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.
One point that surfaces again and again in the book is … just what are these drugs doing? Not in the chemical sense: The ability of these drugs to emulate serotonin and fit into the chemical lock of neurotransmitters is much better understood now—in part because that first generation of psychedelic work really kicked off much of the research into brain chemistry.
It’s the other part of what they do that generates more, and more uncomfortable, discussion among researchers. That is: Are the spiritual, metaphysical insights of people who have taken these drugs “authentic?” It seems clear enough that the numinous experiences are just as valid, deep, and lasting in their way as anything achieved by fasting, prayer, and meditation. But are they real? Are people who undergo transcendent, ineffable experiences after taking these drugs having a drug trip…or gaining insight into a higher order of the universe?
Is someone who takes LSD, and gains a sense of being face to face with some ultimate reality, actually face to face with some ultimate reality?
On the face of it, the question may seem a little silly. And you would think it would be silly to serious scientific researchers, as well. But it’s hard to wring a definitive statement—from either those who have tried psychedelics or those who have watched their effects on test subjects. Those who have used psychedelics tend to report again and again an experience that destroys their sense of individual ego and removes boundaries that usually surround the idea of “self.” Those who come back from these experiences are frequently, genuinely altered by that moment. Altered enough that it’s notable not just to researchers conducting post-event interviews, but to friends and families, who often see them as more open, more curious, and more loving. It’s hard to dismiss that kind of effect.
And because one of the points the book drives home is the importance of “set and setting” in the results of a psychedelic session, the fact that those researchers guiding these people through the experience tend to expect strong, positive experiences with spiritual overtones…tends to make those kind of experiences occur. In the earlier years of psychedelic research, when many of the psychologists working with the drugs were Freudian, their patients tended to come back with very Freudian imagery.
Having the edges of the ego shattered makes the patients in these studies uniquely suggestible. Those expecting to confront their childhood experiences are likely to do so. Those who expect to gain a vision of how all creatures are connected may get that, just as readily.
So it’s not real? Not really real. Eh…that seems very hard to say with any certainty.
Every portion of the book is fascinating and loaded with incidents that would seem impossible if they hadn’t happened: Life magazine overtly supporting of psychedelic drugs in the 1950s. How the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous shook off his own addiction through the use of a psychedelic. The connection between the start of the Canadian health care system and using LSD for treatment. Cary Grant reporting that LSD not only made him a better person, but made him more attractive to women (a statement that generated lines of men anxious to try the drug). How the techniques used today for guiding patients through sessions were invented by a smuggler with a third-grade education and a penchant for carrying a .45 pistol. And most of all, how many people tried to keep the kernel of psychedelic research alive through decades of neglect and suppression.
Oh yeah, and if like me, you grew up in the era of drug PSAs stating that LSD caused “chromosome damage” …it doesn’t.
The book also includes personal experiences by Pollan, who not only went to the Pacific Northwest to gather mushrooms with a noted fungus expert, but volunteered for a series of experiences with underground “spirit guides” operating beyond the clinical environment. Pollan’s descriptions of his own sessions are interesting…though like anyone else who has tried to describe such moments over the past sixty years, Pollan admits that his words are both unable to adequately capture what he experienced, and derivative of ideas and phrases penned by earlier “explorers.”
Like with all of Pollan’s books, I came out feeling informed and excited about the topic. And, despite a lifelong fear of losing control that has kept me able to number the times I’ve overindulged in any substance on exactly two fingers, I came out with a desire to have a psychedelic experience of my own.
I have a particular reason to be interested in the possible effects that psychedelics might have, in my case. I’m aphantasic. That is, I’m not capable of forming an internal mental image.
Like many people with aphantasia, until a few years ago when I read or heard someone say something like “picture this...” I had no idea that people were, somehow, actually picturing something. I thought it was an expression for the kind of thing that goes on in my head. Tell me to picture a dog, and what I get isn’t an image. It’s kind of list of dog-associated properties. Not a visible list. More…dog stuff comes to the fore. In little bundles of…gestalt. Sort of.
About the best I can do to generate an image is to press on my closed eyelids, which creates a pattern of intricate, intertwined geometric shapes. It also eventually makes my eyes hurt.
So, I have to wonder if a few grams of psilocybin or micrograms of LSD would be enough to turn on that internal projector, giving me a glimpse of not just some transcendent reality, but an ability that’s apparently shared by over 99 percent of the people around me. I even wonder if, like many of the effects that these experiences seem to generate, that effect might linger.
If you’re out there, psychedelic research director, and you want to help me address that curiosity, my email is on the masthead.
And trust me, if someone does bring me in for research, I’ll be happy to write about it. But don’t expect me to eff the ineffable any better than Michael Pollan already has.