We Need to Understand Psychedelics

Our many misapprehensions of the drugs

Having been under the boot of the law for the greater part of 50 years, psychedelic drugs now seem to be undergoing a revival. Silicon Valley types take shrooms or lick frogs in the desert. Joe Rogan seems obsessed with DMT (“it’s the spirit molecule, bro") and Americans flock by the thousands to manicured ayahuasca trips in deepest Peru. With the celebrity interest comes dubious scientific studies —  papers finding various obscure hallucinogens to be the cure to PTSD or Parkinson’s —  and cult attitudes verging on religious fanaticism. Suffice it to say, I’m sceptical. These drugs certainly aren’t recreational like alcohol or marijuana, but neither are they the key to everything, especially not in the hands of tech bros and finance geeks. They are medically useful and should be legalised, but they should not be treated lightly. 

What are psychedelic drugs? Broadly speaking, they’re a class of non-addictive consciousness-altering chemicals including LSD, mescalin, and psilocybin, among others. With the exception of LSD, they are organic chemicals, isolated mostly from plants. In most cases, they have a long history of use among the indigenous peoples who live where these plants grow, from New Guinea to Siberia. Europeans have also used psychedelics like liberty cap mushrooms for millennia, in small quantities (though claims that Hieronymus Bosch was inspired by a bad trip are probably overblown). 

Interestingly, indigenous groups that have strong traditions of psychedelic use often don’t care all that much about the drugs themselves. Instead, the significance of ayahuasca or peyote is the ceremony that accompanies it, which usually happens regardless of how many cacti your tribesman found in the desert that day. This was lost on the early twentieth-century anthropologists who brought these substances back to Europe. Removal from ceremonial significance meant that, in the West, psychedelics occupied an uncomfortable position between religious mysticism and mere recreation. The best early writers on psychedelics, such as Aldous Huxley (whose Doors of Perception I printed out on the school printers when I was sixteen), recognised this dilemma and urged caution for the nascent tie-die revolution. “I am not so foolish,” writes Huxley, “as to equate what happens under the influence of mescalin or of any other drug with the realisation of the end and ultimate purpose of human life.”

The moral panic that banned psychedelics in Europe and the United States only meant that they developed an even greater cult status, however. The intervention of the state meant that there was now something subversive in drugs like acid, and their former countercultural association only increased their allure for tech elites and venture capitalists who want to claim that edgy association. 

Today, we’re caught between two understandings of psychedelics which are impossible to reconcile. If they are life-changing substances of genuine spiritual importance, then they cannot also be merely recreational. There are already plenty of stories about Wall Street bankers going on corporate ayahuasca retreats to improve “productivity” or “mental clarity”, but who end up quitting their jobs instead. As psychedelics begin to become legalised, the companies campaigning for their legalisation will attempt to cast them as fun diversions or as productivity or mood boosters. Sensible people should understand that they are both far more serious than that, with serious life-altering effects (both positive and negative), but also chemicals like any other. It is important that we don’t let either narrative dominate the conversation.

Illustration by Zoe Small