Like comic John Oliver, I’m worried that America will make a righteous hash out of therapeutic psychedelics instead of providing the open-minded regulations that we'll need if we’re to bring these transformational “medicines” to market.
It would be a tragic shame, because these natural- and lab-produced hallucinogens have been successfully delivering exciting new ways to reduce the impacts of trauma-produced injuries (like PTSD), stubborn addictions, paralyzing phobias and chronic depression, while at the same time opening opportunities for the general public “to find measures of transcendence in an increasingly confounding world.”
That’s a lot of potential healing.
But we’ll deny these therapeutic opportunities to the millions who need them if we (in the US, at least) respond to their attendant risks with moralistic condemnations, on the one hand, or the dithering that paralyzes our ability to protect ourselves with sound regulations, on the other.
During the Flower Power years of the late 60’s and early 70’s, instead of embracing these transformational “medicinals,” we locked them up with Silent-Majority intolerance and laws that aimed to limit harmful “counter-culture” influences, effectively denying these opportunities to subsequent generations for five more decades. Or until quite recently, after waves of American warriors returned from Iraq and Afghanistan with PTSD or chronic depression and enterprising doctors produced startling occasions for healing with psychedelics like MDMA (or ecstasy) and LSD when used in controlled environments with long-standing treatment approaches like talk therapy. As a result, the drumbeat “to mainstream” these medicinals has been steadily growings over the past several years.
But as I noted on this pagelast week, America’s track-record at regulating transformational industries and their profound social impacts has been fraught—to say the least.
It’s mostly because we’re more divided these days than they seem to be in Europe (and in many other places) about “the Good Society” that we want for ourselves. (Is abortion “a sin” or “a choice”? Is immigration “a threat to our way of life” or “a continuous way to refresh our country with new blood”? Are LSD and ecstasy a “devil’s brew” or “gateways to healing”?) The divisions aren’t exactly Red or Blue, but they are equally wide and deep. And that’s what John Oliver was worrying over as he poked hilarious ridicule at activists, both then and now, on each side of the debate.
For those of us who have enjoyed him over the years, Oliver’s shtick is Gadfly-By-Way-Of-Ridiculous-Examples, and there is plenty of that in his recent Last Week Tonite segment. (I defy you not to laugh when you see the opening bits about the BBC reporter and ASAP Rocky, along with Oliver’s deconstructions of what you’ve just seen.) He plainly sees laughing as a way to open viewers knee-jerk certainties to the controversial subjects he covers (not always successfully) but when he does (as here), even get-the-government-out-of-my-face types might begin to see the wisdom of bureaucrats at the FDA or NSA (yes, even there) regulating the use of these substances in ways that will maximize their benefits and reduce their potential harms.
Oliver takes us joyously/alarmingly back to our government’s vehement attempts to crack down on hippies during our divides over Vietnam, launching “an era of anti-psychedelic hysteria.” Junk research studies were ordered up featuring dubious but terrifying claims like the probability that LSD will warp your chromosomes. “Educational documentaries” shown in public schools employed a range of scare tactics, including showing abnormal fetuses in mothers who had taken psychedelics during pregnancy, a harridan hectoring about “trips” that their travelers never returned from, and a hearse “that improbably made house calls” driving another drug-victim from an Ozzie-and-Harriet-style suburban home.
Of course, Pennsylvania played its own prominent role in the frenzy, with one “state official” initially claiming that “half a dozen tripping college students stared at the sun for so long [that] they went blind,” before admitting much later that he'd made it all up after attending a particularly alarming lecture. As the crescendo built, Richard Nixon drove home the passage of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, restricting the use of LSD (and its psychoactive agent psilocybin) in the same ways as heroin, with the effect (says Oliver) of effectively “stopping medical research [on all psychedelics] dead in its tracks.”
Today this seems like a time almost lost to history until we recall Nancy Regan’s “Just Say ‘No’” advertising blitz during the late 1980’s (remember the sunny-side up egg frying in a pan while a voice intones “your brain on drugs”?), as well as Bill Clinton’s even more recent 1994 Crime Bill, which was also aimed at "anti-social" drug use.
So until now, these transformative drugs have only been available to people participating in clinical trials, but that's on track to change. On behalf of everyone who stands to gain, Oliver is rightly concerned about “repeating past mistakes or making entirely new ones” as psychedelics enter the marketplace.
Regulating how these drugs are administered is critical because of the possibility of “bad trips” and, given the expense, whether they're accessible to those who need them most. As reported in the newspaper last week, its hardly surprising that venture capitalists and start-up companies are angling for a piece of the upscale market for psychedelic-driven therapies today. The Journal began by noting that “Wall Street is betting tens of millions of dollars on psychedelic drugs that backers say could treat mental illness for a fraction of what it costs to do therapy with better-known treatments.” In other words, it will be relatively cheap for the few who can still afford it.
So “there is a lot to figure out here,” Oliver notes, because once these drugs enter the market and people get hurt (as they invariably will) or barred from potential cures (given the expense), we could be back with Sixties/Eighties/ Nineties fear-mongering bans and the stifling of further research, “which are the last things we should want to happen.”
The risks of America’s mishandling the coming psychedelic wave in old as well as new ways—particularly with the unprecedented hostility towards government regulation these days—are considerable. Given the startling amount of promise around this class of medicinals, that would truly be a shame.
Outside of injured communities (like traumatized vets or the chronically depressed, addicted or phobic), professor and author Michael Pollan has had a lot to do with the greater prominence of psychedelics in our discussions today.
His wildly successful 2016 book, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, attracted readers who’d already been following his research and commentary along with many others. That book was followed by a Netflix documentary, directed by the excellent Alex Gibney (Zero Days), in which Pollan discusses what he's discovered in his always accessible way. Here’s a link to the documentary’s trailer, promoting psychedelic’s “potential to revolutionize mental health care. (“Think how much human suffering could be relieved!”)
Among other things, that’s because when traditional therapies add psychedelics to the mix, patients can often open up “new neural pathways” to both re-live and come to terms with the past and face a broadter range of possibilities in the future.
The opportunity is also timely. As I reported here a couple of weeks ago (We May Be in a Neurological Mismatch With Our Tech-Driven World), it’s not only teenagers who are flooding emergency rooms with mental health problems given the peer pressures and difficulty of finding your moorings when so much of your reality is filtered through a smartphone’s or some other tech-enabled screen. (“None of our brains are wired to withstand the bombardments [of bad news and alarming impressions that] we’re confronting today.”) Indeed, the toxic impacts of our “too loud and insistent environment” has spawned another profit-seeker, this one angling to capitalize on the lack of available therapists during this mental health crisis.
If you are on social media at all you could not have missed the ubiquity of ads from a company called Better Health that promises a therapist on-line at any time (“You Deserve to Be Happy”), whether these “licensed professionals” will actually be equipped to handle either your problem or the general deluge of patients who've been heading in their direction. Unfortunately, I see another poorly-regulated “time bomb” that’s likely to go off as more patient tragedies and scathing reviews by former Better Health therapists get publicized.
Judicious use of psychedelics might be the better way to help calm our mental health storm.
That’s because when it comes to trauma-related injuries (like PTSD) or other persistent psychological disabilities (like chronic depression, addiction and phobias), psychedelics can relax the primitive “fight or flight” parts of our brains and open sufferers to new ways of seeing their pasts as well as futures. At the same time, this “opening of possibilities” may have more widespread benefits. Particularly at a time when fewer people are finding connectedness through organized religion, psychedelics can provide opportunities for experiencing transcendence and the greater sense of belonging that almost always tends to follow.
Michael Pollan talks about this non-religious access to a spiritual dimension beautifully in a 2022 interview (both audio and transcript) conducted by Katherine May (whom you may recall from my postabout May’s “Wintering” book). When it came to this mind-blowing topic, May was an inspired and encouraging conversation partner for Pollan. Listen and you’ll appreciate just how quickly and informatively they found “the same wave length.”
As part of his research before the book, Pollan experimented with psychedelics in controlled environments that he’d identified over 30 years of writing about topics like botany and food. Pollan’s previous book (and Netflix documentary) was called “Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation” about preparing various food stuffs by fire, water, air and earth—that is, by fermentation—so he was also thinking a great deal about both transformation and ingestion before writing How To Change Your Mind. But in this more recent journalistic foray of his, ingesting for the sake of transformation (instead of nutrition) merely rearranged their sequence, with results that amazed even him.
As he confided to May, taking psychedelic substances reminded him:
“that we spend a lot of time encrusting these fundamental ideas about life and reality with irony and all these protective rhetorical devices to keep them at bay. And suddenly, all that crust comes off, and like, oh my God, love [in the sense of connectedness with others and your surroundings] is the most important thing in the universe. And you understand that, and you have a conviction about it that is just unshakeable.
“I mean, one of the most striking things about psychedelic experience, to me, is something William James isolated more than 100 years ago. And he said that — he was speaking of mystical experience in general, and a powerful psychedelic experience is a mystical experience in various ways. And he said that one of the characteristics of that, besides ego dissolution and transcendence of space and time, is what he called the “noetic quality.” And this was the quality that what you learned, the insights you had, were not merely opinions but were revealed truths. And they have a stickiness and a power that I think is central to the experience, and it is what allows people to change.”
For Pollan (and many others), these substances allowed him to escape the limitations imposed by his ego and other self-protective mechanisms to find a sense of comfort, belonging and possibility that he’d never felt before and could no longer deny so cynically.
With May’s coaxing, Pollan described his bittersweet melancholy (both during and after using psychedelics) because, among other things, he “re-connected” with family members, including a favorite grandfather who’d passed away. So while not delivering “happiness,” he insisted that the associations he experienced felt both "so right and so beautiful.”
Two other observations that Pollan made also struck me as worth highlighting here (although the whole, lengthy interview is terrific). The first was his recommendation to experiment with these substances later in life instead of when you’re young.
“[W]e are more deeply mired in the grooves of habit, the older we get. We have developed a set of very sophisticated algorithms to get us through the day, get us through arguments with our partners, get us through how we do our work — it all becomes kind of habitual, and very efficient for that reason, but habit, you know, dulls us to reality. You know, there’s a trade-off…. Habit helps you get stuff done, but habit cuts you off from fresh experience, seeing things freshly. So there’s the throwaway line in How to Change Your Mind that maybe psychedelics are wasted on the young… I know lots of young people who’ve had very powerful and valuable experiences. But I think they have a unique benefit to people as we get older and as we’re thinking about death, as we’re thinking about these spiritual questions, but also as we’re set in our ways and losing contact with experience, as a result. There’s a kind of cleaning the doors of perception that’s going on [when we take these psychedelic substances].
“And there’s a wonderful metaphor that one of the neuroscientists [in the book] gave me….And he said, Think of the mind as a snow-covered hill and your thoughts as sleds going down that hill. Over time, the more runs of the sled, the deeper the grooves, and it becomes very hard to go down the hill without getting drawn into the grooves. They become attractors. Think of psychedelic experience as a fresh snowfall that fills all the grooves and allows you once again to go down the hill, along another route, any route you want.”
(To similar effect, a different article about “the new science of psychedelics” says much the same thing, but without reference to either age or the extent of an individual’s experience:
“The power to disrupt mental habits and ‘lubricate cognition’ is what Robin Carhart-Harris, [a] neuroscientist at Imperial College, sees as the key therapeutic value of [these] drugs…. Depression, anxiety, obsession and the cravings of addiction could be how it feels to have a brain that has become excessively rigid or fixed in its pathways and linkages—a brain with more order than is good for it.”)
Pollan’s second piece of perceived wisdom related to the enormous benefits that access to these therapeutics might have on many more of us these days.
“[M]y fondest hope would be that — the psychedelic renaissance has come along at a moment where we most need it, at a moment where we’re learning that the objectification of nature, the objectification of other people that egotistical thinking leads to, is leading us to disaster — I’m talking about the environmental crisis; I’m talking about tribalism. [and our deep-seated suspicions about one another]…. But my fondest hope is that this medicine has arrived at a moment when we’re really sick [laughs] and it might help treat us.”
He had me thinking about that animated masterpiece Wall-E, not the tranquilized passengers but the path-finding little robot trying to serve them as well as his one, favorite companion by never letting go of his connectedness to something larger.
Of course, none of the individual or general maladies that are holding us back will be alleviated by psychedelics if we fail—and fail we very well might—to create a regulatory framework that maximizes safety while providing access to those who could benefit from these potential cures the most.
I guess the question is whether our government can embrace its maternal and paternal sides enough these days to become the best kind of trip advisor for its troubled citizens.
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Thanks to Evan Sharboneau of Photo Extremist for the gorgeous image that leads off this post.
Thanks too for reading and for reaching out with your comments when you're done. I’ll see you again next Sunday.
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