{"id":979,"date":"2012-08-23T22:54:20","date_gmt":"2012-08-23T22:54:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gaiamedia.org\/english\/?p=979"},"modified":"2018-03-30T22:55:32","modified_gmt":"2018-03-30T22:55:32","slug":"the-heretic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gaiamedia.org\/english\/2012\/08\/23\/the-heretic\/","title":{"rendered":"The Heretic"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Tim Doody<\/strong><\/p>\n

For decades, the U.S. government banned medical studies of the effects of LSD. But for one longtime elite researcher, the promise of mind-blowing revelations was just too tempting. This article has first been published by online magazine\u00a0The Morning News<\/em>\u00a0on 26 July 2012.<\/p>\n

At 9:30 in the morning, an architect and three senior scientists \u2013 two from Stanford, the other from Hewlett-Packard \u2013 donned eyeshades and earphones, sank into comfy couches, and waited for their government-approved dose of LSD to kick in. From across the suite and with no small amount of anticipation, Dr. James Fadiman spun the knobs of an impeccable sound system and unleashed Beethoven\u2019s \u201cSymphony No. 6 in F Major, Op. 68.\u201d Then he stood by, ready to ease any concerns or discomfort.<\/p>\n

For this particular experiment, the couched volunteers had each brought along three highly technical problems from their respective fields that they\u2019d been unable to solve for at least several months. In approximately two hours, when the LSD became fully active, they were going to remove the eyeshades and earphones, and attempt to find some solutions. Fadiman and his team would monitor their efforts, insights, and output to determine if a relatively low dose of acid \u2013 100 micrograms to be exact \u2013 enhanced their creativity.<\/p>\n

It was the summer of \u201966. And the morning was beginning like many others at the International Foundation for Advanced Study, an inconspicuously named, privately funded facility dedicated to psychedelic drug research, which was located, even less conspicuously, on the second floor of a shopping plaza in Menlo Park, Calif. However, this particular morning wasn\u2019t going to go like so many others had during the preceding five years, when researchers at IFAS (pronounced \u201cif-as\u201d) had legally dispensed LSD. Though Fadiman can\u2019t recall the exact date, this was the day, for him at least, that the music died. Or, perhaps more accurately for all parties involved in his creativity study, it was the day before.<\/p>\n

At approximately 10 a.m., a courier delivered an express letter to the receptionist, who in turn quickly relayed it to Fadiman and the other researchers. They were to stop administering LSD, by order of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Effective immediately. Dozens of other private and university-affiliated institutions had received similar letters that day.<\/p>\n

That research centers once were permitted to explore the further frontiers of consciousness seems surprising to those of us who came of age when a strongly enforced psychedelic prohibition was the norm. They seem not unlike the last generation of children\u2019s playgrounds, mostly eradicated during the \u201990s, that were higher and riskier than today\u2019s soft-plastic labyrinths. (Interestingly, a growing number of child psychologists now defend these playgrounds, saying they provided kids with both thrills and profound life lessons that simply can\u2019t be had close to the ground.)<\/p>\n

When the FDA\u2019s edict arrived, Fadiman was 27 years old, IFAS\u2019s youngest researcher. He\u2019d been a true believer in the gospel of psychedelics since 1961, when his old Harvard professor Richard Alpert (now Ram Dass) dosed him with psilocybin, the magic in the mushroom, at a Paris caf\u00e9. That day, his narrow, self-absorbed thinking had fallen away like old skin. People would live more harmoniously, he\u2019d thought, if they could access this cosmic consciousness. Then and there he\u2019d decided his calling would be to provide such access to others. He migrated to California (naturally) and teamed up with psychiatrists and seekers to explore how and if psychedelics in general \u2013 and LSD in particular \u2013 could safely augment psychotherapy, addiction treatment, creative endeavors, and spiritual growth. At Stanford University, he investigated this subject at length through a dissertation \u2013 which, of course, the government ban had just dead-ended.<\/p>\n

Couldn\u2019t they comprehend what was at stake? Fadiman was devastated and more than a little indignant. However, even if he\u2019d wanted to resist the FDA\u2019s moratorium on ideological grounds, practical matters made compliance impossible: Four people who\u2019d never been on acid before were about to peak.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think we opened this tomorrow,\u201d he said to his colleagues.<\/p>\n

And so one orchestra after the next wove increasingly visual melodies around the men on the couch. Then shortly before noon, as arranged, they emerged from their cocoons and got to work.<\/p>\n

Over the course of the preceding year, IFAS researchers had dosed a total of 22 other men for the creativity study, including a theoretical mathematician, an electronics engineer, a furniture designer, and a commercial artist. By including only those whose jobs involved the hard sciences (the lack of a single female participant says much about mid-century career options for women), they sought to examine the effects of LSD on both visionary and analytical thinking. Such a group offered an additional bonus: Anything they produced during the study would be subsequently scrutinized by departmental chairs, zoning boards, review panels, corporate clients, and the like, thus providing a real-world, unbiased yardstick for their results.<\/p>\n

In surveys administered shortly after their LSD-enhanced creativity sessions, the study volunteers, some of the best and brightest in their fields, sounded like tripped-out neopagans at a backwoods gathering. Their minds, they said, had blossomed and contracted with the universe. They\u2019d beheld irregular but clean geometrical patterns glistening into infinity, felt a\u00a0rightness<\/em>\u00a0before solutions manifested, and even shapeshifted into relevant formulas, concepts, and raw materials.<\/p>\n

But here\u2019s the clincher. After their 5HT2A neural receptors simmered down, they remained firm: LSD absolutely had helped them solve their complex, seemingly intractable problems. And the establishment agreed. The 26 men unleashed a slew of widely embraced innovations shortly after their LSD experiences, including a mathematical theorem for NOR gate circuits, a conceptual model of a photon, a linear electron accelerator beam-steering device, a new design for the vibratory microtome, a technical improvement of the magnetic tape recorder, blueprints for a private residency and an arts-and-crafts shopping plaza, and a space probe experiment designed to measure solar properties. Fadiman and his colleagues published these jaw-dropping results and closed shop.<\/p>\n

At a congressional subcommittee hearing that year, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy grilled FDA regulators about their ban on LSD studies: \u201cWhy, if they were worthwhile six months ago, why aren\u2019t they worthwhile now?\u201d For him, the ban was personal, too: His wife, Ethel, had received LSD-augmented therapy in Vancouver. \u201cPerhaps to some extent we have lost sight of the fact that it\u201d \u2013 Sen. Kennedy was referring specifically to LSD here \u2013 \u201ccan be very, very helpful in our society if used properly.\u201d<\/p>\n

His objection did nothing to slow the panic that surged through halls of government. The state of California outlawed LSD in the fall of 1966, and was followed in quick succession by numerous other states and then the federal government. In 1970, agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration released a comprehensive database in which they\u2019d sorted commonly known drugs into categories, or schedules. \u201cSchedule 1\u201d drugs, which included LSD and psilocybin, have a \u201csignificant potential for abuse,\u201d they said, and \u201cno recognized medicinal value.\u201d Because Schedule 1 drugs were seen as the most dangerous of the bunch, those who used, manufactured, bought, possessed, or distributed them were thought to be deserving of the harshest penalties.<\/p>\n

By waging war on psychedelics and their aficionados, the U.S. government not only halted promising studies but also effectively shoved open discourse of these substances to the countercultural margins. And so conventional wisdom continues to argue that psychedelics offer one of a few possibilities: a psychotic break, a glimpse of God, or a visually stunning but fairly mindless journey. But no way would they help with practical, results-based thinking. (That\u2019s what Ritalin is for, just ask any Ivy League undergrad.)<\/p>\n

Still, intriguing hints suggest that, despite stigma and risk of incarceration, some of our better innovators continued to feed their heads \u2013 and society as a whole reaped the benefits. Francis Crick confessed that he was tripping the first time he envisioned the double helix. Steve Jobs called LSD \u201cone of the two or three most important things\u201d he\u2019d experienced. And Bill Wilson claimed it helped to facilitate breakthroughs of a more soulful variety: Decades after co-founding Alcoholics Anonymous, he tried LSD, said it tuned him in to the same spiritual awareness that made sobriety possible, and pitched its therapeutic use \u2013 unsuccessfully \u2013 to the AA board. So perhaps the music never really died. Perhaps it\u2019s more accurate to say instead that the music got much softer. And the ones who were still listening had to pretend they couldn\u2019t hear anything at all.<\/p>\n

On a Saturday last October, 45 years after dispensing those last legal doses, James Fadiman stood on stage inside the cavernous hall of Judson Memorial Church, a long-time downtown New York incubator of artistic, progressive, and even revolutionary movements. High above him on a window of stained glass, a golden band wrapped Escher-like enigmas around the Four Evangelists. Fadiman appeared far more earthly: wire frames, trim beard, dropped hairline, khakis, running shoes \u2013 like a policy wonk at a convention, right down to lanyard and nametag.<\/p>\n

A couple hundred people sat before him in folding chairs and along the side aisles of the hall. He adjusted his head microphone, then scrolled his lecture notes and side-stepped the podium. He felt fortunate to be there for many reasons, he said, including a health scare he\u2019d had a few months back \u2013 a rather advanced case of pericarditis. \u201cSome of you, I know, have experimented with enough substances so that you\u2019ve \u2018died.\u2019 But it\u2019s different when you\u2019re in the ER.\u201d He chuckled. \u201cAnd you\u2019re not on anything.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most everybody laughed at his icebreaker, understood he was comparing, quite unfavorably, his recent experience to the way that, under the influence of high-dose psychedelics, one\u2019s personality has a tendency to scatter like stardust. Which is to say that Fadiman was not addressing an ordinary audience.<\/p>\n

He was the first presenter of the day at the fifth-annual Horizons, a weekend-long forum organized to \u201copen a fresh dialogue\u201d regarding the role of psychedelics in \u201cmedicine, culture, history, spirituality, and creativity.\u201d The crowd consisted of young and old, dreadlocks and suits, crushed velvet and institutional bonafides. A self-declared prophet sat near Bellevue Hospital\u2019s leading addictions specialist. Both are pro-psychedelics, though they differ on what qualifies as appropriate usage. Said addictions specialist is currently administering psilocybin to people with recurrent and advanced-stage cancer in \u2013 surprise! \u2013 a government-sanctioned study. Most people enrolled in his study have reported that a single psychedelic session substantially reduced their anxieties related to death, while also qualifying as one of their most spiritual experiences.<\/p>\n

\u201cI kind of did the squarest bio I could,\u201d Fadiman said, pointing at a Horizons brochure, \u201cjust in case other people were reading it.\u201d Who did he mean? Squares? Feds? He\u2019d chosen to highlight his post-ban work, which sounded mildly interesting though fairly innocuous. Co-founder of the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology. Course instructor at San Francisco State, Brandeis, and Stanford. Writer. Member of various corporate boards. Don\u2019t be fooled though. His bio obscures a well-documented notoriety.<\/p>\n

In\u00a0The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test<\/em>, Tom Wolfe writes about encountering \u201ca young psychologist,\u201d \u201cClifton Fadiman\u2019s nephew, it turned out,\u201d in the waiting room of the San Mateo County jail. Fadiman and his wife were \u201chappily stuffing three I-Ching coins into some interminable dense volume of Oriental mysticism\u201d that they planned to give Ken Kesey, the Prankster-in-Chief whom the FBI had just nabbed after eight months on the lam. Wolfe had been granted an interview with Kesey, and they wanted him to tell their friend about the hidden coins. During this difficult time, they explained, Kesey needed oracular advice.<\/p>\n

Fadiman\u2019s influence transcends counterculture, though. It might even stretch through the very medium through which you\u2019re reading these words. In\u00a0What the Dormouse Said<\/em>, John Markoff reports that Fadiman had dosed and counseled numerous \u201cheads\u201d as they were attempting to amplify consciousness through silicon chips and virtual reality. The personal computer revolution, Markoff argues, flourished on the Left Coast precisely because of a peculiar confluence of scientists, dreamers, and drop-outs. And indeed, if you were to illustrate with a Venn diagram the relationships between those involved with Acid Test parties, the Homebrew Computer Club, the Augmented Human Intellect Research Center at Stanford University, Xerox\u2019s Palo Alto Research Center, various backwoods communes, and, of course, the IFAS research center, you\u2019d see an overlap of communities on the San Francisco Midpeninsula that just wasn\u2019t available to the average IBM computer scientist in Westchester.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true that Fadiman cooled it for several decades, did those square things in his bio, settled into the suburbs, and kept on the down-low any lingering passion for chemically boosted consciousness. But then, in 2010, with the publication of his book,\u00a0The Psychedelic Explorer\u2019s Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys<\/em>, it became official: At 70 years old, Fadiman had gone rogue. In a mild-mannered sort of way, yes, with charts, hypotheses, and a winning bedside manner. But government be damned, he was now an outspoken advocate for the careful but criminal use of psychedelics, especially LSD, his favorite.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s astounding isn\u2019t so much that he came out of the psychedelic closet for a second time \u2013 most everyone retains a certain allegiance to their formative experiences \u2013 but that he is far from alone. And we\u2019re not just talking about the tens of thousands of utopians who co-create an ephemeral Mecca in the swirling sands of Black Rock each summer.<\/p>\n

Though draconian laws still keep psychedelics from the general public, next-generation administrators at the FDA and DEA have been approving research studies again. The taboo broke with a 1992 investigation of how dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, a fast-acting psychedelic, impacts consciousness; DMT wasn\u2019t burdened by the cultural baggage of its three-lettered cousin. And what began quite haltingly had become, by the middle of the last decade, if not routine then certainly notable: Terminated research from the \u201960s was being replicated and even furthered in dozens of studies by big-name players, including Johns Hopkins, NYU, and UCLA. These studies, which almost exclusively explore the psychotherapeutic potential of psychedelics (as opposed to, say, how they might influence creativity), are getting results that would make a Big Pharma rep salivate. Of the hundreds of volunteers who\u2019ve participated, a high majority have said that psychedelics, given in a safe, supportive setting, helped them to, depending on the study, accept imminent mortality, overcome drug and alcohol addiction, mitigate obsessive-compulsive urges, or heal post-traumatic stress disorder.<\/p>\n

Yet another study recently passed the approval process despite strong objections from the Pentagon: In the summer of 2011, 16 vets who returned from Iraq and Afghanistan with PTSD began receiving a combination of talk therapy and MDMA (pure Ecstasy). This, though the DEA still officially states that psychedelics\u2019 \u201cuse in psychotherapy largely has been debunked.\u201d The current relationship between regulators and these Schedule 1 substances is a tangle of impossible possibilities \u2013 not unlike the stained glass window overlooking Judson\u2019s stage.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat happens in serious psychedelic work,\u201d Fadiman said to the people before him, \u201cis there\u2019s a sudden reframing of massive amounts of worldview. We don\u2019t know much about what that learning means, but we sure can see the results.\u201d Though he applauds the aforementioned studies, he has come to Horizons specifically to speak on their limitations. In fact, his entire lecture is intended to be an attack on what he calls \u201cthe medical model,\u201d an approach to psychedelic drug use that curtails access to only a fraction of society, and for only narrowly defined goals centered around personal therapy.<\/p>\n

Fadiman studied the people before him, then widened his eyes with faux innocence. \u201cHow many of you are going to be in a legal research study next year?\u201d<\/p>\n

No hands.<\/p>\n

\u201cIncluding not me. You not only have to be ill (to participate), but you have to be ill with something fairly awful. Now, how many of you are planning to have a psychedelic within the next year?\u201d<\/p>\n

An overwhelming majority of the audience raised a hand, some enthusiastic, others sheepish. Heads swiveled like periscopes, the better to see all those mea culpas.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo, I\u2019ll talk to you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Widespread laughter: score!<\/p>\n

\u201cFor a long time after research stopped in the \u201960s, I thought, \u2018Oh, I can\u2019t do the research that interests me the most, that\u2019s the most life-changing, that has the most potential.\u2019 I also realized that \u2026 what the government said is, \u2018We are restricting some basic freedoms.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Throughout the lecture, his left hand poked like a conductor\u2019s stick as he challenged his listeners with a series of questions.<\/p>\n

\u201cCan you go to most any group, from tea parties on one end, to us, I think we\u2019re probably on the other, and say, is religious freedom something that we support in this country?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIs it all right to establish or re-establish or discover a connection to the Divine?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIs it OK to do something that leads to your own self-healing and improves your connection to the natural world?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIs it OK to discover how the universe works? At the moment, we\u2019ve got two Nobel Prize winners who\u2019ve copped to the fact of where they got their ideas.\u201d<\/p>\n

Francis Crick is one and the other: Kary Mullis, who was intermittently under the influence of LSD as he developed the polymerase chain reaction, a genetic sequencing technique through which scientists can detect certain infectious diseases, map the human genome, and trace ancestral heritage back thousands of years.<\/p>\n

Fadiman was warming up now, standing tall for the 23 million Americans who, according to government stats, have already taken LSD, and the 400,000-plus who will try it for the first time this year. Curiosity continues to trump criminalization.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not necessarily going to be content if certain psychedelics are available on prescription (for people who are really ill),\u201d Fadiman said. \u201cThat\u2019s not what psychedelic freedom is about.\u201d<\/p>\n

Just as he began to speculate on how and when \u201cpsychedelic freedom\u201d might be achieved, the microphone slipped off his ear, shoulder-bounced, and tumbled to the floor. It sounded like gunshots or a door being bashed in. Fadiman threw up his hands, fingers splayed, head lowered, as if a SWAT team was raiding the auditorium. He had the audience laughing again as a sound tech scrambled to make things right. Nonetheless, his slapstick evoked a sobering truth concerning the tenuous turf between personal and legal conviction. How many people here have ever been in an actual raid? Hands please?<\/p>\n

The discovery of lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, is a fairly known tale, at least in certain circles. As war ravished Europe, Dr. Albert Hofmann hunkered down in his lab in Basel, Switzerland, and synthesized dozens of compounds from ergot, a grain-attacking fungus, in an effort to create a medicinal blood stimulator. In 1943, he accidentally (or, as he has claimed, synchronistically) absorbed a few potent drops from the 25th variety, soon thereafter experiencing a \u201cnot unpleasant intoxicated-like condition\u201d that dramatically altered his bicycle ride home.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s less commonly known, even in certain circles, is what should or shouldn\u2019t be done with this potent discovery, which Hofmann has referred to as \u201cmy problem child.\u201d During a second, entirely intentional exposure, his problem child unleashed upon him a slew of hellish and terrifying visions, severely compromising both his short-term sanity and his ability to navigate the physical world.<\/p>\n

Through his re-stabilized head microphone, Fadiman was focusing on exactly these sorts of dangers: He\u2019d transitioned from advocacy to shop talk. \u201cHave you ever had a bad trip?\u201d he asked the audience. \u201cHands please. That\u2019s quite a few. Do you know why it was a bad trip? Unfortunately, less hands.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of his own hands: The right clutched lecture notes, while the left danced. \u201cOK, you aren\u2019t going to be involved in research studies. But in your personal lives you are going to be looking at\u201d \u2013 left ascending three invisible steps \u2013 \u201cyourself, science, and the Divine. And so it\u2019s important to know, what is necessary for the safest, most successful, and potentially sacred experience?\u201d Palm upward. \u201cThe answer is, very simply, six items.\u201d And then down to the podium.<\/p>\n

These six items are, perhaps simply enough, factors that Fadiman believes determine the quality of a psychedelic experience, as well as its specific nature. He has culled them from his work with hundreds of people in therapy sessions, creativity experiments, and Death Valley vision quests. They are:<\/p>\n

Set: the mental attitude of a would-be psychedelic voyager
\nSetting: the surroundings in which a psychedelic substance is ingested
\nGuide: a person experienced with non-ordinary states of consciousness who helps to mitigate challenges and channel insights
\nSubstance: the type and quantity of psychedelic agent
\nSession: the entirety of a psychedelic trip, including all activities or rituals
\nSituation: the environment, people, and culture from which a person comes to a session and returns afterward<\/p>\n

Regardless of whether they use Fadiman\u2019s preferred terminology, medical researchers conducting government-approved therapeutic studies look for these same essential parameters, as do shamans and tribal elders across the globe. These diverse facilitators of psychedelic experiences carefully screen applicants to ensure they are of sound(-enough) mind and prime them on the benefits that a session can offer, thereby helping to focus intentions, establish positive expectations, and dramatically increase the odds of a favorable outcome.<\/p>\n

Sessions typically occur in a comfortable, often enchanting, environment \u2013 say, a star-shaped temple in the Brazilian Amazon or a cushy, made-over hospital room at NYU\u2019s dental school. And in these settings, therapists, shamans, and researchers follow a certain protocol, comprised of time-tested, peer-reviewed rituals that have been shown to most effectively channel revelatory and even, as Fadiman would have it, sacred, experiences. A psychedelic voyager may be guided with singing and drumming, or with prerecorded non-lyrical music, eyeshades, and photographs of loved ones, or with suggestions, observations, and questions, and, sometimes, later in the session, as the potency of a substance wanes, with forays into particularly choice habitat. Afterwards, the voyager is welcomed back and assisted with integrating into her situation any learning, insights, and mystical flashes that may have occurred.<\/p>\n

Those least likely to account for these six factors are typically people with less stable personalities, which is to say, youth. Which is to say, most of us who found ourselves with LSD on our tongues for the first time in a friend\u2019s basement, at a jumping party, or on the untamed outskirts of sprawl. The mind might be entirely unprepared, the dosage too much, the setting and lack of effective support quite dangerous.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think guides are wonderful,\u201d Fadiman said, \u201cwhich often gets me dismissed as a radical conservative \u2013 a kind of fun thing to be in this crowd. But look, you don\u2019t go to the airport and say, \u2018I want to fly a plane.\u2019 And a pilot says, \u2018Here\u2019s the keys, pick one of those, and give it a shot.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

He has a point. After all, even the most positive LSD experiences often involve disturbing visions and moments of paranoia. Most of us still managed to do OK during our first time, maybe even were steered toward an epiphany. But some of us didn\u2019t. Some of us crash-landed and injured ourselves or others, or were overpowered by unresolved subconscious conflicts, or, in extremely rare cases, unleashed a latent psychosis. Over the last 50 years, more than a few were locked up in a correctional facility of one kind or another and injected with Thorazine, which, unfortunately, has a way of transforming a drug-induced freakout into life-long affliction. (Xanax is a far better option.) Acid casualties from the 1960s still haunt Telegraph Avenue like ghosts with unsettled scores.<\/p>\n

When Fadiman sat down to write his book, he had at first been attempting to write a memoir; after an early draft, he decided he was doing too much navel-gazing and shifted his style and content to create\u00a0The Psychedelic Explorer\u2019s Guide<\/em>, which reads a good deal like a how-to-manual. Still, he didn\u2019t entirely suppress his initial urge to tell portions of his own tale, and why should he? Even as he conducted government-sanctioned research, he was cavorting with mystics, poets, outlaws, and a pistol-packing man who transnationally distributed LSD, regularly communicated with U.S. intelligence agencies, and pioneered procedures for psychedelic sessions that highly regarded medical facilities still use today.<\/p>\n

In one anecdote that made the cut, he recounts a night spent with Ken Kesey on a feral embankment between the shoreline and the town dump of sleepy Pescadaro, California. Peaking on a relatively high dose of LSD shortly before dawn, Dorothy, one of Ken\u2019s girlfriends, lay down in the dirt to better observe one particular wild violet. Stardust waltzed off its purple petals into the embankment, the ocean, even the dump. Stranger still, the violet budded, blossomed, withered, and died, both forward in time and in reverse.<\/p>\n

When Dorothy tried to explain it all to James, he didn\u2019t scoff. Instead he got down beside her and, utilizing insights he\u2019d developed as an IFAS guide, urged her deeper into the experience. Dorothy became aware that stardust was also coursing through her neural network. The universe wasn\u2019t random chance, she thought that morning, but ebullient choice. She didn\u2019t need to go anywhere because she was everywhere.<\/p>\n

If you ask her today, she\u2019ll tell you the effects from her trip lasted long after she came down. For starters, she\u2019d say, this was the pivotal moment that led her to become a filmmaker. (Her short documentaries have earned numerous accolades, including an Emmy, an Oscar nomination, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Gold Medal.) But, she\u2019d add, that\u2019s not all. That morning, she ditched Hunky Ken for Interstellar James, and for 47 years and counting, they\u2019ve lived together in an open marriage.<\/p>\n

What happened to Dorothy Fadiman that morning? How about Francis Crick and the people with cancer in the anxiety studies? Staunch materialists might argue that exogenous, psychotropic molecules had simply transformed their three pounds of gelatinous gray head muscle into funhouses for a few hours. But Ms. Fadiman, Crick, and most study volunteers say something quite different \u2013 that the psychedelics they ingested acted as a sort of antenna, allowing them to receive rather profound transmissions that they couldn\u2019t typically access during their ordinary states of consciousness. Such a claim is not without precedent.<\/p>\n

Ever since people first altered their surroundings with celestially aligned rocks, they\u2019ve also been altering their inner landscapes. Though Albert Hofmann\u2019s recipe is entirely modern, tribes and other pre-industrial societies from Australia to Mesopotamia have long been mixing the medicine into brews, snuffs, and powders. In rituals, often of a collective nature, they\u2019ve ingested these substances and then sung, drummed, and channeled to access insights, archetypal beings, and alternate realities. While these societies are as eclectic as orchids, they share at least one characteristic: Their rituals have served as an axis mundi, a psychic compass that simultaneously situates and provides direction to both individual and community. As a result, matter and consciousness are experienced as entwined, purposeful, and sacred.<\/p>\n

On stage and page, Fadiman has argued that, in marked contrast, most members of post-industrial societies perceive themselves as happenstance cogs in a clockwork universe, and consequently, exhibit a profound and increasingly dangerous alienation. The dissociation of self is so fundamental that bioregions are sub-divided into tract housing, resources into quarterly earnings, and people into one-percenters and the rest. For Fadiman at least, even traditional Western therapy, which seeks to re-align a sick individual to this worldview, must necessarily end in a cul-de-sac.<\/p>\n

Marlene Dobkin de Rios, a medical anthropologist, has argued that there is a strong correlation between centralized power and psychedelic prohibition as authoritarian leaders have perennially associated these substances with insurrectionary tendencies. Indeed, whether in 17th-century Europe or 19th-century America, even as proponents of church and state enclosed communal lands and subjugated the inhabitants therein, they especially targeted those deemed most resistant to ideological control \u2013 the shamans, witches, magi, occultists, and others who concocted, imbibed, and distributed psychedelic substances, and believed themselves to be in an ongoing discourse with land, non-human species, and spirits.<\/p>\n

The !Kung (tongue-click then \u201ckung\u201d) is one of the psychedelically-augmented, anarchistic societies that had survived these purges well into contemporary times. A nomadic people, they\u2019d harmonized with the austere rhythms of the Kalahari Desert for thousands of years. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, who lived with them during the 1950s, writes that the !Kung recognized an illness called \u201cStar Sickness,\u201d which could overcome members of the community with a force not unlike gravity and cause profound disorientation. Unable to situate themselves in the cosmos in a meaningful way, the afflicted displayed jealousy, hostility, and a marked incapacity for gift-giving \u2013 the very symptoms that plague many Westerners, according to Fadiman (and, certainly, quite a few others).<\/p>\n

To cure and prevent Star Sickness, the !Kung conducted all-night trance dances around a bonfire four times per month on average, often augmenting them with psychoactive plants including dagga (marijuana) and gaise noru noru (more than marijuana). As dancers sang, stomped, shook rattles, and spun, a boiling force called\u00a0n\/um<\/em>\u00a0collected in their abdomens and sometimes flowed out through their heads, causing them to soar over fantastical terrain. These grand vistas were said to provide the necessary perspective to re-align community members both to the stars and one other.<\/p>\n

Surely, the !Kung\u2019s chosen mode of governance reflected these regularly-scheduled astral tune-ups. Until the 1970s, when apartheid-era colonizers irrevocably altered the flora, fauna, and flow of the Kalahari, the !Kung had organized through leaderless, consensus-based decision-making, coupled with a bawdy humor that infused even the most sacred moments to dispel tension and check the power-hungry. This sort of power-sharing sounds not dissimilar to what Occupy Wall Street protesters attempted last year with their General Assemblies and Spokes Councils. Perhaps both Occupiers and the !Kung have tapped something primordial: When researchers isolate heart cells on a Petri dish, the cells bounce to their own idiosyncratic rhythms. But placed beside one another, they self-organize into a collective beat.<\/p>\n

The urge to connect with the numinous remains strong throughout the world, including the West \u2013 even as medical experts pathologize it, monotheistic bureaucrats neuter it, and Madison Avenue spellcasters exploit it. Of course psychoactive plants, fungi, and synthetics aren\u2019t the only way to sate this urge: Sufis spin, musicians riff, and physicists formulate. And sometimes psychedelics just get in the way, according to religious scholar Huston Smith.<\/p>\n

After surveying late-\u201960s counterculture, he warned that without the grounding of long-term spiritual practice, psychedelic drug use amounts to, at best, a \u201creligion of religious experience,\u201d a series of mystical wows decontextualized from personal and community health.<\/p>\n

Notably, though, the plant teachers \u2013 as some shamans refer to vision-inducing flora \u2013 have been perceived by what probably amounts to a majority of human societies as a legitimate and particularly effective portal into the fabric and meaning of reality. Michael Pollan popularized what ethnobotanists have been saying for some time with his 2001 book,\u00a0The Botany of Desire<\/em>: Plants and people have been involved in a symbiotic relationship for millennia. They entice our noses, bellies, and brains; we nurture their terrain. It\u2019s a fairly open secret that not only does the Amazon contain the necessary ingredients for ayahuasca, one of the strongest and oldest psychedelic brews, but that the forest itself isn\u2019t so much a wilderness as a 10,000-year-old garden under indigenous management.<\/p>\n

By comparison, Americans commonly perceive the wild violet as a noxious weed \u2013 though it\u2019s a rich source of Vitamins A and C, as well as antimicrobial and anti-HIV agents. The wild violet is quite hardy, too, which is why Dorothy Fadiman\u2019s prized flower was able to flourish near the Pescadaro dump, the ass-end of civilization. But for homeowners intent on turning their parcel of property into a monochromatic green sheet, that simply means repeated applications of a particularly strong herbicide along with, as one website advises, \u201cpersistence.\u201d Such an approach to land use, which views private property as so inviolable and autonomous that it\u2019s above even the laws of nature, surely reflects how many Americans perceive not only their surroundings but also themselves. You\u2019ve heard the one about the rugged, entirely self-made individual?<\/p>\n

Albert Einstein, who navigated the twilight turf between consciousness and matter for much of his life, argued that \u201cMan\u201d suffers from an \u201coptical delusion of consciousness\u201d as he \u201cexperiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest.\u201d His cure? Get some\u00a0n\/um<\/em>. \u201cThe most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious,\u201d he said. \u201cIt is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: His eyes are closed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though scientists are more typically seen as killers of myth, not its creators, Einstein and many of his more visionary contemporaries sound as trippy as any of yesterday\u2019s mystics. They say that the time-space continuum warps like the surface of a trampoline. They say that we are stardust. That there is no \u201cin the beginning.\u201d That things are not things at all, but relations. That the observer tweaks the observed, at least on a sub-atomic level, just by observing.<\/p>\n

Who knows, their latest findings may one day affirm some ancient hypotheses. If reality isn\u2019t shaped with the psychically aware, self-organizing units that Giordano Bruno called monads in the sixteenth century, then perhaps it\u2019s woven with Indra\u2019s net, the jeweled nodes of which stretch into infinity, each one a reflection of all others. To entertain such ontologies is to re-contextualize one\u2019s self as a marvelous conduit in a timeless whole, through which molecules and meaning flow, from nebulae to neurons and back again. If certain of these molecules connect with our serotonin receptors like a key in a pin tumbler, and open a door to extraordinary vistas, why shouldn\u2019t we peek?<\/p>\n

Fadiman had another question for the audience: \u201cHow many of you have heard about micro-dosing?\u201d He adjusted his bifocals to a groovy sight: two-dozen uplifted hands. \u201cWhoa!\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite the 45-year government ban, Fadiman had never stopped longing to tinker with LSD, to catalogue what we might be capable of with this byproduct of mold. Of all the possible forays into this psychic terra incognito, he was most eager to explore micro-dosing \u2013 specifically its long-term effects. And he didn\u2019t have another 45 years for the feds to get hip to the plan.<\/p>\n

Fadiman claims the \u201cnormal range\u201d of an LSD dose varies, based on whether one is seeking a recreational experience (50 mcg), creative boost (100 mcg), therapeutic session (100-250 mcg) or face-to-face with \u201cthe Divine\u201d (400 mcg). But, he cautions, a higher dose is a riskier dose.<\/p>\n

First things first: Fadiman defines a micro-dose as 10 micrograms of LSD (or one-fifth the usual dose of mushrooms). Because he cannot set up perfect lab conditions due to the likelihood of criminal prosecution, he has instead crafted a study in which volunteers self-administer and self-report. Which means that they must acquire their own supply of the Schedule 1 drug and separate a standard hit of 50 to 100 micrograms into micro-doses. (Hint: LSD is entirely water-soluble.)<\/p>\n

Beginning in 2010, an unspecified but growing number of volunteers have taken a micro-dose every third day, while conducting their typical daily routines and maintaining logbooks of their observations. Study enrollment may last for several weeks or longer: There doesn\u2019t appear to be a brightly drawn finish line. After several weeks (or, um\u2026), participants send their logbooks to an email address on Fadiman\u2019s personal website, preferably accompanied by a summary of their overall impressions.<\/p>\n

\u201cMicro-dosing turns out to be a totally different world,\u201d Fadiman extolled. \u201cAs someone said, the rocks don\u2019t glow, even a little bit. But what many people are reporting is, at the end of the day, they say, \u2018That was a really good day.\u2019 You know, that kind of day when things kind of work. You\u2019re doing a task you normally couldn\u2019t stand for two hours, but you do it for three or four. You eat properly. Maybe you do one more set of reps. Just a good day. That seems to be what we\u2019re discovering.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elsewhere Fadiman has been more specific about the logbooks he\u2019s received. One physician reported that micro-dosing got him \u201cin touch with a deep place of ease and beauty.\u201d A vocalist said she could better hear and channel music. In general, study participants functioned normally in their work and relationships, Fadiman has said, but with increased focus, creativity, and emotional clarity. Until he releases his data archive in a comprehensive manner, it is, of course, not possible to scrutinize the validity of his claim.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the micro-dose study offers Fadiman the opportunity to follow the recommendation of a longtime, now-deceased friend, Albert Hofmann, who, according to Fadiman, called micro-dosing \u201cthe most under-researched area of psychedelics.\u201d Word on the street is that Hofmann had also surmised that micro-doses of LSD would be a viable market alternative to Ritalin. It\u2019s an intriguing claim. After all, if Fadiman had administered Ritalin to the scientists in his creativity study, they might have focused on their problems just as intently as they had on LSD, but they probably wouldn\u2019t have had as many breakthroughs. Even as Ritalin boosts attention, it has a tendency to create tunnel vision, which, more often than not, stymies imagination.<\/p>\n

\u201cI just got a report from someone who did this for six weeks,\u201d Fadiman said. \u201cAnd his question to me was, \u2018Is there any reason to stop?\u2019\u201d More laughter throughout the hall, another adjustment of bifocals.<\/p>\n

Is Fadiman reckless, irresponsible, a mad corrupter of youth? Most of today\u2019s politicians, law enforcement officials, cable news hosts, and medical practitioners \u2013 whom, collectively, Fadiman might refer to as \u201cthe establishment\u201d \u2013 would undoubtedly level these charges and more against him if only they knew of his research. But these sorts of accusations have long been aimed at those who posit opinions so dissident that, if taken seriously, they threaten not just how society operates, but, perhaps more fundamentally disturbing to both reigning authorities and the general public, how we perceive ourselves.<\/p>\n

Regardless of whether heretics are visionaries, cranks, or people to whom both labels apply, if their ideas have a certain traction, the powers that be \u2013 aka establishments throughout the ages \u2013 attempt to silence them through exile, thumbscrews, the stake, incarceration, public ridicule, etc. Such tactics are terribly effective. Which is to say that most accused heretics suffer and are forgotten. But not always. Every once in a while, posthumously or otherwise, one of them topples a paradigm.<\/p>\n

During an afternoon break, a handful of younger Horizons attendees \u2013 dressed, to greater and lesser effect, in daring colors and cuts \u2013 clumped together on the front stairs of Judson Church and worked through the logistics of micro-dosing. No scale required, they said. Paper blotter, Pez, whatever, just plop it in a water bottle, draw some ticks on the side. A little trial and error of course, but do mind the chlorine.<\/p>\n

Occupy Wall Street protestors streamed by, sleep-deprived, scruffy, grinning, keffiyehs knotted around necks; several held aloft a golden bull, \u201cFALSE IDOL\u201d painted on its flanks. They were rallying across the street in Washington Square Park before attempting an evening takeover of Times Square, on this, the 29th day after sleeping bags were first planted in the Financial District. Heavily armored police surrounded them and covertly amassed on adjacent streets where the media cameras weren\u2019t focused. \u201cWe are unstoppable!\u201d a thousand Occupiers chanted. \u201cAnother world is possible!\u201d<\/p>\n

History has proven the fallibility of their first line. But as to their second? For starters, this other world depends on visioning at least as much as active resistance, and that\u2019s where, historically, psychedelics come in. Long before the mathematicians and scientists in Fadiman\u2019s creativity study utilized LSD to better envision formulas, materials, and the interstices between, traditional societies tripped to comprehend and commune with people, animals, plants, bioregions, and the spirits they felt moved through all things.<\/p>\n

Which brings us to the next point: It\u2019s not just one world that is possible, but many. The American Psychiatric Association could recognize Star Sickness as a pathology. The U.S. government could tether progress to Gross National Happiness as is done in Bhutan, or follow the lead of Evo Morales, Bolivia\u2019s first indigenous leader, and implement the Law of Mother Earth, so that \u201cthe balance of ecosystems and local inhabitant communities\u201d are granted the legal right \u201cto not be affected by mega-infrastructure and development projects.\u201d Many enlightening policies emanate from societies like the above, where non-ordinary states of consciousness are prized.<\/p>\n

If these ideas seem far out to you, that\u2019s precisely the problem. Or so thought Einstein. Capitalism, he argued, simultaneously creates a \u201chuge community of producers\u201d who are \u201cunceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor\u201d and an \u201coligarchy\u201d that \u201ccannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized society.\u201d He believes this subjugation is largely accomplished \u201cnot by force\u201d but because \u201cthe privileged class\u201d had long ago established a \u201csystem of values by which the people were thenceforth, to a large extent unconsciously, guided in their social behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, cops don\u2019t just hide on side streets \u2013 they sneak into heads, too. And so Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential hopeful, can declare with patrician matter-of-factness, \u201cCorporations are people, my friend.\u201d He\u2019s absolutely correct, too, as far as U.S. law is concerned. Corporations have the rights that bioregions don\u2019t. And they have far better legal representation than you.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re always evolving, one way or another, as we play for keeps on what William James called the \u201cfield of consciousness.\u201d While countless questions remain as to the parameters of this field, one thing is certain. Fadiman and his far-flung colleagues have provided the means through which contemporary Westerners can visit areas once thought to be out-of-bounds, or accessible only to a select few, through divine grace, a near-death experience, or 10,000 hours of meditation. Under the right circumstances, these psychic d\u00e9rives are far less dangerous than, say, a lunar landing, and may ultimately prove as rewarding, if not more so.<\/p>\n

So then, why the hysteria?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a question Fadiman asks and attempts to answer. \u201cWhy did our drug research frighten the establishment so profoundly? Why does it still frighten them?\u201d he writes. \u201cPerhaps because we were able to step off (or were tossed off) the treadmill of daily stuff and saw the whole system of life-death-life. We had discovered that love is the fundamental energy of the universe. And we wouldn\u2019t shut up about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

At first glance (and maybe second and third), his answer may sound maddeningly, well, Californian. But that doesn\u2019t mean he\u2019s not onto something. After all, to experience self and surroundings as entwined and enchanted, which those engaged in a guided psychedelic session have a statistically significant chance of doing, is to extend the very definition of self outward, so that one is far more apt to behave like heart cells. Jesus is said to have overturned moneychangers\u2019 tables in the name of sacred turf. Just imagine what a critical mass of formerly upright citizens might do if they suddenly saw the whole earth as a temple. \u201cNo wonder,\u201d Fadiman writes, \u201cenlightenment is always a crime.<\/p>\n

\u00a9 Tim Doody \u2013 publishes with kind permission<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Tim Doody For decades, the U.S. government banned medical studies of the effects of LSD. But for one longtime elite researcher, the promise of mind-blowing revelations was just too tempting. This article has first been published by online magazine\u00a0The Morning News\u00a0on 26 July 2012. At 9:30 in the morning, an architect and three seniorContinue Reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gaiamedia.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/979"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gaiamedia.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gaiamedia.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gaiamedia.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gaiamedia.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=979"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.gaiamedia.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/979\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":980,"href":"https:\/\/www.gaiamedia.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/979\/revisions\/980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gaiamedia.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gaiamedia.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gaiamedia.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}