguing for keeping psychedelics illegal and talking about their dangers while bragging about breaking the law to enjoy them?” So I was filled with joy when he said that he had had wonderful experiences on psychedelics, and Labate immediately hit him with: “But there’s no proof that your experience was wonderful. There’s no peer-reviewed study. How do you know it was wonderful?” Yeah, take that, pal.
There was a place to submit questions, but the live session was kept to a half hour, leaving most questions unanswered. I wanted to know if the Against Legalization team would be for legalization if it was presented in a “licensed legalization” manner—the way Doblin had explained in his first segment (which wasn’t discussed again because it was outside of the main argument). Wesley Thoricatha of Psychedelic Times asked another great question in the chat window: “If our society believes that the benefits of alcohol legalization outweigh the observable risks, how can there be any valid case against legalizing these non-addictive substances that clearly have more potential benefits and less overall risks?” Since the pros didn’t address these thoughts, I guess it’s now the job for all of us to keep asking these questions and having these conversations on our own time.
All said and done, I really enjoyed this debate and found the arguments really interesting. Sabet’s “why would we get it right this time?” overcommercialization argument really hit home with me, as I’m quickly becoming disgusted with the money-grabs, ridiculous patent-filing, and dangerous “magic pill” narrative that keeps proliferating this movement, while constantly being reminded of the ineffectiveness and rampant corruption in the government. But I wondered if he really meant that, or if he was just trying to win the debate by cashing in on the “rich people are evil” attitude he guessed many viewers would have. And while his vision of the future is ugly, was his point (or any others made by the Against Legalization team) any stronger than Doblin’s argument for taking money out of the hands of criminals in favor of safer drugs?
I loved Labate’s passion and realness and she made some great points, but her talking over people hurt her. Lieberman was very organized and prepared, but his rigidity and inability to make strong, understandable arguments hurt him. So this felt more like a debate between Doblin and Sabet, and after breaking it down more, it really felt like hope, compassion, and common sense were going up against pessimism and fear.
At the end of the debate, the results were tallied. My view was a little more nuanced and I was more open to discussion, but I still generally sided with the For Legalization team. This was not the case for others. Before the debate, 65% of viewers voted to legalize psychedelics, while 15% disagreed with the motion and 20% were undecided. After the debate, however, even though the For Legalization vote increased to 67%, the Against Legalization vote grew to 24%, giving them a 9% total increase over the For Legalization’s 2%. Therefore, in the preliminary vote, Against Legalization ended up winning the debate.
Intelligence Squared US then posted the video and encouraged people to watch, leaving voting open for a week for a separate “online audience” tally. I assumed that a larger audience would trend more towards legalization and I’d get my win here, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Not only did the Against Legalization vote jump from 11% pre-debate to 30% post-debate, but the For Legalization vote dropped from 74% to 62% too, leaving me to wonder what arguments swayed people so much.
In the end, as I assumed it would, this debate just highlighted the importance of nuance and looking at huge, important topics like this from all angles. I’m not sure that “should society legalize psychedelics?” is a question we should even be asking (can it really be answered with a simple yes or no?), but the beauty of it is that these questions are even being asked and debated, especially by such big names on such a mainstream platform. And as a culture, we’re now making available both sides of the argument, to be heard by anyone who wants to listen. These conversations need to be had, bad arguments need to be called out, and strong points by the other side need to be looked at fairly. While the complete adult-use legalization of all psychedelics may never happen, this is the only way we’re ever going to get close.
About the Author
Mike Alexander works for Psychedelics Today. He writes the show notes for each podcast, handles most of the email, edits video and audio, helps with the blog, and annoys the rest of the team on Slack. He eats a lot of pizza, spends a lot of time in the woods, and spends most of his money on Phish tour.
Taking a deep look at the trial’s Supplementary Appendix, the response from the psychedelic science community, and the choice to measure the results using the QIDS depression rating scale.
On April 15, 2021 the New England Journal of Medicine published a study comparing the efficacy of psilocybin-assisted therapy to a popular SSRI antidepressant, escitalopram (sold under the brand names Lexapro, Cipralex, and others): titled: Trial of Psilocybin versus Escitalopram for Depression. The landmark paper written by the team at Imperial College London’s Centre for Psychedelic Research, concluded that the “trial did not show a significant difference in antidepressant effects between psilocybin and escitalopram in a selected group of patients”, which caused a bit of an uproar in the psychedelic science community.
Reactions and questions came quickly on social media: Was the paper edited too heavily by the New England Journal of Medicine? Were appropriate rating scales used to judge the effectiveness of psilocybin? Are the “real” results hidden in the study’s appendix? As a participant in NYU’s study on psilocybin-assisted therapy for major depressive disorder in 2020 who received incredible benefits (my depression of five years went completely into remission and has remained there), I felt it was necessary to try and explain the latest results in more depth.
The study in question, under lead authors Robin Carhart-Harris, Ph.D, David Nutt, MD, Rosalind Watts, D.Clin.Psy and others, was a double-blind randomized trial with 59 participants for six weeks to compare the efficacy of psilocybin versus a leading antidepressant in treating depression. Each trial started with a psilocybin dose day; one group received a high dose of 25 mg, the other a negligible dose of 1 mg. Then, the high dose group proceeded to receive a daily placebo while the low dose group received 10 mg of escitalopram each day for the first three weeks. At three weeks, the psilocybin group received a second 25 mg dose of the magic mushroom compound and continued with the daily placebo. The SSRI group received a second placebo, 1 mg dose of psilocybin and also had their daily dose of escitalopram increased to 20 mg. Both groups received an equal amount of extensive psychotherapeutic support and counseling, totaling around 35 to 40 hours during the six week-trial using Watts’s ACE therapeutic model: Accept, Connect, Embody.
Prior to the start of the trial, both groups received multiple and extensive depression assessments, using four different depression rating scales; QIDS- SR-16, HAM-D-1A, BDI-17, and MADRS. Of the four depression inventories, QIDS-SR-16 is the newest, designed for convenience of use so patients can “self-rate” (that’s what the SR stands for), and crucially for this trial, it was the primary scale used to compare psilocybin and escitalopram’s efficacy in fighting depression. However, lead author Robin Carhart-Harris has now stated that should have been better considered because QIDS-SR-16 is the least established of the four scales used. There are several issues as to why it was not the best rating scale to use and its results should be viewed as less accurate, and we will explain those issues below, but first let’s review the trial results as published.
In the abstract, the NEJM concluded:
“On the basis of the change in depression scores on the QIDS-SR-16 at week 6, [the mean (±SE) changes in the scores from baseline to week 6 were −8.0±1.0 points in the psilocybin group and −6.0±1.0 in the escitalopram group, for a between-group difference of 2.0 points] this trial did not show a significant difference in antidepressant effects between psilocybin and escitalopram in a selected group of patients.”
This is an extremely conservative and staid summary for all the rating scales and secondary outcomes. Even so, in my opinion, this alone is phenomenal because they are stating that psilocybin, a psychedelic compound, is at least as effective as a leading SSRI for treating patients with major depressive disorder. But the real results are in the data contained within the appendices and tables, many published in the Supplementary Appendix rather than in the abstract or main study itself, so let’s examine them.
Analyzing the Supplementary Appendix
In clinical research, the two main items to track in depression scores are the “response” rates and the “remission (remitter)” rates. A response rate means there is an improvement in depression symptoms in at least 50% of patients. A remission rate means that a patient no longer has enough symptoms to qualify for a medical diagnosis of depression; for all intents and purposes, it’s effectively gone. So even when we look at the solely at QIDS scores for those two rates, the difference is striking:
“A QIDS-SR-16 response occurred in 70% of the patients in the psilocybin group and in 48% of those in the escitalopram group… QIDS-SR-16 remission occurred in 57% [psilocybin] and 28% [escitalopram]… Other secondary outcomes generally favored psilocybin over escitalopram, but the analyses were not corrected for multiple comparisons. The incidence of adverse events was similar in the trial groups.”
In both ratings for the QIDS scale we see psilocybin outperform escitalopram by nearly double with only two doses as opposed to six weeks of daily doses. But also notice the statement at the end about secondary outcomes favoring psilocybin and that adverse events were similar.
Honestly, these are significant understatements when you look at the secondary outcomes directly in the appendices and tables. Certainly, as a leading scientific journal it’s a far better position to conservatively report the outcome rather than promote the results, but consider the following: In the three other well-established depression inventories, HAM-D, BDI, and MADRS, the response rate for psilocybin at the 6-week mark was between 67.9 and 76.7% while for the SSRI it was only 20.7 to 41.4%. Even more striking are the remission rates, lying between 28.6 and 56.7% for psilocybin while the SSRI produced remission at 6 weeks in 6.9 to 20.7% of participants. (Check out the Supplementary Appendix, pg. 13 to see for yourself.)
As this is a two-dose study, there was a similar outperformance after the first psilocybin dose; in two scales (QIDS and BDI) 33.3 to 51.7% of participants no longer qualified as being depressed by the end of the first week. In my opinion, it can’t be overstated how miraculous these remission rates are; these are patients that have often been non-responsive to other treatments for depression, and have likely been through a gamut of approaches, including psychotherapy, exercise, other antidepressants, alternative therapies, and had yet to find relief, let alone remission after a single week.
When we look at secondary outcomes, there are even more revelations. In a score known as “wellbeing”, participants in the psilocybin group increased 15.8 points after six weeks while those in the SSRI group only improved 6.8 points. This not only shows a reduction in depression symptoms, but a marked improvement in patients’ happiness with their sense of self. This is similarly reflected in the “Flourishing Scale” which found the psilocybin group to improve 14.4 points while the SSRI group only improved by 8.9 points after six weeks.
Other similar secondary outcomes also demonstrated remarkable efficacy for psilocybin including reductions in suicidal ideation, trait anxiety, experiential avoidance, anhedonia (which has implications for chronic pain), emotional breakthrough inventory, psychotropic related sexual dysfunction, and others. A key line to take from the caption for Supplementary Table S1 that compares depression inventory rates across all six weeks is: “All contrasts favored psilocybin. None favored escitalopram.” These are well established depression inventories that are used as the standard of comparison in nearly every modern study testing efficacy against nearly any method or medication for relieving depression, but because they were not chosen as the primary scales, they were classified as secondary outcomes. But if all these scores had been corrected against each other, including the QIDS, psilocybin would have shown to be clearly superior.
So why was QIDS chosen as the primary evaluation instead of the much more frequently employed MADRS inventory? As someone who had to take the MADRS inventory repeatedly in order to qualify for NYU’s investigational study of psilocybin for major depressive disorder, I will tell you it is surprisingly precise and accurate, making it nearly impossible to hide the depths of your disease from yourself. As much as we may mask the symptoms of our disorder to others in order to function in our day to day lives, we may in fact find we mask the severity of our symptoms to an even greater degree to ourselves. According to Carhart-Harris, the choice to use QIDS was almost arbitrary and now considered ill-advised in hindsight. And other professionals on Twitter and elsewhere online are largely in agreement, arguing that QIDS was a scale not designed to measure depression so much as one designed for patient convenience and to measure response to classic SSRIs. For example, QIDS has no measure for wellbeing, emotional breakthrough, experiential avoidance or, dare we say, mystical experiences.
SSRIs modulate and downregulate distressing feelings, but do not generally resolve them, much like a daily salve that keeps negative emotions just under conscious awareness. Psilocybin not only goes to the heart of engaging the origin of troubling feelings, but due to its ability to induce neuroplasticity, it’s theorized that the psychedelic compound directly aids in a cortical reorganization of prior maladaptive circuits and strongly held associations that create the framework of a patient’s life experience and the events in it.
Evaluating the Choice to Use the QIDS Scale
Worth noting about the QIDS scale relative to the other inventories in the study is a concept in statistics known as a confidence interval or CI. When a study is performed, it’s obviously not done on the entire population but on a sample of the population. A confidence interval is a measure of how likely the mean average of the results in the study population would match the mean average of results in the general population. It’s also a measure of how likely those same results would occur if scientists were to repeat the test multiple times.
In a study like this one where two medications are being compared against each other for efficacy, their confidence intervals can be laid out on a table or graph known as a forest plot. When the CIs are displayed on a forest plot, they are shown as a range of most likely results (i.e. -2 to -15). This is key because that allows researchers to demonstrate their confidence that a given range of results would occur for 95% of the general population or in repeated studies. 95% is the agreed upon standard for proof of any statistical significance in patient response to medication for this type of study. However, if on a forest plot, your CI crosses zero (which is the midline between the two groups), there is a far greater likelihood that there is no difference in effect between the groups.
So recall now that Carhart-Harris said that choice of QIDS was arbitrary as the main depression scale for the study and that their team of researchers predicted no difference in effect size between the psilocybin and escitalopram when they submitted the pre-req application to run the study. For more than a week before the study was released, Carhart-Harris did a daily thread on Twitter describing effect size, how different measurements may in fact be measuring the same issue and could be condensed, that NEJM analysis of the results are extremely conservative, but most of all he “implored” readers to view the supplementary tables and appendices, and to particularly look at the confidence intervals for the main inventory and then the confidence intervals for the secondary outcomes.
Carhart-Harris made a very careful note that confidence intervals that do not cross zero are considered statistically significant and those that do cross zero are considered insignificant. He directed us to look at Figure S1 and Table S4 where you will see at the top that the only inventory that crosses zero is the QIDS scale, which strongly implies its result is a false negative in showing no difference in outcome between the SSRI and psilocybin, and we can be confident of that because of the redundancy of the other evaluations they also used. Every other inventory and measure shows psilocybin far out pacing escitalopram by nearly a two to one margin. You can take a look yourself by accessing the study’s Supplementary Appendix, and turning to Section S6. Supplemental Figure S4: Mean change for primary and secondary outcomes with confidence intervals (pg. 16).
Conclusion
Between the extraordinary results in the secondary outcomes, the fact that the QIDS scale was the only inventory to cross zero in the forest plot, and the strong likelihood that modern depression scales aren’t designed to capture the full range of positive personality change that underpin psilocybin’s cortical mechanisms, it’s hard to see how this is not an overwhelming win for psilocybin.
It would certainly be remiss for me to not once again state I was a participant in a very similar study myself who experienced full remission and know others who experienced the same. I would be equally remiss to not mention that for many who took the two doses, their depression returned after a few months—but not all of them. However, this is already the case with standard daily antidepressants. And with psilocybin, there are no sexual side effects, you can actually feel a full range of emotions, and the frequency of dosing is far less. But for people that have either found themselves unresponsive to standard SSRIs, or experience untenable daily side effects from antidepressant medication, psilocybin appears to offer an equal, if not superior, opportunity to recover their happiness and effectiveness in their daily lives.
About the Author
Court Wing has been a professional in the performance and rehab space for the last 30 years. Coming from a performing and martial arts background, Court served as a live-in apprentice to the US Chief Instructor for Ki-Aikido for five years, going on to win the gold medal for the International Competitors Division in Japan in 2000 and achieving the rank of 3rd degree black belt. In 2004, Court became the co-founder of New York’s largest and oldest crossfit gym, and has been featured in the New York Times, Sunday Routine, Men’s Fitness, and USA Today. He is also a certified Z-Health Master Trainer, using the latest interventions in applied neuro-physiology for remarkable improvements in pain, performance, and rehabilitation. You can find out more on his website: https://courtwing.com
A safe and sensitive way to speak with your children about psychedelics, explained.
We are living through rapidly shifting times. As parents in the psychedelic community, we are not only navigating our own medicine work, but realizing a responsibility to help our children make sense of the changing landscape as well. Whether they’re teens perusing Reddit boards and watching Netflix documentaries, or young children overhearing adult conversations about psychedelic medicine or drug policy, young people are constantly absorbing messages about these substances. Parents have an opportunity to help set the tone for ongoing dialogue and intentionally guide their children toward a less stigmatized understanding of psychedelics.
Many advocates feel passionately about reducing stigma around psychedelics as medicine and changing the way we approach substance use as a society. One way that we can interrupt harmful stereotypes and policies is by living our truths within our own families and intervening in the messaging the next generation receives about substance use. By helping young people develop a less sensationalized and more factual and nuanced perspective on psychedelics, we can empower them to make balanced and informed decisions as they grow up.
Because I worked on Measure 109 in Oregon and several cannabis farms beforehand, my son, who is now seven, is unusually adept in his understanding of plant medicine and psychedelics. His introduction to mushrooms came in the context of fighting for healing options in our community, and his understanding of cannabis involved running through fragrant fields on a biodiverse organic farm. We have spoken openly about these medicines his whole life. Because of this, they don’t carry the same frightening charge they had when I was a child, growing up in a strict, Pentecostal home where the mere mention of drugs, let alone curiosity about them, was forbidden.
For those who don’t have opportunities to teach through professional exposure like I did, here are a few tips for starting and navigating a conversation with your children about psychedelics.
Remember that basic communication values apply: Ask for consent before sharing; create opportunities to listen as much as you speak; and be okay with not reaching a tidy conclusion. These topics are far reaching and can be overwhelming. Ideally, they should be infused into larger family conversations and be revisited as they come up naturally over time.
How To Talk With Your Kids About Psychedelics:
Get Clear with Yourself First
Before you open up a conversation with your child, spend some time journaling and reflecting about your own beliefs and assumptions around psychedelics. What are your hard and fast rules about substance use, and how did they come to be? Is it possible that your experience doesn’t paint the whole picture? For example, your profound healing experience with ayahuasca does not mean everyone who uses it will experience the same benefits. Alternately, having a scary experience with LSD does not make LSD inherently dangerous. Do you believe that some substances are inherently harmful and others are inherently beneficial? Why is that? (For a deeper exploration of this subject, read Dr. Carl Hart’s book, Drug Use for Grown-Ups.)
What are your blind spots? See if you can identify your biases, own your unique experience, and not allow your individual narrative to color the entire landscape of your child’s views on drugs. Get clear on the heart of your message and know when to set aside your personal experience in exchange for larger truths.
Get on the Same Page with Your Co-parent
Every family is different. On one end of the spectrum there are parents who use psychedelics together and are prepared to have a family conversation about it. If you are in a co-parenting situation there are added considerations. Is it possible this topic could spark family tension or create a burden of secrecy or pressure to choose sides for your child?
In cases where custody is a consideration, take extra caution. Do you have a co-parent or other adults who may use the knowledge of your usage against you in court?
If at all possible, have a conversation with your co-parent about your relationship with psychedelics and see if you can get on the same page about how to approach this conversation with your children.
Show, Don’t Tell
If you believe psychedelics can be beneficial and part of a healthy, happy life and want to convey this to your child, make sure your lifestyle and substance use reflects this. As the saying goes, lessons are “caught, not taught.” What you model about psychedelics in daily life will speak volumes over the words you say.
Consider the Timing and Risks
The risks and benefits of disclosure are different in every family. If you are currently closeted about your psychedelic use, it might be more beneficial to come out publicly around the same time you open a family dialogue. If you are in a community or job where the implications of your drug use could be damaging to your reputation or employment, seriously consider possible outcomes before proceeding.
Asking your child to keep a secret from friends, parents, and teachers could be a great burden. Make sure you have thought through the potential impacts on your child and your expectations about how they will respond. They may not be able to keep your use a secret, so consider what could happen if they disclose this information to others.
Author, Rebecca Martinez, and her son, Moses.
Open an Ongoing Conversation, Not a One Time Talk
If this is the first time you are broaching the conversation, it may be tempting to overload your child with information to ensure they have all their questions answered. Remember that your support or personal use of psychedelics may come as a surprise and be a lot for them to digest.
Be prepared to have a brief conversation and leave space for questions. Let your child set the terms for how much to discuss. Before moving on to other topics, let your child know you will check in a few days to answer any questions they may have. Be sure to follow through on this.
Consider Age and Awareness Level
How this dialogue plays out will vary widely based on the age of your children. A conversation with small children is not needed. Instead, take a cue from parents using cannabis in the home: Make a habit of keeping substances and supplies securely out of reach and when needed, let children know these medicines are strictly for grown-ups.
If you open the dialogue with your child during grade school, this may be their first introduction to the topic. Ask them questions. Have they heard about psychedelics? What do they already know or believe about them?
Ask for their consent to share about your perspective and explain why you have chosen to have a conversation. Maybe you want to build trust and create a culture of honesty in your home. Perhaps you’re anticipating the messages they’ll get in school and want to offer an alternate perspective. Or maybe you want to be involved in their introduction to psychedelic experiences.
Most older children and teens will be capable of having a more nuanced conversation. Ask them to share what they know and how they feel about drug use. Be prepared to talk about laws, cultural stereotypes, and household expectations.
Don’t Make It a Huge Deal
Kids these days will be exposed to plenty of anti-drug messaging which can feel quite serious and scary. If you approach the topic of psychedelics with too much gravity yourself, you may be sending conflicting messages. They will pick up on your tone, body language, and mood as much as what you say.
If you frame a coming-out conversation more like a confession, or if it is intense and emotionally charged, your child may come away confused about how you feel about your own substance use. By demonstrating that it is easy to have an open, stigma-free conversation about psychedelics, you will open the door to future conversations when they have questions or curiosity.
Explain Your Decision to Use Psychedelics
If your child wants to hear, explain when your relationship with psychedelics started. Talk about things you wish you would have known beforehand.
Discuss your personal path. How has your psychedelic use benefitted or changed you? Do you use them for mental health or in your spiritual development? What are the reasons you support the use of psychedelics?
Share about your personal practices for using them safely. Do you only use them when you’re not parenting? How do you create safe containers and make sure you can still be the best parent and person you can be? Explain what set and setting is, and how intentional use differs from party/recreational use that young people may be exposed to.
Discuss the Laws and Consequences
Times are changing. We are already seeing a wave of changing laws, first with cannabis nationwide, and now with psychedelics in select cities, and possession of all drugs in Oregon. The old reprise, “Don’t use drugs because they are illegal,” is no longer sufficient for talking with kids about drugs. This calls parents to think critically about how they present the issue.
Explain why the age limits on legal substances exist, and the importance of taking extra good care of one’s mind and body, especially during the developmental years.
Help your child understand why you are discreet about your use of psychedelics. Familiarize yourselves with the laws in your area. Discuss the consequences of possession and use of scheduled substances. You may choose to do some research together. It is okay to admit if you feel conflicted about breaking the law to use psychedelics. Most youth appreciate seeing humanity and vulnerability in their parents.
Watch a documentary or read a book together about the war on drugs. Talk about initiatives in your area and what you are doing to help create change. Ask your child to share their thoughts and prepare to be surprised by their clarity and insight.
Explore History and Indigenous Use
Put the use of psychedelics into a historical context. This is information young people won’t be exposed to in school. Emphasize that the ceremonial history of entheogens goes back thousands of years and is far more multifaceted than the American 1960’s psychedelia subculture. Explore stories about Maria Sabina and the Mazatec people of Oaxaca, Mexico, the Bwiti people’s relationship with Iboga in West Central Africa, and other histories of ceremonial psychedelic use around the world. What is your family’s heritage? See if you can find the pre-colonial traditional use of entheogens in your ancestral line.
Discuss the Research
Most children know someone who is affected by depression, addiction, or PTSD. In an age-appropriate way, explain that there are research institutions finding ways psychedelics can help people heal their minds and spirits and live happier, healthier lives.
Ask what your child thinks about these medicines being used in a medical context, and be willing to listen and answer questions they may have.
Explain the Experience
If alcohol is commonplace in your home, explain that, like drinking alcohol or using certain medications, taking psychedelics has temporary effects on the mind and body which make it unsafe to drive or work while under the influence.
Take time to clarify assumptions and common misconceptions. Discuss how the media’s portrayal of psychedelics differs from your firsthand experience. If your child wants to know what psychedelics feel like, be sure to highlight the emotional and spiritual sensations as much as the visual and sensory experiences associated with them. Try to find common ground when broaching this topic, for example, many children relate to the idea of a dream quest or journey, especially if they are interested in fantasy books or media.
Talk about the power of language. To you, are these substances drugs that you trip on, or are they medicines for healing experiences and journey work? Do you use them to unwind and relax, or as a ceremonial part of your spiritual practice? It’s important to get clear with yourself first, and then explain to your child using your preferred language.
Discuss your Expectations and House Rules
Explain why there are age restrictions on the use of legal mind-altering substances. Define what you see as an appropriate age for use, revisit the legal risks and ramifications of use, and set clear household expectations. Some parents want to be present for their child’s first psychedelic experience. Some want to source the supplies for them. Others want their child to feel safe calling them if they find themselves in situations that feel unsafe or out of control. Whatever expectations you set, be prepared to follow through on this commitment.
Remember that your child will choose to do what they wish, and that building trust and open lines of communication will lead to more safety than simply enforcing hard and fast rules.
As you wrap up the conversation, be sure to emphasize your openness to your child with phrases like: “If you ever have questions, I am here for you. There are no stupid questions and I will do my best to create a judgment-free space for you.”
Provide Alternative Resources
Depending on your relationship, your child may not feel fully comfortable opening up about their questions or experiences with you. If they want to learn more, offer books, films, organizations, or documentaries, and perhaps a trusted mentor you can refer them to.
Things to Avoid When Speaking with Your Children About Psychedelics
Overloading: Take cues from your child on whether they have heard enough or are engaged and want to hear more.
One Sided Conversation: Create space for your child’s comments, questions and concerns. If they don’t have much to say, assure them this is fine and don’t push it.
Binaries: Good-bad, us-them, right-wrong type of language can make children feel pressured to pick sides in a highly nuanced conversation.
Showing Your Stash: There’s no benefit in showing your child where your drugs are kept or how they are used during this conversation.
Stories About Bad Trips or Scary Experiences: Modern children will hear enough anti-drug messaging during their lives. Your child needs to feel that you, as their parent, are secure and safe in order to feel secure and safe.
Conclusion
Part of the beauty of psychedelics is they introduce us to a more complex and interconnected view of the world. Through the lens of expanded states of consciousness, the world seems at once simple and profoundly intricate. Children have an innate capacity to see the world this way. Beyond the binaries of modern life exists a space for nuance and relationship. See if you can meet your child there.
It takes courage and commitment to the process to talk with children about psychedelics. When we do so, we are breaking generational patterns of stigma, fear and secrecy. The conversation around psychedelics could open up doors into deeper trust and communication with your child. Perhaps, by changing the culture in our homes, we can begin to change the culture at large.
About the Author
Rebecca Martinez is a Portland, Oregon-based writer, parent and community organizer. She is a co-founder of the Fruiting Bodies Collective, an advocacy group, podcast and multimedia platform exploring the intersections between healing justice and the psychedelics movement.
Paradigm-shifting tools don’t fit into paradigmatically static ways of doing things
Psychedelics. Maybe you’ve heard. They’re having a bit of a moment right now. And for good reason. To name just a few examples, the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) is moving MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD through the FDA approval process. Decriminalization of psychedelics, including LSD (!), is taking place at a breakneck pace. Psilocybin-assisted therapy was even legalized in Oregon during the 2020 election. And, multi-million dollar research institutions are also popping up left and right.
However, there’s an elephant in the room. The looming presence of large, for-profit companies swallowing up patents left and right and ostensibly becoming the primary option for psychedelic therapies of the future is becoming too big to ignore.
It’s beginning to get called out, for a start. More articles are popping up rightfully critiquing this situation as an issue. About a month ago, famous entrepreneur Tim Ferriss kicked off a question on his blog asking if there are any viable alternatives to for-profit psychedelic companies. In reply, Christian Angermayer, one of the main investors behind Compass Pathways, a for-profit psilocybin-assisted therapy company responsible for a large chunk of the patent grab, basically said, “Nope”.
This is disheartening to many in the psychedelic field, to say the least. Most of us didn’t become advocates for psychedelics because they promised to make our healthcare system a bit more effective and a few people a lot more rich. We became advocates for psychedelics because they offered a promise of a better way of doing things; not just for healing, but for the world.
Traditional for-profit companies that are seemingly dominating the space are a betrayal of that promise, especially when no viable, scalable alternative seems to be in sight. Luckily, I think there is a true paradigm-busting healing model that’s not only a proper fit for psychedelics, but has been worked on for years right under our glitter-speckled toenails. We just haven’t yet given it a name. But first, let’s address the elephant in the room: equity.
The Equity Elephant in the Room
I’d like to call this elephant in the room the “Equity Elephant” for two reasons. One is that this elephant is largely a product of private equity entering into the psychedelic space a few years ago. Think venture capital and angel investors. Another reason for deeming it the Equity Elephant is that the response to large, for-profit companies dominating the psychedelic space has largely been one of increasing equity in terms of fairness—or in other words—increasing access. This makes sense considering that most of the companies in question are derived from our healthcare system, which is not exactly the Cadillac of compassion and accessibility.
Thus, the question around what to do about the Equity Elephant has largely been around increasing access. There’s a problem with this, however. Much like how the old paradigm for mental health failed because it treated symptoms rather than causes, increasing access to a system that is inaccessible by design isn’t really going to do all that much good.
We became advocates for psychedelics because they offered a promise of a better way of doing things; not just for healing, but for the world.
Another issue is that we’ve only so far been using one half of the meaning of the word “equity”. Another important use of the word is equity as ownership. So far, asking who owns the future of psychedelic healing has been relatively off the table when it should really be on the tips of our tongues.
First, let’s dive into what ownership means a little more. Ownership is not just about who gets to keep the profits from something. This is another relic from the old paradigm. It’s also about who has the power to direct something’s future. It’s about stewardship, rather than just status. Equity as a term, defined as meaningful power over directing something, needs to be put to use yesterday in the psychedelic space.
The absence of discussing equity as ownership is, in my opinion, why the Equity Elephant in the room is so disheartening. It exemplifies a radical feeling of disempowerment by us in the psychedelic scene who’ve experienced profound healing benefits from these substances. When faced with these behemoths of capitalism making such large strides in the psychedelic space, it’s no wonder we feel outmatched. These organizations don’t strike us as stewards to the future we’re trying to bring about.
But fear not. Now that we know equity is about access and ownership, or fusing them together to increase access to ownership, I think some very promising alternatives will begin to emerge.
Before we go into what those are though, let’s take a quick look at who, in my opinion, actuallyowns the psychedelic future and why they’re charting its path forward: community-based psychedelic organizations.
Community-Based Psychedelic Healing
Perhaps I’m a bit biased. I have been leading the Brooklyn Psychedelic Society since 2016. But to me, what’s been taking place at psychedelic societies across the globe over the past years is muchmore headline worthy than a new multi-million dollar psychedelic company popping up overnight.
Psychedelic societies are self-organized, mutually supporting organizations that together form a grassroots movement of thousands of healers, seekers, organizers, artists, psychedelically curious, and many, many more that have been healing each other with little input from traditional therapeutic institutions. They’ve been doing this for years in ways that regular for-profit companies can only dream of, in an effective, decentralized, evenly distributed and accessible manner.
Why isn’t this getting any headlines? Well for one, twenty people gathering in a park for an integration session with a net yield of $8 and some palo santo sticks isn’t exactly click bait. It’s also because it’s emblematic of a pattern that took me many a psychedelic trips to realize: The most transformative changes aren’t in the headline-grabbing epiphanies (I’M GOD?!!), but in the little, subtle things that we integrate and adopt into our lives patiently and gradually over time (I really need to start painting again and be nicer to people). And that’s exactly the kind of transformation that psychedelic societies have been holding space for.
Because of this, a bonafide healing modality on its own has emerged: community-based healing. Besides just anecdotes from the hundreds of people I’ve met who’ve gotten healing through our community and other psychedelic societies around the world, there’s good ol’ science to back this up as well.
Much like how the old paradigm for mental health failed because it treated symptoms rather than causes, increasing access to a system that is inaccessible by design isn’t really going to do all that much good.
Mike Margolies, founder of Psychedelic Seminars, even came up with a nifty acronym to describe this approach: PEACH (Psychedelic Education and Community Healing) that I highly recommend reading. But, why is community-based healing its own approach altogether?
As mentioned earlier, the old mental health paradigm was failing because it treated symptoms rather than causes. We know that isolation and loneliness exacerbate some of the conditions psychedelics treat so effectively, such as addiction and depression. Thus, delivering psychedelic healing in environments that lack an authentic social component seems to repeat the same mistake of the old paradigm, albeit with better tools.
Of course, clinical modalities for psychedelic therapy should always be available and made as accessible as possible—if that’s what’s needed by the person seeking healing. I don’t think community-based healing will or should replace therapy altogether. But it does seem to be a genuine fourth context that goes beyond the clinical, retreat, and recreational settings, and should probably be the first place to go when someone is seeking a transformative experience.
Psychedelic Mutualism
While we are on a streak of trying to get to the root of things, I’d like to briefly outline what I think is the core philosophical difference between the community-based approach to psychedelic healing and those of the clinical models.
The difference is that community-based approaches take interdependence not just as a fact of life, but as a necessaryaspectof well-being and growth, especially when it comes to healing. This is called “mutualism” in biology and is something that ecologists have long been saying is key in order to awake from our anthropocentrism.
Therefore, psychedelic mutualism is the philosophy that emphasizes community, interdependence, and proactive peer support as centralto growth and flourishing on both an individual and societal level.
The clinical and retreat models contrast with this approach. These modalities are derived from an older philosophy: We are all atomized individuals with consciences that need to be preserved and kept secure. Hence the model: Go to a clinic and get your healing, and then go back to your private life, work and all the other dysfunctions of modern living included.
Sure, these settings might have some community components to them, such as check-ins with retreat members for a few weeks after the journey. But this is not core to their operating philosophy.
Psychedelic mutualism, and the healing modality in which it’s most exemplified, community-based healing or “PEACH”, puts community at its core. The psychedelic experience shows us this in spades by revealing our interdependence not only intellectually but viscerally, in our minds, bodies and hearts.
So how do we scale these modalities to not only increase access, but also increase ownership over them? In other words, how do we democratize the ownership of psychedelic healing?
The Cooperative Model of Ownership
Most traditional organizations are either non-profit or for-profit, with a board, an executive team, managers, employees, and then the people they serve (usually, the customers). While input is sometimes welcomed by other stakeholders within and outside the organization, the decisions are ultimately made by a small handful of people.
Using our definition of ownership as meaningful power and say over something’s future, these organizations are centrally owned. There is an alternative to this model called worker or member owned “cooperatives”.Cooperatives, or co-ops, work differently than the organizations previously mentioned. A cooperative is democratically owned (decentralized) and controlled by its members. Its members can be its workers, its consumers, a combination of both, or any number of different combinations depending on the needs of the community that it serves. Each member gets to vote on the direction of different parts of the organization’s future.
Thus, the key difference between co-ops and regular for-profit companies is that they’re owned by the people that produce and use their services. Put in another way, the profits made by cooperative organizations are in service to the community, not vice versa.
Cooperatives are social and equitable (in both the access and ownership sense) by design, rather than community being a nice byproduct. In other words, mutualism is baked into how they operate. One of the best accounts of this model specifically in a psychedelic context is Bennet Zelner’s Pollinator Model. In his article, Zelner contrasts “pollinator” organizations—those that contribute to the wellness of its members, surrounding communities and society—with “extractive” organizations that accrue value for its shareholders but don’t distribute that value to those they serve or are adjacent to.
Most of the companies that the psychedelic community is rightfully up in arms about are the latter variety. The co-op model is just the answer we’ve been waiting for, I believe. It just has to be applied.
Owning Our Future with Psychedelic Co-ops
You can’t fit a paradigm-busting tool, like psychedelics, into a paradigmatically-static context, like our healthcare systems and traditional for-profit companies. You also can’t use an old philosophy to help shoehorn it in. The settings and operant philosophy needed for psychedelic healing to scale in an authentic way must be at least as transformative as the tools and modalities they are provisioning.
So far, however, no viable and scalable alternatives have been presented. This is where cooperatives and psychedelic mutualism enter into the picture. Yes, large for-profit companies will be in the space. But they are not the end all be all. One day, I hope for-profit companies in the space will be the alternative to the default model: psychedelic co-ops.
Psychedelic co-ops would treat psychedelics and healing as they are meant to be treated: as a publicly accessible service that’s for the benefit of all, in the communities they serve. We have all the building blocks we need to not only construct our psychedelic future, but to own it. So all we need to do now is build. Together.
About the Author
Colin Pugh is the executive director of the Brooklyn Psychedelic Society (BPS), a MAPS-sponsored organization whose mission is to make psychedelic healing a publicly accessible good through community, education, democratic ownership, and advocacy.
Many in the Black community are weary of psychedelic therapy because of stigma rooted in the racist War on Drugs. But how do we begin to change that?
Last year I wrote an article entitled “Why Don’t More Black People Use Psychedelics?” I cited several reasons as to why we haven’t seen psychedelics embraced by Black people at the same rate as other groups. One of those reasons was that drug use has been highly stigmatized, especially in Black communities.
Another topic that has been heavily stigmatized within Black culture is therapy. As a result, many Black people are hesitant to try a treatment that involves both drugs and therapy.
Numerous research studies have shown that psychedelics can aid in the treatment of trauma, depression and PTSD. According to Medical News Today, “Depression is about as prevalent in Black communities as in white ones, but there are significant differences. Black people face different social pressures that may increase their risk of depression.”
These risks include but are not limited to:
Racial trauma
Difficult life experiences as a result of racism
Barriers and lack of access to mental health resources
Socioeconomic inequalities are another stressor that can increase poor mental health. In 2019, Black people represented 13.2% of the total population in the United States, but 23.8% of the poverty population. According to the organization Mental Health America: “Black and African American people living below poverty are twice as likely to report serious psychological distress than those living above the poverty level.”
Equity in psychedelics has been a popular topic of discussion. For those of us that are committed to equity in this space, what can we do to help destigmatize drugs in the Black community?
1. Normalize Drug Use
Society has led us to believe that illegal drugs are harmful while prescriptive drugs are useful.
This is not true.
We can end this harmful narrative by normalizing the use of drugs, all drugs.
In his latest book, Drug Use for Grown-Ups, Dr. Carl Hart writes about his experience with recreational heroin use. He shares that he uses heroin to unwind at the end of his day, the same way many of us turn to a glass of wine. Dr. Hart is not addicted. Instead, he says that his use of heroin has increased his overall life satisfaction. In order for our society to start to normalize drug use, we need to hear more of these stories.
2. Normalize Therapy in the Black Community
In the Black community, mental illness is a taboo topic and often, we’re labeled as “crazy” if we seek mental health services. Instead, we’re told to find solace in the church or prayer. In order to start to normalize therapy, we need to educate ourselves and each other about mental health. Part of that education needs to involve open and honest conversation about mental health in schools, churches and in the Black community.
3. More BIPOC Representation in the Media
Psychedelics have been portrayed in the media as a drug for white guys. We rarely see the portrayal of a Black man taking a trip on acid or psilocybin. Documentaries such as Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia and Psychonautics have helped to destigmatize psychedelic drug use, but not in Black communities. While I’m glad that these shows exist, they need to include faces that look like ours.
4. More Black Representation in Healthcare
Only 4% of all therapists in this country are Black. Finding any therapist you connect with can be hard. Finding a Black therapist can prove to be even more of a challenge. And if you’re in search of a Black psychedelic therapist, that can be nearly impossible. Just as we need to see faces that reflect ours in the media, we need to see that representation in the healthcare industry as well.
Our current healthcare system includes racial and ethnic biases which can impact the quality of care Black people receive. As a result, this may deter a person from the community to seek care. We need more Black therapists, trip sitters and educators in this space. We can start by seeking out future therapists and introducing them to these medicines and the benefits they offer.
For those in the Black community who want to pursue the path of becoming a therapist or healthcare professional, there needs to be adequate funding offered to support our education as well as our future research studies.
Conclusion
We can begin to normalize the stigma of psychedelics in the Black community by sharing information, having open conversations and seeing diverse representationin this space. The Black community has the added pressure of overcoming the stigma of both drug use and therapy, but the more we talk about these medicines and this work, the more normalized they will become.
Black people are traumatized. We not only live with current daily racial trauma, but the generational trauma endured by our ancestors as well. Psychedelics offer us a path to healing that exists outside of Western medicine. If we can begin to undo the stigma and shame associated with drugs and therapy, then as a community, we can finally begin to heal.
About the Author
Robin Divine is the founder of Black People Trip
Robin Divine is a writer, psychedelic advocate and the creator of Black People Trip, an online community with a mission to raise awareness, promote education, teach harm reduction, and create safe spaces for Black women interested in psychedelic use. If you’d like to support Robin in her mission to bring Black People Trip to more women of color, check out her Patreon or find @DivineRobin on Venmo.
We know this past year has been extremely challenging and isolating. Humans are social creatures by nature, and quarantine and social distancing have been hard on all of our psyches and mental health. But as a community, we have to get real: if we really want what’s best for the collective whole of humanity, the truth is that it’s still not safe to meet up in big groups to do psychedelic work or ceremonies.
We’ve been talking about it a lot on the podcast, especially on Solidarity Fridays, so here is a reminder in print: COVID-19 is real, psychedelics and spirituality won’t make you exempt from catching and spreading it, and therefore, it’s still too dangerous to be doing group psychedelic work.
Often, when people justify disregarding masks or social distancing measures, their line of reasoning is that they’re not a senior citizen or immunocompromised, and so the current safety precautions don’t apply to them. But this is not a zero-sum, “die or survive” game, and it’s not just about you and your healing; it’s about the people around you–employees at your local grocery store, your bus or taxi driver, the nurses, doctors, and teachers in your community–people you don’t know and don’t think about, who still might be harmed by your actions.
And COVID-19 is not temporary. There are psychedelic community members with vagus nerve damage, permanent vocal cord damage from severe coughing, lung issues, and other serious long-term conditions. We know plenty of people in their 30s and 40s who survived COVID-19 and thought everything was fine, but their post-virus quality of life has since been severely lowered. We know folks who are still sick, struggling with chronic pain, brain fog, and low energy for over a year, who have therefore been unable to work and have become dependent on family members to support them as their recovery extends past the 13, 14, and 15-month marks.
Beyond our immediate community, a recent study published in The Lancet journal of psychiatry found that a significant portion of COVID-19 survivors were diagnosed with a neurological or psychiatric condition within 6 months of contracting COVID, many for the first time. And remember- we’re still seeing COVID variants pop up, so while many feel we’re making our way out of this dark period, we may still have a long way to go.
And it sucks. We understand people are struggling right now. Kyle sees it every day in his therapy and coaching practice, and we all feel it. Being in isolation and lacking human connection is extremely hard, unnatural, and affecting us all. The need for healing and contact is immense and only getting bigger, and we absolutely empathize with you all. We understand that it goes against our individualistic cultural conditioning, but this is a social responsibility that is beyond individual healing or personal politics, and we have to think communally. When the community is sick, the individual is sick. And when the individual is sick, the community is sick.
When we’ve posted about this on social media, we’ve had folks bring up suicide statistics from 2020, using the high number as an argument for encouraging much-needed psychedelic healing work. Everyone on our team has lost someone to suicide and we know how difficult that is, and also how easy it is to think that perhaps an ayahuasca or mushroom ceremony could have saved our loved ones from their afflictions. So it feels insensitive to compare numbers of deaths against each other, but since that’s something that gets brought up a lot, look into it: while the 2020 stats aren’t final and don’t take overdoses into account, the numbers are actually very similar to 2019, with the number of deaths directly attributed to COVID-19 being drastically higher. It’s uncomfortable to think about, but the numbers speak for themselves. This is beyond our emotional ties to the issue; this is for the sake of the whole community of humanity.
The fact of the matter is, psychedelic group work involves a lot of touching, being close together for 6 to 12 hours, and being in close proximity to others’ bodily fluids while we cough, purge, or cry. Cups of water, pipes, snuff tools, and tobacco cigars are often shared. People hold hands, hug, and practice bodywork with each other. These are all optimal opportunities for viruses to spread. Plus, when you are under the influence of a psychedelic medicine, the realities of social distancing and spreading germs won’t exactly be in the forefront of your mind and can easily be cast aside as “silly human problems.” And while that belief may feel freeing, it won’t protect you from catching or spreading disease.
Are there safe options for participating in psychedelic healing work? At the moment, we think the safest option for those looking for mental health relief with psychedelics is ketamine-assisted psychotherapy and infusions. Unlike underground group work or retreats abroad, ketamine clinics and practitioners are regulated by organizations like OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) in the US, meaning they have to follow governmental guidelines for safe and sterile working environments. Also, ketamine infusions, injections, lozenges, and nasal sprays are not typically done in groups, and if they are, they also follow social distancing protocols, as outlined in our recent piece on the topic.
We understand that for many, treatment options like ketamine-assisted psychotherapy may not be accessible or appropriate, and some people will still participate in group work anyway. To those people, we encourage everyone to do everything as safely as possible by only engaging in small ceremonies that are following strict safety and social distancing protocols and have contact tracing in place. If the work can be done outside, do it there. And if you’re traveling, please quarantine in consideration of the communities you’re traveling between. But don’t forget- there are lots of virtual psychedelic community offerings to keep us all engaged too. And think about the other work you can do, from meditation, breathwork, and journaling, to creating art or just going for a walk in the woods. Not all healing comes from psychedelics and group work.
As more people get vaccinated and the world begins to reopen, we are all feeling the excitement to move towards the sense of normalcy we all miss so much. But this is a slow process, and we encourage everyone to continue to move slowly, stay cautious, and continue engaging in safe practices and social distancing measures until we get there.
We know that this is not what a lot of the psychedelic community wants to hear, but regardless of how unpopular putting this out might make us, we feel it’s a necessary reminder that we all have a shared responsibility to keep our communities safe.
Thanks for your support,
Joe, Kyle, & the rest of the Psychedelics Today team
Internal Family Systems therapy, or IFS, is an effective complement to psychedelic therapy and integration. But how does this therapeutic approach – best known for working with the many pieces of the psyche that comprise one’s personality, or “parts,” – work in conjunction with psychedelic medicines?
My own experiences with this modality enabled me to better understand how it works.
Navigating inner space is always a surprisingly visual journey for me. In one particular session, my eyes had been closed for a while. And this time, in a guided Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy session, the powerful visual component was exactly the same.
There are many paths from which one can enter the inner world, known as “trailheads” in this detailed method of psychotherapy. Just taking a few breaths within this dark, introspective place, I could feel something churning like magma in my stomach. I saw and felt hot, crackling flames of anger percolating within my abdomen; painful memories of betrayal filtered through my consciousness.
Using this bodily trailhead as an entry point and working through the “parts” that hallmark the IFS approach, my therapist began to gently ask about it, as if the anger was a sentient presence.
“What would your anger do if it didn’t have to keep doing this job?” I heard from what now seemed like a far-off place.
“I don’t know,” I mumbled. “I like the anger. I know it’s here to protect me. We get along.”
It felt deeply familiar, like a well-worn sweatshirt that I couldn’t bring myself to let go of. It was safe. Or rather, it kept me safe. In the language of IFS, I had contacted a protective part of my psyche, which in this case, was a flaming cauldron of anger.
“Good. Let the anger know that you appreciate it. Really let it feel that… what does the anger have to say to you now?”
“That sometimes we lose people,” I sighed. “And that that’s OK.” These simple words gave way to a massive sense of release.
I felt the turbulent energy inside me suddenly transform into something which encompassed my entire awareness. The fiery magma of anger which coursed through my body a minute ago shifted into something that I can only describe as an emotionally expansive, all-inclusive moment of peace.
This space was familiar. I had felt it before, this wordless balance between bliss and sorrow which the thinking mind, or “ego”, seems to dissolve in.
Now, instead of feeling the flames inside me, I was inside the flame itself. I felt my entire body relax. My mind, a psychic battleground only moments before, was quiet.
I exhaled into a stillness which resonated throughout my cells. The immensity of all of life’s crushing beauty somatically flooded through my nervous system and inner vision. I felt my heart beat and my lungs expand as forgiveness flowed through my entire body. My mind relinquished control, letting the story behind this painful life chapter melt into the purifying, boundless flame I suddenly found myself engrossed in. I was deeply immersed in what IFS therapists call the energy of “the Self.”
The distant voice advised me to stay there as long as I could. And so I did, until time began to loosen its grip upon my consciousness.
As powerful as any psychedelic moment of healing, this visionary journey was facilitated by a therapist in my Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy training program. After being guided through this modality, my suspicions around its potential for use in psychedelic therapy and integration were confirmed beyond a doubt.
What Is Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy?
Developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz in the late 1980’s, Internal Family Systems is a psychotherapy modality rapidly growing in popularity. As an outgrowth of his work studying family systems therapy and working with patients struggling with severe eating disorders, Schwartz noticed that his clients spoke about their inner conflict in terms of “parts” of themselves guiding their troubling behaviors and inner conflicts.
In what is ironically a radical act in many areas of the psychological establishment, Schwartz actually took his clients at their word.
Integrating his knowledge of family systems, as well as the work of Carl Jung and other psychotherapeutic pioneers, Schwartz created the IFS model which embraces the notion that our personalities are actually composed of a symphony of different parts, as well as a core, boundless source of energy that both Jung and Schwartz deemed “the Self.”
“There are times where you just can’t convince these protective parts to let us get to an exile and heal it. And a psychedelic session can expedite that pretty easily, it seems,” Schwartz told Psychedelics Today.
When asked about working with IFS and MDMA, Mithoefer said, “I have learned how well the spontaneous observations and experiences of our participants map onto IFS, including both parts and the Self… in my experience, people are hungry for this perspective. (Richard Schwartz) didn’t make it up – IFS taps into real phenomena.”
Schwartz says his experiences with psychedelics and the insights he gathered through substance work helped open his awareness to the “multiplicity of mind,” a core principle of IFS.
In the past, the field of psychology viewed subpersonalities with great skepticism, giving way to infamous diagnoses such as dissociative identity disorder (DID), formerly called multiple personality disorder (MPD). Yet IFS, a non-pathologizing form of psychotherapy, looks at the many subpersonalities, or parts, as natural facets of the psyche–aspects of ourselves which yearn to be known, understood, and healed.
As a depth psychotherapist, I was trained to suss out the unconscious and possibly archetypal aspects of a given dynamic or situation with my clients. Image and metaphor have long been the bread and butter of depth psychology, with myths and fairytales frequently providing the backdrop for some of this tradition’s most memorable texts. In other words, both depth psychology and IFS take to heart the notion that image and psyche are one and the same.
After slowly developing my own therapeutic style, which is influenced not only by human teachers, but psychedelic plant teachers as well, IFS felt like an immensely practical tool with which to weave this odd tapestry of animism, image, and archetypes.
After all, what is an archetype if not psychic energy crystallized into an image?
What are “Parts” in IFS?
For millennia, psychedelic medicines have been used by humans to invoke visions, as well as bring one into dialog with some larger presence: the Great Spirit, the spirits of teacher plants, animals, elements, or the ancestors. Especially with ayahuasca, DMT, and other tryptamine-containing substances, people report encountering beings or entities who often communicate detailed information that can be recalled after the effect itself has worn off.
Whether these entities are mere reflections, or personifications of psychic parts,is a valid, but different, discussion. The point is that when one goes deep enough into the mind, research and anecdotal evidence proves that it is not unusual to encounter presences that seem entirely other than one’s own self.
Instead of entities, beings, or spirits, IFS employs the language of partsto describe the psychic presences which collectively constitute one’s personality.
As a psychedelic integration therapist, IFS provided me with a systematized toolkit for working with people trying to make sense of the paradigm-bending moments that can often occur during a psychedelic journey.
For example: take the voice that suddenly tells you to quit your job; the sinking feeling in your stomach when you think about a memory from childhood; feelings of unworthiness that you’re doing it all wrong; or that suddenly you’re not safe, despite all evidence to the contrary. From the IFS perspective, these are most likely parts expressing themselves and asking for your attention. From a shamanic perspective, these messages might be coming from the spirit of the plant you just ingested, from the ancestors, or from something else entirely.
For psychedelic explorers who prefer not to think in terms of spiritsor entities, IFS can provide a useful method of conceptualizing and categorizing potentially confusing aspects of psychedelic experiences that might not fit within their worldview.
Defining “Self” in Internal Family Systems
Both IFS and psychedelics work by reconnecting one to an internal source of transpersonal energy, which Schwartz, taking a page from Carl Jung, calls “the Self.”
IFS has the potential to lead one into profoundly visionary and emotionally cathartic experiences. For me, IFS has been comparable to some of the most healing moments that I’ve experienced with psychedelic medicines.
IFS can provide both facilitators and participants a language by which to conceptualize and map an experience that would otherwise be, by its very nature, ineffable.
In describing the energy of the Self, Schwartz developed what he calls the “eight C’s”:
Compassion
Curiosity
Calm
Clarity
Courage
Connectedness
Confidence
Creativity
In IFS, it is the energy of the Self, not the therapist, that truly heals.
The good news here is that everyone, regardless of past trauma or experiences, has within them the boundless energy of Self. Thus, IFS believes that everyone has the capacity to heal.
The notion of the Selffirmly locates IFS therapy in the terrain of existential-humanistic, transpersonal, and depth psychology, all of which form the foundations of emerging and long-standing modalities of psychedelic psychotherapy (for examples, see Grof, 1975, Stolaroff, 1997, and Leary, Metzner & Alpert, 2007).
One could say that within the psychological establishment, the idea of the Selfis as radical a notion as LSD being used to heal. In many mental health agencies or governmental health services, both concepts would likely be given a sideways glance at best, mockery or early termination at worst.
In my own psychedelic experiences, I can recall moments of feeling immersed in many of the eight C’s.Formal research has yet to be conducted connecting the Jungian and IFS concept of the Selfwithin psychedelic experiences and its potential for healing, though the work of Stanislav Grof, as well as Griffith’s research mentioned above, comes close.
Perhaps the expansive, all-encompassing energy of the Self is what the famous Mazatec curandera, Maria Sabina was referring to when she said, “Heal yourself, with beautiful love, and always remember, you are the medicine.”
How Psychedelic Integration Could Employ IFS
After a psychedelic experience, my clients often share what can seem like a deluge of information, imagery, and questions. In addition to archetypal imagery, transpersonal, and shamanic perspectives, IFS provides me a detailed map for understanding and deeping into the integration process with clients. Often, there are recognizable themes or patterns that can emerge during a psychedelic experience – for good or ill.
Here are some core concepts in IFS therapy that I have found useful while facilitating integration work: “Unburdening,” “Polarization,” and “Blending.”
“Unburdening” in IFS
If one could distill IFS therapy down to a single sentence, it could be that it consists of helping certain parts of ourselves let go of outdated or inherited ways of being that cause us to suffer.
IFS calls this process “unburdening,” as it understands that certain parts take on “burdens” early in life which, as we grow, might become less and less helpful or healthy.
This unburdening is achieved by establishing a connection to the Self, so that the part can realize it doesn’t have to do it all by itself, that it’s not alone, and that its past experiences don’t dictate the future. Usually, these moments are profoundly cathartic and emotional. It can also take an immense amount of work to get there, which is why psychedelics can potentially play a helpful role in this therapeutic process.
From an IFS perspective, unburdening is often what happens in a positive psychedelic experience, and can be some of the most memorable moments of the journey. For example, metaphorically giving your anger to the fire; letting your grief float away into the ocean; or planting your sadness into earth. Such images are common in both IFS therapy sessions and psychedelic journeys.
Through the lens of IFS, our stories about who we are or how the world is might be a burden carried by a part. For instance, seeing oneself as a savior, victim, martyr, or outcast is a story that might be severely limiting one’s idea of who they really are and their self worth. Tendencies towards workaholism or scarcity fears, chronic shame, feelings of not being enough and needing to prove oneself, are all burdens that certain parts might carry for decades. Many burdens were placed upon us during childhood by family members, and in that sense are not true reflections of who we really are.
On an even deeper level, some burdens are inherited through our blood lineage and ancestry, or experienced through what author and psychotherapist Resmaa Menakem calls HIPP (historical, intergenerational, persistent institutional, and personal) trauma. These heavy burdens may inform every aspect of someone’s life, and are heartbreakingly real, but are still not accurate reflections of who they truly are.
Trauma twists someone’s story about who they are. Healing helps rewrite it.
“Polarization” in Internal Family Systems
Dealing with “polarization” between parts is a common occurrence in IFS therapy sessions. Through an IFS lens, challenging psychedelic experiences can often occur because these same polarized parts are amplified during a journey. Looping or confusion – a frequent element of a bad trip – might be seen as an extreme polarization.
Polarization is like an inner battle. A difficult psychedelic experience might occur because of this inner tension: one part wants to surrender, another part is terrified to do so. One part says to take a second dose, another part cautions against it. One part wants to lay down under a blanket, another wants to stand up, stretch, and go outside. Such conundrums can be viewed through IFS as polarized parts playing a psychic tug-of-war.
This can get exhausting. And usually, there is a much deeper process going on beneath. The IFS therapist’s job is to tend to the parts that arise with compassion, to witness them, help them unburden, and reconnect them to the energy of the Self.
“Blending” in IFS
We all have certain parts that become strong aspects of our personality. Many people who live outwardly successful lives might be plagued by a “manager” part which acts as a strict taskmaster, inwardly limiting their creative expression and spontaneity. High levels of anxiety, especially social anxiety, can be viewed through IFS as a “critical manager” or “worrisome exile” part which gains control in uncertain situations. Or someone struggling with a strong addiction, for example, can often revert to what’s called a “firefighter”–a reactive part that rushes in to dramatically protect the system when triggered, even though it ultimately sabotages that person’s wellbeing.
Such experiences are referred to in IFS as “blending.”
Fear of letting go, or becoming stuck in certain thought patterns is a basic example of being “blended” in a psychedelic state. The psychic energy being taken up by the part in question is inhibiting one from connecting to the body, the deep nervous system, and the Self, which is how healing most easily occurs.
Extreme examples of negative outcomes from psychedelics can often be seen through this idea of blending.
How many of us have experienced someone – possibly ourselves – fresh out of a psychedelic state convinced they are either some kind of messiah with a sacred mission, or at fault for some global catastrophe, disaster, or cosmic mishap?
Taken to the extremes, this is the stuff that psychedelic-induced psychosis is made of.
And almost guaranteed, there is a much deeper reason why the part in question took over. Likely, it is to protect the psyche from facing something incredibly scary or traumatic.
From a Jungian lens, one could view these extreme examples of blending as a type of “archetypal possession,” resulting from some form of inflation. During an archetypal possession, according to Jung, an archetype takes “hold of the psyche with a kind of primeval force and compels it to transgress the bounds of humanity. The consequence is a puffed-up attitude, loss of free will, delusion and enthusiasm for good and evil alike.
Interestingly, psychedelics can both inflate or deflate the ego, filling someone up with grandiose visions of spreading the “good news,” or reducing one into a fragile shell of themselves.
This is the critical role of integration: to recalibrate the ego with the Self, to witness and guide the vulnerable parts that need care, and to ground potentially expansive visions into a genuine path of tangible healing.
Using IFS to Navigate Psychedelic Journeys
Beyond integration, IFS can offer an immensely valuable toolkit for navigating psychedelic space as well. Speaking from personal experience, IFS has helped me to create more psychic spaciousness within a journey. Much like mindfulness, remembering my IFS training has helped me practice observing, rather than getting “hooked” into particular thoughts and feelings that might emerge during a psychedelic experience.
The basic premise of IFS is that the psyche is inhabited, and that we can learn to dialog with these presences or parts. Remembering this simple fact, I’ve been able to remain in a space of gentle curiosity when, for instance, I might fall into a thought pattern that could potentially send me down a critical, anxious, or confused internal loop during a journey.
Cultivating the ability to remain connected to Self, or any of the eight C’swhich characterize this energy, helps me to remain grounded and present within psychedelic space. Much like mindfulness, the goal is to create psychic flexibility, spaciousness, and literacy, so that we might more deeply be able to do “the work” that psychedelics inevitably ask of us.
Every IFS therapy session, like every psychedelic experience, can be worlds apart. Speaking from experiences both as a therapist and client, I am continually blown away by what this therapeutic modality has revealed to me and those I’ve been lucky enough to work with.
Internal Family Systems is not only an effective psychotherapy modality with an extraordinary capacity to heal trauma, demonstrated in a pilot study in which 92% of participants no longer qualified for a PTSD diagnosis, it is also a non-pathologizing, client-directed, and ultimately psycho-spiritual framework for guiding one on the potentially infinite road of inner work.
As every good navigator knows deep down, the map and territory will always remain two very different realms. Yet as far as a set of directions for charting the inner world, and for helping people integrate potentially life-altering psychedelic experiences, Internal Family Systems therapy presents a toolkit which can greatly benefit therapists and facilitators looking for a detailed, multifaceted, and truly psychedelic methodology for exploring the soul.
Nine women of color who are working hard to ensure their communities have access and representation in the psychedelic movement
As interest in psychedelic medicine explodes, it is trailed by conversation about representation and access. From leaders, authors and filmmakers, to researchers and clinical study participants, one simple fact is clear: The psychedelic community is disproportionately white. The recent global focus on racial inequity and social justice has called us all to reflect on our impact and seek out tangible ways to show up for communities of color. Now, this conversation has reached the psychedelic community and called leaders to task. Are we ready to explore why the movement is so homogenous, and to learn from leaders of color who can help us shift and evolve?
While psychedelic press coverage focuses on hand-wringing over the privileged corporate takeover, there is a more hopeful subculture emerging. Around the world there are visionary and collaborative leaders who aren’t waiting for an invitation from the vanguard of psychedelic elites. We spoke with nine women of color who are shaping psychedelic culture at the grassroots level and helping to create more inclusive spaces within the movement for global healing.
Buki Fadipe, Founder Adventures in Om
Buki Fadipe is the founder of Adventures In Om
Buki Fadipe, founder of Adventures In Om, is a transformational guide, artist, and psychedelic practitioner in training based in London, England. Her work focuses on empowering individuals to take part in their own healing and consider all aspects of the self: emotional, physical, environmental, spiritual and psychological. “When we self-heal, we do so for our lineage, community, collective, Mother Earth and all living beings,” Fadipe says.
In the future of psychedelics, Fadipe hopes to see better representation and access.
“Accessibility is a big issue,” she says. “The way the industry is currently heading does not leave much room for focusing on marginalized groups. These medicines are being worked into a psychiatric framework, a system that is already incredibly dismissive of those from lower economic brackets who are often most in need.”
Fadipe’s goal is to positively disrupt the conversation, one which she says overemphasizes the clinical model and dependence on quick fixes, pharmaceutical medicines, and years of ineffective talk therapy.
“This is an emerging field,” she continues. “How can we map its scope without more diverse data coming from a realistic representation of society? I hope that the future will lead us to see more leadership from BIPOC and women who need representation across the industry, from clinical research and decriminalization to harm reduction, education and integration.”
Jenn So, Founder SO Searching Oneself
Jenn So is the founder of SO Searching Oneself
As a femme embodied person from a family of Viet-Khmer immigrant refugees, Jenn So, LCSW and founder of SO Searching Oneself in Washington, USA, is passionate about generational healing. So has worked as a professional social worker for the past 14 years, and her private practice specializes in racial trauma, adverse childhood experiences, and intimate partner violence. She first became intrigued about the healing potential of psychedelics after witnessing firsthand how psilocybin transformed her cousin’s life.
“Psychedelic-assisted therapy could help someone who has experienced trauma return to a specific moment in their memory and know they can be safely walked out of it,” So explains. She emphasizes the importance of trained professionals and safe environments.
“Western life is disconnected from the idea of things being passed down generation to generation. We don’t live with our elders. We don’t have opportunities to be closely involved with their lives and experiences the way traditional cultures do,” So says. She believes we are just beginning to appreciate the way trauma impacts the body and family lineage.
“These medicines are being worked into a psychiatric framework, a system that is already incredibly dismissive of those from lower economic brackets who are often most in need.”
–Buki Fadipe
Is the mental health community ready to take a serious look at the potential of psychedelic medicine? So isn’t sure.
“The stigma around psychedelics is largely because we don’t fully understand them,” she says. “We humans believe that what we know is all there is to know, so new information is met with skepticism and fear. The mental health community isn’t immune to these attitudes.”
So hopes to bridge the conversation and help mental health practitioners better understand psychedelic medicines.
Charlotte James, Co-Founder The Ancestor Project
Charlotte James is a co-founder of The Ancestor Project
When co-founders of The Ancestor Project (formerly The Sabina Project) Charlotte James and Dre Wright met, they connected over their shared experiences in white medicine spaces and the recognition of the need for BIPOC-centered healing environments. They launched The Ancestor Project (TAP) in 2019 with a focus on Baltimore-based events, then shifted online when the pandemic hit.
James outlines some tangible steps the psychedelic community can take to better support Black community members: “We invite White folx to buy our Psychedelic Anti-Racism workbook. To sit in their discomfort as they unravel privilege and find their role in the collective liberation movement.” James continues, “Also, recognize that racism causes trauma, [and so] treat Black and BIPOC folx with the same trauma-informed care you provide others.”
The mantle of leadership is heavy for a woman of color navigating her own healing path while working to further conversations about psychedelics as medicine. James emphasizes how important it is to slow down. “I really try to live my life in ceremony. I have a massive toolbox of practices and technologies that support me: sitting in ceremony, practicing Kemetic yoga with my partner, spending time in nature, dance, meditation, drinking lots of water, and building a healthy, shameless relationship with food. I would say though, when you’re walking in your purpose, the work is less draining–even when it is really intense.”
James shared about TAP’s recent name change, and the importance of modeling accountability:
“We have to walk the walk. We can’t be out here holding White folx accountable to their sh*t and not also reflecting on the ways that we have deeply internalized their ways of being to the point that the system becomes self-replicating. It’s okay to be vulnerable and admit when you have self-reflected and recognized a misstep. I’m grateful for the humans who support us as we do our own liberation work, and to the ancestors, spirit guides, and relatives who are the true geniuses and creators of this work.”
Elan Hagens, Co-Founder Fruiting Bodies Collective
Elan Hagens is a co-founder of the Fruiting Bodies Collective
Elan Hagens is the co-founder of the Fruiting Bodies Collectivein Oregon, USA, which was born out of a need for education, advocacy, and community within the state’s new psilocybin therapy program.
“Just inviting people of color into the scene or making options financially accessible isn’t enough,” Hagens explains. “We need to consider why communities of color aren’t as aware of or interested in psychedelics. We need to understand the history of the War on Drugs and what can happen if we invite people into vulnerable healing spaces and then they return to a world that can be dehumanizing.”
Hagens also explains the need to be mindful of the language we use. “When enthusiastic advocates talk about “magic mushrooms” and “tripping”, we can lose a lot of people due to stigma and cultural connotation. Instead, can we talk about these medicines with respect and in a new way that people from all walks of life can understand and relate to? Healing goes beyond one subculture. We all have hearts and souls and an innate ability to heal in the right conditions.”
“We have to walk the walk. We can’t be out here holding White folx accountable to their sh*t and not also reflecting on the ways that we have deeply internalized their ways of being to the point that the system becomes self-replicating. It’s okay to be vulnerable and admit when you have self-reflected and recognized a misstep.”
–Charlotte James
Ultimately, healing must go beyond the individual. The founders at Fruiting Bodies believe that individual healing and societal change are inseparable. Beyond helping shape Oregon’s program, their mission is to shift the narrative and destigmatize psychedelic medicine through relationship building and storytelling.
*Note: Elan Hagens is co-founders with Rebecca Martinez, who authored this article.
Robin Divine, Founder Black People Trip
Robin Divine is the founder of Black People Trip
Robin Divine is the founder of Black People Trip, an online community with a mission to raise awareness, destigmatize, teach harm reduction, and create safer spaces for Black women in psychedelics.
“There is such a stigma around drug use (as well as therapy) which makes the idea of psychedelic therapy taboo for many Black people,” Divine says. “We need to see the faces and hear the stories of people who look like us in order to begin to break down these outdated ways of thinking.”
Divine explains that Black communities are traumatized. She sees psychedelics as a way for people to take healing into their own hands, down a path to wellness that exists beyond Western medicine.
“I invite white community members to get involved. If you are truly committed to equity in psychedelics, then take action. If you have the resources, then donate money to organizations that are doing the work to create better access in Black communities. I’d also ask them to respect the idea that Black people need their own spaces to heal that don’t involve them. In short: take action, and honor our space.”
Jessika Lagarde & Tian Daphne, Co-Founders Women on Psychedelics
Jessika Lagarde is a co-founder of Women on Psychedelics
Jessika Lagarde and Tian Daphne are the co-founders of Women on Psychedelics (WOOP), which began organically during the COVID-19 lockdown while the two were volunteering for a mushroom-related initiative. “Having ourselves experienced the healing and transformative power of psychedelics, we saw a glaring need to not only normalize the talk around psychedelics, but to specifically work to end the stigmatization around women’s mental health and substance use,” Lagarde explains.
Tian Daphne is a co-founder of Women on Psychedelics
The promising research inspired them to become advocates. But as they dove deeper, they quickly noticed a lack of diversity in the psychedelic space. “Despite having disproportionately higher rates of trauma, people of color and women remain underrepresented in research amongst participants, as well as in underground psychedelic communities and the movement toward decriminalization and legalization,” Lagarde adds.
“Through Women on Psychedelics, we hope to connect women through social, creative, political, and educational content and activities. We truly believe that everyone should have the freedom and ability to access psychedelics for their own healing and growth.”
Mariah Makalapua, Founder the Medicine Collective
Mariah Makalapua is the founder of the Medicine Collective
Mariah Makalapua is a Hawaiian and mixed Native North American artist and mother who is the founder of the Medicine Collective in Oregon, USA. Since 2017, the Medicine Collective has combined art and medicine for the purpose of healing people and the planet. Makalapua’s mission is to provide safe and respectful healing experiences rooted in indigenous traditions.
Makalapua believes respect for indigenous rights and wisdom is an expression of an individual’s healing process. “Trauma healing has to do with diving into your upbringing, your ancestry, and ultimately, decolonizing and clearing your own lineage and understanding where you come from. We all have ancestors. No matter who you are, there is a reality of what colonialism and patriarchy did to your family.”
“We need to consider why communities of color aren’t as aware of or interested in psychedelics. We need to understand the history of the War on Drugs and what can happen if we invite people into vulnerable healing spaces and then they return to a world that can be dehumanizing.”
–Elan Hagens
If people understand these things, she says, we will no longer need to argue about cultural appropriation because we will develop a heart level-understanding of it. “You wouldn’t attend an ayahuasca ceremony and then think a medicine leadership role is yours to take. You just wouldn’t be having that jump. It’s not a healed or whole approach.”
In regards to Oregon’s legal psilocybin therapy program, Makalapua advocates for wisdom, accountability and intentionality.
“Historically, indigenous communities did not exist in a vacuum in their healing. The medicine was part of the larger culture and there was a collective consciousness around it. They understood: This work is terrifying, necessary, and we must go to the right people. But this collectivism has been lost from modern culture. We need support in watering the seeds planted during ceremony. It is deep, inner, relational work: making changes, making boundaries. It requires friendship, community, and at least a few close people who can support and guide you through that change.”
“The mushrooms are going to be mushrooms no matter what we do,” Makalapua continues. “I want to protect their sacredness. It’s like protecting your grandmother. You know she’s strong and a badass, but you’re not going to let her go and do something dangerous. It’s the same with the mushrooms; we should respect them, love them, and help carry their groceries, so to speak.”
Hanifa Nayo Washington, Founder One Village Healing
Hanifa Nayo Washington is the founder of One Village Healing Photo credit: Rachel Liu
Hanifa Nayo Washington is an award winning cultural artivist and sacred activist combining arts, healing, and activism for the last 20+ years. Based in Connecticut, USA, Washington is the founder and principal organizer of One Village Healing, cultivator of beloved community at the Fireside Project, director of community engagement for CEIO, and a founding member of several emerging psychedelic initiatives, including the Equity in Psychedelic Therapy Initiative.
In 2017 she released her third album, Mantras for the Revolution. In December 2018 Washington received a Phenomenal Women Arts Award from the Arts Council of Greater New Haven for her contributions and achievements in the arts. She is currently working on a storytelling project called Growing Wilder, which is expected in 2022.
Washington explains how her own healing experiences led her to the intersection of psychedelic medicines and social transformation:
“Going into ceremony and creating sacred spaces…helped me deconstruct the poisons of internalized systems of oppression. These allies, these plant medicines, have helped me to unhook these things from my body and mindset, and allow me to be in deeper relationship with myself and others in ways that are not poisoned,” she says.
What makes Washington’s leadership stand out is both her joy and her specificity. One vision many emerging leaders share within the psychedelic space is inclusion. Washington carries a torch into the unknown and helps to illuminate the “how” by shaping practical models with which to realize this shared vision. Equity and access are more than buzzwords at One Village Healing–they are the pillars that form the very structure and breath of the organization, which currently provides seven online wellness sessions for free to the community.
“Historically, indigenous communities did not exist in a vacuum in their healing. The medicine was part of the larger culture and there was a collective consciousness around it. They understood: This work is terrifying, necessary, and we must go to the right people.”
–Mariah Makalapua
The immense value of Fireside Project’s Psychedelic Peer Support Line is multiplied by their attention to “providing compassionate, accessible, and culturally responsive peer support, educating the public, and furthering psychedelic research, while embracing practices that increase equity, power sharing, and belonging within the psychedelic movement,” Washington says.
In order to create safer spaces and experiences for marginalized communities, Washington suggests a few practical steps:
Normalize and furthermore, require, inner work as a fundamental part of all psychedelic organizations, businesses, and institutions. “That means creating space and time within the work schedule for individual and collective learning, to practice and imagine ways of being that support healing from the trauma of oppressive systems.”
Within this process, trust and invest in affinity integration spaces.
Listen to, fund, and invest in individuals, businesses, projects, and initiatives led by people who have been impacted the most by systems of oppression.
“Without representation in leadership,” she says, “I’m pretty convinced that these aforementioned aspects will not happen.”
Conclusion
The common threads that come through these interviews help weave together a larger story. It’s a vision for global healing that doesn’t stop at getting over depression or healing family trauma. It’s a call to recognize our interconnectedness with one another and the Earth, and to commit to the work which enables psychedelic insights to transform us into more engaged, justice-focused citizens. Because of their intersectional identities, women of color offer the presence, leadership and perspective which are essential to the integrity of the psychedelics movement. We have endless opportunities to lift them up and learn from them as we grow and heal together in the years to come. Let’s begin today.
About the Author
Rebecca Martinez is a Portland, Oregon-based writer, parent and community organizer. She is a co-founder of the Fruiting Bodies Collective, an advocacy group, podcast and multimedia platform exploring the intersections between healing justice and the psychedelics movement.
The week I am writing this, author and psychedelic philanthropist Tim Ferriss poised a very direct question (via Twitter) to the public and various leaders in the psychedelic community, including Michael Pollan, Rick Doblin, and Robin Carhart-Harris.
Ferriss asked about how best to navigate the apparent “patent land grab” occurring behind the scenes within various private companies, many of which have received millions of dollars in investment capital and stock valuation.
This was in no doubt a response to the bizarre move by the British psychedelic startup Compass Pathways to patent, according to a recent VICE article, “the basic components of psychedelic therapy,” including the use of “soft furniture and holding hands.”
The internet being what it is, Christian Angermayer, a venture capitalist representing both Compass Pathways and a biotechnology company called ATAI Life Sciences, chimed in. Downplaying Ferriss’ philanthropy efforts and deeming his concerns as “wrong,” Angermayer defended the business strategies that Ferriss, along with many other leaders in the psychedelic community, called into question.
We are in the midst of a psychedelic gold rush. This comprehensive article from VICE addresses the nauseating pace at which psychedelic patents are springing up, including everything from psilocybin-infused cannabis to Phillip Morris e-cigarettes containing DMT and patents for psychedelic treatment of food allergies.
As if our world wasn’t getting strange enough.
If the $1 billion initial public offering (IPO) of Compass Pathways tells us anything, it is that we are well into witnessing the birth of an unwieldy and unpredictable psychedelic capitalism–a phrase which would likely compel the Huxleys, Hoffmans, and McKennas of the world to roll over in their infinite cosmic graves.
With multiple decriminalization measures passing this past year across the US, along with Measure 109 in Oregon that will allow the therapeutic use of psilocybin, the trip train is moving fast.
This news is worth celebrating. Personally, I am overjoyed, especially due to the fact that psychedelics played a central role in why I became a psychotherapist. Yet at this very moment, the future of psychedelic medicines is being bought and sold through high-level investment pitches delivered in sleek board rooms across San Francisco, London, and beyond.
Along with it is the potential for equitable and affordable access to psychedelic treatment for millions of people desperately seeking their healing effects–the very same people these companies claim to want to “help.” Forgive me for being skeptical.
Because here’s the thing we all must keep in mind as we trudge along into this wild new century:
Psychedelic Capitalism Doesn’t Exist.
There are psychedelic substances, experiences, music, art, and literature. There are psychedelic philosophies, ethics, worldviews, and sub-cultural communities. And there is psychedelic healing, treatment, and indigenous traditions. Psychedelics dissolve boundaries and reveal the soul, as the Greek definition of the word indicates (psyche– soul, delos – to reveal).
And then there is capitalism: an economic system controlled by private corporations based on infinite growth, resource extraction, consumption, and the bottom line of financial profit. Capitalism engulfs, confines, and extracts the soul from what it consumes.
Like “military intelligence” or the “music business,” the two words create a philosophical conundrum. We are currently witnessing how these paradoxical concepts will mesh in the here and now. The balance will undoubtedly be precarious.
In the heart-wrenching internet comic,We Will Call it Pala, artist Dave McGaughey tells the story about one woman’s vision to start a psychedelic healing clinic colliding with the hyper-optimized ethos of Silicon Valley and the cold-blooded demands of her venture capital investors.
As the story progresses along its all-too-likely trajectory, she faces the monstrosity she has unwittingly created. Grieving for her seemingly naive vision, the heroine laments, “There is no medicine strong enough to blow a corporation’s mind.”
This is because, despite their legal standing in our society, corporations are not conscious beings. By definition, a corporation will never have a mind-altering or heart-opening experience. And though the etymological roots of the word inevitably boils down to “body,” a corporation will never feel a thing.
Art may be one of the best arenas where we might be able to predict how the weird, alchemical vinegar of psychedelics will merge into the oil-laden waters of capitalism.
It is said that art can serve either as a hammer or a mirror for society. Even once a great work has been absorbed by the market–a Banksy or a John Cage or a Van Gogh–the impact of that work can still continue to resonate within the psyche and catalyze an imaginal or inner shift, no matter how many coffee mugs it’s been plastered onto.
Art is able to, at least partially, escape the trap of capitalism because it exists between two realms.
Art takes a form in our physical, time-bound reality, but also lives within the imagination, and is formless. Art can embody and transmit ideas, imparting rare messages that transcend the tangible and time-bound. Art changes culture. Art evokes emotion, even if we’ve seen the same image a thousand times. Art can shock, uplift, or crush us. Art is dangerous.
The Art of the Trick
Lewis Hyde, in his book Trickster Makes This World, argues that artists have evolved to become the mythological trickster figures within our modern culture, previously relegated to ritual and story.
Charting the work of figures as diverse as Marcel Duchamp, Bob Dylan and Frederick Douglass, Hyde explores the very nature of the words “art” and “artist,” tracing their etymological origins back to the Latin “artus,” which means joint, or juncture.
As Hyde playfully elaborates, the “artus-workers” of our modern era now play the role that Hermes, Raven, and Coyote played in their own cultural mythologies, as gods of the threshold, the trick, the lie, and the oft-misunderstood bearer of culture.
These were celebrated beings who, often unwittingly, upset the established and most likely stale cosmic order, and introduced a bit of divine chaos, thereby creating a new cosmic law, sacred technology, or a new world entirely.
Despite their humble or comedic natures, tricksters, like psychedelics, are not to be taken lightly.
Take the Greek myth of Hermes that Hyde uses as an example in his book. Hermes, through stealing and then slaughtering the golden cattle of his brother Apollo, performed the first sacrificial offering to himself and made himself a god. He clearly made a fool of his brother, who had a thing for fancy board rooms in the sky. The other Olympians thought it was hilarious and let Hermes stay.
Another example, Coyote, comes from Native American tradition, as told in the 1984 book, American Indian Myths and Legends. In thousands of tales told across many languages, Coyote creates the world, teaches hunting and tracking, or travels to the land of the dead, amongst other adventures. Up north, Raven brings fire to humans, invents the fish trap, and perfects the art of theft. He also travels between the earthly and heavenly realms, bringing messages across the divide.
Eshu and Legba, trickster gods from West Africa and the Carribean, are invoked before all other gods, for it is understood that every act of divine communication and exchange must pass through their hands. According to Hyde’s book, even though Eshu and Legba are not the most powerful beings in the Afro-Carribean pantheon, these lords of the crossroads are feared above all others because of their pivotal cosmic position. And you never know what you are going to get.
Even the Loki, dark trickster of the Norse pantheon, sets into motion events which would result in the destruction of the very gods themselves–Ragnarok. But what is often forgotten is that Ragnarok is not just about the fiery end of all things. It is also the beginning of the new world, all of which was put into motion because Loki couldn’t help but push a few buttons up in Asgard.
Come to think of it, trickster myths seem to have a lot in common with the role that psychedelics play within the psyche and the brain. Stay with me here.
Neurology and New Worlds
Neuroscientist and psychedelic researcher Robin Carhart-Harris’ landmark 2014 article, The Entropic Brain, highlighted the ways in which psilocybin decreases blood flow to an area of the brain called the default mode network (DMN), enabling novel connections to be made between neural pathways that are normally routed through this cognitive superhighway.
Psychedelics upset the applecart of our normal cognitive functioning, and by introducing a bit of pharmacologically mediated chaos, make room for new and different neural connections to take shape.
Of additional interest here is Carhart-Harris’ discussion of psychedelic states being “poised at a ‘critical’ point in a transition zone between order and disorder” in terms of consciousness. The place between two places, often called the liminal, plainly invokes the many trickster gods we have been speaking of, for all dwell on this same precipice, and can be found anywhere that roads, worlds, and perhaps even neural networks, collide.
Even the many studies showing the promise of psychedelics to treat addictions can be seen in the light of trickster myths (e.g. de L. Osório, et.al, 2015, and Hamill et.al, 2019). Whatever epiphany is granted during the psychedelic experience that might finally help someone kick a long-held, potentially lethal habit, marks a shift from one world to another, mythologically speaking.
True recovery marks an end and a beginning. Such an epiphany, especially in the language of Alcoholics Anonymous, is seen as a message from a higher power, which the Greeks and the Yoruba knew was always mediated by the trickster.
Lastly, let’s not forget the reason why psychedelics were made illegal in the first place. As Terance McKenna famously said, “Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.”
Just like art, psychedelics have the potential to change culture, and can be dangerous to the established order of things. The 1960’s and 70’s proved that with a spectacular flair. It is not difficult to imagine why Nixon deemed Timothy Leary “the most dangerous man in America” at the onset of the drug war.
The simple fact that a naturally occurring plant or fungus could impart such soul-revealing visions may even be “the best kept secret in history,” according to Brian Muraresku in his revelatory book, The Immortality Key. Who needs priests to talk to god when you can do it yourself with the help of a plant? But that’s a story for another time.
Even if these awe-inspiring revelations are “occasioned” (to use the words of psychedelic researcher Roland Griffiths) through a psychopharmacological trick of serotonin agonists, if the above mythologies teach us anything, it is that sometimes a trick is exactly what’s needed for real transformation to occur.
Standing at the Crossroads
Psychotherapy, it has often been said, is both an art and a science. And now as psychedelics firmly make their way into the field, it may require those facilitating this work to embrace the deeper dimensions of what such a sentiment actually implies.
Perhaps the evolving art of the psychedelic therapist or facilitator will be to more deeply embrace the fact that these medicines are as unpredictable as the tricksters we’ve just met, and that their true implications for both individuals and culture lay far beyond simply feeling better and having a nicer day at the office.
To believe that psychedelics can be confined to the clinic, the lab, or the corporate body not only ignores the volatile history of these compounds in the 20th century, it ignores the fact that the very function of these substances is to dissolve boundaries and dismantle familiar, long-held structures on neurological, psychological, and cultural levels.
To bring this all to a close, and to end where we began in true trickster fashion, it seems that Hermes has one last ace up his sleeve. Not only was he the divine messenger, bringer of dreams, guide of souls, and lord of the crossroads, Hermes was also the god of the marketplace. Any time money is exchanged, Hermes is said to be there. The true “free market” is imbued with the spirit of Hermes, and involves much more than the simple exchange of currency and intellectual property rights sold to the highest bidder.
Emerging philosophies, religions from far off lands, rumors of wars, and village gossip were all exchanged in the markets of old. They were places of excitement, cross-pollination, unpredictability, and community–things I think we could all use a bit more of these days.
There’s one last thing. It was said that one could ask for Hermes’ help by leaving an offering at his shrine, located at the heart of the market, covering one’s ears, and walking away. The first thing you heard when you opened your ears was Hermes speaking to you. The fine print is that one had to be firmly outside the hustle and bustle of the market before listening for the winged messenger’s reply. I believe the modern term for uncovering one’s ears too soon is called an “echo chamber,” and we all know how helpful those can be.
What does this mean for our purposes here? I haven’t the slightest idea. Only that the god of the marketplace requires us to maintain a certain distance from his domain to be clearly heard. Just because Hermes rules the marketplace doesn’t mean he lives there.
So just like where we find ourselves today, peering over the precipice of this new psychedelic capitalism, there’s no map for where we must go before listening for Hermes’ synchronistic response. Go far enough out and we might encounter the language of owls, moonlight, and whoever else prowls those liminal wilds. Stay too close, and we risk repeating just more of the same.
And if we get lost, and find ourselves back at the crossroads where we first began, perhaps that is the message we were needing all along. Because ultimately, the joke’s on us.
About the Author
With a masters (MA) in depth counseling psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute, Simon Yugler is a depth and psychedelic integration therapist based in Portland, OR. Weaving Jungian psychology, Internal Family Systems therapy, and mythology, Simon also draws on his diverse experiences learning from indigenous cultures around the world, including the Shipibo ayahuasca tradition. He has a background in experiential education, and has led immersive international journeys for young adults across 10 countries. He is passionate about initiation, men’s work, indigenous rights, decolonization, and helping his clients explore the liminal wilds of the soul. Find out more on his website and on Instagram , Twitter (@depth_medicine) or Facebook.
Could taking and integrating ketamine in groups make psychedelic therapy more accessible?
As psychedelic-assisted therapy continues marching into the mainstream, the issue of how absurdly expensive the treatment is continues to present countless difficulties. Of the strategies practitioners are taking to circumvent this problem, one of the most promising—and underreported—approaches is offering psychedelic-assisted group therapy.
Despite promising preliminary research using psilocybin in small groups to treat depression in cancer patients and MDMA-assisted therapy for couples where one partner has PTSD—and ignoring the fact that psilocybin-containing mushrooms are traditionally taken in group ceremonies in Mexico—ketamine is the only psychedelic medicine that’s already legally used in psychedelic-assisted therapy. Let’s take a look at the emerging world of group ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, its benefits as well as drawbacks.
Group Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy
Though traditionally used as an anesthetic, ketamine, an Essential Medicine of the World Health Organization, is now widely being prescribed off-label by qualified practitioners to treat a host of mental health diagnoses, including depression, addiction, PTSD, and chronic pain.
Ketamine-assisted psychotherapy—“KAP” for short—is a growing mental health treatment option for people who meet diagnostic criteria. In line with most psychedelic therapy protocols, KAP involves a sequence of medicine sessions, in which clients take the substance with the mental health professional present, and sober therapy sessions referred to as “preparation” and “integration.” Through KAP, many people are finding healing where prevailing mental health treatments have fallen short.
Also in line with most psychedelic therapy protocols, KAP is really freaking expensive.
Though ketamine’s effects are relatively short-acting compared to MDMA and psilocybin, therefore requiring fewer therapist hours to pay for, sessions still cost several hundred dollars. Ongoing treatment can quickly climb into the thousands.
Even ketamine “infusion centers,” which involve no therapy, tend to charge $400-$600 for each intravenous infusion—and they typically make it clear that lasting symptom relief only occurs after several rounds. At such centers, folks may receive infusions in group rooms, but oftentimes it’s more akin to the way you’d find yourself sitting on a sterile lab chair next to some stranger at a plasma donation center, while someone who doesn’t want to hear about your problems sticks a needle in your vein and leaves. While this might help some folks, costs remain abundant.
Group ketamine-assisted psychotherapy is different. Though there is currently no published research on group KAP’s efficacy, ketamine’s legality via prescription allows therapists to smoothly translate the modality into groups. As group members can then split the price of the therapist’s time—the largest contributor to high costs of treatment—the overall cost decreases significantly.
Raquel Bennett, Psy.D., is a psychotherapist and researcher who specializes in ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, who also teaches our masterclass on ketamine ethics as part of our Navigating Psychedelics for Clinicians and Therapists course. She practices in Berkeley, CA, where she runs the KRIYA Ketamine Research Institute. Bennett has been studying the therapeutic properties of ketamine since 2002, when a personal encounter with the medicine sparked her awareness of its powerful antidepressant properties. That was over a decade before infusion centers started popping up, well before “ketamine-assisted psychotherapy” was a term.
“I was studying this long before it was cool,” Bennett tells Psychedelics Today with a laugh.
Motivated by a desire to lower cost and increase accessibility, Bennett began facilitating ketamine groups with her medical partners in 2016. The same motivation also prompted the Wholeness Center, a leading ketamine therapy clinic and psychedelic research site in Colorado, to offer ketamine therapy groups as well. Scott Shannon, M.D., who founded Wholeness in 2010, teamed with colleague Sandra Fortson, LCSW, to offer the clinic’s first ketamine therapy group last year.
“One of the most prominent reasons why I endorse and am exploring group therapy is that it solves one of the greatest drawbacks of the psychedelic model right now, which is that psychedelic therapy is a treatment of the affluent,” Shannon tells Psychedelics Today. “Instead of offering KAP for three or four hundred dollars a session, group therapy brings the cost down closer to a hundred dollars a session, which is a big difference.”
Fortson elaborates on how significant that difference can be: “Clients are looking at a savings of almost 50% for a 5-week KAP group curriculum—including medical clearance, intake, 3 experiential sessions and final integration session.”
At the time of writing, Shannon and Fortson have facilitated two groups, each spanning five sessions. They are currently planning for a third and foresee group KAP as an important option in the Wholeness Center’s future psychedelic therapy offerings.
What Group Ketamine Therapy Looks Like
Bennett breaks down the process of ketamine-assisted psychotherapy into four essential steps:
Patient selection
Patient preparation
The medicine session
Follow-up care
At the preliminary level of patient selection, legal concerns must be taken seriously. “In order to participate in a ketamine group, you still have to fully meet the criteria for a clinically necessary treatment,” Bennett explains. “It’s currently not legally defensible for a person to participate in a group just because they want a ketamine experience.”
Both Wholeness and KRIYA use a cohort model where the same participants come together at scheduled times, and their series of sessions begins and ends together. Throughout that process, the group engages in both ketamine and non-ketamine sessions together, the latter of which involves working through their challenges and implementing insights into their lives with the support of the therapist(s) and fellow group members.
Shannon and Fortson have limited their cohorts to four people due to COVID-19 restrictions and social distancing protocols. Going forward, Shannon envisions groups of eight participants, which would require two therapists present. At KRIYA, Bennett has found that five or six participants with two clinicians is an optimal ratio.
At the Wholeness Center, participants sit on bean bag chairs in socially-distanced corners of a large room. During the ketamine sessions, members are given eyeshades along with their measured doses. Specifically-curated music plays through speakers, and Shannon and Fortson remain present in the space, supporting as needed and facilitating conversation if appropriate—and if possible, for at higher doses of ketamine, folks often temporarily lose their capacity to form words with their abruptly-nonexistent mouths.
There are three primary routes of administration in ketamine-assisted psychotherapy:
Lozenges (held in the mouth)
Intravenous (IV) administration
Intramuscular (IM) injection
All three require an MD’s prescription, and the latter two require a nurse or doctor for administration. Dose ranges vary significantly in each route—though low-dose sessions are often orally administered, while high-dose sessions typically come through IV or IM.
Each route yields a unique experience in terms of onset, depth, length, and intensity. Different routes of administration and doses are associated with the treatment of different conditions—in individual KAP, for example, high-dose IM treatment is often regarded as uniquely effective for suicidality. At KRIYA, doses and routes of administration are determined based on individual and group assessments.
“As providers, we need to be clear about what effects we are going for, and then make our dose recommendations based on that,” says Bennett. “That varies depending on the needs of the group and what we’re trying to accomplish.”
Regardless of dose and route of administration, ketamine sessions at KRIYA follow a consistent protocol. “Our ketamine groups include an opening ritual, time for sharing, the ketamine administration, quiet rest, and a potluck meal, with more time for sharing,” Bennett explains.
The frequency of group sessions at KRIYA varies. “For some cohorts, the participants come once per month for four consecutive months. In other cohorts, the participants come once per quarter, four times in a year,” describes Bennett.
A capacity for fluidity and openness is called for on the part of the therapists, along with a willingness to learn from the groups and attune to the members’ needs.
“Sometimes, we ask people to share something that feels heavy on their heart, and that usually opens a conversation,” Bennett says. “Then, we move to something they feel grateful for—it’s very helpful to invite people to enter a positive mindset as the medicine is wearing off, because that then seems to linger. Other times, we are quiet and simply hold the space as people spontaneously work on what they need to work on.”
At the Wholeness Center, ketamine groups have thus far followed fixed, five-session structures. Shannon details the process:
“We start with a prep session, where we get to know each other and build rapport. The second session is a low-dose oral experience, which doesn’t put people in a full, dissociated state. It reduces their inhibitions, opens up their heart; what we find is that people actually bond very well during that session. They feel safe and secure. In the third session, which is a moderate-to-higher-dose oral session, they begin to have deeper, fuller psychedelic experiences. We really encourage people and give them the instruction that they can come in and out at will. If they want to come into more consensual reality, they can talk with us, connect with us, or their peers even—or they can go inside if they’re feeling pulled to explore.
“That third session begins to give them the taste of the more full-fledged psychedelic experience,” Shannon continues. “In the fourth session, they have a high-dose IM experience, where they’re going to fully dissociate and go into their personal inner space. People reenter the group space at various times as they’re ready and able, and come back and process it. Then, the fifth session is an integration session.”
Unlike the varied frequencies of KRIYA’s groups, the Wholeness Center’s groups meet once a week. Shannon is not attached to that model and expresses that future groups may follow different formats. Likewise, Bennett remains open to new possibilities. Even after all her years of ketamine research, she reflects, “We are always learning and trying things to find the most effective strategies.”
How to Establish a Safe Group Culture
For an effective group, a culture of safety and trust must be established. One way of doing that is to create “homogenous” groups, where all members share common struggles, such as depression or anxiety. The Wholeness Center, for instance, is in the process of creating a KAP group to treat PTSD experienced by COVID first responders, as well as a group for alcohol addictions.
At KRIYA, Bennett is not attached to homogeneity as a necessity, yet she recognizes that disregard for commonality among group members can be detrimental to the group’s safety, and therefore efficacy.
“It is possible to have somebody in the group who is on such a different page than the other folks that it really puts the group out of balance,” she explains. “We try not to do that.”
Bennett circumvents issues related to group imbalances by focusing on preliminary assessment. She describes the assessment process as an under-regarded component of psychedelic healing, the “magic for helping people to get better in the fastest and most cost-effective way.” If therapists take a first come, first serve approach to their groups, imbalances are bound to emerge, negatively impacting trust and safety.
“Not everyone is a good candidate for group treatment,” Bennett candidly states. “Ketamine is a fickle medicine. People need to feel physically and emotionally safe in order to have big and beautiful and expansive experiences. They need time to relax into the space and develop trust with us.”
For example, Bennett has found that people with complex trauma are better suited for individual work, noting that these folks “are often better served by having the individual attention of the therapist.”
Shannon underscores the necessity of a detailed intake process to ensure safety. When group safety and assessment are sufficiently prioritized, however, he has found that ketamine presents very little risk to individuals or groups in a therapeutic context.
“People are screened ahead of time for concerning medical or psychiatric issues,” Shannon says. “We haven’t seen any safety issues in our groups so far. I think that reflects our experience with KAP in general—that it’s a low-risk, quite safe medical process.”
For folks who have been properly screened and assessed, Shannon has found that the drop in individual attention from the therapist that groups entail does not negatively affect the healing process.
“I think we overrate the value of having an expert in the room, and we underrate the importance of connection and community in our current mental health paradigm,” he reflects. “My observation is that although the attention of the practitioner is more divided in a group, that is more than enhanced by the sense of community and safety and support that comes with it.”
Healing in Community
On top of assessment, non-ketamine preparation sessions help establish the safe and supportive group environment.
“People spend time getting to know each other in the preparation sessions before the medicine is introduced,” Bennett explains. “We’re not just throwing people in and shooting them up. That would be totally unethical.”
The cohort model contributes to participants’ sense of safety through rapport and consistency. When safety is established, Bennett has found that groups are not only consistently effective, but offer a host of benefits she did not anticipate.
“In individual treatment, people often felt very alone, that they were the only person on earth dealing with whatever problem they were living with,” she explains. “In the group, people quickly found that there were other people who had similar issues and challenges. That in itself is healing.”
Shannon and Fortson have observed the same trend. Fortson shares, “While it is difficult to explain, there is something about the sense of connection and support that is fostered in a group environment, specifically as it pertains to KAP, that seems to greatly expand the therapeutic benefit experienced by participants.”
Shannon notes this “enhanced response” is influenced by participants’ magnified expectation of hope, as well as something more primordial.
“With the pandemic, and really just in modern society, one of the major plagues we’re facing is a sense of disconnection, isolation, and removal from our social roots as herd animals,” he reflects. “A primary reason I like group therapy so much is that it really makes use of the power of community and group process.”
This unmeasurable component of community healing is emerging as a trend of group psychedelic therapy. The Forbes article linked in the introduction indicated that the cancer patients who receive psilocybin treatments together “frequently develop a sense of community and mutual support that can enhance their recovery and overall well-being.”
Implications of Ceremony in the West
An intriguing argument sometimes leveraged on behalf of group psychedelic therapy hinges on its potential correlation to group entheogenic healing ceremonies practiced by countless cultures for millennia. While it would be imprudent to propose a generalized, catch-all comparison between the two, given drastic differences in cultural context, traditional plant medicine healing ceremonies testify to both the safety and the power of group psychedelic journeying when held in an intentional and meaningful container. Base-level similarities between these processes—i.e. community healing through visionary journeys—suggest the possibility of a ceremonial, rite-of-passage element to group psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy.
Now, I am not advocating for psychedelic therapists to buy rattles and drums and chant songs from other cultures they do not understand. That would be very bad. My suggestion—which I am not the first to make—is that outside the boundaries of important issues related to appropriation, there are archetypal processes of ceremonial rites of passage that have factored prominently into countless cultures through the ages, and their general lack of existence in Western society may have some connection to the rampant isolation, existential confusion, and struggles of purpose and maturity afflicting so many people in this hyper-individualized capitalist paradigm.
It strikes me as significant that countless Western people are traveling to distant countries to experience sacred plant medicine ceremonies of cultures about which they know nothing, seeking a kind of spiritual healing and renewed sense of meaning their lives lack. Could group psychedelic therapy play a role in patterning these forsaken archetypal ceremonial processes into Western culture?
What kinds of ceremonies could fit into and emerge out of a Western therapeutic context? Can such rituals respectfully incorporate wisdom shared by other traditions, while establishing a unique and authentic identity? How might ceremonial rites of passage, held in a safe therapeutic container, help heal the complex, multitudinous mental health struggles unique to our techno-capitalist world?
These questions are way too massive to attempt to answer here. The fact that group psychedelic therapy raises them, however, highlights an added layer of its potential significance.
Diversifying the Psychedelic Space
The decrease in cost has the obvious benefit of making the treatment accessible to more people. A hope is that such increased access will invite more diversity to the space of psychedelic healing, which remains strikingly un-diverse. In 2018, Dr. Monnica T. Williams and her co-authors demonstrated that between 1993 and 2017, 82.3% of participants in psychedelic therapy trials were white. While no research has been conducted on diversity in the practice of ketamine-assisted therapy, it is unlikely that results would be much different.
It would be erroneous, however, to suggest this lack of diversity is related exclusively to cost and implicit bias among practitioners. It’s also about safety. In my recent interview with MAPS-trained therapist Dr. Joseph McCowan, McCowan reflected, “People of color desire to do what is safe prior to contributing to research or science, or even healing themselves. Right now, psychedelic spaces, due to their illegality and the stigma they carry, are not safe.”
While offering more affordable treatments is a great start, white therapists must educate themselves on unique struggles and barriers related to mental health in communities of color, as well as the socio-political factors—i.e. the ramifications of the War on Drugs—that keep these barriers standing. Further, they must use that education to create more safety. Only then can the decreased cost offered by modalities such as group KAP really help diversify the landscape of psychedelic healing.
Training and Ethical Considerations for Group Ketamine Therapy
As the field currently stands, there are no regulated training requirements for clinicians to facilitate ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. Theoretically, so long as an M.D. prescribes the medicine to the client, any therapist can offer ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. Many are disturbed by this lack of regulation, and an increasing chorus of voices is calling for higher ethical standards for ketamine therapy practitioners to abide.
Bennett is a leading voice on the ethical front. She recently authored this article on ethical guidelines for ketamine clinicians that was published in the Journal of Psychedelic Psychiatry, which establishes the importance of assessment, medical safety, preparation, training, and maintaining professional conduct for providers.
As with other psychedelics, ketamine should not be taken lightly or offered carelessly. It is a powerful substance that can consistently facilitate healing experiences when offered with care; at the same time, it can have destructive consequences when handled carelessly. If facilitators are unprepared to work with deep and painful unconscious content that can unexpectedly erupt in clients under its influence, they are putting clients at risk of retraumatization that could leave them in a far worse state than before. At a broader level, reports of such egregious harms could do significant damage to the still-vulnerable field of psychedelic therapy in general.
Many practitioners advise therapists who intend to offer KAP to experience the medicine themselves. Both KRIYA and Wholeness have run groups for mental health professionals who meet specific criteria; Bennett shares that KRIYA’s professional participants “reported that their direct experiences with ketamine vastly increased their understanding of how to use this tool with their own clients.”
If therapists do not meet criteria to experience ketamine therapy themselves, a number of trainings in KAP now exist, many of which involve an experiential component. Shannon and Fortson, for instance, helped found the Psychedelic Research and Training Institute (PRATI), a nonprofit organization that currently offers several KAP trainings each year. Over the course of the three-day intensive, therapists are given the opportunity to experience both a low-dose and high-dose ketamine session while dyad partners practice skills in the facilitator role.
“For clinicians who want to do group work with ketamine, it is strongly recommended that they get specialized training,” Bennett emphasized. KRIYA has compiled a list of reputable trainings for those interested in learning more.
Group Ketamine-Assisted Therapy: Summarizing the Journey
In the new mental health frontier of psychedelic-assisted therapy, group psychedelic therapy represents an even newer frontier. With its potential to lower cost and invite the healing power of community into psychedelic therapy, group ketamine-assisted therapy calls for more attention in both research and ethically-minded practice. It will not be for everyone, and it is far from a panacea, but the modality holds tremendous promise to help people with a whole lot more than lowering their bill.
And even if a lowered bill proves to be the sole benefit, that’s still a huge accomplishment for the current landscape of psychedelic therapy.
About the Author
Sean Lawlor is a writer, certified personal trainer, and Masters student in Transpersonal Counseling at Naropa University, in pursuit of a career in psychedelic journalism, research, and therapy. His interest in consciousness and non-ordinary states owes great debt to Aldous Huxley, Ken Kesey, and Hunter S. Thompson, and his passion for film, literature, and dreaming draws endless inspiration from Carl Jung, David Lynch, and J.K. Rowling. For more information or to get in touch, head to seanplawlor.com, or connect on Instagram @seanplawlor.
From virtual psychedelic integration circles to conferences, book clubs, and classes, we’ve rounded up the best of online psychedelic community to help you get through the next few months.
We’re almost a year into lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and if you’re feeling quarantine-fatigued, believe us, we get it. We are too. However, like we’ve been mentioning in our Solidarity Fridays podcast, that doesn’t give us an excuse to ignore safety precautions and begin meeting in large groups to do medicine or integration work. But the good news is, there are lots of virtual psychedelic community options to get involved in as we ride out the last of Covid. From online integration circles to events, conferences, and Discord and Facebook groups, there are plenty of ways to meet like-minded folk, both in your area and all over the world. So don’t lose hope and join us in an upcoming online community event that speaks to you – there are plenty of options!
Virtual Psychedelic Integration Circles
One of the best ways to meet like-minded folks and to stay grounded while doing personal psychedelic journey work is to join a psychedelic integration circle. Pre-pandemic, these were often groups of 10 to 20 people who would meet up once a month or so to share psychedelic experiences and insights in a safe and accepting space. Luckily, most of the circles that were already established migrated to online platforms and are still going strong today, which also means that folks who live outside of big cities where these were hosted in-person can now join from anywhere in the world. Plus, there are lots of specialty integration circles for particular groups so you can choose the meet-up that makes you feel the most safe and comfortable.
General Integration Circles Open to Anyone
Before we describe all the speciality integration groups, we thought we’d start with some of the general integration circles we know of and trust. First up, our friends at Mt. Tam Integration host an open circle every Wednesday evening on a sliding scale from free to $30, depending on what you can afford.
The Portland Psychedelic Society hosts an open integration circle called “Community Integration Circle” every other Saturday afternoon.
Lastly, the NYC Psychedelic Society has teamed up with the New York-based Psychedelic Sangha to offer a monthly harm-reduction focused integration circle, called “Global Gathering” with a $5 to $10 suggested donation.
San Francisco Psychedelic Society
One of the most active psychedelic societies hosting an array of psychedelic integration circles and other online community opportunities is the San Francisco Psychedelic Society (SFPS). They host a general psychedelic integration circle open to anyone who’s interested on the first Tuesday of every month, but it’s all their specialty offerings that really make them stand out.
They host an integration circle specifically for those with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) on the second Monday of every month, a women’s circle called “Sacred Sisters Spaceship” on the third Friday of every month, and a circle for BIPOC folk on the fourth Sunday of every month (each circle has its own link, so visit the main page for more details).
SFPS, along with MycoRising also hosts a group specifically for mushroom people where folks can discuss both mushroom cultivation questions as well as any entheogenic mushroom concepts and experiences on the first Thursday of every month. They also host a group for microdosing support, The Microdosing Movement, on the second and fourth Tuesday of every month.
For those in addiction recovery, SFPS have an addiction-focused circle for asking questions and sharing experiences, which is more focused on harm-reduction than following the traditional 12-step program. They also offer a dream circle for folks to come discuss and integrate their dream work in a safe and open-minded space.
One of the best things about SFPS is their affordable pricing model. They only ask for a donation of around $10 for groups and will not turn anyone away if they can’t afford even that.
More BIPOC Circles: The Sabina Project & Others
Feeling safe, seen, and heard is so crucial to psychedelic integration work, which is why a lot of psychedelic societies around the country have started their own specifically BIPOC integration circles led by and open to people of color. The Sabina Project, a community that supports “radical self-transformation in the name of collective liberation,” also hosts a BIPOC circle on the first and third Sunday of every month, co-facilitated by their founders, Charlotte and Dre.
Other local groups also host BIPOC circles, like the New York City Psychedelic Society, which hosts a virtual integration circle for people of color once a month. The Portland Psychedelic Society also hosts a monthly BIPOC integration circle.
More Women’s Integration Circles
Another popular choice for people to feel safe and heard in integration spaces are women’s integration circles (which are often also opened up to non-binary people). Mt Tam Integration hosts a virtual women’s circle on the first and third Thursday of every month. The Portland Psychedelic Society also hosts a Womxn’s Support Group every other Wednesday.
Men’s Integration Circle
The Portland Psychedelic Society doesn’t only have a womxn’s support group, but also one for men on Mondays.
Trans and Non-binary Circle
The NYC Psychedelic Society hosts a peer-led circle specifically for trans, non-binary, gender non-conforming, and gender-questioning folk called “Transdelic” once a month on Tuesdays.
Psychedelic Integration Circle for Parents
There is also a virtual integration group specifically for parents, the Plant Parenthood Integration Circle, facilitated by Rebecca Kronman, LCSW (founder of Plant Parenthood) and Andrew Rose. This group meets virtually once a month to discuss issues such as talking to children about psychedelics, including children in the integration process, understanding intergenerational trauma, coping with stigma and shame in parent communities, and much more.
Psychedelic Integration for Neurodivergent Folk
Folks with neurodivergence or who are on the autism spectrum also have a few of their own spaces to integrate psychedelic experiences. Aaron Orsini, author of Autism on Acid, hosts a group with Justine Lee called The Autistic Psychedelic Community (APC). They meet on Thursdays and Sundays for folks to share experiences, receive support, and ask questions.
The Portland Psychedelic Society also hosts a virtual space for neurodivergent folks (facilitated by Orsini and artist Nathan Cooper) called “Spectrum of Experience.” The next free/donation-based event will be on March 11th.
Psychedelics in Addiction Recovery
In addition to SFPS’s recovery circle, there is also a 12-step based group that hosts multiple meetings a week for those in addiction recovery who are curious about or engaging with psychedelics. Founded by writer and addiction counselor, Kevin Franciotti, Psychedelics in Recovery (PIR) has 15 meetings a week and even host a couple meant to cater to those in European and Australian time zones. You can sign up for their weekly meeting newsletter for days and times, and they also have a private Facebook group for people to continue to form and engage in virtual community in between meetings.
Psychedelic Societies: Beyond Integration Circles
There are loads of psychedelic societies and clubs around the country and globe continuing to form psychedelic community through other online activities, like live talks, events, Facebook and Discord groups, and other saloon-type virtual meetups. Some of our favorites include:
There are many more psychedelic clubs and societies with virtual offerings around the world that you can find on Psychedelicexperience.net and around the US on Psychedeliclub.com.
Online Psychedelic Courses
Another great way to build community and learn some valuable info at the same time is by enrolling in an online course related to psychedelics. There are a lot of different courses out there, with some popular topics including learning how to become a psychedelic therapist, how to grow your own mushrooms, and how to use psychedelics safely.
Of course, if you follow our work, you’ll know we’re very proud of our online course offerings here at Psychedelics Today, which you can browse in our course catalogue here. But one of our biggest contributions to the psychedelic movement is our “Navigating Psychedelics for Clinicians and Therapists” course, which is an 8-week intensive class on everything interested mental health professionals need to know about psychedelic substances. The course is super handy for clinicians and coaches who want to deepen their knowledge of entheogens so that they can help support their patients and clients who might be considering a psychedelic experience or already experimenting (plus we offer CE credits!). The course is also a great way to form community and valuable working relationships with other professionals because it includes weekly live 90-minute group discussions and Q&A sessions to explore the reading and lecture of that week in more depth, as well as a private Slack group for clinicians to continue to network, problem-solve, and educate each other on psychedelic and mental health topics.
Of course, we also have a whole catalogue of other courses, not limited to offerings for doctors and therapists. We have all sorts of offerings for the curious-minded, like our class that explores how to view the psychedelic experience through a Jungian lens, called Imagination as Revelation, and a deep dive into shadow work called Psychedelics and the Shadow. We also have great entry-level classes for those looking to experiment with psychedelics in a safe and responsible way, like our in-depth Navigating Psychedelics: Lessons on Self Care, and our totally free 8 Common Psychedelic Mistakes: Exploring Harm Reduction & Safety. And that’s just a taste – we have other offerings (some that are even free!), and we’re always working on new ideas, like our upcoming free webinar exploring the legal side of psychedelics, Religious Use of Psychedelics in the United States. You can always sign up for our newsletter to stay up-to-date with all of our offerings!
If you’re interested in learning how to grow or use mushrooms, then we’d recommend checking out the virtual courses our friends down at the Fungi Academy host. Their mushroom cultivation course is the most in-depth online class we’ve seen; a go-at-your-own-pace class, it covers everything beginner and intermediate home-growers need to know, from equipment, inoculation and sterilization, to more advanced techniques like working with liquid cultures and maximizing yields. Plus, students also receive access to their Discord channel to continue to socialize with and learn from other mushroom people from around the globe.
They’re also about to release a class on using psychedelics in a safe way called Psychedelic Journey Work, which I’ve had the privilege to peruse. It’s a super in-depth and unbiased approach to psychedelic use that I found fascinating and helpful, especially for the newly psychedelic-curious person in your life!
Over at DoubleBlind Mag, they’re also dipping their toes in online courses, events, and community. They also teach a 101 mushroom cultivation course that is great for total beginners because it uses one of the easiest and most fail-safe “teks” (mushroom people lingo for techniques) out there. And they’ve recently released a more advanced 102 course co-taught by Dr. K. Mandrake, co-author of the popular books, The Psilocybin Mushroom Bible and The Psilocybin Mushroom Cookbook.
The Sabina Project also hosts monthly masterclasses with a social justice slant. In March, they’re offering “Microdosing to Dismantle Your Oppression,” which will not only teach the basics of microdosing, but moves away from the “productivity” benefits of microdosing and instead, focuses on creating a healing practice that “honors your spiritual, mental and physical wellness” to “help dismantle White Supremacy.” The 90-minute master class is open to anyone, only costs $22, and is a live group gathering.
There are many more online courses related to psychedelics out there, especially for those looking to learn about becoming a psychedelic therapist or facilitator. You can find a bunch on this website Aaron Orsini created, Psychedelic.Courses, and through our post: How to Become a Psychedelic Therapist.
Virtual Psychedelic Conferences
In pre-pandemic times, one of my favorite ways to forge new psychedelic community was by attending conferences. These kinds of large events will probably be one of the last types of gatherings to start up again in person, but that doesn’t mean they’re going extinct! In fact, with so many conferences going online, it’s actually opened up a new opportunity for folks in small towns and big cities alike to attend conferences they never would have been able to in person. While the bulk of conference season is usually in the fall, there are a few fun ones coming up around Bicycle Day (April 19th) that we’re already getting excited about.
First up, our friend Daniel Shankin from Mt. Tam Integration and who organizes the fun and pleasantly weird Psilocybin Summit in September, will be hosting the first-ever conference focused entirely on psychedelic integration (and everything in between), called the Mt. Tam Psychedelic Integration Family All Star Jamboree. It’ll be a totally virtual 3-day event from April 16-18th, packed with fascinating talks, panels, experts, and music! Our team here at Psychedelics Today is already plotting our involvement and we’re so excited to share more info with you all soon!
Earlier that week on April 14-16th, the Philosophy of Psychedelics conference will also be 100% online and feature talks from some of the greatest thinkers in psychedelics (including our very own Joe Moore and Kyle Buller, who will be moderating some fascinating discussions). Plus, the conference plans to facilitate many virtual group discussions open to the public that will be a great way to forge community and learn from other psychedelically-inclined new friends. More info will be released shortly and you can stay up to date by visiting their website.
The next week, our friends over at Chacruna.net will also be hosting their own online conference, Sacred Plants in the Americas II from April 23-25th. This multidisciplinary event will focus on psychoactive plants of North and South America and will spotlight the Indigenous communities who have kept their healing wisdom alive for generations.
Lastly, our friends at Psychedelic Seminars are also hosting a three-part series of online talks called CryptoPsychedelic Flashback. These three online events are a look back at the first CryptoPsychedelic Summit, which took place in February of 2018. Now, those involved are reconvening to discuss cryptocurrencies through a psychedelic lens, and how blockchain technology has grown in the three years since the original summit. Tickets are on a sliding scale and unsurprisingly, they accept cryptocurrencies!
Psychedelic Facebook Groups, Discord Channels, and Clubhouse Rooms
Another way to build some form of community in these weird times is by joining psychedelic message boards, Facebook groups, Discord channels, and most recently, Clubhouse rooms. We moderate a very active Facebook Group called Psychedelics Today Group where our listeners share psychedelic current events, ask questions, share experiences, and engage in healthy discourse.
There are tons of other groups out there on Facebook and sites like Erowid, Shroomery, Reddit, and others. Mt. Tam integration also has a Discord group, and I saw recently they’re on Clubhouse as well. Speaking of Clubhouse, there’s a bunch of psychedelic clubs already on there, and it seems to be really easy to start your own. We’re looking into joining soon, so stand by for more info!
Other Fun and Weird Psychedelic Online Events
For the book nerds out there, my friend Bett Williams, author of The Wild Kindness, has started a psychedelic book club that meets monthly. Every month, they read a different psychedelic classic, curated and hosted by Williams herself *squeals in fan girl*. Next up on March 11th, they’ll be discussing one of my favorite sci-fi, gender-fuck classics, Dawn, by Octavia Butler.
There are seemingly endless ways to get involved with virtual psychedelic community, and here at Psychedelics Today, we’re always trying to find new ways to grow our community and keep our listeners and readers involved. We recently hosted a “happy hour” panel discussion for the new psychedelic film, Light Years, with director Colin Thompson and co-host Joe Moore, where we invited all of you to come hang out and discuss whatever you want.
We plan to keep providing these kinds of online community events because we know how important “finding the others” is and how much more sense the world of psychedelics makes when you can share it with fellow travelers. So continue to seek out and attend virtual community events, and by the time we can all meet-up again, it’ll be an epic party.
About the Author
Michelle Janikian is a journalist focused on drug policy, trends, and education, and the editor of the Psychedelics Today blog. She’s also the author of Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion and her work has been featured in Playboy, DoubleBlind Mag, High Times, Rolling Stone, and Teen Vogue, among others. One of her core beliefs is that ending the prohibition of drugs can greatly benefit society, as long as we have harm-reduction education to accompany it. Find out more on her website: michellejanikian.com or on Instagram @michelle.janikian.
Science has demonstrated that psychedelic compounds “can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance.” Scientific surveys indicate that a statistically significant number of people have a stronger belief in a higher power after taking psychedelics. Science is starting to “prove” these things that practitioners have known for thousands of years, and society is rapidly redefining its relationship to psychedelic sacraments and medicines.
As more and more people begin taking psychedelics, an ever-growing number of them will start asking spiritual and religious questions that arise out of their experience. Our goal in this class is to open some space for these conversations and to help educate people about the legal risks that such explorations may involve.
Our regular contributor on legal matters explains how the nascent psychedelic pharmaceutical industry and grassroots reformist movement could work together to achieve both their goals, read to the majesty of the classic American musical, Oklahoma!
Interested in learning more about the legal side of psychedelics? Then sign up here to receive info on our upcoming FREE series: Religious Use of Psychedelics in the United States.
In my last article, I introduced the idea of crafting the Uniform Plant and Fungi Medicine Act (UPFMA), which could be employed as a public initiative or adopted by state legislatures as a solution to the local piecemeal reforms and slow and improbable response from the federal government to make traditional entheogens lawful outside of religious use. I am happy to report that a team is assembling to undertake drafting UPFMA.
This, of course, begs a serious and important question: Who’s going to pay for that?Cue music…
“Oh, what a beautiful morning!” …. it would be to see the burgeoning psychedelic pharmaceutical industry back and support UPFMA. Why? Because, like the cowman and the farmer, the pharmaceutical industry and the grassroots movement can be friends. In fact, they need one another. No need to struggle with your feelings over cowboy Curly McLain and farmhand Jud Fry, Laurey. You can have both!
This is no mere minstrel show; this is serious stuff. Consider:
Farmers (Played Here by Grassroot Reformists) Need a Friend
UPFMA’s promise is to provide a uniform model body of law, akin to other uniform model laws (e.g., the Uniform Commercial Code) for state reformation and regulation of plant and fungi medicines. Amongst UPFMA’s goals are to promote further options in health care, responsible use, freedom of choice, elimination of the underground market, and personal and public safety, through state adoption of a uniform reformation law that will span the gulf between prohibition and total deregulation via a reasonable regulatory structure. The model we hope to write is intended to be adoptable either by state legislatures, or by public initiative campaigns in the more than a dozen states that allow citizen legislation.
Even with the volunteers who exist and those who will come, the production and campaign will cost the sort of sums that these sorts of campaigns cost. Let’s just put it out there on the square dance floor: “Purty little surreys” ain’t cheap. UPFMA needs benefactors, sponsors, patrons, supporters, shekels. So, peering over the fence and into the grazing lands, UPFMA’s supporters want to give a loud “Howdy, Neighbor!” to our cowmen friends in the pharmaceutical industry. We cannot help but to notice that supporting UPFMA would be hugely beneficial to your interests. It need not be, “All Er Nuthin.” Can we count on you to be neighborly?
Cowmen (Played Here by the Pharmaceutical Industry) and Grassroot Reformists Are Not Competitors for Territory
The psychedelic pharmaceutical industry will derive its revenues by exploiting patents and trademarks. But, aside from modified genetics, the pharmaceutical industry cannot patent or trademark natural medicine in its unrefined state. In contrast, UPFMA would seek only to democratize natural substances and would not be aimed at the same patent-driven and trademark-driven “market” as western industrialized pharmaceuticals seek to create. UPFMA poses no challenge to pharmaceutical patents or trademarks. Indeed, discussed further below, UPFMA might even be able to help facilitate product research. Like the cowmen and farmers from Oklahoma!, pharmaceutical industry and grassroots reformists may occupy overlapping interests, but they are not competitors and do not seek incompatible goals.
UPFMA Can Help Cowmen Catch Cattle Rustlers
As the existing pharmaceutical industry can tell the future psychedelic pharmaceutical industry, the individual home grower and/or user is no threat. Rather, it is the underground market, where pirate industrializers infringe intellectual property and undercut prices, that are your true “cattle rustlers.” Unfortunately for our cowmen…errr…pharmaceutical companies, the coming FDA approval of their products also brings an increase in public interest in psychedelics, and so too an increase in the illicit market. UPFMA is no friend of the unregulated market. Rather, one of UPFMA’s goals is to reduce illicit trade, and not just in (our metaphorical) Kansas City.
You Can’t Sell the Steak, But You Can Sell the Sizzle: Pharmaceutical Companies Benefit by Supporting UPFMA
Until FDA approval is given, the psychedelic pharmaceutical industry may not advertise their products or offer them for sale. Psilocybin and MDMA are at Phase 3’s door, and FDA approval looks promising, if not inevitable. But FDA approval is still years away, and pharmaceutical companies continue to burn capital waiting for the FDA’s start pistol to fire. This delay in marketing is a costly lost opportunity.
Meanwhile, UPFMA can do what no pharmaceutical company may – begin to educate the public and draw national popular interest in natural psychedelics. While pharmaceutical companies vie for rescheduling and for FDA approval, pharmaceutical companies who back UPFMA will receive years of permissible brand awareness and marketing research, in advance of being able to bring their products to market.
Support of UPFMA Does Not Risk the Ranch
Natural medicines and their patented counterparts do not typically compete. Instead, they compliment. Because of pricing constraints, a significant population will be unable to afford pharmaceutical industry products. It is significantly that demographic – those who cannot afford these patented medicines – that UPFMA addresses. UPFMA offers an alternative to exclusion. UPFMA does not pull market share away from the pharmaceutical industry. Rather, it addresses “customers” the industry never had or was going to have. In the wise words of Obi Wan-klahoma, “These are not the cows you’re looking for.”
There’s a Bright Golden Haze on the Meadow: Support of UPFMA Grows the Ranch and Buys More Cattle
Just like the nascent psychedelic pharmaceutical industry, UPFMA optimistically predicts the public will warm to psychedelics as an optional (if not preferred) tool to fight all sorts of mental illness. As UPFMA democratizes access, a residual effect will be the encouragement of further investment, thereby enabling pharmaceutical companies to more easily explore varieties of formulations, concentrations, extractions, etc., making their products more varied and more accessible to an ever-increasingly interested market. Again, UPFMA’s focus is on natural non-branded medicines, and has no ambition to occupy the patent market.
Support of UPFMA Allows Industry Cowmen to Better-Protect Fences
UPFMA intends to consider and to factor traditional use of entheogens, including cultural and environmental interests. UPFMA’s focus is legal access, not promotion of industrialization and scale, and UPFMA resists commoditization. UPFMA can help build fences, to allow the grassroots reformists to sustain themselves while leaving scale as the province of pharmaceutical companies. And don’t forget, pharmaceutical companies will, by virtue of their patents, retain exclusivity to further refine and to sell refined products.
UPFMA Helps When the Pharmaceutical Industry Brings Its Cattle to Market
By supporting UPFMA, the pharmaceutical industry invests in itself. UPFMA helps to popularize and to normalize psychedelics and can do it more quickly than the nascent industry presently may. Not only might that help to speed FDA approval for the industry’s products, but it might help to speed acceptance by health insurance companies. In turn, that speeds up and increases revenue that can be paid back to investors or poured back into research and product development.
UPFMA Gives Cowmen Opportunity to Show the Pharmaceutical Industry’s Human Side
At the end of Act I of Oklahoma!, an unscrupulous patent medicine peddler sells our heroine actual heroin – laudanum, to be precise – promising he had her best interests at heart, whilst taking her money. While no one expects the pharmaceutical industry simply to be just a girl who “cain’t say no,” industry support of UPFMA avoids a coming public relations whirlwind over the unavoidable disjunction of the pharmaceutical industry touting the benefits of its patent medicines, while pricing them outside the reach of many.
Support of UPFMA is consistent with ubiquitous sound public policy of fostering and promoting good mental health and responsible drug use. UPFMA can help give the public an alternative, while allowing the industry a platform to openly share the benefits of supporting humanitarian goals that pharmaceutical companies hold in common with the public. In other words, if the pharmaceutical industry touts its wares as good for everyone, support of UPFMA allows the industry to walk the walk.
UPFMA Can Create a Public Health Database
For public health study, UPFMA may consider inclusion of voluntary and anonymous data gathering provisions. This may include regulatory agency ability to present program users with voluntary questionnaires regarding their experiences and other relevant health data points. Support of UPFMA fosters gathering data and sharing it for study and research.
I submit that UPFMA and the pharmaceutical industry would be fine partners at the square dance. And, like in Oklahoma!, this would be OK. Besides, UPFMA needs a partner. How about it, cattlemen? Care to two-step?
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Could 18-MC, a synthetic derivative of Ibogaine, make treatment safer without the psychedelic trip?
With COVID-19 still spreading, mutating, and killing, it’s easy to forget the other health crises ravaging the country. One of the most concerning of these is drug overdose deaths, with opioids representing a large share of such casualties. From 1999 through 2018, nearly 450,000 people fatally overdosed on opioids in the US. While slight decreases in 2018 buoyed hopes that we were past the peak, even then, overdose deaths were four times greater than in 1999. In 2019, such optimism was dashed as the number of opioid overdose deaths climbed to 50,042, an increase of nearly 7 percent over the previous year. But, are there viable treatment options that are overlooked by the medical community and general public?
In the psychedelic community, many would argue yes, and highlight the potential of ibogaine, a psychedelic compound found in the West African shrub, Tabernanthe iboga. But ibogaine comes with more possible health risks than other psychedelic plants and substances that we’ll explore below, and of course, there remains a lingering bias in some parts of the medical establishment against psychedelics. And so, a non-psychoactive alternative, 18-Methoxycoronaridine (18-MC) was developed in the 1990s and is now advancing through the FDA’s drug development process at a steady clip, while research into ibogaine remains virtually frozen. However, the question remains: are the concerns about ibogaine’s risks valid enough to explain the differing fates of these chemical cousins, or are other factors at play?
What is Ibogaine?
Ibogaine is a plant-derived alkaloid with unique psychoactive properties distinct from those of classic psychedelics, such as LSD, psilocybin-producing mushrooms, or DMT. One of its effects is panoramic recall, often described by patients as watching a movie of their life playing in their head. Sometimes called a dissociative psychedelic, Geoff Noller, a medical anthropologist with a doctorate from the University of Otago’s Department of Psychological Medicine, prefers the term “oneiric” (pronounced ō-ˈnī-rik), which is defined as, “dream-inducing.”
This description of the ibogaine experience was seconded by Dr. Bruno Rasmussen, a physician and researcher based in Brazil who provides ibogaine therapy. “Ibogaine doesn’t make you hallucinate; Ibogaine makes you dream, but you are awake when you are dreaming,” Rasmussen said. “If you do an EKG during the effect of ibogaine, the lines will be like they are in a REM state, the rapid eye movements state, the dream state.”
How Does Ibogaine Work?
The unique, psychedelic qualities of ibogaine are not the only way it differs from more familiar hallucinogens. Psilocybin, LSD, and DMT all act in a more focused manner on the brain’s serotonin receptors. And while ibogaine does act on serotonin levels in the brain, it also acts on numerous other neural systems. Noller compares its relatively blunt mode of action to cannabis, which also acts on many different receptor sites, and contrasts it with more targeted designer medicines like Prozac.
While the exact neural systems ibogaine engages are not fully understood yet, studies show it can reduce opioid withdrawal symptoms and help control cravings. This offers a window of opportunity for patients to make changes in their life that would otherwise be more difficult due to the pain, anhedonia, and other symptoms of withdrawal. Once they have weathered this storm, the reduction in cravings increases their likelihood of not relapsing.
Furthermore, studies have shown that ibogaine reduces the amount of drugs, like cocaine, alcohol, and nicotine, that animals self-administer, despite the fact that each of these drugs has their own distinct way of influencing neural chemistry. This ultimately suggests that ibogaine acts on multiple regions of the brain. Studying this broad function could lead to new insights into the physiological underpinnings of addiction, which makes the relative dearth of research on ibogaine all the more curious — until you consider its potential hazards.
Ibogaine Risks
The benefits of ibogaine must be weighed against its potential dangers. An article in the Journal of Forensic Science examined 19 deaths that occurred following ibogaine treatments given between 1990 and 2008. Post-mortem testing revealed that at least 11 of these patients had other drugs in their systems, such as benzodiazepines, cocaine, opiates, and methadone, all of which are known to be dangerous when mixed with ibogaine.
Prior to treatment, however, a dozen of the patients who died also had one or more comorbidities known to pose risks when using ibogaine, such as obesity, brain neoplasm, and a range of diseases affecting the liver, heart, and other organs.
Although ibogaine research in the US stalled in the late ‘90s, it continued abroad. Thomas Kingsley Brown, a California-based anthropologist, worked with the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) for a 2017 study in Mexico, where ibogaine treatment is not specifically outlawed. Thirty people with opioid dependence received ibogaine treatment and were evaluated over the following year. After one month, half of the research subjects stated they had not used opioids since their ibogaine session. Further follow-ups showed sustained anti-addictive effects.
“To address the first question of whether or not ibogaine can be used safely and effectively, my short answer is yes,” Brown said. “There are going to be risks with that, but you can also minimize the risk.”
In addition to screening patients for potentially dangerous comorbidities and identifying contraindications, such as the presence of drugs that could cause harmful interactions, Brown explained that genetic tests can determine how quickly people’s bodies break down ibogaine into noribogaine. This helps those administering the treatment determine whether it’s safe for a patient to move forward with ibogaine and how to calculate an optimal dosage.
Noller also worked with MAPS on an ibogaine study, though this one was based in New Zealand, where Medsafe (the country’s equivalent of the FDA) made such treatment legally available as a non-approved medication in 2010. According to Noller, this classification gives doctors the ability to write a prescription for a drug or treatment even if it hasn’t gone through a three-phase trial testing period.
He points out that ibogaine’s mortality rate is comparable to methadone. A 2008 paper in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology reported 11 ibogaine-related deaths from 1990 to 2006 out of the 3,414 people estimated to have taken it — a mortality rate of 0.32 percent. A 2007 paper in the Drug and Alcohol Review found 283 methadone-related deaths in Australia between the years of 2000-2003 out of an estimated 102,615 episodes of treatment, which yields a mortality of 0.27 percent.
But Rasmussen believes it can still be safer, attributing the majority of ibogaine-related deaths to preventable failures on the part of caregivers, such as not having qualified doctors present, forgoing the use of cardiac monitors, and passing on testing patients for drugs that could cause harmful interactions. His strongest piece of evidence for the ability to safely use ibogaine is that none of his roughly 2,000 patients have died due to or during treatment. In fact, he hasn’t even had a subject develop complications, like severe heart arrhythmia. In Brazil, doctors can legally prescribe ibogaine therapy in hospital settings, a model Rasmussen champions.
“I think that the trick here is to face it as a little surgery,” Rasmussen explained. “We make some pre-surgical examinations, lab tests, blood tests, and EKGs. We do it in a big hospital with the emergency team aware that there is an ibogaine patient in the hospital. For anything we could need, we are backed up, but we never needed the emergency team because we do the lab tests, so we can usually prevent the complications.”
18-MC: The Non-Psychedelic Alternative to Ibogaine
Concerns about ibogaine’s psychoactive effects and potential risks led to the development of 18-MC in the 1990s. Dr. Kenneth Alper, a professor of psychiatry and neurology at New York University School of Medicine, explained that 18-MC is a structural analog of ibogaine, meaning they share a common molecular base, in this case the ibogamine ring system. At the microscopic level, even small variations can lead to big changes.
The general consensus seems to be that 18-MC is not psychoactive or oneiric, though Alper speculated that it could potentially be hallucinogenic at higher doses. 18-MC also does not seem to carry the same cardiovascular risks. MindMed, a new Canadian pharmaceutical company focused on psychedelic and psychedelic-inspired medicines, obtained the patent for 18-MC in 2019 when it acquired the biopharma startup, Savant HWP, for an undisclosed sum. MindMed recently completed Phase I testing on 18-MC. The company declined to share information about their 18-MC trials or comment for this story.
18-MC Patent and the Halting of Ibogaine Research
Karen Szumlinski, a neuropharmacologist, neuroscientist, and professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, worked on animal studies for both ibogaine and 18-MC from the mid to late ‘90s—long before Savant HWP or MindMed existed. 18-MC was first developed in 1996 by a group of scientists, one of which served as Szumlinski’s research mentor. Based on her observations, Szumlinski believes 18-MC is not psychoactive. But the bias against psychoactive compounds combined with 18-MC’s minimal cardiovascular risks are likely the reasons why ibogaine research in the US halted when it did.
Another reason ibogaine studies in the US stopped is due to profitability. Ibogaine is a natural product not eligible for a patent, according to Brown. Patenting molecules is how companies make big profits. Somewhat confusingly though, Howard Lotsof, the person credited with discovering ibogaine’s anti-addictive properties, was able to patent the use of ibogaine and related molecules in doses ranging from 1 mg/kg to 60 mg/kg given orally or rectally for treating poly-drug dependency in 1990. The patent covered addiction to one or more of the following: alcohol, heroin, methadone, cocaine, caffeine, amphetamine, desoxyephedrine, and nicotine. However, it’s the patents held by companies like MindMed that cause Rasmussen to express concerns.
“Big pharma, they like molecules that they can register as their intellectual property and make more money on,” Rasmussen said. “So, I think that’s the reason that there’s a lot of money for 18-MC and there’s no money for ibogaine research.”
Is the Ibogaine Experience a Crucial Part of the Treatment?
Ibogaine’s effectiveness for treating substance abuse disorders and addiction is established in human trials and supported by numerous first-person testimonials. We were unable to find data showing the same for 18-MC, likely because the results of clinical research don’t exist on the molecule yet. But when such information is available, it may offer additional insights into whether the consciousness-altering properties of ibogaine are essential to its effectiveness for treating various SUDs.
Alper suspects the new data will be consistent with what is shown in the existing research. “In terms of ibogaine and its effects on self-administration and withdrawal, the animal model and human experience appear to align pretty well,” Alper said. “Effects on reduced drug self-administration following treatment with ibogaine or 18-MC are not likely to be based on the processing of the content of psychoactive experience.”
In other words, Alper doesn’t think that the reduced consumption of addictive substances by lab animals is caused by psychedelic epiphanies. Rather, he believes it’s the physiologic processes induced by ibogaine. He suspects the same is true for humans, though he also accepts that the psychedelic experience could be a useful aid for patients undergoing psychotherapy.
Other researchers were less optimistic about 18-MC’s relative prospects in human trials. “I think that at least in some cases—not the majority of them maybe, but in a significant number of situations—the psychedelic experience is a key to solving the problem,” Rasmussen explained. “It’s not that I think that 18-MC will not work, but I really don’t understand how it would work as well as ibogaine does without the psychedelic experience.”
Instead of viewing the question as a zero-sum game that promotes one treatment at the expense of the other, the true win-win scenario for patients would be that both medicines become safely available. After all, the need for more effective therapies is paramount. COVID-19 and the policies put in place to contain it have only exacerbated the risks posed by SUDs. The Lancet reports that as of July 2020, drug overdose deaths in the US increased by 13 percent, with rates in some states up by over 30 percent.
If the end goal is to reduce harm and save lives over the long haul—and not pump up stock prices in the short term—then it’s up to those within the psychedelic movement to continue their decades-long struggle to end the criminalization of these potentially life-saving medicines. Otherwise, the fate of these powerful and potentially transformative substances will be decided by supporters of the failed policies of criminalization and the corporatization of psychedelics.
About the Author
Jeff Kronenfeld is an independent journalist and fiction writer based out of Phoenix, Arizona. His articles have been published in Vice, Overture Global Magazine, and other outlets. His fiction has been published by the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, Four Chambers Press, and other presses.
Can psychedelics heal humanity’s global mental health crisis? If so, when will it be legal and accessible to all?
Mental health disorders affect over a billion people worldwide. Prior to the pandemic, the 2017 Global Burden of Disease study estimated that 264 million people in the world suffered from depression only.
Since the start of the pandemic, rates of depression have tripled in the US, while rates of substance abuse from alcohol to opioids have risen 30%.
Psychotherapists might say that the root of this crisis is widespread trauma, the outcome of an increasingly unequal capitalistic culture exacerbated by financial uncertainty, and social isolation caused by the pandemic.
Shamans might say that the cause of this disease is humanity’s separation from Nature and Spirit; that the events of 2020 signified a shamanic initiation of planetary proportions, a warning sign of a civilization recklessly out of balance, and an urgent call for humanity to wake up.
What if both are right?
The acute need for a new way to address humanity’s mental and spiritual crisis has pushed the promise of psychedelic medicines to the forefront, making 2020 a banner year for drug policy reform and psychedelic therapeutics.
In spite of the pandemic, demand for underground ceremonies remains stronger than ever, as people seek out community, spiritual meaning, and alternative healing, some fearing vaccines more than the virus.
Join me, my friend Lorna Liana (publisher of media platform EntheoNation), and 40+ experts in a series of bold, inquisitive conversations about the future of psychedelic medicine and the expansion of plant medicine shamanism.
This is not your boring academic conference filled with scientific presentations and cultural anthropology papers. We celebrate the work of psychedelic research, but now, it’s more important than ever to raise awareness of how the ordinary person can participate in the “Psychedelic Renaissance” and access the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics… Safely, responsibly, and with integrity.
Together we’ll explore:
Ancestral Plant Spirit Healing Traditions (Ayahuasca, Iboga, Peyote, San Pedro, Sacred Mushrooms) as well as Kambô, and Bufo
The Past, Present & Future of Psychedelic Medicine
The Art & Science of Microdosing Transformation
Psychedelics & Leadership Innovation
During this visionary 5-day event, you’ll hear from:
Kyle Buller, co-founder of Psychedelics Today, who shares his insights about the emerging field of psychedelic integration therapy and coaching and the shadow side of psychedelics.
Ninawa Pai da Mata, spiritual leader of the Huni Kuin community of Novo Futuro, on the indigenous cultural renaissance catalyzed by the globalization of ayahuasca and their tribe’s decision to collaborate with outsiders. Filmed in the Kaxinawá indigenous territory of Humaitá in Acre, Brazil, during the Eskawatã Kayawai Festival, this mini-documentary shares their culture, shamanic medicine traditions, challenges, and hopes for the future
Wade Davis, celebrated author, anthropologist, ethnobotanist, and filmmaker, who talks about the impact of the Psychedelic Renaissance on contemporary culture, as well as about the Drug War’s destruction of Colombia and what he considers to be the ultimate sacred medicine of South America (not ayahuasca)
Nat Kelley, activist & actress (Fantastic Fungi Foundation, The Fast & the Furious, Vampire Diaries) and Alan Scheurman (Santiparro), musician / shipibo trained facilitator, discuss the impact of COVID on the indigenous communities in the Amazon, and what it takes to create a global campaign of active reciprocity.
Bruce Parry, filmmaker and explorer, on the delicate nature of living with remote peoples, egalitarian tribal cultures, and his visionary experiences on iboga, ayahuasca, Bufo and ebene (yopo), revealing the surprising reaction that overcame him… that might have been a little TMI
Cecilio Soria Gonzales, Shipibo indigenous rights activist, on how the Comando Matico initiative is distributing plant medicine through indigenous communities to treat and prevent COVID (and the recipe for this remedy… dare you drink it?
Jeremy Narby, legendary anthropologist and author of the Cosmic Serpent, with advice on how Western ceremony facilitators from the Global North can stop engaging in spiritual extraction of indigenous cultural wisdom, and give back in a meaningful way
There is no charge to attend this event, no upfront ticket to purchase in order to gain access to this diverse wealth of information. All sessions are free to the public for 48 hours. So, grab your complimentary seat right here:
Decriminalization, legalization, and medicalized psychedelics are advancing rapidly. Discover the impacts these developments may have on humanity’s mental well-being and capacity to thrive, as well as the risks of bad actors, corporate profiteering, and the perpetuation of colonialism in psychedelic medicine.
You’ll also hear from Shelby Hartman, co-founder of DoubleBlind Magazine, Daniel Shankin of the Psilocybin Summit, Carmen Jackman of Students for Sensible Drug Policy, Tricia Eastman & Joseph Peter Barsuglia of Psychedelic Journeys; Elizabeth Bast, Iboga Provider & Integration Coach ; Chor Boogie, visionary artist ; Kyle Buller, host of Psychedelics Today; Mareesa Stertz filmmaker and producer of the series The Healing Powers, and many more.
We are hosting a panel discussion about the film Light Years. We will be joined by the filmmakers to have some enlightening conversations about Light Years.
Register here for our Feb 12 event. It will start at 8p ET / 5p PT.
We had Colin Thompson on our podcast recently and you can check that out here.
The story of John Mack, the Harvard psychiatrist who wanted to believe—and ended up introducing the entire culture to the possibility of transpersonal experiences.
“At their core Carlos’s encounters have brought about a profound spiritual opening, bringing him in contact with a divine light or energy, what he calls “Home,” which is the source of his personal healing and transformational powers. In our sessions, when he comes close to this light he becomes overwhelmed with emotions of awe and a longing to merge with the energy/light/being. Space and time dissolve, and he experiences himself as pure energy and light or consciousness in an endlessness of eternity, ‘a pure soul experience . . . I go back to the source because I’m not just human. I need to go back to the source in order to continue.’ Carlos, like so many abductees, has developed an acute ecological consciousness. He is deeply concerned with the earth and its fate. The question of whether this is an unintended by-product of a process that he, no more than any of us, can fathom, or is an integral part of the alien phenomenon, cannot, of course, be answered. Carlos clearly believes that the aliens, however awkward, or even brutal, their methods, are trying to arrest our destructive behavior.”
-Dr. John E.
Mack, M.D.
Abductions: Human Encounters with Aliens (1994)
Until many lines in, to us in the psychedelic community, the passage above reads exactly like insights from a psychedelic-assisted therapy or integration session. But to my surprise in my recent alien abduction reading, this was work being processed with abductees – or “experiencers” as they preferred to be called – by pioneering psychiatrist, John E. Mack, in the 1990s. Mack wasn’t only the Head of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, but also the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T.E. Lawrence (his 1977 biography of “Lawrence of Arabia” ), and a fearless anti-war activist as well.
“John had always been so well regarded,” his former research associate and girlfriend Dominique Callimanopulos tells Psychedelics Today. “He was such a wunderkind in circles, such a bright light and leader in his field, and well known for his clinical perceptiveness and precision.”
So how does a Harvard psychiatrist get into the fringe world of alien abductions? It probably won’t surprise our readers that the story has its roots at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. According to NY Times journalist Ralph Blumenthal’s upcoming biography on Mack, The Believer: Alien Encounters, Hard Science, and the Passion of John Mack (scheduled to come out in March 2021 on University of New Mexico Press), in 1987, Mack attended the “Frontiers of Health” conference at Esalen in which Stanislav Grof spoke about transpersonal psychology and hosted an unplanned Holotropic breathwork session for the group. It was Mack’s first time trying the consciousness-altering form of breathwork and he had a profound experience relating to the death of his mother when he was only nine months old, as well as his first truly transpersonal experience.
Mack continued his exploration and training with breathwork, and according to Blumenthal’s book, by 1989, he had become a “regular” participant in Grof’s breathwork modules. Elizabeth Gibson, co-founder of Dreamshadow Transpersonal Breathwork and co-author (with Mack and Grof) of the 2003 article, “Reflections on Breathwork and Alien Encounter Experiences,” remembers Mack’s involvement in the Grof breathwork group. On a Zoom call, she recalls that Mack was a facilitator at the first Holotropic breathwork session she had ever participated in, one of the “big weekend workshops” Stan and Christina Grof used to host. “There must have been 130, 140 people there that weekend,” Gibson recalls, “and John Mack was on the team with them [to help facilitate] and he brought with him a lot of the psychiatric residents that were then in training with him at Cambridge hospital.” Similarly, Callimanopulos recalls that Mack was part of a Grof breathwork “pod” that would meet a few times a year in different parts of the world for two weeks at a time. “That was a very strong bonding experience for all the people in his pod,” she says.
It turns out that Grof not only introduced Mack to breathwork and transpersonal experiences, but to the alien abduction phenomenon as well. In March 1988, at a breathwork training module at Pocket Ranch in California, Grof gave Mack a chapter on alien abductions from his and Christina’s upcoming anthology, Spiritual Emergence: When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis (1989). “I have no idea why Stan thought I would be particularly interested in that subject,” Mack wrote in 2003. “I read the chapter with much interest, although I kept asking myself, ‘But is it true?’ Were people really being contacted by humanoid beings or the like?” Later in the same article, Mack wrote, “Through Breathwork I became open to the fact that the universe might be full of entities, which we call spirits, gods, archetypes, angels, mythic beings or whatever. The humanoids encountered by abduction experiencers seem to be one such type of being.”
Soon after the March ‘88 breathwork module, Mack was introduced to New York artist and famous alien experiencer and researcher, Budd Hopkins, who then introduced him to a whole network of abductees through a support group Hopkins was running. Unlike other mental health care professionals these folks may have seen, Mack had a much more empathetic approach. Instead of disbelieving what these people claimed to have experienced because he couldn’t prove it was true, Mack just held space for these folks to process their abductions, much like one would do for any other type of non-ordinary state of consciousness, like a near-death, psychedelic, or mystical experience.
“I think that was one of the big gifts he brought to this community of people he was working with. He never questioned whether their stories were true. He just accepted that people were having these experiences and tried to support them and give them a safe place where they could express what they were going through without fear of being judged. And that was huge for people,” says Gibson.
Mack helped abductees tremendously through this approach to their trauma by helping them “integrate” this reality-shattering experience, and at the same time, he started to find some undeniable common threads among their stories, which he writes about extensively in his two books on the subject, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (1994) and Passport to the Cosmos(1999). For example, the alien beings typically communicate with people telepathically and transmit profound messages through their big, dark eyes. Aliens also seem to alter people’s consciousness during their abduction experiences and even their “vibrations,” which then permits the aliens to move humans through the air and even through solid objects like the walls of their homes. What was also reliably consistent from experiencer to experiencer was a traumatizing loss of control of their bodies, incredibly invasive medical procedures, and even forced sexual contact and impregnation, which was often communicated to experiencers as an essential part of an alien-human hybrid program, and the future of both of their species.
Now, I know this all sounds a little X-Files-y (and according to Blumenthal in The Believer, Chris Carter (the TV show’s creator) even called Mack to pick his brain when he was developing the iconic series), but for the actual experiencers, this was deeply traumatizing. Budd Hopkins, for example, found the abductions to be incredibly demoralizing and felt it was a deep violation of trust and power by the alien beings, and that’s how he framed his support group for abductees—as one of victims processing trauma.
However, when Mack worked with experiencers, he used his recent training as a Holotropic breathwork facilitator to “hold space” for folks to integrate the non-ordinary state and to help it reach some kind of conclusion, which often lead to spiritual transformation. “As our work deepens, especially as the reality of the alien intelligence is acknowledged and the abductees come to accept their lack of control of the process, the frightening and adversarial quality of the relation seems to give way to a more reciprocal one in which useful human-alien communication can take place and mutual benefit is derived,” writes Mack in Abduction. “For example, the abductees [who] felt bitterly resentful about having their sperm and eggs used by the aliens in the hybridization project, may come to feel that they are participating in a process that has value for the creation and evolution of life.”
What Mack understood is that folks were processing experiences that completely shattered their worldview, similar to having one’s idea of reality flipped on its head after a strong psychedelic experience. How were folks supposed to get back to their regular lives after communicating with aliens telepathically and being shown we’re not the only intelligent life in the universe? “The terror is not just the terror of being paralyzed, having your body taken and having things done to you, the terror is the terror of the expansion of consciousness,” Mack said at a seminar on “Affect” in June 1992. He goes on to explain that is it a type of “ontological shock” that attacks people’s sense of their material reality—as it has attacked his own. And in his opinion, that’s what really needed to be integrated, not only by the abductees themselves, but by society, because that’s what really shocks people—that there’s more out there than we perceive on a daily basis.
In fact, his theories on the existence of aliens greatly differed from many of his UFO-hunting counterparts. Through his work with abductees and transpersonal realms of consciousness, he came to believe that aliens exist, but not in this physical dimension that we humans know as reality. He started to theorize about other realms of existence, or spiritual dimensions, where entities and intelligence like the alien “Grays” could exist, possibly less embodied but more conscious than us. And perhaps, the alien abduction phenomenon exemplified the most damning occurrence in the “Western dualistic worldview” as he often called it—that there are intelligent beings who are, at will, able to travel between dimensions and enter our material reality from their spirit realm.
“In
short, I was dealing with a phenomenon that I felt could not be explained
psychiatrically, yet was simply not possible within the framework of the
Western scientific worldview,” Mack writes in Abduction. “My choices then were either to stretch and twist
psychology beyond reasonable limits, overlooking aspects of the phenomenon that
could not be explained psychologically… Or, I might open to the possibility
that our consensus framework of reality is too limited and that a phenomenon
such as this cannot be explained within its ontological parameters. In other
words, a new scientific paradigm might be necessary in order to understand what
was going on.”
While deep in this research, my next question was: how significant were Mack’s psychedelic experiences to this openness to the possible existence of aliens, in this reality or another? Because for me, as a person who’s not particularly spiritual or religious and also grew up with a Western idea of what’s “real,” it wasn’t until my psychedelic experiences began lifting the veil that I started opening up to the possibility of spirit realms, plant intelligence, and now, the existence of aliens in some dimension. Mack admits in Passport to the Cosmos that his own experiences of “a transcendent reality” influenced his evolution of thought, in addition to his decade of working with experiencers and all the data they supplied him with.
In The Believer, Blumenthal also reports that Mack was experimenting with some psychedelics with his Grof group and other close friends. He talks of MDMA, LSD, ayahuasca, and ketamine trips, in addition to Holotropic breathwork. Mack also had correspondences with psychedelic philosophers and researchers doing adjacent work, like Terence McKenna and Rick Strassman. There’s a 1992 video of McKenna interviewing Mack at the International Transpersonal Conference in Prague and multiple references to McKenna’s work and the conversations the two of them had in transcripts and correspondences of Mack’s, which the John E. Mack Institute provided for me while I was researching this piece.
When Mack started theorizing about the purpose of the alien’s visits in his writing—that perhaps they were sent by some greater creative intelligence or “Anima Mundi” to expand human consciousness and help us not only evolve (or co-evolve), but also help us understand we are all intricately connected and need to take better care of our most precious gift, the planet earth—it sounds a lot like the insights from a strong psychedelic experience, or a talk from Terence McKenna at the time. At another Affect Seminar in July 1992, Mack referenced a McKenna quote, “that even God has limits”, in which Mack took to mean, “There is a point when one species seems to have carried the experiment too far in certain directions, then there is a cosmic correction occurring of a sort. And many of the abductees actually experience that powerfully, that this phenomenon involves some kind of balancing that is going on.”
Mack continues this line of thought in other talks and later writings—that perhaps the Anima mundi thinks we’re getting too destructive and it sent the aliens here to help us correct our ways. While I was in a deep reading of these ideas 20 years later, I couldn’t help but think that perhaps in 2020, that same intelligence thought psilocybin mushrooms may be a more successful plan to help evolve the human mind to realize its vital connection to all things. It’s a very common psychedelic insight (especially on mushrooms or ayahuasca) to feel a deep, spiritual connection to everything and to return with a great sense of urgency to help save our ailing planet. Could these messages all be coming from the same “source”?
Or, was Mack inserting his own spiritual and environmental bias onto his clients? “My own impression, gained from what abductees have told me, is that consciousness expansion and personal transformation is a basic aspect of the abduction phenomenon,” Mack wrote in Abduction. “I have come to this conclusion from noting in case after case the extent to which the information communicated by alien beings to experiencers is fundamentally about the need for a change in human consciousness and our relationship to the earth and one another. Even the helplessness and loss or surrender of control which are, at least initially, forced upon the abductees by the aliens—one of the most traumatic aspects of the experiences—seem to be in some way “designed” to bring about a kind of ego death from which spiritual growth and the expansion of consciousness may follow. But my focus upon growth and transformation might reflect a bias of mine.”
Are the aliens trying to expand human consciousness so we
can live more harmoniously with the rest of the galaxy, save our own home
planet, and become more in touch with a spiritual dimension? Or was Mack
letting his own consciousness expansion leak into his work and influence it too
strongly? “We would fight about it sometimes,” Callimanopulos recalls. She explains that Mack
was accused of leading people to believe their experiences were spiritual in
nature, and she also believed it had become his bias. Coming from an
anthropological background, she “felt he should hold back more and be more
neutral. Let people struggle to define their experience more.”
Yet, Callimanopulos also says that she often felt Mack was being very appropriate, and she describes how powerfully real people’s emotions were when they began to recall and process their abduction experiences. “He started this work because people were hurting,” Callimanopulos says. She also drives home that Mack possessed an incredible intellect and was always drawn to life’s mysteries. “John always tried to address the big questions in life, like what’s life about? How does it all work? What are we doing here? What’s our identity?”
After Abduction came out, Mack supported his theories—that aliens exist, but perhaps not in this physical dimension, and they’re here to expand and transform human consciousness for a higher intelligence’s purpose—on all the mainstream outlets of the time, including Oprah and Charlie Rose. But after a few damning articles in Time Magazine and the New York Times that questioned Mack’s practices, Harvard began a long and trying inquiry into the standards of his work. For instance, part of how Mack worked with abductees to help them remember and process their experiences was a relaxing form of hypnosis. But could that just be opening the door for false memories or confusing nocturnal dreams with reality? Mack defended his practice and truly felt that a non-ordinary state of consciousness like an alien abduction needed a similarly altered state to help the integration process, but to others, its necessity was less clear. There were other discrepancies that Harvard looked into as well, like how he billed insurance and charged abductees, and whether they were formally clients or research subjects.
Mack survived the Harvard inquiry tenure intact, but the emotional toll it must have taken on him is only for us to wonder. “He was very used to being well regarded and well-liked. It came as a big shock to him that people—his close colleagues, turned against him,” Callimanopulos says. “I think it was also harsh for John because he was a very collaborative, empathic person who enjoyed relationships more than anything else in life and sought out that harmony— that comfort and adulation from colleagues. So I think it was really tough.”
However, he continued the work with abductees, releasing his second and more openly spiritual book on the phenomena, Passport to the Cosmos, in 1999. Then, he also began a professional interest in the survival of consciousness after death, until his own tragic passing in 2004. When Mack was in England for a conference, he was hit by a car after looking the wrong way while trying to cross the road in London. It was a shock to the abductee community and all who knew him. He was 74 years old.
I can’t help but wonder if Mack’s ideas would be more easily accepted today in a world that’s decriminalizing magic mushrooms, pumping out psychedelic doses of ketamine to depressed patients, and scientifically quantifying the significance of mystical experiences in psychedelics’ usefulness for treating mental health conditions. During a time when more people are taking mushrooms and ayahuasca than ever before and coming to very similar insights as Mack’s abductees, would we be more receptive to his ideas of aliens expanding human consciousness in order to enlighten and transform our species, so that we can save ourselves from ourselves?
In 1999, he wrote in Passports to the Cosmos: “We seem to be experiencing now in the United States, and more or less throughout Western culture, a kind of spiritual renaissance. It reflects a deep hunger for something missing in the lives of many people, a sense, however vague, that there are other realms from which they feel cut off, and a growing realization that many of the catastrophic events of this century now ending have derived from radical secularism and spiritual emptiness.” Perhaps Mack himself was part of the cosmic correction, opening the mainstream’s mind to a whole world of transpersonal possibilities. “He was a big catalyst for the whole conversation being in the mainstream,” says Callimanopulos. “Maybe if he lived longer, he might have gone on to do a little more mapping of those different dimensions.”
About the Author
Michelle Janikian is a journalist focused on drug policy, trends, and education. She’s the author of Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion, and her work has also been featured in Playboy, DoubleBlind Mag, High Times, Rolling Stone and Teen Vogue. One of her core beliefs is that ending the prohibition of drugs can greatly benefit society, as long as we have harm reduction education to accompany it. Find out more on her website: www.michellejanikian.com or on Instagram @michelle.janikian.
Wittingly or not, pharmaceutical companies are clearing the path to the next populist revolution in traditional psychoactive plant and fungi medicines. Although still on the horizon, reregulation is fait accompli. As decriminalization and rescheduling of plant and fungi medicines advances, the inability to drive product costs suitably down will fuel the existing black market. Illicit users exist and more will join their ranks as pharmaceutical companies create a customer base. While new understanding of these ancient medicines disseminates, the public will learn that plant and fungi medicine is significantly less expensive to forage or cultivate at home than clinics or pharmacies could ever offer.
Pharmaceutical Companies Are Protecting Their Interest with Patents, and the FDA Will Impose Limits on End-Users
Pharmaceutical companies are doing necessary and helpful work, leading the way with regulators. But their reign will not last. It is inevitable that a populist preference to procure psychedelics per penny will prevail. Profiteers have a problem: price.
Consider the effect on price caused by:
Federal law’s support of patent “monopoly.”
Health insurance’s slow adoption of psychedelics.
Investor need to recoup investments in years of research and promotion.
Investor hunger for profits.
Novelty, as the world awakens with fascination to something old as something new.
To recoup the tens-to-hundreds of millions of dollars invested in securing FDA approval and related patents, and then the expense of thereafter marketing their wares for a profit, the corporate owners of these future FDA-approved psychedelics are not acting out of principled charity or for the goodwill of all humankind. They are going to make their money, either in the pricing of the medicine or in the coupling of it to clinical services. At least in the early years, as the owners of these patents and FDA approvals try best to figure out how to market their products, it seems the inevitable price per dose will be multi-hundred dollars. Even if the price gets down to tens of dollars, nature remains tough competition- nature’s price tag of “free” is a tough price to beat.
Pharmaceutical Companies Are Not the Problem— But They Are Its Origin
This not a rant against pharmaceutical companies, capitalism, or therapeutic services. It’s far from such, and each plays a necessary and vital role in this story. Without pharmaceutical company efforts, there would be no story. This is simply an observation that plant and fungi medicines are nothing more than unrefined nature, metaphorically and literally as cheap as dirt. With simplicity of that sort as competition, pharmaceutical companies are going to have a tough time keeping the genie in their “bottle of exclusivity.” This is not the circumstance where a retort of, “If you don’t like our prices, try to manufacture your own ibuprofen” ends the conversation. With psychoactive plants, if you do not like industrial prices, you can easily forage or home grow for pennies or free.
FDA Approval Means Islands of Privilege and a Festering Public Resentment
Here is the rub: future customers who may initially believe it acceptable to pay high prices for psilocybin or other natural therapeutic psychoactives will be the second group to bear resentment.
The people who cannot afford to partake are the first to be left out.
The western industrial medical model is unintentionally in the midst of creating a psychedelic privileged class. If you cannot afford FDA-approved medicine, you will be left out. And if you try to partake like the wealthy people who can pay Gwyneth Paltrow prices, you will be branded a criminal. The difference? Pay your “tithing” to a corporation, and you will be alright. Do not pay? Well, tough luck on you, felon.
Who dares tell those who can’t afford this ancient “new” medicine not to turn to alternative sources, after science and corporate America confirm these plants and fungi are effective and healthy? Who dares blame those who correctly observe that contemporary science confirmation and corporate blessings do not themselves literally turn something old into something new? The fact that a corporate board finally figured out how to squeeze a nickel, or a politician found courage through campaign donations is not going to wipe out thousands of years of well-documented natural medicines and their effects.
Shareholders telling the public not to access nature, while slapping nature’s bounty with big price tags, is not going to sit well. The public will not long tolerate pharmaceutical companies touting the “added value” their little tweaks, concentrates, or clever packaging and marketing may bring. The public will inevitably learn that science did not give us psychedelics. Rather, science, in the name of politics, merely confirmed what thousands of years of human history have already well documented. The use of certain psychoactive plants and fungi to treat anxiety and depression is no more a credit-worthy invention than Columbus accidentally running into North America, and like a continent, thousands of years of history were not waiting for a contemporary politician’s approval to justify its existence.
Resentment over artificial financial barriers will satiate itself in a black market and home cultivation. The more pharmaceutical companies raise awareness, insisting compounds like psilocybin treat depression and anxiety, the more the public will want affordable access. Profiteering pharmaceutical companies are making a case against their own long-term interests. As modern cannabis has taught us, much like every vegetable at the supermarket, product price is a race to the bottom, and the vendor with the lowest price wins. Mother Nature, with her pesky ability to self-generate, and with a price tag of “free,” poses eternal and tough competition.
State Legislatures Could Be the Solution (But Won’t)
As federally approved plant and fungi medicines make inroads, there will be market-driven increase in illicit use- illicit being “illegal,” only because our current laws deem it so. Knowing this, the logical thing would be for legislatures to act and get ahead of what will become a problem. Make no mistake, it is coming. But most legislatures are too frightened of change, and psychedelics, for too many, represent radical change.
The political familiar is not the noble lion. It is the chicken, and rather than face their fears (and in so doing, master them), legislatures opt to ignore and pretend it will all just go away. My home state of Arizona is such a place. Three times, the citizens of Arizona passed pro-marijuana laws by public initiative. This election, a successful citizen initiative made Arizona the 13th state to legalize recreational marijuana. Although invited multiple times to craft laws, Arizona’s legislature took no action, forcing the citizens to do so for themselves.
A Better Solution— Introducing the Public Initiative
No one expects self-initiated reform from the federal government or from agencies like the FDA and DEA. One need only look to cannabis’ experiences these many decades. But one-by-one, citizens of certain states and cities are changing their local laws through a direct democratic process known as public initiative.
Public initiatives are citizen-initiated and citizen-driven proposals for new state laws or state constitutional amendments (sorry, there is no such thing as a federal public initiative). If enough citizen signatures are collected to qualify an initiative to be on the ballot, the initiative is added to the ballot and citizens vote on whether to adopt the initiative as new state or city law. For example, in November 2020, a few plant and fungi medicine citizen initiatives went to ballot, including Oregon’s psilocybin initiative, Measure 109, Arizona’s recreational cannabis initiative, Smart & Safe Arizona, and District of Columbia’s Initiative 81. All were successful- a historic first in U.S. history.
Even though state initiatives do not change federal law, changes in state law take off some pressure, reduce individual criminal entanglements, and allow for experimentation of policy reform. Plus, public initiatives garner the attention of other states and the federal government, thereby advancing the dialogue of reform.
Citizens of states with no public initiative
laws are in a tougher place. They must resort to lobbying and campaigning for
office to make these changes. But maybe those of us in states with public
initiative laws can help at home. Plus, there is no reason a uniform model
plant and fungi medicine act could not similarly be adopted by state
legislatures. After all, the goal of a public initiative is to create laws upon
which a majority of citizens agree. Any well-worded initiative good enough for
a public vote could as easily be adopted inside a legislature.
Do Not Move a Mountain One Pebble at a Time
Although an initiative’s success at the ballot box is important, the progress it brings is slow, local, and piecemeal. There is a better way. Citizens can join forces and campaign with a uniform initiative that could be introduced simultaneously in multiple states and flip the country in one election.
As seen with cannabis, successful initiatives sometimes have a domino effect. There is every reason to believe that neighboring states will take notice. A well-regulated legal environment is apt to serve as the national model, and success invites imitation. Strong currents in law and politics favor uniform laws. They make commerce and predictability more reliable across jurisdictions. The unanimous adoption of the Uniform Commercial Code is emblematic.
Strength in Numbers
Imagine the buying power of shared campaign costs across ten or more states. Imagine the impact on national public awareness with campaigns running simultaneously in multiple states, educating the public about plant and fungi medicine reform. Imagine the favorability a well-crafted initiative will receive, if citizens across the country know they are not alone in considering change. A multi-state public initiative can attract and focus investment dollars from every national (and local) group with a stake in serious drug policy reform. In lieu of small and local, perhaps a national campaign will attract national dollars and national support from national drug policy, mental health, civil liberty, and similar reform organizations.
As results of the 2020 election suggest, there has never been a better time than now to push for impactful reform. A uniform initiative can succeed if it is thoughtful about cost and access, is patient-focused, is respectful of privacy, is driven by science, promotes responsible access and responsible use, and looks upon plant and fungi medicine as a health and spiritual issue instead of a criminal issue.
Remember there is no such thing as perfect law, and there is always someone ready to complain. Doomsayers can be placated with the inclusion of terms to address child safety, impaired driving, tax allocation, etc. A well-crafted uniform model plant and fungi medicine act can and should deal with the good and the bad upfront. A well-crafted uniform plant and fungi medicine initiative can curry favor amongst millions of citizens and be implemented in multiple states in a single election cycle. Swaths of the nation can tune in and turn on together, while implementing sound and measured policy that can start to erase the damage of the last 50 years of oppression and societal harms brought about by the Controlled Substances Act and the war on drugs.
If we do not face the issue of medicine guide abuse with as much courage as the psychonaut faces the edges of reality and their own healing process, we would be missing an important opportunity to do the necessary work at hand for us in this realm. When else would we confront the Shadow so greatly as this past year, when fascism, a global pandemic, and ecological demise were no longer on the horizon in post-apocalyptic visions, but were instead upon us? As we begin to heal and recover from the last four years and detox from the underlying structures of oppression at the core, we realize all that is at stake.
The longing to be more connected and the need to create order out of the chaos of conflicting narratives combined with the simultaneous upsurge in fear of the virus, hate crimes, and political unrest, has created a swirl of catalytic enzymes with everything needed to activate a new wave of high-demand groups. In everything from the alt-right to the psychedelic underground, we see manifestations of high-control group dynamics, including charismatic leaders, propaganda, brainwashing, and the gaslighting of anyone with an opposing voice. Adding in the complexity of non-ordinary states with the accompanying loss of sense of self and agency, dissolving boundaries, and susceptibility, we have found ourselves deep in the psychedelic Shadow.
The current zeitgeist calls for a level of inquiry, openness, and capacity to withstand critique, without fear of losing the whole endeavor. We have an opportunity to refine, make the work more potent, and have more integrity and efficacy. This is the charge we have received: to name the ways that misuse of power in the guide/journeyer relationship manifests in traumatic consequences, to take actions to prevent future abuse, and help people heal from past abuse.
This article will explore the types of high-control group dynamics that perpetuate and amplify psychedelic guide abuse, dispel myths, and offer a healing path forward on individual and collective levels.
Demystifying High-Control Group Dynamics
I wrote this piece to better understand and to share about the dynamics that set into motion a cascade of loss of agency, loss of identity, and the inability to speak up and out against problematic behavior. We can understand it on a micro-level within families, and a macro-level with what we, as a country, are coming out of from the last four years. All of us, especially the most vulnerable, have been affected by blatant narcissistic abuse.
High-control groups (HCGs) are defined by the areas that are being controlled and by diminishing the will of the individual, while the affected person actually is manipulated into believing what’s happening is in their best interest. Or, in some cases, the perceived value of the cause outweighs personal needs, and their intuition and ethical compass can become faulty.
Steve Hassan’s BITE Model (Behavior control, Information control, Thought control, and Emotional control) is an entry point to begin to see the underlying infrastructure of HCGs. When we combine Hassan’s BITE model with data from Yale’s 1962 Milgram Obedience to Authority Study, Palo Alto High School’s 1967 Wave Experiment, and Phillip Zimbardo’s 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, we begin to see how these forms of control and manipulation have great potency to influence the thoughts, words, and deeds of others in group dynamics.
In his book, Practice And All Is Coming: Abuse, Cult Dynamics, And Healing In Yoga And Beyond (Embodied Wisdom, 2019), Matthew Remski explores self-care and recovery while unpacking these dynamics, and cautions us to have discernment. The book’s final section includes a workbook for “better practices and safer spaces.” Janja Lalich and Madeline Tobias’ book, Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (Bay Tree, 1994), is a comprehensive reference on cultic mechanisms, paths to recovery, and therapeutic concerns. Its appendix, “Characteristics Associated with Cultic Groups,” written by Lalich and Michael Langone, is a useful analytical tool to discover if the group you or a loved one is in displays such features.
Lalich wrote another book with Karla McLaren called Escaping Utopia (Routledge, 2017), in which they share “the stories of 65 people from 39 different cults in more than a dozen countries.” On her website (which features her very helpful “Systems of Influence” checklist, McLaren talks about a common occurrence that happens to people:
“When powerful systems of influence are active, people may lose their sense of self, their critical thinking, and their autonomy – and when they do, they can be converted into obedient followers. One of the strange side effects of this process is that converts may begin to believe that they have free will, and that they have intentionally chosen to de-self and obey. They become true believers and lose any real awareness of the influence methods that reshaped and resocialized them – and they come to believe that they willingly accepted this personal transformation to be one of the chosen few. This seems bizarre, but it’s a crucial feature of toxic systems of influence and persuasion. And it’s possibly the most difficult feature for someone who hasn’t experienced it to fully understand. “
People get hooked through a combination of insiders finding out what they want and believe and offering them just that. It is essentially sales, and the lieutenants/recruiters are the best salespeople on the team. They may say: “You need to offer this to your clients in order to really help them,” “You’re special, and I don’t know why you’re just now being invited,” “This is your destiny,” “You’re perfect for our program/cause/community, and together we can create a better world.”
Then, one is broken down to induce further vulnerability on physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual levels, through methods including, but not limited to: overwork, lack of rest or nutrition, altered states, and cathartic and re-traumatizing processes. When one sees abuses or questionable behavior, they are gaslit or judged as being unwell in some fundamental way, and coerced and guilted into silence. Once a person has been broken down, they no longer have a will of their own- a new persona is rebuilt that matches the need of the group and serves as a proxy for the leader’s enactment of will.
A window into these dynamics- the allure and encroachment, followed by people awakening to what’s happening, leaving, and fighting back, can be seen in the HBO docuseries, “The Vow,” about the NXIVM sex cult. Be sure to watch it and consider the synchronicities you see between this group and other organizations, or even patterns in the rise of authoritarian governments on the planet, in various communities, or within family systems. It is vital to understand these patterns on both micro and macro levels to be able to tend to the underlying wounds that give rise to these structures and reactions, defenses, trauma enactments, and conscious or unconscious perpetuation of harm.
Psychedelic Guide Abuse and the Problem of Community Complicity
As the Shadow of Psychedelics makes itself more overtly known to us though lived experience and our holding space for those who have been harmed, it has become vital for me, as a clinician, to name and express these concerns- for the survivors, and as an advocate for the ethical employment of entheogenic therapies. Many topics arise from the depths, including appropriation, misuse of power, complicity through economic ties, and allyships with other communities as funnels.
The implication that psychedelics will be the panacea that will cure all the ills of our time on the planet may blind some to the problems at hand and the detoxification that needs to be done to make these practices safe again (which will ultimately be in service of furthering the movement overall). We notice, as well, the lack of proper training in how to honor and work with trauma as well as extraordinary states catalyzed by the medicine, such as Spiritual Emergence, and lack of oversight and accountability within communities (if they are underground).
Two examples of psychedelic guide abuse that everyone is already familiar with are the stories of Octavio Rettig and Gerry Sandoval, highlighted on 5-meo-dmt-malpractice.org, which displays the following open letter:
Join us in standing against psychedelic and entheogenic malpractice.
For many years there has been concern in psychedelic and entheogenic circles about what appears to be reckless, unethical, and potentially criminal behavior by Dr. Octavio Rettig and Dr. Gerry Sandoval in their capacity as facilitators of ‘Bufo’, the 5-MeO-DMT containing secretion of the Bufo alvarius toad.
Despite difficulties in gaining a clear picture of the overall situation, there is now overwhelming evidence that these concerns are well founded. For that reason we, coming from the psychedelic, entheogenic, and broader consciousness communities, have decided it is necessary to make this public statement.
A brief list of reported malpractices by Octavio include: dangerous sessions leading to hospitalizations and deaths; psychological and physical violence; non-consensual interventions and abuses of power; and neglect of people who have been damaged.
A brief list of reported malpractices by Gerry include rape; clandestine drugging; planting drugs on people with intent to endanger them; intentional overdosing; grossly unsafe serving practices; psychological manipulation; and financial fraud.
The collective consequences, apart from death, include physical injuries, psychological trauma, ongoing mental health issues, and shell-shocked and divided entheogenic communities.
For these reasons we, who come from the psychedelic, entheogenic, or simply the broader consciousness community, think it is time to take a stand. Now that these long running problems have come clearly to light, choosing to push them back into the shadows is no longer an option. Silence in the face of this knowledge risks making us complicit in any future abuses. It also risks completely distorting the role of this entheogen as it makes its way into the world.
We invite you to sign and take a stand with us.
Another example is in the March 3, 2020 Quartz article “Psychedelic therapy has a sexual abuse problem,” by Olivia Goldhill. In the article, Lily Kay Ross, who said she felt the need to leave her psychedelic work behind after speaking out about her rape by an ayahuasca shaman in the Amazon, shared, “I was told explicitly that I might single-handedly re-instigate the war on drugs and undo all of the advancements in the field of psychedelic research since the 1960s. There’s the idea that psychedelics are so important and so wonderful that the train has to keep going. We can’t slow down to get the rapists off the train.”
Ross will be speaking on a panel at the Psychedelics, Madness, and Awakening Conference in early 2021 with therapist and author of Outside Mental Health: Voices and Visions of Madness, Will Hall, among others. They will be sharing their concerns about the impact of psychedelic guide abuse. In Will Hall’s most recent Psychedelics Today appearance, he discussed the shadow side of psychedelics, and challenged us all to look into what our motivations are, and how they align to the movement’s ethics:
“What is the commitment? Is the commitment to get psychedelic drugs accessible at all costs? And we’re going to lie, cheat, and steal our way to get there? Or is the commitment to trust that truth is the way? And if we just stick with the truth, that is how we change society?”
Dispelling the Myths
1) These Groups will naturally self-correct.
False. HCGs are closed systems that self-perpetuate their beliefs and dynamics and create a feedback loop. Thus, they not only create homeostasis, or a balancing within that keeps things the same, but this homeostasis may also intensify as the closed system feeds back upon itself. In the groundbreaking book, The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision, authors Fritjof Capra & Pier Luigi Luisi have this to say with respect to feedback loops: “Feedback loops not only have self-balancing effects but may also be self-amplifying” (Capra & Luisi, 2014, p. 91).
Knowing this, we can see that by doing nothing, nothing will change. Many of us have thought that because the medicines are working in the ceremonies and sessions, they will help to automatically awaken and shift dynamics. For some, that is the case. For others, it deepens the trauma bonding them to the guide and HCG, and creates an even stronger disorganized attachment, which strengthens the reliance upon the guide and, by proxy, the medicine.
2) The abusive guides must not realize they are doing harm.
This is based on an assumption that folks who work with medicine are free from the traits that are self-serving, manipulative, or Shadow manifestations. Maybe these are unconscious dynamics/trauma re-enactments, or maybe they are sadistically harming. I will not participate in the othering, though, lest I fall prey to enantiodromia (a Jungian principle that states that over time, an extreme, one-sided tendency can unconsciously change into its polar opposite). But suffice it to say that not all guides and facilitators of the work prioritize the healing and service for the highest good of all beings in their journey toward wholeness.Their motivations might be financial or for power, feeding the ego that gives them that godlike rule over folks in non-ordinary, vulnerable states. How do we demand accountability and create the change that needs to be made in these situations? If it is unconscious, how can the gift of the medicines not intensify these defensive structures, but instead melt them away?
Can we lean into the wisdom of restorative and transformative justice to both understand the wounds that create those structures, and at the same time, keep those that are vulnerable safe from the abuse? Which part of this web of healing are you? Are you an advocate, ally, supporter, or educator? Know that each of us is needed to heal this together. And we must keep in mind and heart the words of Thich Nhat Hanh: “When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself, and his suffering is spilling over. He does not need punishment; he needs help. That’s the message he is sending.”
3) Others in the community, and outside of it, know and don’t care.
This myth stems from the idea that “nobody is doing anything about it.” We need to remember that the trauma which occurs while in non-ordinary states of consciousness is so profound and the recovery so delicate, we must not place the burden of transforming this issue on the backs of the survivors. We all must acknowledge the harm that is being done, and those who are complicit out of financial necessity need to do the right thing and disconnect their umbilical cord from the toxic womb. If the community complicity is bound to the group’s silence and secrecy, and has lost agency and capacity to speak out against abuses, then more support is needed. And more support is needed for those that do see, and when they are excised for going against the grain, they need to be witnessed, held, and cared for.
Because so many of the harmful communities are underground, there is no way to go to above-ground sources for accountability and ethical quality-control. So how can the wider community of psychedelic educators and healers enact the change that is needed? This is a question in process- in deep inquiry now, and I would love to see more discussion, panels, and think tanks, here and through other platforms and organizations.
A Way Forward: Ethics, Education, and Accountability
The amplification of the intensity of trauma within entheogenic extraordinary states makes the impact of guide abuse, gaslighting, and complicity much vaster, and the effects deeper and more difficult to recover from. I propose that there is a way forward, beginning by naming and honoring the reality of these experiences, offering a haven for the abused, and sharing new ethical standards, not only for the above-ground practitioners, but for the underground as well. This can be community-based, restorative and transformative justice, and peer-led; informed by open dialogue, harm reduction, and radical humanism.
Remember: Cognitive liberty is not only the freedom to, it is also the freedom from.
How does one resist these dynamics and methods of control and manipulation, maintain integrity in the sacred work we are undertaking, and therefore protect the safety and efficacy of psychedelic clients? First, do an inner inquiry into your relationship to power- others’ and your own. It is very likely that in entheogenic non-ordinary states of consciousness, that COEXes (layers of resonant trauma imprints) may re-create trauma enactments, whether you are the sitter or the journeyer. There may also be role-reversal, the unconscious’ way of balancing the scales. The Shadow activations thus may be on the continuum of repetition or counterpoint.
The guides must have adequate education on trauma, spiritual emergence, and emergency, be well-versed in transpersonal psychology, and have the capacity not only to validate the reality of subtle realms, but great respect and competence to work with all of its parts: entities, energies, possession states, archetypes, lifetimes, and dimensions. At a minimum, each guide must have a list of resources for trained trauma therapists, Spiritual Emergence Coaches and energy workers, shamanic practitioners, and psychopomps.
It is our ethical responsibility to maintain a clear and protected container for our clients. When a breach of ethics is witnessed, it is vital to intervene in some way to protect the vulnerable. Check your complicity. What keeps you silent? Is it livelihood? Access to medicines? The stream of potential clients? What is the cost of work if it is founded on harm, manipulation, abuse, and potential re-traumatization? Instead, bring curiosity, compassion, and humility to each session, and the courage to trust the Inner Healer of the client and the inner compass of the soul.
On a community level, we must replace these unwell systems of control with what Karla McLaren calls “healthy systems of influence.” She shares about the qualities of these healthy systems, which can help us orient when faced with HCGs or on behalf of others we care about. She says:
“Healthy systems of influence involve rules that make sense, clear checks and balances on power, responsive and respectful leadership, and goals that are livable and beneficial for everyone.
The system is democratic; all members have a say in how the rules and regulations are developed and implemented.
Members have the right to question, doubt, and challenge the system.
Checks and balances are in place so that the system remains flexible, responsive, and fair.
The system supports equality, and no person is above the rules.
The system incorporates fairness, justice, and leniency; no one is humiliated, abused, or shunned.
Members appreciate the sense of structure and discipline that the system provides.
The system provides a healthy sense of belonging and camaraderie.
The system helps members develop a unified group identity that does not erase their own identities.
The group encourages critical thinking and welcomes ideas from outside the system.
When a system of control is healthy, its structure supports and nurtures the people inside it. When a system is toxic, its structure crushes, demeans, and dehumanizes the people trapped within it.”
I would like to close this piece with a quote from Matthew Remski, who offers us hope and inspiration in the possibility of what he calls an “empowerment network:”
“The values expressed in an empowerment network directly opposed those in the abuse-enabling network, because the goal of victims and their allies is to deconstruct and re-distribute power, rather than to capture and hoard it. Where secrecy silenced harm, there will now be transparent speech. Where deception confounded critical thinking, there will now be evidence and research. Where power had crystallized vertically, there will now be a horizontal sharing of space and dignity… Harm is not inflicted in a vacuum, and healing is not accomplished alone“ (Remski, 2019, p. 242).
References
Capra, F., & Luisi, P. L. (2016). The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision (Reprint ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Hassan, S. (2015). Combating Cult Mind Control: The #1 Best-selling Guide to Protection, Rescue, and Recovery from Destructive Cults. Freedom of Mind Press.
Lalich, J., & McLaren, K. (2017). Escaping Utopia: Growing Up in a Cult, Getting Out, and Starting Over (1st ed.). Routledge.
Lalich, J., & Tobias, M. (2006). Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2nd ed.). Bay Tree Publishing.
Remski, M. (2019). Practice And All Is Coming: Abuse, Cult Dynamics, And Healing In Yoga And Beyond. Embodied Wisdom Publishing.
Zieman, B. (2017). Cracking the Cult Code for Therapists: What Every Cult Victim Wants Their Therapist to Know. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
About the Author
Michelle Anne Hobart, MA, SEC, AMFT is a teacher, writer, and Associate Marriage and Family Therapist at the Center for Mindful Psychotherapy. She trained as a Spiritual Emergence Coach with Emma Bragdon, works closely with the Gnosis Retreat Center project, and among other collaborations, co-facilitates Psychedelics Today’s Spiritual Emergence Course with Kyle Buller. She offers individual, couple, and group therapy, and leads community wellness workshops and retreats. Michelle graduated from the Integral Counseling Psychology program at CIIS in May 2018, she finished her second book, Holding Sacred Space in February 2020, and is in awe of the beautiful opportunities to support others that the universe provides her with through writing, being a therapist, and her other energy healing modalities. You can learn more at michelleannehobart.com.
In February 2020, Israel treated its first PTSD patients in Phase 3 trials with MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. The trials are part of a research initiative conducted in partnership with the US-based Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), encompassing 15 sites in the US, Canada, and Israel, that is expected to conclude in the fourth quarter of 2021, in anticipation of receiving full regulatory approval.
The first randomized controlled trial of MDMA, the results of which were published in 2010, achieved an incredible 83% success rate in alleviating symptoms of PTSD, sustained over the 3.5-year duration of the study. More recent studies have demonstrated such significantly higher therapeutic results with MDMA relative to FDA-approved drugs for PTSD that in 2017, the FDA granted it a breakthrough therapy designation (BTD).
In 2019, Bella Ben Gershon, director of the Israeli Ministry of Health’s Psychological Trauma Unit, reported a 68% success rate for clinical trial patients whose PTSD symptoms were resistant to more conventional forms of treatment.
Considering the role of post-traumatic stress in exacerbating and perpetuating conflict, one way the US could improve its prospects for achieving a sustainable set of interdependent diplomatic agreements addressing security concerns in the Middle East would be to lead a Middle East science diplomacy initiative including Israel, Iran, and the Arab states.
A highly promising area of research to focus regional cooperation on would be the application of psychedelic drugs to the treatment of post-traumatic stress, which, over time, could be applied to countering violent extremism, security sector reform, and conflict resolution.
Political opposition to a US invitation to Iran should be reconsidered in light of decades of scientific cooperation on a broad range of issues between the US and the Soviet Union from the Eisenhower to the Reagan administration. Israel and the UAE’s more recent decision to conclude a peace agreement and engage in scientific cooperation, followed by a similar agreement between Israel and Bahrain (despite outstanding policy differences between these countries concerning the Israeli-Palestinian issue) set the stage for regional science diplomacy. Despite persistent enmity between Israel and Iran, Israel’s direct offer to the Iranian public to assist in water supply management, though lacking in diplomatic tact, further strengthens the case.
Though its many applications have yet to enter into the mainstream of international relations, psychedelic research based in prestigious Western research institutions such as Johns Hopkins University, New York University, MAPS, Imperial College London, and Beckley Foundation has made great scientific strides since the missteps of the 1960s and subsequent decades of government suppression of research into these highly intriguing substances.
One can envision a future, as close as the next decade or two, in which they become instrumental- not only to the treatment of mental health disorders that established medications and therapeutic techniques have, in many cases (at best) unsatisfactorily managed, but also to resolve some of the most complex problems of international diplomacy. Solving these problems will depend on leaders reconciling with their own trauma and expanding their empathetic and creative problem-solving capacities, all of which psychedelics have the potential to facilitate, depending on the openness of those who are courageous enough to explore them.
This is not such a bold proposition considering the broader historical and current context. Intelligence agencies, including the CIA, researched LSD and other psychedelics beginning in the 1950s (if not earlier) for their potential efficacy in interrogation and covert operations. Illicit drugs such as Captagon are being distributed on the battlefields of Syria to bolster combatants’ endurance and fighting resolve.
The highly unstable state of the Middle East and the demonstrated shortcomings of world leaders to engage broadly in effective diplomacy raises the question of why drugs should not be studied in earnest with the aim of applying them to psychological issues related to peace-building and international cooperation. Considering the existential threats to human civilization from cyber and hypersonic nuclear weapons and the callous disregard of world leaders for the destabilization of our planet’s climate, this is arguably, more than ever, a moral imperative.
As MAPS’ Director of Policy and Advocacy, Natalie Lyla Ginsberg, notes, “For millennia, indigenous communities around the world have used ceremonies and traditions involving plant medicines in the service and protection of intergenerational peace, and some communities continue to use traditional medicine practices for active conflict resolution. For example, in Colombia, councils of indigenous communities are joining together to hold yagé (ayahuasca) ceremonies to bring together those fighting on opposing sides of the civil war.”
Anecdotes of deep personal shifts in perspective, healing, and transformation have been documented in American veterans who have explored treatment with ayahuasca for post-traumatic stress- a contributing factor to substance abuse, domestic violence, and suicide.
In addition to ayahuasca and psilocybin mushrooms, there is evidence that natural psychedelics such as ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT may be able to catalyze healing from post-traumatic stress and related symptoms, as documented in a study published in the scientific journal Chronic Stress in July, 2020.
In an October 2018 segment on treating veterans with the empathogen MDMA, The Economist reported that the VA alone spends approximately $400 million per year on PTSD and other mental health issues. An estimated 8 million Americans suffer from PTSD.
Approximately 900,000 Israelis- 10 percent of the population- also suffer from PTSD, according to Dr. Keren Tzarfaty, MAPS’ representative in Israel.
Among the millions of refugees and internally displaced persons of the conflicts of Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Libya, vast numbers are susceptible to developing PTSD and some are vulnerable to recruitment by militant groups, in part, as a result of their traumatic experiences.
Psychedelics do not offer magic cures to the complex problems ailing our world. They can be used for nefarious and noble purposes and everything in between. As with nuclear power or any technology, it ultimately depends on how one chooses to use them. With wisdom and good intention, they may help us to achieve even deeper diplomatic breakthroughs that have, for so long, eluded us, in great part because they have so challenged our political leaders’ empathic capacities.
Thomas Buonomo is an independent political consultant with expertise in Middle East affairs. Much of his research over the last decade and a half has focused on how trauma associated with violent conflict can inhibit conflict resolution and, in more recent years, on how psychedelics could help increase the probability of constructive diplomatic outcomes. His writing has been published by Middle East Policy, Atlantic Council, Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s Fikra Forum, The Cipher Brief, Securing America’s Future Energy (SAFE)’s The Fuse, Cairo Review of Global Affairs, The Daily Star, The National, RealClear Defense, Informed Comment, The Hill, CQ Roll Call, The Humanist, et al.
Working in psychotherapy with substances such as LSD, MDMA, and psilocybin in order to help heal depression, post-traumatic stress, or to overcome death anxiety has been the subject of many publications. Some authors, such as Stanislav Grof, have even gone so far as to establish new stages in human development. Just as Freud in his time conceived of psychopathology on the basis of trauma in the oral, anal, or genital stages, Grof postulates that certain behavioral disorders stem from suffering encountered in one of the four perinatal stages. In conjunction, both older (James Fadiman, Michael Mithoefer) and more recent authors (Benny Shannon, Eric Vermetten) have modeled psychotherapy settings that use work under psychedelic substance.
Our aim today is not to question these different approaches and their possible transferability to countries where the law prohibits such practices. Indeed, what are the implications regarding the relationship with therapists when working in a framework outside the law, which imposes secrecy towards the environment? What does this induce in therapy?
In France, the law prohibits the use of substances in psychotherapy. However, in our therapists’ offices, we receive people who have gone abroad to other continents to have psychedelic experiences (whether conducted according to traditional practices or not) or even to nearby countries where foreign shamans come to perform ceremonies. The people who come to consult in this context have either had a “bad trip” that still disturbs them, or are no longer able to reintegrate socially after a strong mystical experience, or, still further, want to understand and integrate what they have lived through.
This is “afterthought” process work that differs from what a therapeutic framework would have involved, with preparation prior to the experience, specific therapeutic support during the experience, and an integration (the phase where meaning is given, where the experience is symbolized) and assimilation (the phase when we are able to link this experience to all our past experiences and our history, enabling us to visit prior beliefs) of the elements that emerged during the experience. Indeed, the psychedelic experience induces a shock by opening up hitherto unknown spaces which the psyche does not know what to do with, or, if it does, it will literally cling to the visions that have arisen during the experience, even if this means being out of step with daily reality.
These people come knocking at our door because they know that in addition to our training as a psychologist and psychotherapist, we have been initiated into shamanic practices. As such, we are supposed to know all about this, or, at least, are willing to hear non-ordinary stories without limiting our diagnosis to psychopathology. Through this approach, we are asked to hear these accounts not as pure madness, but to take care of their experience as a salient moment in their lives, even if a painful one.
In doing so, the experiencers come to challenge our own reference grids and our anthropology. Applying a single theoretical reference frame as we usually do in therapy has the risk of greatly reducing our understanding of the experience, even if this frame of reference was based on the transpersonal current. From our point of view, Grof’s perinatal stages or the archetypes of Carl Jung or Gilbert Durand cannot, by themselves, sufficiently support the elaboration work required by our patients. We believe that elements emerging during a psychedelic experiment are polysemic. They must be looked at on several levels: symbolic, metaphorical, transcendental, processual, as well as on the ego and somatic levels. Each level can, in itself, feature several interpretations.
For example, if I see myself as a warrior killing the dragon to free the princess:
-This may symbolize a problem in my married life which is very difficult to solve (we talk about symbolism at this point, because in our culture, references to the warrior and the princess speak of couples, as seen in children’s tales).
-At the level of the ego, it may question my desire to be recognized by my wife, or manifest my need to be seen as a powerful man.
-At the transcendental level, I may be envisaging the influence of superior, and even very ancient archetypal forces impacting my life as a couple.
-On a metaphorical level, it could be interpreted as the work I have to do to channel masculine strength and liberate the feminine dimension of my being.
-On the somatic level, during this experience, I may have felt a lot of energy inside, which could point towards the fact that I have a lot of inner energy at my disposal to obtain what I desire.
-On a process level, if I follow through with my vision, it has me view my wife as a weak person in need of rescue. Maybe this reveals my thoughts on male/female relationships.
-And at the transgenerational level, it may evoke how one of my ancestors forced a marriage upon his family against their advice.
The symbolic and metaphorical levels can overlap, and it’s often a very fine line to distinguish between them, and not necessarily always useful to do so. However, it is essential for therapists to keep these different levels in mind so that interpretations can be broken down and not rushed through too quickly, for the sake of an immediate ‘aha’ moment that would obscure and eliminate all other possibilities.
At the same time, a single level of interpretation may contain several meanings. For example, at the symbolic level, seeing oneself locked in a dark cave from which no escape is possible can represent how my current life is functioning now, just as it can symbolize the overwhelming constraints which I am confronted with in my environment, or my inability to see my situation clearly, etc.
To shed light on our way of working, we offer below three very different clinical cases.
Marc is a 38-year-old man. He lives alone without any children. His mother died when he was 20, and he sees his father quite regularly. He has little contact with his brother, who lives far away. Marc has been to South America, where he tried mushrooms, peyote, and ayahuasca. During his experiences, he was given a highly spiritual task: to attain spiritual enlightenment and guide his fellow citizens on this path. He saw himself as having high spiritual potential and became convinced that this was his destiny. Unfortunately, his return home to France was not as smooth as expected. There were no followers to be found. His speeches were met with irony. He didn’t make a good Messiah. Disheartened and still convinced by the visions he experienced deep inside, he isolated himself and drifted into a state of depression.
When we meet him for the first time and ask him about the faith he has in his own visions, he answers that his mother had the gift of clairvoyance and that she spoke “The language,” implying the language used by Christ. So there was no doubt that he had to continue the work of his lineage, being himself, like his mother, a person different from others.
From a psychological viewpoint, we could make the hypothesis of narcissistic disorder, eased by an extraordinary ideal. This defense mechanism against narcissistic collapse, however, is undermined by the lack of disciples. The depressive movement is the reason for his consulting us, and not his psychedelic experiences, which he believes to have understood sufficiently well.
Initially, no attempt was made to deconstruct his defense mechanism. We looked at his mission and more precisely how he had come to this conclusion. Based on his visions where he had sensed divine power within and where he had seen himself conveying it to others, we came up with several other interpretations for each of the levels previously evoked.
For example, divine power was seen as a spark of life shared by every human being (transcendental level). It was no longer a superpower that he possessed and that made him into an exceptional being. Together, we worked on his representation of the visible and invisible worlds, and the beliefs attached to these representations; namely, whether every human being had a mission, who assigned it, and whether we all had some degree of freedom with regard to this mission.
We also looked to see if this mission could stand as a metaphor for the way his family functioned, in which one person was the leader of all. We explored his family lineages. Was this “gift” already present over several generations? He thought his maternal grandmother had it, but wasn’t sure. He could only confirm that this particular trait was not recognized by those around him. Rather, it caused exclusion. This was a form of transgenerational recurrence. He thus was able to see exclusion as something to be avoided and discontinued. We did not go any further on that level.
Next, we addressed the level of ego, in this case, the desire to be recognized, admired, loved, and to be able to guide others. Through this inquiry, he was able to let go of his feeling of being all-powerful. It reintroduced a notion of intersubjectivity that he was overriding. It was also a way of looking at his limits and of accepting his shortcomings, thus allowing acceptance of a sufficient level of frustration (in the psychoanalytical sense) to live in society.
We suggested to him to let his vision unfold to the maximum (on the imaginary level), push it to the limit, and see how that would be for him, and what he would learn from it. This is the process level. When we go to the very end of the rationale of “I have something divine that I must share with others,” it most often leads to a crazy, untenable position. In this situation, it could well lead to becoming a new Christ. Pushed to this extreme, he felt that it was not right.
During these experiences, he had felt full of energy. He told himself that it would be forever present in him and that he could rely on it for his new life projects. Working on the different interpretation levels allowed him to let go of the initial conclusion that had stuck him in an unbearable pattern. Working on his ego, he resumed humility, which, in turn, helped him find a job in nature that he easily adapted to.
Exploring the transcendental level through how he viewed the visible and invisible worlds set him back on a spiritual path that did not split him off from the people he knew. In this case, we can speak of a shock or intrusion that caused spiritual trauma. If psychedelics have been shown to open up a spiritual space that is helpful for the person, they can just as easily cause a form of trauma, because the experience cannot be integrated, thus locking the individual into an alienating dynamic.
This example shows us once again the regrettable absence of a containing setting when using psychedelics. Such experiments proposed in a different cultural context, with codes often unknown to us Westerners, do not allow the experimenters to integrate the contents of their experience.
The second situation refers to a person who underwent a bad experience using psychedelics with a sitter in a supposedly therapeutic context.
Simon had taken LSD. After marveling at the fantastic images and colorful music, he had found himself locked in a kind of hell with viscous, crooked, suffering beings. Some of them were obsessed with sex. Disgusted, Simon could see in these beings all the darkness of their souls. A voice sounded in his ears: “You’re just like them, just as bad… You’ll never get away with it… You’re doomed to stay here…”
In fact, until the end of his psychedelic experience, Simon would not leave this space. Very affected and upset by his experience, he shared it with his sitter, whose answer was: “The medicine knows what is good for you… Let this experience take you through.”
A state of depression ensued. Simon couldn’t bear to see this hideous evil forever lodged in the depths of his soul. He saw no way out of this condemnation. The darkness of the images he had seen on that trip had left a deep impression on him. He imagined he’d be stuck there even after his death. This state lasted more than three months without his sitter being able to help him any further. She was always evasive during their phone calls, probably overwhelmed by the situation herself.
It was at this point that Simon began work to heal his depression. We invited him to delve into the darkness he evoked and see how it was inscribed within. Through our elaborations, differentiation was made between his cowardice in everyday life, the fears that triggered aggression, the frustrations generating anger, and the possessive, predatory nature of his sex drive.
The darkness he witnessed during the journey was no longer a shapeless, slimy magma. In fact, each element of this hell could metaphorically represent an aspect of Simon’s personality. Viewed in this way, it provided a perspective to work with. By unfolding each element, we were able to extract him from the suffocating magma he couldn’t shake free from before.
This “bad trip” can be construed as an attack on the ego. The ego seeing itself in its darkest aspects with no hope of breaking out triggered the depressive episode. The attack on the ego also contributed to taking a good look at the reverse polarity: “Who do you think you are, to imagine you’d be free from negativity?” The process allowed Simon to identify his quest for an idealized self (being a good person in all respects), which cut him off from a whole part of his being.
His spiritual quest, as he practiced it, let him off from confronting his shadow areas. In fact, it really supported a cheap narcissism. However, it was actually through this soul-searching initiative that he finally was able to take into account the shadows perceived during his journey. He saw them as constitutive of all human beings, i.e. elements that everyone had to work on.
This transcendental perspective made him accept his shadow areas and brought him out of his self-condemnation that had frozen his being. Having to improve on these negative areas, as with any human being, brought movement back into his life. It also gave him more compassion for others and for their shortcomings.
At the process level, this experience was analyzed on two levels:
-The form of idealization that he held for his sitter was shattered. Through this idealization, Simon was looking for a knowledgeable figure who would pass on their knowledge to him. From the pupil being taught special knowledge, he became the grown man making the effort to search for himself. The fact that the sitter had failed to be of help forced him to give up his search for a master and to discover himself.
-The second level of the process consisted of pursuing his vision to the end, i.e. remaining locked up in this hell. Simon then asked himself who held such a power to condemn? Could God condemn a human being to such a degree?
Several hypotheses were offered to Simon on the basis of his spiritual beliefs:
-Christ (Simon had been raised as a Catholic) is a God of love and forgiveness. This is what He preaches. Simon could not see Him condemn in this way.
-Reincarnation makes us consider death a passage and not a prison.
-Returning to the original source is not what he had seen either.
Simon concluded that the only one who could condemn him to this hell was himself. He had to learn to forgive and have compassion for himself, which was quite different from a narcissistic drive.
At the same time, he had also associated the image of hell with what his father had endured during the war. This episode was never talked about in the family, and, as Simon saw it, everything about that war was censored in his family. Through his vision, it was as if that hushed-up part of family history was finally revealed. That’s how Simon interpreted it. Without talking about closer ties between father and son, Simon understood and accepted more of his father’s silence. It also opened up a whole new set of questions about his transgenerational legacies.
Working this way on the different levels enabled Simon to move out of his depressive state. This example shows that the medicine does not do the work on its own, contrary to what is sometimes claimed by some counselors. The qualification of the counselor/sitter is fundamental.
The third example tells us about a defaulting set and setting.
Elizabeth had been experimenting with a friend, Birgit. One day, Birgit suggested she should work with an LSD specialist she knew and admired highly. Elizabeth agreed, but some time before the experience, she got into an argument with Birgit.
On the day of her experience, Elizabeth was greeted very coldly by her friend, who quickly introduced her to the specialist before she left. After taking LSD, Elizabeth was shown into a small room, with a stained bed and deafening music. She remarked on the lack of cleanliness of the sheets, but at the insistence of the sitter, she moved in with resignation and disgust. After some time, Elizabeth got up and asked to move to a chair in another room. A power struggle immediately ensued. The sitter refused and, in a rage, Elizabeth physically grabbed her. Frightened, the sitter gave in. Shortly thereafter, Birgit reappeared. Elizabeth was beginning to come to her senses. Confused by the tense atmosphere, she decided to go home against Birgit’s advice.
This experience left Elizabeth in a deep state of unease and she severed contact with both her friend and the sitter. She thought things over without really understanding what had happened. Guilt took over.
A few months later, she signed up for a trip to swim with dolphins. Two striking events followed: a mother dolphin and her baby dolphin came to swim with her. Then, a hummingbird landed on her while she was lying on the sailboat in the open sea. These two events caused a shockwave. The discomfort disappeared and gave way to an old childhood memory of being in communion with animals. She had rediscovered the simple joy and wonder of her childhood nature.
Looking back with Elizabeth on what had happened, she saw these moments as signs of healing that her soul had granted her- an interpretation based on her spiritual approach strongly anchored in shamanism. This interpretation, based on a transcendental perspective, but also on a childhood experience, had reconciled her with life through connection to the animal world.
Yet there were further developments to the session. Her relationship with her friend Birgit changed. From a relationship of dependence, she went through a period of anger, sadness, and then detachment. She came to see how the emotional bond was tied in with a form of submission. This issue, playing out on the level of the ego, concerned all three persons involved. Each one was playing their part in the game (loyalty, displacement of the bond, and roles).
How the framework is set and how the setting (physical conditions) is organized will have a strong impact on the experience, since it conditions mindset and the inner security with which the experience is met: many psychic contents will be colored by those factors. It also underlines the importance of the sitters/caretakers overcoming personal issues in order to avoid feeding them back unconsciously into their work environment.
Thus the framework, which had become violent due to the climate of disagreement (above and beyond the mere dirtiness of the sheets and the intensity of the music), had, in turn, summoned Elizabeth’s physical violence. Realizing how everyone had participated in the unfolding of this session, Elizabeth was able to refrain from taking on all the guilt and to see what recurring patterns were at play in her relationships.
Curiously, Elizabeth had few memories of what she saw during her trip, other than her strong desire to admire the beauty of spring outside, from the vantage of a clean and quiet environment. It was as if the most important part of the experience revolved around what happened between these three people. In this situation, the process level stood out clearly. This episode also echoed on the metaphorical level for Elizabeth. It highlighted how the people who needed to take care of her had failed to do so, and how nature had made up for it.
The multiple levels summoned in the integration work (and their scope) require of the therapist a real freedom and skill in wielding the whole keyboard of interpretive planes, i.e. a vast opening to numerous therapeutic, symbolic, emotional, processual, transgenerational, and spiritual meanings, in the face of the infinite psychic contents unveiled in these experiences.
Through these three clinical vignettes, we propose a structured intervention framework quite different from what is applied in traditional therapies, and that we use when assisting clients with such painful experiences or “bad trips.” We insist on the polysemic nature of each vision and on the different levels to be explored:
-The symbolic level -The level of ego -The transcendental level -The somatic level -The process level -The transgenerational level
Of course, when exploring all these levels, some may not be relevant to the person’s experience. Yet we ought not be satisfied with the first insight singled out, which would lead to an overlooking of the other equally relevant possibilities. We have often noticed that by focusing on a first interpretation, one failed to question the ego level, thus avoiding an awkward challenge.
In fact, this type of work unfolds in time. Integration and assimilation cannot happen in the span of a few rare sessions following the stressful experience. Indeed, these bad experiences often confront our clients with hidden elements of their functioning, beliefs, or history, i.e. elements which they were not ready to face, hence the importance of in-depth support.
About the Authors
Denis Dubouchet: A clinical psychologist for 35 years, psychotherapist, and Gestalt therapist, he trained at Michael Harner’s Foundation for Shamanic Studies, and he has worked with shamans and participated in ceremonies in their countries. He is the author of Etats de Conscience Elargie, Psychothérapie et Chamanisme (Ed. Dervy, 2017). You can reach him at denis.dubouchet@gmail.com.
Rosine Fiévet: A Gestalt therapist and coach for over 20 years, Rosine first discovered shamanism in 1981 with the women of Okinawa. She now regularly travels to North and Latin America to explore the traditions of the First Nations people to support her practice in ancestral healing. She has completed a full course in shamanism with the Sacred Trust in England. You can reach her at rosine.fievet@orange.fr.
The 2020 U.S. election has brought several significant wins for proponents of drug policy. Presidential and pandemic madness aside, these wins deserve to be celebrated. Here are the most significant changes this election has ushered into law.
1. Psilocybin Mushrooms Have Been Legalized in Oregon
For the first time since they became a Schedule I drug in 1971, psilocybin mushrooms have attained legal status in a U.S. state. With nearly a 56% majority, Oregon’s Measure 109, referred to as the Psilocybin Services Act, has significantly altered the psychoactive fungi’s future in the state, and quite possibly the nation.
Psilocybin’s newfound legality in Oregon carries important caveats: mushrooms will be legal only within state-regulated “psilocybin service centers,” their use will require supervision by a state-licensed facilitator, a preparation session will be required, and participants must be over the age of 21. Thus, it would be more accurate to state that under the umbrella of the Oregon Health Authority (OHA), regulated psilocybin mental health services will now be legal in the state.
The OHA will establish the specific protocols- i.e. supervisor training requirements and dosing standards over the next two years. So long as universal implosion has not transpired by 2022, we will witness the formation of a legal service in the United States that committed psychonauts of the last many decades never could have anticipated.
So, Oregon will not suddenly become a haven for independent growers holding ecstatic dance bashes and selling their flushes to flannel-wearers far and wide. It will, however, set the standard for psilocybin-assisted mental health services in the United States. Given that the Schedule I label has long classified mushrooms as having “high potential for abuse” and “no currently accepted medical use,” a successful implementation of these treatment facilities could pave the way for large-scale changes in propaganda-informed prohibitions long embedded into federal law.
For the sake of a bad pun at the expense of one of two U.S. Presidents most responsible for these prohibitions, let’s celebrate Measure 109 as a loss for the Gipper, and a big win for the Tripper.
2. Measure 110 Decriminalizes Drug Possession in Oregon
Beyond the psychedelic-specific world, Oregon has made another huge move in ending the war on drugs with the passing of Measure 110. The measure, which passed with nearly a 59% majority, effectively decriminalizes non-commercial possession of small amounts of some of the most heavily penalized drugs in the country, including cocaine and heroin.
To clarify the significance, Oregon’s previous classification of non-commercial possession was a Class A Misdemeanor, which was punishable with up to a $6,250 fine and one year in prison. That has now changed to a Class E violation. Instead of potential imprisonment, folks possessing small amounts of these substances will have the option to pay a $100 fine or receive a “completed health assessment” at an addiction treatment facility. According to the measure, these treatment services will be paid for “in part by the state’s marijuana tax revenue and state prison savings.”
This is a huge win for those fighting the oppression of the war on drugs on several fronts. Not only are penalties far less life-destroying, but the state is actively shifting the ethos of criminality around substance use that has dominated the nation for decades into a model of rehabilitation and social service. Within this shift is the recognition that substance addiction is not reducible to moral failures of the will, but rather a mental health illness that often requires external intervention to heal.
Now, it’s key to remember the difference between “legalization” and “decriminalization.” Mushrooms, for instance, were famously decriminalized in Denver in 2019. This meant that they remained a Schedule I illegal substance, but the prosecution of their possession became the city’s lowest law enforcement priority. The potential ambiguities of this nuance were cast in sharp relief when Denver’s infamously boastful mushroom grower/distributor Kole Milner was raided by the DEA five months after the initiative’s passing. Milner was charged on one account of possession with intent to distribute, and last month, Milner pleaded guilty in hopes of reducing his sentence to six months in prison.
The goal in sharing this isn’t to freak you out or be a downer. It’s to remind you to be mindful and careful during this propitious phase of drug policy reform and evade the pitfalls of Icarus’ ill-fated hubristic flight.
A final implication of Measure 110 is that while psychedelics may be the substances of choice for readers of Psychedelics Today, it can be dangerous to over-glorify psychedelics at the expense of other drugs. Engaging in this “psychedelic exceptionalism” can unconsciously perpetuate and embed racially-motivated, propaganda-induced stigmas around “bad” drugs. As Dr. Carl Hart told Psychedelics Today, “It’s just wrong to vilify people for wanting to alter their consciousness and the particular drug that they use, especially when you’re doing the same thing with another drug.”
At its core, using any substance is choosing to alter consciousness. Measure 110 opens a big door on the long route toward making that choice an essential human right, while simultaneously recognizing and addressing the potential for harm that substance use invariably opens.
One of the most high-profile chapters of the Decriminalize Nature movement has been Washington D.C.’s Initiative 81. Yesterday, the initiative passed by a landslide, with 76% of voters casting a ballot in its favor.
The initiative effectively decriminalizes the “non-commercial cultivation, distribution, possession, and use of entheogenic plants and fungi” in the nation’s capital, a category defined as “species of plants and fungi that contain ibogaine, dimethyltryptamine, mescaline, psilocybin, or psilocyn.”
Initiative 81’s passing makes D.C. the fourth U.S. city to decriminalize entheogens, and the fifth to decriminalize psilocybin. (Denver’s Ordinance 301 was limited to psilocybin mushrooms.) As with the decriminalization measures of Oakland, Santa Cruz, and Ann Arbor, the D.C. initiative renders the enforcement of laws against natural plant medicines among the lowest law enforcement priorities.
The decriminalization movement’s continuing spread through the U.S. has not come without controversy. The Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative (ICPI) and the National Council of Native American Churches (NCNAC) have spoken critically of the decriminalization movement, citing histories of oppression and mistrust of these non-Indigenous measures that could further threaten peyote, their sacred and endangered medicine. In March of 2020, these organizations made a specific request that decrim movements remove the word “peyote” from their initiatives. While Initiative 81 mentioned “mescaline,” the psychoactive chemical of peyote, the phrasing appears to have respected this request.
4. Four States Legalize Cannabis for Adult Use
Cannabis is now legal for adult recreational use in four more states: Arizona, Montana, New Jersey, and South Dakota (South Dakota!). On top of legalization, Arizona’s passed measure will also allow for people previously convicted of particular cannabis-related crimes to clear their records. With these four added to the roster, cannabis is now legal for adult consumption in fifteen States.
South Dakota and Mississippi legalized cannabis for medical use as well, making South Dakota the first state to pass medical and recreational laws under two separate measures in the same election. These advances now bring the total number of states offering some form of medical access to thirty-five.
In their debriefing of these changes, the Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) wrote, “By 2022, we could end U.S. federal marijuana prohibition.” The fight to end the war on drugs is far from over, but each new policy is a crucial step toward an optimistic conclusion.
Looking Forward
2020 has been quite a turbulent flight for many, if not an intergalactic rocket on constant verge of explosion. All predictions of where the world is headed appear to have collapsed into cosmic uncertainty. Nevertheless, amidst the turmoil these curated algorithms of frantic news churn and sell, significant changes in drug laws continue to take effect in unprecedented propulsion.
With these new laws in mind, as well as MDMA-assisted psychotherapy’s legal forecast set for 2023, the landscape of substance use and normalization is shaping up to look radically different by the mid-2020s. Plenty of folks are going to need some help rebounding from this seismic maelstrom we are collectively navigating. For those who often sink into despair lamenting the global situation, perhaps it’s helpful to remember that these new options are adorning the tables of expanding possibility.
About the Author
Sean Lawlor is a writer, certified personal trainer, and Masters student in transpersonal counseling at Naropa University, in pursuit of a career in psychedelic journalism, research, and therapy. His interest in consciousness and non-ordinary states owes a great debt to Aldous Huxley, Ken Kesey, and Hunter S. Thompson, and his passion for film, literature, and dreaming draws endless inspiration from Carl Jung, David Lynch, and J.K. Rowling. For more information or to get in touch, head to seanplawlor.com, or connect on Instagram @seanplawlor.
For decades, the subject of children and psychedelics has been one of great contention. The mere thought of exposing children to mind-altering substances elicits substantial controversy in public opinion, often considered a “no-go zone.” Anything that concerns children and how to best care for them precipitates strong reactions because parents aim to safeguard their well-being and protect them from harm’s way. Nonetheless, after a long period of suppression, we now find ourselves in the midst of a psychedelic renaissance. As access to these substances continues to expand through legalization, decriminalization, and medicalization efforts alike, our conversation redefining the use of these substances should seek to holistically address the groups that interact with them, including children.
Re-examining Cultural Paradigms
Viewing the subject through a Western lens, there is often the conception that child and adolescent brains are not fully developed, and that ingesting psychedelics could be damaging to brain development and identity formation. This view is widely held even among psychedelic enthusiasts, such as lay psychotherapist Ann Shulgin, who believes that “when you are under the age of, say, 16, you haven’t really lived that long. You haven’t had time to find out what the core of your self is.” Shulgin estimates that a well-prepared 15-16-year-old could cope with the experience, but recommends waiting a while “until you’ve lived a little bit” (Mind States, 2017).
Similarly, Armando Lozaiga, certified chemical dependency specialist and president of the Institute of Intercultural Medicine of Nierika A.C., suggests that adolescents from the age of 16 onwards are better psychologically equipped to deal with psychedelic experiences. At that age, “you have more of an emotional intelligence as well as abstract thinking functions,” he says. Lozaiga also contrasts Western and Indigenous perspectives, noting that “through a Western lens, in order to attain benefit, I feel that you have to have undergone certain hardships and have a medicinal need.”
In general, psychedelics are considered to be physiologically safe substances that do not lead to dependence or addiction. In fact, many classic psychedelics, including LSD, psilocybin, and ayahuasca are being researched for their anti-addictive properties. In theory, even if you were to ingest psychedelic substances on a regular basis, the human body is hardwired to develop a tolerance to them in a short timespan, diminishing both their psychoactive and physiological effects.
For many, the idea of pairing psychedelics with children (even in a medical venue) sounds absurd due to the cultural stigma attached. However, medicating young children diagnosed with ADHD with amphetamines like Adderall has become normalized within our societal paradigm. Why then, should it be such a leap for us to imagine that certain psychoactive substances could provide healing benefits to children?
In an interview conducted earlier this year, Mark Haden, the executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) Canada discussed the topic, suggesting that psychedelic experiences are a health service, reframing the question by asking: “How do youths access health services?” Haden acknowledges that youth access in a medical context would also necessitate parental consent as well as being dependent on the individual child in question. He believes that there is no golden rule for an individual being ready for such experiences, firmly asserting that youth access “isn’t about age, it is about maturity.”
Limited studies have been conducted on psychedelics and children in a medical setting. However, researchers in the 1960s looked at LSD as a treatment for autistic children, concluding that the effects “were very promising and could even be considered excellent for the majority of children.” Despite this, the positive outcomes associated have often been dismissed due to the fact that the study designs employed were not as rigorous or effective when compared to today’s standards. A more recent double-blind study by Yale University is examining the effects of using ketamine as a therapy for treatment-resistant depression in adolescents.
Beyond this, Phase 3 clinical trials for MDMA as a treatment for PTSD are well underway, with MDMA moving ever closer to becoming an FDA-approved treatment. Once MDMA becomes legal, the FDA has signaled its willingness for MDMA to be used as a treatment for adolescents suffering from PTSD.
Regardless of whether or not children should have access to psychedelic substances, the fact remains that a large proportion of adolescents choose to experiment with psychoactive drugs before coming of age and graduating high school. According to the 2016 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, approximately 2 million U.S. adolescents aged 12 to 17 were current users of illicit drugs at the time.
As it stands today, when it comes to drugs, we tend toward a “zero tolerance” policy, strictly writing substances off because they are “bad” and have no perceived value. However, this attitude is itself dangerous as many young people world-over are drawn to experiment with psychedelic substances regardless, resulting in failed or misguided self-initiations that can be damaging and harmful. Our “‘zero tolerance’ style of drug education trivializes the factors underlying actual drug abuse and pathologizes normal adolescent experimentation” (Stuart, 2004).
As greater access to psychedelics awaits on the horizon, we are in dire need for a reform in drug education. The prevalent strategy of repeatedly reinforcing the message of simply avoiding drugs does not provide our youth with ways to maximize the benefits and minimize the risks associated with these substances.
Recognizing the need for a safe, non-judgemental space to talk about such delicate subjects, Rebecca Kronman, a licensed therapist specializing in psychedelic integration, founded Plant Parenthood, the only digital and in-person community dedicated to exploring how psychedelics impact modern parenting as well as de-stigmatizing the subject of children and psychedelics.
Reflecting on the origins of Plant Parenthood, Kronman shares that the idea for the project emerged through conversations with parent peers about psychedelics. “Many shared stories about their own use and how it changed them as a parent, and some shared about their use while their children were present (sometimes sleeping, sometimes not),” she says. “When these conversations can take place in a loving, open way, it makes space for more dialogue and inquiry, which is enormously helpful to reducing stigma.”
Learning from Indigenous Cultures
Taking a step beyond our cultural conceptions, there are numerous examples in which children are included in psychedelic medicine rituals, including non-substance participation in ceremony as well as use of psychedelic substances throughout all stages of the life cycle.
Kronman recently wrote on the topic, emphasizing the value of using Indigenous traditions to re-evaluate Western paradigms. “When we look towards Indigenous cultures, the paradigms that govern our thinking around children and psychedelics are reflected back to us,” she explains. “It allows us to see that it doesn’t have to be this way.”
Within the Indigenous Huichol culture of Mexico, children are thought to begin ingesting peyote around the age of six, as they are able to verbally articulate their experience at that age (Stuart, 2004). Comparatively, within the Native American Church (NAC), younger children are less likely to consume peyote in ceremony, and are usually invited into the tipi as a rite of passage around the age of 12, when they hit puberty. Families in the Brazilian ayahuasca churches, Santo Daime and União do Vegetal, likewise allow children to participate in ceremonies and have also been known to give extremely small doses of ayahuasca to newborn babies as a symbolic initiation into their tradition.
Contrary to Western youth, Kronman (2020) highlighted the fact that “Indigenous children are not using psychedelics for escapism, experimentation, or in ways that are contrary to their society’s norms.” Instead, the ingestion of psychoactive plant sacraments is culturally ingrained into a way of life and the use of substances can be both culturally and spiritually reaffirming, reinforcing the values of the community. “If it is in ceremony, and Huichol children want to eat peyote, it is reinforced, as it is part of them fulfilling their spiritual identity,” says Lozaiga. “It is not a drug, it is a spiritual plant completely free of prejudice, and they know that it is not going to do them harm.”
Although both peyote and ayahuasca are Schedule I substances, Indigenous groups and ayahuasca communities are entitled access to their medicines through religious freedom laws. In the United States, Indigenous adolescents are free to participate in NAC road meetings (ceremonies) without facing legal hurdles due to their religious exemption, allowing them to use peyote as a ceremonial sacrament. Within the Brazilian ayahuasca churches, the consumption of ayahuasca by pregnant women and children is considered as an “exercise of parental rights” (Labate, 2011).
Childhood and adolescence are both periods characterized by significant brain development, and naturally, the use of substances that influence our brain functioning and development should be approached with caution. Hence, there is a paucity of research examining how psychedelics affect the developing brain.
Even so, there is no evidence that the long-term use of peyote causes brain damage and mental health issues. On the contrary, a 2015 study attempted to understand the long-term effects of peyote consumption in Native Americans, finding that there was no evidence of residual neurocognitive problems and that the subjects actually scored significantly higher on overall mental health measures compared to members of the same tribe who were of a different religion and did not use peyote. Similarly, another study analyzed the effects of ayahuasca on adolescents, comparing 40 Brazilian adolescents who consumed ayahuasca to a control group and finding no measurable difference in scores on neuropsychological and psychiatric tests.
In Indigenous peyote traditions, many women ingest peyote throughout different stages of their life cycle, including eating peyote prenatally, while nursing, and sometimes even during childbirth, as it is thought to help prevent miscarriage, allow for the healthy development of the fetus, increase breast milk production, and ease the experience of labor.
As it happens, the theme of pregnancy and peyote is intimately intertwined with the Huichol origin myth of the first pilgrimage to the sacred peyote desert, Wirikuta. In the myth, the Earth Goddess (Utüanaka) and the Mother of Peyote (Wiri’uwi) begin to menstruate before they enter the desert and encounter peyote, only to consume it and fall pregnant.
Stacy Schaefer, Professor Emerita of anthropology at California State University, has devoted much of her research career to the topic of pregnancy and peyote, illuminating how Huichol women use peyote throughout their life cycle as well as providing theories for how it may interact with the female reproductive system. Through her research, Schaefer has explored how consuming peyote throughout pregnancy may affect a baby’s cognitive development in the womb. With limited research on the processes of prenatal cognitive development, she speculates that peyote might stimulate the fetus’ neocortex and help with the connection of neurons in the brain.
Schaefer’s hypothesis is based on the idea that the more stimulation a baby gets, the better its nervous system will develop, including cognitive and reflex abilities. She compares this to an existing theory which posits that the reason newborn babies require so much sleep is because they do not get the necessary stimulation from the environment in their waking states. “Peyote is a stimulant, and I wonder what is going on as their brains are developing and these neural pathways are being created,” says Schaefer. “However, this is something that can’t be proven unless there is more research.”
In Schaefer’s field studies, some Huichol women suggest that eating peyote when you are pregnant can predispose young children toward becoming shamans. Schaefer attempts to make sense of this in relation to her theory. “We use very little of our brain capacity and perhaps the neural pathways that are being stimulated can create an even greater consciousness or awareness that wouldn’t normally exist,” she says. “Indigenous societies would not continue to do this if it was maladaptive. They would notice if something was wrong through trial and error,” she emphasizes. “They would see it is causing serious problems to their children and pregnancies, and they simply wouldn’t do it.”
“All I can say is that I can propose these ideas, but I don’t feel comfortable promoting children- especially young children consuming psychedelics, including peyote, in Western society, unless there is more medical and scientific research done,” says Schaefer.
Going beyond peyote traditions, it is also increasingly common within the Santo Daime and União do Vegetal ayahuasca churches for women to drink ayahuasca throughout their pregnancies and during the process of childbirth.
There is conflicting information revolving around the subject of pregnant women ingesting ayahuasca and peyote. Some advocate avoiding consuming ayahuasca and peyote during the first trimester in which the embryo undergoes critical development (Schaefer, 2018), while others suggest that it is perfectly safe to consume ayahuasca throughout the whole pregnancy (Labate, 2011).
Glauber Loures de Assis, sociologist and president of Céu da Divina Estrela, a Brazilian Santo Daime church, shared that his wife drank ayahuasca during the process of childbirth, finding it helpful and spiritually important. Beyond that, Loures de Assis shared, “The first thing I did when my son was born was to give him a drop of ayahuasca. In Santo Daime, it is in our tradition to serve ayahuasca to pregnant women and to children alike,” he says. “However, they often drink smaller quantities as a symbolic gesture.”
Non-Ingestive Ceremonial Participation
For pro-psychedelic parents looking to help lay the foundations of their children’s spiritual lives and expose them to the ceremonial aspect of psychedelic use (without them actively ingesting substances), Kronman (2020) suggests that introducing children to the ceremonial aspect of psychedelic use by itself can serve as a model for Western parents to teach their children important values about community, spirituality, and nature on an experiential level.
Lozaiga shared about his own experiences raising his children in this context: “In my experience, we sensitized our children to ceremonies, but we didn’t necessarily want to give substances to the kids until they were adolescents. For us, it was more about exposing them to the ritual; to the sacredness that revolves around the consumption of plants, rather than inducing visionary effects.”
“For many young adolescents, I think psychedelics can do more harm than good,” he says. “There is a general lack of guidance, and looking ahead, if we were to destigmatize these substances to the point where we could look at them objectively, I would like to see initiatory spaces in which young adults can come and be introduced to the sacred dimension of themselves in a guided way.”
Lozaiga additionally believes that incorporating youth in ceremonies and educating them about psychedelic medicines could serve as drug abuse prevention. “These plant medicines can help people be more inoculated, as once you have sat in ceremony, you begin to understand that it is no game.”
Re-examining Rites of Passage
It is clear that in our modern, industrialized culture, we are missing meaningful rites of passage that help our youth transition into adulthood. It has been thought that modern-day Western society allows for the delay of adult responsibilities, in that youth are educated for extended periods of time to meet the employment demands of today’s complex economy (Stuart, 2004). Many young people seek ways to claim the independence of adulthood, and experimenting with psychedelics is one of those ways.
Despite contention over what age adolescents should have access to psychedelic substances, many agree that under the right circumstances, with the proper guidance and a controlled set and setting, such experiences could potentially be beneficial in serving an initiatory function for young people. “I think it is treacherous in Western society to promote psychedelics with children from birth until puberty,” says Schaefer. “However, at puberty and adolescence, under the right circumstances, with a proper support system in place, it has the potential to be an incredible rite of passage.”
In many ways, Western, industrialized society has become bereft of meaningful rites of passage. However, our society is still permeated with rituals like the celebration of birthdays, Bar Mitzvahs, graduations, and so on. Exploring how our rituals have become deprived of meaning and living spirit, beloved guru and countercultural figure, Ram Dass, suggested that the main problem with modern-day rites of passage is that they “no longer provide direct contact with the numinous” (Dass, 2004).
It is important to tread with care despite the existence of both anecdotal and empirical evidence, in that there are very few peer-reviewed scientific studies observing how psychedelics affect adolescents and how they affect children developmentally when mothers ingest prenatally or during nursing. However, we can learn from Indigenous communities and their age-old cultural integration of plant medicines throughout the life cycle, better preparing our own children to approach these substances with respect. By including children in the psychedelic dialogue, we pave the way to dissolving the taboo and stigma that are often a cause for harm among Western adolescents, as well as cultivating reverence for the sacredness of these substances.
In re-examining the principles that have dominated our perceptions in the West, and looking beyond the boundaries of our society’s current paradigm while integrating the wisdom of other cultures, we can develop a fuller and more nuanced understanding of these substances and what they can add to our lives.
Schaefer, S. B. (2018) Fertile Grounds? – Peyote and the Human Reproductive System. In McKenna. D. (Ed.) Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs (Vol. 1 & 2): 50 Years of Research. Synergetic Press.
Jasmine Virdi is a freelance writer and editor. Since 2018, she has been working for the fiercely independent publishing company Synergetic Press, where her passions for ecology, ethnobotany, and psychoactive substances converge. Jasmine is also a writer for Psychedelics Today, Chacruna.net, Lucid News, and Cosmic Sister. She is currently pursuing an MSc in Spirituality, Consciousness, and Transpersonal Psychology at the Alef Trust with the future aim of working in psychedelic integration therapy. Jasmine’s goal as an advocate for psychoactive substances is to raise awareness of the socio-historical context in which these substances emerged in order to help integrate them into our modern-day lives in a safe, grounded and meaningful way.
Claudio Naranjo was a Chilean-born shaman of Moorish, Spanish, and Jewish descent. He was also a psychotherapist, medical doctor, author, educator, serious Buddhist practitioner, and pioneer in the areas of psychology, psychedelic therapies, and human development. His integrative approaches to a variety of fields elevated his work and created global reach and influence. He was always keen to point out that “spirituality should not be confused with religious beliefs or moral codes.” Towards the end of his life, he stressed the importance of emotional education, and the forgotten goal of educating for wisdom– and not just for knowledge to be harnessed for financial gain.
An early practitioner of Enneagram, he enriched it by integrating Gestalt therapy via Gurdjeff, meditation, music and art therapy, and other practices designed to provide deep, personal insights. But he admitted a vulgar commercialization of the Enneagram took place in North America. He explored the power of education to counter the patriarchal beliefs contributing to our deepening global crisis. “To change the world,” Claudio would say, “change education.” Naranjo’s approach to Buddhism was the same as the Buddha’s; he taught meditation with the offer to “ just try it,” and “see what it offers.”
His many years of teaching at Esalen Institute in the 1960s were both a pinnacle as well as a painful period in his life. One of his closest friends was Carlos Castaneda, who agreed with his concern that the “powerful gentleman Mr. Money” had increasingly taken control of the world, and belittled human beings to the point of dehumanization. Claudio soon became one of Fritz Perls’ three successors at Esalen, along with Jack Downing and Robert Hall. Claudio attended sensory awareness workshops with the legendary Charlotte Selver. Richard Evans Schultes arranged for Naranjo to make a special journey by canoe up the Amazon River to study ayahuasca with the South American Indians. He brought back samples of this drug and published the first scientific description of the effects of its active alkaloids.
Claudio also took part in the meetings of Leo Zeff’s pioneering psychedelic therapy group. He was an early enthusiast of using psychedelics (primarily ayahuasca, MDMA, and ibogaine) as medicines for a panoply of social and psychiatric conditions. Married four times, his last partner was Carolyn Merchant, a marriage and family therapist and a co-worker with Claudio on his book and teachings. In 1970, Claudio lost his only son in a terrible car accident on Big Sur’s Highway 1. He stated that the most significant realization of his life was that “nothing is more important in our time than our learning to be a little kinder.”
The Naranjo Institute presented the Seekers After Truth (SAT) program in 2012, with a new cohort opening annually. The program consists of four residential workshops, each lasting between six to nine days. The retreats represented a comprehensive exploration of psychological, spiritual, and expressive practices for understanding the human trajectory toward growth and fulfillment. From exploring who we have become and the precise ways we have each become stuck and continue to get stuck, the program went on to encourage processes of active healing and the expansion of one’s sense of possibilities. It was a “supplementary curriculum” of self-knowledge, relationship-repair, and spiritual culture.
In the course of its evolution as a program for personal and professional development of therapists and teachers since its rebirth in the late eighties, Naranjo called SAT a “psychotherapy laboratory,” in which people learned to help each other through the development of psychotherapeutic skills that do not require a background in the customary academic theoretical literature. He called this the “democratization of psychotherapy,” and education of future teachers, who may be able to assist their students in their personal growth.
Claudio’s recent and last talk was the highlight of the 2019 World Ayahuasca Conference in Girona, Spain. I will never forget his courage as one of his arms was violently swinging in the air due to his Parkinson’s. For all of his powerful influence on the development of human consciousness, in the bigger picture, Naranjo felt unsatisfied with his work, and disillusioned: “The economy has dominated politics, and practically everything else, asphyxiating life and its intrinsic values, the social order, and all our institutions.” A harbinger of things to come (such as defunding police) was his hope that the community take charge of many things (or perhaps of everything) that it once delegated to its governments, including communications, finance, and maintaining peace.
Claudio also found time to write or edit numerous books. He revised an early book on Gestalt therapy and published two new ones. He published three books on the Enneagram of Personality, as well as The End of Patriarchy. He also published a book on meditation, The Way of Silence and the Talking Cure, and Songs of Enlightenment.
Published in 2010 with a foreword by Jean Houston, was Healing Civilization: Bringing Personal Transformation into the Societal Realm through Education and the Integration of the Intra-Psychic Family. Naranjo explored what he saw as the root causes of the destruction of humanity: war, violence, oppression of women, child abuse, environmental endangerment, and patriarchy, which has taken root over millennia in our own conditioned minds. He touted the work of Tótila Albert, who asks us to see ourselves as three-brained with the “Inner Father” (corresponding to the head), the “Inner Mother” (corresponding to the heart), and the “Inner Child” (corresponding to the instincts). As people learn to integrate these three “brains,” Naranjo believed, they (the instincts) may bring about a functional- even divine, family within. For Naranjo, transforming education to be oriented toward personal and collective evolution could help heal civilization.
In his last book, The Revolution We Expected: Cultivating a New Politics of Consciousness (2020), Dr. Naranjo presents a call for individual and societal transformation in order to rebuild and humanize our institutions and realize a post-patriarchal global ecological community. “Even if the catastrophe of the sinking of the patriarchal vessel in which we have been sailing continues,” Naranjo writes, ”it is better for us to understand, by going through our crisis with faith, that the agonizing death rattles of our civilization are our greatest hope for regeneration.” He speaks of “apprentice shamans, who, without knowing it, are searching for their own development, and will sooner or later have the possibility of being of help in a world needing precisely those qualities they are developing.”
Dr. Naranjo observes that ‘realizing’ is the bravest thing of all- “to see that one was wrong and to change direction.” As Canadian psychologist Steven Pinker reminds us, “We humans have a very good eye for intellect but we do not yet have the right organ to understand consciousness.”
Claudio Naranjo passed away in July of 2019 at 86 years old.
The role of therapy in psychedelic therapy has been underexplored in mainstream articles that focus more on neuropharmacology and the psychedelic medicine experience. Without therapy, however, results from clinical trials would be no more significant than if the substance was studied in a recreational setting, and the fact that there is such a difference is central to the growing appeal.
As our companion article on psychedelic therapy explained, numerous therapeutic approaches used in psychedelic therapy converge on an inner-directed, relational approach. In psychedelic sessions themselves, therapists take more of a back-seat role, encouraging clients to focus inward and engage in an authentic process facilitated by their “inner healer” and refraining from interpretation. Still, complications can arise in psychedelic sessions, such as an upsurge of trauma, and if therapists lack the skills to respond, they risk leaving clients stuck and unresolved, potentially re-traumatized from improper care in a vulnerable state.
While therapeutic training is essential in case overwhelming content arises, the bulk of therapy work occurs during preparation and integration sessions. Across numerous clinical trials and clinics offering ketamine and cannabis-assisted psychotherapy, psychedelic therapists are using many therapeutic approaches to help their clients heal. Here are some of the most common.
Internal Family Systems
One of the most consistently referenced models used in psychedelic therapy is internal family systems (IFS). Developed by Richard Schwartz in the 1980s, IFS views the psyche as an amalgamation of interrelated personalities, or “parts” that often conflict with one another. IFS brings clients’ attention toward three main parts of the psyche: Exiles, Managers, and Firefighters. When these parts are in conflict, they prevent people from grounding in their core Self.
Exiles are related to psychological trauma, often from early childhood. They are the parts that have been cast away- buried beneath shame, fear, or pain that has not been expressed or accepted. In psychoanalytic terminology, they have been “repressed.” Managers keep the Exiles in control, relegating them to their shadowy domain so they do not disrupt overall function. Still, Exiles sometimes break through Managers’ control, at which point Firefighters take over, putting the system on high alert and inciting reactive behaviors to avoid encountering the Exiles. All of these parts create the “internal family,” and IFS helps clients center in the Self, which transcends all the parts, to create a loving inner container for intrapsychic balance and communication.
“The goal of IFS is to first acknowledge these protected and wounded parts within a person, and then to foster this reconnection with the higher Self,” explained Jason Sienknecht, who practices ketamine-assisted psychotherapy in Fort Collins, CO. “Ultimately, the Self is put into a position of a manager so the other parts can fall in line behind the Self’s guidance, instead of monopolizing a person’s consciousness. We want the Self to monopolize the person’s consciousness.”
Sienknecht is a MAPS-trained MDMA-assisted psychotherapist and a lead trainer for ketamine-assisted psychotherapy through the Psychedelic Research and Training Institute (PRATI). In his psychedelic therapy work, Sienknecht regularly uses IFS. “The reason I gravitate toward IFS is because ketamine aligns the client with their higher Self, or innerhealer, very naturally,” Sienknecht said. “The Self doesn’t need development- it’s the root of love and wisdom within each of us. Some people have lost sight of the Self through years of identifying with the protected or wounded parts of themselves.”
Sienknecht added that clients’ subpersonalities also naturally arise under the influence of ketamine, and IFS helps them make sense of the confusing content. As such, it is more a framework of integration than an intervention used in psychedelic sessions. “When you’re engaged in dialogue in a medicine session, you don’t want to give your client linear, logical reflections that their left brain can attach to,” Sienknecht said. “You want to encourage their non-linear state of consciousness to continue, rather than connecting them back to their thinking mind. I generally don’t bring my understanding of IFS into the dialogue of a medicine session.”
As a tool for psychedelic integration, IFS provides a powerful means to restructure one’s relationship to one’s inner reality for lasting healing to occur.
Gestalt Therapy
Gestalt therapy preceded internal family systems as a predominant modality focused on internal parts. Created and developed by Fritz and Laura Perls in the 1940s and 1950s, Gestalt therapy helps clients enhance their present moment awareness through acute sensitivity to internal responses to stimuli. “Gestalt is a way to identify inner polarities within a person, or inner parts, and encourage dialogue between those opposing parts or beliefs,” explained Sienknecht.
Those dialogues can take the form of the “empty chair technique,” in which clients converse with a part of themselves as if that part is sitting in the empty chair beside them. Clients are encouraged to feel and express the emotions that arise. Through the process, therapists help them expand their self-awareness and take more responsibility over their way of being in the world.
Sienknecht recently facilitated ketamine therapy for a man suffering from alcoholism. A part of this man wanted to stay in a comfort zone and keep emotional pain at bay, which he did through binge drinking, while another part wanted to free himself from that addiction. Sienknecht helped him become aware of the polarity between these opposing parts, and from that awareness, the client could move toward resolving the conflict.
Psychedelics can enhance clients’ awareness of the relationships and dichotomies between internal parts of themselves. Therapists have found that models based on accepting and balancing those parts can significantly enhance the healing potential from that newfound awareness.
Somatic Therapy
Somatic therapy refers to body-focused psychotherapy. Somatic therapy is a relatively recent development without much research on its efficacy, yet it has still recently come to be regarded as one of the most effective approaches for healing trauma. Its foundational premise is that trauma is stored in the nervous system, and listening to the body’s messages is the ideal inlet to healing trauma’s lasting effects.
The two most prevalent somatic methods are sensorimotor psychotherapy and somatic experiencing. Rafael Lancelotta, a psychedelic therapist and researcher practicing in Denver, CO, helped elucidate the differences. “Somatic experiencing is highly relational and has a ton of emphasis on resourcing,” he said. “Sensorimotor is more based on movement. It’s a little less relational; more let’s go into your body and see where these incomplete movements are. It’s more physical in nature.”
The somatic style used by Innate Path, a psychedelic therapy clinic where Lancelotta worked for two years, is called trauma dynamics. Trauma dynamics uses elements of both approaches but focuses more on challenging clients outside of their window of tolerance. Lancelotta explained that while challenging clients can be effective, sometimes it can be too challenging and push clients too far outside their comfort zone. “I’ve found it most helpful to use pieces of all of these to find something that can be more fluid from one person to the next,” he explained.
Since somatic therapy involves focusing on the body, it can be a helpful intervention in psychedelic sessions themselves. If therapists notice that clients appear stuck in their processing, they can invite the client to focus on their body and notice what arises. From there, new content can become conscious, allowing the client to move toward the point of stuckness and continue processing through it.
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy
Many psychedelic therapists reject the efficacy of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and claim it does not lend itself well to psychedelic work. Nevertheless, one of Johns Hopkins University’s most significant psilocybin studies to date uses a framework of CBT- a study using psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy for smoking cessation.
Dr. Matthew Johnson is the study’s principal investigator. While he explained that the psilocybin sessions themselves (which typically involve the synthetic equivalent of a Terence McKenna “heroic dose”) proceed with a non-directive, supportive approach, the many weeks of preparation and integration are CBT-focused.
“In terms of the CBT, my thinking is that any number of empirically validated forms of therapy can be brought to bear here,” Johnson said. “If a tool tends to work for the disorder of focus, my bet is we can combine it with psychedelics and make it work. When you’re talking about smoking cessation, most of the programs and a lot of empirical support are based in CBT.”
CBT is among the most widely practiced therapies; used for depression, anxiety, PTSD, and addiction. Therapists help clients identify distorted thought patterns and then replace these cognitive distortions with new, healthier thought patterns, which correspond to better emotional regulation and healthier behavioral patterns. CBT has no interest in psychoanalysis and the unconscious mind. It is an action-oriented, solution-focused approach, and Johnson has found it particularly effective during the “afterglow” of a psychedelic experience.
“We have a lot to figure out [about] what that afterglow is, but there’s probably some neuroplasticity lingering- this window of increased agency,” Johnson said. “If we then establish a new normal with boring, bread-and-butter techniques like CBT, it’s probably going to help.”
In the study’s ongoing second iteration, 59% of participants who received psilocybin were confirmed as abstinent from smoking in the one-year follow-up, as compared with 27% who received a nicotine patch. Such powerful results suggest that even modalities unconcerned with psychological depth can enhance psychedelics’ healing properties.
Mindfulness-Based Approaches
Mindfulness involves directing one’s open attention to present moment awareness. While this may seem like a given in therapy, many therapeutic approaches encourage interpretation and recounting of past experiences, both of which can impede awareness of the present. Mindfulness-based approaches to therapy, such as mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) and mindfulness-based stress reduction, foster present-moment awareness as a path to healing.
Sienknecht has found that mindfulness-based approaches align well with ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. “Ketamine quickly and effectively helps someone transition from the thinking self to the observing self,” he explained. “It just so happens that meditation does the exact same thing. Meditation mimics the activity of the higher Self, which some people refer to as the eternal witness. You’re not walking down the street, you’re aware of yourself walking down the street. It’s one step back from the ego. Mindfulness-based psychotherapy can help teach the skills needed to move more fully into this observing self.”
In order for people to move more fully into the witnessing Self, both inside and outside the psychedelic session, it is important they develop a daily mindfulness practice. “I find that people who practice daily throughout the course of a two-month ketamine treatment program are more able to move in the natural direction of the medicine as it moves you away from your thoughts and into an observing self,” Sienknecht explained.
A daily mindfulness practice does not have to be seated meditation. The practice can involve journaling, painting, exercising, or simply walking through the woods, as long as it is intentional time taken to practice awareness and receptivity to what arises within and without.
Learn more about our course on Psychedelics and The Shadow
The Hakomi Method
The Hakomi Method is a mindfulness-based somatic approach that is often discussed alongside psychedelic therapy. Developed by Ron Kurtz in the 1970s, Hakomi focuses clients on their present-moment experience and understands that the body is the harbinger of messages from one’s inner workings. Hakomi clients are encouraged to focus on mental content that arises alongside embodied sensations, such as images and memories.
Hakomi therapists use “probes” to gather information on a client’s internal process. These probes often aim at clients’ core beliefs that structure their relationships to their self and their world. For instance, a hakomi therapist might encourage a client to close their eyes, focus on their breath, and notice what arises as they say, “You are lovable exactly as you are.” It does not matter whether a client experiences elation and lightness, or bitter, self-defeating thoughts and constriction of the stomach- what matters is that the client notices what happens, because the response contains all the information needed to then work with the core content.
Psychedelic sessions can cast new light on core stories while also showing clients that other stories are possible. Skilled Hakomi therapists help clients restructure and heal those stories’ ongoing impact on their present moment experience.
Experiential Therapy
Another present-focused approach is experiential therapy. Sara Reed spoke to the approach’s efficacy in her work with ketamine-assisted psychotherapy at the Behavioral Wellness Clinic in Connecticut, as well as her work in MAPS’ Phase II trials for MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD. “What that therapy is about is really focusing on what’s happening in the here and now,” Reed explained. “Often clients come in flooded with a lot of different things, and experiential therapy can help clients slow down and be present with what’s happening in the here and now.”
Experiential therapy can take many forms; those forms are united in that therapists involve clients in real, present-focused processes to gain insight into their thoughts, feelings, and emotional responses. Examples include art therapy, animal-assisted therapy, adventure therapy, and psychodrama.
Michelle Hobart, a specialist in psychedelic integration, uses psychodrama with her clients. She described psychodrama as “an embodied enactment of certain scenes from life,” thereby allowing clients to engage creatively with their experience. “Creativity is a really important way of working with the material that arises,” Hobart explained. She often helps clients work with their psychedelic experiences as if they were dreams, focusing less on analytical processing than on “embodiment and active imagination.” This approach becomes especially important when psychedelic experiences cannot be rationalized or interpreted at all.
Transpersonal Psychology and Spiritual Emergence
While transpersonal (meaning “beyond the personal”) psychology is not a modality, it is a broad wave of western psychology that embraces the validity of non-ordinary states of consciousness and understands humans as inherently spiritual. Academic programs in transpersonal psychology, such as those offered at Naropa University and Sofia University, are among the most popular programs for students interested in working with psychedelics. Understanding the expansive frameworks through which it views people can help therapists support clients through their most challenging internal experiences.
An important topic within transpersonal psychology is “spiritual emergence.” Developed by Stan and Christina Grof, spiritual emergence refers to experiences in which individuals suddenly expand far beyond their established understandings of themselves into a broader perspective on the universe. When this process becomes too overwhelming, it can incite a “spiritual emergency,” which the western diagnostic model can misinterpret as psychosis.
“Spiritual emergency is when something comes up that’s so expansive that it’s not able to be metabolized or integrated,” explained Hobart, who specializes in spiritual emergence in her integration work with clients. “Sometimes that opening is very ecstatic and blissful, and sometimes it’s terrifying and devastating. If we don’t have a framework for how to work with and hold spiritual emergence and emergency, then when that process happens; whether it’s catalyzed by medicines or happens spontaneously as through kundalini awakening or near-death experience, people may think it’s a mental illness or psychosis. Then people get sent into hospitalization, thrown into the pathology paradigm and forcibly medicated, and it’s not understood as what is actually happening.”
In honoring clients’ overwhelming experiences, Hobart helps clients integrate those experiences and adjust into a society that does not understand or appreciate their profound transpersonal expansion. “I hold it in terms of awakening to spiritual gifts,” she explained.
Hobart also suggested that the potential for spiritual emergency in a psychedelic session heightens the need for therapists to be highly skilled and trauma-informed. “Some people who have been activated into these states have not been held properly in medicine spaces,” she said. “To be able to hold spiritual emergence and emergency, and for that matter, entheogenic work, people need to have attunement and the capacity to hold emotional and energetic space. And they need to be trauma-informed. That’s a huge piece.”
Conclusion
If anyone told you that being a psychedelic therapist is easy, that person lied to you. While specific regulations and training requirements are sometimes hazy and differ between medicines, psychedelic therapy calls for both responsibility and a diverse skill set for therapists to bring out optimal healing potential for their clients.
These therapeutic approaches and frameworks do not comprise a complete picture of the approaches currently being practiced in psychedelic therapy. As Johnson suggested, it is possible, if not likely, that psychedelics can enhance any therapeutic specialty. Regardless, a robust therapeutic tool kit will help any psychedelic therapist meet clients’ specific needs. There is always more to learn, and psychedelic work has never been about staying within an established pattern or comfort zone.
About the Author
Sean Lawlor is a writer, certified personal trainer, and Masters student in transpersonal counseling at Naropa University, in pursuit of a career in psychedelic journalism, research, and therapy. His interest in consciousness and non-ordinary states owes a great debt to Aldous Huxley, Ken Kesey, and Hunter S. Thompson, and his passion for film, literature, and dreaming draws endless inspiration from Carl Jung, David Lynch, and J.K. Rowling. For more information or to get in touch, head to seanplawlor.com, or connect on Instagram @seanplawlor.
Peyote (Lophophora williamsii) is a small, spineless cactus endemic to North America, growing in the vast desert thorn scrub that runs from the southwestern United States into north-central Mexico. For centuries, the mescaline-containing cactus has been used by Indigenous groups in Northern America as a ceremonial medicine and a religious sacrament considered integral to their way of life. The rapidly growing psychedelic movement has generated a new wave of interest in plant medicines, including peyote, requiring us to tread with awareness for the impact this has on the Indigenous cultures and communities who have long stewarded these medicines.
At present, the peyote cactus is in the midst of a deep conservation crisis. Over the past few decades, wild peyote populations have been rapidly declining due to a convergence of factors including oil and gas development, illegal poaching, agricultural development, and unsustainable harvesting practices. Amongst Indigenous communities, there is a growing need to conserve this quickly disappearing natural resource that is a core element of the Native American Church (NAC), the largest pan-Indigenous religion in the United States.
Due to growing evidence of the decline of peyote and mounting concern about obtaining their sacred medicine, the NAC commissioned the Peyote Research Project (PRP) in 2013. The first phase of the project (PRP 1) concerned itself with documenting the decline of peyote as well as assessing threats to its natural habitat, while the second phase (PRP 2) focused on identifying conservation strategies, including “securing sovereign land” to protect the Peyote Gardens and building relationships with landowners to lease space for replanting and harvesting.
Sandor Iron Rope, former President of the Native American Church of North America, current president of the Native American Church of South Dakota, member of the Oglala Lakota Oyate (Oglala Sioux Tribe), and Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative (IPCI) board member, reflects that “supply and demand have always been an issue, and when we started looking at it through the lens of the PRP, we found out many issues were in the forefront of the longevity of supply.”
The research activities of the PRP showed that peyote was under threat, both in regards to its populations and quality of the plant. As the need to conserve peyote became more pressing, the National Council of Native American Churches (NCNAC) called for the establishment of the IPCI. “The coalition of the NCNAC were involved in PRP 2, and the collective decided that conservation itself needed to be addressed. Hence, IPCI was born in 2017,” says Iron Rope. “The Church is a religious, spiritual organization, however, peyote is a cactus that needs its own attention as far as its conservation status.” IPCI is not a religious organization, but a conservation center focused entirely on supporting the broader NAC community in North America. It is led by a Board of Directors controlled by NAC leaders from across the United States.
In late 2017, the NCNAC secured 605 acres of peyote habitat in southern Texas, often referred to as “the 605” on behalf of IPCI, with the help of the RiverStyx Foundation. Later that year, IPCI was formally established with the aim of empowering Indigenous communities across the U.S., Mexico, and Canada to conserve and regenerate peyote for generations to come. IPCI operates as a non-profit, officially becoming a 501c(3) organization in 2018. In early 2019, IPCI held its first peyote harvest on the 605, educating children alongside their families on how to harvest in an ecologically and spiritually respectful way.
Unlike other conservation initiatives, IPCI is a cooperative Indigenous-led initiative, and is employing a range of biocultural strategies in order to conserve, as well as facilitate spiritual reconnection with peyote. Beyond purchasing land allotted for peyote conservation, they are also building alliances with local landowners, and developing a system of harvest and distribution that is in line with their values.
IPCI considers the rancher community in south Texas an important ally in its efforts, and its members have established an ongoing relationship with landowners from whom they lease land for biocultural harvesting and replanting. “Sharing our perspective as practitioners with the ranchers, we were encouraged to seek our own land and regain sovereignty over our medicine,” shared Iron Rope. “Most ranchers that we spoke to had a lot of issues concerning poaching, and lack of respect for their land making them fully supportive of our cause.”
Lophophora williamsii – Peyote
How and When Did Peyote Become Endangered?
For decades, Indigenous cultural practices and peyote ceremonies were suppressed across the U.S., with peyote ceremonies being illegal in many states where peyotists practiced. It wasn’t until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (AIRFA) was passed in 1978 (and further amended in 1994 to expressly include peyote) that the NAC was finally granted exemption on a religious basis, allowing federally recognized tribes to use peyote as a ceremonial sacrament. The possession, transportation, and use of peyote by persons who are not members of federally recognized tribes remain illegal under federal law.
The endangered status of peyote is by no means a new problem. According to Dawn Davis, a Shoshone Ph.D. candidate at the University of Idaho and an Indigenous researcher studying the peyote habitat, researchers and scholars have been talking about peyote’s endangerment since the 1960s, when so-called “hippies” became aware of its “psychedelic” properties.
In the heat of the 1960s countercultural revolution, peyote was brought to public attention, gaining worldwide popularity through the works of Aldous Huxley and Carlos Castaneda. Their writings generated a newly sparked interest in the psychoactive properties of the plant and resulted in an influx of eager psychedelic tourists traveling to Texas and Mexico to seek out the famed cactus in its natural habitat.
To some extent, this trend continues today as we find ourselves in the midst of a psychedelic renaissance, and interest in the therapeutic potentials of visionary plants continues to grow. Such “psychedelic tourism” has inevitably impacted the availability of peyote for Indigenous groups. In fact, it was the countercultural movement of the 1960s and the corresponding interest in psychoactive substances that resulted in the U.S. government enacting The Controlled Substances Act of 1970, which classified peyote as a Schedule I substance.
Due to improper harvesting techniques and overharvesting, peyote populations were left decimated, and it was declared an endangered species in Mexico as early as 1991. Currently, peyote is listed as “vulnerable” as populations in the wild continue to decline. “The International Union for the Conservation of Nature placed peyote on their red list as a vulnerable species in 2009 and the next level after re-evaluation of the population, it could move to endangered status,” says Davis. “It is also important to acknowledge that within the United States, in Texas, peyote is considered an endangered species at the local level.”
Other threats to peyote populations are largely a result of exploitative land management practices, including mining, oil and gas development, the construction of wind turbines, rancher root plowing, cattle grazing, and poaching. “Over the last ten years, wind turbine development within peyote gardens has had a huge impact on peyote populations, completely extirpating large populations of cacti from the natural range,” says Davis.
Lophophora williamsii – Peyote
Another less obvious threat to peyote lies in the ongoing debate between Indigenous groups and the decriminalization community. Earlier this year, IPCI and NCNAC leaders produced an official statement in response to Decriminalize Nature Oakland’s resolution to decriminalize all plant medicines, including peyote. Although those working with Decriminalize Nature (DN) might have been well-intentioned, NCNAC leaders felt disappointed in Decrim’s failure to consult with Indigenous peoples, as well as their oversight of the cultural and religious history of peyote and the plant’s endangered status. The NCNAC’s statement requested that Decriminalization initiatives should not include peyote in their efforts to decriminalize all plant medicines, with the concern that it would provide citizens with a false sense of legality. Indigenous leaders fear that the decriminalization of peyote could unintentionally cause damage to populations by serving to “increase interest in non-native persons either going to Texas to purchase peyote or to buy it from a local dealer who has acquired it illegally and unsustainably in Texas.”
Very recently, Decriminalize Nature Santa Cruz issued a formal apology to the NAC for not consulting with them prior to proceeding with the resolution to decriminalize all entheogenic plants and fungi. DN Santa Cruz’s apology was accepted, and both the NCNAC and IPCI have stated that they “look forward to building a continued relationship based on unity, solidarity, and allyship.” DN Santa Cruz hopes other Decrim efforts will follow their lead, building a respectful relationship with Indigenous peyote practitioners.
A licensed distribution system was established in Texas as a regulatory companion to the federal exemption for Native religious use of peyote. This system employs licensed dealers, also known as peyoteros, to legally harvest and distribute peyote to NAC members, however, not all peyoteros necessarily consider Indigenous values of spiritual and ecological sustainability.
There have been issues with over-harvesting and improper harvesting by the current licensed dealers. When harvesting is done sustainably, the top of the root hardens and is able to produce more peyote pups in the future. Peyoteros (and black-market poachers) sometimes sever the root, causing the entire plant to die.
Iron Rope expressed IPCI’s intentions of being inclusive of and working with existing peyoteros, wanting to build relationships with them and start a dialogue about sustainable harvesting techniques. “The IPCI are a new family in the neighborhood,” he says. “We come as friends, as neighbors, as partners, and we don’t want to engage in any type of conflict.” However, IPCI also wants to take a step towards sovereignty, training Indigenous distributors so as not to rely solely on current suppliers.
“As Indigenous practitioners, it is important for us to reconnect in order to gain the full spiritual benefit of our medicine,” Iron Rope shared. “We are learning how to sustain our peyote for generations because a lot of our tribes have never harvested medicine and we have become lazy in a sense, relying on the non-practitioner distributors to send it to us in the mail.”
At the beginning of this year, there were four licensed peyoteros. According to Davis, the process of becoming a licensed peyotero is both time-consuming and costly, involving submitting an application to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). Up until last year, peyoteros were licensed through the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS). However, the law has changed and the DPS regulatory program was dissolved, making it only possible to acquire a license through the DEA.
“The stringent process of becoming a licensed peyotero involves annual application fees and thorough background investigation, but as far as harvesting protocols and regulations, there are now none,” adds Davis. “This has contributed to a lot of the issues that peyote is having in regard to propagation, because distributors aren’t necessarily harvesting ecologically. “If you look at pictures taken from peyote harvests, you can see that a shockingly high percentage of peyote are harvested unsustainably.”
Even if harvesting protocols and regulations were implemented through the DEA, Davis is doubtful that they would be effective, in that peyoteros operate in sparsely populated areas and such regulations would be hard to monitor. She also fears that increasing regulation would push distributors out of the business, making it more difficult for tribes who don’t have a connection to landowners in Texas to access their medicine.
“I feel that there is a more organic way of resolving this than relying on western law,” says Davis. “Rather, NAC practitioners could prevent these issues by educating fellow peyote practitioners about what a properly harvested peyote button looks like, encouraging them to buy sustainably harvested peyote.” Demanding properly and spiritually harvested peyote is the first step to bringing about lasting change.
Lophophora williamsii – Peyote
How Can The Psychedelic Community Respect Indigenous Traditions?
As the psychedelic renaissance continues to unfold, it is increasingly important that we learn from the mistakes of the past, and make efforts to avoid another wave of colonial entitlement when it comes to peyote as a plant medicine.
Despite being given such reverence by Indigenous tribes and the NAC, peyote traditions have been extremely misunderstood by outsiders for centuries. From the persecution of peyote traditions beginning in the early 1600s by Spanish colonists in Mexico to the 19th and 20th-century legal suppression of peyote practices in the U.S., Indigenous people have had to undergo countless struggles to ensure the continued use of their sacred medicine.
Rather than feel entitled to peyote, the psychedelic community can serve as an ally to Indigenous communities by listening and choosing to support them in the ways that they wish to be supported. “It starts off with respect. Those that want to help can do something as simple as supporting Indigenous initiatives such as IPCI,” offered Iron Rope. “Indigenous people know what is best for them for the most part, and allowing them to take lead on certain matters is important.”
Beyond this, Davis expressed that one of her biggest concerns as a practitioner and a researcher is that non-Indigenous people should try to understand the history of peyote and what Indigenous people have endured in order to access and use their medicine. “Peyote went back underground until the passing of the AIRFA amendments in 1994, and now we have this movement pushing for peyote to be a sort of ‘free for all,’ and completely negating the historical struggle of Indigenous people’s use of peyote.”
Further, Davis also urges people to stay clear of harvesting wild peyote populations anywhere throughout its range, suggesting that one of the most important things that allies can do for peyote is to take the position that they will refuse to harvest wild populations while encouraging others to do the same. “Whether it be in Texas or Mexico, people who are truly respectful of this medicine- this plant, this way of life, will not harvest any wild populations because of peyote’s status as a vulnerable species with potential for future extinction.”
As we traverse the developments of this renaissance, it is crucial for our community to be aware of the impact we have, not only on mainstream culture, but also on Indigenous communities who have so frequently been left unheard. There are several steps that we can take to support peyote conservation, including sharing information about peyote conservation issues and educating oneself on the ethical considerations to be made when choosing to buy or use peyote outside of a bona fide NAC context, which must include awareness for the socio-historical baggage specific to this plant medicine.
About the Author
Jasmine Virdi is a freelance writer, editor, and proofreader. Since 2018, she has been working as a writer, editor, and social media coordinator for the fiercely independent publishing company Synergetic Press, where her passions for ecology, ethnobotany and psychoactive substances converge. Jasmine’s goal as an advocate for psychoactive substances is to raise awareness of the socio-historical context in which these substances emerged in order to help integrate them into our modern-day lives in a safe, grounded and meaningful way.
Is Salvia divinorum more than just a crazy trip? And what would salvia therapy or spirituality even look like?
Like many teens in the mid-2000s, I took a bong rip of Salvia divinorum extract in a group of laughing friends, and didn’t feel the need to touch the plant again. The 5 to 10-minute trip completely took me out of my mind, body, and surroundings in what I’d still, to this day, categorize as one of the most intense psychedelic experiences of my life. In the dreamlike state, I was walking on clouds and then found myself stuck in a cave where I had to move boulders aside to escape. As the cave slowly faded away and I drifted back to reality, I found that I was on my hands and knees in the corner of my best friend’s room, moving scissors and other art supplies around. I looked back to see my wide-eyed friends still sitting on the bed, bong in hand, staring at me, simultaneously giggling and relieved to see that I had returned.
When Psychedelics Today co-founder, Joe Moore, asked me to look into salvia for my next article nearly 15 years later, I laughed out loud, recalling that cave and the thrashing, ripping-apart-of-the-body feeling that salvia can give in high doses, and said something along the lines of “that shit is crazy.” But through researching this piece and talking to experts, I’ve learned there’s so much more to Salvia divinorum than smoking that weird black extract that was easier to get than booze or weed when I was 17- that there are people both in indigenous communities in Mexico and psychedelic societies in San Francisco who are developing deep and healing relationships with this purple flowering plant that contains the strongest naturally occurring psychedelic on our planet.
Indigenous Salvia Ceremony and Practices
The oldest standing Salvia divinorum tradition is held by the same indigenous community that still practices magic mushroom ceremonies, the Mazatec of Oaxaca, Mexico. “For us Mazatecs, salvia is very sacred,” says Inti Garcia Flores, Mazatec professor and archivist. Over WhatsApp, he explains to me the Mazatec legend of the origin of Salvia divinorum, or “La Pastora” (Spanish for “the shepherdess”) as he refers to it during our conversation. Essentially, salvia was one of the first three plants in existence. Tobacco was the first plant, who is a male spirit and the father. Then came salvia, who is a female spirit and the mother. Lastly, the mushrooms were born, who are the children.
Oaxaca highlighted in map of Mexico
To prepare for such a powerful encounter, part of the Mazatec tradition is a 40-day cleansing period before the actual ceremony. When it’s time for the ceremonial encounter with La Pastora, prayers are said while leaves are picked from salvia plants that grow around the Sierra Mazateca mountain range. Notably, it’s the only region in the world where this psychedelic strain of sage grows, and it has likely been propagated by indigenous people of the land for hundreds of years and possibly longer.
Salvia Divinorum
Salvia is consumed in ceremonies which are held at night, in the home of a curandero (Spanish for “healer”), and in front of an altar that typically faces the west. Then, the leaves are either chewed and swallowed in pairs, or drunk in a kind of salvia mash tea, but the plant is never smoked. Mushrooms are also consumed in pairs in Mazatec ceremonies to represent the duality of life: the masculine and feminine energies- a necessary balance, which, as I understand it, is a core concept in their spirituality. Garcia tells me that approximately 40 leaves are eaten for a Pastora ritual, sometimes more. It really depends on the curandero and the purpose of the ceremony. “Every curandero has their own style,” explains Garcia.
And to my surprise, ceremonies last about four to five hours, approximately the same amount of time as the effects of mushrooms. Then, the ritual is to be followed by another 40-day cleansing period. As far as the purpose of these ceremonies, healing and divination are two of the main reasons for seeking out La Pastora, and it’s especially common to use salvia when mushrooms aren’t in season (mushrooms only grow in the rainy season in Mexico, which is generally May through September. Garcia tells me that salvia, on the other hand, grows year-round).
Personal Salvia Divinorum Rituals
Learning about the sacred power of La Pastora got me thinking about the bad rap salvia has gotten in the west as a crazy and unpleasant, short-acting psychedelic. By smoking it, especially in extracted form, are we disrespecting the delicate plant spirit, and therefore missing its healing potential? But not everyone outside of the Mazatec community are teens like my friends and I were, tricking each other into smoking salvia. In fact, there are some folks using Salvia divinorum in a ritualized manner for healing trauma and other psycho-spiritual matters, like spiritual emergence coach and marriage and family counselor, Michelle Anne Hobart.
For Hobart, who’s also the author of Holding Sacred Space, salvia came to her in a time of need. She was recovering from trauma when she was guided to salvia, and the plant had a message for her: “Let go of all other practices for a year and work with me alone.” So that’s exactly what Hobart did. She formed a relationship with salvia in its tincture form. “She was very specific with me that I was only to take it in sublingual tincture form and not smoke it,” Hobart tells me over the phone, referring to salvia with feminine pronouns, just as Garcia had done.
In fact, Hobart’s salvia ritual had some similarities to the Mazatec tradition. She practices a pre-ceremony cleansing period where she only eats vegan and refrains from smoking or drinking (a practice that has now become a lifestyle). She also consumes La Pastora in front of her own altar with much prayer and meditation involved. For Hobart, this protocol has helped her reconnect with herself and her body, and she feels the short psychedelic experience (taken sublingually, she reports the experience lasts about 90 minutes to 2 hours) is very manageable and “integratable” for her as a highly sensitive person who is recovering from trauma.
Hobart spent much of her monogamous year with salvia working in low dose ranges that gave her a more spacious quality to her meditative practice. She explains that for those with trauma, even meditating or connecting with the body can seem like “a daunting, almost impossible task.” But by working with different levels of salvia and titrating her dose to cautiously work her way up to a higher dose range, it became more manageable. “If there was anything I learned in my experience of healing trauma with salvia, it’s that I don’t have to go to the top plateau to do the work. There’s work at every level and you can be gentle and compassionate with yourself and your nervous system. And honestly, you can integrate better when you titrate.”
That was especially interesting to me as someone who went straight to a smoked high-dose salvia experience. Are there really other levels to this medicine that are less intense? Hobart definitely thinks so, and when I ask her about the uncomfortable feeling in the body at higher doses, she reports that with her tincture protocol, she doesn’t find that to be the case. She explains that she views a salvia trip as having 3 phases: the clearing phase, the resourcing phase, and then the re-embodiment phase. At higher doses in the clearing phase, she can have visions, which she interprets as a cleansing that’s connected to the trauma she holds in her body. Then, in the resourcing phase, she can experience a type of ego-loss where she becomes one with the earth, which helps her release the trauma that can come up during the clearing phase. “It helps me realize I’m more than this body,” she explains.
Then in the re-embodiment phase, she returns to herself, “clean and free of that trauma.” Hobart specifies that she’s not completely free of trauma though. “There’s always more work to do. But in that moment, for that piece of work that needed to be done, I can re-inhabit my body in a safer way than I ever have before.” In that year of regular practice, Hobart was able to clear a lot of trauma, which, in turn, helped her anxiety decline. “I was able to return to my own sovereignty and empowerment through the understanding that this story is mine to tell,” she says.
Cloud forest of Southwestern Oaxaca
Somatic Salvia Therapy and Effects
Christopher Solomon, who is a somatic salvia guide, went down a similar path with the plant that started over 10 years ago. He had smoked salvia a handful of times as a teen in the early 2000s and found the experience pretty bizarre and unwieldy. “It just didn’t really make much sense,” he tells me over Skype. But one day, as he was loading his bong with salvia, he received a “download” from the plant. “Out of nowhere, there was a feeling inside of me that just said: ‘Wait. Meditate first.’” Even though he didn’t have much of a meditation practice at the time, he took 10 deep breaths before inhaling the salvia, “and it was just completely different… it was a lot smoother and more gentle on my system,” Solomon explains. “It was more grounded. Instead of me being taken elsewhere or torn apart, it was more like this other reality unfolded gracefully in front of me.”
Now, over ten years later, he’s also developed a very intimate relationship with the plant and its many levels of psychedelic experience, and he’s even started to guide others through salvia journeys. Like Hobart, Solomon also sees a lot of benefits in working in lower dose ranges. In fact, he’s theorized the salvia experience has about 10 levels, and a lot of the most therapeutic work is done in levels 1 through 7. Solomon explains that levels 1 through 3 are almost sub-perceptual.
“It’s very akin to being taken [to] a very, very deep, still place in meditation. One’s breath becomes deeper and there’s a feeling of grounding down and opening up. It’s not opening up to [the] world around one, it’s more as if one’s body is opening up to itself, like an internal opening. There’s a sense of slight physical tingles that come on the body and then the chattering mind gets a little bit less chattery. It can be summed up as being taken to a place of quiet, deep stillness.” He adds that finding this place in regular meditation practice can be very difficult for a lot of folks, echoing a sentiment Hobart expressed about how daunting it can be for those with trauma to try to reconnect with their bodies. But according to Solomon, in levels 1 through 3 of salvia, focusing on one’s breath feels pleasurable and comfortable, even euphoric. “It really increases your ability to remain attentive to whatever you put your concentration on. With the quieting of the mind comes a greater ability to concentrate on one’s own embodied self and be very present.”
This is a key concept in somatic therapy, in which Solomon is certified. “One of the main premises of any sort of somatic work is coming back to what is in the present,” he explains. “And instead of getting caught up in stories, expectations or memories, it’s about coming to the present moment- to the now, and seeing what’s right in front of one and seeing what we think.” When it comes to the salvia experience, the sense of presence that the plant insists on can be very healing. For Solomon, the lesson has been very clear- that learning to be present in the current moment is key to living a healthier, happier life. Salvia taught him: “Don’t worry about the future. Don’t worry about the past. Just be here now, and engaged, and aware, and playful. And then everything else kind of works itself out.”
These messages from salvia often come in the next dose range, in levels 3 through 7, where the feeling in the body becomes more intense (sometimes called “salvia gravity”), and visions, entities, and being taken to a new reality are more common. However, Solomon notes, the best preparation for these higher dose experiences is working in levels 1 through 3 first and getting comfortable there. But many of us don’t know about this preparation or don’t bother, and are shot straight to levels 9 or 10 on our first trip of smoking a bowl of 20x or 50x extract, and in turn, are completely turned off by the intensity of the salvia gravity sensation.
Photo of salvia packaged for retail sale
But when you prime your body first by titrating your dose and starting in lower, sub-perceptual dose ranges, “the pushing feelings do happen in your body, but it doesn’t feel as aggressive or foreign. It feels a lot more controllable instead,” says Solomon. And this is where things get really interesting and hard to explain. But through his deep practice with the plant, he’s learned that you can control those pushing and pulling feelings, or “energies,” and direct them towards parts of your body that need healing. Solomon’s most profound example of this is also the experience that led him to pursue sharing salvia with others as a somatic guide. Essentially, a few years ago, he had a swollen lymph node in his neck for months that he tried everything to cure, including three courses of antibiotics and diet and lifestyle changes. “But no matter what I did for months, there was this big swollen lymph node in my neck. It just didn’t go away.” At the time, he consulted with a couple of doctors who both said he needed to have his tonsils removed.
Before having the surgery, he decided to turn to salvia for the first time in nearly 2 years. “I smoked a bowl of 20x extract,” he says, “and usually when I do, I feel this pulling and pushing sensation on my body coming from outside, or it feels like I’m being moved through time and space.” But this time was different. “I felt all this energy tingling, kind of like little ants rushing up from every extremity of my body. And it all went straight to where the swollen lymph node was. This energy was congregating around the swollen lymph node and a thought came to me: ‘Oh, well, let me just heal myself.’” He says his hand “automatically picked itself up,” and he began pressing on his swollen neck like he had done many times before. But this time, as he rubbed his lymph node in a circle, “I felt it split in half,” he recalls. As he kept rubbing, it kept splitting. “It got smaller and smaller and smaller. It felt like tiny little grains of sand. And then those split even more, and it kept dividing until I couldn’t physically feel it anymore. Then all that energy that initially rushed to that part of my neck rushed over the rest of my body.” He reports that he laid there for about ten minutes until coming to, and his swollen lymph node was totally gone, and has remained absent ever since.
A Profound Salvia Divinorum Healing Ceremony
Kathleen Harrison, famous ethnobotanist, writer, psychedelic elder, and co-founder of the Botanical Dimensions library in Northern California, told a similar story in a talk at the Entheogenesis Australis conference in 2018. She sought out a Mazatec curandero who specializes in salvia healings and had a traditional ceremony in the highlands of Oaxaca. At the time, she was experiencing a lot of heart trouble and doctors told her that the only way forward was lifelong medication to manage her condition. But in a ceremony with salvia, she felt a female presence wave a hand right through her body and physically take her pain away. “A little door opened in my heart. It blew open like a sudden breeze had come, and I just saw this hurt fly out and dissolve. And my heart was better. I never had another problem with it,” Harrison describes in her talk. When she got back to her California home, medication was no longer necessary.
These healings are hard to explain in terms of what’s happening in the brain, even though there are psychedelic researchers looking into Salvia divinorum at Johns Hopkins and other universities. Formal research began in 1994, when ethnobotanist and researcher Daniel Siebert first isolated the psychedelic compound in Salvia Divinorum – Salvinorin A – and published his findings. Since then, Siebert has become salvia’s champion: he founded the salvia information vault, Sagewisdom.com, which includes a salvia safe-use guide, and he ended up piquing the interest of psychedelic researchers and run-of-the-mill psychonauts alike.
Is Salvia Legal?
Today, salvia is still legal in about 20 states, which makes it easier than psilocybin or MDMA for researchers to study. In 2010, Johns Hopkins University conducted the first controlled human study of salvinorin A, and their team is still looking into how salvia works. That’s partly because salvia is unique in the way it affects the brain, and so offers researchers a novel opportunity to study other psychedelic (and potentially therapeutic) mechanisms of action. Essentially, most classic psychedelics, like psilocybin, LSD, and DMT, mostly bind to the serotonin 2a receptors, and that action is thought to be responsible for most of their psychedelic effects. Salvia, on the other hand, has no affinity for the legendary 2a sites, and instead focuses the majority of its attention on the kappa opioid receptors.
Salvia laws in the United States (may not be fully up to date) – Source Red – Jurisdiction where salvia is illegal. Orange- Jurisdiction where salvia is decriminalized. Yellow – Jurisdiction where salvia is legal with age restrictions. Blue – Jurisdiction where salvia extracts are illegal but the plant itself is legal Green – Jurisdiction where salvia is legal.
But, How Does a Salvia Trip Work Exactly?
Yet, oddly enough, according to Manoj Doss, a postdoctoral scientist at the Hopkins Psychedelic Research Center (who is the lead on analyzing the latest salvia brain scan data), even though the receptor action site is different, the overall effects on the human brain are very similar to classic psychedelics. “We essentially found the same pattern [that Robin Carhart-Harris found with LSD],” Doss explains. “We got decreases in functional connectivity within network connectivity, so these networks are communicating less within themselves… [and] decreases in Default Mode Network connectivity, [which was the strongest effect]. And, we have increases in connectivity between areas that don’t usually communicate with each other as much.” However, although the effects were “quite similar” to other psychedelics, Doss believes more research is needed. “There are a few more caveats that are going to require a study with a larger sample size,” he says.
To folks like Solomon, while research is exciting, it’s not necessary towards understanding how salvia works for healing. “It’s very somatic medicine,” Solomon says. And it’s inspired him to complete a certification at the Hakomi Institute and provide guided somatic salvia sessions to clients. And unlike other traditions, Solomon’s clients smoke salvia, but not all in one go. In fact, Solomon has invented (thanks to a message from the salvia plant herself) an entirely new smoking apparatus for consuming salvia, aptly named “the salvia pipe.” The contraption has five separate bowls into which he sprinkles just a couple of flakes of salvia for clients. The idea is to titrate the dose to make the experience more similar to a chewed fresh leaf ceremony, which he admits is his preferred method of consumption, but isn’t very accessible unless you grow your own salvia. And so, his clients only smoke a very small amount at a time, then they meditate together for five minutes between each bowl to gradually work up to a level 3, 4, or 5 experience that they can manage and are comfortable in.
Solomon even does guided salvia sessions online, which have become increasingly popular since the pandemic, and the first thing he does is send clients a salvia pipe packed with the correct dose (if the client lives in a state where salvia is legal). He says folks come to him for a whole host of reasons: sometimes just out of curiosity, and others to work on self-esteem, physical ailments, or trauma. “I like to think of salvia as ‘the great neutralizer.’ If you’re feeling up, salvia will help bring you back down to a baseline calmness, or ‘groundedness.’ But if you’re down in the dumps, salvia can bring you up… and that is essentially how it incorporates so well into somatic therapy—because a lot of trauma therapy is getting the person to a sense of feeling grounded and stable, as if they have their own resources… it’s like a hard reset—a reboot to the present.”
Regardless of how Salvia divinorum works, it seems it has a lot of therapeutic potential that’s not getting a lot of attention, especially considering that it’s legal in 20 states. But I believe that’s because most of us go on one incredibly intense and off-putting first date with salvia at a young age and are completely unprepared for the experience. Yet it seems by building a relationship with the plant by preparing one’s set and setting, titrating dose, and being mindful of its sacred power, it can have lasting benefits for those who bother to take the time.
About the Author
Michelle Janikian is a journalist focused on drug policy, trends, and education. She’s the author of Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion, and her work has also been featured in Playboy, DoubleBlind Mag, High Times, Rolling Stone and Teen Vogue. One of her core beliefs is that ending the prohibition of drugs can greatly benefit society, as long as we have harm reduction education to accompany it. Find out more on her website: www.michellejanikian.com or on Instagram @michelle.janikian.
Now that millions of dollars are being invested in psychedelics and platforms ranging from Fox News to Bloomberg are reporting positively on them, it’s safe to say that psychedelic therapy has entered the mainstream. But mainstream news tends to highlight catchy elements while glossing over other details, often resulting in an unbalanced portrait of the whole. For psychedelic therapy, you’re way more likely to hear about the “psychedelic” than the “therapy.”
No surprise there. Reports on people healing complex PTSD by taking the “party drug ecstasy” while wearing eyeshades and listening to music in a cozy office are more gripping than reports on the months of talk therapy that follow (ecstacy is not always MDMA, it sometimes contains other dangerous compounds). So, perhaps this article on the therapy side will not be as gripping as an Anderson Cooper60 Minutes special, but I hope it will prove informative for anyone who desires to learn more about how psychedelic therapy is currently being practiced, and the complex elements beyond the administration of a substance that go into achieving the astounding improvements in depression, addiction, and PTSD that have now been so broadly reported.
The Importance of Staying Humble
I’ll kick this off by recognizing it is not possible to “capture” psychedelic therapy in any sentence or article or doctoral thesis. There are as many approaches and strategies as there are practitioners, and eliminating the potential for exploration and breakthrough through a prescriptive definition would be an insult to psychedelics themselves, which have exploded understandings of phenomena for centuries.
“There’s a lot of impression about what psychedelics are, how they should be treated, and what the optimal therapy is,” explains Dr. Matthew Johnson, Associate Director of the Center for Psychedelic & Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins University. “We need to keep humble in terms of how much we don’t know, rather than fooling ourselves into thinking something is cemented in.”
While the future is ripe for exploration, there are several trends in approaching psychedelic therapy. So, this article is simply a glimpse into these trends, rather than a concrete definition of the whole.
Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy
“Psychedelic therapy” is more accurately termed “psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy.” This distinction is critical, because the psychedelic is an adjunct to the therapeutic process, rather than a replacement for the process itself. So, when I refer to “psychedelic therapy,” I am simply abbreviating “psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy.” And there are far fewer psychedelics being used in therapy than there are psychedelics in general.
Psilocybin and MDMA are the two predominant substances currently being researched in psychedelic therapy, and each has been granted “Breakthrough Status” by the FDA in separate clinical trials, which basically means even the government recognizes how promising they are in therapy. Other substances used in psychedelic therapy are ketamine, a legal medicine throughout the U.S., and cannabis, which is still fully illegal in only eight states.
Interestingly enough, only one of these substances—psilocybin—is a classic psychedelic. The other three are all noted as having psychedelic properties, but ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic, MDMA is an entactogen, and no one can seem to agree on what cannabis is.
Other psychedelics, such as LSD, ibogaine, ayahuasca, and 5-MeO-DMT, are being researched, yet none appear close to becoming legal. However, research into LSD-assisted psychotherapy in the ‘50s and ‘60s, especially as spearheaded by Dr. Stanislav Grof, provided foundational elements for common frameworks implemented with other substances today. But LSD’s stigmatization remains heavy, and its unpredictable effects are particularly long-lasting, so it has not re-emerged to the forefront of psychedelic therapy. So, the “psychedelics” of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy of interest in this article will be psilocybin, MDMA, ketamine, and cannabis.
A Framework of Preparation and Integration
Psychedelic therapy is not as simple as administering a substance and Voila! Depression defeated! The psychedelic sessions—interchangeably referred to as “medicine” or “dosing” sessions—take place in a broader framework of preparation and integration therapy, neither of which involves the administration of a substance.
The ratios of preparation/integration sessions to medicine sessions vary widely and depend on many factors, such as dose size and financial limitations. The most widely-documented framework currently being practiced comes from the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), the organization behind the FDA-approved trials for MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for the treatment of PTSD. MAPS’ MDMA therapy involves three 90-minute preparatory sessions, a first MDMA session, three integration sessions, a second MDMA session, three more integration sessions, a third MDMA session, and three final integration sessions. In total, that’s three medicine sessions, and twelve preparation/integration sessions, a cycle that lasts about five months.
That’s five times as many non-medicine sessions as medicine sessions. MAPS’ significant results—i.e. one year after their Phase 2 trials, 68% of participants no longer qualified for PTSD—cannot be separated from this full process. Sara Reed, who worked on MAPS’ Phase 2 trials and is now the Director of Psychedelic Services at the Behavioral Wellness Clinic in Connecticut explains, “The integration sessions are just as important as the dosing sessions, if not even more important.”
Johns Hopkins University’s research in psilocybin therapy also involves far more preparation and integration therapy than psychedelic sessions. Among the many focuses of their Center for Psychedelic & Consciousness Research, Johns Hopkins is researching psilocybin therapy for smoking cessation.
Johnson is the study’s Principal Investigator. Results from the study’s pilot phase, published in 2014, found that after 6 months, 80% of participants had remained abstinent from smoking, compared to the 30-35% success rate of predominant treatment models. In the study’s second iteration, which is ongoing at the time of this writing, Dr. Johnson reports that at the one-year follow-up, 59% of the psilocybin group were biologically confirmed as abstinent, compared to 27% of the group who used a nicotine patch.
While the pilot study involved three medicine sessions, the current study involves only one. Everything else is preparation and integration. “Right now, they have integration sessions for ten weeks after the psilocybin session,” Johnson explains. “These are hour-long, weekly check-ins. With preparation, we have about eight hours across four different sessions.”
Given that ketamine therapy is being widely practiced, and numerous other psychedelic therapy trials are underway, it would take many articles to detail all the protocols being used. The trend to note is that sober preparation and integration sessions are essential to psychedelic therapy, and even tend to involve far more time than the medicine sessions.
A Relational Approach to Therapy
I’m tempted to write a section on what preparation and integration therapy looks like, but this would be impossible. These terms are vague; there is no set way to do them, no script to follow. Yet amidst common components such as intention setting, dose determination, and discussions of the particular psychedelic’s effects, the glue that connects these sessions across countless frameworks is the essentiality of establishing a strong and trusting therapeutic relationship.
“More important than the therapist’s psychological orientation is the rapport with the participant,” Johnson explains. “If you actually care for this human being you’re dealing with, and you’re making a sincere effort, and they get that—that overrides whatever descriptors you use.”
A client-centered, relationship-based approach to therapy arose in the mid-20th century in response to the dominant paradigms of psychoanalysis and behaviorism. Back then, therapists were viewed as the “expert” in the room, interpreting and diagnosing clients while remaining emotionally detached. Carl Rogers then theorized that interpretation and theoretical expertise were not essential, or even necessarily helpful; the central element to a client’s healing was the quality of the therapeutic relationship, cultivated in a climate of genuineness, accurate empathy, and unconditional positive regard. This client-centered approach laid the foundation for humanistic psychology.
Whether or not one aligns entirely with Rogers’ framework and disposition, it is widely accepted in psychedelic therapy that the therapeutic relationship is paramount.
“When you’re getting into psychedelic work, there can be a subconscious pull toward skipping aspects of relationship building,” explains Rafael Lancelotta, who practices cannabis and ketamine therapy at Innate Path in Denver, CO. “That can really negatively affect the process. If you’re going to vulnerable places with someone you don’t trust, your system’s defenses are going to come up and prevent you from moving through a healing process.”
Therapy is already vulnerable; that vulnerability amplifies exponentially when a substance is involved. Imbibing a psychedelic, a client sacrifices control, accepting the heightened uncertainty of where the session may lead. If they do not trust the therapist, the lack of trust will likely manifest in the medicine session and impede the work.
An important element to a relational approach is respecting and understanding the identities clients hold. Sara Reedis part of several committees devoted to increasing access to psychedelic medicines for underserved populations, and she brings specific attention to the complexities of clients’ social identities.
“I approach ketamine therapy through an intersectional lens,” Reed explains. “I take into account a person’s age, race, sexual orientation, gender, geography, socioeconomic status, education, and what they’ve been exposed to in the world. I’m sensitive to the way they language their experience and the way they experience the world. From that lens, we create treatment plans specific to their symptom presentation and symptom severity to give them a tailored psychedelic psychotherapy experience.”
Reed does not position herself as the expert; she positions herself humbly in relation to the client’s experience, listening to their unique background and needs in order to develop a course of action. This humility, and the trust-building that comes through it, is the essence of a relational approach.
Given that psychedelics often attract people with spiritual and esoteric worldviews, therapists must be prepared and willing to enter and understand a client’s way of seeing. Michelle Anne Hobart specializes in preparation and integration therapy—which, by the way, is a legal therapeutic modality, so long as illegal medicines are not administered. Hobart is a specialist in “spiritual emergence,” which she describes as “a space of people expanding beyond the separate sense of self into a larger understanding of interconnection between other beings and the planet.” This inner awakening can occur through psychedelic experiences and potentially be destabilizing, and Hobart’s specialty allows her to meet her clients in their expansive worldviews.
“It can be helpful to check the astrology transits in preparation for journeys,” Hobart explains, referencing the Archetypal Astrology work of Stan Grof and Richard Tarnas. “It’s making correlations between the type of medicine experience that someone might be having with the overlay of archetypal dynamics at that time. It can be really empowering to know that certain tones might show up in the medicine journey.”
If an astrologically-minded seeker comes to a material scientist whose preparation cannot extend beyond images of entropic brain states and explanations of oxytocin, the amygdala, and the hippocampus, it probably will not be a good fit. A relational approach hinges on meeting clients where they are, and many psychonauts do not view the world through a strictly scientific lens.
Therapists cannot simply assume trust due to the position they hold. They have to earn it, and that process takes time and patience. If that process is not honored, numerous problems can result, including the potential for re-traumatization in the medicine session due to an unsafe container—an issue that Hobart rightly describes as a “shadow” of psychedelic therapy. Like therapy itself, preparation and integration are most effective when relational, adaptable, and responsive to clients’ individual needs. With a trusting relationship established, an “inner-directed” process can unfold.
Learn more about our course on Psychedelics and The Shadow
Inner-Directed Therapy
Psychedelic therapists often maintain that the medicine helps incite an “inner-directed” healing process, where a client’s “innate healing intelligence” or “inner healer” can emerge from its walled-off container and catalyze the necessary internal movement.
“As a therapist, your therapeutic stance is to trust the process and not get ahead of the medicine, to follow the participant in their journey,” Reed explains. “In essence, you’re just really present with the medicine, the material, the client, and yourself, navigating that liminal space where transformation can happen.”
Again, the client is the expert, and the therapist skillfully cultivates space for a process to organically unfold. Stan Grof created the term “holotropic” for this process, which translates to “moving toward wholeness.” The therapeutic approaches then used in integration can come out of the client’s authentic holotropic experience, allowing for the integration to meet emergent needs rather than place an established framework onto a process.
Psychedelic therapists create trusting, comfortable conditions that allow the client’s inner healer to guide the medicine sessions, and all ensuing sessions by extension. What that clients’ inner healer brings forth depends on other measurable factors as well, such as the size of dose administered.
Psychedelic vs. Psycholytic Therapy
When folks are talking about psychedelic therapy, they are sometimes in fact talking about psycholytic therapy. “Psychedelic” therapy involves high-dose medicine sessions, in which the client may lose contact with the therapist, if not the physical world. “Psycholytic” therapy involves low-dose medicine sessions, in which perceptual doors are opened, but not obliterated completely.
Jason Sienknecht trains ketamine therapists through the Psychedelic Research and Training Institute (PRATI), an organization he helped found. In his therapeutic practice at the Wholeness Center in Fort Collins, CO, he facilitates both psychedelic and psycholytic ketamine therapy.
“In the psychedelic session, we use high-dose ketamine to induce a fully-dissociated psychedelic state,” Sienknecht explains. “They go in very deeply, and the ketamine and music helps them move toward insights about their life and give them clarity and perspective about their struggles.”
This high-dose, non-dialogue approach is used by Johns Hopkins with psilocybin in the smoking cessation study. “We use a high dose of 30 milligrams per 70 kilograms of body weight,” Johnson says. “That generally equates to about 5 dried grams of psilocybe cubensis. So, it’s the classic Terence McKenna ‘heroic dose.’”
In psychedelic sessions, dialogue with the therapist is kept to a minimum—sometimes by necessity, when clients temporarily lose the ability to speak. In psycholytic sessions, on the other hand, clients enter a “low-dose trance state” and stay engaged with the therapist.
“With psycholytic therapy, you don’t dissociate so much that you lose your capacity to sustain dialogue with a therapist,” Sienknecht explains. “You stay in contact the entire time. Some clients I work with really like that, as opposed to me saying, ‘Goodbye, I’ll see you on the other side,’ as we do with psychedelic sessions.”
Each approach has its uses. Some clinicians believe psychedelic sessions are necessary for clients to transgress their self-imposed limitations and open to a more expansive kind of healing. Psychedelic sessions can also be helpful for crisis situations. For example, some clinicians use high doses of ketamine for suicidal clients, as an ego-dissolving experience may be necessary to help the client “break out” of their all-consuming mentality.
Psycholytic sessions allow for conscious processing of emerging material through direct, intentional work with what arises. Further, these low-dose sessions allow clients to work directly with relational wounds by remaining in contact with the therapist through the non-ordinary state. Again, the significance of this relational element cannot be understated, especially as relationship-building extends beyond the need for trust in the session.
“I find it difficult to think of any form of mental illness that isn’t highly relational,” explains Lancelotta. “I think this work is for healing those core relational wounds.”
In this understanding, the relationship with the therapist is the relationship through which deep relational wounds can be healed. These “core relational wounds” affect people far more than they often realize, playing into numerous mental conditions and existential struggles that cannot be healed in isolation.
Whether a client’s healing will come best through psychedelic or psycholytic therapy—or a hybridization of the two, as Lancelotta envisions—depends on numerous factors, to which therapists must remain sensitive and attuned. A “more-medicine-is-better” mentality can be highly problematic and potentially destabilizing for an already unstable client. Regardless, medicine sessions cannot exist in a vacuum. Without preparation and integration to support the psychedelic experience, psychedelic therapy is no different than peer support, and while this can still be hugely impactful, it will undoubtedly diminish the potential for lasting transformation.
Bringing It Home
Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy is an umbrella term that is far more complex than someone taking a drug in a calm and comfortable room. It is an extensive framework involving a significant amount of “regular” therapy that adapts to clients’ unique struggles and needs. As much as mainstream news may want to convince you otherwise, psychedelics are not the “magic pill” panacea that will quickly and easily make all your problems go away. Yet psychedelic experiences can bring profound insight and meaning, and a growing body of psychedelic therapists use tried and tested methods to enhance these substances’ transformative potential, so that a revelatory trip can truly change a person’s life.
About the Author
Sean Lawlor is a writer, certified personal trainer, and Masters student in Transpersonal Counseling at Naropa University, in pursuit of a career in psychedelic journalism, research, and therapy. His interest in consciousness and non-ordinary states owes great debt to Aldous Huxley, Ken Kesey, and Hunter S. Thompson, and his passion for film, literature, and dreaming draws endless inspiration from Carl Jung, David Lynch, and J.K. Rowling. For more information or to get in touch, head to seanplawlor.com, or connect on Instagram @seanplawlor.
As a professional DJ and full-time psychotherapist offering ketamine-assisted psychotherapy sessions, I love selecting music for people. Almost universally, clients report a heightened sense of significance and interest in music while on psychedelics. How you select music for your client’s experience can have a profound impact on what they experience and the depth of experience they have.
There are numerous approaches to selecting and playing music for psychedelic work. While the Holotropic Breathwork people have a sophisticated method of making playlists and supporting the arc of a session, they have the added burden of having to play music that is going to work for everyone in a group experience. As a psychedelic therapist, your task is to assist a client in having a powerful non-ordinary experience, and you’ll likely be working with one client at a time. As such, there is room to get more specific and tailored in the approach that will offer a deeper and more powerful session.
Music Selection – Recreational vs. Therapeutic
One of the large differences between recreational and therapeutic psychedelic use is the focus of the experience. While psychedelics can be used in a wide variety of ways that we might consider recreational, using them in a therapeutic context has one key feature- namely that the psychedelic journeyer has the full attention and attuned nervous system of the therapist with them through the experience. This situation allows the psychonaut to go to places internally that they may not have gone without the benefit and psychological safety of being held in another’s mind. As such, people are coming to know their own depth of being in a new way. I would encourage you, dear therapist, to play things for them that will help them go deeper into their experience. You are helping someone have an experience of themselves within a psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy session.
Is the song beautiful or are you beautiful in the presence of the song?
A critical question at the heart of psychedelic music selection that was put to me by a mentor of mine: “Is the song beautiful or are you beautiful in the presence of the song?” A well-curated playlist can be used not only to have a beautiful experience, but to come to know your own depth and beauty and emotional range more fully. One thing that will help your clients go into their experience is to select pieces that are less beat-driven. Here’s a rule of thumb: if you can bob your head to it, don’t play it. This rule breaks down in working with anger/rage. In that situation, the right kind of beat can be very helpful. Generally though, find pieces that are more open and moving than a beat-driven song.
When someone is having a psychedelic experience, they are feeling their sense of self being stretched to new dimensions. Having one’s awareness bent and moved emotionally by instruments and sounds that are less known is akin to being stretched in new ways emotionally. You’ll deny your clients this gift by playing music for them that is within their musical wheelhouse. The point isn’t to have a “good” experience, but a meaningful one. You can play music that will add to that sense by picking pieces they are unfamiliar with and therefore have fewer associations to. Examples include ambient or neo-classical composers. Another critical way of accomplishing this is to play music for them from other cultures, and luckily there is no shortage of absolutely beautiful, deep, emotional world music to choose from out there that is still quite accessible to most North American ears. Middle Eastern, Asian, and African string instruments, chants, and flutes from all over the world bring out an otherworldly quality that can help your client to stretch into new ways of knowing themselves.
How to select
Aside from what to play, let’s talk about how you should select music for psychedelic sessions. I’m of the opinion that a good place to start is with something that is soothing yet stimulating and emotionally neutral. This is a great way to do no harm, musically speaking. There are many playlists out there to give you the inspiration to start. Try searching “psychedelic therapy” on Spotify or any streaming service you use. If you never do more than this, your clients will have a worthwhile experience. However, in this emerging field, I think we can do better.
Here are some guidelines that help me select during a session. When emotions or emotional needs emerge, try matching them musically in tone, or leading with music that has a slightly stronger affective tone. This can also be great for people who are by nature less in touch with their emotions or have less access to certain emotional ranges like anger or sadness. Begin building playlists and finding albums that have consistent emotional tones you can call on- sorrow, sadness, playfulness, anger, confusion, or pensive, heroic or childlike feelings, etc. This way, you’ll have them at hand when you need them. Your collection of playlists can go on and on and get more and more refined as you build your library. For me, the joy of this kind of collecting is to find new pieces that open me up to different emotional tones, and over time, they get more and more nuanced. Then try them with clients and see if they support their experience. You might have a sense a certain song will work, only to find that it falls a little flat when you try it with clients. That’s no problem at all- just as in every other aspect of therapy, you make an informed guess, you try something, and you see how it lands. Put simply, your job in session is to sonically attune to your clients. Keep an eye out for their affect and consider playing something that matches that tone. It’ll help your clients go deeper into their experience and get more out of their session with you because the music offers them permission to keep going where normally they might hold back and where a stock playlist may totally miss them.
I regularly see clients go further and deeper into the range of emotions than they ever have before. And once something that a client didn’t even know was possible becomes an option, their life starts to change. New neural networks emerge to support that experience, and that deep, new experience they had with me in the office becomes something they have access to in other areas of their lives.
Since so much of what I encounter with my clients is relational wounds and developmental trauma, it can be helpful to play music that has the voices of the same gender as the parent they have a particular wound with. If Mom was cold or unavailable, it can be incredibly powerful for a client to hear warm, soothing (non-English speaking) women singing. It offers a missing experience. The same is true with fathers and masculine wounds. I have specific playlists built out of women and/or men singing or music that for me has a particularly gendered expression. I call them “limbic feminine” and “limbic masculine.” With transference, those limbic tones can be a crucial part of healing.
Here are a few examplesof different songs:
Reflective:
Emerging:
Pensive:
Heroic:
Limbic Femininity:
Limbic Masculinity:
Stimulating Neutral:
Mendel Kaelen is also doing beautiful work creating playlists that support people going through psychedelic sessions with gorgeous general arcs.
So to you, dear therapist, I have some suggestions on how you can integrate this into your psychedelic practice.
Engage in your own work: First and most importantly, you have to keep doing your own work. As is true in ordinary psychotherapy, you won’t be able to take your clients beyond where you yourself have gone. Continue exploring your own depth of being through ongoing work with the medicines you are working with.
Widen your Music Selection: Listen to lots of things! Search out sorrowful songs, find what instruments produce those best, listen to movie soundtracks for passionate or suspenseful elements, and find music from other countries and cultures that have different instruments and scales. This can go as deep as you want.
Use Spotify to find new music: If you’re using Spotify, let their algorithms suggest things! I can’t tell you how often I find new stuff through their suggestions based on my playlists.
The collection and selection of music for psychedelic work is an ongoing venture. You’ll get better as you go, and you’ll fall in and out of love with songs or albums. And you’ll get more masterful in your own approach.
At the end of the day, what we’re offering our clients is an education into their own depth and beauty. By selecting music well, we’re saying, “You’re more than you thought you were, and what you actually are is totally welcome here. In fact, it’s fantastic”.
I hope you enjoy the endeavor.
About the Author
Pierre Bouchard is a Licensed Professional Counselor with a private practice in Boulder and Denver CO and professional vinyl DJ. He specializes in blending somatics, embodiment, attachment theory, and trauma therapy with ketamine assisted psychotherapy. He offers supervision around ketamine assisted psychotherapy and training on music selection. He’ll be opening a clinic soon to expand ketamine access and to further prepare for the psychedelic revolution. You can find out more here pierrebouchardcounseling.com and on Instagram @pierre.bouchard.lpc
Mental health has become one of the central themes of 2020 thanks to COVID-19 and the resulting societal shutdown. In fact, the psychological spillover from coronavirus is projected to evolve into an entirely separate pandemic, according to the Journal of the American Psychiatric Nurses Association(JAPNA). Like the virus itself, the “second pandemic” is nothing to ignore. The United Nations, World Health Organization and other academic sources such as the Journal of the American Medical Association have also sounded the alarm about a potential mental health crisis coming down the pipeline.
The JAPNA study, however, calls for the implementation of “new mental health interventions” and “collaboration among health leaders” in order to prepare for mobilization when the masses are seeking psychological assistance. While psychedelic medicines were not explicitly cited in the study, these drugs offer an array of treatments that just so happen to address many of the mental health issues brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, including depression, anxiety, PTSD, and paranoia. Specifically, psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, which is on the brink of legalization in Oregon, may serve as one such model to assuage the psychological fallout from COVID-19.
Causes of the Mental Health Pandemic
So, how can COVID trigger a mental health crisis? That answer is: Easily. At the time of writing, over 121,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 and more than 2.3 million have been infected, according to data from John Hopkins University. The authors of the JAPNA article note that survivors of ICU treatment face an elevated risk for depression, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), sleep disturbance, poor quality of life, and cognitive dysfunction.
Those who contract COVID are not the only ones facing psychological trauma from the pandemic, however. Healthcare workers on the frontlines are at a heightened risk of experiencing severe trauma, PTSD, anxiety, and depression from COVID. Family members of coronavirus patients also face heightened distress, fear, and anxiety, all of which are likely aggravated by the restrictions on hospital visits and lack of testing. The rapid influx of COVID-19 cases also has the potential to decrease capacity for treating other patients, such as those experiencing psychological issues.
Moreover, even people who have not directly dealt with COVID may experience mental health troubles. A lot of anxiety exists around virus exposure, which is triggered when having to leave the house for basic reasons, such as going to the grocery store or bank. The media’s inconsistent, doomsday coverage of the pandemic adds to the confusion around what’s going on, resulting in extreme fear, information overwhelm, and hysteria.
The unintended consequences of a nationwide shut down is also proving to have a negative impact on mental health, according to a study published in European Psychiatry (EP). Lack of social interaction, specifically, is a well-known risk factor for depression, anxiety disorders and other mental health conditions. Further, the study warns that the longer such policies are in effect, the more risk they pose to those with preexisting mental health issues.
“Most probably we will face an increase of mental health problems, behavioral disturbances, and substance-use disorders, as extreme stressors may exacerbate or induce psychiatric problems,” the EP authors write.
News from the economic front is also concerning. The IMF projects global GDP will contract by 3 percent this year—the most severe decline since the Great Depression—with the US GDP predicted to drop by a whopping 5.9 percent. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show more than 40 million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits since mid-March, a number that will likely increase. For many, job security means financial stability, which generally ties into one’s mental wellness.
Research published in Clinical Psychological Science found that people who lost their job, income and housing during the Great Recession were at a higher risk of depression, anxiety and substance abuse. This is particularly troubling considering the Great Recession only caused a .1 percent drop in global GDP, a decline 30 times less severe than the financial crisis caused by COVID-19. Moreover, suicide rates in the US are directly related to unemployment. In fact, for every unemployment rate percentage increase, the suicide rate rises 1.6 percent in the US, according to a study in the Social Science and Medicine journal.
Looking at all of these factors combined, a mental health crisis seems imminent. A report from the Well Being Trust predicts that COVID-19 and its associated stressors will cause anywhere from 27,644 to 154,000 deaths from alcohol, drugs and suicide. The results of a recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation suggest our trajectory could already be trending towards the worst-case scenario. The poll shows that 56 percent of Americans surveyed believe the outbreak has negatively impacted their mental health. But that number rose to 64 percent for those who experienced income loss.
How Can Psychedelics Help?
Psilocybin, MDMA and ketamine combined with psychotherapy show promise for treating an array of mental health conditions— many of which happen to be brought on by the pandemic.
Studies show that psilocybin-assisted therapy decreases depression and anxiety in patients with life-threatening diseases, such as cancer. Participants reported reduced feelings of hopelessness, demoralization, and fear of death. Even 4.5 years after the treatment, 60 to 80 percent of participants still demonstrated clinically significant antidepressant and anti-anxiety responses. While we do not advocate for those sick with coronavirus to eat mushrooms, these studies suggest that psilocybin may be effective in treating the extreme fear, anxiety and depression activated by the virus and global shutdown.
MDMA-assisted psychotherapy also promises major relief from pandemic-related trauma. Multiple studies show that it is a profound tool in the treatment of PTSD for military veterans, firefighters and police officers with no adverse effects post-treatment. MDMA therapy could be particularly beneficial to healthcare workers, survivors of extreme COVID cases or those who lost a loved one to the disease— all of which can inflict significant trauma, and therefore, PTSD.
“We found that over 60 percent of the participants no longer had PTSD after just three sessions of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy,” says Brad Burge, the director of strategic communications at MAPS. “We also found that those benefits persisted and people actually tended to continue getting better over the next year without any further treatments.”
Ketamine (and the esketamine nasal spray) treatment, on the other hand, is already available in North America. It’s especially effective in assuaging the tension of treatment resistant depression, bipolar disorder, chronic pain, and PTSD —all of which could be exacerbated by pandemic-related stressors.
Keep in mind, however, that using psychedelics at home is different than receiving psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. Catherine Auman, a licensed family and marriage therapist with experience in psychedelic integration, warns that now may not be the best time to use psychedelics, especially in a non-clinical setting. She worries that pandemic-related stressors could impact a patient’s psychological state.
“Psychedelics are powerful substances and are best to do at a time in a person’s life when they’re feeling more stable, not less,” Auman explains. “This is good advice whether someone is using them recreationally or therapeutically.”
Will COVID-19 Impede Psychedelic Research and Delay Public Access?
The pandemic has impeded both psychedelic research efforts and access to currently available therapies. We’re essentially at a standstill until COVID is controlled. MAPS is among few—if not the only—organization with FDA permission to carry on research, but at a reduced scale. When we first spoke with Burge for this story, MAPS was on its first session of Phase 3 MDMA clinical trials. More recently, however, the FDA allowed MAPS to end the first round of Phase 3 early with only 90 out of 100 of the planned participants enrolled. Burge confirmed MAPS is already preparing for their second and last Phase 3 clinical trial. He predicts the DEA could reschedule MDMA by as early as 2022.
Usona Institute temporarily paused all in-person activities related to its Phase 2 clinical trials looking at psilocybin for major depressive disorder, according to its April newsletter. Usona is still recruiting participants for clinical trials at five sites, however.
Compass Pathways is not currently accepting any new patients in its clinical trials looking into the impact of psilocybin on treatment-resistant depression, according to a statement. They continue to support already enrolled patients remotely, when possible within the protocol. Pre-screening of potential study participants continues where possible, too.
Field Trip Health is a recently formed network of clinics offering ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. The facility opened its first clinic in Toronto in March. But, after seeing one patient, it promptly shut down due to the accelerating spread of COVID-19.
The decision for Field Trip Health to close its clinic was relatively easy, according to Ronan Levy, the company’s executive chairman. They didn’t have large numbers of patients actively receiving treatment yet. But, the pandemic has forced the organization to quickly adapt. “We launched a digital online therapy program, so patients can self-refer or have referrals to our psychotherapists, who are trained in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, with specific protocols and behavioral therapies,” says Verbora, Field Trip Health’s medical director. “Long term, as these clinics start to open up again, we’ll have dual streams. We’ll be able to sort patients in the clinic for ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, but some of their care may be able to be done from home.”
While the COVID-19 pandemic has hampered research efforts in the short term and, the movement around the healing properties of psychedelic medicine is still going strong.
“The path to acceptance might be slowed down a little bit due to COVID,” Verbora says. “But the current path that’s being undertaken by a number of different groups and institutions is one that’s going to lead to profound changes in the way we approach mental health.”
The timing couldn’t be more perfect.
About the Author
Jeff Kronenfeld is an independent journalist and fiction writer based out of Phoenix, Arizona. His articles have been published in Vice, Overture Global Magazine and other outlets. His fiction has been published by the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, Four Chambers Press and other presses.
As the use of ayahuasca becomes increasingly widespread, the Amazonian vine has extended its roots beyond the traditional indigenous and religious contexts of South America, lending itself to a newly evolving field of practice. However, the economic viability of ayahuasca ceremonies combined with the vine’s complicated legal status opens the field to a plurality of malpractice, particularly when it comes to what practitioners actually serve in the cup.
A Closer Look at the Chemical Composition of Ayahuasca
Ayahuasca, otherwise known as yagé, is perhaps one of the most curious hallucinogenic plants of the Amazon, known for its powerful psychoactive effects and healing capacities. Generally, when we refer to ayahuasca, we refer not only to the woody liana Banisteriopsis caapi, but the visionary decoction made by pounding its stems and boiling them together with various plant admixtures.
Typically, ayahuasca, as prepared by the syncretic ayahuasca churches of Brazil, the Santo Daime, União do Vegetal, and Barquinha, only contains B. caapi and P. viridis (Psychotria viridis). However, it is increasingly common to encounter additional plants in brews made by the indigenous groups in Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia. For example, Colombian yagé is made with an entirely different DMT-containing admixture plant, Diplopterys cabrerana, which produces mild qualitative differences in terms of effect.
The psychoactive compound DMT is inactive when ingested orally, as it is the enzyme monoamine oxidase (MAO) in the gut that breaks down the vision-inducing ingredient before it is able to cross the blood-brain barrier and make its way into the central nervous system. However, the vine itself contains the beta-carboline alkaloids harmine, harmaline, and tetrahydroharmine (THH), of which harmine and harmaline are monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs). Chemically speaking, the alchemical essence of ayahuasca rests in the mixing of monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs) present in the alkaloids of the B. caapi vine with a DMT-containing admixture plant.
Determined to understand the diversity of ayahuasca brews, Helle Kaasik, a researcher from the University of Tartu, Estonia, in collaboration with researchers from the University of Campinas, Brazil, sought to illuminate the chemical differences in ayahuasca brews across traditions.
Their study, yet to be published, analyzed changing distributions of DMT, harmine, harmaline, and tetrahydroharmine (THH) across 102 ayahuasca samples. These samples were taken from different locations in Europe and Brazil, spanning across different traditions including indigenous shamanic, Santo Daime, and neo-shamanic.
Interesting tendencies emerged based on the traditions from which the samples came, with indigenous brews showing a balanced ratio between the concentrations of DMT, THH, and harmine. Samples that came from the ayahuasca religion, Santo Daime, also showed a similar balance between chemical compounds, although some brews tended towards increased concentrations of DMT.
However, when it came to brews received from neo-shamanic facilitators of different backgrounds, there was notably more variation between chemical constituents, and on average, they contained substantially greater concentrations of DMT than indigenous brews.
Of the 102 samples, 39 were further tested for additional additives and contaminants, with several brews from neoshamanic practitioners found to contain Peganum harmala (Syrian rue) andthe DMT-containing Mimosa tenuiflora, otherwise known as jurema. Similar to the ayahuasca vine, Syrian rue contains the MAOI, harmaline. The combination of the MAOI in Syrian rue with the DMT-containing M. tenuiflora mimics the chemical composition of ayahuasca, being a well-known ayahuasca analog or “anahuasca.” The substitution of P. viridis with M. tenuiflora contributed to the higher concentrations of DMT found in neoshamanic brews.
More shockingly, two of the samples obtained from Europe were found to contain no caapi at all. Rather, this counterfeit ayahuasca was found to contain a combination of moclobemide (a pharmaceutical antidepressant and MAOI), psilocin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms), and high concentrations of DMT from M. tenuiflora.
For years now, well-seasoned psychonauts have been imitating the active ingredients in a similar manner, creating ayahuasca analogs by combining other DMT and MAOI-containing plants. Combinations made of extracted or synthesized ingredients are referred to as “pharmahuasca.” However, there is a distinction to be made between testing anahuasca, pharmahuasca, and other psychonautic cocktails on oneself as opposed to falsely marketing brews as ayahuasca. Hence, using the term “counterfeit.”
Comparatively, there was no counterfeit ayahuasca found among disciplined ayahuasca traditions such as the Santo Daime and among indigenous practitioners. In South America in general, the raw materials to make ayahuasca are both abundant and affordable, removing any incentive to replace them with other plants or pharmaceuticals.
Towards an Ethos of Transparency
Within the psychedelic community, the pressing issue of counterfeit ayahuasca is either often neglected or largely unknown. Thus, without pointing fingers, it is important that we as a community work to develop self-regulating mechanisms that foster and encourage transparent practices.
According to ayahuasca researcher and co-author of this paper, Helle Kaasik, the complicated legal situation surrounding ayahuasca combined with its lucrative viability as a business “attracts risk-prone and overconfident people who often do not understand the level of responsibility of giving a strong psychedelic to people in need of healing.” As a result of these bad actors, disciplined ayahuasca traditions should not be persecuted or forced to go underground.
“What the community can do,” Kaasik explains, “is to expect clear information about [the] composition of whatever ‘medicine’ is offered to them and avoid drinking with facilitators who don’t tell the full truth about the constituents or act offended when asked.”
Ayahuasca religions such as Santo Daime have their own self-regulating mechanisms built into the tradition. For example, amongst Daimistas, the brewing of the sacrament is a ritual in which the whole community participates, making it almost impossible for contaminants to be added while cooking.
In line with Chacruna.net’s “Ayahuasca Community Guide for the Awareness of Sexual Abuse,” we should also seek to establish guidelines for transparency among ayahuasca practitioners when it comes to informing participants about a brew’s origin and composition. Practitioners should take it upon themselves to communicate truthfully and proactively to participants what is in the brew before they decide to participate in a ceremony.
Building a culture around transparency is especially important in the case of adverse reactions. “Imagine someone ‘enrich[es]’ your ayahuasca with dissociatives, mushrooms or synthetic chemicals without your knowledge?” Kaasik adds. “This would be ethically unacceptable and unsafe, but sadly, sometimes it happens.” In such cases, knowing what was in the brew could make adverse reactions more easily remedied and avoided.
In many circles, ayahuasca is reverently referred to as “the medicine,” but would we ingest a medicine without first knowing what we were taking? To uphold the sanctity of this beautiful sacrament, it is critical that individuals keep themselves actively informed about what they are ingesting. Given the choice, people don’t want to take suspicious substances with questionable facilitators when they have access to safe communities. If we are to call ayahuasca a medicine, we should also treat it like one.
About the Author
Jasmine Virdi is a freelance writer, editor, and proofreader. Since 2018, she has been working as a writer, editor, and social media coordinator for the fiercely independent publishing company Synergetic Press, where her passions for ecology, ethnobotany and psychoactive substances converge. Jasmine’s goal as an advocate for psychoactive substances is to raise awareness of the socio-historical context in which these substances emerged in order to help integrate them into our modern-day lives in a safe, grounded and meaningful way.
As a media company at the forefront of many tough psychedelic conversations, we are looking to speak up for those who need to be heard and to provide a platform for oppressed people. Working in the psychedelic renaissance, in a space that typically favors the voices of white privilege, we yearn to bring the unheard voices of women, color, and indigenous roots to the conversation.
We can all agree that African Americans have been systemically and horrifically oppressed for hundreds of years. Countless innocent black people have been murdered by law enforcement with near-zero accountability or sent to jail for decades for crimes that white people may serve no time for.
The drug war has produced horrific outcomes for people domestically and around the world (Colombia, Honduras, Philippines, Singapore, and more). One of the worst parts of the drug war in the US is highly unequal profiling, consequences, and sentencing for non-violent drug offenses.
We try to understand every day by bringing unheard voices into the spotlight to have tough conversations. That said, we know that we will never understand. We are committed to listening deeply to better understand these issues so that we can become stronger allies.
As conversationalists and educators, we like to dig deep and uncover individual truths of what we think is the right way to behave in this world. Our goal is to help bring justice to many causes: ending the drug war, opening eyes to climate change, protecting threatened psychedelic plants and animals, helping indigenous communities, healing minds and bodies through sacred plant medicines and psychedelic drugs, and ending racial inequality in the drug world and beyond.
Psychedelics can inspire a deeper connection to nature, relationships, love, equality, and peace. What we learn from these qualities can be applied to fix many issues, such as racist policies and violence. While acting as journalists to help people form their own opinion, we try to embody these qualities in our decision making.
We will never truly understand what it feels like to be an oppressed black person in America, but we stand with solidarity for those who do know what it feels like. We want to help make the conversation loud, to make the silenced voices heard.
Many other groups and individuals are far better suited to help you protest, donate, or get involved politically. Of the many groups doing great work, a few to start with are: Students for Sensible Drug Policy, M4BL, or Extinction Rebellion.
We believe that the positive lessons that can be learned from psychedelics have the power to change many deeply rooted issues. Our message to everyone right now is to educate yourself and others so you can make the best possible decisions, fight for justice, and hopefully end oppression and racist violence for good.
Let’s rewrite the narrative together, through conversation, education, sharing, and peace.
Resources:
Please take the time to check out these resources to learn how to donate, help, and educate yourself on the situation better.
“There is something about the core of this experience that opens people up to the great mystery of what it is that we don’t know.” -Roland R. Griffiths, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
It is well-established that mystical experiences have historically played a pivotal role in indigenous shamanism and world religions (the miracles surrounding Moses’ burning bush and Jesus’ baptism). What is less well-known and quite unexpected is the discovery that mystical experiences are the catalyst for healing in contemporary psychedelic research.
Both the Johns Hopkins and NYU studies of the impact of psilocybin on cancer patients found that “In both trials, the intensity of the mystical experience described by patients correlated with the degree to which their depression and anxiety decreased.”
In other words, research scientists have consistently occasioned mystical experiences ̶ “flights of the soul” traditionally thought to be beyond the scope of empirical science ̶ in clinical settings by administering high-dose synthetic psilocybin. Furthermore, it turns out that these experiences hold the key to positive patient outcomes in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. Let this enigma sink in for a moment.
Three Seminal Studies
In the 1960s urban legends began circulating, claiming that psychedelics could allow intrepid trippers to meet spirit guides, to travel to other dimensions, and even to know God. In fact, the new science of psychedelics was in part inspired by the mystical experiences of early psychonauts: Grof’s cosmic consciousness revelations on LSD in Prague; Harner’s near-death journey on ayahuasca in the Amazon; and Leary’s mind-expanding awakening on psilocybin mushrooms in Cuernavaca, Mexico, to name but a few. Over time, the ability of psychedelics to generate authentic mystical experiences was confirmed in three seminal studies.
Stanislav Grof, MD, PhD
The first, the Miracle of Marsh Chapel (also called the “Good Friday Experiment”), was a psychedelic research experiment carried out by Walter N. Pahnke under the auspices of Leary’s Harvard Psilocybin Project. On Good Friday 1962, Pahnke randomly divided twenty volunteer Protestant divinity students into two groups assembled in a small room in the basement of Marsh Chapel. In this controlled double-blind study, half the students received capsules containing thirty milligrams of psilocybin and the other half received a large dose of niacin (vitamin B3) as a placebo. The results were compelling.Almost all members of the group receiving psilocybin reported profound mystical experiences.
As Pahnke reports, “the persons who received psilocybin experienced to a greater extent than did the controls the phenomena described by our typology of mysticism.” He built a follow-up survey into the research design, which found that six months after the experiment the psilocybin subjects reported persistent positive, and virtually no negative, changes in their attitude and behavior.
The second study showed that the Good Friday Experiment would withstand the test of time and scrutiny by independent reviewers. A 25-year follow-up investigation conducted in 1987 by then-graduate student Rick Doblin, founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, documented that “all seven psilocybin subjects participating in the long-term follow-up, but none of the controls, still considered their original experience to have had genuinely mystical elements and to have made a valuable contribution to their personal lives.”Doblin concluded that Pahnke’s research on synthetic psilocybin “cast considerable doubt on the assertion that mystical experiences catalyzed by drugs are in any way inferior to nondrug mystical experiences.”
In assessing Pahnke’s research, Walter H. Clark, recipient of the American Psychological Association’s Award for contributions to the psychology of religion, writes “There are no experiments known to me in the history of the scientific study of religion better designed or clearer in their conclusion than this one.”
A third round of studies initiated more than 40 years after the Good Friday Experiment was conducted at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine under the direction of psychopharmacologist Roland R. Griffiths. In two papers, published in 2006 and 2008, Griffiths empirically demonstrated that psilocybin could regularly result in mystical experiences with lasting benefits for participants. These double-blind studies found that: psilocybin was safe in structured, clinical settings; generated one of the five most meaningful experiences for most participants; and produced improvements in mood and quality of life that lasted more than one year (up to 14 months) after the sessions.
Roland R. Griffiths, PhD
Mystical Experience Questionnaire
Our understanding of the common elements in mystical experience is largely based on the insights of William James (The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902) and Walter T. Stace (Mysticism and Philosophy, 1960). These elements were refined, validated, and incorporated into a 30-question operational definition of mysticism, the Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ30) utilized in the Johns Hopkins psilocybin studies.
The five common elements of mystical experience are:
Unity/Sacredness – deep sense of unity with all of existence; knowledge that “all is one”; profound sense of reverence.
Positive Mood/Ecstasy – deeply felt sense of well-being; experience of ultimate peace and tranquility; irrepressible feelings of joy and amazement.
Transcendence of Time and Space/Eternity – loss of usual sense of time and space; existing beyond past, present and future; entering in a liminal, mythical dimension.
Authoritative/True Self – ability to know reality beyond the illusion of the senses; encounter with all-knowing divine presence; understanding one’s authentic or true self.
Ineffable/Indescribable – difficulty describing the experience in words; impossibility of adequately communicating it to others.
Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy
Since 2006, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine has been conducting the first research since the 1970s administering psilocybin to human subjects, including studies of personality changes and of psychedelic therapy for treating tobacco/nicotine addiction and cancer-related distress.
In 2016, Johns Hopkins undertook the largest ever study of psilocybin in treating chronic depression and anxiety among patients with life-threatening cancer. In this randomized, double-blind, cross-over trial, 51 patients were given a low placebo-like dose (1-3 mg/70 kg weight) vs. a high dose (22 or 30 mg/kg) in two sessions with a six-month follow-up.
In a Journal of Psychopharmacology article, Roland R. Griffiths, Matthew W. Johnson, and colleagues report that “High-dose psilocybin produced large decreases in clinician- and self-rated measures of depressed mood and anxiety, along with increases in quality of life, life meaning, and optimism, and decreases in death anxiety.” A six-month follow-up study showed that these results were sustained in most of the participants.
Some 70% of the cancer patients rated the high-dose psilocybin sessions as among the top five “most meaningful” and “spiritually significant” life experiences. In addition, their post-session mystical experience scores served as statistically significant predictors of therapeutic efficiency in reducing anxiety and depression.
Source: Matthew W. Johnson, “Psilocybin in the treatment of cancer-associated depression and anxiety,” Powerpoint presentation, Ottawa, 2018
The daughter of one study participant noted that “This opportunity allowed my dad to have vigor in his last couple of weeks of life ̶ vigor that one would think a dying man could not possibly demonstrate. His experience gave my father peace. His peace gives me strength.” These outcomes prompted Griffiths to observe that “It’s very common for people who have profound mystical-type experiences to report very positive changes in attitudes about themselves, their lives, and their relationships with others.” And to exclaim that “As a scientific phenomena, if you can create a condition in which 70 percent of the subjects achieve positive, lasting results…in one or two sessions!”
Guided Imagery-Assisted Psychotherapy
Julie M. Brown, coauthor of this article, is a psychotherapist who for thirty years worked with women’s issues and cancer patients. In her private practice, she utilized a variety of therapeutic modalities, including guided imagery which she studied under her mentor in psychosynthesis.
Guided imagery, also known as visualization, is a technique in which psychotherapists help clients focus on mental images in order to facilitate relaxation, healing, and resolution of life issues. In guided imagery-assisted psychotherapy, a person can call on mental images to improve both emotional and physical health.
Typically, Brown’s cancer patients turned to psychotherapy after conventional treatments (chemotherapy, radiation, pharmaceuticals) failed to reduce or eliminate tumors. By combining guided imagery with a complementary cancer approach, Brown found clients could enter states of mystical experience that empowered both emotional (anxiety, depression) and physical (cancer) self-healing. The profiles and outcomes for three clients are summarized in this table.
Client Profiles and Guided Imagery Therapy Outcomes
Unlike the controlled Johns Hopkins study involving 51 participants, these three case studies were not validated by independent observers nor subjected to methodological controls. Nevertheless, the seminal role of mystical experience in both psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy and guided imagery psychotherapy raises important questions.
Comparative Questions for Future Research
In the case of Brown’s guided imagery outcomes with cancer patients, significant questions are:
Can success in healing cancer via guided imagery be validated? Beyond Brown’s anecdotal cancer outcomes have other therapists been able to reduce or eliminate tumors utilizing guided imagery? Could healing have taken place in this context without a strict sugar-free diet, or was it the combination of diet and guided imagery that facilitated remission?
Can psychedelic therapy protocols be integrated into guided imagery therapy? As an experienced psychonaut, Brown recognizes that the ability to administer psilocybin to clients could have significantly shortened the therapeutic healing process, possibly from years to months. Given that clinical trials on psilocybin for treating depression have been given “breakthrough therapy” status by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, what changes in state and federal policies and professional regulations would have to take place so that psychiatrists and psychotherapists could legally integrate psychedelics into more conventional treatment modalities?
In the case of Johns Hopkins psychedelic therapy outcomes with cancer patients, significant questions are:
Can psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy be used not only to alleviate psychological anxiety and depression in terminal cancer patients but also to facilitate physiological healing in cancer patients?
Given the pivotal role of mystical experience in both short-term psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy and long-term guided imagery psychotherapy, could psychedelic therapy combined with guided imagery possibly reduce or eliminate tumors in cancer patients, if integrated into a mid-term treatment protocol?
Will long-term, costly psychotherapy eventually be replaced by short-term, more affordable psychedelic psychotherapy? Since short-term psychedelic therapy has achieved positive and sustained outcomes in 70% of the participants, based on one or two high-dose psilocybin sessions administered over several weeks, will it eventually replace long-term psychiatric and psychotherapeutic modalities which require years of treatment and cost thousands of dollars?
How Does Mystical Experience Facilitate Healing?
These rigorous psychedelic therapy studies of psychological stress reduction and anecdotal guided imagery therapy cases of physiological cancer remission suggest that mystical experience can facilitate both mental and physical healing. “How” this healing takes place is the theoretical Holy Grail of the new science of psychedelics.
Our quest to unravel this mystery begins with the insights of four mind explorers: Roland R. Griffiths, grandfather of the psychedelic renaissance; Robin Carhart-Harris, pioneer of psychedelic brain imaging; Stanislav Grof, founder of LSD psychotherapy; and Carl G. Jung, who with Sigmund Freud laid the foundations of modern psychotherapy.
In essence, Griffiths concludes that “the psilocybin experience enables a sense of deeper meaning and an understanding that in the largest frame everything is fine and that there is nothing to be fearful of.” How the brain expands from normal consciousness to encompass this “largest frame” is visually revealed in Carhart-Harris’s magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the brain’s neural pathways before and after ingesting psilocybin mushrooms. Psychedelics allow us to leave the “brain’s default-mode network,” the brain’s everyday information highways, and travel into areas of the mind only available in expanded states of consciousness, clearing the way for mystical experience.
Carhart-Harris: Brain’s Neural Pathways: Before and After Magic Mushrooms
Source: G. Petri, P. Expert, et. al., “Homological scaffolds of brain functional networks,” Journal of the Royal Society, December 2014
What is the source of this expanded consciousness? Based on guiding thousands of psychedelic sessions, in The Holotropic Mind, Grof reaches this paradigm-shifting conclusion: “I see consciousness and the human psyche as expressions and reflections of a cosmic intelligence that permeates the entire universe and all of existence. We are not just highly evolved animals with biological computers embedded inside our skulls; we are also fields of consciousness without limits transcending time, space, matter, and linear causality.”
Jung’s concept of the “spiritual self” (also called “spiritual consciousness”) embodies knowledge that emerges from these transcendent “fields of consciousness.” Beyond Freud’s three-fold model of the self, comprised of the body, emotions, and intellect, Jung proposes the existence of a “spiritual self.” Through dreams, messages from the spiritual self are brought into awareness. This paper shows that, in addition to appearing in dreams, the authentic spiritual self may emerge through mystical experiences occasioned by psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy and guided imagery.
Mystical experiences arise when the doors of perception are flung wide open so that the spiritual self can emerge from the depths of the psyche, empowering us to heal and understand that in the cosmic scheme of things “all is well.”
Grof suggests that “the potential significance of LSD and other psychedelics for psychiatry and psychology was comparable to the value the microscope has for biology or the telescope has for astronomy.” We propose that, just as in astrophysics “dark matter” cannot be directly “detected” but only “implied” by gravitational effects, so in psychology, mystical experience cannot be easily “accessed” but can be regularly “occasioned” through psychedelics. Hidden from ordinary consciousness, mystical experience manifests from the dark matter of the mind.
Hopefully, these reflections on the role of mystical experience in psychotherapy will inspire further exploration of this unique phenomena that holds a key to health and well-being.
Jerry B. Brown, Ph.D., is an anthropologist and Julie M. Brown, M.A., LMHC, is a psychotherapist. They are coauthors of The Psychedelic Gospels: The Secret History of Hallucinogens in Christianity, 2016.
Undoubtedly, psychedelics are valuable tools for self-understanding, transformation, and healing, enabling us to peer into our inner workings and understand the world around us in new ways. By nature, psychedelics are destabilizing as they facilitate non-ordinary states of consciousness, catapulting us outside the bounds of our everyday perceptions. They heal us by disrupting our normative flow of consciousness leading to a multitude of insights ranging from the somatically strange to the mystically ineffable.
But, psychedelics and the realizations they enable will not necessarily change your life if you are not committed to working with the experienceafterwards. This step is known as “psychedelic integration” and it involves chewing on our experiences, digesting any insights, and taking practical steps to implement those insights as positive change.
Psychedelic researchers and psychedelic-assisted psychotherapists have long considered integration a key component in psychedelic healing. In fact, they place major emphasis on post-experience “integrative follow-up sessions” as a scientific approach to aftercare. Many believe that integration protocols and strategies play a crucial role in positive long-term therapeutic outcomes, and some even argue that the value of integration is greater than the psychedelic sessions themselves.
What Does Psychedelic Integration Mean in Practical Terms?
Going on a psychedelic trip is a lot like physical travel. If you’ve ever gone backpacking or traveled for an extended period of time, you will know that returning home can often come as a major shock to the system, sometimes taking weeks—months, even—to re-adjust to our former lives.
Similar to travel, psychedelic experiences can also shift our perceptions about the world, pushing us outside our comfort zones and into self-realization. Returning to our regular work-life patterns can be psychologically jarring, as we find ourselves irrevocably changed whilst everything we left behind remains the same. Thus, reshaping our lives to mirror the inward changes we’ve undergone can be profoundly challenging.
The psychedelic experience produces a spectrum of insights, ranging from personal to transpersonal to ecological. Sometimes a person will gain a new perspective on who they are, shifting the landscape around their professional purpose, intimate relationships, and lifestyles.
Psychedelic integration, then, is the process of weaving the practical with the mystical, taking profound, ineffable experiences beyond the temporality of the psychedelic state and grounding them in our day-to-day lives in the form of enduring, positive changes.
In this sense, integration is an active, intentional process where an individual consciously reflects on their psychedelic experience and what it means for them personally. It involves exploring how insights can be translated into bite-sized actionable steps. The personal nature of integration means that an individual needs to find an authentic way of implementing their experience in a way that suits their unique needs and personality.
After an initial revelation, the experience, materials accessed, and insights gained can quickly fade into a dreamlike memory or become psychically compartmentalized, getting lost in the busy pulse of modern life. Thus, it is important to carve out time to consciously work with these experiences.
Integration and the Importance of Pre-Session Intention Setting
Preparation and pre-session intention setting are critical components to integration. Returning to the metaphor of travel, preparing for a psychedelic experience is likened to all the work that goes into preparing for a long-distance trip. We would never go to the airport to catch a flight without the basic essentials: passport, money, a bag with at least the bare necessities, and a destination.
Similarly, setting an intention is akin to having a destination. It can provide a grounding anchor in a psychedelic session, helping guide an individual and give them a lens through which to process insights that arrive post-trip. Integration is unique to each individual — it’s inextricably intertwined with their reason for using psychedelics in the first place.
In the cult classic, The Psychedelic Experience, former Harvard researchers Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert write: “In planning a session, the first question to be decided is ‘what is the goal?’” Whether your intention is to heal from a traumatic experience, overcome addiction, deepen your connection to nature, or examine a specific aspect of yourself, it is important to know what you’re aiming for.
According to clinical psychologist, psychedelic integration therapist and author of The Psychedelics Integration Handbook, Dr. Ryan Westrum, psychedelic integration is a continuous process similar to an infinity wheel in that “future stories will be cultivated, supported and benefitted if you are thinking about them prior.”
Another crucial element of preparation involves tending to your set and setting. “Set” generally refers to a person’s pre-session mindset. However, it can also include both immediate and long-range states of mind, covering everything from fears, hopes, and expectations about the session to personal history and enduring personality traits. The better the preparation, the more equipped an individual is to integrate their experiences.
The “setting” is the container of the experience. It factors into account when and where the experience will take place. In The Psychedelic Experience, the description of “setting” includes a temporal dimension, encouraging individuals planning for a psychedelic session to set aside up to three days to process their insights, so there’s “sufficient time for reflection and meditation.” The text cautions that returning to work too hastily will likely “blur the clarity of the vision and reduce the potential for learning.”
Similarly, Dr. Westrum advises:
“One could argue that the first hours and the days that immediately follow the psychedelic experience are the most crucial when it comes to integration. In general, our modern-day, contemporary lifestyles are so hectic, and we find ourselves constantly working, traveling and moving. It is important if you are considering taking a psychedelic, to take the proper time to do so, more appropriately thinking of it as a two-day experience. We need to carve essential time out to reflect and digest what happened, using the second day for purposes of integration.”
When considering healthy integration practices, it is essential for an individual to carve out the time and space needed for processing. Individuals are generally advised to avoid making any major life changes in the weeks that follow a psychedelic experience, and instead take time to rest, digest and distill insights before initiating dramatic changes.
Integration, Intuition and “Inner Healing Intelligence”
The concept of psychedelic integration is closely linked to “inner healing intelligence,” a notion originally developed by Stanislav Grof, and later refined by Michael Mithoefer, Clinical Investigator and Medical Director at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS).
The notion of “inner healing intelligence” is built on the premise that nature is intelligent by design. For example, when we injure ourselves physically, bruising a knee or cutting a finger, our body automatically initiates its own sophisticated healing process. Just like a seed contains within it all the knowledge to become a tree, humans have an innate capacity to heal when they are in the right environment. Similarly, the psyche has its own innate healing capacity to extend towards wholeness. In the integration process, individuals are encouraged to connect with their inner healing intelligence and take responsibility for mending.
The Emerging Field of Psychedelic Integration Therapy
With the psychedelic renaissance in full swing and the resurgence of research illuminating the therapeutic potential of hallucinogens, it’s no surprise that the public opinion of psychedelics is beginning to shift.
But, the stigma around psychedelics still exists. For this reason, individuals who undergo psychedelic experiences outside of a psychotherapeutic or clinical paradigm meet challenges upon reentering their day-to-day lives. The reason is that they usually have no one to openly share the experience with and no available resources to help sift through the intricacies of the trip.
Sometimes individuals need to reach out for professional support in order to digest the experience properly. Unfortunately, most mainstream therapists aren’t equipped to have a constructive conversation about psychedelics, however. As a result, many patients feel reluctant to talk about their experience for fear of being judged.
This gap in the mental health system paired with the growing public interest in psychedelics creates a higher demand for psychedelic therapists. As a result, the number of professional integration therapists, coaches, and specialists is increasing. The newly growing subdiscipline of psychedelic integration has risen to prominence, creating a bridge between traditional psychotherapeutic practice and the “psychedelic underground” in which the two cross-pollinate.
Many individuals who have not followed the institutional track to become an accredited mental health professional are emerging as practitioners within this space. But, what makes an individual qualified to be an integration expert? To an extent, it seems that a bona fide psychedelic experience takes greater precedence than formal certifications.
In choosing an integration therapist or coach to work with, integration expert Dr. Ryan Westrum expressed his concern over individuals falling into the wrong hands:
“Neo-integration therapists and coaches that don’t have a psychological background or a deep understanding of the world of consciousness scare me. There is beauty if calling something a ‘spiritual emergence,’ but if you start to recognize a person has suicidal ideation or chronic depression that didn’t break, you need healthy psychiatric and psychological support.”
He is careful to emphasize that beyond having the training to deal with such difficult scenarios, he believes “relationship is number one” and that ultimately “there needs to be a relationship established that feels safe, is psychedelic friendly, without judgment and is willing to hear where you need to go.”
Beyond psychotherapeutic and research paradigms, psychedelic integration is beginning to take root in the mainstream. Spanning across the US, there is now a variety of public integration circles emerging in the form of in-person and online groups. Psychedelic integration circles provide individuals who cannot afford therapy or private coaching a low-cost alternative. It gives them a judgment-free space to talk about their experience and provides access to a community that otherwise might not be there.
Recognizing the growing need for psychedelic literacy in mental health, Psychedelics Today founders, Kyle Buller and Joe Moore, created an online course “Navigating Psychedelics For Clinicians and Therapists” especially directed at healthcare professionals looking to deepen their knowledge of psychedelic research and to support their clients with psychedelic integration. The next eight-week online course is currently open for enrollment, scheduled to begin on May 7, 2020.
Is Integration Always Necessary?
I asked Dr. Westrum for his thoughts on the importance of integration after a psychedelic experience. Is it always necessary? He cautioned:
“It is never that you’re not taking enough medicine or not having enough experience. Rather, it is that you aren’t processing it appropriately. In 90% of cases, you look at people’s behaviors and lifestyles only to find they’re still stuck, they’re not taking what they are learning through psychedelic experiences and integrating it.”
It can be helpful to envision integration as existing on a spectrum or continuum. Four days of consecutive ayahuasca ceremonies will likely require more time for integration than a microdosing experience. Even if we feel that we don’t have anything that needs integrating, Dr. Westrum urges us to “at least process the experience at the level of ruling it out,” emphasizing that “everything deserves to be integrated into our lives.”
About the Author
Jasmine Virdi is a freelance writer, editor, and proofreader. She currently works for the fiercely independent publishing company Synergetic Press, where her passions for ecology, ethnobotany and psychoactive substances converge. Jasmine’s goal as an advocate for psychoactive substances is to raise awareness of the socio-historical context in which these substances emerged in order to help integrate them into our modern-day lives in a safe, grounded, and meaningful way.
Throughout my twenties, I spent a lot of time wondering what the meaning of my life was. I was reading Hermann Hesse, Viktor Frankl, and other similar authors, but I couldn’t quite connect those books to my own life. I wanted to know what it was like to experientially engage in a vocation. Reminiscing on this struggle, I was motivated to write an article on my experiences thus far with psychedelic integration, share what has been helpful to me, and provide insight to those either wondering about this practice, studying it, or actually beginning it.
My path towards becoming a licensed psychotherapist was not direct, as I did not receive my clinical license until my late 50s! I can now see, with that lovely 20/20 hindsight, that everything I did led me here, with valuable insight that I would not have had if my path had been more direct. I studied food, nutrition, and painting, had children, taught yoga, and became a certified Ayurvedic counselor before landing on my current path.
My Ayurvedic practice began to really crystalize my direction. Ayurveda is a science of life and embodies the mind, body, and spirit to integrate a lifestyle most suited for each individual. Much of my Ayurvedic practice had to do with clients’ emotional states. As such, I became more focused on the mind. This led me to a conversation with the dean of a nearby university, and shortly after, I enrolled in a Master’s program that had not even been an idea in my conscious awareness the year before.
Plant medicine was not on my radar at the time of my schooling. This path evolved through witnessing the healing that close friends and family experienced. Having had my fair share of psychedelic experiences as a young adult living through the ‘70s, I was always comfortable with the experience but did not yet see it as a healing therapy. After going directly to the source again and having my own experience with this new idea in mind, I now KNEW this was an unprecedented healing modality. I have since expanded my mindset to welcome plant medicines/psychedelic experiences as one of the most effective healing therapies that exists.
For thousands of years, people have been using psychedelic substances to further their understanding of themselves and the universe. Sadly, most of these medicines have been labeled as Schedule 1 drugs in the USA, though this is changing with several FDA clinical trials currently taking place. These research trials are studying the efficacy of using psilocybin as a treatment for depression, and MDMA as a treatment for PTSD. The trials for MDMA are in Phase 3, and the hope is to have this as a valid form of therapy by 2021. In the meantime, outside the US, there are countries where plant medicine is legal now.
Psychedelic Integration is designed to assist those seeking support in connection with psychedelic experiences. Individuals who have had difficult experiences can benefit from a better understanding of the often-challenging feelings stirred up by psychedelics; while those who have found the use of psychedelics to be a positive method of gaining insight can use supportive therapy to bolster and integrate that knowledge into their daily lives (http://www.ingmargorman.com/psychedelic-therapy). This part of the process, before and after the experience itself, is such an integral component of the whole journey. Working together, the therapist helps the client to understand what may happen, guiding them toward the safest set and setting (this phrase describes the physical, mental, social and environmental context that an individual brings into a psychedelic experience), and then fully integrates the experience afterward, perhaps even for months or years to come. We all have the capacity to understand our own selves, but having a guide makes sense of a plant medicine journey or psychedelic experience leads to deeper healing and a deeper understanding of self. I like to think of it like this: if plant medicine is a teacher, then an integrative therapist is a tutor, helping the traveler understand the teachings.
There are 3 categories in which I have been offering integration to clients, not one necessarily more prevalent than any of the others.
Category One: “My husband is freaking out! He did Bufo 3 days ago and he is sitting on the floor of the shower, shaking and crying… he can’t seem to come out of it.”
Category Two: “I found your name on an integration list and I need to talk to someone about an experience I had…”
Category Three: “I’ve been thinking a lot about going to do ayahuasca (or psilocybin, etc). I’ve read so much about it but I feel scared. I’ve never done anything like this before.”
All names and details are changed to protect privacy as I proceed to describe a sample of each category:
Category one:
I received a call from Ron, who was clearly in distress, evidenced by the urgency and desperation in his voice. He was begging me to see him (he lived 2 hours away). He had experienced a powerful bufo journey (the strongest known natural psychedelic on planet earth, tryptamine 5-MeO-DMT, produced by Bufo Alvarius, a toad of the Sonoran Desert). I found out that he was not an inexperienced partaker in psychedelics, as he had gone on an ayahuasca retreat for a week the year before. Regardless, the bufo experience floored him. Until I was able to get him in to see me, I instructed him to go to the beach, assisted by his friend, and sit on the sand, feeling the sand under his hands and legs, and breathe in the healing salty air, using a mantra of “I am safe, I am right here” repetitively. This mantra was to ground him to the here and now. I also had him eat grounding (comforting) foods, which his friend was able to provide (warm stew, butternut squash, soup, etc.).
He arrived the next morning to my office wrapped in a blanket with sand on his feet, as he was coming straight from his second day of sitting on the beach. He was trembling and he didn’t understand what had happened to him. Having been further informed by his friend, and thankfully, with the knowledge of Dr. Stanislav Grof’s work with “spiritual emergency,” I was able to normalize this intensity for him. He was experiencing past trauma (that he re-lived during his ayahuasca ceremonies the year before), but now he was somatically experiencing it, coming up and out of his body, resulting in uncontrollable shaking. Through his tears, he described his trauma as his body continued to tremble. As a child, Ron had been repeatedly molested by his older brother, and when he went to his mother, she told him he was lying. Confused and traumatized, he left home at 11 years old to stay with a friend, and his mother never came to collect him. I encouraged him to just keep on letting his body tremble- that this was a necessary part of releasing the traumatic experience. I found myself moving closer to him and making sure he felt safe. After giving him the encouragement that this was exactly what needed to happen, and with the support of his loving friends and family, he was eventually able to go home, instead of what normally would have resulted in an ER visit (I have to admit, when he first arrived, I thought I would have to refer him to the ER, but am very thankful that this didn’t happen). His trusted friend kept very close by, physically assuring him that he wasn’t alone and he was safe.
Two of his friends brought him back the next morning. Ron already looked better and was able to articulate more about his experience. He went on to meet with me several more times and has been able to process these very difficult events to the point where they are no longer stuck in his body. He has since described a sense of calm that he couldn’t ever remember feeling.
Because of the knowledge of what each of the particular plant medicines can do and how the body processes trauma, we were able to prevent what could’ve been a very detrimental stay in a psychiatric hospital. This is a very clear example of why integration is so important, and particularly with a trained therapist, with prior experience working in an acute care unit of a psychiatric hospital.
People who reach out for integration are looking to understand their experience and process it through their own history and trauma. They’ve turned to plant medicines or psychedelics because what they have been doing hasn’t been working and they’re not happy with how they’ve been living. They have not been able to get through the walls they built to keep them safe growing up (but no longer serve them as an adult).
In a therapeutic environment, there are no “bad trips.” The experience referenced above may appear to be frightening, but as we can see, it was very intense, and yet, very healing.
Category Two:
As for Category Two, I’ll share an example I had with Paul. He called to tell me that he wanted an appointment because he had a psilocybin experience that left him feeling happy for the first time since he could remember. He had been on the verge of suicide many times for the 3 years prior, seeking different forms of therapy and medication to no avail. He could not get out of a deep sadness and numbness that he felt, no matter what he tried. Plant medicine was a last resort, and in his words, if it didn’t work, he was done.
He tentatively arrived in my office and described this feeling of peace and love that he was somewhat desperate to hold on to. This integrative therapy evolved in a way that I didn’t expect, because over the course of a year of our work together, Paul went through some physical symptoms that derailed him for quite some time, but was so closely connected to the fear that kept him from experiencing any joy in his life. As he came to realize that these symptoms were connected to past trauma, and as he realized that he was, indeed, a very sensitive person (this was met with almost disdain when it was suggested in the early stages of therapy), he truly began to heal and come alive. This is an example of what the “spectrum of trauma” means. Paul’s repressed grief had a lot to do with his intense emotions around the death of a beloved pet when he was 11 years old. He was shamed for his grief by family members and peers. By pushing down these feelings of grief, coupled with this new shame, his capacity to feel was also pushed down, and depression became his norm. While this trauma may not appear to be nearly as intense as Ron’s trauma, it affected Paul to the point where he had disconnected from himself, and ultimately, didn’t think life was worth living, although he had no understood connection to the repressed grief at the time.
The psilocybin journey showed him what was possible, but it did not enable him to live a happy life until he got underneath his “firewall” (described below) and worked at it. There was a lot of grief for him to process, and tears came along with shame until it moved its way out. Today, I can happily say that smiling is the norm for him, and spontaneity is part of his daily life. He embraces his sensitivity and sees how it has become a gift to him. He worked hard to get there.
We all have unresolved trauma. Trauma is the response to a deeply distressing or disturbing event that overwhelms an individual’s ability to cope, causes feelings of helplessness, diminishes their sense of self and their ability to feel the full range of emotions and experiences. Some of us have experienced more intense trauma than others, but some of us are more sensitive than others as well. If a disturbing experience led you to disconnect from your true self because what you were feeling was too much, that is the internal impact of trauma. We create a “part” that protects us from this overwhelming emotional pain, assuring us that we will not feel it again. Most of the time, we are completely unaware that we have done this.
These traumas become more clear during integration therapy, as the plant medicine helps to reveal that which we have buried deep in our subconscious. I truly believe that psychedelics/ plant medicine, when used properly, are here to bring us back to our whole self- to show us our own “operating system” that we have created as a result of our experiences, and how there may be some “firewalls” up that are protecting us from pain and keeping us from our true nature. Why would we want to pull down this firewall that has protected us for so long? Because that pain we are protecting is where we are going to find ourselves the most alive. We need to sit with it, feel it, allow it, and finally, let it move its way through us and out. What is depression, but a condition where we feel disconnected from self and others, where nothing will make us feel better because we have lost our way? What is anxiety, but an unprocessed fear that we are not going to be ok? We may have felt like we couldn’t survive this emotional pain as a child (emotional pain can be very intense and confusing for a child, and none of us are exempt from this), but we need to know that we will survive it now. This is also what integration therapy is about- having a safe place to be reminded that you will be okay now. You are safe. You can learn to witness and feel at the same time, thus allowing the firewalls to gently move out of the way.
Category Three:
Finally, I’ll touch on Category Three. Terry called to tell me that she wanted to take psilocybin but was very scared to. Her husband and brother had both taken it and assured her that they would be there for her. Her motivation for wanting to do this was to help understand and heal her Misophonia, a condition meaning “hatred of sound,” which manifested in her becoming highly irritated at many sounds, with the sound of someone chewing or sniffing causing her the most distress. She loved her husband and children, but these sounds, even coming from them, created anger inside of her, which in turn, stressed her out even more.
We talked about some of her history and when the Misophonia began. She described overhearing a conversation between her parents that involved her father being unfaithful with a man. Terry loved her dad, and I believe she did not know what to do with any feelings of anger towards him, and she remembers being really angry at him chewing his food. This wasn’t the first time she thought there was a connection, but she didn’t know how to remove the root of it. We talked about what the set and setting would be like for her journey: music, a mantra she could use as she began preparing for the day, and what her husband could do as her “sitter.”
When we met after her journey, she described feeling so much love and no fear at all. She shared that she had a sure feeling that whatever was going on, there was something inside of her that was going to know how to handle it and know what to do. This was the plant medicine reminding her who she really was. Our subsequent sessions were about connecting with the anger that she was sidestepping and sitting with feeling uncomfortable around that, as she was able to understand that while it wasn’t safe for her at the time to feel anger towards her father, she transferred it to something that did feel safe. Obviously, this was no longer serving her and it was hurting her and her family members. Because of the inner knowing that she received from her experience with psilocybin, she was more easily able to access the anger in our integration sessions afterward, without feeling like she couldn’t handle it. She worked hard through these sessions and in-between, and while the Misophonia isn’t completely gone, she feels it very rarely now, and she is able to easily ride through the irritation.
As a therapist, it is a very rewarding experience to see the recognition in someone’s eyes that “yes, I can handle this and I will be ok.” This concept, called “therapeutic alliance,” allows a client to let go- to begin to trust. Many clients aren’t aware that they don’t trust because they’ve never experienced trust in the first place. They don’t know what it feels like to let go and still feel safe. Somewhere along their road of life, usually in early childhood, the world became an unsafe place to be. This is often due to parents or caregivers unable to see their child’s pain, or not knowing what to do with it, likely due to their own unrealized traumas. The child then learns to do whatever is necessary to survive because their world depends on them burying their intense emotions and “pushing through.” Intense emotions can make someone feel as if they are going to die. The emotion is too big for the child to bear, and often, there are no words to communicate this. If they are not seen by someone who cares, then the child has to figure it out for themself. This is where plant medicine can reveal deep traumas, underneath all of their survival mechanisms, beyond the “firewall.” Of course, there are other methods, but here, we focus on plant medicine.
It takes a great deal of courage (doing something in spite of fear) to put yourself in the hands of a shaman or sitter and enter the unknown. Most clients will say that they were scared but did it anyway.
Another final case I’d like to share: Brian had been addicted to heroin on and off for about 7 years. Many rehabs and detoxes did not accomplish what a 10-day stay at an ibogaine clinic did.
Brian had been on and off with me for about 3 years. We were working on a harm reduction approach away from opiates. This approach involved cannabis and kratom (an extract from a tropical evergreen tree from Southeast Asia, often used to help wean someone off opiates). Brian had already been through Buprenorphine and Methadone enough times to realize they weren’t going to keep him from relapsing back to opiates. The cannabis and kratom approach was up and down, and he still felt desperate. After much talk about ibogaine (ibogaine is a plant-based substance extracted from the iboga shrub, which originates in Africa), he went to a clinic out of the country and was administered ibogaine from a medical doctor. I believe that it is an immense disservice to addicts that ibogaine has not yet been legalized in this country for opiate addiction, although that is a subject for another article (stay tuned!). Two weeks later, he was back in session with me describing his experience, and it was clear that something had truly changed. He was able to see different paths that he took in his life, and how he always had other options. These paths were shown to him in a way that he reports “almost felt like it had rewired my brain. My interest in opiates is just not there”. A year and a half later, still clean from opiates, Brian has been working on creating that trusting relationship with his own self, developing confidence that he can withstand uncomfortable and painful emotions. Without integration, the uncovering of painful emotions could have led back to a relapse.
Thus, integration involves creating that relationship with yourself, dialoguing with that younger version of yourself, and helping your inner child to heal- integrating your OWN self. The word integration is so perfect, because as we are integrating the plant medicine experience, what we are really doing is integrating our true self, beyond all of our ego’s constructions of what was necessary at the time, but no longer serves us in being whole.
What has been most helpful to me as an integrative therapist was my own experiences with plant medicine, particularly ayahuasca. It’s not always easy to “hold space” for some of the pain that is releasing from clients, as the energy can be intense. One of the most important visions I had during an ayahuasca journey in Peru was the night I had a matrix in front of me of all happenings between humans for a long timespan. Certain squares of the matrix would become the focus as I observed specific human mental suffering, abuse, some more benign scenes… some family members and friends I knew… I could move the scene out of the way if it wasn’t something I felt I needed, and focus closer on scenes that were meaningful to me in some ways. I witnessed a scene between a relative and her father that was devastating, as well as several others like this. The reason this was the most important vision for me was I was a silent observer. I was aware of the pain and tragedy, but I wasn’t in pain myself. This is not usually true for me in my daily life, as I feel pain in my own body when someone else is experiencing pain. It has, at times, made it difficult for me as a therapist to hold back tears when a client is in tears, and I have had to momentarily think of something funny to pull me out of this empathic experience. Being able to be aware of the pain in this matrix experience, but not be in pain myself, has helped me tremendously in my practice, as well as with friends and family. I feel less responsible to “fix” it, in a way, because I clearly realize the pain is not mine. This has not made me less empathetic in any way, but it has enabled me to have more clarity. Therapy isn’t about fixing, but helping people to uncover their own guide within; their own inner wisdom. This has become my purpose, to just be a guide in the storm of someone’s life and allow them to see that they’ve known all along who they are, they just need to move their “firewalls” out of the way.
If you are reading this and have been wondering what it might be like to work with people in this capacity, I hope this has been helpful. As Terence McKenna once said, “It’s all about love… making someone else’s existence just a little easier… nothing else matters. I know this now.”
About the Author
Debbie Kadagian became certified as a Holistic Health Practitioner in 2007, specializing in Ayurvedic Health Counseling. She traveled to India to study at the Jiva Institute with Dr. Partap Chauhan. She received her Masters in Social Work from Fordham University and became a licensed clinical social worker. She has worked at inpatient psychiatric hospitals and outpatient treatment centers prior to setting up her private practice. Debbie is also a certified yoga teacher since 2001. Debbie has a true desire to assist people in finding meaning in their lives in order to transcend suffering, addiction, and trauma.
Debbie is the producer of the film, “Healing the Mind: The Synthesis of Ayurveda and Western Psychiatry.”
When we think of psychedelics, we don’t often think of cannabis. But in an era when people are turning to alternative medicines for mental health, can we use cannabis as an adjunct to therapy?
By Sean Lawlor
As people eagerly anticipate MDMA’s forecasted legalization as a therapeutic adjunct for treating PTSD, others are turning to a popular plant medicine to work through trauma.
When people hear that cannabis is used in therapy, they often respond with confusion. Cannabis is often thought of as a drug to avoid or dull pain and trauma—not a medicine for healing it. But, if the psychedelic renaissance has made one thing clear, it’s that intention can transform a drug experience into a journey of profound healing.
Daniel McQueen is regarded as a pioneer of “psychedelic cannabis,” or using the plant to experience insight, growth, and healing. After earning a masters degree in transpersonal counseling from Naropa University in 2012, McQueen founded Medicinal Mindfulness, an organization dedicated to promoting safe and intentional psychedelic medicine practices for personal and global healing, and transformation.
Given the illegality of psychedelics, Medicinal Mindfulness focuses on integration coaching and psychedelic harm reduction. The organization even offers psychedelic crisis counseling at festivals. McQueen’s trip sitting workshops unknowingly paved the foundation for a Psychedelic Sitters School, one of Medicinal Mindfulness’s most popular offerings.
When Colorado passed its adult-use law in 2014, the organization focused on harnessing the plant’s psychedelic potential in “conscious cannabis” circles. Like many plant medicine ceremonies, these groups involve intention setting, ceremony, music, and breathwork to enhance the psychedelic experience and catalyze a powerful internal experience. From these groups, McQueen developed cannabis-assisted psychedelic therapy, where clients use THC as an adjunct to their one-on-one therapy.
In 2014, no other organization approached cannabis with a therapeutic lens. In recent years, other businesses have launched clinics using the same concept. From Massachusetts to Alaska, there’s now some form of cannabis-assisted healing found across the USA.
Due to Colorado’s cannabis laws, Medicinal Mindfulness can offer their services above-ground. An agreement with the clinic’s landlord allows clients to vape cannabis oil or use a tincture in the therapy session, so long as the client provides their own cannabis. While doctors may refer patients with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder to the clinic, a referral is not necessary because PTSD is a qualifying condition for the state’s medical-cannabis program. Plus, you don’t need a card to procure cannabis anymore.
“We’ve never had a legal issue,” McQueen explains. “In Colorado, you can get a medical marijuana card for PTSD. We’re just [addressing trauma] in a novel container.”
That container is a therapy office and assistance with personal growth and emotional healing. Medicinal Mindfulness’s therapeutic container is built on a foundation of trust, connection, and empathy, so clients feel heard and safe before entering a vulnerable emotional state. These sessions also involve talk therapy and going inward, or lying down with an eye mask on and listening to slow, relaxing music, while the therapist leads a guided meditation or other support.
Dr. Carla Clements is Medicinal Mindfulness’s Clinical Advisor. On top of having served as chair of Naropa’s transpersonal counseling department and as the independent rater for MAPS Phase II MDMA study, Dr. Clements has 35 years of clinical experience specializing in helping women with PTSD. She describes the ideal container as a place where clients can feel seen and heard. This gives them space to relax into a sense of safety, which is essential for healing trauma.
“Trauma is not just the mind being captured by a traumatic event,” Dr. Clements says to Psychedelics Today. “We now know trauma is buried deep in the body’s neurological system.”
Specifically, trauma gets buried in the body’s sympathetic nervous system (SNS), home to the fight, flight or freeze response. Trauma hijacks the SNS, restricting access to the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), the internal network that controls feelings of pleasure and well-being.
Parasympathetic Nervous System Sympathetic Nervous System
(PNS) (SNS)
The curve chart—used by Dr. Clements to explain trauma—represents the spectrum of possible emotional experience. Most experiences occur near the middle. Stress pulls one to the right, while relaxation opens to the left. The far right of the curve represents severe trauma. People with this type of trauma often become trapped in that small sliver of emotional experience. “The normal range of emotions gets crushed into the trauma reaction,” explains Dr. Clements.
In contrast, the far left represents a height of pleasure and satisfaction or a “peak” experience. The sympathetic and the parasympathetic cannot function at the same time, however. So, if a person is trapped in the SNS, the bliss and relaxation of the PNS is impossible—unless something breaks them out of their rut.
Enter plant medicine.
“What we’re learning about psychedelics,” Dr. Clements explains, “is that they have a peculiar ability to help people restore normal functioning in the PNS/SNS balance.”
Similarly, Dr. Clements believes cannabis is a highly-underestimated modality that can evoke healing experiences on par with more traditional psychedelics. “We minimized the power of cannabis,” she says. “We called it a ‘weed.’ We didn’t understand its healing power, and we’re finding our way back now.”
She sees that when we use cannabis with intention, ritual, and support, it can help people “touch that peak place inside,” widening the spectrum of emotional potential. In the therapeutic container of empathy and trust, she invites the patient to relax and focus on their embodied experience by deepening their emotional awareness. As they focus on relaxation, the patient creates new neurological memories outside SNS panic. In this state, Dr. Clements can help clients integrate these new feelings into their lives, ultimately making pleasant, calm emotions more accessible.
Dr. Clements explains that during integration—the session that happens post-plant medicine to help patients integrate messages, ideas, and new perspectives into their lives—patients can experience and relive positive feelings similar to the way they recall negative emotions about their trauma. “Now, there’s a tiny bit more balance, a little bit of good against that tidal wave [of negative emotions],” she says. “[They] then can create a structure around that memory, a healing trajectory where goodness can expand.”
So, why isn’t every therapist incorporating cannabis into their practice? Unfortunately, all evidence showcasing cannabis’s healing power is technically anecdotal. This is largely due to the plant’s Schedule I status, and the DEA’s archaic regulations forcing researchers to study notoriously weak cannabis flower grown at the University of Mississippi—product that pales in comparison to what’s available in dispensaries.
Dr. Clements admits her model—focusing on cannabis’s effects on the nervous system—is less aimed at scientific validity than communication of complex issues. She describes her model as a way of “understanding what’s occurring inside, with some science and metaphor mixed in.”
The scientific language of the SNS and PNS can help people understand their experience of trauma. But the curve is ultimately an allegory for one’s internal experience, a way of visualizing severe trauma and one’s inherent potential to heal.
Interestingly, Dr. Clements’s model is comparable to MDMA treatment in several ways. For instance, MDMA regularly energizes sensations of love, empathy, and relaxation. It allows trauma survivors to have peak experiences, ultimately rebalancing the nervous system. Still, there are key differences between using MDMA and cannabis to heal trauma. A cannabis experience is shorter, allowing people to use the plant day-to-day without much disruption. The comedown is gentler, too, compared to MDMA, which is often followed by a period of depression from serotonin depletion. Most significantly, cannabis does not overwhelm the participant, which is essential when working through the complexity of PTSD.
“With cannabis, there’s a lot more agency and control, which people who have been traumatized really benefit from experiencing,” says Dr. Clements.
Still, Dr. Clements doesn’t believe that cannabis therapy can produce the results seen in the MDMA trial, where 68 percent of participants no longer met the criteria for PTSD. McQueen disagrees, however. “I’m becoming more and more convinced that cannabis, when used skillfully, may be as effective as MDMA in treating PTSD,” he writes in Psychedelic Cannabis; Breaking the Gate, his most recent book.
Then why do some folks experience paranoia and dissociation when medicating with cannabis? For McQueen, it comes down to the classic concerns of set and setting—a concept generally overlooked in cannabis consumption—and, McQueen’s contribution: Skill.
Skill involves blending flower strains with equal weights of sativa, indica, and hybrid. McQueen recommends making a ritual of the process by setting intentions through meditation or prayer. With clients, skill also incorporates a ceremonial approach and helping clients with therapeutic interventions and shamanic practices. That includes breath work and somatic releasing or discharging stored tension from the nervous system through organic processes such as crying, laughter, and even physical shaking.
“We’re creating a container to allow our clients to gently turn toward their present moment experience with relaxation and acceptance,” McQueen explains. “With these special blends of cannabis, you can mimic the physiological effects of MDMA. The body shakes out the trauma like they do in MDMA sessions. I’ve seen transformational results in just a few sessions.”
“Cannabis medicine is a very soft provider of lessons,” Dr. Clements explains. “If you’re open and relaxed, you can have profound psychedelic experiences where you touch the peak—you feel it, you are in it, and it is you. When people have that again, it is life-transforming.”
Cannabis appears to facilitate more healing than its reputation suggests. In many states, it is already accessible. “It’s legal, it’s affordable, and it can be scaled up to groups—and you can grow it in your backyard,” McQueen points out. With his book and training, he’s trying to spread the word as far as possible. Because, ultimately, everyone has the right to heal. “The gentler we are, the slower we go, the more permission we have to take care of ourselves—the faster we actually move through these transformational processes.”
About the Author
Sean Lawlor is a writer, certified personal trainer, and Masters student in Transpersonal Counseling at Naropa University, in pursuit of a career in psychedelic journalism, research, and therapy. His interest in consciousness and non-ordinary states owes great debt to Aldous Huxley, Ken Kesey, and Hunter S. Thompson, and his passion for film, literature, and dreaming draws endless inspiration from Carl Jung, David Lynch, and J.K. Rowling. For more information or to get in touch, head to seanplawlor.com, or connect on Instagram @seanplawlor.
For decades the consensus of the psychedelic science community regarding bipolar disorder is that people with manic depression should avoid psychedelics as to not aggravate their condition.
They’re one of the few groups, along with those with a psychotic spectrum disorder or a heart condition, who are told sorry, psychedelics are not safe for them. In the case of those diagnosed with bipolar disorder, the fear is that the psychedelic experience can cause them to go manic, a state characterized by grandiose thinking and over-extending oneself (and often one’s bank account) that can lead to reckless, dangerous, and intrusive behavior that’s essentially out of character and can cause folks to lose control of their own lives or put themselves and possibly others in life-threatening situations.
And it’s not a myth, there are case studies, like this one from 1981, of people going manic during or after psychedelic experiences, but there haven’t been any trials controlling for things like the type of substance, set and setting, and dosage.
The Serotonergic System and Bipolar Disorder
Classic psychedelics and other medicines like MDMA work largely by affecting the brain’s serotonin system, especially the 5-HT2A receptor, says Will Barone, PsyD who’s worked in research and clinical settings with therapies involving MDMA, psilocybin, and ketamine. For most people, that’s not a huge risk. It’s not physically dangerous unless mixing different substances or taking super-high doses. But for people with bipolar disorder, the serotonergic activity may be what poses the problem – that increased activity could potentially trigger mania, or at least “increase the likelihood for mood episodes,” as Barone puts it.
Most bipolar people can’t even take SSRI anti-depressants without the risk of hypomania or a manic episode, and it’s how many of the folks I interviewed and who filled out a survey on bipolar and psychedelics I created got diagnosed in the first place. They went to their doctors feeling depressed, got prescribed an SSRI, and instead of feeling better (or nothing at all), they went manic, some even bordering or breaking through to psychosis. And so, to most in the psychedelic community that’s the end of the story. If an SSRI can cause mania, then surely it’s unsafe to give these folks psilocybin, MDMA, or ayahuasca, for example. Sorry bipolar diagnosed people, but you are excluded from the incredible and mystical insight, perspective shift and depression relief that psychedelics can grant others. But what if it’s not as open and shut as the community would make us think?
Before I dive any deeper into what I found investigating this subject, it’s important to say that I am in no way encouraging anyone to take psychedelics or get off their prescription medications. But living with bipolar disorder can be hard. Not only can mania be dangerous but the depression is also life-threatening; people with manic depression are much more likely to attempt and commit suicide than the general population. Yet, the hypersensitivity that is sometimes a handicap can also be a gift, one that many are unwilling to give up. And traditional pharmaceutical medication often suppresses empathy, creativity, spirituality, and concentration, among a host of other natural processes. So are there other options for folks living with this condition?
The Use of Ketamine for Bipolar Disorder
“Ketamine is the primary substance I would feel comfortable working with for a bipolar client,” says Barone. “It doesn’t seem to have the same risk for inducing a mood episode as MDMA or psilocybin.” He explains that ketamine doesn’t work nearly as much on serotonin as other entheogens, that instead, its primary action is on the glutamate and NMDA receptors, which has made many researchers theorize how ketamine produces its rapid antidepressant effects. “We’re still figuring out a lot about how ketamine works,” Barone explains, but the risk of inducing a manic episode from clinical ketamine treatment seems to be very low. “That’s one of the interesting things,” he says, “so far in clinical ketamine treatment, we haven’t seen mania develop in people with bipolar disorder, even with a history of mania. I haven’t personally seen any cases.” However, it’s important to note, many bipolar clients of Ketamine assisted therapy or infusions are also staying on their medications, likely mitigating the risk. “Ketamine is one of the only medications with psychedelic properties where it is appropriate for a patient to remain on their mood-stabilizing medications,” says Barone. “This is important for patients with bipolar disorder who can be destabilized by stopping medication too abruptly.”
In the program where Barone practices, Healing Realms Psychotherapy, clinicians sometimes utilize ketamine assisted psychotherapy (KAP) for individuals with bipolar disorder. It’s on a case by case basis, but essentially ketamine can be offered at different doses in conjunction with talk therapy, which can “use that psychedelic or altered experience to better understand your situation,” says Barone, “to have better awareness of your ego functioning and how to manage mood, in addition to the mood-stabilizing properties of ketamine.” Then, clinicians often increase the amount of follow-up sessions for bipolar clients to continue to monitor changes to mood or cognition, Barone tells me.
The Risks of Triggering Mania with Different Substances
A Ph.D. candidate at Flinders University, Benjamin Mudge, is looking into this phenomenon for his thesis and believes the type of substance plays a large role in mitigating the mania risk and providing the most balanced depression relief for those with manic depression. Mudge himself is bipolar, and at 48 has been through the wringer in attempts to treat his condition. Over a three hour Skype conversation, he tells me about being institutionalized and medicated on 17 different pharmaceuticals over 10 years with varying degrees of negative side effects, from weight gain and hair loss to losing his ability make art (a practice many thought he’d pursue professionally as a young person), capacity to make and perform music, and complete numbness to the rich world around him.
“I don’t feel suicidal, manic, or crazy [on the drugs the psychiatrists prescribed me],” Mudge explains. “But I don’t feel pleasure, fun, or arousal. I don’t feel a spiritual connection with nature. I can be sitting in a sacred ceremony, church, music festival, or forest, and everyone that’s around me is feeling something deep. But I just feel numb. And as a result of that, I then feel a sense of frustration and alienation from other people, and a sense of pointlessness.”
Eventually fed up, Mudge stopped taking pharmaceuticals cold-turkey (a practice he does not recommend to others) in search of a more natural remedy. After failed attempts with herbs like St John’s Wort, a friend asked if he had heard of ayahuasca. Now, 15 years later, Mudge drinks ayahuasca every couple of months to manage his condition (in addition to being careful with nutrition and avoiding other psychoactive substances) – and has never felt better. Even though, he tells me repeatedly throughout our conversation that this path isn’t for everyone and he in no way recommends folks stop taking their meds in favor of ayahuasca.
But his Ph.D. in psychiatry gives him the opportunity that many don’t have: he is systematically recording his moods and other reactions to ayahuasca, along with analyzing each tea he drinks in the lab to try and figure out the optimal brew for those living with manic depression. And he’s formulated a few fascinating theories that are catching the eye of psychedelic researchers around the globe.
For one, substance matters, and Mudge believes DMT might hold the most benefits for those with bipolar disorder because of its incredibly short binding time to the 5-HT2A receptor. Most psychedelics “plug into” the 2A receptor, LSD, psilocybin, and DMT included, but the length to which they stay there determines the length of a trip. So for example, (see image 1) LSD stays plugged in for the longest, which explains why it’s such a longer-lasting trip than psilocybin or simply smoking pure DMT. But Mudge theorizes the binding time also matters when determining the mania risk for the bipolar brain, that the short binding time of DMT poses less of a risk of pushing bipolar people into mania, while substances that bind for longer, like LSD, present a higher risk.
His theory gets more complicated than this and some of his mechanical ideas are based on findings of his mother, Anne W. Mudge, a Professor of neurobiology at University College London. In 2002 she discovered the bipolar brain has a malfunction in its inositol phosphate metabolism, which is a key regulating function that helps average folks regulate their moods, speed of their thoughts, and other related actions. In a nutshell, she discovered that instead of the bipolar mind being “too high” or “too low” (aka manic or depressive), that in reality, it was functioning at speeds that were too fast or too slow because of its missing regulating mechanism, thus explaining how medication like Lithium comes in to help regulate that speed (see image 2).
Now when we add serotonergic psychedelics or SSRI medication on top of a “dysregulated” brain, there’s a chance it could overextend itself and go too fast for too long, which could look like mania. And often, depression follows the mania in these cases, hence, the “disorderly” moods. However, this gets back to the binding time in Mudge’s theory, because what if shorter-acting psychedelics didn’t push people over the edge into mania, but rather, jump-started them out of depression and left them with more self-awareness to notice when their moods are fluctuating, giving them the ability to be more proactive in that process?
Mudge has found that ayahuasca and DMT help him the most (in carefully curated circumstances that we’ll discuss below). It brings him depression-relief and healing from a long list of past traumas, plus incredible awareness of the internal signs of a rising manic episode and how those behaviors have affected others. “One of the most fundamentally valuable things about ayahuasca for bipolar people is that it’s helped me understand how the manic episode is damaging people around me and damaging myself,” Mudge explains. “There is a sort of heightened sense of conscience, a social conscience that comes from the psychedelic awareness. That principle is perfect for getting bipolar people to understand how problematic the mania is, even if it feels amazing at the time.” And with the right brew of ayahuasca in a supportive container, this insight and healing come without pushing him into mania. He says after an ayahuasca ceremony he feels a “humble happiness” rather than a speedy or bordering on manic one.
Part of his research is interviewing others and collecting qualitative data of folks with bipolar disorder who use ayahuasca and DMT to try and determine what’s happening. And it’s beginning to prove his theories. For example, of the 10 bipolar people, he’s interviewed that smoke or vape pure DMT (without any MAOI inhibitor-containing plants or substances), “none of them went manic.” He says, “All of them reported the same thing, which was that it was mildly antidepressant. But it was also calming and grounding. As in, if they were on the manic end of the spectrum [which three were], it would bring them back to the center. And if they were depressed, it would bring them slightly up, but it wouldn’t keep pushing them and escalating into mania.”
This is a shocking finding, but not a surprising one. Psychedelics in the right dose and a prepared set and setting are known to give people a new perspective on their lives and behaviors, so why couldn’t they help folks increase their self-awareness around their mood? In a survey I conducted of bipolar diagnosed people who have tried psychedelics, I came to a similar finding. Of the 42 bipolar people who continue to use psychedelics like psilocybin, ayahuasca, DMT, mescaline and even LSD, 35 found the experience helped them manage their symptoms, including not only depression-relief but more awareness to ground themselves during mood shifts and ability to recognize manic behavior.
“I am aware of my manic episodes when they are taking place. I am also able to recognize them faster after they happen. Maybe I can’t change what I did in those moments, [but] I am able to hold compassion for myself and understand that I am still learning and growing because for so many years I just numbed myself with Pharma and alcohol,” described Mary* a 31-year-old with Bipolar I who no longer takes pharmaceutical medication but has been using psilocybin in varying doses since January 2019. “The manic events are shorter and less severe. For example, instead of spending $1,000 at a store, I’ll spend $100 and then recognize it and am able to hold compassion that I am making progress. (My manic episodes tend to lean towards over-spending, over-eating, over-everything). Also, it has helped my binging and purging, and my depression. Obviously, all are related, but I am just more aware of everything and also the plant medicine helps me see where everything is stemming from so I can re-parent those sides of myself.”
Interestingly, some who reported more awareness and ability to manage manic behaviors pointed to mania being a very “ego-driven” experience, perhaps explaining how psychedelics are helping folks deal with it rather than aggravate it further. “When I am starting towards a manic episode, psychedelics kind of smack me back down to earth and help me remember that I don’t have all my shit figured out. It humbles me and relieves the burning anger and irritation with compassion and connection to the ‘other’,” explained Sarah*, a 37-year-old with Bipolar 2 who is now off pharmaceuticals and instead uses psilocybin truffles about once a month in different doses, which are legal in the Netherlands where she lives.
Admittedly, the responses to the survey I created have a bias because most folks found the Google Form through my social media where I’m very pro-psychedelic (especially psilocybin mushrooms) and so my followers are more likely to report positive experiences than negative ones. However, considering the lack of options beyond lifelong medication for the bipolar population, it’s an interesting finding in need of more investigation beyond anecdotal reports. Could one psychedelic experience every few months “ground” bipolar folks, allowing them to experience and manage their full range of feelings without heavy meds like Lithium? Even in Barone’s practice with ketamine, he tells Psychedelics Today that when appropriate, the goal is to wean some patients off their pharmaceutical medications eventually and instead, manage their moods with the help of intermittent ketamine-assisted therapy sessions and building skills to independently manage mood fluctuations.
It’s super controversial, especially considering unmedicated bipolar folks are at a much higher risk for suicide. Plus, going off psychiatric medication quickly without a doctor’s supervision is also dangerous, especially when combined with psychedelics. Barone, who’s volunteered at Burning Man’s Zendo Project for seven years and supervised for four, explains the combination of stopping medication to take psychedelics has caused numerous attendees to have a psychotic break at Black Rock City. Plus, Barone says that for some people, “It may be the intensity of the experience or having insufficient support during and after a trip that shifts mood or cognitive process beyond the effects of the substance.”
At the same time, mixing bipolar medications with psychedelics seems to be contraindicated, although getting a clear answer from doctors on this is hard. While it’s pretty common knowledge that SSRI’s shouldn’t be combined with psychedelics for several reasons, including the potential risk of Serotonin Syndrome, there’s less info out there about common bipolar medications like lamotrigine and lithium. Some doctors, like a psychiatrist Mudge, knows of in New York and those I interviewed for my book on mushrooms, seem to think lamotrigine doesn’t pose a huge risk when mixing with psilocybin or ayahuasca, however, lithium seems to be in a class of its own. I’ve personally heard of two instances where lithium mixed with LSD caused such negative reactions (including a seizure) that both people were sent to the emergency room to the despair of their tripping friends. There’s more info on mixing Lithium and LSD in this Erowid vault.
To make matters even more complicated, even some of those who responded to my survey saying psychedelics help them reflect on their manic/hypomanic behaviors and ground themselves often also describe a singular incident where they did go manic and even psychotic or deeply paranoid after particular psychedelic journeys where they either “took too much,” had a “bad trip”, or took substances in less than ideal set and settings. Which brings us back to Mudge’s theories, that the bipolar brain is more sensitive and can’t handle certain substances or situations, like frequent psychedelic use or poly-drug mixes, without possibly heading into mania.
And so, Mudge has created harm reduction guidelines for bipolar diagnosed people who want to drink ayahuasca, although he tells me multiple times he is not advising anyone to take ayahuasca or do anything illegal, but instead to please wait until his research and other community initiatives are completed. Yet, if people ignore his advice, the guidelines (see image 3) do provide a lot of interesting information to reduce harm and the risk of mood episodes. For instance, while the ayahuasca tradition is to partake in multiple ceremonies over a week or two, Mudge says that puts the bipolar brain at a much higher risk for mania. Instead, participating in one ceremony and getting enough sleep afterward will provide folks with a lot more benefits than continuing to drink – and stimulate their 5-HT2A receptors – night after night.
Plus, he’s seen this high frequency of psychedelic use play out badly with other substances as well in his interview subjects, even at microdoses. For example, he tells me of a bipolar man who was microdosing psilocybin every day to manage his mood and had the worst manic episode of his life – at 40. Mudge believes it was the repeated stimulation of taking a serotonergic substance that binds for six hours that induced mania – similar to what an SSRI would do to a bipolar person.
When it comes to safe ayahuasca practices for those diagnosed with manic depression, Mudge believes mixing with other substances – even if they’re presented in ceremony as holy tools, like rapé, cannabis and even cacao or chocolate – poses a higher risk for pushing the bipolar brain into mania. I ask if there should be a specific bipolar “dieta” (a concept in the ayahuasca tradition where you adhere to a special diet in preparation for your ceremony) and he says absolutely. “This is why you’re not supposed to eat overripe bananas and soy sauce. Because it’s chemically reactive,” Mudge explains, and for bipolar folks, the dieta will have to be even more restrictive to provide the maximum benefits and the least amount of harm.
Lastly, when it comes to ayahuasca, not all brews are created equally, and Mudge also believes some brews that pose a higher risk than others based on their chemical composition. For example, ayahuasca prepared in the Amazon jungle can have a different combination of herbs and precise species of vine depending on the shaman, culture, and retreat center. While most psychedelics have a single type of molecule causing the experience, there are at least four psychoactive ingredients in ayahuasca: harmine, harmaline, tetrahydroharmine, and DMT. Therefore, brews can have different ratios of MAOI inhibitors to DMT molecules, and Mudge believes the bipolar brain responds better to a brew that has more DMT because the MAOI inhibitors can push people into mania (just like MAOI pharmaceuticals are known to do). He also says ayahuasca prepared in other parts of the world that use Syrian Rue instead of the ayahuasca vine also poses more of a risk because it has a different ratio of harmala alkaloids than the Banisteriopsis caapi vine used in genuine ayahuasca.
Plus, lots of the ayahuasca that is consumed isn’t brewed fresh, but brewed once and is carried around for months to over a year, and in that time it begins to ferment and produce alcohol. And Mudge believes fermented ayahuasca poses a problem for the bipolar brain where a depressive hangover can follow rather than a humble afterglow. “I think it changes the qualitative experience for everybody,” he elaborates. “I think it makes the ceremony more intense, more into the shadow.” But for the bipolar brain, “which is more sensitive” it can leave people feeling agitated and depressed. He explains there is a trick to getting rid of the alcohol in aged ayahuasca, basically cooking the brew on a very low heat for 10 to 20 minutes so that it steams the alcohol off but never starts to boil or even simmer. “It should start to smell like a vegetable soup when it’s ready,” Mudge says.
And it’s not like bipolar people don’t ever go manic after drinking ayahuasca, it happens, and 17 of his 62 interview subjects experienced it. But, after investigating each situation further, it seems many, if not all, of the 17 were mixing substances, drinking fermented ayahuasca or brews with Syrian Rue and participating in multiple ceremonies in a week, and so in terms of his research, are technically false negatives. Although, these situations only further prove the need for his research and more like it.
Clinical Perspectives and Safety Concerns
But what about other psychedelic substances? If Mudge’s theory is correct, is DMT the only option that’s less likely to cause mania? What about mushrooms, LSD, or MDMA? Could they all have a place with specific safety guidelines? And what would those guidelines look like for a person diagnosed with manic depression? Cynthia*, a clinical therapist specializing in spiritual emergence and psychedelic integration who was trained in the transpersonal paradigm at the California Institute for Integral Studies (CIIS), thinks bipolar clients not only need a lot of preparation and integration support for a psychedelic experience, like with a professional therapist or spiritual guide, but they need to be able to sustain their stability without medication first, which she realizes just isn’t possible for everyone. She’s come to this belief not only as a clinician but as someone who was diagnosed with bipolar herself over 20 years ago, although she doesn’t identify very strongly with the diagnosis.
She views bipolar, and all mental illness, through a very spiritual lens. “It’s not just our biochemistry and our diagnostic criteria, but it’s really our souls,” she says. She tells me about her only manic-psychotic episode which was brought on by SSRI medication in the late 1990s when she was only 20 years old. “It absolutely was also a very spiritual experience and very much a healing crisis.” She explains, during her episode, she had trauma from her early childhood come up and other painful material that needs resolving, but she didn’t get the support to really examine it until years later. I ask her if she thinks mania can be thought of in terms of Stanislav and Christina Grof’s idea of “Spiritual Emergence(y)”, a theory that views some non-ordinary states of consciousness as healing processes that could be supported for the most positive gain rather than suppressed with tranquilizing medication.
“I do think mine was a spiritual emergence. And I knew that at the time, but I didn’t have the language for it,” she says. “And what I’ve come to conclude is I think it’s not necessarily a completely ‘either-or’. I think there’s both, or it’s almost like two different languages used to describe a similar thing. Because, if you go through the checklist, I definitely fit the criteria for manic psychosis. And I definitely was having trouble, just at the very end, not eating and sleeping and not being able to use words, things that were dangerous. Now, if I had had sitters and 24 hours of support and a bunch of space to wander around, I probably could have rode it out and had the support to just be in that state faithfully until it ran its course. But I didn’t, and most of us don’t.”
It’s a curious and radical idea that insight and healing can come from some natural non-ordinary states of consciousness, like mania and psychosis, if they could be “sat with” and supported as they played out, just like a psychedelic trip. And it’s not the first similarity between manic depression and the psychedelic experience that I came across researching this piece. Two other bipolar diagnosed people I spoke to pointed to mania being very much like a entheogenic journey. “So much of my mania feels like tripping,” said Pam* a 39-year-old woman with Bipolar 1 who no longer takes prescription mood stabilizers but uses different psychedelics to deal with her depression, “If the tripping will end, so will the mania.”
However, in our society, we very much view these states as needing to be “cured” and suppressed rather than explored and supported. And in Cynthia’s case, she ended up in a psychiatric hospital and then on Lithium for five years after her episode. But during her first semester of grad school at CIIS, she began working with a holistic psychiatrist, part of the Grofs’ Spiritual Emergence Network, who helped her confront her trauma, wean off the medication, and learn to feel and manage the full range of her emotions through the use of spiritual and Eastern practices. Which admittedly, right after years of Lithium, was hard. She essentially had to relearn how to feel and it was overwhelming at first. “And then I was terrified of doing anything spiritual. I was terrified to meditate. I had a chance to do holotropic breathwork and I was like, I don’t want to rock the boat.” But she did learn and developed other spiritual practices, like yoga, which helped her understand how to regulate her own energy. And, even though she’s not currently on daily pharmaceuticals, she definitely still thinks they have a place, like to regulate mood for a shorter time and to control “breakout” symptoms of mania, such as trouble sleeping.
Implications for Future Research and Guidelines
For Cynthia, psychedelics were not part of this re-learning for 20 years. Instead, she spent that time integrating her spiritual emergence/manic episode, learning how to recognize the “edges” of hypomania and ground herself naturally. But two years ago, she finally felt ready to go back into the psychedelic space with spiritual guides, and now she manages all types of psychedelic experiences, even the ones Mudge warns against like LSD, MDMA, 2C-B and others I had to look up like 3-MMC and 2C-E. She says it’s not the psychedelics that keep her grounded like some of my survey participants reported, but since she’s learned how to ground herself, these experiences are manageable and beneficial for other healing.
“I’ve had a lot of stuff come up from around my episode, like fear of my own greatness. It’s like I’m scared to go visionary because they’re going to label me as manic. But I had to reclaim my comfort with that.” Cynthia admits, after a trip, especially with “heart medicines” like MDMA, she does have increased energy, “It’s exciting, I have this sort of energy of how wonderful everything is. I just have to make sure I’m sleeping and intentionally doing things to stay grounded.”She says there was atime recently where she was taking empathogens a little too often – once a month, sometimes more – and she started to have “more depressive dips and more anxiety.” But she was able to recognize that and back off. “Now I’m trying to keep it like once a quarter or even less than that.”
However, she says as a clinician, “I don’t feel super comfortable if I had a bipolar client doing classic psychedelics. I might, but it would be very case by case because I do think there is that potential risk.” She also believes bipolar to be a spectrum, and those with more severe cases with recurrent manic episodes might not be able to stabilize themselves like she’s learned to. But the connection between spiritual emergence and bipolar disorder, psychedelics and mania seem too close and full of such vast potential to not be investigated further. And of course, Mudge has a plan for how to proceed.
Once Mudge figures out the ideal recipe for brewing ayahuasca “in a balanced way” that is medicinal but “not dangerous in terms of triggering mania,” his mission is to create the “Manic Depressive Community Church”. It would serve as a community for those with bipolar and those affected by the condition (like parents and spouses) where ayahuasca, served in the safest possible way by understanding facilitators who are bipolar themselves, is the sacrament. His vision is that this church would be a non-profit organization that’s local to people so they wouldn’t have to travel to the Amazon to take this medicine. And of course, being the academic that he is, he also envisions setting up a clinical trial or having the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) come in to do an observational clinical trial so the community can finally get some hard data on this population other than assumptions, anecdotes, and old case studies.
Mudge also insists that bipolar folks wait for him to accomplish this goal before they start drinking ayahuasca or taking other kinds of psychedelics. He says his safety protocol and recipe are still about two years away from being complete, and in the meantime, he encourages folks to prepare by getting their lifestyles in order. He explains that it means accepting their diagnosis and getting on medications that work, like lamotrigine and a low dose of lithium. It also means getting enough sleep and stopping other recreational or self-medicating drug use like alcohol, cannabis, or whatever else. “That’ll help you in the next year or two in a massive way,” says Mudge, “and then you’ll be ready to drink safely.”
But the weight of the bipolar community’s desire to heal shouldn’t be all up to one man. The psychedelic science community should also step up and start investigating the potential benefits and harms for this large and desperate population. “There’s a massive potential of psychedelics, but bipolar people have unique brain chemistry,” says Mudge. “They need the psychedelic experience to be chemically tailored to their brains’ needs.”
Some interesting developments today in the world of Holotropic Breathwork & Dr. Stanislav Grof. Stan and his wife Brigitte issued a statement on Facebook about their moving further away from Grof Transpersonal Training (the Holotropic Breathwork trademark owner).
We wish Stan and his family the best of luck on this venture.
You can learn more about Stan’s current and future work here. Learn more about their upcoming film here.
In 2014 I became aware of a gentleman named Kilindi Iyi in Detroit, Michigan. He was doing some wildly exploratory and esoteric mushroom trips in community with others. Kilindi was one of the most interesting people I had the chance to talk to during my time running my first podcast.
Here is a list of things that struck me as important while speaking with him.
He had a community of peers and students doing very similar work and sharing results.
Kilindi was not afraid to grow mushrooms and was quite public about it.
He used VERY high doses in silence (10+ grams being common).
Some in his community went so far as to do extractions to help stomach larger doses.
His approach of warriorship and courage in mushroom experiences was powerful and unique.
His African martial arts practice hugely informed and assisted his psychedelic work.
To me, he was an important pioneer in the psychedelic world. The psychedelic world will do well to remember him and his work. He did a tremendous amount for his community and our movement. His legacy will certainly continue to help us moving inward, outward and upward for many years to come.
Could it possibly be safe, ethical or even beneficial for psychedelics to have a role in addiction recovery?
The recovery community is huge and diverse, but the thing most members of AA and NA subscribe to is the complete abstinence from all mood-altering substances. Yet, there’s a small and controversial movement within the community that looks to loosen the strict boundaries of sobriety by allowing for the intentional use of psychedelics.
Psychedelics for Addiction in Clinical Trials
In clinical trials with classic psychedelics like psilocybin, a high dose, monitored entheogenic experience with clinical support is being shown to help people break addictive relationships with substances like alcohol, tobacco, and cocaine. For example, at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, clinical psychologist and researcher, Peter Hendricks, and his team are finishing up a study on psilocybin-assisted therapy for cocaine addiction, and their preliminary results are quite striking. Although they haven’t completed their data collection yet, Hendricks says they have looked at the first 10 participants, six of whom received psilocybin and four a placebo. And those who received the magic mushroom compound used cocaine much less frequently than those who received the placebo following their dosing session.
Hendricks believes the psilocybin group received greater benefit because of the vast insight the psychedelic experience gave them, specifically regarding their own cocaine use. “There seems to be this change in mindset, this very specific realization that ‘my cocaine use has had a very negative impact on the people I love. And the people I love are what’s most important to me. That’s what life is all about. And I can’t let my behavior continue to impact the people I love. So I am committed to stop this,’” describes Hendricks. “In the back of their mind, there’s this sense that I’m going to get back into it [sobriety]. I’m going to be abstinent. I’m going to make a change, no matter what I have to do.”
On the other hand, many in the placebo group reduced their cocaine use, but still “continued a certain pattern of use,” says Hendricks, rather than the extended periods of abstinence and drive to stay sober they saw from the psilocybin group. “I don’t know that it’s ever really a reasonable goal that someone would stop using any given substance and never ever use again, but we want to reduce as much as we can,” says Hendricks. “And if there are lapses or bumps in the road that those lapses would not turn into a full-blown relapse where folks return to their previous use patterns.”
Psychedelics in Addiction Recovery Support Groups
Although taking psilocybin in a clinical trial context is a bit different than taking mushrooms at home or out in nature, the insight psychedelic experiences provide, including the lasting motivation to prevent relapse, is a major reason folks in recovery are turning to psychedelics. Danielle Negrin, Executive Director of the San Francisco Psychedelic Society and Founder of the “Psychedelic Recovery” support group in the Bay Area explains most of the participants in her group are looking to sustain their sobriety from certain substances that cause them the most harm – like meth, opioids, or alcohol – in a practice called “targeted abstinence”. And they’re curious if psychedelics could be a part of that.
“I think that psychedelics can highlight really how harmful other substances and those behaviors can be and help us look introspectively at our lives and at our past to really reflect on the actions that we were taking and help us wake up to the fact that we are addicts and alcoholics and that recovery from that is possible,” explains Negrin.
Kevin Franciotti, who’s involved in a similar group on the East Coast, Psychedelics in Recovery, that’s now mostly an online community, tells me many members of his group are seeking out psychedelics for similar reasons. Although he couldn’t get into too much detail to protect folks’ anonymity, he says psychedelics have been helpful for people in recovery for a number of reasons, including “cultivating a conscious contact with a higher power of their understanding, which is a key component of 12 step recovery. And admitting powerlessness and then seeking the guidance from a trusting and loving power greater than oneself.” Franciotti also says he’s heard of a member using mushrooms for deeper insights into AA “step work”. For example, when it’s time to make amends with the people in their lives who they hurt with their addiction and related behaviors, they go to a mushroom trip to help them realize who else they might have hurt that they’re forgetting.
Yet even though intentional psychedelic use can seem like a good compliment to recovery, bringing this stuff up at an AA or NA meeting is risky. Most members of the program won’t want to hear it, it’s not an accepted part of the program, regardless if AA Founder Bill Wilson had life-changing LSD experiences, and so could get you ostracized from recovery communities. But that’s why groups like Psychedelics in Recovery are so important, to give a support network to folks who are trying to navigate this delicate and controversial landscape.
The Psychedelics and Addiction Recovery Movement
A new non-profit in the psychedelic community, Project New Day, is looking to support these recovery groups. Founded by Mike Sinyard and Allison Feduccia, PhD, Director and Co-Founder of Psychedelic.Support (a psychedelic integration resource), they’re inspired by psychedelic experiences helping folks overcome their addictions, and want to give back to that community. For their first order of business, they created an advisory board of four clinicians and five people who are already involved in psychedelic recovery support groups, including Negrin and Franciotti.
Feduccia says their next step is to create tangible materials, like pamphlets, for folks that go to these support groups and their family members who might be concerned about using one substance to get over another. They’re also planning on helping these support groups develop exercises they can engage participants in, as well provide referrals to clinicians for group members with more severe issues. Overall, Feduccia says they want to establish and promote best practices for such groups, and then help to promote them to a wider audience. She explains part of the plan is to expand Psychedelic.Support to include more support groups and to allow reviews. They’re also planning on providing grants to people who want to start these types of groups in their area, and to eventually expand beyond talking circles to more nature-based integration groups, like hiking or biking together.
“We’re just really in that phase of [exploring], what does the community need? How can we provide resources, information, connection to other people in a way to advance these groups?” says Feduccia. “[We’re] thinking of it as a way of modernizing an AA type program, which is really abstinence-based. We want to make this a little bit more inclusive for people as these [psychedelic-assisted] treatments become more readily available.”
Psychedelics and Addiction Recovery—A Deep Personal Journey and Decision
And a modernized, more harm-reduction focused approach to AA is desired by many in the community. Either because they find AA to be too restrictive, or like in the case of Ethan Covey, photographer and co-Founder of the Psychedelic Sangha group in NYC, they get the help they need from AA, but eventually outgrow it and are ready to move on. In Covey’s case, after four and a half years of following the program, he felt confident that his mindset and lifestyle had changed enough – away from his destructive addictive behaviors that opioids caused him – to cautiously dip his toes in psychedelic waters for personal and spiritual growth. Perhaps, psychedelic experiences could augment his new sober lifestyle. “I really felt like I learned the lessons that I needed to learn [regarding my own addictive behaviors]. And I started questioning whether the appropriate response to that was just to continue to check off time,” he says.
Covey explains, to get to that point, he really needed those four and half substance-free years to work on himself and change his lifestyle. “But as years went by doing that, I got to a point where I became very confident in my ability to not do the things that I know I shouldn’t do.” For Covey, that means maintaining an opioid-free, and for now, alcohol-free lifestyle. While telling me this story, he’s super cautious and stops himself more than once to tell me, “This is very difficult to talk about because I most definitely don’t want to say that my experience is what anyone else would experience, you know?”
And he’s right, everyone who struggles with addiction and substance misuse/abuse is on their own very individual journey. While consciously augmenting sobriety with psychedelics might work for some, it certainly doesn’t for others. For example, even though Franciotti is passionate about psychedelics in recovery, and has helped to write safety guidelines for such use, he tells me he’s not currently using psychedelics (or any substances) since his last relapse in 2018.
Ibogaine in a clinical setting helped to get him clean, but a few years later, he helped to organize an ibogaine conference in Mexico where he would have the opportunity to take a low dose. He debated with himself for months leading up, and at the same time, was going through a period of distance from his recovery community. So when the iboga opportunity fell through at the last minute, he instead spontaneously took an unknown amount of LSD in what he sees now as impulsive drug-seeking behavior and a “fear of missing out.” Even though he considered that LSD experience to be reckless and he tried to adhere more closely to an abstinence approach afterward, it was a catalyst to beginning a full-blown relapse. Not long after, he purchased a kilo of Kratom because he heard the DEA planned to ban the substance and that eventually led him back into the arms of his problem substance: opioids.
This type of narrative is a main concern for folks who attend Psychedelics in Recovery groups, that psychedelic use is considered a relapse or can push them over the edge back to the substance that causes them the most problems. Or, another related fear that Negrin points out, that they’ll replace one substance with another, like get off prescription anti-anxiety or depression meds, only to become reliant on microdosing psychedelics.
There’s also some concern around the addictive potential of psychedelics. Unlike other substances, classic psychedelics like magic mushrooms aren’t really considered addictive because they don’t promote compulsive use like opioids, meth, or alcohol. Plus, with most psychedelics, you can’t really use them to numb yourself and escape your problems like other substances. Instead, many psychedelics offer a deeper dive into those feelings, or a new perspective on your deeply held beliefs, and that can be too uncomfortable to dive back into day in and day out.
Yet that’s not to say people can’t develop problematic relationships with psychedelics. Not to stigmatize any substance further, but there’s definitely cases of people developing problematic relationships with LSD, MDMA/ecstasy, and Ketamine, particularly. But people can become “addicted” to all sorts of things, including food, sex, sugar, exercise, shopping, stealing, gambling, the list is endless. It really depends on the person and how they’re actively engaging these dopamine-releasing activities. And that’s another reason why support groups specifically for psychedelics in addiction recovery are so important, to help people navigate this tricky landscape and hold themselves and each other accountable.
If you’re in active recovery or addiction and this resonated with you, everyone I spoke to for this story recommended really checking in with yourself before engaging in any psychedelic use and taking a harm reduction approach. So be honest with yourself on your motives or intentions for use, and seek ample community support. Whether that’s your sponsor, close friends, family, partner(s), or support groups like Psychedelics in Recovery (or a combination of all of the above), because honesty, openness, and community are crucial to avoiding old, problematic, addictive behavior patterns. But psychedelics aren’t for everyone, so really do your homework before embarking on any kind of chemically-induced journey, and always practice safe use.
About the Author
Michelle Janikian is a journalist focused on drug policy, trends, and education. She’s the author of Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion, and her work has also been featured in Playboy, DoubleBlind Mag, High Times, Rolling Stone and Teen Vogue. One of her core beliefs is ending the prohibition of drugs can greatly benefit society, as long as we have harm reduction education to accompany it. Find out more on her website: www.michellejanikian.com or on Instagram @michelle.janikian.
If you want to learn how to become a psychedelic therapist, we’ve outlined the five main legal paths.
More people than ever are curious to try psychedelics for mental health and personal growth. But even though “psychedelic-assisted therapy” is going mainstream, the actual substances, like psilocybin, MDMA, LSD, and ayahuasca are still Schedule I substances in the U.S. Yet despite their illegality, doctors and therapists are regularly getting inquiries from their clients about psychedelics for addiction, PTSD, depression, and more. So, what can professionals do to start working with psychedelics—legally?
How to Become a Psychedelic Therapist Path One: Legally Facilitating Psychedelic Journeys
At the moment in the US, the only way for clinicians to legally facilitate psychedelic experiences with MDMA or psilocybin is in a clinical trial (we’ll get to substances like cannabis and ketamine below). These trials are being held at select universities in the US, like Johns Hopkins, NYU, and others. Each substance requires their own training by the different organizations that sponsor these trials. In the case of MDMA, that training is provided by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), and for psilocybin, it’s provided by either Compass Pathways or the Usona Institute, depending on the trial.
MAPS is currently training physicians (MDs, DOs, psychiatrists, and other “eligible prescribers”) as well as licensed therapists to work on phase 3 clinical trials using MDMA for PTSD and to form therapy pairs to open potential “expanded access” sites in the near future. MAPS training consists of five parts, beginning with an online course, which covers the basics from their treatment manual as well as recent scientific research and study protocols.
For part B, trainees attend a 7-day in-person retreat with “senior MDMA-assisted psychotherapy researchers,” which is often Michael and Annie Mithoefer. “[the Mithoefers] are really the core people that have been doing this since the beginning,” says Angie Leek, MA, LMFT who completed Parts A and B of the training in 2019.“Even if I never get to do this work – which I hope I do – but even if not, it was phenomenal,” elaborates Leek. “It influenced my clinical work without being able to do the MDMA part, for sure.”
Then, parts C, D, and E become more hands-on and include days of experiential learning with an opportunity to have an MDMA session, a day of role-playing, and then, supervision and evaluation of trainees’ first few sessions.
While getting trained to work with MDMA may seem simple and straightforward, the problem is that the training isn’t free. In fact, it’s out of budget for many, especially on a therapist’s salary. For instance, because Leek doesn’t live near a clinical trial site, she has decided not to complete training until the future of the therapy is more concrete. Until then, she can’t afford to keep paying out of pocket. She tells Psychedelics Today she paid $3,500 for the first two parts of the training, and she was told completing all 5 parts costs $7,000. As of now, MAPS has not announced training costs for 2020. Interested clinicians can apply for MAPS MDMA training here.
To work with psilocybin, professionals are trained by either Compass Pathways or the Usona Institute, however (as far as I can tell) training to work with either of these organizations is not currently open to the public. At the moment, only research professionals at universities hosting this research can currently be trained to work with psilocybin.
It’s also important to note that both MDMA- and psilocybin-assisted therapies are on track to become legal, FDA-approved medications for specific conditions in the near future. The FDA has granted both substances “breakthrough therapy status” which fast-tracks them for approval. According to MAPS’s Director of Communications, Brad Burge, MDMA is expected to be approved for the treatment of PTSD by 2021. Yet, in an email, Burge tells Psychedelics Today that MDMA could become available for expanded access in as soon as a few months.
The expanded access program, also known as “compassionate use”, gives patients with life-threatening conditions the right to obtain and use unapproved drugs and medical devices outside of clinical trials. In early 2019, MAPS applied for expanded access for MDMA to treat PTSD, considering the high risk of suicide those with treatment-resistant PTSD face, and it’s expected to pass in early 2020. Therefore, many trained MDMA-assisted therapists and prescribing physicians could be needed very soon to open expanded access MDMA sites around the US.
Which is why another route many in this field consider is applying to the California Institute for Integral Studies (CIIS) Center for Psychedelic Therapies and Research. This one-year long certificate program is an in-depth study on psychedelic-assisted therapy and research, taught by the leading experts in the field, including Anthony Bossis, Rick Doblin, Charles Grob, and Michael and Annie Mithoefer. The program is only available to licensed professionals, like licensed family therapists, medical doctors, and registered nurses. Plus, acceptance into the program is competitive. According to an email CIIS sent to a recent applicant, they will be accepting a total of 75 students for their class of 2020, meaning one in four applicants will be admitted.
The program is completely accredited and considered the most prestigious training for psychedelic-therapists, yet completing the certificate does not guarantee graduates the ability to work with psychedelic substances or even on clinical trials. After completing the certificate, graduates will still have to undergo training from organizations like MAPS, Usona or Compass, and pay for it themselves.
Path Two: Training in Trauma and Transpersonal Psychology
Before professionals jump right into psychedelic-assisted therapy training, there are a few schools of psychological thought and therapy modalities they can get familiar with that can inform their work with “non-ordinary states of consciousness”.
For instance, although CIIS’s psychedelic therapy program may not be the best fit for everyone right now, two therapists we spoke to for this story received their master’s degrees from the university, and chose it for its focus on transpersonal psychology.
Transpersonal psychology is a school of psychological theory that considers the spiritual and transcendent aspects of life alongside modern psychological thinking, and it has been used by professionals to help folks work through altered states for decades. If you’re interested in learning more, check out the books and articles by Stanislav Grof as well as educational programs at Sofia University and Naropa University.
Another important area to be well versed in professionally before working with psychedelics is trauma. In fact, all the experts we spoke to for this story stressed the importance of training in different trauma modalities, especially somatic practices, as well as understanding and being comfortable with transference and projection. This level of comfort comes from both training in the subject matter and doing your own inner work.
While some of the training programs we’ve listed cover these issues, both Leek and Saj Razvi of Innate Path recommended Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing training as an informational and trustworthy source of trauma and somatic therapy work. Other integration coaches and therapists have also recommended the Hakomi Institute, a body-centered, trauma-based psychotherapy method that helps people work with strong emotions through mindfulness and guided meditations.
And of course, many in this field stress the importance of professionals doing their own inner work with psychedelics as an important aspect of training. While this can be contested in the community, it does seem like processing one’s own non-ordinary states of consciousness can help others do the same. For now, MAPS’s MDMA training does include an opportunity for clinicians to receive their own MDMA-assisted therapy session. While the CIIS program does not currently include any medicine work, they do incorporate opportunities for transpersonal breathwork and other drug-free forms of altering consciousness.
Path Three: Psychedelic Integration Therapy Training
Both therapists I spoke with for this piece, Robin Kurland, LMFT and Angie Leek, LMFT, told me they’d be interested in getting trained to facilitate psychedelic-assisted therapy in clinical trials, but haven’t found the whole process to be very accessible, especially considering the uncertainty of this work, it’s just not worth it to shell out over $10k for training. However, they both found a compromise in offering their clients “psychedelic integration therapy.”
Unlike psychedelic-assisted therapy, integration therapists do not provide clients with any type of guided psychedelic trip. They can, however, help interested folks in preparing for and then integrating their psychedelic experiences by discussing what it means to them and how they can use any insights or realizations they had in their everyday lives. It’s a very new thing for licensed therapists to offer even though psychedelic therapists in clinical trials and underground have been providing clients with prep and integration sessions for decades. But with the increased interest in this work and in people trying substances on their own or at retreats abroad for healing, aboveground therapists have begun helping people navigate the sometimes tricky emotions that come before and after these peak experiences.
Training for psychedelic integration is limited but exists and is growing quickly. The organization Fluence, based in New York City, hosts accredited classes for interested clinicians, called “Psychedelics 101 and 102” taught by Elizabeth Nielson, Ph.D. and Ingmar Gorman, Ph.D. In their two-day long workshop, they cover everything doctors didn’t learn in medical school about psychedelics, from past and present research to harm reduction and how to help clients prepare for and integrate their sometimes troubling experiences. Gorman and Nielson are also hosting a 3-day long retreat this January 17-20, 2019 in the Catskills, New York called “Psychedelic Integration in Psychotherapy: A Retreat for Clinicians.”
There are also options for life coaches and other interested individuals who are not necessarily licensed doctors and therapists. One popular choice is Being True to You (BTTY), which offers a four-month long, psychedelic integration coach training program that’s completely online for $3,500.
Here at Psychedelics Today, our founders Joe Moore and Kyle Buller also host an online course for clinicians, therapists, and coaches looking to expand their knowledge of psychedelic research and provide psychedelic integration to clients. The next eight-week live online course is enrolling now and begins on February 6th, 2020. The first four weeks cover the basics, including the history of psychedelic research, safety tips like preparation and navigating the space, and an intro to Stanislav Grof’s transpersonal psychology framework. Then in weeks 5 through 8, classes get more specific to clinicians, and cover topics like how to support psychedelic-curious clients, how to help clients integrate their experiences, and how to navigate the legal and ethical considerations.
MAPS is also a source of psychedelic integration education and has provided webinars as well as in-person training sessions in the past. This year, MAPS is planning another webinar series for April 2020 with a session on integration, Burge confirms. “Integration tends to be one of the most popular topics we address in our webinars, conferences, and educational materials,” Burge says.
Despite recent training offerings, many psychedelic integration therapists can still get frustrated by this work, mostly because it has to be substance-free at the moment. Kurland says she mostly worries about people taking mushrooms by themselves in less than ideal situations. “That’s really why I want to hurry and get the ball rolling with the FDA and have that certificate [from CIIS]. I would love to just be able to say, I’m going to sit with you and you’re going to be safe. I’m going to hold space for you and whatever comes up, we’re going to work through it and I’ll be there to hold your hand,” says Kurland.
Path Four: Working with Legal Altered States of Consciousness: Cannabis, Ketamine, and Transpersonal Breathwork
A new option emerging in this field is working with legal or prescription substances, like cannabis and ketamine. Psychiatrists already have the ability to give ketamine to patients in their offices as an “off-label use” for treatment-resistant depression, PTSD, and other conditions. It’s becoming increasingly popular, with ketamine infusion clinics opening around the US. Naturally, there are a number of ketamine training programs emerging alongside. So many, in fact, that we decided to dedicate a whole future piece on ketamine-therapy training, so keep an eye out.
Then there’s cannabis, which many argue is psychedelic in its own right and is legal in a majority of states for adult or medical use. And there are two programs in Colorado taking advantage of that fact. The first was Medicinal Mindfulness; they offer group psychedelic cannabis ceremonies, 1:1 cannabis therapy sessions, and now, cannabis “trip-sitting” training for any interested party.
There is also Innate Path, who began offering cannabis-assisted therapy to clients in 2018 in a very similar fashion to psychedelic therapy, and are now offering training to professionals. Innate Path co-founder and Director of Education, Saj Razvi tells me his cannabis-assisted therapists don’t actually give clients any weed, the client has to bring their own, which avoids any legal conflicts. This allows providers to practice psychedelic therapy before MDMA or psilocybin pass through the FDA, and if it catches on, has the potential to expand access drastically.
Razvi explains the cannabis-assisted therapy modality he and his co-founders have been developing over the course of several years is very body-focused and influenced by his own work as an MDMA-assisted therapist in MAPS’s phase 2 clinical trials, as well as the work of Peter Levine and Eugene Gendlin, the theorist, and philosopher who inspired Levine. At Innate Path’s training workshops, they teach therapists their somatic method, transference work, and psychedelic-therapy principals, which they use for both ketamine and cannabis-assisted therapy.
Of course, there is also the option of working with non-substance induced altered states of consciousness. “Holotropic” or “transpersonal” breathwork is a non-ordinary state very similar or indistinguishable from the psychedelic experience for many. Developed by Stanislav and Christina Grof, they have their own training program called Grof Transpersonal Training (GTT) that teaches practitioners to facilitate and process breathwork experiences with clients.
Dreamshadow Holotropic Breathwork is another group of trustworthy breathwork facilitators who offer an educational training program. Their founders, Lenny and Elizabeth Gibson, are colleagues and close friends of the Grof’s and are also who trained Psychedelics Today founders, Joe Moore and Kyle Buller, in this work.
Path Five: Trip Sitting
For clinicians and non-professional folk alike, getting trained to trip sit by MAPS’s Zendo Project is a great entry into the world of psychedelics. Zendo sets up shop at music festivals like Burning Man to provide a safe and tranquil place for people going through difficult psychedelic experiences to come and relax. They train sitters to be a calm and supportive presence for trippers without “guiding” their experience in any direction.
Zendo hosts trip sitting training workshops around the US to prepare interested participants for volunteering at events, and is a great way to learn the basics of “holding space” and to get experience working with those under the influence of a psychedelic substance. Zendo also has great resources for interested folk, like webinars and their book, The Manual of Psychedelic Support.
All in all, there are many options for all skill sets and types of professionals to get involved in this work. While becoming a psychedelic therapist right now might be expensive, it is possible. For those who can’t budget the risk until this therapy becomes more available, there are plenty of other options with lower price tags. We hope this piece cleared up some misconceptions in the community and can help folks choose the right path for them.
We realize there are also underground training options but they can be unreliable and hard to vet, so we decided to only focus on aboveground options for this piece.
About the Author
Michelle Janikian is a journalist focused on drug policy, trends, and education. She’s the author of Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion, and her work has also been featured in Playboy, DoubleBlind Mag, High Times, Rolling Stone and Teen Vogue. One of her core beliefs is ending the prohibition of drugs can greatly benefit society, as long as we have harm reduction education to accompany it. Find out more on her website: www.michellejanikian.com or on Instagram @michelle.janikian.
Given the overall state of the world’s mental health, this research is sorely needed, and long-overdue. With the kind of success rates we’ve been seeing, with lasting relief sometimes from one or a few sessions, it’s reasonable to predict that these remarkable substances will play an increasingly important role in the treatment of many mental illnesses, and hopefully will also be sanctioned for safe use in other contexts, as well.
While their effectiveness is becoming more and more established, psychedelics’ “mechanism of action” is perplexing to many psychologists, particularly to believers in prevailing ideas about mental illness and treatment. They’re clearly working, but why or how are they working? What is the cognitive or neurological basis for their sometimes near-miraculous treatment success?
One thing that’s not yet being discussed enough is how the high success rate of psychedelic therapies can be seen as a challenge to dominant mainstream paradigms about psychiatric epidemiology (the study of what causes mental illnesses), particularly the reductionist biological chemical imbalance theory, and related ideas. While we’ve all heard psychedelics are working, the largely untold story is how the way they seem to work should cast doubt on prevailing theories of mental illness.
Reductionism in Psychology
Psychology today has become dominated by the idea that most common mental disorders, particularly mood disorders like depression, can be explained by reducing mental activity to things like chemical imbalances in the brain, a wrench in the neurochemical gears so-to-speak, which are generally more or less random and/or biologically predetermined. While the psychological sciences have acknowledged more recently that depression is more complex than that, the idea remains prevalent among psychiatrists, and the overall view of mental illness in general remains mechanical and biological.
In other words, scientific reductionism in psychology dominates the scene, and determines how mental illnesses are understood, and treated. Like the universe itself, according to philosophical materialism which many think of as “the scientific worldview”, mental illness is considered a random, meaningless occurrence, which is best controlled by adding new chemicals to the brain to offset the error, and perhaps implementing cognitive-behavioral changes through the efforts of the conscious, rational mind. We are biological robots in a meaningless universe, and mental illness is like a computer malfunctioning.
There are many reasons for objecting to biological reductionism in psychology, but the general idea is that a sizeable dissenting minority of psychologists believe reducing everything to brain chemistry and other scientifically measurable variables isn’t enough when it comes to understanding the human mind. Even in a purely materialistic universe, the inability to account for the role of emergent qualities in psychological health goes largely ignored, under this model. While this skepticism of the reduction of the psyche is a powerful intuition in itself, there are also good reasons for believing in the limitations of biopsychiatry on a rational basis, as well.
Psychology has a rich history of non-reductive theories which emerged from other types of methods of investigation, including the humanistic and depth psychology traditions, as well as transpersonal and contemplative approaches, to name a few. Could these now alternative theories of the mind help us understand the findings of the psychedelic renaissance; to go even further, could their legitimacy even be implied by psychedelic experiences, themselves?
These alternative perspectives often pertain to branches of psychology which recognize and deal with things outside the purview of biopsychiatry (meaning things that aren’t so easy to measure), and which aren’t taken seriously by materialism. These include phenomena such as the dynamic between the conscious and unconscious mind, and its importance to psychological well-being, and potentially transcendental components of the human psyche, or at least the importance of transcendental states of consciousness. Because they are difficult to measure and prove, all these are things which the biopsychiatry crowd usually relegates to the realm of pseudoscience, or speculative fancy, and denies their very existence.
Yet, in light of the therapeutic and transformative effect of psychedelics, these ousted theories do seem to be granted a rise in validity. This is not to say that the findings of cognitive neuroscience research into psychedelics are no longer relevant, but an honest assessment of the psychedelic experience in all it’s profound strangeness coupled with its therapeutic success should at least call reductive assumptions into question. If psychedelic experiencers and researchers observe the emergence of unconscious material, and mystical or other non-ordinary states of consciousness, and these seem to act almost like a miracle cure for many of our psychological ailments, why should we ignore what that implies about the ailments themselves?
Depths and Heights Encroaching
The problem (for reductive explanations) is that some of the findings of psychedelic research indicate that their unique action, which can sometimes bring almost overnight cures or at least long-lasting one-time treatments, may pertain to both the emergence of psychological content from the unconscious mind, and also their ability to take people to the heights of human mystical experience. Most people who have encountered psychedelics in culture know of the profound realizations or otherworldly qualities they’re said to have, and in the lab, they are not so different. What’s surprising to those totally disconnected from the very idea of spirituality is that they work so well.
It’s not uncommon to hear recipients of psychedelic therapy say things like, “It was like years of therapy in one night,” or therapists reporting that “Miracles are becoming — not mundane, but pretty normal around here.” Since psychedelics are being found to accelerate psychotherapy by allowing people to discover underlying issues which had been inaccessible to normal therapeutic practices, this arguably implies that there are unconscious elements that influence and perhaps cause mental illnesses, a view long held by depth psychology known as psychodynamics.
Although the unconscious is not necessarily outright rejected by all cognitive scientists, some of whom have proposed a more reductive “New Unconscious”, it has generally been rebuked or deemphasized by the more science-oriented modern trend in psychiatry. The subjective psychedelic experiences of therapy recipients where unconscious material seems to be brought to the surface of consciousness, therefore, calls this rejection into question and deserves further investigation. This is compounded when some neuroscience indicates the validity of psychodynamic models, as well.
While psychedelics’ effects on the unconscious psychodynamics are only slightly explored in the literature, psychedelic mystical experience is a far more heavily researched topic, and its long-lasting psychological benefits have been a central point of the larger discourse around psychedelic research since the time of the Good Friday experiment, in 1962. Some have noted that the benefits of psychedelic mystical experience may relate to their ability to enhance the perception of meaning, another area where science remains agnostic beyond questionnaire measurements. The phenomenon of ego dissolution, where a person’s sense of self is temporarily obliterated to be born anew like a phoenix, also seems to be a major part of what creates these transformative effects.
Tracing from Cure to Cause
Although we typically approach illness by first investigating its cause and then using that knowledge to find its treatment, it is possible to do the reverse, when effective treatments already exist. We can learn more about the cause of a problem through what treats it best; in this case, a better understanding of the epidemiology of mental disorders may be derived from the very fact that the psychedelic experience treats or resolves them better than other methods, and this is most pointedly true in the case of depression.
The negative implications of psychedelics’ success for the chemical imbalance theory of depression aren’t difficult to see. Conventional biopsychiatry wisdom says that depression is a random chemical imbalance, although in more recent years they have broadened it to include “caused by a combination of genetic, biological, environmental, and psychological factors. (NIMH)” The ability of psychedelic mystical experiences to drastically improve or even cure depression, potentially by enhancing meaning, should be a clue that depression may have causes which are simply difficult to measure, and therefore not amenable to a scientific definition.
For instance, some have proposed that a major part of the epidemic of depression is something deeper than a mere chemical imbalance, but is instead a side-effect of a cultural swing towards the philosophy of materialism. Of course, many deny this connection, or even that materialism is inherently depressing, but it’s hard not to see this as straw-grasping. You don’t have to have a doctorate in philosophy to recognize that scientific materialism is dreary, as it basically tells us that we are little more than dust in the wind of a meaningless, purposeless, cold and cruel universe. To deny the inherent bleakness of this perspective is an exercise in futility; I won’t belabor the point here. What’s worse, this is now put forward as the intellectually orthodox worldview.
Naturally, this is not to say that scientific materialism and its intrinsic nihilism are the only reason that people get depressed; no doubt, various factors like economic disparity and poverty, political chaos, childhood development issues, and trauma play a huge part. Regardless, the fact that psychedelic experiences both help with depression and tend to make people more spiritually-minded should give the bio-centric psychiatrists pause. Just because it’s difficult to measure or explain, is it really so hard to see how psychedelics’ ability to show that we might be more than just space dust successfully treats people’s depression, and that this might shed light on a major cause or contributor to the disease itself?
A War of Ideas On the Battlefield of the Mind, and It’s Casualties
The point of critiquing reductionism in psychology is not that we should leave the psychiatric sciences behind us, but rather that a pluralism of methodologies and theoretical approaches have their place, in our quest to understand and heal the human mind. Measuring the activity and chemical levels of the brain during mental illness, or during the psychedelic experiences that seem to treat them, need not lessen or replace other theoretical systems, but instead can supplement them. It doesn’t have to be either/or.
This seems like a fairly pragmatic, diplomatic, and agreeable assessment, but unfortunately, psychology has become a casualty to a much larger ideological war of scientism against all things immeasurable. Psychology is merely one domain, one battlefield in this philosophical conquest, but a critically important one because so much of our suffering or well-being hinges on our having the best understanding of the human mind we can achieve.
One result of this parsing out of anything that can’t be scanned, measured, or repeated in a lab is that the default treatment for mental disorders has become (conveniently for pharmaceutical giants) psychoactive daily medications like antidepressants. We have reached a point in psychiatry where the central goal is essentially to chemically engineer the population’s neuro-soup, until all can be productive members of society, ideally in a way that is highly profitable. The fact that antidepressants aren’t really working comes as no surprise to those who never believed in the adequacy of biopsychiatry, in the first place.
While many seek refuge from guilt or blame in the biological definition of their mental illness, the reality is that understanding our illnesses to be more than just random neurochemical accidents, but perhaps fragmentations or distortions of the psyche which can be healed, can replace biological fatalism and reliance on daily doses of Xanax with hope and progress towards restored mental health. Psychedelics can help us make great leaps towards that brighter future, once we recognize and integrate the things they are showing us, and let go of our outdated ideological assumptions.
About the Author
Jonathan Dinsmore is a writer and digital freelancer with a degree in psychology, and a passion for all things philosophy, science, spirituality, and psychedelics.
Dr. Carl Hart is neuropsychopharmacologist and Chair of Columbia University’s Department of Psychology. His research, which focuses on the behavioral and neuropsychological effects of psychoactive drugs in humans, has been published widely in academic journals, and Dr. Hart has discussed his research on numerous shows including Democracy Now!, The O’Reilly Factor, and The Joe Rogan Experience. His award-winning memoir, High Price: A Neuroscientist’s Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society, charts Dr. Hart’s journey from childhood in a harsh Miami neighborhood to an academic life devoted to reframing society’s biased and harmful narratives around stigmatized drugs.
At the 2019 Psychedelic Science Summit in Austin, TX, Dr. Hart addressed a crowd of psychedelic enthusiasts about concerning language he’s noticed in psychedelic-focused conversations. In this interview, Dr. Hart explains how these narratives create a “psychedelic exceptionalism” that perpetuates harmful narratives around drugs like heroin, methamphetamine, and crack cocaine, by extension demonizing people who choose to use such substances. In these transitional times, Dr. Hart reminds us of the importance to hold healthy criticism while always maintaining focus as humanitarians.
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Sean Lawlor: In your speech, you were less gung-ho about this psychedelic renaissance than other people. This was partly due to something called “psychedelic exceptionalism.” Can you speak about this?
Carl Hart: This term refers to the perspective that psychedelics are somehow better and more useful than other classes of drugs like opioids or stimulants. I was just trying to remind people that these are all psychoactive substances. They interact on receptors in the brain to produce their effects, and we shouldn’t be treating some drugs as if they’re special while other drugs are somehow evil. Drugs all carry some risk, and depending on how you define danger, they fall on different levels of the spectrum of risk, and benefits.
Sean Lawlor: So, you’re responding to seeing people glorifying psychedelics while continuing to demonize substances that have been demonized since the War on Drugs, if not before?
Carl Hart: That’s exactly it. It’s great to be enthusiastic about your drug of choice. But remember not to vilify other drugs. That puts people at risk, and it marginalizes people. I don’t think anybody really wants to do that.
Sean Lawlor: Can you say more about how that puts people at risk?
Carl Hart: When people talk about heroin being evil or dangerous in generalized ways, it stigmatizes that drug and, by extension, people who use that drug. Then, we have increased penalties, and we view those people as being defective for even using that drug.
Sean Lawlor: A way of “othering” those people, putting them in a negative box.
Carl Hart: That’s right. We did that with crack, and we did that with that methamphetamine. But you look at MDMA versus methamphetamine, and the chemical structures are not that different. But we have wildly different narratives about them. It’s just not warranted.
Sean Lawlor: What do you see as the roots of this exceptionalism?
Carl Hart: I think people think that they’re being strategic. Folks who want to increase the availability of psychedelics for medicinal reasons, for recreation — I think they feel that if they associate with stigmatized drugs, then that stigmatizes their drug of choice. They’re playing a political game, a numbers game — you could say they’re calculating this. But there are people who are really suffering, who don’t have a choice to calculate, and no one’s given us the right to play with people’s lives based on politics. What’s wrong is wrong, what’s right is right, and it’s wrong to vilify drugs and people. No matter what.
That’s why I try to keep the focus on doing what’s right as a human being, as a humanitarian. It’s just wrong to vilify people for wanting to alter their consciousness and the particular drug that they use, especially when you’re doing the same thing with another drug. That’s just inconsistent with respecting other people’s humanity.
Sean Lawlor: I think a lot of people have seen friends and family die from opiates. You talk about how these deaths may be due to what they’re getting, how much fentanyl may be in there, etc. But if someone’s caught in cycles of addiction with drugs that have a higher overdose potential than, say, mushrooms, and a high dose of mushrooms could allow them to work on deeper issues fueling addictive cycles, how could that drug not be seen as more healing?
Carl Hart: Because there are all kinds of assumptions with that question that are flawed. First of all, it’s not up to me to decide what people choose to work on and what drug they use. If they choose heroin as opposed to mushrooms, that’s cool. That’s their decision as autonomous adults. And if we think heroin is uniquely more dangerous than mushrooms — well, if we’re talking about respiratory depression, yes, it certainly can be. But if we’re talking about paranoia at large doses, mushrooms are more dangerous.
When we look at the Swiss situation, with a regulated supply of heroin and all sorts of services, you don’t have the problems of overdose that we see in this country. So it’s not the drug. It’s the conditions under which the drug is being administered.
Now, we do have people in our country who are dying from heroin or opioid-related overdoses. That’s a fact. But that has more to do with the stigma and the social conditions under which the drug is being taken. I am wholeheartedly in support of dealing with those issues, which are not that complicated. We could have a regulated supply of heroin. We could check the mixture to verify that people don’t have an adulterated drug. With mushrooms, you’re less likely to have adulterants in your compounds than you are with opioids. That’s a problem, but not of the opioid itself. That’s a problem of our supply.
Sean Lawlor: How about the problem of what’s underlying people’s addictions in general?
Carl Hart: That’s a whole different issue, that we have to figure out why people are addicted. People are addicted for a variety of reasons — and when I say “addiction,” I mean the DSM criteria for substance use. Those criteria have to do with people’s inability to inhibit, their lack of responsibility skills, or the conditions under which these drugs are available or not available. It has more to do with all of those things than, again, the drug itself.
It’s true that opioids can produce a physical dependence, whereas other drugs are less likely to. But alcohol can produce a physical dependence that is deadly, and we do alcohol relatively well in this country. There are people who have problems with alcohol, but the vast majority of folks don’t. So, alcohol will remain legal.
Whether it’s a drug or an activity like driving a car, people can and will get in trouble. It’s crazy to think we’re somehow going to prevent all negative possible outcomes of some activity. We can certainly take steps to minimize it. And we do. And we could do the same thing with drugs like heroin.
Sean Lawlor: You said something during a panel that elicited a strong response. I believe your quote was, “Heroin made me a better person.” I’m curious what that meant.
Carl Hart: I don’t remember the context that I was saying that. But the point I was trying to make is simple. We have alcohol at receptions, for example, where alcohol functions as a social lubricant. The same can be true with a drug like heroin.
Many of these psychoactive substances people use make them less anxious, more magnanimous — all of these kinds of things. That’s not a shocking statement. It’s only shocking for people infected with the Puritanism virus. Anybody who knows anything about drug use, particularly with opioids, knows they can enhance positive social interactions, and that’s why many people take them.
Sean Lawlor: You’ve said that only 25% of people who use heroin are addicted, which is different than the instant-addiction cultural narrative we’ve inherited.
Carl Hart: Yeah. But still, you don’t want people to become addicted. And when I say addicted, I mean the DSM criteria, not just physical dependence. People who take antidepressants, for example, have physical dependency. They can’t abruptly stop after taking antidepressants for a number of years. They have to be weaned off. The same is true with opioids. So when I say “addiction,” I mean that the person is distressed by their drug use and the consequences of their drug use, and they have disruptions in psychosocial functioning.
That 25% still concerns me. But I think it has to do with the stigma associated with heroin. People have to hide their use and engage in tremendous risk because of how society sees heroin. In places like Switzerland, where heroin is available medically, you don’t see people engaging in disruptive behaviors to get it. They just go to the clinic and they get their daily doses. In many cases, these people work. They’re responsible members of society.
Sean Lawlor: If there’s a psychedelic correlate to these trends, I’d say it’s LSD. Microdosing is popular, but LSD carries the heaviest social stigma of any psychedelic. I hear far less people speak publicly about their use of it than mushrooms and MDMA, which have essentially been adopted as “good.” And LSD often appears at festivals, where you don’t know what you’re getting, and really bad stuff can happen.
Carl Hart: Exactly. You hit it on the head. We see that with all stigmatized drugs. People are more likely to take risks that decrease their likelihood of getting the drug they’re seeking, because people can replace them with more potent drugs. And that could be dangerous.
Sean Lawlor: Do you see any effort in this psychedelic community to combat psychedelic exceptionalism?
Carl Hart: I have to tell you, I’m always disturbed when people identify themselves as a “psychedelic community.” That seems fucking bizarre to me. When you have all of these psychoactive substances, and people are taking them for similar reasons of altering consciousness, and then you have a line — these drugs over here, these drugs over here — I just find it bizarre that people would even identify as such a thing.
Sean Lawlor: Have you noticed that delineation more than me saying it right now?
Carl Hart: Oh, yeah. I didn’t mean — you’re absolutely right. I’m just saying as a neuropsychopharmacologist, as somebody who’s interested in consciousness and having your consciousness altered by these substances, it just seems strange that people would have the audacity to include themselves in a single sort of community that delineates its boundaries in a way that excludes other people doing the same thing.
Sean Lawlor: Yeah, that very language is a kind of exceptionalism, aligning with a “community” that uses drugs that are becoming less stigmatized and more popular.
Carl Hart: Yeah. It’s very disturbing. It’s just inconsistent with being a humanitarian.
Sean Lawlor: I’m thinking about how the War on Drugs set regulations in place that have disproportionately affected people from particular areas or particular races who tend to associate with particular drugs, and how that’s created, institutional divisions.
Carl Hart: But it’s not necessarily the laws. It’s the enforcement of the laws. The laws can be enforced in a way that hits across the various dimensions of society. But the laws are not enforced in that way. The enforcement of the laws seems to focus on specific communities of color, so enforcement is the problem.
My expertise is in drugs, so I focus on that. But this is not unique to drug law enforcement. This is how we behave in this country in general. That’s why I try to help people to understand how their verbal behavior about one compound versus another contributes to a misperception that allows for disproportionate enforcement of the drug laws.
Sean Lawlor: What is your parting advice for people invested in this psychedelic renaissance?
Carl Hart: I would ask that people think about the language they’re using for substances they like versus their language for substances that have been vilified. I ask that people think about the narratives that have been built around crack cocaine and heroin versus the narratives built around drugs like psilocybin and MDMA, and how wildly they conflict. Whether people are using heroin or MDMA, they’re seeking to alter their consciousness. They’re seeking intimacy with partners. They’re seeking the same things.
Sean Lawlor: Thank you for your time, Dr. Hart. I figured some biases and assumptions would come through my questions, but hopefully representing them here can help dismantle them for others who read it.
Carl Hart: I hope so. Thank you for doing this. And if you just remind people to think about other people’s humanity in the same way they think about their own, this won’t be an issue. If they think of people as being equal to them, this is not a problem. We all make mistakes, and that’s fine. But once you remember that no matter who you’re dealing with, they’re another person who deserves the same kind of respect you deserve, then it becomes easy.
About the Author
Sean Lawlor is a writer, certified personal trainer, and Masters student in Transpersonal Counseling at Naropa University, in pursuit of a career in psychedelic journalism, research, and therapy. His interest in consciousness and non-ordinary states owes great debt to Aldous Huxley, Ken Kesey, and Hunter S. Thompson, and his passion for film, literature, and dreaming draws endless inspiration from Carl Jung, David Lynch, and J.K. Rowling. For more information or to get in touch, head to seanplawlor.com, or connect on Instagram @seanplawlor.
Modern neuroscience has demonstrated that psychedelics such as LSD, psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, as well as ayahuasca operate to significantly reduce activity in the brain’s default mode network (DMN). This reduction in DMN activity functions as a kind of ‘rebooting’ of the brain, and is thought to be linked to one of the most enduring therapeutic effects of psychedelic substances.
What is the Default Mode Network?
The default mode network refers to an interconnected group of brain regions that are associated with introspective functions, internally directed thought, such as self-reflection, and self-criticism. Increased activity of the DMN is correlated with the experience of mind-wandering and our capacity to imagine mental states in others (i.e. theory of mind) as well as our ability to mentally “time travel”, projecting ourselves into the past or future.
The functioning of the DMN is considered essential to normal, everyday consciousness and is at its most active when a person is in a resting state and their attention is not externally directed on a worldly task or stimulus. For example, if you put somebody in an MRI scanner and don’t give them anything to do, their mind will start wandering and you will see the regions that make up the DMN light up.
The functional connections that make up the DMN increase from birth to adulthood, with the DMN not being fully active until later in a child’s development, emerging around the age of five as the child develops a stable sense of narrative self or “ego.”
As we mature, we learn to respond to life’s stimuli in a patterned way, developing habitual pathways of communication between brain regions, particularly those of the DMN. Over time, communication becomes confined to specific pathways, meaning that our brain becomes more ‘constrained’ as we develop. It is these constrained paths of communication between brain regions that quite literally come to constitute our ‘default mode’ of operating in the world, coloring the way we perceive reality.
Evolutionarily speaking, it has been hypothesized that the DMN plays a major role in our survival, helping us form a continuous sense of self, differentiating ourselves from the world around us. The DMN has been described by psychiatrist Matthew Brown as the part of the brain which serves to “remind you that you are you.”
Overactivity of the Default Mode Network & Mental Health Conditions
The DMN has been found to be particularly overactive in certain mental health conditions, such as depression, anxiety, and OCD. Matthew Brown likens DMN overactivity to experiences of “hypercriticality”, “rigid thought patterns”, and “automatic negative thought loops” about oneself.
Imagine that you are at a party, telling a joke that gets met with an awkward silence. Initially, people might think “Oh no, that wasn’t so funny,” but they tend to quickly move on to the next leg of the conversation, forgetting about it entirely. However, you go home that evening, finding yourself completely unable to sleep because you are wrought with worry about the bad joke you told, what a fool you appeared to be, and how others might be judging you harshly for it. This is a classic example of DMN overactivity and the negative thought patterns which tend to be visible in people who suffer from depression, anxiety, and OCD.
How Do Psychedelics Affect the Default Mode Network?
Psychiatric doctor and ayahuasca researcher Simon Ruffell likens the effects of psychedelics on the DMN to “defragmenting a computer.” When you ingest a psychedelic, activity of the DMN is significantly decreased whilst connectivity in the rest of the brain increases.
“Brain imaging studies suggest that when psychedelics are absorbed they decrease activity in the default mode network. As a result the sense of self appears to temporarily shut down, and thus ruminations may decrease. The brain states observed show similarities to deep meditative states, in which increased activity occurs in pathways that do not normally communicate. This process has been compared to defragmenting a computer. Following this, it appears that the default mode network becomes more cohesive. We think this could be one of the reasons levels of anxiety and depression appear to reduce.”
Dr. Simon Ruffell, Psychiatrist and Senior Research Associate at King’s College London
Due to psychedelics’ ability to disrupt the activity of the DMN, they have a particularly strong therapeutic potential when it comes to changing negative thought patterns. For example, a study by Imperial College London assessed the impact of psilocybin-assisted therapy on twelve patients with severe depression. Results demonstrated that psilocybin-assisted therapy was able to dramatically reduce their depression scores for a period of up to three months.
A follow-up study suggested that the therapeutic impact of psilocybin was linked to its ability to ‘reset’ the DMN, turning it off and reconsolidating it in a way that is a little less rigid than before.
In general, it has been shown that psychedelics produce increases in psychological flexibility, positing another explanation for why we see decreases in depression and anxiety following a psychedelic experience. Based on what we know about the DMN, we could hypothesize that it plays an influential role in one’s ability to be psychologically flexible.
Matthew Brown gave an analogy for how psychedelics are able to reset the DMN, enabling an increased sense of psychological flexibility:
“If you do the same thing repeatedly, it is like you are walking down the same path all the time. Naturally, that path becomes very well worn and easy to walk down. However, you realize that maybe there is another path that might be more advantageous for you and you want to try walking down that path. Psychedelics ‘mow the lawn’ so that it doesn’t seem that the weeds are quite so high and you can walk down that new path a little bit more easily.”
Entropic Brain Theory & The Reducing Valve
Psychedelics tend to disrupt the activity of the DMN, temporarily disintegrating the highly organized system of networks that it is made up of, allowing for “less ordered neurodynamics”, and a greater degree of entropy within the brain. That is to say that open, freer conversations begin to take place between brain regions that are normally kept separate.
According to the ‘entropic brain’ theory, the state of consciousness associated with psychedelics is comparable to that which exists in early childhood – we experience awe and wonder, looking at everything in the world around us as wholly novel.
These findings are in line with writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley’s early reflections on the psychedelic experience, in which he described psychedelic consciousness as “Mind at Large” in that it grants us access to a larger set of brain functions, allowing us to tap into an unbounded state of consciousness which extends beyond the individual and into the collective. He theorized that in order “to make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system.”
In this case, we can think of the “reducing valve” as a metaphor for the DMN which in some sense serves “to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, […] and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.”
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The Default Mode Network & Ego Death
In 2016, a breakthrough study by Imperial College London used a combination of neuroimaging techniques to measure electrical activity and experiential reports from participants to investigate the link between brain activity and reported psychological responses to LSD in twenty volunteers.
Results demonstrated that LSD dampens the function of the DMN, and that this decrease in activity strongly correlated with the subjective experience of “ego dissolution” or “ego death”, indicating that the DMN performs a vital part in sustaining the “ego” or “self.”
Similarly, researchers at Johns Hopkins University published a pioneering study, demonstrating that psilocybin is able to produce mystical-type experiences in participants, such as the experience of ego death. These experiences were considered to be deeply meaningful by participants and were seen to elicit sustained positive changes in attitude and behaviour.
Generally, it’s our ego – our sense of “I” – that tends to create and harbor negative thought patterns. In conditions such as depression and anxiety, we become self-absorbed, narrowly focused on thoughts about ourselves, unable to take a step back and see the bigger picture. The ego erects boundaries that can lead to us feeling isolated from the people around us, disconnected from nature and even ourselves.
In a state of ego dissolution, these boundaries are let down and a great “zooming out” takes place where you begin to see things on a macroscopic level. You are no longer an individual isolated from life as it takes place around you, but rather you are interconnected with everything through the web of life. It is not a logical, but rather a felt experience of incredible love and reconnection.
When asked about the therapeutic implications of having an experience like ego dissolution, Matthew Brown explained that it can be tremendously healing as our consciousness is able to extend itself beyond the confines of our individual experience, and become one with nature’s larger whole.
“You realize that you are extremely insignificant, and perhaps that sounds defeating. However, it can be very freeing to realize that you are just one human who is existing for a very small blip of time in the grand scheme of the universe.” — Dr. Matthew Brown, DO, MBA, ABPN, Child, Adolescent, Adult Psychiatry
It is important to note that although experiences of ego death can lead to deep personal insight, and thus have therapeutic benefits, they can also be terrifying. Author of Changing our Minds, Don Lattin reminds us that ego death can be a “fearful and/or enlightening experience” that “depends in large part on whether mind travelers are ready for the journey, what baggage they bring along, and who’s accompanying them.”
Perhaps what is most interesting about the ego death experience, and the temporary rewiring of the brain enabled by psychedelics, is the long-lasting, enduring therapeutic effects that remain beyond the temporality of the drug. The resetting of the DMN combined with the powerful experience of ego death induced by psychedelics are often described as amongst the most meaningful of experiences in a person’s life. Such experiences help us to break free from negative thought patterns, become more psychologically flexible as well as dissolve the barriers between ourselves and the world around us, realizing our place in the interconnected web of life.
About the Author
Jasmine Virdi is a freelance writer, editor, and proofreader. She currently works for the fiercely independent publishing company Synergetic Press, where her passions for ecology, ethnobotany and psychoactive substances converge. Jasmine’s goal as an advocate for psychoactive substances is to raise awareness of the socio-historical context in which these substances emerged in order to help integrate them into our modern-day lives in a safe, grounded and meaningful way.
Sonoran Desert toads emerge from earthly tombs every year after the late summer monsoons roll in, which cause countless tiny ponds and lakes to form. Though most will evaporate in a few hours or days, toads lay eggs in the depths of these small water beds. Most of the tadpoles won’t last longer than the waters in which they are born, a few will become pollywogs then toads, ensuring survival for another generation.
Life in the desert is stark as it is. But these unique desert toads are currently facing a host of new threats, including climate change, habitat loss and — perhaps most dangerous — commodification. Bufo alvarius, the Sonoran Desert toad’s scientific name, is the only known animal source of 5-MeO-DMT, a popular chemical among psychedelic users. Unfortunately, poachers overharvest toads to feed the ever-growing market for this powerful substance. While the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List of Threatened Species placed these toads in the lowest category of risk for extinction in 2004, the same report acknowledged they were virtually extinct in California. Scientists, conservationists, and artists are banding together to ensure the rest of the species avoids a similar fate.
Climate Change on Habitats
To understand how human-caused climate change could impact Sonoran Desert toads, we first need to look at potential effects on their home region. A 2012 study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) predicted that the Southwest would continue to get hotter and drier. A 2018 National Climate Assessment bore out those predictions. This is bad news for toads, who already live near their physiological limits. More troubling was a 2017 report in Nature Climate Change, which predicted the probable decline of monsoons by 30 to 40 percent over the next century.
Thomas R. Jones, Amphibians and Reptiles Program Manager for the Arizona Game and Fish Department, believes parsing the impact of climate change from other threats and historical fluctuations is difficult if not impossible. This past summer he observed a decrease in toad populations at a site where they are normally abundant. “I think it’s a reasonable assumption to say if the monsoon gets squirrely and we have drier years, it will be rougher on summer breeding anurans — toads and frogs — like the Sonoran Desert toad,” Jones said.
Overdevelopment and the Destruction of Habitats
While climate change looms like ominous clouds in the distance, habitat loss is the single greatest threat to Sonoran Desert toads. According to a 2013 report from the USDA, 90 percent of riparian areas in Arizona and New Mexico converted to other land uses over the last century, ultimately turning habitats into agriculture fields or residential developments. At the same time, surface water was diverted from the few year-round rivers into massive reservoirs as aquifers pumped out groundwater in order to supply the region’s growing population and agricultural production.
These toads once thrived in farmland irrigation systems, too. But, due to the increasingly intense use of chemicals — both pesticides and fertilizers — and mechanization, they disappeared from some agriculture areas, such as the Southern California side of the Colorado River and the Imperial Valley.
Paved roads are also particularly deadly to these creatures. Toads go to pools that form on impermeable surfaces where water can more easily absorb through their skin. The hot spots for Sonoran Desert toads are lined with roads, often putting them in harm’s way. In fact, a 2010 study in Human-Wildlife Interactions estimated 12,264 amphibians died annually on roads in and around Saguaro National Park just west of Tucson, Arizona. Roads also hinder the toad’s range, causing a loss in gene flow, or genetic evolution, which negatively effects populations, according to Jones. “The number of animals that die on roads are just huge.”
Pop Culture, Money, and Psychedelic Tourism
The least understood threat is the impact of poaching and overharvesting for the 5-MeO-DMT market. Though Sonoran Desert toads can be legally gathered with appropriate licenses in Arizona, collecting them for the extraction of 5-MeO-DMT — which became a Schedule 1 substance in 2011 — is a federal crime.
In order to extract 5MeO-DMT, the toads must be agitated, which causes their glands to excrete poison. Then, it’s squeezed or scraped out. Robert Villa, president of the Tucson Herpetological Society (THS) and a research associate at the University of Arizona’s Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill, is concerned about the harm this poses to toad survival.
“I think what’s going to happen over time is that if intensive collection continues,”Villa explained,“it’s going to create a vacuum in these areas, what is also known as a mortality sink.”
Some argue that indigenous communities have used the drug for centuries. But Villa points to flaws in this argument, saying that some advancing this position may have a vested financial interest in doing so. Some scholars have cited the discovery of toad bones at shamanic burial sites. If true, it could legitimize the toad extraction industry, helping businesses grow at the expense of the toad populations. For doctors or others selling 5-MeO-DMT, this would be a boon.
But Villa noted the bones were from a different species of toad that doesn’t produce 5-MeO-DMT. He is not convinced by the evidence that indigenous people historically used the toad as a source of 5-MeO-DMT. “We couldn’t decipher it from residues. There’s research that discovered cacao residue in pots in New Mexico,” Villa explained. “What we see today is a blatant misuse of indigenous culture to do it.”
We may never know who first smoked 5-MeO-DMT for sure, but one of the earliest academic papers citing its psychedelic properties appeared in a 1967 issue of Biochemical Pharmacology. Then, knowledge about how to extract, prepare, and consume 5-MeO-DMT from toads was first widely propagated by a pamphlet written in 1983. The document contained detailed instructions, diagrams, and background information. Its author was listed as Albert Most, a pen name, though multiple people throughout history have claimed to be Most.
Though its authorship is disputed, the pamphlet’s role in raising awareness about the drug is not. Following its publication, groups like the Church of the Toad of Light started promoting 5-MeO-DMT consumption. Its proponents claim the drug can help with depression and anxiety, which was supported by a study in The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse earlier this year. Advocates also claim it helps with recovery from substance abuse.
Unfortunately, a number of bad actors are harming toads and humans by providing the toad excrement for consumption. An open letter published earlier this year accused two doctors who facilitate 5-MeO-DMT use, Octavio Rettig and Gerry Sandoval, of defrauding, harming, and even causing patients to die. Numerous self-proclaimed shamans administer the drug illegally throughout the US and other countries. One such person was identified as Shaman Dan. He is alleged to have led a series of 5-MeO-DMT parties at the residence of a woman in Southern California, who we’ll call Christina (not her real name) for the sake of anonymity.
Christina was connected to Shaman Dan by her mentors, who recruited her into Amway, a multi-level marketing company accused of being a pyramid scheme by consumer advocates, academics, and newspapers such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. She described Shaman Dan as a white male under 25-years-old who formerly sold energy drinks through a multi-level marketing company. He told Christina that he was trained in Mexico by a woman named Shaman Sandra. After extracting the toad’s poison — which Christina incorrectly identified as venom — Shaman Dan described using an undisclosed chemical as a bonding agent into the 5 MeO-DMT blend.
“It’s not something the individual taking it knows,” Christina said. “That’s why it’s very important that you trust whoever is administering this, because if they do not know what they’re doing, they will mess you up. It’s basically like taking crystal meth from a drug dealer off the street.”
Public awareness of the toad has grown rapidly in recent years, with increasing references not just in academic journals, but in popular media as well. Journalist and author Michael Pollan discussed his negative experience with 5-MeO-DMT in his 2018 bookHow to Change Your Mind, which reached number one on the New York Times bestsellers list. Pollan also discussed the subject on The Joe Rogan Experience,a popular podcast. Host Joe Rogan has covered 5-MeO-DMTs transformative power many times, perhaps most notably in an episode from earlier this year with Mike Tyson. All this buzz leaves the little toads facing evermore heavyweight dangers from all corners.
The Sonoran Desert toad does not face these challenges alone, however. The THS is funding a project to study how the ionic composition of cement water holes may be harmful or even lethal to amphibians. Villa partnered with Cream Design and Print to produce t-shirts, posters and other items that spread awareness about the danger extraction poses to toads, and to raise money for conservation efforts. He hopes that if potential 5-MeO-DMT users know the harm they’re doing to these hardy animals, that they will choose less-harmful methods for obtaining whatever it is they seek.
While the toad may be the only animal source for 5-MeO-DMT, the compound can be synthesized and found in many plants. The seeds of one species of Anadenanthera trees in South America contain 5-MeO-DMT and DMT. Virola trees also originate from South America, and some species of this plant contain both forms of DMT as well. They are both typically prepared as snuffs but can be consumed otherways as well.
Synthetic 5-MeO-DMT is in many ways a superior delivery vehicle to the toad-sourced variety. The extract from toads contains many other chemicals and can be dangerous if it is not consumed correctly. Synthetic 5-MeO-DMT can be precisely dosed, whereas every toad’s extract is a little different. The study cited earlier showing 5-MeO-DMT’s effectiveness as a treatment for depression and anxiety used the synthetic variety in its experimental trials.
The benefits of synthetic versus toad-sourced 5-MeO-DMT were even discussed by Rogan on his podcast. Rogan reported a very positive experience when he consumed synthetic 5-MeO-DMT. Pollan had a very different reaction, describing his consumption of the toad-sourced variety as horrible. For the most toad-loving psychonauts, these alternatives can provide a safer and more eco-conscious way to experience this unique molecule. “It boils down to your individual ethics,” Villa said. “As psychonauts, I would hope that you are able to think about how your use of substances and your acquisition of those substances has an effect on the rest of the world.”
About the Author
Jeff Kronenfeld is an independent journalist and fiction writer based out of Phoenix, Arizona. His articles have been published in Vice, Overture Global Magazine and other outlets. His fiction has been published by the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, Four Chambers Press and other presses. For more info, go to www.jeff-k.com.
The psychedelic revolution is upon us. After receiving an FDA “Breakthrough Therapy” designation for psilocybin (a hallucinogenic compound in magic mushrooms) and MDMA-assisted psychotherapy against treatment-resistant depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), hallucinogens are finally finding place amongst the most viable psychiatric protocols of the modern-day. With appropriate dosage, set and setting, psychedelics have demonstrated unparalleled clinical efficacy in alleviating symptoms of some of the most prevalent and pressing psychological disorders and afflictions—depression,1,2 PTSD,3 substance abuse and addiction,4,5,6,7 obsessive-compulsive disorder,8 anxiety in the terminally ill…9,10 The list goes on. And whether its the decriminalization of psilocybin by Denver and Oakland, new strides in clinical research with MDMA, or microdosing LSD to enhance corporate creativity in Silicon Valley, I open the paper to a new headline every day. The reach of these psychedelic agents is great, and only becoming greater.
With the second advent and accruing legitimacy of these therapeutic tools, we are confronted with an entirely new era of psychiatry and consciousness studies. It is the marriage science and spirituality, or, in the words of UCLA psychiatrist and psychedelic researcher Charles Grob, a form of “applied mysticism.”11 Under the auspices of integrative medicine, individuals are benefitting tremendously from psychedelically-occasioned mystical-type experiences. They are afforded feelings of unity, euphoria, vastness, unbridled love, and profound peace and joy.12,13,14 Also referred to as “plant teachers” and “entheogens”—literally translated to that which “releases the divine within”—psychedelics seem to open us up, to expose us to ourselves and the entire palette and majesty of existence, and then return us graciously to our more familiar form of being, endowed with an enhanced capacity for the fundamental human tenets of empathy, love, and compassion.
Undoubtedly, then, it is an exciting time — But a provocative and precarious time at that. There is still so much to know. So we must learn from the lessons of our psychedelic past, temper our excitement, and exercise faith and patience in the gradualism of empirical science. In order to fully realize the potential of psychedelics in psychological healthcare, we must all act together, slowly, steadily, and with altruistic intention.
As a recent undergraduate, I completed an independent Senior research project on the biochemistry of hallucinogenic mushrooms, in order to do my very small part. Word got around that I was studying psychedelics, even quicker than you would expect at a small liberal arts college in the middle of a rural farm state. To strangers, I became “the girl who studies shrooms,” and I did not mind.
Magic mushrooms? Spirituality? And Biochemistry? At an academic institution? How could that be?
To those inquisitors, I was prepared and passionate to discuss my findings. But I never could have anticipated the explosion of interest and many thoughtful inquiries I did receive.
My email inbox was deluged with “your research,” “looking to connect,” or “coffee?” subject headings, from people of all walks of life—those that fit the psychedelic archetype, and those remarkably unsuspecting or straight edge; those in tie-dye and those in polo shirts; students of every grade and social circle, athletes and artists, of red and blue states, all races, religious ideologies or lack thereof, and socioeconomic class; professors of music and mathematics, biology, economics, gender studies, and yes, of course, physics and poetry. Many were already knocking on Alfred Huxley’s Doors of Perception and finding that their particular variety of everyday existence just wasn’t cutting it anymore.
I was startled by how many were curious to try psychedelics, or were already actively exploring the subtlest realms of their unconscious mind; how many aspired for a better understanding of themselves, or felt spiritually deprived and were seeking validation or comradery of the soul; how many sought antidote to their feelings of anger, alienation, or dissatisfaction in “recreational” psychedelic use, and spoke with me in crisis of the psyche, believing there is and wanting more.
I wondered, is this a time of collective awakening and curiosity, but occurring behind closed doors? According to the 2010 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 17% percent of people surveyed between ages 21 and 64 reported lifetime use of one or more psychedelics, LSD, psilocybin (magic mushrooms), mescaline, and/or peyote.15 That is an estimated 32 million Americans tripping. People are doing psychedelics — on a therapist’s couch, in National Parks, in your very own neighborhood streets. And, consistent with accounts from clinical therapeutic psilocybin and MDMA trials, people are having extraordinary revelations. They are experiencing undiluted joy or traversing phantasmagorical landscapes of kaleidoscopic complexity. Some are enduring adversity there, confronting buried traumas and subconscious discontent, while others come face-to-face with God. Some experience an extinction of self, sheer terror, or utter bliss. Psychedelics are reawakening individuals to life, and sometimes, to love as its essence. And upon return to baseline “consensus reality,” many don’t quite know what to do.
The majority of those with whom I spoke or exchanged emails with were concerned with reintegration. They were apprehensive of the applicability of their psychedelic insight into day-to-day life. Put simply, they worry, where to put all the love? How to incite this change?
And I hope we can agree, it is sad that this dilemma exists. That inspired individuals struggle to find practical or quotidian applications for newfound senses of interconnectedness, peace and joy. Many feel estranged or paralyzed in the aftermath of a psychedelic experience, under the impression that their come-to-God realizations or mystical musings are not compatible with their preexisting way of life. Some worry that if they speak of their journey, eyes will roll, and their story will be met with skepticism. People do not feel adequately supported, socially or societally.
One friend of mine, a highly successful financial analyst in his mid 50’s, wrote to me after a particularly potent psilocybin journey, “society is not a place for the loving. It is ill-compassionate in conception and now character. And I am afraid I will be called a hippie.” I, too, struggle with this. My goal is to become an integrative psychiatrist, but I have been counseled to refrain from mentioning psychedelic research in my medical school application. I am not supposed to speak openly about my belief that hallucinogens are tremendous tools for personal transformation, or of the love and gratitude I have been afforded by incredible psychedelic insights of my own. I am not Michael Pollan and lack his immediate credibility. How may we legitimize our curiosity and excitement?
I believe the power to do so is in the hands of the people. By practicing acceptance, acting with kindness, cultivating community, and welcoming the return of psychedelic voyagers with open ears and arms, we, as an evolving society, may eliminate the stigma. We may realize the full potential of these medicines, in and outside of sanctioned medical settings. Because let’s face it, people are tripping anyway. Much like clinical psychedelic-assisted therapeutic models, in which debriefings are held, explorers of the mind may benefit from similar sympathetic settings to decompress, review and reflect, to derive meaning from their experience, assimilate and grow. In the absence of a mediating shaman or psychiatrist, by default, this responsibility may be assumed by friends and family. People should not be left to confide only in “the girl who studies shrooms.” Not to mention, risks associated with psychedelic use are most pronounced when used recklessly and/or in unsupervised settings. The likelihood of experiencing panic and paranoia of potentially lasting psychological detriment, or of injury or fatality due to impaired judgment, is reduced in safe and supportive physical session environments, which we may create and hold for one another.
May we remain leery and methodological regarding the process of legalization, then, to the extent that it does not inhibit personal growth, freedom of expression, cognitive liberty, and the propagation of love. While psychedelics are finding their rightful nook in modern medicine and perhaps, impacting the lives of some you hold dear, we should engage in communion, and indulge in the most effectively human thing about us, our ability to care and connect. To give and listen and learn. Hopefully, someday soon, there will be formal research and psychiatric training facilities, providing comfortable, secure environments for sensible psychedelic use. But in the meantime, may we embrace this important avenue of self-exploration, by being there for one another.
About the Author
Zoe Moynihan graduated in May, 2019 from Middlebury College, with a Bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry, Summa Cum Laude. Zoe completed independent senior research on the biochemistry of psilocybin mushrooms, which culminated in her final paper entitled Magic Mushrooms: A Reconciliation of Science and Spirituality; Psilocybin Phenomenology, Pharmacodynamics, and Psychopharmaceutical Applications.
Psilocybin for depression is becoming a major avenue of clinical research. The Usona Institute out of Madison, Wisconsin is about to begin the largest psilocybin-depression study in the US. Part of the FDA’s drug approval protocol, this phase 2 clinical trial will test the magic mushroom compound in 80 individuals for safety and efficacy in treating major depressive disorder (MDD).
When Usona co-founder, Malynn Utzinger, MD presented at this year’s Horizons Conference, she explained that she and co-founder Bill Linton originally wanted to look at psilocybin for depression and anxiety in those with terminal cancer. But when they brought the idea to the FDA, the government organization basically said: Why limit yourselves to depression in cancer patients? And so they changed gears to research psilocybin for depression more generally.
“It is our duty to make sure a potentially effective medicine gets to the widest… group of medical need,” Utzinger said on stage. She went on to explain that depression affects 300 million people worldwide and is predicted to be the second-largest cause of medical morbidity by next year, to further show the need for this research.
Psilocybin Depression Studies
So could psilocybin help those millions of people? Usona is hopeful, especially among the large portion of people with depression for whom traditional treatment, like anti-depressant medication, does not work. They’ve recently secured 7 clinical trial sites that will conduct this research and give qualified participants psilocybin along with therapeutic support. The sites are located around the US and include Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, the University of California San Francisco, Yale University in Connecticut, University of Wisconsin-Madison, private testing sites in Chicago and Miami, and NYU in Manhattan – which is also the first site to complete training of facilitators and begin recruiting participants.
People are very interested in trying this new depression treatment. In fact, Utzinger said in her talk that over 6,000 people have volunteered for the 80 available spots in their phase 2 trial.
Although this is the biggest study in the US looking at psilocybin for depression, this isn’t exactly a new concept. Outside of clinical trials, folks have been reporting reduced depression symptoms from psychedelic experiences – and peak experiences in general – for a long time. In fact, a 2017 study that looked at lifetime psychedelic users in “naturalistic settings” (meaning outside of a trial, but whether it’s for fun or ceremony is unknown) found them to be less “psychologically distressed” and suicidal than users of other substances.
Over at Imperial College London, their team of psychedelic scientists have been looking into this even further, trying to figure out how psilocybin works for depression, both on a psychological and neurological level. Clinical psychologist from the Imperial team, Rosalind Watts, PhD and her colleague Ashleigh Murphy-Beiner, spoke right after Utzinger at Horizons, and presented a paper Watts authored which gives practitioners a framework for facilitating psilocybin for depression therapy, called the “ACE (Accept, Connect, Embody) Model.”
Watts developed this idea after facilitating participants’ psilocybin experiences during Imperial’s first psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression trial. During “psilodep 1” 20 people were given psilocybin-assisted therapy, and 19 had decreased depression symptoms at week 1 and nearly half at week 5. Plus, none of their participants began a new course of anti-depressants until after week 5.
Now, she tells Psychedelics Today over the phone that Imperial is halfway through their second study on psilocybin for depression; they’ve seen 38 out of “65, possibly 70” participants in a trial that’s comparing psilocybin to an SSRI antidepressant for depression treatment efficacy.
Psilocybin for Depression: The ACE Model
The ACE Model (which should be published before the end of the year) highlights psilocybin’s ability to promote psychological flexibility as a key function in how this therapy works. Essentially folks move from a psychologically rigid place where they’re stuck ruminating on negative thoughts to a more flexible, open, and accepting place, post-psilocybin session.
Watts describes it to me in terms of a ski slope. That our minds, or our “default mode network” is like a skier who follows the same path in the snow until they’ve become deeply ingrained grooves. Then a psilocybin-assisted therapy experience is like a snowplow that comes in and evens out the entire mountain. And so folks are suddenly freed from their ruminative ruts and now have the option to ski anywhere (or think about anything) they please. “They feel that they can think a different way. That they can have new thoughts and see themselves slightly differently,” Watts says. “They can have a sense of space and freedom, mental clarity, not stuck in those deep groves.”
It’s this same idea that her colleague at Imperial, Robin Carhart-Harris, PhD, made famous, that psychedelic experiences can “reset the brain” or “shake up the snow globe” allowing for new thoughts and perspectives. “It’s a disruption,” says Watts. “It’s actually that disruption that allows for a reset.” Yet, she explains that doesn’t happen so easily for everyone, and she doesn’t think it’s healthy for folks to go into these experiences with that expectation, because if they aren’t magically “reset”, they can be extremely disappointed.
“They’re often in very, very desperate states. Sometimes they haven’t been outside of their homes for years and their relationships have suffered and they’re feeling very isolated,” Watts says of the depression participants. “The amount of expectation and pressure that is on them for those experiences is huge.”
Therefore, in the ACE Model, they frame the whole experience in terms of a journey – rather than a reset – for participants, to try and lower the pressure and encourage the acceptance of all experiences as they come. That includes accepting challenging material that may arise as well as not making participants feel like a failure for “resisting” the medicine; in the ACE Model, it’s all part of the experience. And that’s where preparation and integration become critical to the whole healing process.
“It needs to be a therapeutic intervention where that person’s unique set of fears and hopes can be gently sat with, processed and held so that the person that’s sitting with them has some sense of the complexity of the whole scenario,” Watts explains. “Because so often the healing isn’t actually just in the trip, it’s in the environment, it’s in the relationships that you have in the room. And actually, often it’s as much about the narrative, the story you co-construct [as the psilocybin].”
When all the pieces come together, when people feel fully supported and understood, then psilocybin can help folks out of depression by helping them see themselves and their lives more clearly. The process can also include planning actionable steps during integration that participants can take to improve happiness, like being less hard on themselves and spending more time with community or in nature.
Watts described the psilocybin healing process in a 2017 paper as people “moving from disconnection to connection” or “from avoidance [of emotions] to acceptance” and that’s very much part of what they try to instill during the therapy sessions. The ACE Model also includes guided meditation, and during a preparatory session they have participants visualize a journey, often a diving expedition where they’re encouraged to go deep into the dark parts of their mind in search of pearls of wisdom. The therapists remind divers that pearls are often found in scary, prickly oyster shells, so it may not always be easy, but the value will be great and worth the struggle.
This process of psilocybin-assisted therapy for depression is personal, and experts like Watts and Utzinger both point out its high rate of success is likely as much about the deep connections participants feel with their therapists as it is about the effects of psilocybin. Unlike taking anti-depressant medications for depression – which tend to numb people’s feelings – psilocybin and the therapy surrounding it encourage people to dig deep into their emotional worlds to try and heal themselves from the inside out.
The Future of Mushrooms for Depression
Even though psilocybin-assisted therapy is working for people in initial studies, it’s often not a permanent fix. Watts says many people from her trial have found that their depression symptoms come back after a few months. However, when I ask her about this, and about the potential future of legal mushrooms for depression therapy, she’s hopeful folks will have more options, including opportunities to do psilocybin sessions once every few months or so. She also adds that she thinks there’s lots of room to develop integration practices for more long-term depression relief, which could include integration groups that go out and do meaningful activities together, like planting trees.
Obviously this is just the beginning of scientific research looking into this treatment. And hopefully, as law and science catch up with nature, there will be more options for folks to access this therapy for depression in the near future.
About the Author
Michelle Janikian is a journalist focused on drug policy, trends, and education. She’s the author of Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion, and her work has also been featured in Playboy, DoubleBlind Mag, High Times, Rolling Stone and Teen Vogue. One of her core beliefs is ending the prohibition of drugs can greatly benefit society, as long as we have harm reduction education to accompany it. Find out more on her website: www.michellejanikian.com or on Instagram @michelle.janikian.
This is the fourth and final blog of a podcast recorded in John Cobb’s apartment in Claremont, California. This was recorded during a small weekend conference on psychedelics titled “Exceptional Experience Conference.” You can listen to the full talk in this episode of Psychedelics Today.
John Boswell Cobb Jr. is an American theologian, philosopher, and environmentalist. Cobb is often regarded as the preeminent scholar in the field of process philosophy and process theology, the school of thought associated with the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead.
John Cobb: Obviously, I’m not going to put this forward as a great psychedelic experience, it still doesn’t feel like it’s just simply my talking to myself. It feels like I didn’t know what to do. I hadn’t thought about this before. Suddenly, yes, of course, that’s what I need to do.
Kyle: It feels like it comes from somewhere else, but it is inside.
John Cobb: But of course somewhere else is not as special somewhere else.
Kyle: Right.
John Cobb: It doesn’t come out of my normal ego consciousness. It feels like that there’s a wisdom in it that was not my wisdom. There’s an otherness about it.
Kyle: Right. And that it’s coming from somewhere.
John Cobb: I know. They’re coming from somewhere, it is immediately… Vision is so spatially oriented that if we talked in a visual language somewhere else is going to be very prominent. With just hearing music, the location of the music isn’t that important, is it? It’s the music in your ear or is it inside your body? Is it in the airwaves around you? Is it where the orchestra is? Well, yeah, any and all of the above. But you see a book, all right, that book is on top of that book. It’s so very clearly located and each object that you see has boundaries. And so that just creates a language and a culture.
The difference between Gautama and the other great Indian thinkers, for Gautama when you seek the self, there is nothing. But the others there is Atman, and Atman is the same as Brahman. The ultimate substance. And Gautama and many of the Buddhists assume that if you conceptualize at all, you will be misled. That just shows how powerful concept and visualizing is such a scene too. Whereas I belong to the view that it should be possible to have… like Bohm was saying, “Okay, let’s just use gerunds.” I don’t think it’s impossible to conceive process. That’s the part, I hope you understand, this is not me anti-Buddhist. I think it’s amazing that 2,500 years ago somebody was able to think so deeply. I regret that the tendency even today is to become anti-concept, when what we need are better concepts.
Joe: Yeah. I’m feeling like you say you can’t skillfully conceptualize process, but perhaps it’s more about feeling like
John Cobb: You can conceptualize feelings.
Kyle: Right. True.
John Cobb: It’s just that our Indo-European languages haven’t, so you can’t quickly think of examples.
Joe: That’s interesting.
John Cobb: And conceptualize maybe the wrong term. But I don’t like a kind of retreat into mysticism. If you say it’s mystical, then you say you can’t think about it anymore. I think we can think about it, and if you don’t want to call it concepts, call it whatever you want. But we can think about processes. And science needs to think about them. And thinking about them doesn’t necessary… I mean, what it has so often meant is locate it in a sight oriented world or substance oriented world, then you’ll see then you’re not really thinking about them anymore. Anyway, that’s why David, I think, has done a remarkable job of thinking about process. And has given us a language that can help us do it. And I think that’s very useful.
Joe: Yeah, I think it’s really helped me quite a bit with perhaps handling psychedelic experiences with a little more grace because it’s not so… Just Lenny has put a lot of this knowledge on us and it seems like it’s really helpful. And it’s hard to put, for me, at this point, to really phrase that well. But it’s certainly been a Boon.
Johanna: What was the one thing that was helpful for you? I’m sure there’s lots of things.
Joe: Lenny’s complicated. And as a result that…. probably more of a gerund type attitude towards the thing as opposed to this is this, this is an Apple. It’s more like, wow, this is just a dynamic flow of things through this very complicated system.
John Cobb: I see. I don’t know Chinese, so my statement that it is not so substance oriented. But when I’ve tried to talk about this with Shahar he points out that the same character can function as either.
Joe: Oh, wow.
John Cobb: An example of a word that this has happened to in English is the word pastor. It was a noun for a long time. You were a pastor. But now people talk about, “I’m going to pastor such and such a church.” No, I think that that gets closer to reality to say a person is a pastor, what does it mean? It means that he pastors. But when you locate it as a pastor, it’s just sort of strengthens this individualistic thinking rather than a focus on the activity.
Kyle: It is versus it’s doing or it’s happening.
John Cobb: Yeah. Well to pastor people means you listen to them when they have something to say and you hear them without judgment. I could go on and on. But that’s what a pastor does. And to call a pastor is really to be pointing into that dimension of activity. The same person who is a pastor is also a preacher, but unfortunately we have a verb to preach so we don’t say to preacher. I just wish there were more cases where I could point to how a noun has just come to be used as a verb. And there are others, but at the moment I’m not thinking of them.
Joe: Do you recall the first time you heard something that made you interested in the positive impact of psychedelics or anything around the beginning?
John Cobb: Lenny was certainly one of the early ones. But I don’t want to say his first because I just don’t know.
Johanna: Right. It was southern California in that period of time when it was probably pretty intense.
John Cobb: But obviously having him, he was really trying to convert me. I appreciated it. This is not a criticism. Anytime one discovers something that’s very helpful, one wants other people to benefit from it. So my relation to him was the first time this had become something that I really had to deal with. But that doesn’t mean I hadn’t heard of it before. Probably I had heard of it more negatively than positively. Because of course the hippie culture included some negatives. I grew up in a context where drinking was already a bad thing to do. And the tendency in circles I moved in, which by that time has ceased to be particularly strongly against drinking, was to associate alcohol and psychedelics.
I was quite sure alcohol did a lot of harm as well as working well for conviviality… You know what I mean. Of a mixture. So I thought psychedelics, and I had no doubt that some people had great experiences and other people that may found them very attractive, but it… Generally, I suspected that society was better off not to have it. So Lenny was probably the first person who really opened my eyes to the potential of very positive use.
I had another experience not too long after I came to Claremont. I had always assumed that civilization was a good thing. There was a professor at Pitzer College, who I worked with quite closely. We co-taught courses. He was very convinced that civilization was the basic evil. I’m not convinced. I mean I think every civilization we’ve had has been pretty horrible. I wouldn’t have said that if I hadn’t had to interact with him about that. But I think if there are people today of course, who just think we need to get rid of civilizations and then we’ll be all right. My impression is today it would be very remarkable if 10% of the world’s population survive without civilization.
Even though I appreciated his opening my eyes, I didn’t walk through that door. And the same thing was true with Lenny, I really appreciated his opening my eyes, but I didn’t walk through that door.
Kyle: I appreciate your openness and curiosity of the subject. For somebody that didn’t walk through the door, you seem to very curious about it.
John Cobb: I’m confident there’s much good that could come from it. And so when there are people who are using it for good, I want to be as supportive as I possibly can. A lot of people today will say, “Yes, we really need basic changes.” But you know what it means to make basic changes in worldview, and most of them don’t. So it’s very comfortable to be in a group of people who when they talk about changes, they know what the-
Joe: Extraordinary change.
John Cobb: Yes.
Joe: Yeah.
John Cobb: Whitehead has made me understand what I think would be the changes that might make us behave in responsible ways. So I don’t feel the necessity of having unusual experiences.
Johanna: And what would be some of those changes?
John Cobb: Have to change from our substance thinking to our process thinking. This would be a change from our thinking of every individual as self-contained, to understanding that we are all our products of our relationships with each other, and that the human individual is… Well, for one thing, I mean from Whiteheadian viewpoint, any individual is the many becoming one. That’s what it is to be an individual. So to be an individual is to be part of everything, is to have everything being part of us.
Economics, as an example, I think economics is the worst, because it is the most powerful shaper of the world and is the worst expression of the university. It assumes radically individual and really the only relationships that count are economic relationships. I think those are just two absolutely erroneous views. If they are not changed, then they have to be changed existentially, not just, oh, that philosophy might work better or something. And it’s because what you do helps to make the existential change that I in no way want to say, “Oh, all we have to do is to do philosophy.” No, no. I think the change has to go way beyond that.
I had one experience out there, which made me very high. So in that sense, but it had nothing, it wasn’t a matter of breathing exercises. It was being in a group where I just felt completely accepted, completely loved. I think that can happen just by the way a group of human beings relate to one another. I was still feeling that deep comfort when I came home. It took my wife a little while to puncture the balloon. So I’m not suggesting that everybody should always be in that state, but nevertheless that’s a feeling of being one with that group of people that people need. The church should be doing this. I’m not trying to push me into the church, you should understand that’s important for me in my understanding.
When I was in the army, one night I said, “Kneel beside my bed.” And the whole room just simply itself felt like it was filled with love and acceptance. You’re not just an individual when that kind of thing happens. You are part of something else. So I’m just saying you could call them psychedelic experiences, if you want, they don’t have many of the characteristics that people describe as psychedelic, but they are experiences of a different possibility that is still a perfectly human possibility.
There is a woman by the name of [unclear Thandeka 01:13:05]. She’s Afro-American and Bishop Tutu. He gave her the name. And she’s spent a lot of times studying neuroscience and gotten getting acquainted with key people in the field. And she’s created an organization called Love Beyond Belief. She seems to be able to help. She’s Unitarian, and she has worked with Unitarian churches, which are not the places that I would have thought, which I say most readily, but sometimes it turns out that people who have been putting all their emphasis upon reason and rationality and so forth, other ones who are really ready for something else. She thinks it’s possible to organize a service of worship in such a way that people will really existentially feel loved. And to whatever extent she can do that, I think that will accomplish much of what I’m interested in. But obviously a number of people in this group, and in almost any group I’m at, have had a completely different experience of a church. That church is a place of judgment and condemnation and guilt and all of that. And that is of course the absolutely opposite of what is needed.
I think the church has great potential for good. It has great potential for evil. It’s like almost everything else. Education has great potentials for good, great potentials for evil. And I think the modern world has tended to bring out the potential for evil in both. But that doesn’t mean, I think, in the middle ages everything was wonderful. I really think Europe was better off in the middle ages than it has been in modernity. But I’m not interested in going back.
John B. Cobb, Jr., Ph.D, is a founding co-director of the Center for Process Studies and Process & Faith. He has held many positions, such as Ingraham Professor of Theology at the School of Theology at Claremont, Avery Professor at the Claremont Graduate School, Fullbright Professor at the University of Mainz, Visiting Professor at Vanderbilt, Harvard Divinity, Chicago Divinity Schools. His writings include: Christ in a Pluralistic Age; God and the World; For the Common Good. Co-winner of Grawemeyer Award of Ideas Improving World Order.
This is part three in a four-part series recorded in John Cobb’s apartment in Claremont, California. This was recorded during a small weekend conference on psychedelics titled “Exceptional Experience Conference.” You can listen to the full talk in this episode of Psychedelics Today.
John Boswell Cobb Jr. is an American theologian, philosopher, and environmentalist. Cobb is often regarded as the preeminent scholar in the field of process philosophy and process theology, the school of thought associated with the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead.
John Cobb: There were lots of biologists who have worked with us that they rather resent being constantly pushed into mechanism when in fact they’re dealing with organisms. That organisms are only complex mechanisms. A lot of biologists know that isn’t right. So we have a chance of making breakthroughs, whereas I don’t think Rosemary Ruether, brilliant as she is… I hope you understand that I’m picking people. We get it. We take her with us when we are promoting process theology. Even if she will say, “Oh, I’m not interested in process theology.” What she says is process theology, so we don’t (laughs)… So the label is not that important, the insights are important. And in a foundational way, they are common sense.
I think the common sense is that our knowledge of each other is not just by visual and auditory clues. But people have been told so long that it is. If you could just have people who never went to school (laughs)….
Kyle: What else would it be informed by if it wasn’t visual and auditory?
John Cobb: Just by our immediate experience of each other.
Kyle: So a felt experience?
John Cobb: Yeah. I think that we’ve had an experience of being in a group where when you walk in, you feel a climate there. If you go into a room where everybody is angry with everybody, of course, you are told that you really are get visual and auditory clues. It doesn’t feel like that. You just feel this is not… The vibrations here are not good. Okay. So we need to deschool. Are you familiar with Ivan Illich’s book, Deschooling Society?
Joe: It’s great.
John Cobb: But of course we also need schools, and there’s no reason, in principle, that schooling has to be indoctrination into a bad worldview. It could be something else. And there are a few schools that are already doing something else.
Kyle: I think a lot about the education system, but I’m curious what would your vision of an education system be if it’s not working right now?
John Cobb: Well, I think the one that Matthew Siegel teaches at in San Francisco CIIS. CIIS and Naropa are examples of a different educational system. I have not studied either one of them enough to hold up one and say it’s better than another. Another educational system that I think well of is The Great Books Program. It needs revision because in the past it’s only been the great Western books. And at Chicago when I was there, the college was operated on a great books basis. And I hope by now they have incorporated great books from other parts of the world.
It’s very different. I’m just saying, I think there are different kinds of educational systems that are better than what we have. If I’m just going to have the opportunity to create a school, it’s going to be a school that teaches ecological civilization. Because in my mind, a healthy human survival is a goal that ought not to be regarded as an eccentric and marginal one, but ought to be regarded as what all we human beings ought to be getting behind collectively together. And if you have a school for that, again, curriculum could really be quite varied, but you would try to see what do people most need? And I think that the production and consumption and sharing of food would be a very, very central part of it. But also we need to understand technology and understand how it can be used for truly humane purposes. We need to understand that capitalism has ignored much of reality.
In economics 101, you can find out what the assumptions are. They are wrong. So people should be told what the assumptions have been and why they’re wrong. Reflect together about better assumptions and what their implications are. How we can go about changing. I’m not giving you a curriculum, but you will understand. I’d try to get the people who know the most about curriculum in the abstract in general. What students at a certain age are likely to be ready to do. All those things are relevant to developing a curriculum. My role is deconstruction. I just want to make it clear what’s going on now is absolutely absurd.
Enlightenment is the worst curse of humanity. We have been enlightened into not believing all kinds of things. The disappearance of subjects from the world of actuality. If that’s enlightened, I don’t want to be enlightened. But I think we need a lot of reflection about the language we use. And of course language is a very popular topic. But the questions that I think are most important are very rarely asked.
Joe: One of my favorite parts of Whitehead is the re-framing of language. In kind of your book, Whitehead Word Book, that’s a really foundational thing. Our language carries weight, our words carry inertia that we’re not aware of.
John Cobb: And I’m sure that the reason we have 36 universities with Center for Process Studies in China and zero in the United States is that the Chinese… The idea that process is more fundamental than substance doesn’t seem strange to them. To us, we know it ain’t so because we got to talk about books and tables. Those are the really real things. And how do we know that? We know because we’ve been speaking that language the whole time.
I’m sure language is important. Western intellectual history I have increasingly come to think of as for a long time a marriage of Hebrew hearing oriented with Greek sight oriented. And hearing oriented has made history important. And now, the universities have succeeded in excluding hearing oriented ideas completely. It’s a complete victory of Cartesian sight oriented thinking. History is no longer taught.
Sight oriented people can know that there have been past events and they can study past events, but history as meaningful, as helping you to locate yourself in a long process, that comes only from Israel. And that used to be very important. I mean a lot of very secular… I mean you didn’t have to be believing Jew and believing Christian in the West to think history was important. If you’d think Hegle and Marx, I mean these are all history thinking people.
We need to understand how things got to be the way they are. What are the issues today coming out of that history? And I think that’s very important. But the university has finally excluded it almost completely. You see for science only what can be repeated in the laboratory (is true). First of all, what can be repeated. But the whole point of history is that events cannot be repeated. That automatically excludes history. Excludes a lot of other things too.
Kyle: I’m curious, you said you haven’t had any experience with psychedelics, but you feel really hopeful about their reintegration in society.
John Cobb: Yes, if they reintroduction in the way this group would do it (regarding a private conference at Claremont College). Obviously if they are reintroduced primarily for the profit of the reintroducer, I’m not confident it would end up being a benefit. The more people use the most expensive drugs, the more profit.
Joe: Right. And you know, skillfully used, you probably need less than 10 LSD experiences to heal most of what you’ve got. And to do some really creative work. Some people just have one and that’s it for their life. That’s a very different thing than drugs that are around for our whole life.
John Cobb: That would be sort of like a near death experience. One is usually enough.
Kyle: I’d say so.
Johanna: Were you there for Kyle’s story? Kyle had one at age 16.
John Cobb: No. I was not there yesterday afternoon.
Kyle: I got in a snowboarding accident and ended up rupturing my spleen, and I lost about five to five and a half pints of blood internally. I guess like where it started to become mystical was when I was in the MRI machine, CAT Scan machine, and they were trying to figure out where the blood was coming from. I was on the other side of the room with the doctors, but I was also in my body at the same time. I kind of describe it as like an orb of light kind of surrounded me, and a voice kind of appeared and said… It wasn’t an external voice. It seemed a little bit more internal, or maybe it felt experienced. I don’t know how to really put it into words.
John Cobb: You felt internal, but nevertheless, it wasn’t just you talking to yourself.
Kyle: Yeah. And something just said, “You’re going home, going back to the stars where y’all come from. And this is just a transition. The more you relax into it, the easier it’s going to be. This physical life’s going to cease to exist, but you’ll continue on.” And it was a really blissful kind of experience at that point, and I got excited, I was like, “Oh, I’m going home.” But then coming back to reality, it was difficult to reintegrate that.
John Cobb: Within the experience itself, there was nothing about coming back to reality?
Kyle: No, there’s a-
John Cobb: Because many people report a kind of moment when there’s a decision made.
Kyle: Yeah. I think they caught me at the right time as I was really starting to slip away. They put me under anesthesia, but I didn’t remember anything. There was a felt sense that I went somewhere and I talked to something. But I couldn’t remember it. And when you say, we’re so fixed on the visual aspect, I mean, that’s what I think irritated me the most that sometimes people report going down a light or they see something. This was a felt experience. Like I knew something happened, but I couldn’t describe it.
John Cobb: In the auditory world, the location of the words… in the auditory, sometimes a meaning is communicated. And if you explain to somebody else, of course you have to put it into words, but it’s initial reality is not words. I think a lot of the time in the Bible when it says, God spoke to me and said such and such, people just felt called. And I’ve had that kind of experience. I’ve never had hearing in the liberal sense. But I just sometimes sit quietly for a while and then it just comes to me, there’s something I need to do.
John B. Cobb, Jr., Ph.D, is a founding co-director of the Center for Process Studies and Process & Faith. He has held many positions, such as Ingraham Professor of Theology at the School of Theology at Claremont, Avery Professor at the Claremont Graduate School, Fullbright Professor at the University of Mainz, Visiting Professor at Vanderbilt, Harvard Divinity, Chicago Divinity Schools. His writings include: Christ in a Pluralistic Age; God and the World; For the Common Good. Co-winner of Grawemeyer Award of Ideas Improving World Order.
This is part two in a four-part series recorded in John Cobb’s apartment in Claremont, California. This was recorded during a small weekend conference on psychedelics titled “Exceptional Experience Conference.” You can listen to the full talk in this episode of Psychedelics Today.
John Boswell Cobb Jr. is an American theologian, philosopher, and environmentalist. Cobb is often regarded as the preeminent scholar in the field of process philosophy and process theology, the school of thought associated with the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Cobb is the author of more than fifty books. In 2014, Cobb was elected to the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences.A unifying theme of Cobb’s work is his emphasis on ecological interdependence—the idea that every part of the ecosystem is reliant on all the other parts. Cobb has argued that humanity’s most urgent task is to preserve the world on which it lives and depends, an idea which his primary influence, Whitehead, described as “world-loyalty”.
Kyle: Do you think what’s going on in the mind, say like neurotransmitters or electrical activity firing, that’s creating this reality, or the experience is having an influence on the neurochemistry?
John Cobb: It’s all experience. It’s a question of whether this is the experience of the neurons or of the psyche, and I think the evidence is that the psyche plays a role. One of the first people we worked with, a very famous physiological psychologist. And there was a man who did a lot of experiments on the split-brain. I’m sure there were other people. I think the name begins with an S, but anyway. He was over here at Cal Tech, so he was more accessible to work with. He really appreciated working with us because he found he could now formulate his findings. He was very, very clear that the evidence that he had was that conscious experience had a causal role.
It’s just common sense. I decided to put my watch back on and stopped fiddling with it and I put it back on. Amazing. Pure coincidence in terms of… Since purpose cannot play a role. I call it the metaphysics. It was wrong when it was only applied to other animals. It deepened the anthropocentrism since it was an only human experience that counted. But it’s just so absurd. Scientists who are busy engineering genetic change tell us that genetic change has no purpose. Purpose plays no role in the genetic change. I don’t think they believe it, but that’s what they have to teach.
Kyle: What do you mean by no purpose in the genetic change?
John Cobb: Because purpose cannot have a causal effect in the Cartesian world. Now, the other way they would say, “Oh, but I know that my purpose is actually completely the result of mechanical relationships between my neurons.”
Johanna: I have a question about the actual occasions.
John Cobb: Yes.
Johanna: So what you say that the human being is an actual occasion?
John Cobb: No, I would say the psyche consists of a series of actual occasions.
Johanna: All right. So could you elaborate on this definition of actual occasions? I know that it’s a really hard concept.
John Cobb: Well, an absolutely basic question in traditional philosophy, I don’t know what’s taught under the rubric of philosophy today, I won’t address, is the question of what kinds of things are in and of themselves actual that would be in distinction from things which can be divided up into other entities. So an actual occasion would not be divisible into other actual occasions. And of course for a long time, beginning with some of the Greeks, the answer was an atom. An atom is indivisible. But that doesn’t keep it from actually existing.
Now for Whitehead, the word atom is so bound up with substantive thinking. For me to simply say an actual occasion is an atom would be confusing. But if you take the basic meaning of atom, the actual occasion is the basic unit of actuality. And of course saying that is an alternative to a substance way of viewing, and it doesn’t exclude the possibility other people will come up with other theories.
But I mentioned Quarks and Quanta, not that I know they cannot be divided further, but right now there is no clear indication that Quark is made up of other things. So it seems to be a unit of reality. So when we deal with living things, obviously if they are like us, have brains and so forth, we assume they have a psychic life, and the occasions of psychic life will also be atomic.
One of the things that I raised in one discussion that there was some evidence that plants also have some kind of unified experience. I don’t think it’s been studied enough to be making any clear pronouncements. But I don’t know whether I mentioned in the larger groups of Findhorn. Have you heard of Findhorn?
Johanna: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
John Cobb: Okay. Well, the people there commune with their plants. They’ve been doing it for 50 years, so it’s not a fly by night. I think there are a lot of people who have a feeling about the tree that it’s not just a lot of cells interacting, but maybe the tree itself may have some purpose or something to say. But that’s all of what are the actual occasions, is an entirely different question from what it means to say it’s an actual occasion. Is that okay or do you-
Johanna: That’s fine. Thank you.
John Cobb: They’re atoms.
Johanna: Yeah.
John Cobb: And when you talk about a society of atoms like the sofa or the chair or the table, which are the kinds of things that standard brand philosophy, for a long time, held up. They’re clearly not atoms. Society as I was indicating, if you have enough actual entities, their dynamism disappears in the society as a whole. Making negative statements that are always very questionable, it’s hard for me to think that a stone is an experiencing entity. I think the molecules are. And I’m sure cells are.
Kyle: Okay, so the rock as the whole isn’t, but the molecules and the atoms are?
John Cobb: That’s right. I’m sure that those cells are influenced by the emotions of people. I don’t think a rock is, could be wrong, and it could be that the molecules are slightly, but that’s just canceled out. But the plant organization, I don’t think it gets canceled out. What happens to the cells affects the way they relate to each other and the total development of the plant. I hope you understand, again, having a particular conceptuality does not tell you just how it’s going to map out on real things, but Whitehead, so many things, well these are empirical questions and they’re important empirical questions. When I think some of the evidence is so great that I just go ahead pretend I know.
Joe Moore: You can see how this worldview seems very psychedelic.
John Cobb: That’s what we keep hearing. I mean even we who haven’t, who don’t know that we have psychedelic experiences, that the things that people report sound true to us. And if they are true, then how you got there is also of great interest.
Joe Moore: Did you have the opportunity to communicate with Stan Grof at all?
John Cobb: You know, I may. I’ve been at Esalen twice, and I kind of think he was there one time. I didn’t have any real conversation.
Joe: Okay. John Buchanan brought him here, I’m sure you’re aware, in 2015, for the big conference.
John Cobb: That’s right.
Johanna: You were very busy. Thousands of people.
John Cobb: I did not have conversations with…
Joe: Thankfully you did (have him at the conference). It was really great. Lenny and John Buchanan have been really pushing Whitehead on Stan, which is really interesting.
John Cobb: Yes. I mean I would like to offer it. If people are not interested, that’s-
Joe: Yeah. I don’t know if pushing is the right word.
John Cobb: It’s perfectly okay. Yeah. But I think when people who have had the experience hear that there is a philosophy which works very well with the cutting edges of science, that they’ll likely define that something positive. That doesn’t mean they have to go spend a lot of time reading Whitehead. And there are so many people who when I listen to them I would say eco-feminism. I’ll give a particular example. The eco-feminists I’ve known best, I mean the theological world, but they’re very strong eco-feminist. Mary Daly and Rosemary Ruether are two of them. Now Mary Daly knew some Whitehead and liked it, but Rosemary Ruether, everything she writes sounds just right to us. She said, “I will not read a word of Whitehead.” So I don’t think that Whitehead is the one and only way of arriving at what I… The reason I push him is that I’m very concerned by the institutions, and especially educational institutions that they have enormous power over what is considered good policy and so forth. And they are so wrong about it. If you say, “Oh, but psychedelic experience shows that’s a mistake.” It doesn’t really open the door for further conversation.
If you have a philosophy that can make more sense out of physical evidence that is taken seriously by physicists, I’m announcing that they are very, very slow to be interested. But at least among quantum physicists, Whitehead’s name is known and appreciated. And that could be an opening wedge that would mean that physics as a whole would adopt an organic model rather than a mechanical. That’s the usual way. We put it and fit.
John B. Cobb, Jr., Ph.D, is a founding co-director of the Center for Process Studies and Process & Faith. He has held many positions, such as Ingraham Professor of Theology at the School of Theology at Claremont, Avery Professor at the Claremont Graduate School, Fullbright Professor at the University of Mainz, Visiting Professor at Vanderbilt, Harvard Divinity, Chicago Divinity Schools. His writings include: Christ in a Pluralistic Age; God and the World; For the Common Good. Co-winner of Grawemeyer Award of Ideas Improving World Order.
This is part one in a four-part series. Kyle, Joe and Johanna Hilla were able to spend time recording with John B. Cobb at his apartment in Claremont, California. This was during a small weekend conference on psychedelics titled “Exceptional Experience Conference.” You can listen to the full talk in this episode of Psychedelics Today.
John Boswell Cobb Jr. is an American theologian, philosopher, and environmentalist. Cobb is often regarded as the preeminent scholar in the field of process philosophy and process theology, the school of thought associated with the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Cobb is the author of more than fifty books. In 2014, Cobb was elected to the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences.A unifying theme of Cobb’s work is his emphasis on ecological interdependence—the idea that every part of the ecosystem is reliant on all the other parts. Cobb has argued that humanity’s most urgent task is to preserve the world on which it lives and depends, an idea which his primary influence, Whitehead, described as “world-loyalty”.
John Cobb: The senses heighten and intensify the connection on particular kinds of connection. The eyes are obviously very sensitive to particular wavelengths, and the ears are sensitive to other wavelengths and so forth. But that this is to think that sight is the most direct relationship to what’s going on externally, doesn’t make sense. Sight requires… I mean there’s lots that happens before what we call sight occurs. And those happenings are more fundamental than seeing. But the tendency of British empiricism has been to start with the data of sight. Philosophy should go deeper than that. What label can we give to the most fundamental relationship? First, we need to describe that relationship. The most fundamental relationship is any happening, the world is made up of happenings, rather than substances.
Any happening enters into its successors. And one of the best kinds of meditations in terms of conscious experience is to think of what’s happening. As you listen to music in any given moment, there’s just one tone, but you don’t really just hear a tone. If you heard just a tone and then another tone, you wouldn’t hear music. You hear at least the musical phrase, and the whole musical phrase is still in the experience at the time that the concluding note is being struck. So the experiences of the previous tones do not end when that experience ends; it gets transmitted.
Our experience is the inclusion of elements of previous experiences. It’s very much like Buddhism in this respect. Whitehead calls the fundamental relationship of inclusion including part of the previous experience a prehension. So a prehension is the way in which one experience enters into successor experiences. And he thinks this is what’s going on also in the subatomic world. So the word, “prehension” is a cause. It’s a causal relationship. But the image of course that Hume was looking for just looking in the wrong place.
So if the world is made up of prehension, then what, in any given moment, is prehended, and Whitehead says everything. That is every past event leaves some trace and has some trace in the present. In that context, you can try to figure out why sometimes particular past events sort of revivifies itself in the present.
You could study it under what circumstances, there’s some event from your childhood all of a sudden. But it doesn’t mean it has had no relationship to your experience. The conscious experience is, of course, a very special form of experience, and the boundary between what is conscious and unconscious is a very fuzzy one.
So when we talk about everything being experience, we certainly don’t mean everything is conscious. Sadly among a lot of philosophers, the only use of the word experience is referring to conscious experience. And then there’s no understanding of Whitehead’s view.
Since everything is a synthesis of relations to everything in the past, you have much more material to work with when you’re trying to explain experience. Now an experience is not exhausted by its relation to the past. Whitehead calls the relatedness to the past, physical prehension. We are prehending actual entities. But we also prehend potentialities. Now those potentialities may also be prehended as realized actualities in the past. So it doesn’t mean that every conceptual feeling is of something that is radically novel, but it is being experienced simply as a potential, not as actual. And Whitehead thinks this is present even in very elementary matters. Waves of vibration. He liked the term. It’s a very large part of the world we live in.
And then when you go back and forth between two states, this is the minimum of novelty that actual entities can have. Both states, neither state is novel, it’s constantly recurrence. He thinks that without some variation from moment to moment, nothing really happens. So this kind of novelty is to be found all the way down in the quantum world. And though as the description of the quantum world, so the indeterminacy and all of that certainly suggests that this is not unreal. Most of the developments in science since his time tend to fit very well into his ideas. Quantum was just on the edge coming into existence when he was writing. He wrote very extensively about relativity, very little about quantum. But many quantum physicists are quasi-Whiteheadians. David Bohm, we worked with a lot because he came and spent two weeks in the house next door to me and we talked all afternoon, day after day. So I really thought I got acquainted with him.
He was very process-oriented. He actually thought that we needed to change our language. He thought we could do it simply by shifting to gerunds from nouns. Because gerunds suggest something’s happening. Nouns suggest something IS. And this has distorted our understanding of the world in which we live.
So from the Whiteheadian side, any experience, however weird, needs to be taken seriously, that happened. If that is experienced, however confusing it is, however misdirecting it may be, nevertheless, if it happened, it happened, and that has to be taken account of. And his combination of the inclusion of actuality and potentiality usually makes it possible to figure it out. And of course, if it’s too much potentiality and too little grounded in actuality, you better be careful of it. But on the other hand, if you don’t have the potentiality, then you ultimately just have a completely deterministic universe. Then you can’t explain a great many of the most important phenomena.
Johanna: Does Whitehead relate potentiality to his ideas about intuition?
John Cobb: The word intuition, you don’t find in Whitehead. I shouldn’t say that. It’s a very limited word in Whitehead. But I think people who have studied about intuition in other traditions usually find that what they mean by intuition is a form of prehension. Intuitions, I think, can be both of pure potentials and can be intuitions about other people. Yeah.
I mean obviously proximity is likely to make something stronger. My psyche can prehend your psyche when you’re sitting there and I’m here. And also around the world even it could… It becomes less and less likely when there were no other supportive… I think when you’re actually talking to somebody, obviously you have visual cues and auditory cues and it enriches the connection, but that’s not the basis of it. That there is an actual occasion over there that is experiencing hearing me and seeing me is intuitively about a certain… It’s really in many ways more certain than that’s a patch of blue. I’m more likely to be wrong about the color than I am about the sheer being, sheer occurrence. So obviously a lot of what are called paranormal experiences are not magical or supernatural or something.
So many things that the university just won’t touch for a Whiteheadian point of view should be regarded as empirical theories. The fact that somebody claims to have seen something or done something doesn’t mean that’s true because there are plenty of illusion. But rather than dismiss it, they just study it and test it rigorously. I mean, it’s not that you just immediately are gullible about everything,
I mean, frankly I have until yesterday paid very little attention to astrology. Now as a Whiteheadian, that does not mean that I think that the planets have no effect on us whatsoever. I’ve just rather assumed it was a rather minor matter. I’m much more open now to learning more about the connections as they say. But just the fact that you find thoughtful people have developed elaborate theories about these connections doesn’t make them right. But it should mean well, that’s interesting. What evidence is there?
And somebody was telling me that… You will see that as far as names are concerned, I’m absolutely terrible. But the woman who spoke (Becca Tarnas)
That she had told him, I don’t think it was either reviewed.
The year he was born, correctly. Just on the basis of very little knowledge, well, no, when I hear that I think, wow, okay, there’s more to this than I thought. But that doesn’t mean Whitehead says anything about this. It’s just he… If we prehend everything that has ever happened, however trivial, then to know in advance that this couldn’t be true is ruled out.
So on the other side, since he does not privilege our standard sensory experience, then if people started talking about having very different sensory experiences, there’s no bias against it. I’m saying what Whitehead offers, and since he makes very explicit points, we need to study experience, drunk experience, sober, he doesn’t say experience in the psychedelics and not, but it’s obviously included.
And then while he’s experienced drunk, does not seem to give one insights into reality through any very… I mean it tells you something about the human body and how our body chemistry affects neuronal activity. I mean, in that sense it cannot be understood, but that it gives you a vision of reality that happens to be much more like Whitehead’s, naturally increases interest on the part of the Whitehead is.
I mean, most people who’ve had drugs feel a deep relationality that is not given to us. An insight, for example. And the world has much more dynamic, and Whitehead shows us how vision abstracts from the dynamism rather than commuting the dynamism.
So I think Lenny can tell you. I mean, he wrote an article that we published in The Center for Process Studies that is using process categories to explain the psychedelic experience. And John Buchanan has been working on that, it got many people. And of course, the psychedelic experience is different with different people. So it’s different with different drugs and all of that. So you can explain one experience, you haven’t explained all. And obviously it can be just as misleading about what the world is like as normal experiences. So the interaction should give rise to hypotheses for testing.
But if someone is already convinced that our interconnections are far more extensive than if somebody says, “Oh, I had this vision and I saw everything related to everything else.” We Whiteheadians are not going to test it, we just say, “Good, I’m glad you’ve see it. I wish I could see it that clearly. I believe it.” One of the very important features of Whitehead is to distinguish a complex society. I mean, the table is a complex society. And if we talk about pan-experientialism, we’re not saying that the table has had the experience. But we are saying that if you analyze the table into the quanta and quarks, that these are dynamic entities.
So when you put together a lot of dynamic as it is, and even as indeterminate as it is. I mean, one of the ironies is that predictions based on theories in quantum, they call it quantum mechanics, but it ain’t mechanic. And they develop a formula and these tend not to be more precise than when you’re just dealing with the big objects. So you might think that if you have a little bit of indeterminacy in the entities that then this could be multiplied, but statistics don’t really work that way.
I mean, if you flip a coin, you flip a coin 10 times, it wouldn’t be too surprising if you got seven on one side three on the other. If you flip it a hundred times, it would be very surprising if you’ve got a 70 on one side and 30 on the other. If you did it 10,000 times, it would be utterly amazing. And you would be quite sure this was no longer neutral, that there was something about the coins or something that was causing this difference. So when you get trillions of cases, as you would in a table, that it comes out so that the prediction can be so precise, doesn’t mean it’s a mistake to think that there was uncertainty in the individual cases.
Physics has opened up vast amounts of things. From a Whiteheadian point of view contemporary physics would be almost universally valid if the world were composed entirely of physical feelings.
Kyle Buller: What do you mean by physical feeling?
John Cobb: Physical feelings are feelings of actual occasions. This term for what is, is an actual occasion. Human experience is an actual occasion.
Johanna: So what would be opposed to the physical feeling?
John Cobb: Conceptual feelings are feelings of potentials.
Johanna: Right.
John Cobb: And he (Whitehead) thinks now our feelings are potentials in every actual occasion. So physics is never adequate to any individual entity. And the attempt to make physics apply, standard physics, of course I mean, apply to the quantum world is a total failure. Almost everybody agrees on that.
John Cobb: I think the attempt to make ordinary physics apply to human experience, which is the task assigned to Neuroscientists. The neuroscientists I have known, and they’re obviously a select group, on the whole, they’re completely convinced that subjective experience has a causal role to play in the world. Whitehead thinks it has the causal role to play in the world.
But as long as you are only talking about the experience of past entities, you can avoid it. But when they found out that when they study Zen practitioners and discovered that their brain’s shapes are changed by their practice, I just don’t see how they can keep on saying that subjective experience has no causal role. And they don’t. I mean the people who are doing these experiments, they said they have to be very careful how they word this when they go back to their… One of my many reasons for not thinking highly of the American university. It is more committed to metaphysics than it is to empirical study. Really is.
John B. Cobb, Jr., Ph.D, is a founding co-director of the Center for Process Studies and Process & Faith. He has held many positions, such as Ingraham Professor of Theology at the School of Theology at Claremont, Avery Professor at the Claremont Graduate School, Fullbright Professor at the University of Mainz, Visiting Professor at Vanderbilt, Harvard Divinity, Chicago Divinity Schools. His writings include: Christ in a Pluralistic Age; God and the World; For the Common Good. Co-winner of Grawemeyer Award of Ideas Improving World Order.
In the heart of Manhattan’s busy Greenwich Village, the Horizon’s Conference: Perspectives on Psychedelics, graced the Cooper Union Great Hall on October 12th and 13th. The largest and longest-running gathering of the psychedelic community brings folks from around the globe together for presentations on psychedelic research findings and activism every year.
The conference first ran in 2007 as a single afternoon of talks at the Judson Memorial Church with around 250 attendees. This year, both days were sold out and attendance exceeded 2,600 people, not including after-parties and other unofficial events around town.
This was also the first year that offered pre-conference classes for physicians as well as interested individuals, like Introduction to Psilocybin Therapy with Bill Richards and Rosalind Watts, Intro to MDMA Therapy for Clinicians led by Shannon Clare Carlin and Marcela Ot’alora, Intro to Ketamine Psychotherapy, and Sexual Ethics in the Psychedelic Community, all of which were sold out on Friday, October 11th.
But what kind of talks are given in such a collegiate atmosphere, at a podium that’s hosted leaders such as Abraham Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, and Barack Obama? On day one, Julie Holland, M.D. and author of Weekends at Bellevue hosted the science-themed presentations, including recent research on psilocybin from the Imperial College London team, mindfulness-assisted Ketamine therapy by Elias Dakwar, M.D., the potential harms and benefits of 5-meO-DMT given by Alan K. Davis, PhD, among other fascinating and informative talks.
Then on day two, the theme switched to culture and Bia Labate, Executive Director of Chacruna and MAPS’s cultural specialist hosted presentations on psychedelics in the media by the DoubleBlind Mag founders, the indigenous peyote way of life by Steven Benally, president of Azee’ Bee Nahagha Nation (formerly known as the Native American Church of Navajo Land), the intersection of art and psychedelic-assisted therapy by artist and activist, Swoon, along with other important and moving discussions.
Let’s take a look at three main themes that emerged this year at Horizon’s to get a sense of the kinds of issues the psychedelic community is currently debating.
1. Psychedelics are coming, but how? Medicalization vs. Decriminalization vs. Legalization
The conversation at this year’s Horizon’s seemed to move past whether or not legal psychedelics are coming. Everyone at the conference seemed to agree that the future includes some kind of legal option for substances like psilocybin, but now the question is: What’s the best model for moving forward?
Yet, even for the psychedelic community, Hart’s ideas are somewhat radical. Other organizations in the space strongly believe in a more medicalized model, where psychedelics wouldn’t be legal to use and possess by anyone, but instead only by doctors who would administer them in a controlled environment to qualifying patients. It’s a big debate in the community, especially considering the medicalization of psychedelics probably wouldn’t be accessible to everyone because of the high price tag that will likely come attached.
Decriminalization is the third option, but can still fall short of being enough for the safest and most responsible drug use. For this reason, many in the community see it more as a step toward full, adult-use legalization than the finish line. In Hart’s talk, he pointed to the fact that law enforcement can still marginalize certain groups, especially POC (people of color), with decriminalization, and without regulations and purity testing of substances, people don’t have enough information to use drugs safely.
2. Economic Models of Psychedelic Expansion
Which brings us to our next point, if psychedelics are legalized, will companies be able to make a profit from selling them? Could “Big Psychedelics” come in and monopolize the space?
George Goldsmith, Bia Labate, Dr. James Rucker
While this issue was brought up in many contexts at Horizons, it was the center of discussion on Sunday morning at a panel titled, “Economic Models for the Expansion of Psychedelics”. George Goldsmith, co-founder and CEO of Compass Pathways, a for-profit company that has patented synthetic psilocybin and threatens to monopolize the space, was a member of the panel and put in the hot seat by many in the community, both during the Q & A and by the other panelists. Goldsmith is already a millionaire and is poised to make the most profit and have the most control over medicalized psilocybin, and that is cause for alarm for many people in the community. Most of the other organizations sponsoring research into psychedelic-assisted therapy are not-for-profit organizations, like MAPS with MDMA and the Usona Institute with psilocybin.
Other options for psychedelic expansion were also addressed in this discussion, like the “pollinator approach” by economics and public policy professor, Bennet A. Zelner, PhD, which is a more community-based model of resource and information sharing and distribution.
3. “Coming Out” as a Psychedelic User
Lastly, another main theme that was touched on in both presentations and private conversations was the need of community members to “come out” publicly as psychedelic users. The idea is to show the mainstream that anyone can be a responsible psychedelic (or other type of drug) user to try and break some of the stigma that still surrounds these substances. If we can change the public perception of psychedelics, then a shift in law and policy could naturally follow.
There’s even a group from Costa Rica trying to start an international coming-out campaign on February 20, 2020 called “Thank You Plant Medicine” to support folks in telling their transformative psychedelic stories publicly.
It was a busy and exciting year at Horizons NYC, and a great opportunity for the community to come together to push the conversation forward. These are three major issues to continue to pay attention to as psychedelic research and decriminalization progress!
About the Author
Michelle Janikian is a journalist focused on drug policy, trends, and education. She’s the author of Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion, and her work has also been featured in Playboy, DoubleBlind Mag, High Times, Rolling Stone and Teen Vogue. One of her core beliefs is ending the prohibition of drugs can greatly benefit society, as long as we have harm reduction education to accompany it. Find out more on her website: www.michellejanikian.com or on Instagram @michelle.janikian.
After years of seeking refuge at the bottom of a bottle, Karen Shaw’s experimentation with psilocybin yielded unexpected discoveries… and a fresh start
Not long after Karen Shaw started microdosing psilocybin, a very distinct thought seemed to cry out, louder than the rest.
“One of the things I said to myself is I have
to make my life more beautiful. I have to do things to make my life beautiful
and happy.”
For months leading up to this point, Karen’s
life felt far from beautiful.
Having deviated from her career to start a
silversmithing business with her partner of 10 years, the venture turned sour
early on as their relationship disintegrated. With both her professional and
personal lives entwined in a deepening crisis, the depression and anxiety Karen
had struggled with for decades intensified and began to close in.
Laying out the story from her home office in
The Hague, at this point Karen paused and looked down at her teacup. A feeble
laugh and a pixelated Skype connection did little to disguise her lingering
pain.
“I’m a bit surprised. I thought I was over it.
But there’s obviously still something there. I’m happy to be talking about it,”
she said, lifting her chin. “They were bad days. Feeling like I could spiral
into the depths of despair and not come out of it.
“I felt like I was hanging on for dear life sometimes.
“Just trying to keep my sanity and keep going.
And of course, relying on drink too much.”
Alcohol had been a toxic ally during ongoing
bouts with mental illness. Feeling trapped in a decaying business still reeking
of her failed romance, Karen’s reliance on the habit grew.
“I think it was vodka at the time. If I’m
honest about it, I was probably drinking between half a bottle to a bottle of
it a day.”
***
Karen’s mounting dread and desperation, as well as her dissatisfaction with past mental health treatment, sent her searching for other solutions. Having stumbled across an article on microdosing a few years earlier, Karen decided it was an alternative measure she was willing to try. Living in the Netherlands, this was a significantly easier undertaking for her than it would be for many others.
“I bought a grow kit of magic mushrooms at a
shop down the road from me. I grew them, dried them and I started microdosing
in March 2017,” she said.
Following a protocol recommended by
psychologist and psychedelic researcher, Dr. James Fadiman, Karen took a
sub-perceptible dose of psilocybin mushrooms twice a week for six weeks.
“I would weigh out 0.2 to 0.3 of a gram and
put it in a little capsule and take that in the morning. I would do that on
Wednesdays and Sundays. They were my microdosing days,” she recalled.
From there, it didn’t take long for things in Karen’s life to start rearranging. Within weeks, she was finally able to pry herself from the doomed business and damaging relationship. While walking away was liberating, the reprieve was brief. At 59-years-of-age, having to join the unemployment line offered proof her life would have to get ugly before finding beauty.
“I was on employment benefits and I had the
opportunity to do some courses in how to design what you want to do with your
life. I remember feeling very insecure walking into those rooms, feeling
everybody was looking at me. I didn’t want to be there.”
The early days of her microdosing experiment
also proved a little bumpy. With some gentle coercion from the psilocybin she
was taking, Karen was forced to embrace a deeper level of vulnerability and
openness, which caused her to “feel a lot of anxiety at first. I think it’s
because I felt that I actually had to face the problems I was going through,”
she said. “It (microdosing) does make you think a lot more. It makes you
analyze yourself and why you do things and of course that can make you feel
uncomfortable.”
But as the days inched past, anxiety gave way
to something else.
“There was a gradual realization that things
were getting better. That I could handle things better. I was much calmer.”
Eventually, this shift unearthed another
realization Karen would never have thought possible… She was now ready to say
goodbye to an old and domineering friend.
“I started drinking less. I’ve not stopped. I
might have a glass of wine, or some cannabis, a joint after work. But I don’t
drink to excess. I don’t like getting drunk anymore. It’s not something I
enjoy.”
***
Following a 10-week break, Karen began her second round of microdosing, and the insights continued to flow, alongside some unexpected opportunities. A few months after making the tough decision to abandon silversmithing, someone approached Karen and offered her work on a small project. Given her background in graphic design and website creation, she decided to take it on. Then, a crazy notion caught her attention.
“I thought, ‘okay, now’s a good time to start
my own business.’ Which I did.”
Softly spoken and harboring a gentle temperament, Karen doesn’t come across as the bragging type. But as she described her newfound joy and contentment at growing her fledgling freelancing venture, she allowed herself a confident smile. Progress is going well. Networking events have filled her calendar as she seeks to expand her client base.
“Before, I just didn’t think I had it in me.
But I haven’t looked back since.”
Throughout this time, Karen has continued to
microdose on and off. She’s recently returned to it again, this time only
taking one dose a week. As well as using psilocybin to climb out of a
depressive slump, Karen found it’s benefitted her creativity, ultimately aiding
her work.
“When you microdose, you sort of go into this
flow state and become very, very aware of everything around you. At first, I
could get very distracted. But once I could control it and focus it on one
thing… well, you just forget everything. You get a sort of childlike delight.
It’s difficult to explain,” she said, shaking her head.
“I feel I can enjoy everything much more completely than
I have done for a long time.”
Digging into the depths of her artistic
potential, Karen has also discovered a love of writing. With the freedom to
explore a new passion, she’s since developed it into more than just a pastime,
and now offers it as part of her professional repertoire.
“I always thought I hated writing. These days,
I can spend hours getting the tone and the message right and enjoying the
language. I’d never enjoyed that before.”
While she’s relishing a fresh start, Karen realizes the difference between her old life and her recent achievements is terrifyingly slim. Asked where she’d be right now, had she not purchased that mushroom grow kit… Karen was adamant she’d be worse off.
“I’d probably still be drinking a lot and just
not enjoying life.”
Having come close to snaring a number of
helpdesk positions during her time searching for work, Karen is grateful such
an opportunity never came to fruition.
“I would have jumped at whatever came along.
I’d be sitting behind a computer answering problem emails all day and feeling
very bored and very unhappy with myself.”
***
While Karen’s career has enjoyed a kickstart,
the most radical transformation has been unfolding internally.
“One thing I noticed is I actually like
spending time on my own. I like being in my own head.”
This prospect, as simple as it seems, wasn’t
an option for Karen before microdosing. Stuck in a never-ending game of cranial
cat and mouse, she spent much of her mental capacity drowning out the pain of
her thoughts and problems. When this got too strenuous, liquor was able to
finish the job.
“My head was like one of those old telephone
exchanges,” Karen said, tensing her hands all talon-like above her light brown
hair to emphasize the analogy. “And it was a terrible mess. I didn’t know what
my problems were. I didn’t know how to turn my life around. I didn’t know how
to stop drinking. I didn’t want to
stop drinking.”
The biggest gift psilocybin gave her, Karen
said, was a “brain reboot”.
“It’s as if you had all this chaos in your
brain then all of a sudden, it sorts itself out and all of the connections are
working properly again. You can think more clearly and make better decisions.”
While the phrase “brain reboot” feels as if it
was lifted straight from the greasy elevator pitch of a Shake Weight salesman,
proof of Karen’s claim goes far beyond her words — it’s written all over her
demeanor. The current portrait of Karen Shaw hasn’t a single brushstroke of the
anxious scrapheap she spent half the interview describing.
“I think if you spoke to my eldest daughter,
she would say that I’m a very, very different person now than I used to be.”
So different, in fact, that talking to this
daughter wasn’t something even Karen herself could do back then. Difficulties
communicating led to frequent confrontations. The shame she carries about for
being inattentive to her children’s needs was just as easy to pick up on as her
own emotional scarring.
“When you feel pain inside, it’s very
difficult to connect with other people. You tend to lash out at them and not be
aware of their situation and their feelings,” she said. “I don’t think I’d ever
thought about my role as a mother before. I sort of just became a mother but
never thought about what that really means. Which sounds awful doesn’t it?”
As Karen’s relationship with psilocybin
deepened, so too did the frayed relationship with her eldest daughter start to
mend. Being less swept up in her perceived problems, Karen’s empathy grew.
Perhaps for the first time in her life, Karen started truly listening to her
daughter.
“She’s much more willing to phone me about her
problems and I’m not just able to help her more, but I’m happy to as well. I’m
gradually getting this feeling that I want to be a role model.
“I want to show my daughters that you can work for
yourself. You can be an independent woman and enjoy your life. I’d never
thought that before.”
Admitting this was a completely unexpected
development in her microdosing journey, the sheepish excitement that crept into
Karen’s features betrayed her gratitude for it nevertheless.
“I’m even looking forward to being a
grandmother. Before, that was something I didn’t want to think about. I thought
being a grandmother meant you were old!” Karen laughed, but was cut short by
the follow up: Is it possible a reconciliation may never have taken place?
“I think if I’d carried on like I was, then I
really think we might have grown further and further apart. It’s awful to think
that was definitely a possibility.”
***
Beyond the prospect of becoming a grandmother,
Karen has much more to look forward to. Chief among all of that is a commitment
to spend as much time as possible with herself.
Being at home, enjoying creative pursuits,
cooking, and gardening now sit at the top of her list of priorities. The simple
pleasures, it seems, are where she’s discovering vitality, as well as that
all-important objective she set out to achieve back when her life fell down
around her ankles — these days, Karen finds beauty where she’d never once cared
to look.
“I can spend hours just watching the birds and
the insects… Oh, and the spiders!” Karen added, an overt tinge of enthusiasm
taking hold of her voice. Someone imbued with a healthy distrust of spiders
might even describe her tone as bearing an irrational relish. “I find myself
being blown away by the incredible beauty of their webs and how they made them
and what clever little creatures they are.
“I even postponed trimming one of my bushes because a
spider had its web up and it was obviously preparing for winter. I wouldn’t
have thought that way before. I’m much more empathetic and feel very connected
to everything.
Last year, a published study out of the
Spiritual Mind Body Institute suggested cultivating a belief in being connected
to something greater than oneself can “have profound impacts on people’s
lives”. Having highlighted exactly where in the brain transcendent states are
processed also helped researchers deduce that spiritual encounters aren’t just
limited to religious practice, but can be brought about in many varied ways.
Potentially, Karen’s newfound love of spiders, and nature, in general, may be helping her build a brighter outlook and find greater meaning.
“Life is such a great thing. It’s all around
us. The world is teeming with life and we’re just a tiny little part of this
living entity,” she said, before more muttering about sounding silly again.
As for microdosing, Karen plans to continue
with one capsule a week, for as long as she feels is necessary. Lately, the
toughest thing about it is actually remembering to take the dose. Without a
reminder set in her phone, she’s prone to forgetting it altogether. It’s a much
different relationship with substances she’s still getting used to, but
understandably, she doesn’t mind the change.
“I’m healing. I don’t know if that process will ever stop, because you’re always growing and changing. But it’s certainly put me on a different path and has me feeling a lot better about myself,” she said. “The world could do with a lot more microdosing, I think there are a lot of people who could benefit.”
About the Author
Jason Schwab: When a 10-week microdosing experiment helped Jason overcome a lifelong struggle with depression and anxiety, he immediately became a passionate advocate for the widespread acceptance of psychedelics. A believer in the power of informed, intentional substance use to foster positive transformation, Jason knows that pulling people’s stories out from the shadow of prohibition is key to inspiring true healing on a global scale. A former journalist, he now travels the world seeking out the everyday men and women taking ownership of their health and wellbeing, making a real difference in their own lives, and consequently, the lives of others.
Extinction Rebellion has become the most well-known climate justice movement in history.
With over 100,000 members and worldwide protests regularly attracting crowds of thousands, XR aims to use non-violent civil disobedience to share their message: political leaders are not doing enough to protect the world from climate catastrophe.
Now the XR hourglass logo can be seen dotted around most major cities, and local groups are catalyzing a global revolution.
Extinction Rebellion began as a collaboration between climate activists who were becoming disenfranchised by the slow progress of their protest efforts. And uniquely, its roots are deeply set in the world of psychedelic plant medicines.
The Psychedelic Origins of Extinction Rebellion
Gail Bradbrook, one of the original co-founders of Extinction Rebellion, has been very transparent about the psychedelic influences behind her decisions.
Having been involved in climate activism for most of her life, Gail was feeling like nothing was working. Speaking at this year’s Breaking Convention in London, UK, Gail described howshe prayed for “the codes to social change” during an ayahuasca retreat in Costa Rica. Gail also took iboga and kambo, alongside ayahuasca, during her time there.
In her talk at Breaking Convention, Gail described the immediate lessons she learned from the West African plant medicine iboga, which told her: “Gail, you create your own reality!” The notoriously uncomfortable iboga experience eventually gave way to Gail feeling all her negative thought patterns being gently removed by a grandmotherly figure.
It was in an ayahuasca ceremony that Gail asked the specific question about where to go next with her activism. The Amazonian psychedelic brew, typically associated with intense physical purging, is often taken by people in search of otherworldly wisdom. “I was praying for guides, and allies, to know that people would have my back.” Although she received no immediate answers, Gail was aware that “ayahuasca is mysterious, and her gifts come later.”
One month after her ayahuasca ceremony, Gail met with activist Roger Hallam, and they talked for hours about the latest research into activism and revolution. It ended with Roger saying “What you’ve got here, Gail, are the codes for social change.”
It looked like her prayers had been answered.
Disobedience was the foundation of these codes, and it directly led to the philosophy of Extinction Rebellion. “It’s only by being disruptive that you get people to have a conversation about an issue,” says Gail. During the press conference at Breaking Convention, Gail called for mass psychedelic disobedience, “where we take [psychedelic] medicine to tell the state that they have absolutely no right to control our consciousness and to define our spiritual practice.”
Gail’s calls for psychedelic law-breaking are a distinct contrast to the mainstream stance of the psychedelic community, who are mostly seeking the medicalization of psychedelic compounds, the first wave of which could come within the next ten years.. Gail has responded to this by saying “We don’t have time to wait for the science. […] Society will have collapsed by then. Why mess around behaving ourselves?”
Psychedelics Can Shift Our Relationship With Nature
Although the Extinction Rebellion organization has no official stance on psychedelics, there’s good reason for XR to be interested in their potential. We know that psychedelics can help to change the way we see ourselves and our position in the world.
People who have more lifetime experience with psychedelics are more likely to feel a connection to nature, and be more environmentally friendly (such as reducing water usage and recycling) compared to others. Even when other personality traits linked to environmental behavior – such as conscientiousness and liberal morals – are taken into consideration, this finding stands up.
It’s also been shown that the intensity of the psychedelic experience can predict the level of connection to nature that people have. Those who have had the most profound sense of a “loss of self” during their psychedelic experiences are the people most likely to feel a strong connection to nature.
These findings are important because our detachment from nature is arguably a large part of why humanity has caused the climate and ecological crisis we find ourselves in. As Daniel Quinn explains in his book Ishmael, the modern narrative of our inherent disconnection from the natural world is a pervasive philosophy that has convinced many of us that humanity is a lost cause.
One chance we have to reject this philosophy is through psychedelics. Science has now confirmed that psychedelics have the potential to change our perspective of the natural world. And any psychedelic journeyer can testify about their power to remind us that there is no such thing as humanity outside of nature.
A Return to Animism?
It’s not just the psychedelic experience itself that can bring us into an awareness of our true place in the natural world, but also the traditions that can accompany it.
Most cultures that have developed alongside psychedelic plant medicines are fundamentally animist societies. This means that they believe every living thing in the world has a spirit, or soul. In other words, every being is just a human in another form; another life.
Animism takes interconnectedness to be the very core fact of life. Although animist societies are not immune to greed, corruption, homophobia or misogyny, in general they appreciate that these actions have consequences. These cultures, though often flawed, very rarely destroy their lands, and they understand that their existence relies upon the wellbeing of their surroundings.
The concept of animism is also starting to enter mainstream Western thought, as our growing understanding of quantum physics points towards consciousness being something of a big deal. The philosophy of idealism, adapted to fit our quantum view of the world, could be about to see a surge in popularity among Western thinkers and scientists. Animism could soon see a resurgence in Western culture.
Westerners often end up taking psychedelic plant medicines within animist cultural contexts, as the most experienced shamans and practitioners usually come from these traditions. This means that psychedelics present a unique opportunity – not just for the encounter with one-ness they can induce, but for the animist wisdom they can bring us into contact with.
Could Psychedelics Catalyze Social Change?
Is an increased connection to nature enough to catalyze widespread social change? Could this be enough to combat the climate crisis?
Gail Bradbrook does not think that this should be our focus. She feels that although changing our relationship to nature will be crucial in order to build a less destructive society, it would be a process requiring “many centuries of work.”
Right now, Gail is calling for urgent social upheaval, starting with large acts of civil disobedience.
Plant medicines have already catalyzed the formation of Extinction Rebellion. Now, they may be used as an expression of cognitive freedom. And ultimately, they could be a route towards a society thataccepts its place in a global ecosystem.
About the Author
Patrick Smith, PhD, is a biologist and science writer. He has been working in the psychedelic space for the past five years. He currently writes for EntheoNation.
Psychedelics Today is sharing this research project from Naropa in hopes that some with adequate experience may contribute! Below is a message and invitation from the Naropa University team.
Hello,
We are a team of researchers from Naropa University investigating the effects of N, N-Dimethyltryptamine (N, N-DMT), an illegal substance.
We are inviting you to participate and/or promote our survey about DMT through your individual connections, your group’s email list, and social media platforms. This is an anonymous questionnaire to gather preliminary data about the potential risks and benefits associated with taking DMT. The data that we collect will ultimately be used to create a protocol for extended state DMT research.
Responses will benefit those who choose to use DMT in the future, as well as help the scientific community to obtain more information about a sparsely researched topic.
To participate in this survey, please click on the following link: https://survey.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_245uviVxh3H7aV7 and you will be directed to a consent form. If you agree to the consent by clicking on the arrow at the bottom of the screen, you will be directed to the beginning of the survey. If you know people who might be willing to participate, please forward this email to your contacts, or share the link on your social media and/or website.
Anyone who has ever used DMT in any setting is welcomed to reply.
This survey should take about an hour to complete. Participants can choose to stop responding at any time and may return at their convenience.
Participants can use their phone, tablet, or computer to respond.
There are no compensations or incentives provided.
Responses will not be connected to any identifying information.
If you have any questions, or experience any difficulties accessing the link or completing the survey, please contact Dr. Carla J. Clements ( drcjclements@msn.com) or Dr. Travis Cox ( tcox@naropa.edu).
We appreciate your support. Sincerely,
Dr. Carla J. Clements, BCPC LPC Dr. Travis Cox, Ecopsychology Professor Naropa University Andrew Linares, Registered Psychotherapist Rosario Vergara, Registered Psychotherapist Mozelle E. DeLong, Registered Psychotherapist.
Ayahuasca is a psychoactive tea traditionally used by indigenous communities of the Amazon rainforest for its powerful healing, purgative, divinatory, and visionary properties. As of late, and with the rise in use of DMT itself, ayahuasca is becoming majorly popular for the intense visions it induces, and which are usually attributed to DMT.
Although the brew’s potency is often recognized by its DMT component in the West, the plants that contain this compound are really just admixtures. The core ingredient of ayahuasca is the vine Banisteriopsis caapi, whose name in the indigenous Quichua language is actually aya waska (meaning “the vine of the soul” or “the vine of the dead”).
There are a number of scientific and cultural reasons why this vine is central to the ayahuasca brew. In this article, we will look into its potential as a healing agent and its place in the Amazonian indigenous lore.
Ayahuasca’s Rising Popularity
Ayahuasca has a wide range of ethereal applications: it’s used for diagnosis and healing, learning and training, social bonding and rite of passage rituals, creating hunting and agricultural strategies, finding missing objects or people, and various other kinds of shamanic activities. Its mystical properties have drawn a number of ethnobotanists and psychonautical enthusiasts to explore and chart the indigenous use of this powerful potion since the mid-20th century.
All the incredible documentation of Amazonian master plant healing practices has brought about the rise of ayahuasca tourism – the phenomenon of Western people visiting indigenous communities in order to take part in ayahuasca rituals.
After decades of development in tourism infrastructure and at a time when viral online information sharing is a highly prevalent means of communication, the brew’s unparalleled popularity can largely be attributed to the wild visions it presents its drinkers with.
Many believe that the source of these visions is the dimethyltryptamine molecule, the major active component in the admixture plants that go into most standard ayahuasca preparations. However, that’s all DMT is – one potential, but well-established additive to an already powerful healing and divinatory potion.
Ayahuasca is more than just DMT. To really understand this, it’s important to learn about the core constituent of this sacred brew – its primary ingredient dubbed the Vine of the Soul.
The Heart of the Brew – the Vine of the Soul
The most common ingredients that make up a typical ayahuasca brew are the vine Banisteriopsis caapi and the DMT admixtures: the shrub Psychotria viridis (also known as chacruna, meaning “mix” in Quichua) or, less commonly, Diplopterys cabrerana (also known as chaliponga or chagropanga). Although traditional brews will vary in their ingredients, all of them will contain B. caapi.
B. caapi contains three indole alkaloids with β-carboline structure: harmine and tetrahydroharmine (THH) in high amounts, and lower amounts of harmaline.
P. viridis and D. cabrerana contain DMT, known worldwide as The Spirit Molecule. DMT’s incredible psychoactive properties are likely the result of its role as an agonist at the 5-HT2A serotonin receptor.
The alkaloids in B. caapiare reversible MAOIs – they inhibit monoamine oxidase enzymes in our bodies, which normally metabolize orally ingested DMT before it can pass through the blood-brain barrier. With this inhibitory activity, DMT remains intact and can access the central nervous system.
The inhibition of both the MAO enzyme and serotonin reuptake systems as a result of ingesting harmine, harmaline, and THH causes a rise in the levels of serotonin and other monoamines. Ayahuasca’s highly potent antidepressant effects could be (at least in part) attributed to these neurochemical processes.
Aside from their effects on MAO enzymes and serotonin receptors, the β-carboline alkaloids in the B. caapi vine have been found to have antiparasitic and antimicrobial functions, as well asa host of other beneficial effects. A recent comprehensive scientific synthesis explains in great detail all we know so far about ayahuasca’s neurobiological workings and its actual and potential therapeutic and clinical implications.
When consumed on their own, harmine, harmaline, and THH have quite distinct and powerful effects.
According to a report from an experienced psychonaut, “Harmaline is a very mentally stoning drug, causing a foggy dreamy state of mind and making you a little shaky and a little disoriented at moderate doses. Harmine is more stimulating and more clear headed, not as disorienting, but otherwise quite similar to harmaline. Both cause a peaceful emotionally detached feeling. […] tetrahydroharmine feels almost completely different. Its main effect is mood enhancement and pleasant orgasmic tingling all over.”
Many other anecdotal reports available online confirm these characterizations.
Traditional preparations of ayahuasca
Furthermore, in traditional indigenous practice (i.e. in the preparations of the Napo Runa, the Sharanahua, the Tukano, and the Waorani, to name a few), the ayahuasca brew would often be made solely from the B. caapi vine, and it was only after the popularization of DMT’s effects among westerners that the DMT admixture plants became a universally present ingredient. The development of ayahuasca tourism brought about the need for facilitators of ayahuasca ceremonies to basically guarantee the visionary effects that have become well-publicized by their past visitors, and a yearning of their future ones.
Knowing about these therapeutic and psychotropic properties of the alkaloids in B. caapi, it’s no wonder that this vine has long been revered as the actual healing agent that catalyzes ayahuasca’s spiritual experience.
According to Terence McKenna, who popularized ayahuasca as not much more than “orally active DMT” in the first place, “[T]he action of the Banisteriopsis, as far as the visions are concerned, is to prevent the Psychotria from being neutralized by gastric enzymes” (Calavia, 2011:131). However, DMT-containing plants are just some of the 80 different plant species that have so far been identified as admixtures to traditional ayahuasca recipes (that number is estimated to be much greater in reality). Each plant modulates or enhances the total or partial effect of the brew, and B. caapi is a visionary plant in its own right.
An interesting fact is that many different varieties of B. caapi itself are used in ayahuasca preparations throughout the Amazon basin. Depending on the strain availability in their respective location, and the desired effect, different indigenous communities will use different varieties. These strains are often botanically identical, and the distinctions are only visible to well-trained eyes familiar with the vegetation in that specific part of the jungle.
Some of the commonly distinguished strains include:
red ayahuasca (ayahuasca colorada) – used almost always by shamans alone to exacerbate their ability to heal others;
white ayahuasca (ayahuasca blanca) – used to facilitate light or dark magic (brujeria), such as projecting spiritual darts (tsentsak) or defending against them;
yellow ayahuasca (ayahuasca amarilla) – widely cultivated and used strain, known for its gentle, but powerful healing properties, and crisp visionary aspect; often given to inexperienced drinkers;
sky/pink ayahuasca (ayahuasca cielo/rosada) – also a commonly used strain, but stronger than yellow, for more experienced drinkers;
black ayahuasca (ayahuasca negra) – very strong and not very visual – most of the visions are said to be drowned out by a thick black fog; intensely healing and purgative;
thunder ayahuasca (ayahuasca trueno) – only given to experienced drinkers, brews made with this ayahuasca cause intense bodily shaking and a violent purge;
Indian ayahuasca (ayahuasca india) – an ancient and extremely powerful strain which is only harvested from white sand rainforests and is not cultivated;
There are dozens more strains in use. Each has its role in the lives of the indigenous peoples who employ them, and their unique systems of beliefs about the spirits of the rainforest. Their names are given based on their purpose, but also based on the color of the plant (the flowers or the vine when the bark is scraped off), or the shade it gives to the visions.
As these strains belong to the same plant species, no scientific distinction has been made in terms of their chemical composition. However, knowing what we know about the individual effects of the β-carboline alkaloids, it’s safe to assume that the indigenous nomenclature may correlate with the alkaloid level ratios in different strains.
B. caapi has for centuries been revered by indigenous Amazonians as an omnipotent Master Plant – it’s their healer, their medium, their knower. Meanwhile, our knowledge about its components and effects is being broadened faster by independent psychonauts than by academic researchers. Western science needs to step up its inquiry into the vine’s therapeutic properties and substantiate the centrality of B. caapi in indigenous healing practices.
Xavier Francuski: With a background in research psychology and apprenticeships in ethereal worlds, Xavier tries to reconcile the astounding nature of the realms beyond with what sense we can make of them in this one. Xavier writes for EntheoNation.
These are the people who toil away in obscurity for years doing the hard lab work with little to no recognition for their efforts. It is my opinion that “science” gets way too much credit while real scientists (not celebrities in lab coats) should be the ones getting the credit and publicity of groundbreaking research. I believe that the recent DMT study published in Scientific Reports is by far the most important study in 2019 and all the scientists involved in the study should deserve wide name recognition and credit for their efforts. Credit needs to go to the following: lead author and fast-rising DMT researcher Jon Dean, Dr. Jimo Borjigin, Dr. Steven Barker, Dr. Rick Strassman, Dr. Michael M. Wang, Dr. Tiecheng Liu, Dr. Sean Huff, and Dr. Ben Sheler.
It’s difficult to recall the last time that I had a great meal and made the generic claim of “I love food”. Generally speaking, it’s either the restaurant that receives compliments, the type of meal that receives praise, or homage is paid to the chef directly. This is why it’s so amusing and yet perplexing when people seem to generically pronounce their “love for science” when an interesting study is published. Similarly to the cooks of a great meal… it is humans, people, scientists that actually carry out the experiments.
JC: So… while many people have heard the backstory of how Dr. Rick Strassman got involved in DMT research due to his book “The Spirit Molecule”, not many know about how you got your start in this field. Would you mind giving us a little bit of background as to how all of this came about?
Jimo: I had been working on the pineal gland and studying how dynamic secretion of melatonin from the pineal gland teaches us about how circadian clock works in the mid-2000. I was also teaching our graduate students about the pineal gland. One day in 2011, when I googled the word “pineal gland” (hoping to find some cool pictures to include for my class teaching), I came across Rick Strassman’s book (DMT: The Spirit Molecule) and the documentary about the book. I was very surprised when I heard Rick saying that DMT was made and secreted in the pineal gland, since I knew nothing about it. I emailed Rick directly and asked him for the evidence that his statement was based on, and was told that it was just his speculation. I told Rick that I was interested in testing his theory, as we were routinely performing pineal microdialysis experiments and I believed that if DMT is ever secreted from the pineal gland, we should have them in the dialysates. Rick was nice and encouraging; he introduced me to Steve Barker who routinely analyzing controlled substances in his lab, and the rest was history.
JC: Good stuff… so let’s just dive right into it…you did a really big study recently. I’m obviously biased but this is probably the most important study of the year for sure. Your research team found the circulating levels of DMT at similar levels to very commonly studied neurotransmitters serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine. Being that you stated that this was found in the extracellular fluid am I correct in assuming that this is the cerebrospinal fluid? If so, where do you hypothesize that the DMT is synthesized in terms of the measurements you took at the cerebral cortex?
Jimo: Oh wow (laughing). Thank you I’m very flattered. Well, it’s within tissue in the extracellular space… we didn’t really stick a probe only into the brain ventricles where the cerebrospinal fluid is in abundance. We stuck our probe into the brain tissue where neurons are packed. So it is definitely extracellular. So, these are not the quantities within individual cells… I’m assuming that DMT is a neurotransmitter and it might be actually packed and stored inside the vesicles within neurons. The release is only activity-dependent if DMT is truly a neurotransmitter. The basal levels of the 3 monoamine neurotransmitters (serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine), which the DMT concentrations were compared with, were also assayed the same way. This means that they inserted a microdialysis probe into the brain to measure the basal level of those 3 neurotransmitters, which is why we think DMT is comparable.
JC: Where do you hypothesize that the DMT was synthesized when taking measurements at the cerebral cortex? Any specific cells?
Jimo: We believe that DMT is made in the neurons. The reason for that is the following… we showed that one of the DMT synthetic enzymes AADC which is also called DDC… the same protein with 2 different names. This is the first of the two DMT enzymes that converts tryptophan into tryptamine. It is essential for all other monoamine neurotransmitter synthesis, but it is also required for DMT synthesis. For a long time people knew that there are neurons in the cerebral cortex (really all over the brain) that contain AADC. However, none of the other 2 enzymes (tyrosine hydroxylase or tryptophan hydroxylase) that are essential for the synthesis of canonical monoamine neurotransmitters such as serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine were found. It is tryptophan hydroxylase (-TPH2 in the brain) that is required for the synthesis of serotonin together with AADC; tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) together with AADC required for the synthesis of dopamine (and norepinephrine). So when people look for monoamine neurons that synthesize serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, … they always have to look for both enzymes (AADC + TH/TPH2). So in these scattered cortical neurons that contain AADC (called D-neurons), people couldn’t find either one of those enzymes (TH/TPH2). So clearly there is a lot of work to do for us to really have a thorough understanding of the details of the localization of potentially DMT produced in neurons in the brain. The reason we think these are neurons is because D-neurons were confirmed to be neurons in both human brains and animal brains in the cortex by others. But we still need to use a neuron-specific biomarker to measure the colocalization of a neuronal marker in the INMT- positive cells to thoroughly demonstrate that these neurons are the source of DMT or have the capacity to produce DMT.
JC: Prior to this study much of the discussion surrounding endogenous DMT from researchers in the field was based on stating that the lungs were the primary source of DMT.
Jimo: Right, right.
JC: From what I understand this was based on the levels of INMT found in the lungs… right?
Jimo: Correct! Yeah it’s amazing (laughing).
JC: But this recent study found not only INMT but AADC co-localized which we basically just covered. But in essence… the same people that were saying that DMT is not produced in the brain or not produced in the pineal gland…based on the INMT-DMT lung hypothesis it would seem that they would be forced to concede that DMT is produced in the brain now?
Jimo: Yeah (laughing)… I would think that any reasonable person would say that. It’s amazing to me that a lot of people were saying that DMT is made in the lungs. In the case of DMT production, it’s been known for a long time that it requires 2 enzymes and ideally, the 2 enzymes would be situated in the same cells in order for that cell to produce DMT. And yet… people are simply just looking at INMT expression and assuming that that alone is sufficient to produce DMT (without AADC).(
JC: Some people think that this study puts the pineal gland theory to rest. I feel like that’s not entirely correct.
Jimo: I think you’re right.
JC: This is the first study that actually shows that the human pineal gland has INMT/AADC in order to make DMT.
Jimo: Yes.
JC: While the extracellular levels of DMT in the cerebral cortex were similar between normal and pinealactomized rats, is it possible that the pineal produced DMT has a greater effect in the third ventricle or thalamus region in comparison to the cerebral cortex levels?
Jimo: Well… all I can say is that the neocortex can produce DMT in the absence of a pineal gland. Our study did not really address the issue of pineal DMT production. The fact is that in our data in the absence of the pineal gland the DMT levels go up (not significantly, though). Our data is relatively crude based on the fact that we surgically removed the pineal gland. When you yank the pineal gland out you disturb the blood-brain barrier a bit since the pineal gland is part of the blood-brain barrier preventing things from going in and out. So we don’t know why it goes up in the absence of the pineal gland. I haven’t given it too much thought but all we’re showing is that the brain doesn’t really require the pineal gland to produce DMT. The pineal may produce a small level of DMT but it’s clearly not contributing a huge amount. If the pineal gland produced 3X as much then we should have seen a difference. I strongly believe that the cortex (where we utilized our microdialysis probe) makes and secretes DMT independent of the pineal gland. The pineal gland is not essential and is not required… it doesn’t mean the pineal gland itself cannot make DMT since all the machinery is there. But we had a long paragraph in the discussion part of the paper discussing why we think the pineal gland may not contribute much to DMT production. If you look at the affinity of the AADC enzyme, it actually prefers to convert 5-hydroxtryptophan (5-HTP) into 5-hydroxytryptamine (5-HT). For serotonin production tryptophan is first converted to 5-hydroxtryptophan by TPH and the second step for serotonin synthesis is converting 5-hydroxytrytophan (5-HTP) to 5-hydroxytryptamine (5-HT); so apparently, AADC has a higher affinity for 5-HTP than tryptophan. So if both 5-HTP and tryptophan are around (in this case in the pineal gland) AADC would prefer to catalyze the reaction of 5-HTP to 5-HT… so it kind of ignores tryptophan. However, in other cells if AADC is only looking at tryptophan and if 5-HTP is not around, it should readily convert tryptophan to tryptamine.
JC: Are there any neurotransmitters or any endogenous biochemical(s) for that matter that have been identified to be rat specific in comparison to that of humans as far as we know? What I mean by this is whether there is any data to suggest that rats produce different biochemicals than humans in the brain or throughout the body?
Jimo: Usually when you go up the evolutionary tree, it is higher-order animals such as humans that have something that the rats don’t have and it doesn’t go the other way around. Especially being that both rats and humans are both mammals, so it’s highly unlikely. On the other hand, if you go down to invertebrates or lower vertebrates who have very unique habitats they may have stuff that humans don’t need. So my answer is NO, not as far as I know. There are genes and proteins only found in humans, but not in mice or rats. I am not aware of any genes or proteins present only in rats but not in humans.
JC: So that would mean that for someone to claim that DMT is not found in the human brain because the research only took place in live rats (although you took in vitro sampling of human brains that observed the same exact enzymes that rats produced in order to synthesize DMT) that they would be making claims that fall outside the scope of scientific data to date?
Jimo: Unless I’m mistaken Dr. Steven Barker has already measured DMT in the brains of deceased individuals and trace amounts in their blood. This could be a question for Steven regarding the solid evidence of showing DMT is found and collected from humans. All reasonable people would agree that if human brains are found to express both INMT and AADC, it is highly likely that DMT will be made in the human brain. The next step would be to stick a probe in a live human’s brain so we could monitor DMT at a level comparable to other neurotransmitters but usually, that level of proof is rarely demanded for research because it is so unusual to be able to get samples using such invasive techniques. No one would want to volunteer for that kind of experiment being that it comes with some kind of risk. So I don’t believe it is necessary. Having experimental proof from humans would certainly help, but it is not always feasible to do so.
JC: I think all the hard-nosed “skeptics” continuing to question whether humans brains produce DMT following this recent study should volunteer for the brain-probe study…
Jimo: (laughing) But remember we don’t want to really make any enemies. My take is that unless you have evidence against the human brain-DMT hypothesis there isn’t much to say. We are doing our best effort.
JC: Going back to the yanking out of the pineal gland… Being that DMT has been observed to have anti-inflammatory properties, is it possible that yanking out the pineal gland causes cerebral inflammation-inducing a periphery response to synthesize more DMT to alleviate this then causing the levels to go up?
Jimo: That is highly unlikely as in the periphery, there are very few cells that contain both AADC and INMT in contrast to the brain. Plus, if there were any inflammation, it should be within the brain near where the pineal gland was in touch with, which is not known to exert peripheral inflammatory responses. We performed numerous pineal removal surgeries over the years, have never observed any signs of notable inflammatory responses in rats.
(JC Note: I didn’t clarify when I stated “periphery.” I meant the periphery area of the brain in near proximity to the pineal gland wound not peripheral nervous system outside of the brain. It was my fault for not clarifying.)
JC: Ok. I find it super interesting that much of the same team that did this study also did the 2013 cardiac arrest study which observed the global and coherent surge in gamma waves in the brain. Based on the literature out there it seems as though exogenous DMT and Ayahuasca also induce increases in gamma waves. Do you believe that there is a possibility of a tight correlation between the upregulation of endogenous DMT and gamma activity?
Jimo: Well… in this recent paper we didn’t even have cardiac arrest in the title so it wasn’t our focus. The main message from this recent paper is that DMT can be produced and released from the neurons in the brain at the level that is comparable to other monoamine neurotransmitters. My students are super excited about our 2013 cardiac arrest paper and the link between the DMT and near- death experiences. The two areas of studies (near-death consciousness and DMT) emerged coincidentally at the same time in our lab as 2 independent branches of research which appear to have the potential to converge into a related research theme. Clearly Rick Strassman talked about this hypothesis and the idea has been floating around out there for many years and it sounds reasonable. In the recent paper, we wanted to know whether there was anything that could upregulate or downregulate DMT release. So when we induced experimental cardiac arrest in animals, their DMT levels went up in some but not all animals, which is interesting. The recent study was not done to demonstrate DMT levels in cardiac arrest but it was more based on showing that there are physiological events that can increase DMT. Some kind of physiological event can regulate DMT release. Regulated release of chemicals is required steps for something to be called a neurotransmitter. We are trying to push this work toward demonstrating DMT as a neurotransmitter. Some interpret our data as DMT being linked to NDE’s which is not my intention or the goal of the study; but clearly a lot of people are interested in the study because of that potential link. However, for DMT-NDE to be linked, we would have to do the same exact study we did in our 2015 PNAS paper where we monitored neurotransmitter release at 60 second intervals and measured the amounts of neurotransmitters released… and it was a huge amount. Within 2 minutes of asphyxic cardiac arrest, dopamine went up, norepinephrine went up, serotonin went up, GABA went up… not all neurotransmitters went up so high though. Glutamate only went up 2-fold… so it’s a massive release of various neurotransmitters, a tightly regulated process that happens super- fast. So we would have to monitor the release of DMT at a finer resolution in order to really say anything about whether DMT is potentially involved. That study still remains to be done.
JC: I guess what I’m asking you is to maybe hypothesize about… in the 2013 study you saw a huge surge in global gamma waves. Basically faster brain activity…
Jimo: Yes.
JC: In the 2015 study you basically saw a “brainstorm” in which a bunch of neurotransmitters were upregulated.
Jimo: Yes.
JC: Do you think it’s that far-fetched to think that DMT might be a part of that biochemical mix and that it could contribute to the gamma wave correlation or is that still too speculative?
Jimo: It’s possible. I guess until we do the experiment we’re not sure, we don’t know. There’s a possibility that those 2 are linked.
JC: In terms of a definitive way to know whether DMT is tightly correlated with gamma waves… is that something that you could figure out with an INMT-KO animal?
Jimo: Yeah… I think if a gamma surge disappeared then that might be a way to support the hypothesis.
JC: That makes sense… but it wouldn’t even really have to disappear necessarily right? It could just be affected.
Jimo: Correct… yes.
JC: Switching gears… One of the biggest issues I’ve seen is that people are so excited about psychedelic research and there seems to be a decent amount of funding for the field but I think that the endogenous research is even more interesting.
Jimo: I think so too (laughing). I agree with you there.
JC: Much of the psychedelic research these days focuses on fMRI studies so it seems like cerebral blood flow seems to be the predominant measure of perceived activity. However, in a yet to be published interview I did with Dr. Mauro Zappaterra he stated that based on his research, cerebrospinal fluid can act as a signaling medium being that it can carry the neurotransmitters and signaling throughout the brain on a global level. This would seem to add another layer of complexity in terms of analyzing brain activity when comparing fMRI to EEG. What are your thoughts regarding this?
Jimo: FMRI monitors changes associated with blood flow. Robin Carhart- Harris has done psychedelic work with fMRI and the subjects actually show the lowering of fMRI measures. It’s a different mode of regulation so we don’t really know… I wish when Rick Strassman did his study he had everybody monitored for EEG or fMRI to see what happened to them. My guess is that study is coming and somebody is working on that. We can easily do an EEG study on animals but we just cannot ask them what they experience. Sooner or later it will have to be done.
JC: It’s interesting that fMRI shows a decrease in whatever might be termed as brain activity but in EEG studies it shows that there’s an increase in faster oscillations and a decrease in slower ones.
Jimo: Right.
JC: A lot of stuff to uncover there…
Jimo: Correct.
JC: While the recent study focused on DMT and the enzymes INMT and AADC… what are your thoughts on researching endogenous monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOI) such as tribulin, tryptoline, neurocatin or pinoline and their relationship with endogenous DMT?
Jimo: Yeah, there is a lot to do and the future research is just wide- open for these questions to be addressed. Our study simply points out that there is a whole new world out there for people who are interested in the molecular basis of altered states of consciousness and a potential new direction for looking into psychiatric disorders. So I think there are lots of interesting things that can happen but right now we have to focus on something that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) could consider funding. We have to convince them that this is something that may be medically relevant and that we’re not just thinking about euphoric states and psychedelic states… something that can benefit patients.
JC: Yeah… would you consider private funding?
Jimo: Oh yeah totally.
JC: We’ll go off the record with that discussion…
Jimo: (laughing)
JC: Do you have any interest in replicating this recent study but also measuring levels of 5-MEO-DMT and Bufotenine?
Jimo: Oh yeah. Once again this is another area that is wide open that one can do. It all depends… once again… on funding. Right now people are lined up to want to work in my lab. Every year, lots of graduate students contact me for a position my lab; and the first thing I tell them is: I am sorry that I can’t take you in my lab because I don’t have NIH funding for DMT research.
JC: (Cutting in) Horrible
Jimo: (laughing) That’s the standard answer for several years now. I just recently accepted a very good student who insisted on joining my group regardless of the lack of NIH funding. In any case, we try to collaborate with people that have grants to make it happen; but the key is to have research funding to support the DMT endeavor.
JC: Absolutely. That’s one of the most frustrating things I see in terms of scientific research. There’s so much money that goes into genetic research and things of that nature but there’s so little funding that goes into endogenous DMT research by comparison.
Jimo: There are various ways that this line of research can now be supported because we’ve shown that DMT is really in the brain and may serve some kind of functions; we just need funding support to do more studies. That’s why I’m happy to discuss this research with the media, so we can raise more awareness and hopefully garner funding for our DMT research. Scientists tend to stay in their labs and do their own research and it takes years to get their data out there to be in the public and to gain support from the public. I think that the publicity this paper has created (which surprised me) may generate a lot of interest.
Jimo: (laughing) I think it would be faster to just wait for the paper to be published right? I don’t know who the author of the paper is though.
JC: It was a study in which the author of the paper passed away so that’s why Dr. Barker said it didn’t end up getting published.
Jimo: Oh. I see.
JC: I think it would be a really interesting replication study in the sense of Barker’s speculations that we have an endogenous hallucinatory system and that a lot of hallucinogens might just be activating that system rather than simply acting on their own.
Jimo: That’s interesting… hmmm. Yeah… well… I’m not sure. There are so many things to do. We have to choose wisely… I have to pick my fights wisely (laughing). I guess it depends on whether the funder is really interested in pushing that line of research and if it’s somehow in-line with my own interest. I am interested in things like demonstrating that DMT is a neurotransmitter which is something that requires some work, and establishing the whole system of DMT centric neurotransmission. Beyond that… as far as looking at the homologues and endogenous system… like you said monoamine oxidase inhibitors and the recent study you mentioned regarding Barker & LSD, there are a lot of interesting things to do (laughing). It would require more dedicated, highly motivated students and people working hard to making it happen.
Jimo: Gamma waves need to be mediated by neurotransmitter secretion that is acting on the post-synaptic neurons. So there has to be a neurochemical reaction that translates into electrical signaling. So I wouldn’t be surprised at all if DMT could be one of the many neurochemicals (not the only one), contributing to the experience although it could be a key chemical. The only real way to test how much DMT plays a role in the experience is to have a DMT deficient human (or group of them) undergo the “God Helmet” and have them report the types of experiences they have and compare them to people secreting DMT normally. So basically I would say that it is not impossible, unless data shows otherwise.
JC: Do you know if there are any methods to induce respiratory fluctuations in animals without inducing anesthesia? The reason why I ask is because breathing techniques such as the Wim Hof Method (WHM), Stan Grof’s Holotropic Breathwork, Joe Dispenza’s meditation, and the more ancient yogic renditions (Pranayama) have all been cited to induce visionary states when carried out for prolonged periods of time. There’s much speculation regarding DMT’s involvement and based on our conversation (and recent study) it wouldn’t be the least bit surprising as to the upregulation of DMT (alongside everything else) from these breathing exercises. Is it feasible to do a comparable study of breathing exercises in live animals?
Jimo: It’s something that I haven’t looked into so I don’t have an answer right now. Changes in breathing patterns can lead to excitation in the central nervous system. In an animal model I think you can create alterations to their trachea… it would be kind of a reversible time-controlled experiment in which you stimulate the nervous system of the animal to breathe harder. Experimentally it seems doable, as long as there are animal models to induce hyperventilation similar to that as humans it’s possible. I’m almost thinking it would be much faster and easier to do this study in humans but the invasive nature of measurement is an issue.
JC: I hear you Jimo. If it was up to you… what would you say are the top 5 studies that need to take place within this field that you are specifically focused on right now?
Jimo: The first one is that DMT is actually a neurotransmitter. After that, we would like to know how the DMT synthesis is controlled; and how it’s release is regulated. My prediction is that some of the regulatory mechanisms in charge of DMT release might be dysfunctional in patients with psychiatric disorders that feature hallucinations. We know that DMT has hallucinatory properties, so it’s not too far-fetched to predict the link there. The potential role of DMT in regards to Near Death consciousness remains to be experimentally tested explored with the gamma waves as you discussed in your blog. That’s something we can easily do to demonstrate that endogenous DMT can stimulate gamma waves.
JC: Ok.
Jimo: And, of course, whether DMT contributes to neural correlates of dream states is also an interesting question.
Jimo: So we’re not the first one to bring up the lack of funding! (laughing)
JC: It’s amazingly horrible. In terms of the human studies… do you have any ideas on how you might go about doing endogenous human studies? Have you looked into any of the technology out there that might be able to do it less invasively?
Jimo: Well… I believe there are human patients who are helped and being diagnosed with a microdialysis setup in certain parts of their brain. I think if we can find patients like that, we could potentially collaborate with their physicians or scientists who are working with those patients and maybe get a sample from them.
JC: That makes sense… like somebody being treated for hydrocephalus or something?
Jimo: Yeah something like that or even from someone undergoing surgery for brain tumor removal. Their brains are already exposed so maybe we can share a little bit of CSF from them and monitor their levels while the patients are alive.
JC: Yeah that makes a lot of sense. Have you heard much about a technology called proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy? I was reading that it has the ability to measure brain fluctuations in glutamate and glutathione non-invasively. Would this be applicable to DMT?
Jimo: Hmm… I’m not sure. I haven’t really looked into any measurement of DMT in humans yet. But that’s something to look into once we’re going that route… I’ll think about that (laughing).
JC: Well Jimo… it seems like I have some work to do in terms of reaching out to some people to try and get your lab some funding to continue this very important research. Thank you very much for your time… do you have anything you’d like to say in closing?
Jimo: What I’d like to emphasize is how important collaboration is to make science happen, not just the funding. If Rick (Strassman) did not introduce me to Steve Barker, our first DMT paper (Barker et al., 2013) would not have been materialized, and Jon Dean, the first author of our DMT paper and a very dedicated graduate student passionate about psychedelic research, would not have joined my team to produce the current publication (Dean et al., 2019). Collaboration with Mike Wang (a co-author on the Dean paper) on the role of a stroke on sleep and circadian rhythms in rats allowed us to discover the surge of neurochemicals in the brain of dying rats, which ultimately lead to the discovery of the surge of gamma activities in the dying rats. Collaboration with George Mashour’s group was essential for the computational analysis of the brain’s electrical signals (Borjigin et al., 2013). Collaboration with Bob Kennedy’s laboratory allowed the high resolution (every 60-sec) measurement of neurotransmitters in dying rats (Li et al., 2015). All I can say in closing is that I have been extremely fortunate to be able to work with these fantastic scientists. Teamwork rocks!
People must remember that “science” is a methodology… it’s not a living organism that makes decisions. “Science” is not even an organization with people within it that makes decisions. “Science” does not have the inherent intelligence to allocate funding opportunities to important, world-changing endeavors. This is because “science” is merely a methodology just like cooking is the method of preparing a meal. Methodology is great and all but it is hardly what makes the world change… it is people that make the world change.
I must admit… I’ve grown to loathe the praising of the term “science” as it is such a misunderstood and misused the term. Scientists are the organisms that propel the knowledge base further so that other organisms (the general public) can reap the rewards. The praise and acknowledgment should go to scientists who work in important fields of research (no… not all fields of scientific research are important). I’m expecting this interview to generate 200,000 to 300,000 reads by the end of the year so for those of you that are interested in seeing endogenous DMT research propelled further… please realize that it won’t happen on its own. This entire field of research has been lagging tremendously since the 1970’s financially speaking. It is embarrassing that with an annual budget of over $39 billion dollars that the NIH still refuses to allocate any amount to endogenous DMT research. One would figure that if the NIH can spend $3.2 million studying the effects of alcohol in monkeys, it can surely spend the same amount on a field that the general public is extremely interested in such as endogenous DMT. In any case, it’s been estimated that there are nearly 2,500 billionaires in the world and likely over 50,000 hundred millionaires (people with $100,000,000 or more). There is enough private funding out there collecting dust that could change this endogenous DMT research industry in a very short time frame. If you’re reading this right now you are already aware of the importance of this topic. I ask you, readers, to assist this movement and reach out to whatever contacts you might have that have access to private funding that has the courage to financially back this very important field of studies. And somebody… anybody and everybody sends this interview to Joe Rogan as he discusses DMT quite often on his podcast and has the reach to help in this endeavor of fundraising. I’m tired of waiting for the NIH to get it right.
E-mail us at dmtquest@gmail.com if you have any comments or $50 million to plunk down into “DMT/Endohuasca” research. DMT Quest is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization dedicated to raising funds primarily for endogenous DMT/Endohuasca research as well as providing media material (documentaries, articles, podcasts) to present the results of this research in layman’s terms. You can learn more about the DMT Quest project by visiting dmtquest.org. We can help fund Jimo’s research as well as other vastly underfunded DMT researchers throughout the world.
About the Author
John A. Chavez is an independent researcher that is interested in the biological correlates of “supernatural” occurrences.
A single inhalation of vapor from dried toad secretion containing 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine (5-MeO-DMT) in a naturalistic setting is related to sustained enhancement of satisfaction with life, mindfulness-related capacities, and a decrement of psychopathological symptoms
The recent publication summarizing the effects of 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine (5-MeO-DMT) on mental health-related variables authored by myself and my colleagues has received great attention both from the scientific community and the public, see full text here; https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00213-019-05236-w
Although my colleagues and I are very pleased that the publication has been so well received, it appears that the study findings are being misinterpreted and misrepresented on (social)media primarily in the general public as an advocacy for use of toad secretion.
Not only is this very disappointing, as the publication is in fact communicating the very opposite, but it is also of great concern to me as the misrepresentation of the study findings may contribute to further unnecessary consumption toad secretion from Bufo Alvarius.
I, therefore, feel it is not only necessary, but also of high importance to clarify that the recent publication is in no way an advocacy or toad secretion use, but rather the opposite.
In fact, the article is summarizing the effects of 5-MeO-DMT, which is the main compound in the toad secretion – as demonstrated by a lab-analysis. This finding makes a clear and strong argument that toad secretion is in no way superior to synthetic 5-MeO-DMT, putting a scientific nail in the coffin for the discontinuation of toad secretion use as a means of obtaining and consuming 5-MeO-DMT.
Furthermore, the article also points to the ethical and ecological implications that comes with toad secretion use. Basically, the increasing demand for the vapor produced by toad secretion will disturb the ecological equilibrium of the toads through the invasion of habitat, excessive milking, amphibian trafficking, and black-market dynamics. Harassment of the Bufo Alvarius toad, however, can be easily prevented by using synthetic 5-MeO-DMT instead of vapor from dried toad secretion containing 5-MeO-DMT. You can read a summary of this issue to greater length here: https://psychedelicstoday.com/2018/10/03/ethics-ecology-bufotoxins/ ).
Additionally, even though many people have benefitted from sessions whereby 5-MeO-DMT from toad secretion has been consumed, others have instead, based on anecdotal reports, had a rather unpleasant encounter with the facilitator and so too experience with 5-MeO-DMT from toad secretion. The reasons for the unpleasant encounter vary per person, but as our recent publication highlight it is clear that some of the recent allegations of malpractice against two facilitators in particular, namely Octavio Rettig and Gerry Sandoval addressed in an open letter (read full text here; https://5-meo-dmt-malpractice.org/), extends beyond these individuals. In our recent publication it was demonstrated that the set and setting vary quite a bit from location to location of these sessions, dose(s) are not standardized but determined by eye-measuring, and span between 30-120 mg of toad secretion (those who received 30 mg dose may have had 7.5-9 mg of 5-MeO-DMT, whereas those who received 120 mg dose may have inhaled up to 30-36 mg of 5-MeO-DMT). Additionally, none of the facilitators have the necessary expertise (clinical background) to properly hold a safe space where altered states of consciousness can be entered, nor to screen for contraindications in participants that are included in a session. This is not only concerning, but also dangerous as it puts people in an unnecessary risk for having an unpleasant, and even traumatic experience which can impact them as well as those around them negatively.
Finally, although the study suggests that inhalation of vapor from toad secretion containing mainly 5-MeO-DMT (with very low traces of bufotenine and DMT) is related to sustained enhancement of satisfaction with life, mindfulness-related capacities, and a decrement of psychopathological symptoms, these findings are in no way conclusive. This molecule still needs further extensive research to assess safety, and to control for various other variables that may account and/or add to the outcome effects such for example set and setting, social desirability bias, therapeutic relationship, and placebo response.
About the Author
Malin Vedøy Uthaug, MSc, originally from Bergen, moved to Prague, The Czech Republic, after graduating from high school in her hometown in 2012. After obtaining her dual bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the University of New York in Prague (UNYP) and Empire State College (ESC) in New York in June 2016, Malin continued with her studies at Maastricht University, The Netherlands. Here, she acquired her master’s degree in Psychology with a specialization in Health and Social Psychology in the fall of 2017. During her research internship, Malin conducted fieldwork investigating the sub-acute and long-term effects of Ayahuasca on affect and cognitive thinking style. This field study was under supervision of Dr. Johannes Ramaekers and Dr. Jordi Riba, and was the starting point of her career as a psychedelic researcher.
After finishing her master’s, Malin continued working as a PhD candidate at the department of Neuropsychology and Psychopharmacology (FPN) from fall 2017. Her current doctoral research centers around the continuous investigation of the effects of Ayahuasca in naturalistic settings, and pioneer work on the effects of 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine (5-MeO-DMT) in humans.
Outside of her thesis work, besides being a co-founder of the Norwegian Association for Psychedelic Studies, and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Psychedelic Studies, Malin is also investigating the effects of Mescaline and Holotropic Breathwork. Finally, she is interested in trauma(resolution) and works hard to aid in changing the current treatment modalities available in the west by demonstrating the superiority of Non-ordinary state Psychotherapy (NOSP) through extensive research, (academic) writing and public speaking.
With the resurgence of psychedelics and the important research into the many therapeutic benefits – from Ketamine for treatment-resistant depression, to MDMA for PTSD, and Ibogaine for addiction recovery, and much more, the myriad lineages of traditional ceremonial and healing ways, as well as the flourishing of radical creativity with entheogenic use, the festival communities, we are all in a time of transformation and potential change for the healing and upliftment of each other and our planet.
These times, and working in these sacred and subtle, sensitive realms require ethics that far surpasses the standards that dictate dominant paradigm interactions. Holding space in a sacred way means attunement, humility, honoring, and most of all, putting aside what you think you know about what’s happening, in service to the one in spontaneous or entheogenically-induced Spiritual Emergence (SE).
The states of heightened sensitivity, openness to multidimensional realms, and to others’ energies requires extra responsibility – the ability to be responsive – on the part of the one who was holding space, witnessing, and guiding. The ones who are in the role of holding vigil must be as attuned as the survivors of trauma and spiritual emergency themselves have had to be.
Those of us who have lived experience of both spontaneous and entheogenically-induced non or extra-ordinary states may be activated and opened into psychic gifts – beholden to the underlying layers of realities and agendas – and when we share our visions and insights, the trauma of both being gaslit and pathologized are damaging in compounding denial of our truth!
In this time of the great revealing, what is hidden is coming to the surface to be seen, held, metabolized, transmuted, and the ethical requirement is that we all make contact with radical openness, radical compassion, and radical humility, contacting the reality that each of us is a bearer of truth, of wisdom, and thus we all deserve to be recognized as embodied divinity and treated with respect and care!
I was traumatized in two different medicine communities, due to lack of attunement, gaslighting, and negligence on behalf of the facilitators, guides, and space-holders. My spiritual emergency and subsequent hospitalizations are directly related to the openings of these intense and deep transformational processes- access to my deepest grief and fear, which had they been held properly, ethically, and responsibly, could have been some of the most healing and corrective experiences of my life, but instead they were some of the most re-traumatizing and isolating.
These spaces, ceremonies, ways are meant to induce opening, initiation, recalibration, and transmutation. When held out of alignment, they become potentially violating, dangerous, and re-wounding, especially for those who have had a history of trauma. As the research shows, entheogenic therapies are potentially very effective in recovery and healing in the right conditions.
What are ethically-held entheogenic containers, therapies, and ceremonies? I can tell you it is NOT forced touch, pushing farther, harder, deeper, or more. It IS attunement, respect, consent, and letting go of agendas. Allowing the Sacred Process to unfold, being guided by Spirit, and the Inner Healer. That is to say, the Inner Healer of the client, and following the needs, and being responsive and responsible to the client. And the necessity for each and every psychedelic therapist and guide to be trained in Spiritual Emergence Support and integration, resources, and acknowledging that the opening into SE through entheogenic use as well as spontaneously, is a deeply transformative process that deserves the utmost care, holding, and respect, as it is inherently an Awakening process, and why we are here in this Time-
To heal together, to return to Wholeness, and to support the activation of our gifts and capacities to be of service to one another and the Planet.
(I delivered this transmission at Will Hall’s Event on 5/4/19 at Oakland Omni Commons)
Featured Image: “Etheric Motherboard of the New Paradigm” by David Wyatt
About the Author
MichelleAnne Hobart, MA, SEC, AMFT is a teacher, writer, energy worker, and Associate Marriage and Family Therapist at Holos Institute. She trained as a Spiritual Emergence Coach with Emma Bragdon and collaborates with the Gnosis Retreat Center project. Her love for the Earth and education was exemplified in her past as a high school Biology and Health teacher working in the Baltimore parochial school system after receiving her BS in Biology from University of Maryland Baltimore County. Deeply longing to immerse herself in the subtle realms, she was drawn to the Bay Area to continue her studies. With her MA in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness from California Institute of Integral Studies, she continued her own personal journey of healing, and then sharing that path with others through her wellness center and intuitive collective. She has been in states of Spiritual Emergence throughout her life to varying degrees, and entered a state of Spiritual Emergency in 2013.. She completed and released her first book, Becoming Sacred Space in 2016. Then, in 2018, Michelle graduated from the Integral Counseling Psychology program at CIIS, and is currently finishing her second book, about Spiritual Emergence.
On May 8th, the city of Denver, Colorado voted yes on I-301, which decriminalizes the possession and use of psilocybin-containing mushrooms. The official results will be certified on May 16th. As of May 9th – the unofficial results are – yes (50.6%) and no (49.4%).
I-301 decriminalizes adult (21 years or older) possession and use of Psilocybin mushrooms – making these offenses the lowest priority for law enforcement. This initiative also prohibits law enforcement to spend money and resources enforcing arresting adults with possession of mushrooms.
Joe Moore recorded with Sean McCallister who is an attorney who helped advise Decriminalize Denver. If you want to learn about what decriminalization in Denver is really all about – tune in here. Expect to hear more from Sean in the future.
Sean T. McAllister is one of the nation’s leading cannabis business attorneys, licensed to practice law in both Colorado and California. Sean’s legal work focuses on the complex interplay between corporate law and state cannabis regulatory structures and federal law. Sean is a recognized leader in the cannabis industry. In 2004, he founded Sensible Colorado, which worked on all of the ballot initiatives in Colorado that culminated in recreational cannabis legalization in 2012.
Ibogaine is a psychedelic chemical found in the West African shrub Iboga. Bizarre in chemical structure and psychoactive properties, the drug remains mysterious to scientists and psychonauts alike. At high doses, ibogaine causes intense, unforgivingly introspective and dream-like hallucinatory experiences that can last upwards of 24 hours2. The African psychedelic might have remained nothing more than a curiosity in the West if not for the discovery of its ability to disrupt physical and psychological drug addiction4, 5. Thousands of anecdotal reports and preliminary scientific research provide evidence that a single dose of ibogaine can eliminate both withdrawal symptoms and craving in drug addicts1-7. In the United States, ibogaine remains a schedule 1 drug, and those seeking treatment must pilgrimage to countries that do not regulate it or take a chance with illegal underground treatment centers. What will it take for ibogaine to become medically available in the United States?
New drugs must undergo a rigorous vetting process to move from discovery to the legal market. To become a prescriptible medication, drugs must pass through clinical trials regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). These trials consist of a pre-testing phase, four clinical phases, and regulatory checkpoints throughout. Advancing to the next phase is predicated on successful completion of the prior phase.
Before moving to clinical trials, researchers must collect extensive pre-clinical data and submit an Investigational New Drug (IND) application to the FDA. Pre-clinical studies use rodent models to determine how effective the drug is for its intended purpose and its safety.
Phase 1 is the first set of studies to determine the safety and efficacy of the drug in humans. If these studies are successful, researchers can proceed to Phase 2, which are well-controlled studies with larger populations. Phase 3 studies test safety and efficacy with different dosages of the drug in even larger populations comprised of various demographics. While the time it takes to move through all phases varies, this process can take many years. After successful Phase 3 trials, the FDA reviews the data and the researchers submit a New Drug Application (NDA). The FDA reviews the NDA and the drug’s labeling to ensure accurate and sufficient information is provided to the consumer and drug-provider. The drug production facility is also inspected by the FDA for health and quality assurance. If the drug is approved, it will be released on the market and available for prescription. Phase 4 trials occur only after the drug has been approved and is publicly available. In Phase 4, the drug manufacturer must continuously monitor the effects of the drug in patients and submit safety reports to the FDA.
For ibogaine to come to market, it must pass through each of these clinical phases of study. Remarkably, ibogaine began the process of becoming an FDA approved therapeutic medication in the early 1990’s. Pre-clinical and Phase 1 trials conducted by Dr. Deborah Mash at the University of Miami supported the anecdotal evidence that patients had significantly reduced drug withdrawal and craving following ibogaine administration. These trials ended prematurely as a result of several factors, including criticism from the pharmaceutical industry, the apparent costliness to continue, and an intellectual property lawsuit between Mash and ibogaine crusader Howard Lotsof1, 2. No clinical trials have been conducted with ibogaine since this preliminary work over 20 years ago.
Another issue facing the medical legalization of ibogaine is that it cannot simply be prescribed in pill form by a doctor. The drug must be administered in a therapeutic setting, potentially as an aid to psychotherapy, as is the case with MDMA. Pre- and post-counseling are vital to ensure proper translation and integration of the psychedelic experience, as well as addressing the underlying problems that contribute to drug abuse. Furthermore, patients must implement changes outside of the clinic to ensure successful treatment outcomes. This means getting away from the external factors that contribute to drug abuse, which can include leaving relationships with friends, family or partners, and/or moving to a new area. While legalization for medical application is important, there must also be infrastructure developed to support proper administration of the drug.
There have been cases of death associated with taking ibogaine. However, none of these cases have been a result of overdose or toxicity2. Individuals with certain heart conditions are at a higher risk of cardiovascular-related death after consuming ibogaine, and taking drugs of abuse with ibogaine may cause adverse reactions that can result in death. Rather than supporting the case against legalization, the risk of death for certain patients further evidences the necessity of legalization: unlike some clandestine ibogaine sources, regulated treatment centers would have the resources to screen patients for comorbidities (reasons not to ingest the drug) prior to ibogaine administration.
Ibogaine has many hurdles to overcome in order to reach the legal market, but pharmacologist Stanley Glick at Albany Medical College and chemist Martin Kuehne at the University of Vermont developed a drug that could reach consumers much faster: 18-Methoxycoronairidine (18-MC). 18-MC is a derivative of ibogaine intended to produce the same anti-addictive properties without the negative side-effects or psychoactive experience. Some ibogaine advocates contend that the psychoactive experience of ibogaine is equally important for attenuating addiction as the physiological effects. But 18-MC’s lack of psychoactivity will likely be more palatable to consumers, and to the FDA.
The process for making 18-MC medically available is already underway. In 2014, a company called Savant HWP began pre-clinical and Phase 1 trials with 18-MC funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. These trials were successful, and Phase 2 trials are set to begin this year. If clinical trials continue to be successful, 18-MC could be an FDA approved treatment for addiction within the next decade.
18-MC becoming available to patients would be a massive step towards ending the opioid crisis, but ibogaine remains full of unexplored potential. While the legal status of ibogaine in the US makes research a significant challenge, countries in which ibogaine is unregulated provide the opportunity to study its use in legal clinics. In 2017, the Multi-Disciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) sponsored two studies investigating the efficacy of ibogaine in Mexico and New Zealand3, 7. With abundant data available for legal collection across multiple fields of study, scientists are just beginning to scratch the surface of ibogaine research. Those interested in studying ibogaine should not be discouraged by the barriers in the United States and should look abroad for more opportunities. For more information about how to get involved in ibogaine and other psychedelic research as a scientist, you can read our post here.
Not a scientist? You can still get involved! The simplest action you can take is to call and write your state and federal legislators. Explain how ibogaine’s legal status is hindering the scientific investigation and preventing sufferers of addiction from receiving effective treatment. During voting season, research how the candidates feel about illegal drugs and vote accordingly. You can also donate money to MAPS and other legitimate research organizations to support the scientists who are currently studying ibogaine.
If you are interested in learning more about ibogaine or 18-MC, you can visit the following links:
Alper, Stajić, & Gill, (2012). Fatalities Temporally Associated with the Ingestion of Ibogaine. Journal of Forensic Sciences, 57(2), 398-412.
Brown, & Alper, (2017). Treatment of opioid use disorder with ibogaine: detoxification and drug use outcomes, The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse
Cappendijk, & Dzoljic. (1993). Inhibitory effects of ibogaine on cocaine self-administration in rats. European Journal of Pharmacology, 241(2), 261-265.
Glick, Kuehne, Raucci, Wilson, Larson, Keller, & Carlson. (1994). Effects of iboga alkaloids on morphine and cocaine self-administration in rats: Relationship to tremorigenic effects and to effects on dopamine release in nucleus accumbens and striatum. Brain Research, 657(1), 14-22.
Mash, Ameer, Prou, Howes, & Maillet, (2016). Oral noribogaine shows high brain uptake and anti-withdrawal effects not associated with place preference in rodents. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 30(7), 688-697.
Noller, Frampton, & Yazar-Klosinski, (2017). Ibogaine treatment outcomes for opioid dependence from a twelve-month follow-up observational study, The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse
This interview was transcribed from our Navigating Psychedelics: Lessons on Self-Care & Integration master class with Elizabeth Gibson of Dreamshadow Transpersonal Breathwork. In this interview, Elizabeth shares her insights of integrating exceptional experiences from facilitating and working with Holotropic Breathwork for over 25 years. Elizabeth has a great wealth of knowledge about the integration process and we are honored to present her insights.
Introduction
Kyle Buller: Welcome to the Psychedelics Today exclusive interview for the Self Care and Integration course. Today we are here with Elizabeth Gibson of DreamShadow Transpersonal Breathwork to talk about integration and breathwork. Thank you for joining us today, Elizabeth. It’s great to have you on.
Elizabeth Gibson: Thanks for having me, I’m happy to be here.
Kyle: So, let’s dig in, what does integration mean to you?
Elizabeth: Well, it’s a big topic and a really important topic to me. To me, integration is one of the most important aspects of work with extraordinary experiences. How do you take material that’s come up for you and bring it into your everyday life? That’s where the real benefit of this work comes from. I think it’s a topic that’s often overlooked.
So, how do people go back out into the world and realize the benefits of the intense inner work that they’ve done? That’s what it’s about to me. It’s about how people figure out how to do that and supporting them in that process.
Kyle: To backtrack a little bit, you have been facilitating breathwork for almost 20 years at this point? [25 years as of 2019].
And then you also were part of some MDMA therapy back in the 80s, right? When it was legal? So, you’ve been in this work for a while — working with people with non-ordinary states and doing integration work.
Elizabeth: Trying to, yeah.
Joe: What are some of the most important thing you see people maybe not do adequately to try to integrate?
Elizabeth: Well, I think the basic principle that we always remind people of when they are leaving a workshop or leaving a session that has involved an intense experience of any kind is the ongoing nature of the process. So, a lot of people who are, especially people who are new to this work, tend to think it’s all about the session.
The session, of course, is extremely important, but the process continues after the session is over. The intense emotions or material that has begun to come up during the session, if it’s a very organic process, can continue in the days and weeks after the session has actually taken place.
So, it’s really important to remind people that it’s important to give themselves space and to allow that process to continue and to really respect what’s going on inside and not try to jump right back into everyday life and the demands of work. given that, for many people, that’s a very difficult thing. People have jobs and families and relationships that they’re going back to.
It is important to remind them to remember the ongoing nature of the process and that it’s not all about your hours in the session. I think all of us who have done this work ourselves personally, I mean, I remember after when I did MDMA-assisted psychotherapy back in the ’80s, I can remember for days afterwards just kind of yearning to get back in the space I had been in.
It seemed like such a sweet experience and my life outside of the session seemed pale by experiences. It’s almost if I was trying to get back to where I had been in the session instead of understanding that I needed to pay attention to what was happening to myself right now in the moment and reconnect with myself in that way.
I think that’s really what integration is about — learning to be more present and authentic with ourselves in the moment. No matter what we are doing, whether we’re in an intense session or you know, even something as mundane as washing the dishes.
Kyle: Yeah, you make some really great points. Joe and I put that quote, “chop wood, carry water” in our presentation in this course. But also, it seems like people want to jump back into sessions again, like I think we brought up the fact that people may want to just go back and do ayahuasca ceremonies over and over again.
Maybe not because of the purging aspect, but just continue taking drugs to stay in that state (of consciousness). Or go back and do a bunch of breathwork sessions to move through some stuff. I think it is important to have that downtime and really be able to embody the experience and really understand what that means.
Elizabeth: I agree, Kyle. I think a lot of the changes that come about as a result of doing this work are subtle changes. The traumatic changes are fairly obvious and maybe don’t need as much attention in the sense that with the subtle changes they can be easily overlooked. The long-term changes that take place over time, those are the ones that I think you really want to honor and respect and give space to allow that to happen in yourself.
Developing A Daily Practice
Kyle: Do you have any tips or advice to how to stay in the moment after a session for the next week or a couple months to really embody what just happened?
Elizabeth: Yeah, well that’s the challenge. I think that it really is a very individual thing. There are specific techniques that can be used. I was looking this morning, and Stan Grof spoke in his book, Holotropic Breathwork, He has a couple of entries for integration. He talks about specific kinds of techniques that can be helpful for people after they do this kind of work. And you know, it’s the kinds of techniques that allow you to tap into yourself, be it whatever kind of form meditation works for you.
Some people like sitting meditation, some people like more active kinds of meditation like tai chi. Some people can’t really connect with meditation at all and there can be other kinds of activities like I remembered when I read Stan’s passage that he used to recommend for people who had intense kinds of physical experiences, that aerobic exercise, like swimming, running, for people who might be inclined in that way, who are more physically active, just as a way of connecting with the kind of energy and feelings that are operating at the deeper levels.
So, for me, I always have found it helpful to journal about my experiences in the days afterward. Not right after an experience because I’m not that verbal yet, which is why initially after a breathwork session, for instance, we offer drawing materials so people can just work with shapes and colors and begin to work with their experiences symbolically on that level before even putting words to them.
But then maybe a day or two later, I always find it really helpful to write about my experience. I notice if I keep up the process journaling in the days moving forward from there, I’m apt to stay more connected with the feelings of the experience.
But again, it’s whatever works for an individual person to create space for themselves to just sink into themselves. Basically, that means some kind of ongoing form of practice, daily practice, whatever works. And that’s a very personal and individual kind of thing.
And we’ve all, I know, tried in our lives to stick to some kind of practice. We’ve tried lots of things. What I’ve learned over the years is for me, I have to make my practice manageable. I can’t try and make it too big. So, I’ve learned for me, if I do something every morning for about half an hour, that’s probably the most realistic expectation I can have for myself.
So, I like to do yoga and tai chi, and I like to journal. Some combination or at least one of those, ideally in the morning. But then during the day, I mean, think what you like to do to nurture and support yourself. Get outside, go for a walk, connect with nature, to work it into your daily life as much as you can so it’s not like a separate kind of thing that becomes one more thing to do every day that you may not get to.
Kyle: Right. And then if you start acting that way, then you start beating yourself up that you’re not practicing, so yeah. I know that happens to me. I’m like, “Ah, I should really meditate more.” Then I think to myself, “Well, why am I beating myself up over it?”
Elizabeth: Yeah, yeah.
But do you find that? I mean, I do. I know that if I do something first thing in the morning, then if I wait ’til the end of the day, it’s less likely that it’s going to happen, so-
Kyle: Absolutely.
Elizabeth: My tai chi teacher used to say, “Just do it before you think too much about it. Get up and do it.”
The Importance of Community and Group Process
Joe: Can you think of any things not to do that might impact integration in a negative way?
Elizabeth: That’s a really interesting question, Joe. Things not to do. I think it’s important not to isolate yourself after you do this kind of work. So, that in addition to the whole principle of the ongoing nature of the process, I think the principle of community is really important.
I’ve come to appreciate the community around breathwork over the years — the relationships that we have created and the support that people offer each other. I really think we can’t do this kind of work completely on our own. We need support not just during the sessions, but in the days and weeks, months and even years between sessions.
We need support. We need to be able to talk with people about our experiences. We need to process our experiences verbally. I mean, we’re very social animals as human beings and we thrive in group kinds of settings. Now, some people at first are put off by group experiences and prefer to work one on one, maybe with a guide or a therapist. And that’s fine, but usually, there’s at least one other person involved. Somebody who can help you get through the rough spots in a way that’s supportive and not overly directive. And that can be a good friend as much as a therapist or an experience facilitator.
Kyle: Yeah. What’s Lenny’s saying? “We’re the descendants of very successful tribes.”
Elizabeth: Yeah, we’re all the descendants of successful tribes. So, that’s part of our heritage. I think in our margin, in our modern culture, that’s something that’s missing. And you see a lot of people just yearning for that kind of communal experience.
A lot of people come to our workshops, I see them get so much meaning and joy out of just the personal connections that are made. A lot of people are simply lonely, and you just need that kind of contact and the building of community and relationships.
Kyle: It makes me think a lot about rites of passages, how those are formed, say, in some of those traditional cultures where maybe the adolescent would go out and you’d have this experience, but then they’d have the safety net of the elders, the container, and the community to come back to.
And when we have these really big experiences, I mean, we might have a few people to talk to, but we don’t really have that community to come back to. I know after my near-death experience, I was like, “Whoa, who do I talk to you about this now? I can’t really talk to my parents about it.” And I had to leave to find that. And I found it in Burlington. I found it in breathwork with you and Lenny.
Elizabeth: I remember that about you, Kyle. And that was a process that took many years for you to build that kind of community. So, as a young teenager, that was really … As I understand it, that was one of the hardest aspects of it afterwards was that you didn’t have anybody you felt you could really talk to.
Kyle: Yeah, exactly. And that’s been one of the biggest integration pieces for me when I think about integration — how do you just be okay with the people around you and learn how to just embody that experience even though you might not be able to talk to that person necessarily? How do you continue to be in a relationship with them and not feel so isolated?
Elizabeth: Well that kind of goes back to your last question, Joe, of what not to do. So, Kyle just touched on that really when he mentioned who you can’t talk to about these experiences. So, I think it’s important to search out people who you know will be supportive and understanding, and not share your experiences with people who might discount or trivialize your experience because they just don’t understand this kind of work.
And that can be lonely if it’s somebody important in your life that you can’t discuss these kinds of experiences with. That’s definitely a big dilemma.
Kyle: Do you have any tips or advice to work through anything that arises after a workshop or an experience? We talk about the process continuing, but maybe how to work with some of that stuff that comes up in the next coming weeks to months.
Elizabeth: Well, so if there’s somatic stuff coming up in the body, it can be really helpful to go get some bodywork after a session. A really good deep tissue massage or any kind of work that’s going to help resolve things that might still be coming up in the body. We’re fortunate now in this day and age, there are so many different kinds of bodywork.
Bodywork can be extremely helpful.
And then those of us who are holding the space for people and supporting this kind of work, I think it’s on us to make ourselves accessible to people after the sessions and to say that we can be available for them to reach out and contact us if they’re having trouble — so that they know there’s somebody who understands what they’ve been through who’s there for them to listen to them.
I mean sometimes people just need to talk. It’s not like you have to do much else than just listen and support them with your attention. People need to be heard and feel that what they’re experiencing isn’t totally abnormal but it’s just a normal part of their process. That can be all they need maybe. Just a friend or a person who understands that they can talk with.
Joe: That ties into a lot of what we’ve been talking about lately where, maybe you have these integration groups, but that’s the essence of it right there is just to talk and be heard.
Elizabeth: I love the idea of the integration groups that you guys are doing. I mean, I think that’s exactly the kind of format that will help fill in the space in between experiential sessions and give people the sense of community and belonging.
I mean look at the whole AA thing, the fact that that’s done as group work. I mean, people struggling with in the addiction field, they go to groups that meet regularly where they can talk about their experiences and share them and feel that kind of support.
That has been an incredibly successful approach over the years. So, I think your idea of having these integration groups is exactly the kind of approach that’s going to be helpful for people who are struggling with integrating extraordinary experiences. I’m really happy you’re doing that.
Kyle: Thank you. Yeah, part of it too is we come to your workshop for a weekend, have these really close connections, have these really powerful experiences, and then in between it’s like, “Oh, where’s that community?”
So, part of it for me is how do we keep it going? How do we keep the conversation going and finding those people that we can support and hold space for so the process can continue and it’s still healing with it.
Elizabeth: Technology has made that easier too. I mean, look at what we’re doing right now. And the fact, even as an email group, you can continue sharing. It definitely has its limitations, but it’s better than nothing.
Don’t Make Any Big Changes Right Away
Joe: You often speak about not making any big changes in the next six months. Can you speak about that?
Elizabeth: Yeah. Well, a lot of times people take material that comes up in their sessions, there’s a tendency maybe to take it literally and think that to interpret their session in a certain way that makes them think, “Oh, that means I need to leave my job right now, or I need to end this relationship now.”
We encourage people to sit with that for a little while before they act on it, to be sure that things have settled and that they’ve had some time to process their experience a little more before making any major life decisions.
But there are no hard and fast rules about that. It’s just something to be aware of. People can have amazing insights and extraordinary experiences that are … Can be taken literally. But sometimes as you know, there are many levels to these experiences, and you have to treat them symbolically or metaphorically. So, it’s just a caveat, but not a hard and fast rule.
Final Thoughts
Joe: Is there anything, any additional points you might want to raise before we kind of wrap up here?
Elizabeth: I would just encourage people to reach out when they feel like they’re having difficulty or trouble understanding something that might be going on, and knowing that there are all kinds of groups out there. And to be sure that when they do this kind of work, they do it in a safe setting, and that they have access to people who will be able to support them afterwards.
The MAPS website is a really good resource for understanding this aspect of the work. I think there’s material there about safety set and setting. So, to keep all of those considerations in mind, I would just end with that reminder.
Joe: You’re never alone and people do want to help you.
Elizabeth Gibson, thank you very much. You can find her website at dreamshadow.com.
Elizabeth: Thank you.
About Elizabeth Gibson
Elizabeth Gibson, M.S., holds a bachelor’s degree in literature and a master’s degree in biology from The University of Tulsa. She has completed Herbert Benson’s Clinical Training in Mind/Body Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Previously she worked as a consultant at Arthur D. Little, Inc., and Radian Corporation in the areas of environmental protection and food research. She is a writer, editor and homemaker with interests in environmental literacy, yoga, music and gardening. Elizabeth is the editor of Stanislav Grof ’s The Ultimate Journey: Consciousness and the Mystery of Death and a contributor to the teaching manual MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy for the Treatment of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, both published by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. For the past 12 years, she has been responsible for local news for the Town of Pawlet, and from 2008 – 2014 she was the editor of the weekly environment section for the Rutland Herald and Montpelier Times Argus newspapers in Vermont.
This is an edited transcript from a podcast that was recorded live in Bolten Valley, Vermont for a MAPS Psychedelic Dinner event in May 2016.
When I met Albert Hofmann, I introduced myself to him by telling him my birthday, which was April 17, 1943. He burst out laughing.
– Lenny Gibson
There are three modern turning points in the modern history of psychedelics. The first one being when Albert Hofmann had the experience that led him to realize the psychotropic properties of the substance he had synthesized. The second one was when Gordon Wasson and his wife, Valentina, connected with Maria Sabina, who was a curandera who used mushrooms. This event resulted in the introduction of psilocybin, in addition to LSD. The third turning point was when Hoffman and Wasson were together, and Hoffman synthesized psilocybin. Psilocybin became readily available, instead of having to go to some obscure place in Mexico to beg people to find somebody who knew where to get the mushrooms.
Greek History
The use of substances in providing transcendent experiences goes back beyond the beginnings of our written history in the west. The shamanic tradition in Greece led to the development of the tragic plays – The great tragic plays of Sophocles and Aeschylus. The Greek word tragedy, literally means goatskin, because in the festivals of Dionysus, who was the god of wine, when the new wine was decanted everybody got really high on the new wine. It gave people permission to act like goats and as you know Dionysus was portrayed as half man and half goat. Dionysus had also been to the underworld and back, like Orpheus, another person that comes out of the shamanic traditions and into, what we call, the Greek Mystery Religions. The most prominent of the Mystery religions was one called the Eleusinian Mysteries, a mystery not in the sense of Ellery Queen, but a mystery in the sense of mystical. That rite goes back beyond recorded time and lasted for, at least, two thousand years. It was a rite built around the myth of Demeter and Persephone.
Source: Wikipedia
Persephone was out picking flowers in the meadow on a spring day and Hades came along and grabbed her, took her down into the underworld. Demeter, her mother, was distraught but Persephone was gone. Demeter appealed to the other gods for help getting Persephone back. It was of no use. So finally, Demeter since she was the goddess of agriculture and growing things, decided that she would stop everything growing. Clearly a symptom of depression.
It didn’t bother the gods because they lived on Ambrosia. But then it occurred to them that if the human beings starved to death there’d be no one to worship the gods. That got to them and they agreed to help Demeter and prevailed upon Hades to let Persephone come back, but she had sampled maybe one or seven seeds from a pomegranate. The way those myths work, she couldn’t be completely freed of Hades and had to, ended up spending half her time in Hades and half with her mother. Thus, the variation of the seasons. So the myth is about going into the underworld and coming back, basically, about death and rebirth. It appears to have involved an ergot-derived substance, a psychedelic. We don’t know exactly because the Eleusis were sworn to secrecy and the secret was never revealed – two thousand years. All of the major people, all the intelligentsia, many of the regular people of Greece were initiates. They could do it once. Pindar, the famous poet, who was also an initiate, along with Plato and Xenophon and the whole, even to the Romans, Cicero was an initiate. Marcus Aurelius was the last Roman Emperor, was an initiate. The whole thing [The Eleusinian Mysteries] was killed when Calvin Constantine converted the Roman Empire to Christianity. Pindar says, not revealing a secret, but says of the right, it was an experience dying before dying. But as I said, Constantine saw the Ring of Fire and decided that the Roman Empire should become Christian, they should stop persecuting the Christians and become part of it. And so Christianity doesn’t have a very good track record with substances other than wine and Eucharist, which are psychedelic for a very limited group of people who are intensely into the sacred technology of the mass.
Huxley and Humphry Osmond
So the middle ages is a kind of, in the west, it’s a kind of desert, as far as psychedelics are concerned. And we don’t really find anything of interest until we jump up to the 19th century. Havelock Ellis took peyote on Good Friday, 1897. He wrote it up for the British Journal of Medicine, they rejected it – too fantastical. His other major work, which was in The Psychology of Sex, seven volumes – sold very well. He gave some peyote buttons to William Butler Yates, who realized that we’re all slouching towards Bethlehem.
Humphry Osmond worked a little mental hospital up in Saskatchewan and began experimenting with LSD [and mescaline]. Aldous Huxley somehow learned of this work and said, “If you’re in LA, come by and see me.” Osmond didn’t think it would ever happen, but in fact, there was a bureaucratic problem at the hospital. They needed to reorganize and move Osmond up and get rid of the guy that was above him, and so while they were doing that, they sent Osmond off to an APA convention in LA – where he got in touch with Huxley. They went to a few sessions of the APA convention and were bored to tears. So they adjourned back to Huxley’s place and Osmond turned him on. It took about 90 minutes before it really hit him and then it blew his mind. Huxley was the author of Brave New World andApe and Essence. Huxley was one of the major intellectuals in the 20th century and an enormously successful author, half blind, but intensely intellectual. He was part of a circle of people that stretches back really to Havelock Ellis and Hermann Hesse [Who wrote Siddhartha andThe Glass Bead Game ], and Carl Jung.
But the psychedelic experience was restricted to a very small elite. Huxley, upon trying the mescaline, called it the most extraordinary and significant experience available to human beings this side of the beatific vision. (The Doors of Perception, he produced as a result of it.) In there, he mentions CD Broad, a British philosopher who characterizes the brain as a cerebral reducing valve. Huxley’s first theories here was that psychedelics eliminate some of the filterings of the brain. Fairly crude though, we have a lot more sophisticated stuff now. Robin Carhart-Harris has advanced that considerably.
Huxley was also friends with a fellow named Gerald Heard, who was again, a major intellectual personage in the early-mid 20th century. The two of them eventually came into contact with a guy named Al Hubbard, nicknamed Cappy, because he was the President of the Vancouver Yacht Club and also the Uranium Corporation in Vancouver. He is best described as a kind peripatetic imp. He rode off to Sandoz and got a huge supply of LSD and I guess carted around the world turning people on but kept it limited to a very small group of people like this.
There’s Gerald Heard, there’s Oscar Janiger, who was a psychiatrist in Beverly Hills, who found out about LSD, got a large supply of it and a group around him Huxley, Heard, Hubbard, Janiger, Sidney Cohen, they were involved in a salon in the LA area. Their recording secretary was Anais Nin. Janiger also obtained DMT and introduced that into the whole thing.
Humphry Osmond first proposed the term psychedelic at a meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences in 1957. He said the word meant “mind manifested” from the two Greek words for psyche and delos, which means clear. Huxley had sent Osmond a rhyme, which went, “To make this trivial world sublime, take a half a gram of phanerothyme. Thumos means spiritedness in Greek. Osmond wrote back, “The fathom hell or sore angelic, just a take a pinch of psychedelic.”
Tim Leary
Now until Tim Leary came along, the psychedelic usage, although it was a growing circle, was pretty much limited to a fairly elite circle, a circle of intellectuals and a few housewives, as you saw before. But then Timothy Leary got a hold of psilocybin and this is a major turning point because Tim Leary couldn’t contain himself. And, in some ways, he advanced things enormously and in other ways, he set them back terribly. But certainly, and there you see him in some of his many guises.
The basic issue was he had started out doing reasonable research at Harvard and he couldn’t keep it in and started spewing it out. So you get the stuff starting to come out into settings that are not conducive to people getting the best out of it. And he became involved with these folks – Good old Alan, William Burroughs, some of you may know he was heir to the Burroughs fortune, the Burroughs adding machine.
So, here we have these guys, Kerouac, On the Road, and Alan Watts, who was a great talker. So East Coast, we’ve got Tim Leary, and West Coast we got, Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, coming out of on the road.
There’s the bus, the first acid tests, which morphed into the trip festivals, which morphed into Burning Man. The first Human Be-In and down there in the corner is one of the sponsors, Augustus Stanley Owsley III, who had a girlfriend who was good at making LSD and he produced zillions of doses really cheap.
But we have some problems here, the war. Psychedelics and the anti-war movement started synergizing each other and the government got really scared.
They (the government) had been interested in LSD early on. There was a guy named James Moore who accompanied Wasson (Gordon and Valentina) to Mexico under the pretext of being the photographer on one of those CIA plans. He (Moore) brought psilocybin back to back to the CIA. They were interested in it because it having mind effects – they discovered when they gave it to the spies, those hardened spooks ended up over in the corner weeping and crying about brotherly love. Other than the ones that ran frantically out of the room and had to be chased down in Virginia where they were found under a fountain talking about those terrible eyes and the monsters that were insulting them. So, it didn’t work out for the CIA.
Prohibition – California criminalized LSD on October 7th, 1966 and that’s when things started to head down because it drove it underground and that’s the worst thing you can do. I mean, prohibition, it’s like, “Will we ever learn?” We tried prohibition with alcohol. When I lived in Oklahoma, one of the lines there was, “It was so dry.” There were some dry counties in Oklahoma in the 1970’s, and the line was, “They would remain dry as long as the Baptists and the bootleggers could stagger to the poles.” It (psychedelics) went underground and at the same time proliferated.
Sasha Shulgin, wonderful man, wonderful, wonderful man. He could give a lecture on chemistry that was just if you didn’t know a bit about chemistry you would be fascinated. And there he is with his wife Ann and immortalized by Alex Grey. And there’s one of his “dirty pictures” down there in the corner, he called them dirty pictures, the molecules. There’s a great video on YouTube about Sasha called, Dirty Pictures, wonderful video.
And here are other folks – Richard Alpert, of course, was with Tim Leary at Harvard early on, but they diverged, India took on Alpert but it didn’t take on Tim. And we see Alpert in an early phase down there in the corner, we see him in his post-India phase when he turned back into just an ordinary transcendental. We have the intellectualization of Ken Wilbur, and we have a leprechaun fully as filled with impishness as was Cappy, Terry McKenna. That book (Be Here Now), I remember going to the church in LA after Ram Dass had come back from India and it was lovely and there were robes and beads and flowers and it was just fun. They were passing out this thing that says, “If you want a copy of this book we’re gonna publish, fill out one of these cards.” We were going, “Oh, these hippies, I’m not gonna bother filling out the card, ’cause it will never happen.” But it did and it’s still in publication.
Stanislav Grof
As the glorious phase was being dampened by the criminalization and all, there came from Czechoslovakia, the Stanislav Grof, where Stanislav Grof had been, when I was graduating from gymnasium (Gymnasium is like high school/junior college). The summer after gymnasium Stan wanted to become a cartoonist, he liked to draw cartoons. He was headed for the Saint Animation School. He had put in his application because you go right from gymnasium to university or professional school. Then a friend of his came by who had found a copy of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. (Freud was forbidden literature in community culture, Czechoslovakia, behind the iron curtain at the point). The friend was very excited about the book, you know try to get a college kid today to read the Interpretation of Dreams, it’s impossible, but tell them they can’t and boy!
Stan picked up the excitement and begged to borrow the book and he said he stayed up all night reading it. Stan then withdrew his application to film school and put in one to become to medical school. He wanted to become a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst, which he did. Stan trained underground, doing his residence at Charles Hospital in Prague where they were working with the Sandoz Corporation in the development of some of the new major tranquilizers (Mellaril is what they were working with). Stan said, “You know when you work on a pharmaceutical company they’re always sending you stuff,” and they sent something to the program he was, and there appeared a box of ampoules of LSD from Sandoz Laboratories. They started a research program that was totally the opposite of what Tim Leary’s operation was. The communist country, people lay things close to their chest – amazing research. Curing, curing! It was not suppressive like most of the psychotropics, the tranquilizer drugs. They cured the people of profound depression.
In his book, (now called, LSD: Door to the Numinous, It was called, Realms of the Human Unconscious originally), Stan shares a story of a fellow who was severely catatonically depressed for a long time was given LSD. Their practice was to give a small dose of LSD at first, but he didn’t get anything from it so they had increased the dose and kept increasing it. They had got this guy up to 3500 micrograms before they got the first reaction. The guy got up out of his room, went to the kitchen, made a bologna sandwich, and then went to the day room and played chess.
So, Stan got out of Czechoslovakia to this country (USA). Stan said he came out with two suitcases, which contained his notes and two shirts. He then fortuitously hooked up with a man named, Walter Pahnke, who had Timothy Leary in his still relatively stable phase as a dissertation advisor and engaged the famous Good Friday experiment. Walter Pahnke was a physician who had taken a sabbatical to go to divinity school, and then went back to Johns Hopkins and began working with cancer patients on whom the oncologists had given up because they were beyond any help. They were in pain, they were in despair, they were scared, and they were using LSD with these patients. All the videotapes have gone, the last little bits of videotape burned when Stans house burned down some years ago.
Most astounding videotape is a guy who was a stevedore on the docks of Baltimore, in his 60’s, metastasized melanoma, they couldn’t give him anything orally and they had to inject him with dipropyltryptamine. Stan is sitting for him and in the course of this session, this man goes from a sort of Neanderthal with like maybe a vocabulary of 600 words, half of which are profanities, but mostly grunts. His family had abandoned him and in the course of this session he is transformed and he’s lecturing the great doctor Stanislav Grof about the “great recycling yard in the sky.” I cried. I’ve been through throat cancer myself. I’m with people who are cancer survivors and who are still facing terror and with 35, 40 years we could have been making it better. But we’re getting there, finally. I never thought it would happen.
Here’s Stan with Christina, when they were young and in love. They always were in love. There’s Stan with Albert Hoffman. He and Stan were good buddies.
The John Hopkins research fell apart when LSD became criminalized. Michael Murphy and Stan fortuitously hooked up and Murphy invited Stan to Esalen as scholar-in-residence. After a few years Stan needed to produce an income for Esalen, so he put together the technique called, “Holotropic Breathwork.” When I was telling Stan for the second time, the reason I decided on holotropic breathwork training was that I had an experience with holotropic breathwork that was identical with the most powerful experiences I’ve ever had with LSD. Stan said, “That’s what convinced me too.” It’s not like taking a pill and you don’t have any choice, ’cause you gotta work at it, that’s why it’s called breath work – but you can get to the same place.
Creativity
Rick Doblin was part of the first Holotropic Breathwork training. There were two parallel groups of trainees of Holotropic Breathwork in the mid-80’s. Rick Doblin was in one of them. Rick got it that Timothy Leary wasn’t the way to go. The way to go was to start, get the credentials, go slowly, and slowly, and slowly. (It’s effective). Through the Holotropic Breathwork training, it’s brought people together that have an interest that was disappointed as the 60’s began to fade. A fellow named Michael Mithoefer, who became the lead researcher for MDMA. So, the Holotropic Breathwork stuff really has been the leverage that’s kept things going, where we actually have hope now that we’re going get this (psychedelics becoming legal as medicine).
I was saying to Stan, “Isn’t this great that Michael’s doing the MDMA research.” And Stan says, “Yeah, but you know, that’s all been done, it’s all been written up before. It’s all there. It’s just been forgotten. The real potential is creativity.”
And indeed, from counterculture to cyberculture. Rick has been working in the psychological realm and some of the other people that came out of the 60’s, Steve Jobs, among them. The future looks bright to me. And I’m sure happy I’ve lived long enough to see it.
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The consumption of 5-MeO-DMT by inhaling bufotoxins from the Colorado River toad (lat. Incilius Alvarius), also known as “Bufo Alvarius”, “El Sapo/Sapito”, “Bufo”, and “Toad”, has become increasingly popular in a variety of underground ceremonial settings in recent years. Furthermore, due to the realization of the potential 5-MeO-DMT holds for therapy it has also become a new interest in psychedelic research.
When I started psychedelic research for my dissertation at Maastricht University in fall 2017, there was no research addressing the subjective effects from inhalation of bufotoxins in humans. Thus, I brought it upon myself to investigate this further as the consumption of the so-called “toad-medicine” was booming worldwide.
The primary aim of the study was to investigate whether the bufotoxins from the toad, which is known to contain significant amounts of 5-MeO-DMT, as well as other compounds, produces long-lasting changes on affect and thinking style. The second objective was to assess whether the acute and long-term effects of the bufotoxins depend on the degree of ego dissolution and altered states of consciousness that was experienced during the ceremony. The preliminary evidence of this study was presented at the Beyond Psychedelics conference in Prague in June, and the recording of this presentation is now circling around on the web.
Even though the study results are very interesting and important to highlight due to the consumption of the “toad-medicine” worldwide, I think it is of equal importance, if not more, to shed light on another side of the story. A side of the story that for once does not focus on humans.
This article aims to share information, increase awareness, and stimulate reflection about how the consumption of bufotoxins affect the toad.
5-methoxydimethyltryptamine (5-MeO-DMT) is a potent, fast-acting, natural psychoactive indolealkymine substance, which acts as a serotonin (5-HT-1-A/5-HT-2A) receptor agonist (Shen, Jiang et al. 2010, Szabo, Kovacs et al. 2014). 5-MeO-DMT was initially isolated from the bark of Dictyoloma incanescens (Pachter 1959), and has also been found in the milky-white secretion that protects the Incilius Alvarius toad against predators (Weil and Davis 1994).
This toad, also known as Bufo Alvarius, has become well-known worldwide as a “5-MeO-DMT-making-machine”. Its secretion, when inhaled through vaporization, has proven to be powerfully psychoactive within 15 seconds, causing an experience of unity reported by participants in underground ceremonies in the most repeated soundbite “we are all one” (Weil and Davis 1994).
The presence of 5-MeO-DMT in the secretion is not the only substance that makes the toad so interesting. In fact, it is also the only species whose skin contains 5-methoxyindolealkylamines as well as 5-hydroxyindole-O-methyl transferase activity (Erspamer, Vitali et al. 1967). This enzyme, among other reactions, converts bufotenine (5-OH-DMT) to the potent hallucinogen 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine (5-MeO-DMT) (Weil and Davis 1994).
That being said, bufotoxins are the name of a collection of compounds which can be found on the toad’s skin, and in the two glands behind the eyes called the parotid glands (Tyler 1976). Several types of toxic and non-toxic substances can be found in the bufotoxins and they include the following; cardioactive agents such as for example bufagins (bufandienolides), catecholamines such as epinephrine and norepinephrine, indolealkylamines such as bufothionine, serotonin, cinobufotenine, bufotenine and dehydrobufotenine, and finally noncardiac sterols, which are non-toxic, such as cholesterol, provitamin D, gamma sitosteral and ergosterol (Chen and Kovaříková 1967). Moreover, as illustrated in the work for Erspamer and colleagues (1967) using paper chromatography, the bufotoxins include not only 5-MeO-DMT but also many other compounds. As previously mentioned, these compounds protect the toad from predators, and can, for this reason, have fatal consequences as demonstrated by reports of animals that have died after biting toads.
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Although these bufotoxins are a natural defense mechanism of the toad, humans have found a way of using them for a different purpose. At the present time, a number of people are smoking bufotoxins at underground ceremonies. Moreover, many also make use of 5-MeO-DMT from plant extract (i.e. yopo) or from a synthetic origin. A recent survey by Johns Hopkins demonstrates that use of 5-MeO-DMT, from either toad, plant extract or synthetic origin, is used infrequently and primarily for spiritual exploration (Davis, Barsuglia et al. 2018). Anecdotal, and empirical evidence demonstrates that people also use 5-MeO-DMT for treating psychiatric conditions such as depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder and substance abuse (Psychedelic Times, 2016). The resulting subjective effects appear to be due to the compounds ability to induce mystical experiences which have been demonstrated to have lasting beneficial effects (Garcia-Romeu, R Griffiths et al. 2014).
To be able to inhale the bufotoxins one would have to “milk the toad.” It is worth noting that the toads hibernate for most of the year, and generally appear just before summer showers, and congregate when the rains begin for reproduction (Fouquette Jr 1970). This is the time when they can be found and milked. The pamphlet titled “Bufo Alvarius, the Psychedelic Toad of the Sonoran Desert” outlines detailed instructions for collecting and drying the venom;
“You hold it [wearing gloves] over a flat glass plate or any other smooth, nonporous surface at least 12-inches square, the toad is held in front of the plate, which is fixed in a vertical position. In this manner, “the venom can be collected on the glass plate, free of dirt and liquid released when the toad is handled” (Most 1984).
Moreover, from the article Weil and Davis from 1994:
“One Bufo Alvarius yield 0.25-0.5 gram of dried venom. Since concentrations of 5-MeO-DMT may be as high as 15% one toad may yield 75 mg of an hallucogenic drug that, when smoked, is effective in humans at doses of 3-5 mg. In other words, a single toad produces 15 or more doses of one of the most potent psychoactive drugs found I nature. A matchbox sized container would represent thousands of effective doses.”
With this in mind, it is no wonder that the harvest and consumption of the toad’s bufotoxins have increased.
The harvesting of the toad’s bufotoxins happens not only from the hands of facilitators of ceremonies, or consumers but also from toad-hunters such as the ones filmed in “Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia: The Psychedelic Toad” who after harvesting the bufotoxins sell it (VICELAND 2017). In the video clip, the toad-hunters report that they have collected around 500 grams of bufotoxins over the years. This equals 5,000 doses if one dose is 100 milligrams of bufotoxin, and means that in order for one person to have the experience at least two toads must be milked.
Colorado river toad (Incilius alvarius), also known as the Sonoran desert toad.
Now how does the harvesting and consumption of bufotoxins impact the toad?
At this point in time (October 2018) the toads are classified as “least concern” on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (Hammerson & Santos-Barrera, 2004). Although this may be true, these assessments are from 2004, and is therefore very likely to be outdated. A new assessment about the toad’s population size is highly warranted given the attention the toad has received and the consumption of the toads’ bufotoxins worldwide.
Nevertheless, it is not old news that the amphibian population worldwide is declining. Actually, their global decline was first recognized in the early 1990s (Wake 1991). As of 2010, 32% of the world’s nearly 6600 amphibian species are threatened with extinction, 43% are experiencing declines and for another 22%, there are insufficient data (Stuart, Chanson et al. 2004). This phenomenon represents the Earth’s sixth mass extinction (Wake and Vredenburg 2008). That being said, there is no single cause to the global amphibian decline, rather there may be several contributing factors (Hayes, Falso et al. 2010). As outlined in the paper by Hayes and colleagues, there are three levels of possible factors for the amphibian decline.
The first level involves 1) death (or removal) of individuals and 2) reduced recruitment within a population. (Editors note: recruitment occurs when juvenile organisms survive to be added to a population, by birth or immigration, usually a stage whereby the organisms are settled and able to be detected by an observer. Source – Wikipedia
The second level involves 1) increased disease rate, 2) decrease in nutrition, 3) predation, 4) human exploitation 5) “other mortality”, which represent everything from the death of older individuals, incidental death, to catastrophic events.
Finally, the third level involves 1) atmospheric change, 2) environmental pollutants, 3) habitat loss, 4) invasive species, and finally 5) pathogens. These levels are also suggested to interact with one another.
It is not rocket science that the above-mentioned factors also have an impact on the toad. The increasing demand for the bufotoxins for inhalation has made the toad susceptible to not only ecological disturbance through the invasion of habitat and excessive milking, but also amphibian-trafficking and black-market dynamics. Additionally, according to herpetologist Robert Anthony Villa, the largest toads are most likely to be spotted and collected over smaller toads, and if you remove the biggest toads, you remove the population’s ability to sustain itself as the bigger toads have a lot of eggs (Psychedelic Today 2018). Moreover, based on studies on snakes, we know that 80% of snakes die if you catch them, move them to a different territory and let them go. Similarly, toads have an inner-GPS that they rely on, and if a toad is taken out of their territory for milking, and then set free elsewhere, they are very likely to die because they are either simply lost, could get run over by a car, or eaten by predators. The latter is more likely to successfully happen when the toad has been deprived of their main defense mechanism.
Along with that, Villa reports that the toad is very likely to be impacted negatively by pathogens, such as for example chytridiomycosis, which is exposed to them by people when they are collected for milking and can spread to the rest of the toad population. Additionally, as the surviving toads depend on the genetic variety of other populations to sustain themselves, the toads would inbreed themselves to extinction if there are no other populations to copulate with. Finally, keeping a toad as a pet, or many in large conservations for breeding, is a huge disservice to the toad as they do not do well in captivity, and due to the factors previously stated.
Given the circumstances, it seems to me that the harvesting and consumption of bufotoxins or so-called “toad medicine” is very much the case of the “double effect” principle; with a good act, comes a bad consequence. The aforementioned are all alarming factors that could very well lead toward population decline and so to extinction. This is all startling information that calls for action.
A discontinuation of “toad medicine” in favor of synthetic 5-MeO-DMT use can diminish the current unnecessary and excessive harassment of the Incilius Alvarius species. Switching from using toad bufotoxin to synthetic 5-MeO-DMT is better for many other reasons. First, synthetic 5-MeO-DMT does not contain a cocktail of other compounds and is therefore much safer to use. Likewise, it will be much easier for researchers to re-schedule and legalize a pure substance for medical use than a complex bufotoxin. Second, synthetic 5-MeO-DMT is not any different from “toad-medicine”. In fact, the argument that “toad-medicine” is better than synthetic is a claim that is drawn from personal experience and is not a good enough argument to extend to a generality.
I personally think it is important that we start to reflect upon the implications our actions have on the toads and take action. It is not necessary to wait until the toads are classified as endangered before we act.
My hope and wish for the future is that all of us, be it, consumers, researchers, organizers, or facilitators, will think twice about whether experiencing 5-MeO-DMT at the expense of a species’ continued presence on this planet is worth it. Especially when there is an alternative way which is much safer to use, not any different from the effects of the bufotoxins, and does not contribute to ecocide.
The book “Homo Deus; A Brief History of Tomorrow” highlights several important and interesting topics. One of them is the power human beings have, and how this power can affect the future of the planet. One thing that Harari points out, which seems to be very fitting for this moment, is that humans have the capability to do many things, but that question is not “what we can do?”, but rather; “what should we do?” (Harari 2015).
References
Chen, K. and A. Kovaříková (1967). “Pharmacology and toxicology of toad venom.” Journal of pharmaceutical sciences56(12): 1535-1541.
Davis, A. K., J. P. Barsuglia, R. Lancelotta, R. M. Grant and E. Renn (2018). “The epidemiology of 5-methoxy-N, N-dimethyltryptamine (5-MeO-DMT) use: Benefits, consequences, patterns of use, subjective effects, and reasons for consumption.” Journal of Psychopharmacology: 0269881118769063.
Erspamer, V., T. Vitali, M. Roseghini and J. M. Cei (1967). “5-Methoxy-and 5-hydroxyindoles in the skin of Bufo alvarius.” Biochemical pharmacology16(7): 1149-1164.
Fouquette Jr, M. (1970). “Bufo alvarius.” Catalogue of American Amphibians and Reptiles (CAAR).
Garcia-Romeu, A., R. R Griffiths and M. W Johnson (2014). “Psilocybin-occasioned mystical experiences in the treatment of tobacco addiction.” Current drug abuse reviews7(3): 157-164.
Harari (2015). Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow.
Hayes, T., P. Falso, S. Gallipeau and M. Stice (2010). “The cause of global amphibian declines: a developmental endocrinologist’s perspective.” Journal of Experimental Biology213(6): 921-933.
Most, A. (1984). Bufo alvarius: The psychedelic toad of the Sonoran desert, Venom Press.
Pachter, I. J. Z., D.E.Ribeiro, O. (1959). “Indole alkaloids of acer saccharinum (the Silver Maple), Dictyoloma incanescens, Piptadenia colubrina, and Mimosa hostilis.” J Org Chem24: 1285-1287.
Shen, H. W., X. L. Jiang, J. C. Winter and A. M. Yu (2010). “Psychedelic 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine: metabolism, pharmacokinetics, drug interactions, and pharmacological actions.” Curr Drug Metab11(8): 659-666.
Stuart, S. N., J. S. Chanson, N. A. Cox, B. E. Young, A. S. Rodrigues, D. L. Fischman and R. W. Waller (2004). “Status and trends of amphibian declines and extinctions worldwide.” Science306(5702): 1783-1786.
Szabo, A., A. Kovacs, E. Frecska and E. Rajnavolgyi (2014). “Psychedelic N, N-dimethyltryptamine and 5-methoxy-N, N-dimethyltryptamine modulate innate and adaptive inflammatory responses through the sigma-1 receptor of human monocyte-derived dendritic cells.” PloS one9(8): e106533.
Wake, D. B. (1991). “Declining amphibian populations.” Science253(5022): 860-861.
Wake, D. B. and V. T. Vredenburg (2008). “Are we in the midst of the sixth mass extinction? A view from the world of amphibians.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Weil, A. T. and W. Davis (1994). “Bufo alvarius: a potent hallucinogen of animal origin.” Journal of ethnopharmacology41(1-2): 1-8.
About the Author
Malin Vedøy Uthaug is a Ph.D. student at the University of Maastricht, Department of Neuropsychology & Psychopharmacology. She has a background in health and social psychology and is currently researching psychedelic (ayahuasca, 5-MeO-DMT, DMT, and mescaline) and yoga-induced improvements of mental health. On the side of being a student and researcher, she is a life coach and public speaker. She started her coaching project titled Love & Gratitude in September 2016 which serves as a platform to spread information related to positive psychology, and transpersonal psychology. Love & Gratitude has also become a way to bring about information about psychedelics and help to destigmatize them. She has since September 2016 delivered talks, webinars and workshops in Belgium, The Netherlands, Czech Republic, Norway, United States of America, and Colombia.
You can find more from Malin on Psychedelics Today here.
For the first time in nearly three decades, novel classes of medication are being offered to those suffering from chronic refractory mental health conditions. Studies have shown that 60% to 70% of people with treatment-resistant depression respond positively to ketamine, and some encouraging results are being found with OCD, PTSD, and alcohol dependence.
Though this discovery has been hailed as a massive boon to those living with persistent mental health concerns, their loved ones, and clinicians alike, it may also behoove us to explore the potential unintended consequence of these effective, fast-acting antidepressants.
Many welcome rapid recovery with relief and gratitude in being able to return to their lives; however, in our work with Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy, we have noticed that a small percentage of clients also experience a period of disequilibrium and difficulty in adjusting to these changes.
These reactions can range from over-reliance on older coping styles that no longer match one’s current state, to the distress that comes from the loss of a habituated identity (“I don’t even know who I am anymore, without my old buddy, Depression”). I have come to refer to this response metaphorically as “the therapeutic bends,” as a way to suggest the effects that can occur when we ascend rapidly from great depths. In two decades of clinical work, I have seen a variety of ambivalent-to-negative reactions to the prospect of “getting better.” Psychotherapy generally offers recovery as a gradual process, with adequate time to adjust and be supported; the “instant cure” has been seen as both unattainable and potentially illusory. The advent of these new treatments requires a shift in how we guide people through this work. I would like to discuss here some possible layers where distress can occur, and interventions for both clients and providers to consider at each level.
Confronting Reality: Cognitive-Behavioral Layer
Ketamine infusion pioneer and psychiatrist Dr. Steven Levine has been noting this reaction for some time; in a recent blog post, he encourages providers to set expectations with clients that “even good change is stressful (marriages, moving homes, new jobs, and the birth of children are some of life’s most stressful events).” More dramatically, he describes a process in which one emerges from a depressive episode, then becomes overwhelmed by the herculean tasks ahead:
[W]hen one looks around, one sees with new eyes the surrounding devastation and the casualties from an incapacity to do anything about the growing problems…[this] is akin to a poorly prepared survivor of a nuclear apocalypse stepping out of his bunker into a lonely world of destruction.
Dr. Raquel Bennett, a psychologist and founder of the KRIYA Institute, has also been observing the effects of therapeutic ketamine on one’s sense of self for many years. She echos Dr. Levine’s observations that:
Resistance can come up for some people; they get a little better, and then can get scared, sometimes retreating back into a remission, which is actually more psychological than chemical… People wake up and realize how much time was lost to their illness, how much money was spent, how many relationships ruined, how many opportunities missed… We need to think about how painful it is to just be with that, what this condition has done to one’s life (personal communication, August 12th, 2018).
Additionally, those accustomed to very brief respites from symptoms may have a habitual tendency to throw themselves headlong into intense task completion mode the moment remission begins, in an effort to “get everything that piled up done before the storm hits again.”
FOR PROVIDERS: Dr. Levine writes that “even a ‘magic bullet’ leaves a wound that requires a period of recovery,” and that key components to this recovery are social support and ongoing therapy. Therapy should, in part, focus on “teaching new skills to challenge and combat depressive thoughts, and working towards achieving successes that help rebuild self-esteem.“ Similarly, Dr. Wesley Ryan states that he frames ketamine treatment as something that can provide a catalyst for change, transiently lifting depression, and allowing people to more easily engage in other activities that will protect against relapse. He encourages “regular exercise, healthy eating, socialization, behavioral activation, structure/volunteering/work, work/life balance, addressing activities or relationships that clash with personal values (such as work, for some people), potentially setting better boundaries” (personal communication, August 13, 2018). Providers may want to focus here on slowing the work down so as to not trigger overwhelm, cognitively reframing approaches to task completion, and teaching new ways to manage the demands of life. Psychotherapists may also invite expressions of regret and grief around the sense of lost opportunities as a way to work through these feelings effectively. FOR CLIENTS: As stated above, it is important to not overwhelm yourself at this stage. Trust that you will have the opportunity to make repairs and address life tasks over time, and please access as much support as possible to assist you in this undertaking. This is an excellent time to begin practicing new self-care habits that will ensure longer-term change. Additionally, you may benefit from making space in your life to acknowledge and feel any difficult emotions you may have around what has happened and talking to someone you trust who can listen without judgment. You may want assistance from a therapist, support group, or a good self-help guide in shifting how you think about yourself and your life.
Readjusting Roles: Interpersonal Layer
Dr. Bennett notes that often people’s intimate relationships become organized around the care-giving other people provide, and that “as soon as they start to improve, expectations and the relationship dynamics start to change.”
In family therapy perspectives, the “identified patient” (also “symptom bearer” or “scapegoat”) is a member of a dysfunctional system that has been unconsciously selected to express the distress of that system. Other members may profess concern for the identified patient, but may also react instinctively (and unintentionally) to any improvement by working to reinstate the status quo. What once seemed like an entirely biochemical illness can often be revealed as multiply determined when we notice loved ones’ discomfort with their ward slipping out of “sick role.” I have often felt concern in watching someone achieve remission, and then return to the same stressful environment in which the initial problems flourished. In less pathologizing terms, let us remember that there is a social expectation in the continuity of the self over time. People around us have adapted to how we typically act and express ourselves, and react with surprise when that shifts. Those reactions may subtly encourage us to return to our previous baseline. This is rarely intentional, but is extremely important to recognize. FOR PROVIDERS: Potential interventions to navigate through this period might include family therapy, couples therapy, or psychoeducation on the nature of family systems or group dynamics. We can assist clients in setting appropriate boundaries, and support them in having difficult conversations. FOR CLIENTS: If this is something you would like to address in your life, please talk to your providers about your specific situation and best practice interventions. It may be helpful to talk through how your relationships might change if your mood improves, or any fears of what might be expected of you if your condition shifts. In general, reading about and practicing Nonviolent Communication is a good way to improve relationships with the people around you.
Exploring Identity: Personal Layer
Much like our intimate others, we also have an expectation in the continuity of the self. When one has lived with a longer-term condition, there are ways in which it can get woven into one’s own identity. We become habituated to our capacities for activity and relating, and depend on our ability to predict how we might think and feel in any given situation.
It can be incredibly disorienting when a cluster of your regular experiences disappears overnight, and can foster a sense of not knowing yourself at all anymore. (This may be partly responsible for the “rubber band effect”–the tendency to return to our usual modes of being–that Dr. Phil Wolfson discusses in The Ketamine Papers.) Participation in online forums and support groups can provide invaluable insight and camaraderie; as helpful as this can be, it may also reify one’s social role as a fellow sufferer. We come to define ourselves as a depressed person, as someone struggling with fibromyalgia, as a recipient of Social Security or disability benefits. (Perhaps this is not such a novel occurrence, after all, as a similar phenomenon emerged with the advent of SSRIs. Peter Kramer noted in his 1997 book Listening to Prozac how his perspective on the nature of temperament was altered by witnessing responses to medication: “I was used to seeing patients’ personalities change slowly, through painfully acquired insight and hard practice in the world. But recently I had seen personalities altered almost instantly, by medication.” He reported similar disorientation and adjustment periods.) FOR PROVIDERS: Just as we would allow space for someone to discover new aspects of the self during a coming-out process, recognize that the remission period is also a fruitful period for exploration. Identity-making is an ongoing conversation throughout the lifespan. Acknowledge that with every new gain made, there are losses, and parts of our selves and lives that we are saying goodbye to. Inquire about the feelings that might arise during this phase. In our practice, we draw upon Internal Family Systems (IFS) techniques to help people have productive dialogues with different parts of their psyche, and discover (without judgment) what attachment to a depressed identity might mean for them. FOR CLIENTS: This is a time to look deeper at the beliefs you hold about yourself, and question their accuracy. You may consider getting reflections from someone who can listen neutrally and without agendas for your direction. A great self-help resource for IFS-style work is Jay Earley’s Self-Therapy. If you are concerned about returning to the workforce, many communities offer peer and professional support for those returning to work after a period of unemployment. This type of support should encourage autonomy, allow exploration of ability and identity, and avoid perpetuating disempowering ideas about what those with mental health struggles are able to contribute.
Letting it Out: Emotional Layer
Classic psychoanalytic conceptualizations regarding depression as “anger turned inward” can help frame the irritability or distress that may surface unexpectedly when symptoms remit. We have supported clients who, once they were relieved of depressive burdens, were then able to confront and feel appropriate anger stemming from past trauma, abandonment, or loss. This can be an incredibly healing process if one is supported by providers who understand the emerging emotional responses in context, but can be difficult to navigate on one’s own. Dr. Bennett has also observed anger and/or grief reactions, with people suddenly feeling “angry at God for making them sick, or at the situation, or all the doctors that didn’t help them previously…[W]hen this is buried or held down in the depression, and then starts to come up and out following treatment, people need therapeutic support to address that.” Though we think about depression as “sadness” and recovery as “happiness,” the reality is often not as simple. Depression can present with a numbing or flattening of emotions, and recovery may mean regaining access to a wide range of different feeling-states. Learning to navigate these states is essential. FOR PROVIDERS: Set expectations for all involved that recovery may involve unearthing unanticipated feelings and memories. Trauma-informed treatment is essential when working with some of these frozen states. Encourage safe expression of affect in session, and offer psychoeducation around appropriate assertiveness, boundary-setting, and anger management techniques. Teaching and practicing grounding exercises, such as the ones in the Seeking Safety protocol, can help people learn to re-regulate themselves when distressed. Additionally, Dr. Bennett notes that some continue to have suicidal ideation, but a critical shift occurs in its source, moving from a ruminative, painful “voice in your head that tells you that you’re better off dead,” to a response of grief, loss, or anger. She emphasizes the critical importance of attuned listening by clinicians to differentiate these sources, rather than assuming that the treatment was unsuccessful. FOR CLIENTS: If strong feelings are emerging during your treatment, please talk to your providers and request specific support for these states. If you are feeling suicidal, please reach out for help from your support network, call a hotline, or access urgent/emergency care. We recommend you do not navigate this process on your own. If you would like to learn techniques to manage anger, you may find an Anger Management Workbook useful. Interpersonal process groups and assertiveness trainings may also be appropriate. We highly recommend the grounding techniques from the Seeking Safety protocol for those looking to manage the overwhelm that results from a history of trauma.
Digging Deeper: Unconscious Layer
Above all, we must make space for the deeply personal and idiosyncratic responses people have to both their symptoms and the remission of those symptoms. We can not assume that this process has identical meaning for everyone we see. Honoring the uniqueness of the self and its adaptations to life’s challenges is part of what gives this work its beauty and depth.
Furthermore, meaning is held both consciously and unconsciously. Deep structures of the self are laid down early in life, in the interactions between temperament and environment, and are rarely available for immediate reflection. It is the work of ongoing inquiry in the therapeutic relationship to bring these templates into awareness. For example, I have had the experience of working with people who were eventually able to articulate their depression as the only link remaining with a lost loved one; there is a way in which these symptoms served as tributes to the depth of their connection. Rapid removal of these mood states may then trigger responses of loss and abandonment. Other clients have also formulated depressions as a coping tool itself: as a protective layer that prevents one from having to engage fully in life, an escape from having to make difficult choices, or an avoidance of confronting painful realities. Another example is indicated by psychoanalyst Patrick Casement in On Learning from the Patient:
I have noticed, with a number of patients, that the experience of feeling better is sometimes treated by the patient as a signal for further anxiety. Some analysts might treat this as a fear of losing the “secondary gains from illness.” Others might regard it as “negative therapeutic reaction.” However, I believe there are some occasions when a patient is indicating that an unconscious link has been formed between an earlier experience of trauma and the prior sense of safety, as if that “safety” had been a warning signal for the pending disaster. Perhaps an unconscious set is formed in which feeling safe and the subsequent catastrophe are seen as forever linked (1992, p. 364).
FOR PROVIDERS: Although psychoanalytic and psychodynamic frameworks are fundamental to understanding the operation of these deep templates, dogmatic adherence to any one theoretical system forecloses the open exploration of individualized responses. Curious inquiry and a desire to hear about any potential meanings that may arise go much farther than the most brilliant textbook formulation. In essence: “what does this mean for YOU?” It can be helpful to explore the relationship someone has with their depression, and how that relationship has changed over time. Narrative therapy ideas and practices can assist people in re-writing the stories of their lives into a more integrated personal mythology. FOR CLIENTS: Part of recovery inherently involves an investigation into the myriad internal, interlocking factors that keep us stuck in old ways of being. Though your situation will be completely unique, you are in fine company with the rest of humanity, as we all struggle to move out of safety and towards growth. If you sense that there have been ways in which depression has protected you from confronting difficult aspects of life, please make sure you begin to discuss this with your providers. Together, you may begin to re-author the tale of your history in a way that conveys respect for your resilience, as well as hope for the future.
Spiritual Crisis: Transpersonal Layer
We know that higher-dose journeys with ketamine can produce psychedelic, dissociative states, facilitating a profound transpersonal or mystical peak experience and expanding one’s sense of self and understanding of existence. Dr. Bennett shares that for some, this “contact with the Divine” can be intense and overwhelming, especially if there has not been much preparation for this self-expansion, and if one has been “out of touch with God for 30 or 40 years.” She also notes that the changes one can be called to make in one’s life following a peak experience can be disorienting. Psychic and spiritual content–especially following the use of psychedelics–can be mistaken for symptoms of psychosis in our highly secular culture. It is extremely important to differentiate between an illness process, and an enhanced sensitivity to transpersonal material. When held in a supportive context, these experiences can be extraordinarily meaningful to people. FOR PROVIDERS: Have conversations during the preparation phase about your client’s existential concerns, spiritual encounters, and beliefs about the nature of reality or the universe. Familiarize yourself with the techniques and mindset necessary for supporting someone during a spiritual emergence or crisis process. Contemplate the differences between a dark night of the soul vs. depression. Work to bracket your own belief systems in order to allow for free expression. FOR CLIENTS: Again, adequate preparation for working with ketamine, especially at higher doses, is essential. Please choose your guides wisely, and work closely with them to help you navigate these experiences. If you are troubled by existential or spiritual concerns following a journey and could use a framework for integration, contact the Spiritual Emergence Network for more resources, including spiritual coaches and helpful reading material. You could work with a provider that specializes in psychedelic integration, or attend a community integration circle. You may also want to seek spiritual guidance within an organized or non-organized tradition (whether Western, Eastern, indigenous, or other). The above linked material on grounding can be helpful if you are experiencing a great deal of energetic activation following treatment.
In practice, these layers are obviously intertwined, and interventions at one level may affect all others, as we present as whole beings, bringing surface-to-depth concerns to every interaction. As a final note: please know that none of this is intended to frighten you away from obtaining ketamine treatment, but rather to assure you that should you have these experiences, you are not alone, and that there are many ways to move through this phase without necessitating a relapse or causing untoward effects in your life. Being prepared for the possibility of the therapeutic bends often helps people feel less surprised or destabilized, and collaborating with your support team on how to handle this, should it arise, is of paramount importance.
Thank you so much for reading this post, and we welcome your questions and comments!
About the Author
Dr. Jessica Katzman is a licensed Clinical Psychologist with 19 years of experience as a therapist, and was trained at California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in both traditional and transpersonal perspectives on healing. She is also certified as a Spiritual Emergence Coach, and approaches altered states of consciousness from a nonjudgmental, exploratory stance.
In her private practice, she specializes in integrating psychedelic experiences, supporting LGBTQQIAAP communities and gender-creative folks, addressing alcohol and substance use from a harm reduction perspective, body image issues, mood/anxiety disorders, social justice conversations, and navigating non-traditional relationships and sexuality.
After assisting a local ketamine infusion clinic with psychotherapy program development, she and our medical doctor joined forces to provide integrated Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy for Healing Realms. She is supported by information received at the KRIYA Conference, an advanced training in therapeutic ketamine, and ongoing consultation with her colleagues in the field.
Psychedelic science and research has been getting a lot of mainstream media attention over the years and for good reason. The preliminary research suggests that psychedelics may be extremely beneficial in helping to treat mental health disorders and as tools for studying consciousness. As this research begins to hit mainstream channels, some people are left wondering, “How can I find a psychedelic guide or sitter?”
We, at Psychedelics Today, have been receiving a lot of requests from people asking for instructions on how to obtain illegal drugs or for us to connect them with people offering underground services. While we understand that many people are suffering and seeking psychedelic treatments, sometimes out of desperation for healing, it is not easy to provide advice. Unfortunately, because of the legal system and the current laws in The United States, we are unable to help you on either of these fronts.
With that stated, we can provide some general advice for those looking for alternatives or legal options. Please take the time to conduct your own research as well.
First Things First
It is important to question what your intentions are and ask yourself why you may be seeking psychedelics either as therapy or as an experience.
Are you seeking a therapeutic experience because of a mental health issue?
Are you seeking a psychedelic experience for spiritual or religious reasons?
Are you just curious to know what the experience may feel like or what it is all about?
Are you looking for a recreational experience or to have fun?
Whatever your reasons or intentions are, it is important to continue to be self-reflective and question whether or not this is the right path to pursue. Also, be sure to spend time reflecting on the risk/benefit ratio.
While psychedelics are generally considered safe both psychologically and physiologically, there are some important considerations to take into account. These medicines and substances affect everyone differently based on the set and setting as well as a person’s own biology.
If you are seeking a psychedelic experience because you are suffering from a mental health issue or looking for psychological healing, it is important to evaluate whether or not it is the best option. The research is promising, but it also requires a lot of work, support, and follow-up treatment. Psychedelics are not always cure-alls or silver bullets.
If you are seeking this treatment out of desperation because you have read how positive or healing the experience can be, it is important to note that this change does not always happen right away. It may be important to find a psychedelic integration therapist to work with after or before. Also, ask yourself, “Have I tried other options?”
There are some powerful and effective somatic-based therapies that can be extremely cathartic and healing, such as breathwork, Somatic Experiencing, and others. A list of alternatives and somatic-based therapies can be found below in the “Experiential Therapies/Approaches” section. These therapies may be worth checking out if you have not looked into these therapies before and may also be a great first step to working with non-ordinary states of consciousness.
Exploring Legal Psychedelic Therapies and Other Alternatives
Experiential Therapies/Approaches
One thing that comes to mind is why are you looking for a guide? Is it to heal trauma or some sort of mental health issue? Are you looking for a spiritual experience or a way to reconnect with yourself? Depending on your intention, there may be other techniques and tools. It may not be as “sexy” as partaking in psychedelic work, but it is important to ask yourself, “What is my intention?”
There are some really powerful therapies and techniques that could potentially be helpful depending on the intention. In regard to therapy or addressing mental health issues, starting with a form of experiential therapy could be beneficial. You could look into some of these somatic approaches that could be helpful for dealing with trauma and other mental health issues before trying to seek underground work or travel outside of the country to work with psychedelic medicines.
Finding/working with a shamanic practitioner may be helpful for some as well. The Foundation for Shamanic Studies (founded by Michael Harner) is a good starting point for finding a practitioner to work with.
Legal Therapy Options
Ketamine-Assisted Therapy
Ketamine is an interesting substance and has recently been used to help treat depression. There are ketamine clinics throughout the United States that provide treatment for depression and other mental health issues. If you are interested in learning more about ketamine-assisted therapy, check out a few of our episodes covering the topic.
Cannabis-Assisted Psychotherapy
While many people do not think of cannabis as a psychedelic, some are exploring the therapeutic potential of cannabis in a legal and therapeutic setting. There are not many clinics operating with this protocol, so it may be hard to find, but as cannabis becomes legalized in more states for medicinal use and recreational use, this may become more accessible. Here are three resources that we know of so far for cannabis-assisted psychotherapy.
Did you know that when cannabis is used intentionally and skillfully, it is psychedelic and mimics other psychedelic medicines? Our participants commonly report experiences quite similar to MDMA, Psilocybin, Ayahuasca and even DMT. Cannabis is also safe, and legal to use in Colorado in this way. As the first organization to facilitate legal psychedelic cannabis experiences in Colorado, beginning in 2014, Medicinal Mindfulness has an incredible track record of keeping our clients safe and creating profound, life changing psychedelic experiences.
Conscious Cannabis Experiences are perfect for people who are curious about psychedelics but don’t know where to start. They’re also great for experienced practitioners seeking to deepen their psychedelic practice. As trauma informed practitioners, we also work with individuals who seek deep, transformational healing. As guides, we work with creative explorers of consciousness and complex problem-solvers, pushing the edges of what is possible.
Innate Path: Ketamine and Cannabis-Assisted Psychotherapy
Innate Path, located in Colorado, is exploring the potential of cannabis-assisted psychotherapy and ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. As mentioned on their site, “Cannabis can be a powerful catalyzer of therapeutic process.”
Innate Path combines somatic processing with ketamine or cannabis assisted work, which is a unique bottom-up approach to psychedelic-assisted therapy.
Sara Ouimette Psychotherapy, located in Oakland, CA, offers psychotherapy, psychedelic integration services, and cannabis-assisted psychotherapy. As stated on Sara’s page:
When used in a particular way, cannabis can actually amplify or exacerbate your internal experience. You can become more aware of tightness or soreness in your body. Emotions are heightened; senses are more acute. You may have access to thoughts, fears, and feelings that are normally out of reach. You may even enter a trance-like state and “journey.” In these ways, cannabis can help deepen your therapy process.
One way to find a psychedelic sitter/guide is to participate in clinical research. Check out the following for more information.
Clinicaltrials.gov: This is a database of clinical studies from around the country and around the world. You can use this database to search active clinical studies on psychedelics and to search for recruitment opportunities. Just perform a simple search for “psychedelic” or anything else that you may be looking for in the search box. You can filter your search option and only search studies that are currently open for “recruitment.”
This option is not always available to everyone because of the cost of travel, accommodations and other expenses. While we understand attending a retreat or center in another country is not accessible for most, it is one of the few legal options for participating in this work. We advise doing extensive research including interviewing the retreat staff/owner and past guests before committing to international travel.
One site that we recommend for finding retreats or reviews is the Psychedelic Experience. While this site is still growing, this may be a great starting point for research. Another popular site is AyaAdvisors.
Psilocybin Retreats
Traveling to another country to participate in this work is obviously not ideal, but the option exists. Mushrooms are legal in The Netherlands, Jamaica, and Brazil. Mexico has protection for traditional medicines, and mushrooms do fall in this category.
Ayahuasca Retreats
Ayahuasca has an interesting legal status in the USA, where many groups are offering sessions in various contexts and settings from religious ceremonies (Christian or shamanic), YMCA gyms, rural retreat centers, churches, etc. Ayahuasca is legal in some countries like Peru and Ecuador. Ecuador provides licenses for shamans/facilitators while no other countries currently do.
Ibogaine Retreats
These retreats exist in Canada, Mexico and other countries around the world including where the plant is from and traditionally used – Gabon. Some facilities are very clinical and others are very traditional. Please know that Iboga and Ibogaine have some serious dangers that need to be carefully considered. There are also environmental concerns around iboga. Please don’t over-use this plant and if you go forward with it, please try to give back to the local environmental movements in Gabon.
5-MeO-DMT Retreats
We currently don’t advise people go on these retreats. The pressure on toad populations is severe and our culture’s desire for the toad venom may push this toad towards an endangered status. After interviewing toad scientists (herpetologists) we have concluded that it is not ethical to be participating in this “market”. If you feel very compelled, the more ethical path (at this point in history) is to work with synthetic molecules.
Holotropic Breathwork and Transpersonal Breathwork
Breathwork is a term used to describe breathing techniques and systems that foster self-discovery, healing, and sometimes deeply emotional and physical cathartic releases. If you have been following Psychedelics Today, you have most likely heard us talk about this technique on the show. Breathwork is actually a legal and safe way to access a non-ordinary state of consciousness. There are various schools of breathwork, but the Breathwork technique that we are most familiar with is in the lineage of Holotropic Breathwork and Transpersonal Breathwork. Holotropic Breathwork was created by Stanislav Grof, who was a pioneer in psychedelic research in the early years, and his wife Christina Grof. Breathwork can sometimes be on par with some psychedelic-like experiences.
It may not sound as sexy as psychedelic work, but do not be fooled, it can foster powerful shifts in consciousness. We have both had tremendously powerful healing experiences using Holotropic Breathwork, which plays a huge part in why we talk about it so regularly.
Conscious Breathwork and Conscious Cannabis | Medicinal Mindfulness
Medicinal Mindfulness is a Colorado-based organization that provides services in psychedelic integration, breathwork, and conscious cannabis work. Medicinal Mindfulness is a consciousness community/membership organization and education program that supports individuals and groups who choose to use cannabis and psychedelics with intention and skill. Through our Community Breathwork and Conscious Cannabis Events, we facilitate legal, accessible, safe and sacred psychedelic journey experiences that integrate the four primary paradigms of intentional medicine use: Creative, Scientific, Psychological & Spiritual. Our approach is Transpersonally aligned and somatically oriented.
You can learn more about the work at Medicinal Mindfulness on this episode of Psychedelics Today with the founder, Daniel McQueen.
Conclusion and Legal Notice
Finding an underground therapist to work with is extremely difficult because unfortunately, many of these substances are still illegal. This is why we often refer people to check out techniques like Holotropic Breathwork or to find a legal way to pursue this type of work. Remember, many underground guides are putting their professional careers and lives on the line providing psychedelic work.
We advise you to learn as much as you can before breaking any law as the consequences can be severe. If there are any questions that you think are serious enough to cause harm to yourself or others, please contact a legal professional before acting.
Psychedelics Today, LLC and its affiliates can not be held liable for any action you take. We are not doctors and therefore, cannot provide any medical advice. Please be responsible and seek professional attention when necessary.
Best of luck out there, and expect us to share as much as possible when the laws change.
As psychedelic research re-emerges from its dark ages, the world is beginning to learn about their healing potential for various psychological disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and near-death anxiety due to terminal illness. The research is fascinating, exciting, and seems to be catching a lot more mainstream attention. The preliminary research shows that psychedelics may be promising tools for mental health and could be the future of medicine. So the question is, how does one get involved in this work?
Joe and Kyle had the opportunity to talk with Ingmar Gorman, Ph.D.about how people can get involved in psychedelic research or in the field of psychedelics in general. Ingmar shared with us some really great information and we would like to recap some highlights. Some of the information provided is a mix between our own thoughts and what Ingmar mentioned.
Important Disclaimer: This is a fairly new field, so it is important to remember that the future of this work is not set-in-stone. Psychedelics are still illegal within the United States and many other countries around the world. While we remain optimistic for the future of psychedelic research, the landscape can shift at any moment. There is still a lot of work to be done!
First Thing First:
Ask yourself, “Why am I interested in entering into the field of psychedelic research?”
Do you want to get your foot in the door because you had an experience that changed your life or inspired you in some way? Did you have a healing experience that you want to share with others?
Do you want to give back to the community in some way by furthering scientific research or inquiry? If so, what is your expertise and area of interest?
What role can you play later on? Are there areas or specialties that need attention or growth?
Understanding and asking yourself, “Why do I want to do this? What is my motive?”
Personal or transformational experiences may not always be the best option for pursuing an active career in researching psychedelics. Psychedelic experiences can be healing, transformative, and magical, but this does not mean you have to enter into the field of science or research. There may be other options that might suit your interests better. Obtaining a professional degree can be a well-worth investment with your time and money if that is surely a path that you wish to pursue. It is important to think outside of the box.
Also, an important thing to note here is that psychedelics are still illegal. While the research and science is happening, obtaining a research position is often difficult considering the limited amount of research. This is not to discourage any of you, but just saying it will require a lot of work! While MAPS is projecting that MDMA will be legal for psychotherapy by 2021, it is still uncertain what the laws and regulations will be. We are hopeful that the future looks bright for psychedelic careers, but it is also important to err on the side of caution as well.
General Information:
Along with asking the questions above, here is some general information or advice for individuals who not wish to pursue a traditional degree. We are all hardwired differently and earning a professional degree may not be in everyone’s best interest.
Do Your Research: It is important to be well-read with the research and science behind psychedelics. If you do not have access to a journal database, check out Google Scholar or check out Academia.edu MAPS and Erowid have some great free sources from research papers to free ebooks.
Go to Conferences and Events: As in any field, it is important to try and make it to a conference or an event. The reality of our world today is that most people get opportunities because they network and seek out the opportunities. Conferences are great ways to network, promote your research or interests, and find the “others.” This is a relatively small and intimate field, and many people are approachable. Chances are you will be exposed to the most up-to-date research, learn about multidisciplinary approaches, and probably meet a lot of great people. You do not have to be a researcher or student to attend, there is definitely a place for everyone at conferences. Here are a few popular events/conferences:
The Non-Traditional Approach: There are other ways to get involved that do not require the investment your time and money for a professional degree. Are you a visual artist? Do you produce music? An interviewer? Are you a product inventor? For example, Joe mentioned during the podcast that he did not feel the need to go on to pursue a mental health degree because he does not feel like being a therapist is the thing that he wants to do right now. Instead, Joe and I are creating this podcast as a resource for the community. The bottom line, is there anything that you can contribute or create for the field? Many researchers and scientists are not artists or graphic designers and the field needs art to help convey the visual experience. Look at Alex and Allison Grey or Android Jones for example.
Develop an Expertise: Whether you are taking a traditional or non-traditional approach, I think it is safe to say that developing an expertise is a smart approach. Develop an expertise that can translate well to psychedelic research. Ask yourself, “how can I help or what can I contribute?”
Apply Your Skills: Again, think about how you can develop an expertise and think about how your skills can be applied to the field. Are you an accountant or into finances? Maybe if Rick Doblin’s dream of psychedelic treatment centers become real in the future, we are going to need lots of people to manage everything.
Volunteer: It does not hurt to reach out and develop a relationship with the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), Erowid, Zendo Project, DanceSafe, Drug Policy Alliance, or any other psychedelic organization. These organizations might be looking for a helping hand in a project or event. Volunteering can help you become connected with an organization, develop a relationship, and maybe help you land a job somewhere! Worst case scenario, you meet some awesome people.
Festival Harm Reduction Services: There are various organizations that provide harm reduction services at festivals. This may be a great way to get experience in the field. Check out the Zendo Project, DanceSafe, or Kosmicare for potential future opportunities.
Create a Psychedelic Club or Society: Local psychedelic clubs and societies are popping up all over the place. You can create your own too! You can check out our guide Tips on Creating Your Own Psychedelic Group
Psychedelic Community: Check out this new site, Psychedelic.Community to connect with others.
Stay Up-To-Date: Get the latest psychedelic news, articles, and podcasts by visiting these websites:
There are numerous ways to get involved in research projects. From self-report studies to actual participation, there are ways to get involved and possibly become a study participant. Here is a list of a few different options.
Clinicaltrials.gov: This is a database of clinical studies from around the country and around the world. You can use this database to search active clinical studies on psychedelics and to search for recruitment opportunities. Just perform a simple search for “psychedelic” or anything else that you may be looking for in the search box. You can filter your search option and only search studies that are currently open for “recruitment.”
Medicinal Mindfulness and DMTx:: Are you interested in participating in an extended-state DMT research project? Medicinal Mindfulness is currently in the process of putting a study together. Learn more at DMTx.org or sign up for the DMTx Psychonaut Training
If you are thinking about trying to get your foot in the door with psychedelic research, it is important to analyze which route you wish to take. There are many paths to choose from and you do not need always need to pursue a degree in science.
Are you currently or thinking about pursuing your Bachelor’s degree?
What are your interests? Are you interested in psychology or psychiatry? Neuroscience or neuropsychology? Chemistry? Biology? History or anthropology? Do you want to do therapy at some point? Figure out what interests you.
It is recommended if you want to do therapy or conduct scientific research to earn a degree in science and psychology.
Find a niche or a specialty: If you’re off to an early start, figure out what you may want to focus on. If you’re a psychology student, maybe focus on trauma or addiction. Current psychedelic research is mostly focused on if these substances can be beneficial for certain psychiatric or mental disorders. The research funds are not really there for “how” these substances work, but that might not be the case down the line in a few years. The field is shifting rapidly.
Go to conferences: Just in case you missed this in the last section, remember to try and attend a conference or event!
Find A School: It is suggested that if you would like to do rigorous academic/scientific research it might be important to seek out applying to a traditional school. There are schools out there doing research and it might not hurt to look into their programs. MAPS has made a list of schools that might make psychedelic research easier.
Create a Club: You can always try to create a drug advocacy/policy club at your university. If you are unsure how to go about doing so, you could always check out the Students for Sensible Drug Policy and create a local chapter at your university or school.
Training and Education: There are plenty of training opportunities that may be helpful when thinking about adding new skills to your toolbox. Here are some examples of trainings that could be beneficial or helpful.
If you just had just completed your undergraduate degree, are currently a graduate student, or trying to figure out what is next, here is some advice.
Master’s Degree or Ph.D.: Many people get caught up on this decision/topic. Some people believe that pursuing a clinical psychology PhD or PsyD is the best option if they want to get their foot in the door with psychedelic psychotherapy. Earning a Ph.D. or PsyD or even a medical degree such as a Psychiatry is a large investment in both your time and money. This route may not be the best option for everyone and it is important to know what you are interested in or what skills you are strong in. Maybe science and math is not your strong point, so pursuing a clinical psychology degree to become a clinical psychologist may not suit you. Some people just want to be able to conduct psychotherapy and there are plenty of ways to do so, such as getting a master’s degree in clinical mental health or social work. Weigh your options and think about what fits you the best.
Specialty and Niche: Like the bachelor’s advice, what is your specialty or expertise? What role can you play later on? The field of psychedelic research is looking for individuals with specialties. Look into the ways how to develop an expertise in the field. If your interest is in trauma, research how to develop a focus in body psychotherapy for trauma disorders. Focus on alternative treatments for addiction.
Passion and Drive: Since earning a professional degree or a doctorate degree is both an investment of time and money, you are going to need to be passionate about what you are studying. There are many people who start programs and realize that it is not for them. Know that if you want to pursue a professional career in psychedelics, you’re in it for the long haul!
Is There Therapeutic Benefit: If you are interested in research Ingmar mentioned that the funding may not be there for questions like, “how do these substances work?” or “how do they heal?” Even though the Imperial College of London has been doing amazing “how” research (how LSD, psilocybin, and MDMA affect the brain) there is not much of that type of research going on within the United States. The MDMA-assisted psychotherapy study wanted to know not how MDMA cures or helps PTSD, but rather, does MDMA-assisted psychotherapy help with PTSD?
Find a Mentor or Professor: It does not hurt to research mentors or professors in the field to see where they are teaching. Katherine Maclean mentioned in our latest interview that she was interested in psychedelic research and knew that Johns Hopkins was researching psilocybin. Look for post-doctorate fellowships, internships, etc. Attend a school that is doing the research
Find Grants for Research: If you are enrolled in a program and can find a faculty member that supports your psychedelic mission, try to find grants or scholarship money to support your research program. The Source Research Foundation is a new organization that is helping to provide grant money to students who want to conduct psychedelic research.
Training and Education: As mentioned in the “For Students” section above, there are various training/education opportunities that will help you grow and develop new skills. Please view the list above for ideas.
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This is the third article in a series on psychedelic chemistry, and the final article focusing on the tryptamine class. In the previous article we learned that though DMT and 5-MeO-DMT lack oral activity, chemistry wizards are able to change that. By making one of a variety of simple alterations to their structure they may be changed into analogs (“research chemicals”, or RCs), each possessing their own unique subset of characteristics including oral activity. That’s because the chemists changed the three-dimensional configuration of the molecules in such a way that the lone pair of electrons situated on the amine’s nitrogen (Figure 1) became shielded, thereby preventing their degradation by MAO. To recap, if one consumes monoamines (such as certain tryptamines) orally, MAO transforms them in the gut and by the time they enter the bloodstream they are no longer psychoactive – Figure 2.
Figure 1. Nitrogen has 7 electrons in total, and 5 valence electrons. It has one electron in each of the three 2p orbitals, which allows it to make three bonds (green), and two electrons in the 2s orbital which exists as a lone electron pair (blue).
Figure 2. After 5-MeO-DMT is consumed orally (1) it enters the gut (2) and is transformed by MAO-A (3). MAO-A uses oxygen to convert the amine into a carboxylic acid (4). This converts 5-MeO-DMT into the nonpsychoactive 5-MIAA (5-methoxyindole-3-acetic acid), the species which enters the circulatory system (5)
This article is going to unpack a study (Figure 3) that showed, by comparing the structures of the naturally-occurring molecules psilocin and bufotenin why the former is orally active while the latter is not. This is another pioneering study from the lab of Dr. David Nichols, who is, along with Albert Hoffman and Sasha Shulgin, in my estimation one of the three true giants of psychedelic chemistry. Its his work and excellent lectures from ESPD50, Psychedelic Science (2013 and 2017), and Breaking Convention that restoked my appreciation for chemistry and inspired me to not only deepened my knowledge, but also to start this series of articles. The outpourings from his majestic mind has fundamentally shaped the topics and content of these articles… Shout out Big D, whut-whut!
Figure 3
The structure and atomic composition of a chemical are obviously critical to our understanding, and the progression of, chemistry and pharmacology. The problem with that is that molecules are small – really small. Even with today’s stupefying repertoire of advanced scientific analytical instruments, there is still no practical way for us to observe their structure directly. So instead we have devised sophisticated methods in which to do so indirectly. One of these methods is called Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Spectroscopy, which uses information about the spin of atomic nuclei to determine what a compound’s structure looks like.
In 1980 the team at Purdue University used NMR spectroscopy to investigate how the three-dimensional structures of bufotenin and psilocybin differ from one another. Even though these two compounds are constitutional isomers (Box 1; Figure 4), there is a critical difference in their activity – psilocin is orally active, whereas bufotenin is not. This tiny change, moving the hydroxyl group from position 5 to 4 made this critical difference in the way they are absorbed by a human body. Though 2D-representations of the respective molecules are too low resolution to allude to the reason for the disparity, the researchers (correctly) suspected that by looking at their 3D-structures they would be able to understand why one molecule could resist deamination by MAO, while the other could not.
Figure 4. Bufotenin and psilocin are constitutional isomers, the only difference in their structure is the position of the hydroxyl group (-OH).
NMR spectroscopy revealed that the ethyl sidechain of bufotenin is able to rotate freely, meaning it can spin around on its own axis (Figure 5). That is however not the case for psilocin, something locks it in place, preventing it from rotating freely. The ethyl sidechains of the molecules are identical, which means that whatever is preventing the free rotation of psilocin’s ethyl sidechain is related to the hydroxyl group being situated at position 4, and not 5. To find out exactly what that was, the researchers used specialized software called LAOCN3. Before we explore what they found it would be useful to our interpretation of the results if we brushed up on a couple of elementary concepts in chemistry.
Figure 5
There are two basic types of bonds that atoms can form with one another. The first, called an ionic bond, forms when atoms exchange electrons with one another. This happens if the encountering atoms possess large differences in their respective affinities for electrons (called electronegativity), one atom really wants to lose an electron, while the other really wants to gain it (Figure 6). So an electron (or electrons) are exchanged, and because it is negatively charged the transfer changes the charge of the each atom. The atom that gains the electron gains a negative charge and thus becomes negative, while the atom that loses the electron loses a negative charge and thus becomes positive. And as the old adage goes, opposites attract – the oppositely-charged atoms come together and form a stable bond with one another.
Figure 6. Ionic bonds.
The other type of bond that can unite atoms is a covalent bond. This happens when atoms with similar affinity for electrons encounter one another, neither really wants to lose/gain an electron so they reach a compromise – they share their electrons among each other. Both atoms pretend that the electron that it shares, as well as the electron shared by the other atom, belongs to it (Figure 7). It’s this overlap of shared electrons that connects the atoms together into a single molecule.
Figure 7. Covalent bond.
Because there are no electrons that are transferred in the covalent bond the atoms don’t assume a charge as was the case with ionic bonds. However, that’s only partially true… In certain cases, the atoms that take part in a covalent bond do have some difference in their affinity – not enough for them to exchange electrons and form an ionic bond, but enough so that when they form a covalent bond and share electrons those shared electrons are closer to one atom than the other. This is known as a polar covalent bond. The atom to which the shared electrons are in closer proximity has a higher electronegativity and thus becomes partially negative (δ-). Conversely, the atoms with lower electronegativity are further from the shared electrons and are partially positive (δ+). Because of this asymmetrical charge, polar molecules are able to form weak bonds with other polar molecules, or with compounds that have a net charge. Now that we’ve covered some basic concepts let’s get back to the results of the study and apply what we’ve learned by taking a closer look at psilocin (Figure 8).
Figure 8. In the red area is a hydroxyl group (Figure 9), and in the blue area is a tertiary amine (Figure 10).
Figure 9. The electronegativity of hydrogen (white) is 2.1, while that of the oxygen (red) is 3.5. This difference of 1.4 in their electronegativity is not enough to form an ionic bond, but does lead to partial charges – oxygen has a higher affinity for electrons meaning the electrons are closer to it and assumes a partially negative charge (δ-), while hydrogen assumes a partially positive charge (δ+).
Figure 10. The tertiary amine group consists of a nitrogen (blue) with an electronegativity of 3.0, connected to three carbons (grey) each with an electronegativity of 2.5. Nitrogen has a higher affinity for electrons and pulls the electrons closer to it, leading to a partial negative charge (δ-), while the carbons have partial positive charges (δ+).
Taken together: psilocin has hydroxyl group at position 4 with a partially negative oxygen and a partially positive hydrogen, and an amine with a nitrogen that is partially negative and carbons that are partially positive. Because of these partial charges something interesting happens – the partially positive hydrogen from the hydroxyl group and the partially negative nitrogen from the amine attract one another (Figure 11).
Figure 11
The hydrogen and nitrogen form a special type of bond with one another known as hydrogen bond (Box 2) which pulls the two atoms closer to one another, changing the shape of the molecule – Figures 12 and 13.
Figure 12. The partial positive charge on the hydrogen and partial positive charge on the nitrogen (left) are attracted to one another and form a hydrogen bond which pulls the atoms closer to each other, changing the molecule’s shape (right).
Figure 13. The hydrogen of the hydroxyl-group is bent backwards into a gauche conformation while the ethyl tail bends towards the indole ring to further shorten the distance between them.
It’s this hydrogen bond that locks the ethyl sidechain into place by forming a closed loop (Figure 14), preventing it from rotating freely. In bufotenin the ethyl sidechain can rotate freely because no such hydrogen bond exists. Because the hydroxyl-group is at position 5 and not 4, the partially charged molecules are too far away from one another to form the hydrogen bond, change the shape of the molecule, and lock the ethyl sidechain into place.
Figure 14
But what has any of this to do with the difference in oral activity between the two molecules? Turns out, everything. It’s this hydrogen bond and closed loop formation in psilocin which shields the lone pair of electrons situated on the nitrogen. Because MAO cannot access the electrons it cannot deaminate the molecule – this is why it can pass through the gastrointestinal system unchanged.
But there’s more. The hydrogen bond and resulting closed loop formation also lead to several other important changes in the property of the molecule which further accentuates its efficacy and potency as an orally-active psychedelic tryptamine. After generating 3D-models of the respective molecules, the researchers went on to compare their pKa (Box 3) and Log P (Box 4) values..
When they measured the pKa and the Log P for both psilocin and bufotenin they found the following:
The pKa for Bufotenin is 9.67, meaning that at that specific pH-value equal amounts of the molecule will be present in both the ionized (water soluble) and protonated forms (lipid soluble). When the molecule is in the blood, which has a pH of about 7.4, almost all of it (99.5%) is in the ionized form. In contrast, psilocin has a pKa of 8.47, closer to the pH of blood. So for psilocin, only about 52% is in the ionized form. That means that in the blood, 48% of psilocin will be in its unionized form versus only about 0.5% when it comes to bufotenin. As it is only the unionized form of the drug that can cross cell-membranes, this has profound implications for the potency of these two drugs – psilocin is not only able to better withstand degradation by MAO, but once it is in the blood there is also much more of it available in a form that can cross cellular membranes and thus can reach the target receptors and exert an effect.
The difference in pKa is also related to the shielding of the electron lone pair by the hydrogen bond. As we have learned, amines possess a nitrogen with a lone pair of electrons. These free electrons, which carry a negative charge, are all too happy to snap up positively-charged protons (H+) from a solution they are in. This is, according to the Bronsted-Lowry acid-base theory, the very definition of a base – something that accepts protons. When it comes to psilocin the lone pair of electrons are shielded and are thus much less likely to accept protons. As a consequence, psilocin is less basic that is bufotenin.
The researchers also detected a difference in the Log P values – 1.19 for bufotenin, and 1.45 for psilocin. In the Log P scale a negative value indicates a compound which is hydrophilic, whereas a positive value indicates one that is lipophilic. Both these compounds are thus lipophilic, and psilocin, with the higher value, is more lipophilic. For drugs, in general, it is preferable for them to be lipophilic so as to be able to cross cell membranes, but not too lipophilic because then they immediately migrate to, and are stored in, the body fat. Research indicates that a Log P value of about 3.0 is the “sweet spot”, so psilocin is closer to this number, again indicating that its properties are more favourable once it enters the body.
The researchers started with a simple question: how is it that two isomeric compounds with such a small difference have such widely different properties when they are consumed orally? With NMR Spectroscopy we learned that it all has to do with the fact that because the hydroxyl group of psilocin is a little bit closer to the amine it was able to form a hydrogen bond between the two groups. This hydrogen bond shields the electron lone pair from deamination by MAO, which means that, unlike bufotenin, psilocin is orally active. The hydrogen bond also decreases the molecule’s proton-accepting capacity thereby decreasing its pKa value which means that at blood pH there is more of psilocin in the non-ionized (lipid soluble) form which is able to cross cell membranes and thus enter the central nervous system (CNS). Finally, we saw that it also affected the Log P value, and that psilocin is a more lipophilic compound, closer to an ideal value for drugs to effectively enter and bind to the appropriate receptors in the CNS.
I hope you enjoyed this journey, in the next article we will start our exploration of the phenethylamine class.
Faan Rossouw was born and raised in Cape Town (South Africa) and currently resides in Montreal (Canada). He holds a MSc in Plant Science, and is the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Indeeva Biomedical, a medical cannabis company that focuses on producing condition-specific cannabinoid therapeutics. Faan possesses theoretical expertise and practical experience in biological production systems, natural and pharmaceutical product development, phytochemistry, and psychopharmacology. Though his background is rooted in science he is most passionate about, and thrives in, the intersection of science, the humanities, and commerce. He is interested in how we can leverage the properties of the new global economy to develop superior and sustainable therapeutic solutions. In his free time he loves to practice Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, spend time in nature with his partner Robyn, or kick back in his lazy boy with a book, a cup of pu-erh tea and his cat Luna.
This is the second article in a series on psychedelic chemistry. In the previous article, I introduced the tryptamine class of psychedelics, and we discussed five well-known examples: DMT, 5-MeO-DMT, bufotenine, psilocybin, and psilocin. While the latter two, primary psychedelic constituents of Psilocybe mushrooms (Figure 1), are orally active, neither DMT, 5-MeO-DMT, nor bufotenine are. In this article we will explore two types of alterations that synthetic chemists can make to those molecules to bestow oral activity upon them. These alterations lead to the psychedelic tryptamine analogs (“research chemicals”): AMT (Indopan), MiPT, DiPT, 5-MeO-aMT (Alpha-O), 5-MeO-MiPT (Moxy), and 5-MeO-DiPT (Foxy Methoxy).
Figure 1
Monoamine Oxidase
L-monoamine oxidase (MAO) is a family of enzymes that catalyze the oxidation of monoamines. Monoamines contain a single amine connected to an aromatic ring via a 2-carbon chain, and include neurotransmitters such as serotonin and norepinephrine, as well tryptamines (Figure 2) such as DMT, 5-MeO-DMT, and bufotenin. The reason therefore that these compounds are not active after being consuming orally is because once they enter one’s gut they are inactivated by MAO.
Figure 2
If you want to experience the psychedelic effects of these compounds there are two basic strategies. The first is to use a route of administration that bypasses the gut. Smoking and vaporizing are by far the most common ways to achieve this, but are also the most intense (rapid onset) and shortest-lasting methods. Accordingly, some people favour other non-oral routes such as sublingual (under the tongue), insufflation (in the nasal passage), and rectal administration. Each of these administration routes has its own set of unique pharmacokinetic properties that may be favoured by certain people depending on the context and/or intention. Different strokes for different folks.
But that applies equally to oral delivery, which is unsurpassed in terms of its simplicity (swallow and then you’re done), ease (no thumbing around the butthole or snorting fiery salts up your schnoz), and duration. Except for transdermal delivery, which is technologically complex and has severe restrictions on what can be administered, oral delivery is the longest lasting. Hence its popularity for journeyers that wish to go in deep. So even with a number of non-oral administration routes available, there is still good reason to utilize the oral route.
How to do so if we all walk around with an enzyme in our belly that will deactivate the psychedelic? Simple – consume another compound, called a monoamine oxidase inhibitor (MAOI), that will deactivate that enzyme. Ayahuasca is a prime example of this, though there are a number idiosyncratic formulas of the brew, in essence, it is based on two core ingredients (Figure 3). One contains DMT, the most common being chacruna (Psychotria viridis), and the other contains the MAOI, which is always the ayahuasca vine (Banisteriopsis caapi).
Figure 3. A pot filled with chacruna leaves containing DMT, as well woody material from the ayahuasca vine containing harmine, tetrahydroharmine, and harmaline (MAOI’s). The former provides the visionary punch, the latter ensures that DMT is not broken down in the gut and is able to enter the blood plasma unchanged.
Synthetic chemists love to ask “what if” questions. Like “what if” I make this simple change to the molecular nature of the compound, how does that then affect its properties? These type of questions are explored not only in the name of scientific curiosity, but also because studying how simple changes affect the properties of compounds informs us about its structure-activity relationship, as well provide intimations of what the target receptor looks and behaves like. To the specific question of whether or not a simple alteration to DMT/5-MeO-DMT can actuate oral activity chemists have thus far provided two answers – α-methylation (Figure 4) and N-alkylation (Figure 6).
α-Methylation
Figure 4
As we covered previously, DMT is a tryptamine molecule with two methyls at the N-position. So what would happen if, instead of adding two methyls to the N-position of the tryptamine, we added a single methyl to the alpha-position? This yields AMT (alpha-methyltryptamine; Figure 5), a molecule originally developed in the ‘60s by a Michigan-based pharmaceutical company called Upjohn and which was prescribed in the USSR as an antidepressant. It is at once psychedelic, entactogenic (like MDA/MDMA), and a stimulant with an oral dose typically lasting upwards of 12 hours.
Figure 5
The same goes for 5-MeO-tryptamine (mexamine) – if instead of adding two methyls to the N-position to form 5-MeO-DMT we add a single methyl to the alpha-position, we get 5-MeO-AMT – 5-methoxy-alpha-methyltryptamine (Figure 5). This orally-active and potent psychedelic, commonly known as ‘Alpha-O’, is sometimes peddled as faux-LSD. This is problematic as, unlike LSD with no known lethal toxicity, 5-MeO-AMT has lead to deaths at fairly low doses. It’s not a War on Drugs, it’s a War on People.
With both AMT and 5-MeO-AMT there is a chiral centre at the alpha-position. Attaching a single methyl to the alpha position potentially yields either an S- or R-configuration. Both are psychoactive, both orally active, but work by Dr. David Nichols lab has found that the S-enantiomer is more potent.
N-Alkylation
Figure 6
With N-alkylation we manipulate DMT and 5-MeO-DMT as the departure point to realize oral activity. Both these molecules possess two methyls on the amine nitrogen. Work again by Dr. Nichols’ lab has found that if you replace one, or both, these methyls with isopropyl, the molecule becomes orally active (Figure 7).
Figure 7
In the case of DMT, if a single methyl is replaced by an isopropyl it results in MiPT (N-methyl-N-isopropyltryptamine), an obscure psychedelic with indistinct effects first introduced to the world in TiHKAL. In the case of 5-MeO-DMT, the same single substitution results in 5-MeO-MiPT (5-methoxy-N-methyl-N-isopropyltryptamine). Commonly known as “Moxy”, it is an extremely potent (4 to 6 mg p.o.) psychedelic with stimulating properties.
As my articles on chemistry are intended for the general reader, I just want to take a brief moment here to remind you that the reason I always write out the substitutive name of each compound is because it describes the actual molecule. If we know the substitutive name, we can draw the molecule, and vice-versa. Let’s briefly review this by using Moxy as an example (Figure 8), but please feel free to skip over to the next paragraph if this is old news for you by now. Starting from back we have tryptamine, so our “foundational” structure is an indole ring with an ethylchain at 3 which connects to an amine group (blue). Then we start from the front – at position 5 we have a methoxygroup (green), at N1 we have a methyl (fuschia), and then at N2 we have an isopropyl (red).
Figure 8
If both methyls are substituted by isopropyl, in the case of DMT the result is DiPT (N,N-diisopropyltryptamine), another bizarre creation of Sasha that primarily produces audial distortions. With 5-MeO-DMT the double substitution leads to 5-MeO-DiPT (5-methoxy-N,N-diisopropyltryptamine) which likely has the most endearing street name of any psychedelic – “foxy methoxy”. Note that in both cases, though making the additional isopropyl substitution retains oral activity, it decreases potency.
What’s Going On Here?
So why is it that in both the case of DMT and 5-MeO-DMT replacing a methyl with a slightly larger and more complex compound makes it impervious to deamination by MAO thereby giving it oral activity? To give us a clue we need to look at the nitrogen in the amine group – Figure 9. In order for MAO to deaminate a molecule, it needs to access the lone electron pair of electrons (blue) on the nitrogen. A change in the molecule, such as substituting functional groups, changes its 3D-conformation. In the case of substituting a methyl with an isopropyl group on the amine, it changes the molecule’s 3D shape in such a way that shields the lone pair of electrons from MAO, thus giving it oral activity.
Figure 9. Nitrogen has 7 electrons in total, and 5 valence electrons. It has one electron in each of the three 2p orbitals, which allow it to make three bonds (green), and two electrons in the 2s orbital which exists as a lone electron pair (blue).
How do we know this is the case that it’s the molecule’s 3D shape that protects the lone pair from attack by the MAO and thus allows it to retain oral activity? Earlier in this article, I said that MAO breaks down tryptamines. We then spoke about DMT and 5-MeO-DMT, but what about psilocybin and psilocin? They are naturally-occurring tryptamines, yet they are also orally active – how so? Pioneering work by Dr. David Nichols in the ‘80s using NMR spectroscopy showed that the fact that psilocin has a substitution at position 4 and not 5 (as with DMT/5-MeO-DMT) causes a critical change in the molecule’s 3D structure which ensures the compound is orally active. This study and all the profound implications for psychedelic chemistry gleamed from it will be the topic of our next article.
Afterword:
If it is your intention to consume DMT, and especially 5-MeO-DMT, orally by combining it with an MAOI please do your homework. And once you’ve done your calculations, double-check them. Terence McKenna used to quip that the only real danger with DMT is “death by astonishment”. Though that is the case for smoking it, overdoing orally-administered DMT/5-MeO-DMT can lead to serotonin shock, convulsions, and in some cases, death. The Psychedelic Ship is leaving the harbour, please don’t drop any cannonballs on the deck.
About the Author
Faan Rossouw was born and raised in Cape Town (South Africa) and currently resides in Montreal (Canada). He holds a MSc in Plant Science, and is the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Indeeva Biomedical, a medical cannabis company that focuses on producing condition-specific cannabinoid therapeutics. Faan possesses theoretical expertise and practical experience in biological production systems, natural and pharmaceutical product development, phytochemistry, and psychopharmacology. Though his background is rooted in science he is most passionate about, and thrives in, the intersection of science, the humanities, and commerce. He is interested in how we can leverage the properties of the new global economy to develop superior and sustainable therapeutic solutions. In his free time he loves to practice Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, spend time in nature with his partner Robyn, or kick back in his lazy boy with a book, a cup of pu-erh tea and his cat Luna.
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Humphry Osmond worked a little mental hospital up in Saskatchewan and began experimenting with LSD [and mescaline]. Aldous Huxley somehow learned of this work and said, “If you’re in LA, come by and see me.” Osmond didn’t think it would ever happen, but in fact, there was a bureaucratic problem at the hospital. They needed to reorganize and move Osmond up and get rid of the guy that was above him, and so while they were doing that, they sent Osmond off to an APA convention in LA – where he got in touch with Huxley. They went to a few sessions of the APA convention and were bored to tears. So they adjourned back to Huxley’s place and Osmond turned him on. It took about 90 minutes before it really hit him and then it blew his mind. Huxley was the author of Brave New World and Ape and Essence. Huxley was one of the major intellectuals in the 20th century and an enormously successful author, half blind, but intensely intellectual. He was part of a circle of people that stretches back really to Havelock Ellis and Hermann Hesse [Who wrote Siddhartha and 
The John Hopkins research fell apart when LSD became criminalized. Michael Murphy and Stan fortuitously hooked up and Murphy invited Stan to Esalen as scholar-in-residence. After a few years Stan needed to produce an income for Esalen, so he put together the technique called, “Holotropic Breathwork.” When I was telling Stan for the second time, the reason I decided on holotropic breathwork training was that I had an experience with holotropic breathwork that was identical with the most powerful experiences I’ve ever had with LSD. Stan said, “That’s what convinced me too.” It’s not like taking a pill and you don’t have any choice, ’cause you gotta work at it, that’s why it’s called breath work – but you can get to the same place.
Figure 3
Figure 5
Figure 6. Ionic bonds.
Figure 7. Covalent bond. 
Figure 14
When they measured the pKa and the Log P for both psilocin and bufotenin they found the following:
Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 4
Figure 5
Figure 6
Figure 7
Figure 8
