Psychedelic Paradoxes

Exploring the ongoing mainstreaming and corporate assimilation of psychedelics

Rick Doblin speaks at the Psychedelic Science Conference in Denver

The Psychedelic Sciences Conference in Denver, put on by Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), just ended. The conference was, by far, the largest we have yet seen in this burgeoning field. An extraordinary 11,000 people flocked to it, including entrepreneurs, psychotherapists, indigenous practitioners, academics, CEOs, each paying a minimum of $800 per ticket. While I didn’t attend this year’s event, I thought I would explore different perspectives on it.

The success of the psychedelic movement in the United States (which continues to spread internationally) is due, to a great extent, to the indomitable will of Rick Doblin, the Director of MAPS. I have had the pleasure of spending a good deal of time with Doblin, who is a friend, in many different contexts — festivals, dinners, and conferences around the world. His unwavering dedication and self-sacrifice — like a kindly entheogenic saint — always impressed me deeply. I thought I would share a story that reveals something of his character.

Long ago, as I started the four-hour drive from to Burning Man from Reno with friends from New York, we ran into Rick at a gas station. I switched cars to ride in Rick’s car, so we could catch up, with my friends driving ahead. Rick and I chatted for a number of hours as we made our way through the desert, toward the festival’s entrance. As we approached the gate, I realized I had left my ticket in my jacket, which was still in my friend’s car. Sadly we had lost sight of them, and there was no cell service back then (around 2010) near the event.

At that point, I was a familiar figure in the Burner community. I gave talks every Summer and my books and essays had inspired many to attend. A number of people stopped and thanked me as we waited on the line to the ticket office to explain the situation. Unfortunately, Burning Man over-compensates for its hippy freedoms with a harsh bureaucracy. We were instructed to drive to “D Lot,” detention, and wait an unspecified number of hours before someone might try to help us resolve our situation. That night, I was planning to go to the annual party put on by the organizers at First Camp. We tried to explain this to the Burner bureaucrats, but they didn’t care. It was already dusk.

When confronted with any official system of enforcement, I typically retract and capitulate. However, as we were parked in D-Lot, Rick began to assess our situation. He realized that security around the area was quite lax, and rolling dust clouds were passing over us at irregular intervals. He figured, if we waited for the right moment, we could drive into a dust cloud and roll with it into the festival, evading detection. He executed this maneuver perfectly, and we arrived at First Camp in time for the canapés.

This experience made me appreciate Rick’s skill as a strategist and system breaker. When he started MAPS in the late 1980s, getting psychedelics accepted by the establishment seemed a hopeless mission. Even when I published Breaking Open the Head in 2002, the possibility that psychedelics might be legalized and regulated — embraced, even, by Republican politicians, like former Texas governor Rick Perry who spoke at the conference — seemed a distant pipe dream. But Rick — with support from a large cast of supporting characters — is closing in on this mission.

When I published my book, there had been no scientific research allowed on human subjects with psychedelics for decades (with the singular exception of Rick Strassman’s DMT study), after they were made Schedule One substances in the 1970s. When the West rediscovered psychedelics in the 1950s, they were declared “wonder drugs,” considered the most powerful tools for exploring the human mind that we had ever found. Then they became “horror drugs,” and finally they were “nothing.” By the late 1970s, almost all information about them was scrubbed out of medical textbooks.

Over the years, I witnessed the expansion of MAPS and the growth of the movement to make psychedelics as well as MDMA legally available tools for treating mental health. Regular events like the Horizons Conference in New York and the MAPS gatherings in California grew from a few hundred people to a few thousand over time. The establishment media slowly changed its rhetorical approach to the subject, modulating and then dropping its snide, dismissive tone.

For example, any New York Times article — like this one from 2001, on an early study on MDMA for PTSD, had to include passages such as the following: “Psychedelia and alternative consciousness — with or without the bad clothes — have long since seeped into the mainstream, from the celestial seasonings of Deepak Chopra to the disorienting swirl of music videos. Once a transgression, the dayglo rainbow is now as often a bore. Never mind wresting the psychedelic experience from the counterculture; it already has a booth at the mall.” For decades, this was the prevailing cultural ambience around psychedelics: You were made to feel like a moron if you even professed interest in the subject, which everybody knew was completely pointless and utterly played out.

To overcome this residue of ridicule and powerful multi-level repression, the MAPS-led psychedelic movement in the US focused — a bit single-mindedly — on scientific research and hard evidence.