As 2023 begins, a new era is dawning—one with an eerie sense of déjà vû. A wave of support for psychedelics is cresting, yet this is a moment of nervous tension between seemingly opposing forces: past and future, growth and safety, the spiritual and the scientific.
On Jan. 1, Oregon became the first U.S. state to legalize adult use of psilocybin, which will be administered by licensed facilitators at state-sponsored service centers. Colorado’s natural medicine law, decriminalizing the possession and use of substances like DMT and ibogaine along with ’shrooms, took effect Jan. 4. Similar measures have been introduced in more than a dozen states, and cities from Seattle to Cambridge and Washington, D.C. have followed suit. Two-thirds of Americans want to end the war on drugs, supporting broad decriminalization, according to a poll by the American Civil Liberties Union. Meanwhile, clinical trials of psilocybin and MDMA, a substance with psychedelic-like properties, are moving toward FDA approval as treatments for depression and PTSD, respectively.
It’s an encouraging moment for those who advocate for these medicines from the underground—not to mention those whose families, lives, and careers have been destroyed because of racist and repressive drug legislation. Yet we’ve been in a place of ecstatic enthusiasm for these substances before, and it’s part of what got us these draconian measures to begin with. History has a way of repeating itself when we don’t learn.
The 1950s and ’60s saw a rising fascination with psychedelics in the Global North. After being synthesized by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann in 1953, LSD therapy was heralded as the cure for everything from “melancholy” to alcoholism and championed by Hollywood stars. Mycologist R. Gordon Wasson introduced the world to “magic mushrooms” in a 1957 Life magazine article about a ceremony performed by Mazatec shaman Maria Sabina. Famed ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes was learning about the traditional uses of psychedelic plants from native Amazonian peoples, penning a book about it with Hofmann.
In 1960, the Harvard Psilocybin Project was co-founded by professor of psychology Timothy Leary, his assistant Richard Alpert—who later became the spiritual leader Ram Dass—and others to study altered states. Through experiments with mushrooms and LSD, they established the foundational concept of set and setting, which explores how a person’s environment impacts their psychedelic trip.
One of their most infamous projects was 1962’s Good Friday Experiment, testing whether psilocybin could occasion a divine encounter. For almost all participants, it did—and headlines heralded this as scientific proof of psychedelics’ spiritual power. An explosion of interest followed, and the anti-war, counterculture movement ran with this momentum, advocating for these substances’ ability to facilitate love and understanding, claiming they were the only path to stopping nuclear proliferation.
As support for psychedelics swelled, Leary and Alpert took progressively less scientific and more reckless approaches: dispensing sacred substances like party favors, taking them along with their students, and violating school codes. Since psychedelics weren’t yet illegal, they were still relatively easy to get, and a black market was birthed in Harvard Square, centered around a storefront set up by Leary. As a result of all this, the school quietly terminated Leary and Alpert’s contracts, just three years after the Project’s founding.
By 1967, Lisa Bieberman, who once ran Leary’s store, wrote that the psychedelic movement had been “ruined,” losing its ideals until it had transformed into a mockery of itself. It had become more about tearing things down than building them up, she argued, with any approach justified in service of stopping nuclear war. But she was warned that publicizing these opinions would undermine the cause—and thus the fate of the world.
“Put ‘psychedelic’ down along with ‘community,’ ‘love,’ ‘religion’ and other good words the hippies, with the help of Leary & Co., have corrupted,” Bieberman wrote. “The only psychedelic happening I’d be interested in [is one that could] help people live better lives … if we could just get clear of the cultish, flashy, idiotic pseudo-underground.”
Leary gets blamed for a lot—probably more than he should—but the conservative backlash his experiments prompted was so strong that some think he was a covert CIA operative. Bieberman’s fears proved prescient as the movement became more Wild West than Sunday service. Irresponsible and unsupported use of LSD stoked fearmongering headlines while Leary’s infamous “turn on, tune in, drop out” mantra was wielded like a weapon in Nixon’s War on Drugs. By 1970, the Controlled Substances Act had made psychedelics illegal.
As today’s “psychedelic renaissance” grows, the most outspoken advocates are making a conscious effort to distance these substances from their countercultural past. Focused on medical applications of psychedelics to treat mental health conditions and combat opioid overuse, they espouse a dogmatic, almost desperate need to prove the benefits using scientific data. Yet the fervor with which they oppose Leary’s methods may be their downfall.
The insistence on hard numbers and quantifiable data to prove the efficacy of psychedelic treatments is causing some researchers to cut corners, says psychologist Eiko Fried, by using models of questionable scientific rigor, confusing correlation with causation, and overinflating claims. For instance, a paper by leading psychedelic scientists Robin Carhartt-Harris and David Nutt was criticized by other researchers for (among other shortcomings) switching measurement scales after the data was collected to one that reflected more favorable results.
Many psychedelic researchers have conflicts of interest that include involvement with for-profit therapeutics developers, Fried explains, while a series in Nature Medicine was even sponsored by a pharmaceutical company. This harkens back to another wonder drug that later became demonized. “One of them talked about the opioid crisis and how … we’re doing this better,” he says. “No, we’re doing exactly the same thing.”
There were even allegations of sexual abuse in the trials by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) that may lead to MDMA’s federal approval; there have been similar controversies in other leading psychedelic advocacy organizations. Yet researchers and advocates who are called into question tend to push back with the same ferocity Bieberman experienced in 1967: Any criticism of the means will jeopardize the end, which in this case is not stopping nuclear war, but legalizing psychedelics. And that includes not only overlooking controversies and abuse but exaggerating data.
The anti-drug propaganda that perpetuated over a century of prohibitions on once-legal substances, from opium and coca to weed and psychedelics, used similar tactics. Researchers rely on the fact that most people don’t know how to interpret scientific papers, says neuroscientist Carl Hart; they use the summary and conclusion sections to tell their own story, trusting people won’t understand the methods, and many make claims about “changes” to bodies and brains when subjects aren’t tracked over time.
From the ’70s on, Hart explains, the only studies that received funding were those that showed the negative impact of drugs. As a result, papers claiming substances from weed to heroin and methamphetamine—an FDA-approved medication for ADHD—damaged the brain and ravaged the body drove sensationalist headlines and stoked repressive legislation, though no causal evidence was ever found. When funding is reliant on a certain research outcome, all must fall in line.
More than one kind of knowledge is valuable, but the medicalization of psychedelics elevates only the scientific, discounting the knowledge that has guided traditional use of these substances since time immemorial, and which includes a spiritual component. If we only value psychedelics for their medical purposes, we miss at least half the picture. Science and spirituality are not mutually exclusive, but they’re also not interchangeable; you cannot use the frameworks, tools, and methods of one to measure the other.
Early clinical trials in today’s “psychedelic renaissance” showed that the degree of healing participants experienced was most strongly tied not to the balance of chemicals or behavior of neurons, but the intensity of the mystical experience they had. But “these medical doctors don’t have training in the study of religion … and what role that mystical experience is playing towards the psychiatric ends,” said Paul Gillis-Smith, correspondent for the Harvard Divinity School, on its podcast, akin to “your priest telling you how to change the oil on your car.”
Leary’s early research recognized this, but as with everything that inspires enthusiasm in American culture, the experience became commercialized—Sandoz Pharmaceuticals even sold LSD pills until unmediated use caused problems—and the values of the movement he helped launch began to be exploited, reduced to simply getting more drugs in more hands.
Today, the companies developing commercial psychedelic medicines are racing to patent compounds and applications found in nature and utilized by Indigenous people stretching back into antiquity. Advocacy organizations that claim to be anti-establishment and support Indigenous sovereignty have partnered with some of these companies, buying ad space and even billboards in Times Square to push courses and products from ketamine clinics to psilocybin pills. Some of these marketing campaigns are the stuff of Naomi Klein’s nightmares, selling our own enlightenment back to us through imagery and language that appropriates other cultures and current values. One billboard read: “Are you ready to wake up? Witness the SCIENTIFIC Renaissance. Witness the CULTURAL Renaissance. Witness the MEDICINAL Renaissance.”
Yet without the proper framework and guidance, preparation and integration, community and a ritual container, psychedelics can do more harm than good. This moment risks a repeat of the “bad trips” of the 1970s, where upsetting experiences made people more destabilized. Besides, if the science is shoddily performed and proven faulty, it’s just fodder for those who want to continue prohibition.
The best offense is a good defense, and the smartest tactics the psychedelic movement can take are to be self-critical, ruthlessly honest, and transparent. Nothing, not even plants that conjure the divine, is a silver bullet for all ills. Psychedelics merely show you where you need healing, and it’s up to you to do the work. Besides, psychedelics don’t have to be proven to cure diseases and disorders for them to be legal. All that’s needed for FDA approval is to show the benefits outweigh the costs—and the benefits extend beyond the medical.
The fear among advocates is that the window of cultural acceptance will close, but you can’t un-know the things you’ve felt in your soul. Anyone who has experienced this healing will carry the torch, whether in daylight or underground, as we’ve always done; there are arguments to be made that it’s better served outside the system. Whatever happens, psychedelics must remain connected to the spiritual if they are to truly heal, while science must do what it does best: never stop questioning.
