Questioning Psychedelic Therapy
In 2020, Oregon legalized psychedelic therapy and decriminalized a “personal use” amount of all drugs (amounts clearly chosen by a novice, but I'm not complaining). Since then, administrators in Oregon have argued endlessly about how to roll out and govern legal psychedelic therapy. Numerous psychedelic companies have made their Initial Public Stock Offerings with an excited reception and the accompanying media attention. CNN asks “Psychedelics: Can getting high improve your mental health?” Business Insider published “Kevin O’leary: Why I’m betting big on psychedelics”, even Fox News mustered the lackluster “Magic Mushrooms could help treat depression, study finds”.
As an Oregonian, I supported both ballot measures, but more for personal reasons than policy ones. Now that psychedelic capitalism is truly here, what exactly are we in for? For now, we’re going to leave out the horrifying possibilities of corporate statist psychedelic drug chemists (the Shulgin of Wall Street?), because the subject deserves a deeper treatment.
I recently finished the extremely fun Chaos, Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O’neill. In an exhaustive, yet inconclusive exploration of CIA mind control and the psychedelic 60s, O’neill entertains and makes a solid case for the possibility that the CIA perfected a terrifying level of brainwashing and mind control. One of O'neills major accomplishments was uncovering a document in which the infamous MKultra psychologist Joly West claims to have successfully erased and replaced a major life event from someone's memory using a combination of hypnosis and LSD. Looking back on history though, even assuming the CIA did accomplish this feat, the utility of this tactic hardly seems worth the trouble when you can still just pay a thug to wack a guy the old fashion way.
To contrast the paranoid perspective is the self-reprogramming of Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson, and the metaprogramming of John C. Lilly, among other psychonauts. In many ways, Joly West can be seen as the evil Tim Leary. Leary and Wilson both spent most of their adult lives researching and cataloging the many approaches and techniques of self-hypnosis, with the aid of many intoxicants. They felt that the limits of this metaprogramming were, as John Lilly put it, the limits of the human imagination – which themselves are further limits to be transcended. This definitely includes Joly West’s memory replacement and much, much more.
It seems pretty clear that curing depression is well within the realm of even a conservative estimate of the possibilities of psychedelics. But is it a good idea? There are clearly cases of extreme PTSD for which psychedelic therapies are an absolute miracle, but the problem appears when we encounter the current models of anxiety and depression as chemical imbalances. Doctors prescribe all sorts of dangerous drugs to deal with what are essentially natural responses to real stimuli from the environment, turning entire cohorts of children into the clichéd, pilled-out housewives of the 50s and 60s. But these classes of dangerous drugs only mask the symptoms of those responses, whereas the psychedelic approach reprograms the brain to essentially leave out those environmental stimuli – be it terrible poverty, war, soulless capitalism or worse.
On the face of it, the new psychedelic therapy is being billed as a guided trip, wrapped in the authentic wisdom of some non-existent tribal psychedelic shamanism. But functionally, is it closer to Lilly’s metaprogramming or West’s MKulta brainwashing?
In Michael Pollan's uninspired How to Change Your Mind, he details the unofficial tripper-guide agreement, which includes some pretty suspect lines about submitting to your trip guide. The line between guided trip and drug-assisted hypnosis is a murky one that may be a matter of individual susceptibility, with most people falling on the susceptible side. Right-wing billionaire finance creep Peter Thiel, an actual super villain, financially backs a publicly traded psychedelics company, Atai, who is currently pushing ketamine as an at-home treatment for run-of-the-mill depression. All this so we can all better enjoy the deadly heat, gut cancer, the brink of nuclear war, next season's sitcoms, traffic, Zoom meetings, and crushing loneliness.
Luckily, there is a simple answer to this problem: buy your drugs from a dirty hippy-like red-blooded Americans have done for a generation. Better yet, learn to find or cook them up for yourself!
In a post to his substack Burning Shore, titled The Elephant LSD, Erik Davis makes two relevant points. The first is that LSD has mostly been sidelined in our current psychedelic resurgence, in part because it is not ideal for clinical studies. Compared to psilocybin, it takes too long to metabolize, making therapeutic sessions significantly longer. This introduces an aspect of what James C. Scott would call “illegibility”, meaning something defies the state’s attempts to catalogue and categorize it. Maybe now we can stake out a new frontier of feral psychedelics that elude commodification.
The second point is that LSD, and here we can include all of Alexander Shulgin’s designer psychedelics, are western creations. Awareness of this fact might help us to avoid attempts at colonizing and over simplifying indigenous psychedelic wisdom and plants, not necessarily by using chemical psychedelics instead of plants, but by using the history of western psychedelics to create western models, myths, and protocols for the psychedelic experience. What lessons do we still have to learn from psychonauts like Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Art Kleps and Robert Anton Wilson?
Ian Blumberg-Enge
Ian Blumberg-Enge is a model agnostic anarchist, writer, and utopian kook. His work is focused on the intersection of mysticism and anarchism. He is co-author, with Peter J. Carrol, of Interview with a Wizard, published by Mandrake of Oxford.