Two new books explore how psychedelics can change your life
Tao Lin's eighth book, Trip, is his best yet, and it’s all thanks to drugs. Well, perhaps not entirely thanks to drugs. With exercise comes mastery, or at least competence, and Lin has been practicing his idiosyncratic craft for over a decade. His first book was published in 2006, when he was twenty-three; improvement during the intervening years may have been inevitable. But Lin—whose authorial voice, notoriously, is so assiduously literal that it sometimes seems transcribed from a robot failing a Turing test—has never been more creative, precise, or inspired than when he details psychedelics-begotten behavior and theories. The behavior is mostly his own, while the theories are often borrowed from Terence McKenna, the late psilocybin advocate whose YouTube videos started Lin down the path to revitalization. While studying McKenna, Lin began to make radical adjustments to his daily drug routines, which in turn radically affected his mind-set. “My default state in 2012 while sober was an easily annoyed grumpiness,” he explains. “I was chronically not fascinated by existence, which . . . did not feel wonderful or profound but tedious and uncomfortable and troubling.” After bingeing on McKenna recordings—“for more than thirty hours”—everything changed. (...)
It's extremely difficult to put words to a psychedelic (or mystical, or sublime, or transcendent) experience, because the event eradicates so much of what we take for granted as the ground from which we speak. In a periodically viral video clip from the 1950s in which a “housewife” takes LSD, the man administering the solution, Dr. Sidney Cohen, prompts her to narrate her altered state. “Tell me,” he prods her. “Well, I just couldn’t!” she replies, shaking her head in wonder and confusion. “I couldn’t possibly tell you.” When he continues to coax her toward explication—“How do you feel inside?”—she repeats “inside” like it’s the name of a lover she hasn’t heard from in years. As if he’d asked for gum, she answers, “I don’t have any ‘inside.’”
With normal ways of speaking rendered useless, a degree of poetry must be employed. Lin’s writing is considerably improved by this predicament. He used to excise all figurative language from his prose, but in Trip he allows himself lines like “A flock of things I’d told myself to remember flew mutely out of view in the sky outside the stuffy cabin of my mind,” because this formulation is more truthful than a less metaphorical alternative. But it took a lot of practice for him to alter the style he’d spent many years establishing: He writes that he has “enjoyed LSD at least eighty times since 2010 at measured doses of [up to] 150 micrograms—and some higher, unmeasured doses—with only, I feel, positive, sanity-promoting effects.” And that’s just LSD; Trip has entire chapters dedicated to DMT, salvia, cannabis, and psilocybin.
Compared with Lin’s rate of drug use, Michael Pollan is . . . behind. In his late twenties he tried mushrooms a few times, and after that, cocaine—maybe? he’s coy about it—but never LSD. “I’m less a child of the psychedelic 1960s than of the moral panic that psychedelics provoked,” he says at the start of his latest book about humans’ relationship to ingestible plants. But now “psychedelics are having a renaissance,” and How to Change Your Mind is an attempt to understand why. (...)
As “a staunch materialist, and as an adult of a certain age,” Pollan has an abundance of skepticism. That moral panic, for him, has not fully subsided, and it renders How to Change Your Mind repetitive and hamstrung. Trip, in its best moments, is a little like having a good one—exhilarating, moving, enlivening—because the writing is clear and sincere but also relaxed, curious, and devoid of expectations. Lin’s previous books (and this one, too) focus on a narrator happy to spend entire days in his bedroom, sequestered from others, lost in his own world, but Pollan isn’t interested in the interior self. “Did I really want to go there?” he asks himself when contemplating what he knows about the mental and emotional extremes he might encounter while tripping. “No!—to be perfectly honest. . . . I have never been one for deep or sustained introspection.”
Nervous, he approaches taking drugs in the spirit of a “harrowing” contract negotiation: fixated on expectations he fears will not be met. He wants to have a spiritual experience even as he suspects there might not be anything “out there” to have a spiritual experience of. He doesn’t want to change his life, but still wants to know if he could learn “something new about it.” Resistance characterizes his emotional state before and after he undergoes guided psychedelic journeys: The rituals are “ridiculously hokey,” what he says while tripping “embarrasses” him, and “dissatisfaction” persists even after moments of beauty and wonder. “It had brought me no closer to a belief in God or in a cosmic form of consciousness or in anything magical at all—all of which I might have been, unreasonably, expecting (hoping?) it might do.”
I get it and sympathize, to a degree, though I mainly find his ambivalence exhausting. Pollan half wanted to find a chemical so powerfully effective that in spite of his colossal doubt, anxiety, and pride, he would cross over into the ranks of the blessed. He was poised for an experience like those documented in the Psychopharmacology study, the one that encouraged him to write about these drugs in the first place. There, participants ranked their trips among “the most meaningful [events] in their lives.” He wanted to be delivered; he wanted a single religious experience that left him with a faith so unshakable he wouldn’t need it to be backed by scientific evidence. Yet he also feared that outcome. As he repeats throughout the book, “set” (mind-set) and “setting” (environment) play a crucial role in what happens to a person who takes a psychedelic. Clinging to his current way of being, and swaddled in trepidation, Pollan was destined to be underwhelmed by his trips.
It’s also telling that while the reported “spiritual” angle of psychedelics is what hooked him, Pollan had no interest in these drugs until they began receiving high-profile institutional approval, in the form of both Times coverage and university studies, like one testing psilocybin’s power to alleviate “existential distress” in terminal cancer patients. There are, of course, more than two “types” of drug users, but I bet you could cleave the lot of us fairly neatly between those who believe institutions have people’s best interests at heart—that they should be trusted to figure out the “best” way to take drugs—and those who see institutional attention as a sign of dark developments to come. At the risk of sounding like a teenager with pot-themed socks and a pot-themed skateboard, I’m confident that many drugs are illegal because they threaten the status quo and not because they’re any more dangerous than alcohol or sugar. As Lin writes while channeling McKenna and perusing “a CIA-LSD-suicide-homicide thread” on the internet: “Psychedelics are illegal not because the government wants to protect us from us, but because they catalyze intellectual dissent.” Pollan says much the same thing when he explains that LSD became so controversial in the ’60s primarily because it was tightly linked to the anti-war, anti-authority counterculture: “Psychedelics introduced something deeply subversive to the West that the various establishments had little choice but to repulse.” If those same establishments are suddenly willing to welcome psychedelics into the fold, we should at least ask why.
We already know what the GOOP-ification of a newly trendy, formerly reviled drug looks like. It is, in a word, bad. White families make millions from selling huge quantities of marijuana, while people of color are incarcerated for possession of minor amounts. Young white people broadcast paeans to microdosing on their podcasts, and wealthy white moms write about it in books, but there’s no national conversation about meaningfully reconsidering the incoherent and murderous “war on drugs.” (LSD and psilocybin are Schedule 1 substances, alongside heroin, cannabis, and MDMA, meaning the government regards them among the most addictive and the least medicinally useful.) How to Change Your Mind is steeped in the belief that drugs might be OK in institutionally circumscribed contexts, when overseen and administered by professionals, but that they should not be left in the hands of the pleasure-seeking masses. (“[Do] I think these drugs should simply be legalized? Not exactly,” Pollan writes in his conclusion.) Take a moment to picture the populations best positioned to benefit from an arrangement like that, and imagine how much opportunity for mismanagement, price gouging, and general abuse it might allow.
Lin regards psychedelics as subversive, and powerfully pure, because they can make people happy and healthy. (Overwhelmingly, this is the case, and even terrifying trips rarely result in lasting damage—though the drugs can have disastrous results in schizophrenics.) But Pollan looks at an aspect of the psychedelics trend that Lin doesn’t: Its role in Silicon Valley. He mentions Steve Jobs’s claim that dropping LSD was “one of his two or three most important life experiences,” and name-checks Stewart Brand, who thinks that “LSD was a critical ingredient in nourishing the spirit of collaborative experiment . . . that distinguish[es] the computer culture of the West Coast.” As a further endorsement, he adds, “I know of one Bay Area tech company today that uses psychedelics in its management training. A handful of others have instituted ‘microdosing Fridays.’”
While some drugs can guide a user toward enduring openness or empathy, no drug will instantly render a selfish man selfless, or a cruel woman kind. And if psychedelics are becoming somewhat ubiquitous in Silicon Valley, it’s proof that they can’t automatically instill ethics in a community used to operating without them. (Would you take a drug that made you as a creative as Steve Jobs, if it also made you just as much of an asshole? Don’t answer that.)
Tao Lin's eighth book, Trip, is his best yet, and it’s all thanks to drugs. Well, perhaps not entirely thanks to drugs. With exercise comes mastery, or at least competence, and Lin has been practicing his idiosyncratic craft for over a decade. His first book was published in 2006, when he was twenty-three; improvement during the intervening years may have been inevitable. But Lin—whose authorial voice, notoriously, is so assiduously literal that it sometimes seems transcribed from a robot failing a Turing test—has never been more creative, precise, or inspired than when he details psychedelics-begotten behavior and theories. The behavior is mostly his own, while the theories are often borrowed from Terence McKenna, the late psilocybin advocate whose YouTube videos started Lin down the path to revitalization. While studying McKenna, Lin began to make radical adjustments to his daily drug routines, which in turn radically affected his mind-set. “My default state in 2012 while sober was an easily annoyed grumpiness,” he explains. “I was chronically not fascinated by existence, which . . . did not feel wonderful or profound but tedious and uncomfortable and troubling.” After bingeing on McKenna recordings—“for more than thirty hours”—everything changed. (...)
It's extremely difficult to put words to a psychedelic (or mystical, or sublime, or transcendent) experience, because the event eradicates so much of what we take for granted as the ground from which we speak. In a periodically viral video clip from the 1950s in which a “housewife” takes LSD, the man administering the solution, Dr. Sidney Cohen, prompts her to narrate her altered state. “Tell me,” he prods her. “Well, I just couldn’t!” she replies, shaking her head in wonder and confusion. “I couldn’t possibly tell you.” When he continues to coax her toward explication—“How do you feel inside?”—she repeats “inside” like it’s the name of a lover she hasn’t heard from in years. As if he’d asked for gum, she answers, “I don’t have any ‘inside.’”With normal ways of speaking rendered useless, a degree of poetry must be employed. Lin’s writing is considerably improved by this predicament. He used to excise all figurative language from his prose, but in Trip he allows himself lines like “A flock of things I’d told myself to remember flew mutely out of view in the sky outside the stuffy cabin of my mind,” because this formulation is more truthful than a less metaphorical alternative. But it took a lot of practice for him to alter the style he’d spent many years establishing: He writes that he has “enjoyed LSD at least eighty times since 2010 at measured doses of [up to] 150 micrograms—and some higher, unmeasured doses—with only, I feel, positive, sanity-promoting effects.” And that’s just LSD; Trip has entire chapters dedicated to DMT, salvia, cannabis, and psilocybin.
Compared with Lin’s rate of drug use, Michael Pollan is . . . behind. In his late twenties he tried mushrooms a few times, and after that, cocaine—maybe? he’s coy about it—but never LSD. “I’m less a child of the psychedelic 1960s than of the moral panic that psychedelics provoked,” he says at the start of his latest book about humans’ relationship to ingestible plants. But now “psychedelics are having a renaissance,” and How to Change Your Mind is an attempt to understand why. (...)
As “a staunch materialist, and as an adult of a certain age,” Pollan has an abundance of skepticism. That moral panic, for him, has not fully subsided, and it renders How to Change Your Mind repetitive and hamstrung. Trip, in its best moments, is a little like having a good one—exhilarating, moving, enlivening—because the writing is clear and sincere but also relaxed, curious, and devoid of expectations. Lin’s previous books (and this one, too) focus on a narrator happy to spend entire days in his bedroom, sequestered from others, lost in his own world, but Pollan isn’t interested in the interior self. “Did I really want to go there?” he asks himself when contemplating what he knows about the mental and emotional extremes he might encounter while tripping. “No!—to be perfectly honest. . . . I have never been one for deep or sustained introspection.”
Nervous, he approaches taking drugs in the spirit of a “harrowing” contract negotiation: fixated on expectations he fears will not be met. He wants to have a spiritual experience even as he suspects there might not be anything “out there” to have a spiritual experience of. He doesn’t want to change his life, but still wants to know if he could learn “something new about it.” Resistance characterizes his emotional state before and after he undergoes guided psychedelic journeys: The rituals are “ridiculously hokey,” what he says while tripping “embarrasses” him, and “dissatisfaction” persists even after moments of beauty and wonder. “It had brought me no closer to a belief in God or in a cosmic form of consciousness or in anything magical at all—all of which I might have been, unreasonably, expecting (hoping?) it might do.”
I get it and sympathize, to a degree, though I mainly find his ambivalence exhausting. Pollan half wanted to find a chemical so powerfully effective that in spite of his colossal doubt, anxiety, and pride, he would cross over into the ranks of the blessed. He was poised for an experience like those documented in the Psychopharmacology study, the one that encouraged him to write about these drugs in the first place. There, participants ranked their trips among “the most meaningful [events] in their lives.” He wanted to be delivered; he wanted a single religious experience that left him with a faith so unshakable he wouldn’t need it to be backed by scientific evidence. Yet he also feared that outcome. As he repeats throughout the book, “set” (mind-set) and “setting” (environment) play a crucial role in what happens to a person who takes a psychedelic. Clinging to his current way of being, and swaddled in trepidation, Pollan was destined to be underwhelmed by his trips.
It’s also telling that while the reported “spiritual” angle of psychedelics is what hooked him, Pollan had no interest in these drugs until they began receiving high-profile institutional approval, in the form of both Times coverage and university studies, like one testing psilocybin’s power to alleviate “existential distress” in terminal cancer patients. There are, of course, more than two “types” of drug users, but I bet you could cleave the lot of us fairly neatly between those who believe institutions have people’s best interests at heart—that they should be trusted to figure out the “best” way to take drugs—and those who see institutional attention as a sign of dark developments to come. At the risk of sounding like a teenager with pot-themed socks and a pot-themed skateboard, I’m confident that many drugs are illegal because they threaten the status quo and not because they’re any more dangerous than alcohol or sugar. As Lin writes while channeling McKenna and perusing “a CIA-LSD-suicide-homicide thread” on the internet: “Psychedelics are illegal not because the government wants to protect us from us, but because they catalyze intellectual dissent.” Pollan says much the same thing when he explains that LSD became so controversial in the ’60s primarily because it was tightly linked to the anti-war, anti-authority counterculture: “Psychedelics introduced something deeply subversive to the West that the various establishments had little choice but to repulse.” If those same establishments are suddenly willing to welcome psychedelics into the fold, we should at least ask why.
We already know what the GOOP-ification of a newly trendy, formerly reviled drug looks like. It is, in a word, bad. White families make millions from selling huge quantities of marijuana, while people of color are incarcerated for possession of minor amounts. Young white people broadcast paeans to microdosing on their podcasts, and wealthy white moms write about it in books, but there’s no national conversation about meaningfully reconsidering the incoherent and murderous “war on drugs.” (LSD and psilocybin are Schedule 1 substances, alongside heroin, cannabis, and MDMA, meaning the government regards them among the most addictive and the least medicinally useful.) How to Change Your Mind is steeped in the belief that drugs might be OK in institutionally circumscribed contexts, when overseen and administered by professionals, but that they should not be left in the hands of the pleasure-seeking masses. (“[Do] I think these drugs should simply be legalized? Not exactly,” Pollan writes in his conclusion.) Take a moment to picture the populations best positioned to benefit from an arrangement like that, and imagine how much opportunity for mismanagement, price gouging, and general abuse it might allow.
Lin regards psychedelics as subversive, and powerfully pure, because they can make people happy and healthy. (Overwhelmingly, this is the case, and even terrifying trips rarely result in lasting damage—though the drugs can have disastrous results in schizophrenics.) But Pollan looks at an aspect of the psychedelics trend that Lin doesn’t: Its role in Silicon Valley. He mentions Steve Jobs’s claim that dropping LSD was “one of his two or three most important life experiences,” and name-checks Stewart Brand, who thinks that “LSD was a critical ingredient in nourishing the spirit of collaborative experiment . . . that distinguish[es] the computer culture of the West Coast.” As a further endorsement, he adds, “I know of one Bay Area tech company today that uses psychedelics in its management training. A handful of others have instituted ‘microdosing Fridays.’”
While some drugs can guide a user toward enduring openness or empathy, no drug will instantly render a selfish man selfless, or a cruel woman kind. And if psychedelics are becoming somewhat ubiquitous in Silicon Valley, it’s proof that they can’t automatically instill ethics in a community used to operating without them. (Would you take a drug that made you as a creative as Steve Jobs, if it also made you just as much of an asshole? Don’t answer that.)
by Charlotte Shane, Bookforum | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Perhaps we are finally having a much needed 'moment': See also: Why We Should Say Yes to Drugs (NY Mag):
"And the word “drug,” like “psychedelic,” is horribly loaded. Like the miraculous weed, psilocybin comes from the earth. LSD comes from bacteria. They are not addictive; yes, they can be abused, but very few who have had a psychedelic experience want to have it again and again. There is something profound about it that stays with you, for a long time. You see something you cannot unsee. And that space of unity and compassion is always something you can reach back to, a mountaintop you can see from a distance. It helps the most addicted smoker quit, simply because, in the context of awe and love, smoking becomes irrelevant. It reconciles people to death, the way religion used to. It can break depression — by scrambling the furrows and rigid patterns of thought that keep us in a groove of self-orbiting misery. The medical potential is extraordinary. (...)
I think of them also as the real and most powerful antidote to opioids and to the condition the opioids are a misbegotten response to: loneliness, depression, and a lack of meaning. Opioids are one solution to our crisis of meaning, in as much as they numb you to sleep. Psychedelics are another: a new unveiling of awe and awakening. In that respect, the ’60s got the metaphor wrong. These are not a means to drop out; they are a path to dropping back in."]
[ed. Perhaps we are finally having a much needed 'moment': See also: Why We Should Say Yes to Drugs (NY Mag):
"And the word “drug,” like “psychedelic,” is horribly loaded. Like the miraculous weed, psilocybin comes from the earth. LSD comes from bacteria. They are not addictive; yes, they can be abused, but very few who have had a psychedelic experience want to have it again and again. There is something profound about it that stays with you, for a long time. You see something you cannot unsee. And that space of unity and compassion is always something you can reach back to, a mountaintop you can see from a distance. It helps the most addicted smoker quit, simply because, in the context of awe and love, smoking becomes irrelevant. It reconciles people to death, the way religion used to. It can break depression — by scrambling the furrows and rigid patterns of thought that keep us in a groove of self-orbiting misery. The medical potential is extraordinary. (...)
I think of them also as the real and most powerful antidote to opioids and to the condition the opioids are a misbegotten response to: loneliness, depression, and a lack of meaning. Opioids are one solution to our crisis of meaning, in as much as they numb you to sleep. Psychedelics are another: a new unveiling of awe and awakening. In that respect, the ’60s got the metaphor wrong. These are not a means to drop out; they are a path to dropping back in."]
