I had a close call on the second night of the ayahuasca ceremony.
I saw my teenage self melting into particles and eventually disappearing altogether. I pulled off my sleep mask and saw the people around me shape-shifting into shadows. I thought I was dying, or perhaps losing my grip on reality.
Suddenly, Kat, my guide, appeared and began singing to me. I couldn’t make out the words, but the cadence was soothing. After a minute or two, the dread washed away and I settled back into a peaceful half-sleep.
The 12 of us — nine women and three men — taking ayahuasca in a private home in San Diego were led by two trained guides: Kat and her partner, whom I’ll call Sarah since she requested anonymity due to legal concerns. Together they have more than 20 years of experience working with psychedelics, including ayahuasca, a plant concoction that contains the natural hallucinogen known as DMT.
Kat (her full name is Tina Kourtney) and Sarah work as a team serving psychedelic medicine every month or so in a different city. Their primary role is to create a space in which everyone feels secure enough to drop their emotional guards and open up to the drugs’ potential to change their attitudes, moods, and behaviors.
There’s a lot of unease heading into these ceremonies, especially for people who have never experimented with psychedelics. The fear of what you might see or feel can be overwhelming. But guides like Kat are your port in the storm. When things get turbulent, they respond with a steady, calm hand.
Though psychedelic drugs remain illegal, guided ceremonies, or sessions, are happening across the country, especially in major cities like New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Guiding itself has become a viable profession, both underground and above, as more Americans seek out safe, structured environments to use psychedelics for spiritual growth and psychological healing. This new world of psychedelic-assisted therapy functions as a kind of parallel mental health service. Access to it remains limited, but it’s evolving quicker than you might expect.
A majority of Americans now support the legalization of marijuana, and while a 2016 public poll on psychedelics suggested they aren’t as favorable, it’s possible that attitudes will shift as the research findings on their therapeutic potential enter the mainstream. (Author Michael Pollan’s 2018 book How to Change Your Mind, about his own experiences with psychedelics, helped spread the word. Even Gwyneth Paltrow has acknowledged their potential in a recent New York Times interview.)
But what would a world in which psychedelics are legal look like? And what sort of cultural structures would we need to ensure that these drugs are used responsibly?
Psychedelic drugs like LSD seeped into American society in the 1960s, and the results were mixed at best. They certainly revolutionized the culture, but they ultimately left us with draconian drug laws and a cultural backlash that pushed psychedelics into the underground.
Today, however, a renaissance is underway. At institutions like John Hopkins University and New York University, clinical trials exploring psilocybin as a therapy for treatment-resistant depression, drug addiction, and other anxiety disorders are yielding hopeful results.
In October, the Food and Drug Administration took the extraordinary step of granting psilocybin therapy for depression a “breakthrough therapy” designation. That means the treatment has demonstrated such potential that the FDA has decided to expedite its development and review process. It’s a sign of how far the research and the public perception of psychedelics have come.
It’s because of this progress that we have to think seriously about what comes next and how we would integrate psychedelics into the broader culture. I’ve spent the past three months talking with guides, researchers, and therapists who are training clinicians to do psychedelic-assisted therapy. I’ve participated in underground ceremonies, and I’ve spoken to people who claim to have conquered their drug addictions after a single psychedelic experience.
Our current laws sanction various poisons, including booze and cigarettes. These are drugs that destroy lives and feed addictions. And yet one of the most striking things about the recent (limited) psychedelic research is that the drugs do not appear to be addictive or have adverse effects when a guide is involved. Many researchers believe these drugs, when used under the supervision of trained professionals, could revolutionize mental health care.
Michael Pollan gives an exhaustive account of this in How to Change Your Mind (a book I highly recommend), but the short version is that psychedelics could never escape the shadow of the countercultural revolution they helped spark.
Timothy Leary, the renegade psychologist and psychedelic evangelist who told kids to “turn on, tune in, and drop out,” is the familiar scapegoat. Leary, the argument goes, was too reckless, too confrontational, and too scary for the mainstream. Leary was such a threat that at one point, he was called the “the most dangerous man in America” by President Richard Nixon.
But Leary’s an easy mark and hardly the sole cause. The culture simply wasn’t ready for psychedelics in the ’60s. The experiences these drugs induce are so powerful that they can amount to a kind of rite of passage. But when they hit the scene, the population had no experience with them, no sense of their significance. As Pollan told me in an interview earlier this year, “Young people were having such a radically new kind of experience that the straight culture could not handle.”
Psychedelics were unleashed so fast that there were no cultural structures in place to absorb them, no containers or norms around them. Cultures around the world — from the ancient Greeks to the indigenous cultures of the Amazon — have been taking psychedelics for thousands of years, and each one developed rituals for them, led by experienced guides. Because there was no established community in the US, people were left to their own devices. When you combine this with a general ignorance about the drugs themselves, it’s not surprising that things went sideways.
But a lot has changed since the ’60s. The political and cultural landscape is radically different, and far more receptive to psychedelics. Rick Doblin, a longtime advocate for psychedelics and the founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), made an interesting point to me when I sat down with him in Washington, DC, recently. (MAPS is a nonprofit research and educational organization that is leading the effort to promote the safe use of psychedelics.)
“In the ’60s,” he said, “the psychedelic counterculture was a direct challenge to the status quo ... it was about dropping out of the culture. Today, things like yoga and mindfulness meditation are fully integrated into popular culture. We’ve integrated spirituality and all these things that seemed so foreign and alien in the ’60s. So we’ve been preparing culturally for this for 50 years.”
At the same time, psychedelics may also play a role in addressing newer health threats like the opioid crisis. (70,000 Americans died of opioid overdoses in 2017, more than the total number of Americans that died in Vietnam.) They’re being used to treat populations like veterans suffering from PTSD, or cancer patients who are confronting their mortality, or people battling depression.
Psychedelics are becoming tools of healing rather than a threat to the social order. And the scientists and organizations and training institutions leading the way are working within the system to reduce the potential for blowback. This is very different from the approach taken in the ’60s, and so far it’s been a success.
Your mind on psychedelics
Psilocybin is the drug of choice for most researchers in recent years for a variety of reasons. For one, it carries less cultural baggage than LSD, and so study participants are more willing to work with it. Psilocybin also has strong safety data based on studies conducted before prohibition, and so the FDA has allowed a small number of small clinical trials to move forward.
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By Sean Illing@seanilling[email protected]
Updated Mar 8, 2019, 1:01pm EST
Image Credit:
- Photo illustrations: Javier Zarracina/Vox; Getty Images
Source : VOX
Link to original study: The extraordinary therapeutic potential of psychedelic drugs, explained
