'How to Change Your Mind' reveals the amazing history and tantalizing potential of psychedelic drugs
newsdepo.com
I’ve been on the road this week, and haven’t had a chance to do the heavy reading it takes to get through the latest issues of PNAS, Science, and Nature. So I’m breaking with the weekly round up from the week’s peer-reviewed journals, to instead focu'How to Change Your Mind' reveals the amazing history and tantalizing potential of psychedelic drugs
I’ve been on the road this week, and haven’t had a chance to do the heavy reading it takes to get through the latest issues of PNAS, Science, and Nature. So I’m breaking with the weekly round up from the week’s peer-reviewed journals, to instead focus on what I actually read during a week spent mostly in cars and waiting rooms. How to change your mind, by Michael Pollan Michael Pollan has long been one of my favorite authors. His books The Omnivore’s Dilemma and The Botany of Desire made me seriously rethink both what I eat, and the relative roles of plants and animals. His books can be always be counted on for some challenging prose, unconventional views, a willingness to point fingers at everyday assumptions, and openness about Pollan’s personal views and experiences. In his latest work, Pollan looks at psychedelic drugs, and in particular at psilocybin and LSD. What Pollan reveals is a history that most people didn’t just forget, they never knew it in the first place. While the popular image of LSD begins with Timothy Leary wearing love beads, and ends with a million bits of paper printed with happy faces, the truth is that both drugs had more than a decade of serious, and extraordinarily promising, clinical work in the books before Leary came onto the scene. Pollan details much of this history, and it’s not just fascinating — it’s almost as intoxicating as a cup of mushroom tea. Again and again, both compounds were shown to be effective in helping people break cycles of addiction, and in dealing with mental health issues that other techniques had barely scratched. More than that, psychedelics proved to have a powerful effect on “well” people. In almost every trial, a large percentage of those involved ranked their experience with these drugs as among the most important, most valuable events of their lives. And that impact tended to last. This wasn’t an experience that had to be repeated regularly. Participants still reported that these experiences had shaped their lives, years after a single ‘trip.” But it’s exactly that amazing, powerful, and often highly positive experience that brought psychedelics into conflict with authority. Those who tried the drugs were not addicted in the sense that they felt the need to take them again (and in fact, neither drug is at all addicting in the traditional sense). However, they tended to be evangelical, anxious to share what they felt was a genuinely spiritual, transcendent moment with friends, relatives…with everyone. It seems almost inevitable that eventually that circle of evangelists would include someone like Leary, who saw psychedelics not as a drug for the individual, but as a tonic for society. Whatever his intentions, his actions didn’t just terrify authorities who heard the “turn on, tune in, drop out” motto as a threat to the nation’s future—and their ability to scrape together enough young men to keep Vietnam burning. He also terrified other psychedelic researchers who, rightly, saw Leary as someone who was taking an important, potentially breakthrough tool, and endangering its use by turning it into a symbol of disruption. But Leary is actually a very small part of the book. Pollan spends much more time with the people who came before Leary in the first age of psychedelic research, then devotes even more attention to those who have come after. A kind of psychedelic renaissance began in the last two decades, with the government finally edging past the fear that turned LSD and psilocybin into schedule 1 “drugs of abuse.” Many of the experiments of the 1950s and 1960s are now being repeated, and expanded on, with greater rigor and a much better understanding of what these drugs are doing. And…come inside. I’m not done with this. Read more