The White House endorses research on psychedelics

Andrew Jacobs, A Long, Strange Trip: How the G.O.P. Came to Embrace Psychedelic Drugs, NYTimes, May 3, 2026.

Mindbending may be just the word to describe the Oval Office ceremony on April 18, when President Trump ordered federal agencies to speed up research into the potential therapeutic uses of illegal psychedelic compounds like LSD, peyote and MDMA.

Here was a law-and-order Republican and lifelong teetotaler championing the hallucinogenic substances that a previous Republican president, Richard Nixon, had condemned as “public enemy No. 1.” [...]

Mr. Trump’s bold efforts to soften the federal government’s stance on certain illegal drugs have been head-spinning — last month, the Justice Department, at the president’s behest, loosened restrictions on medical marijuana, too.

But experts in the field are not entirely surprised.

They note a steady easing of public opposition to psychedelics in recent years, much of it shaped by research that has chipped away at the stigma by demonstrating the drugs’ potential to treat intractable mental health conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and substance abuse.

There's much more at the link.

The state of Texas approves $50M for ibogaine trials

Texas Ibogaine Initiative, Texas Launches Largest Publicly-Funded Psychedelic Research Initiative in History with $50 Million Investment in Ibogaine, CISION PRWeb, May 22, 2025.

AUSTIN, Texas, May 22, 2025 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- In a historic and bipartisan move, the State of Texas has approved $50 million in state funding for drug development trials for ibogaine, a powerful, naturally occurring medicine showing extraordinary promise as a breakthrough treatment for substance use disorder, trauma-related conditions, and traumatic brain injury.

With the passage of House Bill 3717, authored by State Representative Cody Harris (R–Palestine), and Senate Bill 2308, sponsored by State Senator Tan Parker (R–Flower Mound), Texas now leads the country—and the world—in psychedelic research investment. This is the largest publicly funded psychedelic research initiative ever launched by any government worldwide.

"Ibogaine is the Manhattan Project of our time," Bryan Hubbard, Executive Director of the American Ibogaine Initiative and architect of the legislation, said. "We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to change the fabric of this country. And mighty Texas, in all its strength and independence, is the first state to stand up and lead a revolution in the treatment of trauma and addiction."

Ibogaine is a psychoactive alkaloid derived from West African botanical sources. Studies have shown that a single treatment can significantly interrupt substance dependence, reduce trauma symptoms, and promote neurological repair. Yet in the U.S., ibogaine remains a Schedule I drug, blocking formal research for decades. Thousands of Americans, particularly Veterans and first responders, have been forced to seek treatment abroad or go without.

After we're given the history of the initiative, financial arrangements:

The $50 million appropriation will help fund FDA-approved clinical trials of ibogaine in partnership with a drug developer, who will assume all financial risk and regulatory responsibility for advancing the treatment through the clinical trial process. Texas retains a financial stake in any future dividends from successful drug development, which could be used to help fund access to ibogaine treatment for Texans in need.

There's more at the link.

H/t Tyler Cowen.

The Taliban are shutting down the drug trade in Afghanistan

Azam Ahmed, The Once Booming Drug Town Going Bust Under Taliban Rule, NYTimes, Dec. 18, 2024. [plus photographs by Bryan Denton]

Bakwa was once the center of the drug trade in Afghanistan. Now it is practically empty.

An oasis stretched far into the desert, a vast sea of emerald stalks and scarlet poppy flowers that grew to the horizon.

The Taliban operated openly, running a social experiment unlike anything in the country. Tens — then hundreds — of thousands of people flocked here to escape the war and grow poppy, fleeing the American efforts to wipe out the crop. [...]

During the war, this remote district became a laboratory for a future Taliban state, providing money for the war and a sanctuary for the men fighting it.

All that has changed. The Taliban boom town is rapidly going bust.

The same insurgents who embraced opium to help finance their war have put an end to it, ordering a ban that has all but cleared Afghanistan of poppy and other illicit drugs.

What the United States and its allies failed to do in two decades of war, the Taliban has managed in two years of peace. In an area where poppy once dominated the landscape, barely a stalk remains.

There's much more at the link.

The Mexican drug cartels are a bit "like junior partners to corrupt government officials"

Samo Burja, Mexico’s Drug Cartels Are Not Competitors to the State, Bismarck Brief, May 8. 2024.

As of early 2024, despite the incarceration of leading cartel figures such as Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán Loera, the organization he headed, the Sinaloa Cartel, remains the dominant cartel in Mexico and is also an increasingly powerful force in drug networks across the world. Its main competitor is the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) and the two often engage in violent competition, alongside smaller cartels like the Gulf Cartel, the Juarez Cartel, the La Familia cartel, and many more local criminal organizations. In 2017, Americans consumed $153 billion worth of banned narcotics.4 The cartels satisfy a large fraction of this demand. There are no precise estimates of cartel revenues and profits, but it is likely that annual revenues are in the low tens of billions of dollars and profits total several billion after the costs of business, including bribes. The cartels also generate revenue from other criminal activities like human trafficking, extortion, and even illegal logging.

Around the world, such criminal activities have shown to be lucrative enough and resilient enough to state persecution to fund rebellions that could topple governments. For example, the Marxist FARC guerillas in Colombia, as well as multiple generations of Taliban rebels in Afghanistan—first fighting the Soviets, then the U.S.—were funded in this way. Because of the drug war, ongoing violence, and continued influence of cartels in Mexican society, Mexico has sometimes been described as a failed state and some U.S. politicians, such as former President Donald Trump and Republican Senator Tom Cotton, have even called for taking unilateral military action against the cartels, as was done against ISIS, the short-lived Islamist statelet in Iraq and Syria.5

But Mexico’s cartels are not ideologically or politically-motivated groups making the jump to crime to fund their activities. They are rather amorphous criminal groups motivated by profit-seeking, usually relying on familial and regional ties. From a business perspective, it is preferable to collaborate with the government when possible, rather than invite anarchy. Since, through bribery, the cartels represent an important source of revenue for Mexico’s elites, this interest is mutual.

As a result, the cartels are far more like junior partners to corrupt government officials rather than an independent and competing force of their own, though their allegiances have ebbed and flowed from the state level to the federal level—Mexico is a federation of united states—and seemingly back over the last sixty years. This makes Mexico’s cartels clients of the Mexican state, not its competitors, and, in turn, Mexico’s status as a client of the U.S. explains why the cartels continue to flourish and why there is unlikely to be any U.S. intervention in the near future.

And: "The drug trade is powerful in Mexico not because of its size, but because of its liquidity, anonymity, and informality, which makes it easy to enrich particular individuals."

There's much more at the link.

H/t Tyler Cowen.

THC harms human parasites

Why do essentially all adults use "recreational" drugs on a near daily basis? The standard story is that they hijack dopaminergic reward circuits. My colleagues & I are intrigued, however, that all such drugs harm human parasites. Two recent examples (1/2)https://t.co/9u6g5wEa5C pic.twitter.com/1tnWqvVduq

— Ed Hagen (@ed_hagen) January 28, 2024

AlphaFold and drug discovery

Ellen Callaway, AlphaFold found thousands of possible psychedelics. Will its predictions help drug discovery? Nature, Jan. 18, 2024.

Researchers have used the protein-structure-prediction tool AlphaFold to identify hundreds of thousands of potential new psychedelic molecules — which could help to develop new kinds of antidepressant. The research shows, for the first time, that AlphaFold predictions — available at the touch of a button — can be just as useful for drug discovery as experimentally derived protein structures, which can take months, or even years, to determine.

The development is a boost for AlphaFold, the artificial-intelligence (AI) tool developed by DeepMind in London that has been a game changer in biology. The public AlphaFold database holds structure predictions for nearly every known protein. Protein structures of molecules implicated in disease are used in the pharmaceutical industry to identify and improve promising medicines. But some scientists had been starting to doubt whether AlphaFold’s predictions could stand in for gold standard experimental models in the hunt for new drugs.

“AlphaFold is an absolute revolution. If we have a good structure, we should be able to use it for drug design,” says Jens Carlsson, a computational chemist at the University of Uppsala in Sweden.

The article presents material showing that AlphaFold is useful gor drug discovery in some cases, but not others.

Shoichet agrees that AlphaFold predictions are not universally useful. “There were a lot of models that we didn’t even try because we thought they were so bad,” he says. But he estimates that in about one-third of cases, an AlphaFold structure could jump-start a project. “Compared to actually going out and getting a new structure, you could advance the project by a couple of years and that’s huge,” he says.

That is the goal of Isomorphic Labs, DeepMind’s drug-discovery spin-off in London. On 7 January, the company announced deals worth a minimum of US$82.5 million — and up to $2.9 billion if business targets are met — to hunt for drugs on behalf of pharmaceutical giants Novartis and Eli Lilly using machine-learning tools such as AlphaFold.

The company says that the work will be aided by a new version of AlphaFold that can predict the structures of proteins when they are bound to drugs and other interacting molecules. DeepMind has not yet said when — or whether — the update will be made available to researchers, as earlier versions of AlphaFold have been. A competing tool called RoseTTAFold All-Atom3 will be made available soon by its developers.

Such tools won’t fully replace experiments, scientists say, but their potential to help find new drugs shouldn’t be discounted. “There’s a lot of people that want AlphaFold to do everything, and a lot of structural biologists want to find reasons to say we are still needed,” says Carlsson. “Finding the right balance is difficult.”

Why AI won’t revolutionize drug development

Jeffrey Funk - Gary N. Smith, No, AI probably won’t revolutionize drug development, Salon, September 24.

The opening paragraphs:

Drug development is expensive, time consuming, and risky. A typical new drug costs billions of dollars to develop and requires more than ten years of work — yet only about 0.02% of the drugs in development ever making it to market.

Some claim that AI, or artificial intelligence, will revolutionize drug development by ushering in much shorter development times and drastically lower costs. Many scientists and business consultants are especially optimistic about AI's ability to predict the shapes of nearly every known protein using DeepMind's AlphaFold, an artificial intelligence tool developed by Google parent company Alphabet; predicting this information with great detail would be key to quickly developing drugs. As one AI company boasts, "We … firmly believe that AI has the potential to transform the drug discovery process to achieve time and cost efficiencies."

Later:

The relative unimportance of AI in COVID development is consistent with the conclusion of many scientists that AI is not about to revolutionize drug development. The biggest problem is that clinical trials are the longest and typically most expensive part of the process, and AI cannot replace actual trials. Even AI's impact on drug discovery may be limited. A Science op-ed recently argued that, "[AI] doesn't make as much difference to drug discovery as many stories and press releases have had it…. Protein structure prediction is a hard problem, but even harder ones remain."

An often crucial part of drug development is to determine whether a drug binds to the candidate protein, something that MIT researchers have shown that AlphaFold cannot do and DeepMind admits AlphaFold can't do: "Predicting drug binding is probably one of the most difficult tasks in biology: these are many-atom interactions between complex molecules with many potential conformations, and the aim of docking is to pinpoint just one of them." [...]

One huge hurdle for all AI data mining algorithms is that the data deluge has made the number of promising-but-coincidental patterns waiting to be discovered far, far larger than the number of useful relationships — which means that the probability that a discovered pattern is truly useful is very close to zero.

There is more at the link.

How to Change Your Mind [Media Notes 75d] – What's Next?

I’ve watched the last two episodes of How to Change Your Mind, devoted to MDMA, known colloquially as ecstasy, and Mescaline respectfully.

MDMA

The MDMA episode concentrated on therapeutic uses, particularly in connection with PTSD. Much of the footage covered particular cases. MDMA allows you to talk through your traumatic experiences without negative affect and thus facilitates coming to terms with them. Spotlights pioneering independent researcher Alexander Shulgin, Rick Doblin, and the organization he founded, Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, which has funded studies conducted by the Department of Veterans Affairs. It noted that MDMA was close to FDA approval for therapeutic use.

Mescaline

Mescaline is the psychoactive ingredient in peyote, which has long been used in Native American communities in the United States and in Latin America. The episode goes into this history and has extensive interviews with contemporary Native Americans, particularly in connection with the Native American Church, which has succeeded in gaining access to peyote for ceremonial use. These interviews explore the therapeutic importance of peyote, but also its broader spiritual significance and its importance in maintaining a sense of cultural identity.

The last third of the episode gives a great deal of attention to the Decriminalize Nature movement, which is active throughout the United States in urging legislation to decriminalize entheogens (the term it has popularized for psychedelics). The goal is not so much to legalize the drugs but for law enforcement to give them low priority. The movement is at odds with those Native Americans who advocate for peyote. In part the issue is one of cultural appropriation, but it is also practical. Peyote is in limited supply because the cactus takes a long time to mature and exists only in a few locations. Native Americans don’t want the limited supply to be all but taken over by others. Consequently the decriminalize movement has excluded peyote from consideration. In a final note, Pollan noted that, for this reason, he chose not to try peyote.

The episode also mentioned the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece, which may have been mescaline based, though other psychedelics are possible as well. We also have footage from an interview with Aldous Huxley, who had tried mescaline and, in consequence, wrote The Doors of Perception (1953), which I read in my freshman year in college (but not in connection with any course). It has become a classic in the psychedelic literature.

This brings up a split in psychedelic community between populist and elitist theme. The populists, exemplified by Tim Leary advocate giving the drugs to everyone and thereby change the culture. Huxley was more elitist, advocating that use should be confined to “the best and brightest” (a phrase used in the episode) and the benefits would somehow filter down to the rest.

There is a final plea that the use of psychedelics can change our relationship to the natural world, something sorely needed in this time of climate crisis.

Overall?

The series does a good job of presenting the history of psychedelics over the last seven decades. Its strongest case is for therapeutic use. The spiritual and metaphysical case is (much) weaker. The problem, I fear, is with the larger culture. That of course is what the spiritual/metaphysical argument is about. We don’t seem to have the concepts and terms needed to frame a strong argument. Yes, psychedelics and psychedelic research were suppressed. More than that, a whole ‘zone’ of cultural development was impoverished, leaving us with New Age this and that. But that, I fear, is just a middle-class veneer over consumer culture.

It's not clear to me how Pollan could have addressed this.

I have this vague feeling that, when the Metaverse isn’t mostly hype and a way to sell more technology, it represents a desire for something that psychedelic culture was seeking, even promising, but couldn’t deliver – and not because the drugs were suppressed.

Intimations of a Fourth Arena?

I need to think more about this.

How to Change Your Mind [Media Notes 75c] – On the visual style.

Chris Vognar, With ‘How to Change Your Mind,’ Taking a Trip With Michael Pollan, NYTimes, July 25, 2022. I suspected that something like this might be going on:

Tall and bald with the build of a swimmer, Pollan is no Timothy Leary — he isn’t asking anyone to drop out — and the medical trials described and shown in “How to Change Your Mind” shouldn’t be confused with Ken Kesey’s freewheeling acid tests of the ’60s. Back then, when psychedelics left the laboratory and entered the counterculture, the power structure freaked out.

“Kids were going to communes, and American boys were refusing to go to war,” Pollan said. “President Nixon certainly believed that LSD was responsible for a lot of this, and he may well have been right. It was a very disruptive force in society, and that is why I think the media after 1965 turns against it after being incredibly enthusiastic before 1965.”

Junk science spread nonsense about LSD scrambling chromosomes. The drug was made illegal in California in 1967, and then nationally in 1970. Researchers weren’t forbidden from continuing their work with psychedelics, but the stigma made such work very rare until it re-emerged in the 2000s. Today, clinical trials are approved by the F.D.A. and D.E.A.

“From the early ’70s to the early ’90s, there was no approved psychedelic research in human subjects,” said Charles Grob, a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at U.C.L.A., who has written widely about psychedelic therapy. “Since then, research development has re-emerged and slowly evolved, until the last few years when professional and public interest in the topic appears to have exploded.”

Given evolving attitudes, one challenge facing the filmmakers, including the directors Alison Ellwood and Lucy Walker, was how to depict the psychedelic experience in a sophisticated way, without stumbling into the territory of a ’60s exploitation movie.

“We didn’t want to fall into the trap of using psychedelic visual tropes — wild colors, rainbow streaks, morphing images,” Ellwood wrote in an email. “We wanted to keep the visual style more personal, intimate and experiential. We wanted people watching the series who have not had their own psychedelic experiences to be able to relate to the visuals.”

One imaginative scene recreates the famous bicycle ride taken by the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, who first synthesized LSD in 1936 but didn’t discover its psychedelic effects until 1943 (accidentally). Feeling strange after ingesting 250 micrograms, Hofmann rode his bike during the peak of his trip. In “How to Change Your Mind,” we see the buildings around him bend and waver as he rides. The road beneath him blurs. The tombstones in a graveyard sway.

There’s more at the link.

The Times seems to going all-out on this. Here’s an opinion piece, Dana G. Smith, Taking the Magic Out of Magic Mushrooms. The piece isn’t quite the downer the title suggests. It’s about attempts to engineer drugs that have the therapeutic effects of psychedelics without the consciousness altering sensory effects.

How to Change Your Mind [Media Notes 75b] – Psilocybin brings depth to the series.

As I’ve already indicated, I found the first episode in Michael Pollan’s series, about LSD, to be disappointing. The second one, about psilocybin, is much better. Or at least I found it so.

It was natural to begin the series with LSD, for that’s the drug that brought psychedelics to public consciousness. The story’s simple: 1) Swiss chemist accidentally discovers it, 2) Timothy Leary turns on, tunes in, and urges the world to drop out, and 3) HIPPIES! I more or less lived through this story – I’m a bit older than Michael Pollan, who missed it – so the history wasn’t new to me, and this episode was mostly the history.

The second episode has history as well, the story of how Gordon Wasson, a J.P. Morgan banker and amateur mycologist, traveled to Oaxaca, Mexico, to meet María Sabina, a curandera, and thereby brought knowledge of psilocybin to the 20th century Western world. This brings a new dimension to the story. The story of LSD is a story of 20th century pharmaceuticals. But psilocybin is a naturally occurring substance that has been used by humans for centuries and centuries around the world to take these journeys, these trips, these investigations, making them a facet of humanity that has been sidelined by Western culture.

But that’s not how the episode opened. It opened with the story of an older woman who had been diagnosed with cancer. She took psilocybin (in a clinical setting) to help her overcome her fear of death, which it did. Here we see special effect used to present us with her trip, convincingly but not flamboyantly. This is done, I believe, three more times in the series. Once with Paul Stamets, a mycologist, once with a man suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and finally with Pollan himself. I thought this was quite effective. We also learned about the work done on psychedelics at the Spring Grove Clinic in Baltimore – I was aware of it at the time.

Taken in conjunction with the first episode, on LSD, we now have a much more rounded and fully realized picture of psychedelics. In particular, the first episode makes a connection between psychedelics and computer culture through the figure of Steward Brand, best-known as the creator of the Whole Earth Catalogue. Brand had settled in San Francisco, which was an important center of counter-cultural activity (Haight Ashbury was legendary), but the surrounding area, Silicon Valley to the southeast, was important in computer culture as well. Thus these two pivotal movements matured in close proximity.

In one sense they are very different. Computers are highly complex technology used to facilitate things in the external world. Whatever the chemical complexity of psychedelic drugs, anyone can ingest them, and take an inward journey. Both, however, are mind technologies, one a set of devices for externalizing mental activities, the other a group of drugs for re-ordering one’s own mind. Their physical conjunction is thus important. If we are to understand the course of cultural growth and change since the middle of the 20th century, we need to track the parallel evolution of these two movements.

Here's a brief chronology indicating some of the conjunctions of these two movements. It is derived from a book proposal I’d created, but failed to sell, about the interaction of these developments.

Mind Hacks R Us – Computing & Tripping to the Millennium’s End

I'm bumping this to the top of the queue so it can accompany my ongoing posts on artificial intelligence and my recent post on How to Change Your Mind. Perhaps I'll do another one or two on the series. I'm most of the way through the second episode, on psilocybin, and I like it better than the first. Perhaps the third will be even better. Addendum: It was different.

* * * * *

A bit earlier in this millennium I thought it would be interesting to write a book on the parallel evolution of computer culture and psychedelic culture in the United States from mid-century to the end of the millennium. I wrote up a proposal, called it Dreams of Perfection, and it went nowhere. Subsequently John Markoff and Fred Turner each published parts of the story. Now I’m publishing a slightly revised portion of that old book proposal as an independent document. I’ve cut the marketing portions of the proposal, leaving only the conceptual overview and the chapter summaries. I’d envisioned five longish chapters, one for each decade, each chapter keyed to a different film: Fantasia, Forbidden Planet, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Tron, and The Matrix. I’ve retained that structure in this précis and concluded it with a consolidated chronology is significant dates.

Downloadt Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/37206924/Mind_Hacks_R_Us_Computing_and_Tripping_to_the_Millenniums_End

Here's the consolidated chronology:

1936: Alan Turing publishes “On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” This paper established that some computations were, in principle, impossible to perform.

1936: Avant-garde playwright Antonin Artaud travels to Mexico to try mescaline. Artaud’s writings were very influential among the people who created the “happenings” of the 1960s and 1970s.

1938: LSD was first synthesized at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Switzerland, though its mind altering properties were not discovered until 1943. LSD, of course, was the major “drug” of the psychedelic 60s.

1945: Vannevar Bush published “As We May Think,” in the Atlantic Monthly. This article, written by a government research administrator, is often regarded as a harbinger of the personal computer revolution of the 1980s.

1945: Hungarian emigrant and polymath John von Neumann wrote “First Report on the Development of EDVAC,” the document that defined the basic scheme used to implement software in digital computers.

1953: Watson and Crick publish the double helix structure of DNA and thus initiate the age of microbiology, initiating biology into the information paradigm.

1954: J. R. R. Tolkein publishes The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers.

1954: Thorazine, the first major tranquilizer, is marketed.

1956: The Bathroom of Tomorrow attraction opens at Disneyland.

1959: John McCarthy proposes time-sharing to MIT’s director of computing; time-sharing would make computers much more accessible.

1960: Robert Heinlein publishes Stranger in a Strange Land, which would become a major point of literary reference in the drug and mystical counter-culture of the 1960s.

1966: LSD and other psychedelics are outlawed, making it illegal for people to take trips.

1966: Original Star Trek series debuts on television, starting an entertainment franchise that would produce offspring for the rest of the century.

1967: The Beatles release Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a triumph of high-tech electronics and the psychedelic imagination.

1968: President Nixon declares war on drugs.

1969: Herbert Simon publishes The Sciences of the Artificial, a collection of essays that makes fundamental insights of the artificial intelligentsia accessible to a larger audience.

1969: Man lands on the moon, the first time we have traveled to another world from ours – in physical reality.

1969: The Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) establishes a nationwide network linking computer researchers to one another. This is the original seed of the internet.

1977: Star Wars became a motion-picture blockbuster, wedding martial arts mysticism with a space opera story and high tech special effects.

1981: William Bennett appointed to head the National Endowment of Humanities, his first government post. This positioned him to declare and lead a culture war. Later he would become “Drug Czar” under President Bush.

1981: Ted Nelson publishes Computer Liberation, in which he describes an elaborate hypertext system he called Project Xanadu (after the kingdom described in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”).

1984: Apple Computer advertised their new Macintosh in a Super Bowl advertisement that pitched IBM in the role of Big Brother and the Mac as humankind’s liberator.

1984: William Gibson combines video game imagery with reggae music and mythology and sets it in the future, thus placing psychedelia and computing on equal terms in the cyberpunk world of Neuromancer.

1985: Steve Jobs purchases Pixar, from George Lucas, and establishes it as an independent computer graphics company. Pixar would go on to produce the first completely computer-generated motion pictures.

1990: The world-wide-web was proposed by Swiss researchers.

1991: Desert Storm, the first war televised live and in real-time. Now real war is at our fingertips, just like a video game.

1994: Netscape was founded, with its IPO in 1995. This is the first company created by the world-wide-web, and it started the dotcom bubble that was to burst in 2001.

1999: Inventor and businessman turned futurist guru Raymond Kurzweil publishes The Age of Spiritual Machines, a manifesto about a future in which machines will surpass the accomplishments of their human creators.

2000: Detroit Electronic Free Music Festive draws 1.5 million people in its first year and is dedicated to genres of music which cultivate trance states.

2003: Anti-war organizers used the world-wide-web to organize world-wide protests against the American-led war against Iraq.

2003: Two major books about psychedelic drugs and mysticism are published, Rational Mysticism, and Breaking Open the Head.

How to Change Your Mind [Media Notes 75a] – LSD for serious people: Mind-changing is asserted, not shown.

How to Change Your Mind is a four episode miniseries on Netflix based on Michael Pollan’s book of the same name. It has four episodes, each named after a different psychedelic drug: LSD, Psilocybin, MDMA, Mescaline. I’ve watched the first episode. Color me underwhelmed.

Pollan serves as an on-screen guide and narrator, and is appropriately serious. He’s very clear that LSD is a potentially mind-changing and therefore very important drug. But, to be honest, he’s also a bit boring.

Before I get going, however, let me quote from a review of the episode published by James Hallifax in Psychedelic Spotlight News:

Episode 1 of Netflix’s How to Change Your Mind is a great introduction to the topic of LSD for those who don’t already know a lot about the subject. Narrated by Michael Pollan, the show takes us on a journey through the history of the powerful compound, from its discovery and its early medical use, to secret CIA mind-control studies, the counterculture and its banning, and finally to our current renaissance.

From amazing clips of LSD’s inventor Albert Hofmann describing his “Problem Child,” to powerful personal testimonies of individuals who have healed their suffering through LSD, episode 1 is a fun and entertaining refresher on the topic of LSD for even experts in the field.

In short, How to Change Your Mind’s first episode is definitely worth the watch.

My favorite segment came when psychedelic researcher James Fadiman was discussing an early LSD study on its effects on creativity, held at Stanford University in 1960. They recruited 48 senior scientists from various fields, all of whom had been working on a scientific problem to no avail for at least three months. In the study, each scientist was dosed with 100 micrograms of LSD, which can be considered a medium-sized dose.

As Fadiman describes it, “out of the people who came, we had 48 problems and 48 satisfactory solutions.” In other words, the LSD study was a stunning success. The fact that all 48 scientists —who had all been working on their problem for at least 3 months!!!— credited their LSD experience with solving their problem is nothing short of a miracle. True, perhaps this study would not meet the rigid rules of today’s clinical trials, but the results speak for themselves. According to Fadiman, “We had patents, we had publications, and because most of these people worked in industry, we also had products. And eventually the computer world emerged here.”

Despite this amazing story — and many more held within the one-hour premiere — the debut episode was not without its faults. Primary among them is its over-reliance on anecdotal stories, weaving a narrative that is not necessarily always backed up by current scientific study. The best example of this comes towards the end of the episode when Michael Pollan turns towards the subject of microdosing LSD.

About that last paragraph, I’m neither here nor there.

My problem with the episode is a bit different. It’s serious and, on the whole, dull. There’s some nifty special effects used to recreate the legendary bicycle ride taken by Albert Hoffman after he’d taken a substantial dose of LSD, 250 micrograms. There are some special effects scenes as well, and footage from some of Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests from the 1960s. But there was nothing like this:

That’s a mural painted by Bob Hieronimus in Levering Hall on the campus of Johns Hopkins University in 1968-1969. I was a student at Johns Hopkins at the time; I saw that mural being painted. I listened to music played in that room, which functioned as a coffee house on the weekends. I rehearsed with a rock and roll band in a room next to that. That’s what I think of when I think about when I think about LSD.

Mind you, I am not now nor have I ever been an acid head. I’ve only taken LSD twice – which I’ll get to in a minute – but I was there and, if not exactly immersed in the culture, I spent a lot of time at its edges. I read a lot of the scientific literature on LSD and other psychedelics, not to mention a wide variety of material on mystical experience, I listed to the music, wore the clothes. And whatever THAT is, it’s missing from this episode.

The problem is one of technique, of aesthetics. How do you convey THAT while at the same time making it clear that you are not stoned out of your freaking mind? It’s clear that Pollan thinks psychedelics are important, that it’s important that we investigate them, and learn how to use them. He’s also aware that The Establishment, if you will, freaked out and made LSD illegal in 1968, shutting down all research on it. I mean, Pollan writes for The New York Times, fercrissakes, he IS the establishment (almost). He wants to steer clear of all that crazy stuff that freaks people out while at the same time knowing that, considered appropriately, the craziness is the point. It's not crazy, but rather reflects a different order in the universe.

As for my two acid trips, one was in January of 1972 and lasted approximately two weeks and the other was, I believe, in the Spring of 1974 and only lasted several hours. In neither case did I experience the visions and other sensory effects typical of LSD trips. Why, I don’t know. But that first one, that was a trip. Here’s a couple of paragraphs from an article I published in 1975:

What happens on an LSD trip is intimately bound up with one's expectations. I had lots of them. I expected to receive an insight (at least one!) into my study of language which would make it possible to write my masterwork. I had also expected to experience all kinds of nifty sensory effects. None of my expectations were met.

The sensory world remained the same and I spent two weeks living the life of a character in a Thomas Pynchon novel. I was on a quest and every event I faced was a test of my herohood. Nothing was what it appeared to be; everything had a hidden meaning. If I succeeded in my tasks the world would be saved and I would be inducted into the Secret Society of Master Creators (I didn't call it that at the time, but that is what it was) and spend the rest of my life as a Master of Improvisational Musics.

Winter in Baltimore is a dreary rainy affair. But those days in January were like the first days of spring–proof that I had succeeded and the world was being reborn. I received a letter from a friend which was misdated; the year read “1973” rather than “1972.” But I didn't think it was misdated; I merely assumed that self-sacrifice (as in Christ and Oedipus–sometimes I lay in bed at night pressing my palms into my eye sockets wondering if I would be called on to blind myself) had eliminated a year from time and that it was in fact 1973. (I didn't bother checking calendars.)

The account continues in that vein for a half-dozen more paragraphs and concludes:

Many of the people around me surely thought I was going mad. But none of this seemed in the least bit incoherent or confusing to me. And, as my cryptic messages went unanswered, as events refused to follow the course indicated by the signs, I realized that I had been acting out fantasies but that I had not broken free of them. My ego had been inflated, but not transcended. The dance had been exhilarating, but it lacked grace.

During that period I had signed up for trumpet lessons at the Peabody Institute and, as a result, brought my technique up a notch and have continued with the trumpet ever since. As important, perhaps more so, I completed my Master’s Thesis on “Kubla Khan,” and have been pursuing that work ever since. Would I have done those things if I hadn’t taken LSD? I don’t know. The fact is that before that trip I hadn’t played my trumpet in over a year and I was blocked on my thesis.

Pollan surely knows of that. It’s why he wrote the book and undertook this miniseries. I’ve not read the book, though I’ve read a review or two, but something is missing in this first episode. It tends to be strong on the facts, even if only anecdotally, and seems pitched at people who don’t know those facts. If you’ve lived through them, then there’s not much here for you. It jogs your memory, but leaves your imagination untouched.

I’m reminded of some lines from Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode”:

Yon crescent Moon, as fixed as if it grew
In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue;
I see them all so excellently fair
I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!

Where’s the feeling? Maybe things will improve in the other episodes. We’ll see.

"Psilocybin causes rapid, persistent growth of dendritic spines in frontal cortex in vivo."

"Psilocybin causes rapid, persistent growth of dendritic spines in frontal cortex in vivo. The psilocybin-evoked synaptic rewiring is fast & enduring, & may provide a structural trace for long-term integration of experiences & lasting beneficial actions." https://t.co/5p7kKDr01D

— @ChuckBaggett Chuck Baggett 🏴 #FreedomOfMovement (@ChuckBaggett) July 6, 2021

One pill makes you larger, one pill makes you small, but the pills that NIH gives you ... are going to be pretty interesting in the future.

Head of @NIH backs steps to expand research into psychedelic drugs, citing promising developments from studies of their use in treating mental illnesseshttps://t.co/usJkoRSQfu

— Times Higher Education (@timeshighered) June 4, 2021

Keep it going, the modern psychedelic renaissance

"The center is being created to “ensure that the momentum created by the modern psychedelic renaissance is sustained,” according to NYU psychiatry professor Michael P. Bogenschutz, who will be the center’s director." https://t.co/FdjP9aIvyr

— 🌈Paul O’Shea 🏳️‍🌈🇮🇪 (@paullydjoshea) April 24, 2021

Codgers just wanna' get high and bask in the meaning of it all [42] – Ayahuasca

Casey Schwartz, Taking Ayahuasca When You’re a Senior Citizen, NYTimes 10.17.19 (in the Style section, no less).

At 74, the venture capitalist George Sarlo might not have seemed an obvious candidate for an ayahuasca experience. Mr. Sarlo, a Hungarian Jewish immigrant who arrived in the United States in 1956, has had great professional success as the co-founder of Walden Venture Capital. He lives in an upscale San Francisco neighborhood, in a large house with an unobstructed view of the Golden Gate Bridge.

And yet something was always lacking. Mr. Sarlo’s father had disappeared from their Budapest home in 1942. He had been drafted in a forced labor battalion, an experience he did not survive. At age 4, George had told himself that it was because he was “a bad boy” that his father had left that day, early in the morning, without saying goodbye. He believes that he never recovered from that early loss.

Mr. Sarlo’s close friend, a doctor, told him about ayahuasca, a psychedelic brew made from the Banisteriopsis caapi vine, native to the Amazon. Used for centuries in sacred healing traditions throughout Central and South America, ayahuasca is now gaining popularity around the world, featured in recent headlines about the habits of Silicon Valley, though N, N-Dimethyltryptamine or DMT, the active ingredient in an ayahuasca trip, is mostly illegal in the United States (there are a couple of exceptions, under religious exemption). Ayahuasca tourism is thriving, with more and more people happy to fly thousands of miles to take part in weeklong ceremonies in Peruvian jungles, or to seek out more luxurious contexts, like a four-star resort that comes complete with masseuses, pools, and state of the art fitness centers. And, notably, ayahuasca’s increasing popularity knows no age limits: many of those now showing interest are squarely in Mr. Sarlo’s own demographic.

FWIW, I note in passing that some of the pioneering research on psychedelic mushrooms was done by Gordon Wasson, who was a VP at J. P. Morgan.

Later in the article, near the end:

People might startle at the image of someone old enough to be their grandparents willingly embarking on a night of hallucinations and vomiting. But Sophia Rokhlin, co-author of the new book on ayahuasca, “When Plants Dream,” said when it comes to the tradition of drinking ayahuasca, nothing could be more natural. In countries like Ecuador, for example, among tribes who practice healing traditions with ayahuasca (more often referred to there as yagé), the dynamic Ms. Rokhlin has more often observed is this: the elders are increasingly the only ones drinking. “The use of ayahuasca and plant medicines is actually quite stigmatized and looked down upon by communities who are really trying to get a leg up in the capitalist economy,” she said. Younger members of communities who partake in ayahuasca ceremonies, she said, are more intent on building materially successful lives in a global economy than they are preserving their local rituals.

But in the United States, Ms. Rokhlin sees the growth of interest among the 70-and-up set as inevitable, for two main reasons: first,more and more scientific studies are being published showing that psychedelic agents have potential in treating persistent mental distress. In one small study of 17 adults, ayahuasca helped relieve recurrent depression. She said that scientifically backed research matters more to this older demographic than trippy “kaleidoscopic articles in Vice” extolling the ayahuasca experience. But as well, she said, for those “closer to the end than the beginning,” there is also an increasing sense that “there’s nothing left to lose.”

However, there are risks ("Danger, Will Robinson!", who wasn't exactly Alone In Deep Space):

This isn’t to say there aren’t risks associated. Heart problems can be disqualifying. So can many prescription medications. Rick Doblin, the founder of Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (or MAPS), notes that for this older age group, a smaller dose of any psychedelic often suffices, as we can become more sensitive to drugs as we age.

Dr. Charles Grob, professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the UCLA School of Medicine, who has been researching psychedelics since the 1980s, said: “With elderly people, there should be some emphasis on being aware that higher doses may have a level of risk that would not be present with younger individuals. Particularly for cardiovascular problems,” such as arrhythmia. “There needs to be more research.” Dr. Grob advises older people to get a full cardiac work-up before using psychedelics.

Dr. Dan Engle, a psychiatrist in Boulder, Colo., warns that another risk for people in their 70s and 80s is the number of pharmaceutical drugs that are contraindicated for ayahuasca, including the most common form of anti-depressants, Selective Serontonin Reuptake Inhibitors (S.S.R.I.s). “But all of that said, ayahuasca is a visionary medicine and it can heal core psychological wounds,” Dr. Engle said. “At that stage in their life, in their 70s and 80s, ayahuasca can help people become present and have more acceptance.”

More peace, less fear:

For Mr. Kilkenny, what the ayahuasca journeys have provided him with is profound “information.” Now, in the moments when he recognizes his own need for validation, he is less inclined to act on it. [...] “My life is a lot quieter and it’s a lot more peaceful,” he said. “Less seeking, less grasping, less needing. Less fear.”

See my 2003 essay review, "Ayahuasca Variations", which is about Benny Shanon, The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience (Oxford University Press, 2002).

Cat and cannabis in the garden

A Parisian woman with her cat in her cannabis garden, 1910 pic.twitter.com/L5qweRqOaJ

— 41 Strange (@41Strange) August 10, 2019

Psilocybin as a treatment for depression

Psilocybin Could Soon Be a Legal Treatment for Depression.

Johns Hopkins Professor, Roland Griffiths, Explains How Psilocybin Can Relieve Suffering https://t.co/R4cJXk7pxJ pic.twitter.com/P3CbEkwiRh

— Open Culture (@openculture) November 23, 2018

Galen Strawson on Michael Pollan on Psychedelics

Galen Strawson review's Michael Pollan's How To Change Your Mind: The new science of psychedelics in TLS.

What should we call the experience?

There’s a terminally weary group of words used to characterize psychedelic experience. Among them we find (in descending order of association with the supernatural) “holy”, “sacred”, “mystical”, “spiritual”; “transcendence”, “bliss”, “selflessness”, “oneness”. Some are so loaded, and directly question-begging (in the original sense of the term), that it seems best to introduce a new neutral term – “X” – for the purposes of this review. X is whatever it is that is most powerfully positive in psychedelic experience. It is what psychologists try to measure when they administer the “Mystical Experience Questionnaire”, devised in the 1960s. There’s a wide consensus that there is no significant experiential difference between pharmacologically induced X and X that arises as a result of meditative or other spiritual practices.

However:

There is an extra­ordinary degree of agreement, on the part of those who have successful “trips” under suitably controlled conditions, that the fundamental principle of reality is love.

As the Beatles' sang, "Say the word, the word is love". After this and that Strawson observes:

But love requires a lover and a loved (it is logically a two-place relation), and most of those who use the word in an attempt to convey their X experience seem to have something else – a kind of perfectly impersonal blessedness – in mind.

We shouldn’t, then, look for “authenticity” in X experience – if that is supposed to mean that there’s nothing (ultimately) bad in reality. We can leave room for primordial blessedness if it allows for unutterable tragedy. But we should probably look no further than the magnificence of the experience itself. Its significance consists in the fact that it exists.

We can go a little further. There seems to be a deeper psychological formation underneath the experience of love. The best name for it, perhaps, is Acceptance (awarded a capital “A” to match Huxley’s capital-L “Love”): profound, anxiety-dissolving acquiescence in how things are, acceptance of life, acceptance of death. Acceptance, when attained, involves experience of great joy – just as relief from intense pain is (some say) the greatest human pleasure. It is what Nietzsche is after when he speaks of amor fati, loving one’s fate. It’s precisely what he lacked when, in July 1885, he wrote to Franz Overbeck that “my life now consists in the wish that things might be other than I understand them to be, and that someone might make my ‘truths’ appear unbelievable to me”.

Capital-A Acceptance seems tightly linked with the dissolution of one’s sense of self, or at least the elimination of one’s sense of the importance of self, and neuroscientists have not been slow to speculate about this. Scans of the tripping brain show dramatic reduction in the activity in the so-called default mode network or DMN – known to some neuro­scientists as “the me network”. One may doubt all such specific neurological hypotheses, but those who believe that the DMN is a suspect theoretical construct can think simply of activity in, and interaction between, the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, inferior parietal lobule, lateral temporal cortex, dorsal medial prefrontal cortex and hippocampus.

Pollan reproduces two diagrams recently published by the Imperial College lab using various scanning technologies. They represent the activity and interconnectivity of a brain under the influence of psilocybin, and a brain after the administering of an “active placebo” (a placebo that causes a strong tingling sensation, so that one feels one may have been given the drug under test). They’re spectacularly different. The psilocybin brain is thick with areas of activity and lines of interconnection; the placebo or everyday brain is almost bare by comparison. One doesn’t have to accept any of the specific neurological explanations to concede that the diagrams point up the richness of psychedelic experience.

Some think that psychedelics simply reactivate earlier capacities. “Babies and children are basically tripping all the time”, in Alison Gopnik’s words. Growing up fits a powerful “reducing valve” onto the great consciousness engine of the brain, as philosophers like Henri Bergson and C. D. Broad once proposed, and as Wordsworth intimated – and St Paul (“now we see through a glass, darkly; then, face to face”). According to this theory, maturation renders the brain fit for purpose in a difficult world; it imposes a mental filter that admits, in Huxley’s words, only the “measly trickle of the kind of consciousness” we need in order to survive. Psychedelic drugs remove the valve or filter. They dissolve the standard self-system, interrupting what Hazlitt called the “long narrowing of the mind to our own particular feelings and interests”. They return us, in Pollan’s words, to the wonder of “unencumbered first sight, or virginal noticing, to which the adult brain has closed itself. (It’s so inefficient!)”

In ordinary life, as Kant said, the “dear self is always turning up”. Psychedelics takes it offline. In X experience we lose what Iris Murdoch calls the “fat relentless ego”. We quit – again in Murdoch’s words – the “familiar rat-runs of selfish day-dream”. It seems, furthermore – and crucially – that a single dose can have lasting effects.

There's a bit more.

H/t Tyler Cowen. 

"One pill makes you..." – Contrasts on a psychedelic theme

Charlotte Shane reviews two recent books about psychedelics, Tao Lin, Trip, and Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind. Here's a passage from the end of the review:

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.)