The Psychedelic Revolution Revisited

Image from Brian Blomerth's comic Bicycle Day

Like many, my high school and university years were misspent in imagining that the widespread use of psychedelic substances would provide some kind of transcendent experience for everyone which would prove to be a panacea for all social ills. This was an idea brought on by reading books such as The Doors of Perception, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Crying of Lot 49, Dharma Bums, among many others (although most of these are about some really bad trips). In addition to this diet of semi-literary junk food, I also imbibed many discussions about Terrence McKenna’s ideas, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, and erowid trip reports by anonymous psychonauts. More recently, Brian Blomerth’s comic books Bicycle Day, about Hoffman’s invention of LSD, and Lilly Wave, about John Lilly’s NASA funded experiments to give dolphins LSD, blasted me back into nostalgia for psychedelic utopianism.

1960s idealism regarding psychedelics combined with 1990s techno-utopianism was still the flavor of the mid-2000s. It had not yet gone entirely stale. Classmates majoring in chemistry professed a secret ambition to manufacture lysergic acid, and if they couldn’t manage that, at least MDMA. Bitcoin was not yet a legitimate tradeable commodity but a way to anonymously buy Chinese research chemicals which would have psychedelic effects. Ketamine was not yet a trend in the United States, though Northern England was pioneering it as a party drug. As if flung out of time, we still gossiped about large-scale acid tests in California, rumors of public drinking water laced with LSD for a mass scale consciousness awakening that would usher in a world built upon love and wisdom. At the heart of it, we wanted fun, sex, and parties, but we wanted them to be coated in some kind of meaningful, intellectual, spiritual gloss. At the same time, syrupy tales of Indian and Pakistani soldiers who meditated together to resolve border disputes fueled a belief that transcendental soul connections held the key to the end of violence.

It was a trend in university for some of the more politically active students to advocate for the legalization of all drugs (but mainly cannabis). This same idea was often bandied about in narco-states, and, not really understanding the nature of this industry fully, these same idealistic students saw these proposals as highly progressive. The legalization of all drugs became a progressive position, but at that time, these views remained firmly outside of the mainstream, and despite my interest in them, I believed that they would likely always stay there. Naively, I also believed that legalization seemed like a good idea, that it would resolve mass incarcerations and mafia related violence. If alcohol, a substance that could cause alcoholism which killed many people around the world yearly, could be legalized and regulated in order to end prohibition-era crime, I wondered why psychedelic substances couldn’t be. I’m ashamed to say that I also engaged in conspiracy theory-esque speculation about the reasons why the world was the way I understood it (and I didn’t understand it well at all).

The county where I was born and raised was infamous for drug smuggling, glamorized as cocaine cowboys, and I had a front row seat to what the drug-based economy had created: a shallow, cardboard wealth, environmental degradation and breakneck construction, and a lack of meaningful job opportunities. It was a social model I wouldn’t wish on any place, yet I was promoting it and thought that it would produce a result that was different than what I witnessed.

More than a decade later, many of these ideas and concepts which I held in common with my social circle became ascendant. Cannabis was legalized recreationally in more and more states and was legalized medicinally in my own state. Ketamine clinics became a common street side site, and it became simpler to get a prescription for it. Articles praising the medicinal benefits of psychedelic use in treating depression and post-traumatic stress disorder abounded. Typically, these narratives featured a suicidal veteran, someone to inspire the reader’s respect and sympathy. Somehow, they worked, and more states’ laws changed to accommodate these drugs. When twenty years ago, mainstream portrayals of substances such as Ketamine would have emphasized its dangers and the loss of bladder control (“just say no” campaigns), these side effects are now de-emphasized and purely the benefits are played up. But why is it necessary at all to advertise or market drugs when it has cost so much money for years just to try and stop people from buying and selling them?

Everything that I believed in as a high schooler was coming true. But now that I was an adult, this began to alarm me. The world that I now lived in was far larger than it was when I was in high school. I began to understand why Guatemala, Mexico, or Honduras’ presidents often brought up the idea of legalizing all drugs – it was to try to tame the mafias that were responsible for out-of-control violence in the country, not, as I had thought, from any idea that these drugs were safer for the human body than alcohol.

Behind the idealistic words spouted by some Dutch or US based psychedelic research institute, sounding too beautiful to be true, was the frightening desperation of pharmaceutical pushers, nosing out new markets.

I’ve never actually done Ketamine, it was not that popular in my region at the time I would have been interested. But I noticed references to it became extremely prolific online several years ago, and its medical legalization followed on. A cursory internet search for Ketamine and its pharmaceutical incarnation, Spravato nasal spray, describes its unbelievably unexplainable power to nearly cure depression. A lot of insurance plans can now cover these treatments as well, which patients can receive weekly.

But imagine for a second, that, without any context, one of your relatives, such as your mom, who has been under a “treatment resistant” depression for years, very likely due to her self-sacrificing and self-suppressing behavior and the social isolation that often comes with the territory of motherhood, is prescribed weekly Ketamine infusions by her doctor. This has been promised to her as a new “miracle drug” by marketers, who have led an aggressive word-of-mouth campaign on its off-label use. She goes to a clinic and receives the nasal infusions in a doctor’s office setting in which an escort who may or may not be a nurse practitioner but very likely is not an MD, tells her to lie down and turns out the lights before walking out and leaving the door open a crack. Like all doctor’s offices, there is no feeling of relaxation in this setting, and the air conditioner is too cold, and she can hear vague sounds from the hallway of nurses laughing. Uninitiated completely to psychedelic experiences, she proceeds to then have the worse trip of her life. However, since no one has ever given her that kind of warning or vocabulary about tripping, she has no idea what she is experiencing, she’s just in a doctor’s office dissociating and sweating bullets while also feeling chills and possibly hearing sirens believing that ambulances are coming to take her away because she’s dead and left her body.

This can describe some patient experiences for psychedelic treatments. Many people, without training, placed in an isolated, medicalized environment and given a mind altering, psychedelic substance, tend to have a bad experience. That’s not surprising. In fact, early pioneering researchers of psychedelic substance use in a clinical setting, such as Timothy Leary’s midcentury work (his early academic work, not his later crackpot sensationalism), emphasize the importance of setting, mindset, and prior experience. These factors have been emphasized in the use of psychedelic substances as a treatment since they began being toyed with in a scientific setting. Although many patients, who have more of a background in psychedelic use, report very positive experiences with ketamine therapy, there’s no denying that using psychedelics as medicine within the context of the current medical system feels reckless. Also, the language of love, peace, understanding, freedom, and connection is a powerful language, and it can easily be pressed into the service of pushers, as it has been for years.

When we were young, we thought that the psychedelics themselves could entirely alter the system, that mere exposure could irrevocably change a person’s whole inner worldview, could enlighten them. As it turns out, mere substances couldn’t touch the system at all. The system stayed exactly as it was and psychedelic substances were easily coopted to do its bidding, were easily turned into commodities. It turns out, the substances themselves aren’t miraculous, magical, or powerful. They are simply material. Rather, it was our ideas and our desires that were overpowering and intoxicating to us.