Before Timothy Leary came along, psychedelic drugs were respectable. The American public’s introduction to these substances was gradual, considered, and enthusiastic. Psilocybin appeared in an article, “Seeking the Magic Mushroom,” in a 1957 issue of Life magazine. The author of this first-person account of consuming mind-altering fungi at a traditional ritual in a remote Mexican village, R. Gordon Wasson, was a banker, a vice president at J.P. Morgan. The founder and editor in chief of Time-Life, Henry Robinson Luce, took LSD with his wife under a doctor’s supervision, and he liked to see his magazines cover the possible therapeutic uses of psychedelics. Perhaps most famously, Cary Grant underwent more than 60 sessions of LSD-facilitated psychotherapy in the late 1950s, telling Good Housekeeping that the treatment made him less lonely and “a happy man.” This wasn’t a Hollywood star’s foray into the counterculture, but part of an experimental protocol used by a group of Los Angeles psychiatrists who were convinced they had found a tool that could make talk therapy transformative. And they had the science—or at least the beginnings of it—to back up their claims.
Then came Leary and his Harvard Psilocybin Project. In his new book, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, Michael Pollan recounts how nascent but promising research into the therapeutic uses of psychedelic drugs in the 1950s and early 1960s went off the rails. Leary, with Richard Alpert (who would later rename himself Ram Dass), conducted research in a methodologically haphazard and messianic manner, eventually alienating the university’s administration, who fired them. Leary then went on to become a guru (his term) for the hippie movement, urging America’s youth to “turn on, tune in, and drop out.” LSD came to be associated with the anti-war movement, free love, and a general rejection of Middle American mores, and the authorities no longer looked kindly upon it. By 1970, with the Controlled Substances Act, LSD, psilocybin, peyote, DMT, and mescaline were classified as Schedule I drugs—defined as substances with a high potential for abuse, with no currently accepted medical value in the U.S., and unsafe to use even under medical supervision. For four decades, psychedelics were associated with burnt-out cases shambling around college towns like Berkeley and Cambridge, chromosome damage, and the suicide of the daughter of TV personality Art Linkletter.
Pollan is far from the first person to point out that none of the above characterizations are truthful representations of the most familiar psychedelic drugs. As Purdue’s David E. Nichols wrote in 2016 for the peer-reviewed medical journal Pharmacological Reviews, these drugs are “generally considered physiologically safe and do not lead to dependence or addiction.” There have been no known cases of overdose from LSD, psilocybin, or mescaline. The chromosome scare story turned out to be bogus, Diane Linkletter had a history of depression pre-existing her drug use, and while it’s probably a bad idea for any mentally disturbed person to take a powerful psychoactive drug recreationally, there’s no evidence that psychedelics cause mental illness in otherwise healthy people. To the contrary: After 40 years in the wilderness, psychedelics are once more the subject of serious scientific study, with early results suggesting that the drugs, when used under a therapist’s supervision, can help patients suffering from anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and both alcohol and nicotine addiction. (...)
How to Change Your Mind includes an account of how various psychedelic drugs found their way into American laboratories and homes, the great hiatus of research into their potential uses after they were outlawed in the ’60s and ’70s, and the “renaissance” of scientific interest in the drugs, beginning in the late 1990s and culminating in several government-funded studies today. Pollan himself was no psychonaut when he became interested in that resurgence. He’d tried psilocybin mushrooms twice in his 20s, then let the remaining stash of fungi molder in a jar in the back of a cabinet; the experience was “interesting” but not something he felt moved to repeat. What drew his attention to the subject later in life were two studies and a dinner party, where a 60ish “prominent psychologist,” married to a software engineer, explained that she and her husband found the “occasional use of LSD both intellectually stimulating and of value to their work.” One of the experiments, conducted at Johns Hopkins, UCLA, and NYU, found that large doses of psilocybin, when administered once or twice to patients who had received terminal cancer diagnoses, helped significantly reduce their fear and depression. The other study, conducted by some of the same researchers, observed the similarities between the results of high doses of psilocybin administered by teams of two therapists and what are commonly described as mystical experiences. The latter are episodes characterized by “the dissolution of one’s ego followed by a sense of merging with nature or the universe.” As Pollan notes, this hardly sounds like news to people accustomed to taking psychedelic drugs, but it marked the first validation of the idea in a rigorous scientific setting.
Further research using fMRI scanners has confirmed the similarity in brain activity between people meditating and people having certain kinds of psychedelic trips. But not all trips are the same, as anyone who has dropped acid can attest. Leary’s one great contribution to the understanding of psychedelics was his emphasis on what has become a mantra for contemporary researchers: set and setting. Set refers to what the person taking the drug expects or is told to expect from the experience, and setting refers to the circumstances of the trip itself: whether the subject is alone or with others, outside or inside, listening to particular kinds of music, wearing an eye mask, receiving guidance from someone they trust, being encouraged to explore ideas and feelings by a therapist, and so on.
Pollan took a couple of research trips himself in the course of writing How to Change Your Mind, with results that are interesting only to the extent that they help him make sense of other people’s accounts of their own journeys. The meat of the book is its chapters on the neuroscience of the drugs and their evident ability to suppress activity in a brain system known as the “default mode network.” The DMN acts as our cerebral executive, coordinating and organizing competing signals from other systems. It is, as Pollan sees it, the “autobiographical brain,” and the site of our ego. The long history of people reporting the sensation of their egos dissolving while under the influence of psychedelics meshes with this interpretation. It’s an experience with the potential to both terrify and, paradoxically, comfort those who undergo it.
Why should this effect prove so helpful to the depressed, addicted, and anxious? As Pollan explains it, these disorders are the result of mental and emotional “grooves” in our thinking that have become, as the DMN’s name suggests, default. We are how we think. The right psychedelic experience can level out the grooves, enabling a person to make new cerebral connections and briefly escape from “a rigidity in our thinking that is psychologically destructive.” The aerial perspective this escape offers doesn’t immediately evaporate either. The terminal cancer patients in the psilocybin study felt lasting relief as a result of the glimpse the drugs gave them of a vista beyond the limitations of their own egos—even the ones who didn’t believe in God or other supernatural forces. (...)
If How to Change Your Mind furthers the popular acceptance of psychedelics as much as I suspect it will, it will be by capsizing the long association, dating from Leary’s time, between the drugs and young people. Pollan observes that the young have had less time to establish the cognitive patterns that psychedelics temporarily overturn. But “by middle age,” he writes, “the sway of habitual thinking over the operations of the mind is nearly absolute.” What he sought in his own trips was not communion with a higher consciousness so much as the opportunity to “renovate my everyday mental life.” He felt that the experience made him more emotionally open and appreciative of his relationships.
[ed. See also: Hallucinogenic Drugs as Therapy? I Tried It (Michael Pollan - NY Times)
Then came Leary and his Harvard Psilocybin Project. In his new book, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, Michael Pollan recounts how nascent but promising research into the therapeutic uses of psychedelic drugs in the 1950s and early 1960s went off the rails. Leary, with Richard Alpert (who would later rename himself Ram Dass), conducted research in a methodologically haphazard and messianic manner, eventually alienating the university’s administration, who fired them. Leary then went on to become a guru (his term) for the hippie movement, urging America’s youth to “turn on, tune in, and drop out.” LSD came to be associated with the anti-war movement, free love, and a general rejection of Middle American mores, and the authorities no longer looked kindly upon it. By 1970, with the Controlled Substances Act, LSD, psilocybin, peyote, DMT, and mescaline were classified as Schedule I drugs—defined as substances with a high potential for abuse, with no currently accepted medical value in the U.S., and unsafe to use even under medical supervision. For four decades, psychedelics were associated with burnt-out cases shambling around college towns like Berkeley and Cambridge, chromosome damage, and the suicide of the daughter of TV personality Art Linkletter.Pollan is far from the first person to point out that none of the above characterizations are truthful representations of the most familiar psychedelic drugs. As Purdue’s David E. Nichols wrote in 2016 for the peer-reviewed medical journal Pharmacological Reviews, these drugs are “generally considered physiologically safe and do not lead to dependence or addiction.” There have been no known cases of overdose from LSD, psilocybin, or mescaline. The chromosome scare story turned out to be bogus, Diane Linkletter had a history of depression pre-existing her drug use, and while it’s probably a bad idea for any mentally disturbed person to take a powerful psychoactive drug recreationally, there’s no evidence that psychedelics cause mental illness in otherwise healthy people. To the contrary: After 40 years in the wilderness, psychedelics are once more the subject of serious scientific study, with early results suggesting that the drugs, when used under a therapist’s supervision, can help patients suffering from anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and both alcohol and nicotine addiction. (...)
How to Change Your Mind includes an account of how various psychedelic drugs found their way into American laboratories and homes, the great hiatus of research into their potential uses after they were outlawed in the ’60s and ’70s, and the “renaissance” of scientific interest in the drugs, beginning in the late 1990s and culminating in several government-funded studies today. Pollan himself was no psychonaut when he became interested in that resurgence. He’d tried psilocybin mushrooms twice in his 20s, then let the remaining stash of fungi molder in a jar in the back of a cabinet; the experience was “interesting” but not something he felt moved to repeat. What drew his attention to the subject later in life were two studies and a dinner party, where a 60ish “prominent psychologist,” married to a software engineer, explained that she and her husband found the “occasional use of LSD both intellectually stimulating and of value to their work.” One of the experiments, conducted at Johns Hopkins, UCLA, and NYU, found that large doses of psilocybin, when administered once or twice to patients who had received terminal cancer diagnoses, helped significantly reduce their fear and depression. The other study, conducted by some of the same researchers, observed the similarities between the results of high doses of psilocybin administered by teams of two therapists and what are commonly described as mystical experiences. The latter are episodes characterized by “the dissolution of one’s ego followed by a sense of merging with nature or the universe.” As Pollan notes, this hardly sounds like news to people accustomed to taking psychedelic drugs, but it marked the first validation of the idea in a rigorous scientific setting.
Further research using fMRI scanners has confirmed the similarity in brain activity between people meditating and people having certain kinds of psychedelic trips. But not all trips are the same, as anyone who has dropped acid can attest. Leary’s one great contribution to the understanding of psychedelics was his emphasis on what has become a mantra for contemporary researchers: set and setting. Set refers to what the person taking the drug expects or is told to expect from the experience, and setting refers to the circumstances of the trip itself: whether the subject is alone or with others, outside or inside, listening to particular kinds of music, wearing an eye mask, receiving guidance from someone they trust, being encouraged to explore ideas and feelings by a therapist, and so on.
Pollan took a couple of research trips himself in the course of writing How to Change Your Mind, with results that are interesting only to the extent that they help him make sense of other people’s accounts of their own journeys. The meat of the book is its chapters on the neuroscience of the drugs and their evident ability to suppress activity in a brain system known as the “default mode network.” The DMN acts as our cerebral executive, coordinating and organizing competing signals from other systems. It is, as Pollan sees it, the “autobiographical brain,” and the site of our ego. The long history of people reporting the sensation of their egos dissolving while under the influence of psychedelics meshes with this interpretation. It’s an experience with the potential to both terrify and, paradoxically, comfort those who undergo it.
Why should this effect prove so helpful to the depressed, addicted, and anxious? As Pollan explains it, these disorders are the result of mental and emotional “grooves” in our thinking that have become, as the DMN’s name suggests, default. We are how we think. The right psychedelic experience can level out the grooves, enabling a person to make new cerebral connections and briefly escape from “a rigidity in our thinking that is psychologically destructive.” The aerial perspective this escape offers doesn’t immediately evaporate either. The terminal cancer patients in the psilocybin study felt lasting relief as a result of the glimpse the drugs gave them of a vista beyond the limitations of their own egos—even the ones who didn’t believe in God or other supernatural forces. (...)
If How to Change Your Mind furthers the popular acceptance of psychedelics as much as I suspect it will, it will be by capsizing the long association, dating from Leary’s time, between the drugs and young people. Pollan observes that the young have had less time to establish the cognitive patterns that psychedelics temporarily overturn. But “by middle age,” he writes, “the sway of habitual thinking over the operations of the mind is nearly absolute.” What he sought in his own trips was not communion with a higher consciousness so much as the opportunity to “renovate my everyday mental life.” He felt that the experience made him more emotionally open and appreciative of his relationships.
by Laura Miller, Slate | Read more:
Image: Jeannette Montgomery Barron[ed. See also: Hallucinogenic Drugs as Therapy? I Tried It (Michael Pollan - NY Times)
