Brain Damage Control: Psychedelic Evolution

There I stood, a few years ago in San Francisco, with my feet spread apart and my arms outstretched against the side of a car. As I was being frisked by a police officer, I realized that he was facing the back of my Mad magazine jacket, the face of Alfred E. Neuman smiling at him and saying, “What, me worry?” And, indeed, this cop was worried. He asked if I had anything sharp in my pockets.

“Because,” he explained, “I’m gonna get very mad if I get stuck,” obviously referring to a hypodermic needle.

“No,” I said, “there’s only a pen in this pocket”—gesturing toward the left with my head—“and keys in that one.”

When he saw the contents of the baggie that I also had in my pocket, he asked a rhetorical question—“So you like mushrooms, huh?”—with such hostility that it kept reverberating inside my head. I hadn’t done anything that would harm somebody else. This was simply an authority figure’s need to control. But control what? My pleasure? Or was it deeper than that?

Recently, the Journal of Psychopharmacology published the results of a daylong experiment involving psilocybin, also known as “magic mushrooms.” Although this psychedelic has been used for centuries in religious ceremonies, it’s still illegal. The study, which took place at a Johns Hopkins University laboratory, was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and involved 36 male and female volunteers.

Fourteen months later, 64 percent of the volunteers reported that they still felt at least a moderate increase in well-being or life satisfaction, in terms of creativity, self-confidence, flexibility and optimism, after using mushrooms; 61 percent reported at least a moderate change of behavior in positive ways; 58 percent rated the session as one of the five most personally meaningful experiences of their lives; and 67 percent said that the drug had produced one of the five most spiritually significant experiences they’d ever had. Many spoke of being more sensitive, tolerant, loving and compassionate.

One participant reported: “I feel more centered in who I am and what I’m doing. I don’t seem to have those self-doubts like I used to have.” She referred to a sense of “taking off … being lifted up.” Then came “brilliant colors and beautiful patterns, just stunningly gorgeous—more intense than normal reality,” she added. “I feel much more grounded and that we are all connected. There was this sense of relief and joy and ecstasy when my heart was opened.”

According to head researcher Roland Griffiths: “This is a truly remarkable finding. Rarely in psychological research do we see such persistently positive reports from a single event in a laboratory. This gives credence to the claims that the mystical-type experiences some people have during hallucinogen sessions may help patients suffering from cancer-related anxiety or depression, and may serve as a potential treatment for drug dependence.”

Rick Doblin, the founder of MAPS (the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies), has been able to break through the “40-year-long bad trip” that he and other researchers have faced in dealing with the negative fallout from the introduction of LSD and other psychedelic compounds in the mid-1960s. He describes this four-decade intellectual Dark Age as having been characterized by “enormous fear and misinformation and a vested interest in exaggerated stories about drugs to keep prohibition alive.”

As Charles Shaw points out on Alternet: “What was lost in all the derision and urban myths about LSD and other psychedelic compounds like ayahuasca, peyote, psilocybin and iboga—plant medicines thousands of years old—was the fact that they are miraculously powerful medicines, with the ability to effectively treat, and in some cases cure, some of the most debilitating illnesses and disorders plaguing humanity: addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and migraine and cluster headaches. They are also effective palliatives for the sick and dying …. ”

Referring to Doblin’s pioneering work, Shaw adds that “Western governments had to ask themselves what was more important to them: their irrational and erroneous drug propaganda, or the possibility that the millions of lives they had devastated by war, violence and iniquitous economic policies might actually be repaired. In this, the seeds of a psychedelic renaissance were planted.”

Award-winning satirist Paul Krassner edited the groundbreaking countercultural magazine, The Realist (1958-2001). His latest book is Who’s to Say What’s Obscene: Politics, Culture and Comedy in America Today. He also publishes the Disneyland Memorial Orgy poster at paulkrassner.com.

THIS ARTICLE WAS FEATURED IN THE MAY 2009 ISSUE OF HIGH TIMES.