Tag: Psychedelics

A reader writes:

The previous contributor wrote:

There isn't any doubt that psychedelics seem to bestow insights on those who take them. Almost everyone who trips says that they got a lot out of it. What I'm questioning is how real that is. I'm saying that as a person who has tripped many many times, and who has done so in the company of a great many people.

I think the real benefit of psychedelic experience is not the actual content of any particular "insights" provided to the user, but rather the visceral realization that our existence is by definition subjective.

Through the distortion of inputs to our brain from our five senses and the intellectual and emotional filters through which we normally process the world around us, the psychedelic experience points out in a deeply profound and thorough way that our normal perception of the world is always colored by context, our history, and our corporeal nature.  It forces the tripper to acknowledge and understand that there are many – perhaps an infinite number – of perspectives that can be brought to bear on the same objective reality, and makes us realize that objective reality is one which we can never really know.

Of course, it only really takes one or two trips to come to that realization, which is why I think I found myself getting less and less from subsequent psychedelic experiences back in my college days.

Another writes:

I've taken acid exactly once and count it as one of three absolute highlights of my life (the other two are getting married and seeing the birth of my son). That experience ranks so highly because it did change my life. I took a small dose so my experience wasn't psychedelic (with hallucinations and all that), but it was truly powerful.

We were on a secluded beach on Baya. A gorgeous day. We dosed at around noon and from then until dusk, I experienced joy and *awe* of a kind that still, to this day, 20 years on, makes me shiver. I felt connection with and absolute astonishment at nature, people, the ineffable … in short, life. Like another reader, I have not taken acid again because I see that experience as (poseur alert watch!) a lamp on my path. No exaggeration.

Psychedelics are no substitute for prayer and meditation, which I, too, see as the true path to enlightenment. Yes, you "come down." Yes, reality hits you squarely in the jaw after an experience like that. I'm very sure I don't give off any special good vibe. But I had a glimpse of what living a fully, more joyfully can mean. That gift feeds me still, in all that I do.

Another:

Needless to say the only people who dismiss psilocybin have never tried it, and in many cases, for those people I do not recommend it anyway. Not because I'm a medicine man and I know better, but because the entire experience is about focusing on trust and comfort. Perhaps it's an overgeneralization to say that people who are scared, who do not trust others, do not fare well with mushrooms… but it's not far off.

It's a personal experience, that is not to say private. You take it with those you trust and love. Because your insight is extremely keyed in while tripping, it's unwise to do it without some form of ritual. But for all the caution, I can say that my mind has never, of its own accord, gone where it has on mushrooms.

The best experience was three years ago with my girlfriend, now my wife, on new year's eve. We stayed in, ate them around 9, and started to come down sometime after midnight. It doesn't get spoken about very often in the same way the high does, but the come-down is also extremely impacting. You've just spent hours opening every door your mind could choose, and during the come down you have the very sober realization of the real world, and you have to deal with it. What did I see, why can't I have it always, etc. Having my wife there was incredible, because during the come-down our fear was just as synchronized as our joy and amazement only a few hours earlier – but we had each other. We didn't need to say a word. Just pure, complete nonverbal understanding and trust, and it saw us through.

It takes a lot out of you, all the more reason to avoid abuse. But something just happens in your mind, it clicks on and slowly dissipates, allowing you to relive the very real emotion and connection. You come out of it with a repository of trust that can't be shaken, and allows you to locate yourself in a way quite nearly impossible given the amount of neuroses pumped into you in your daily social and professional life.

That's the best I can do to relate the spiritual quality of it. You are confirmed, allowed to exist without fear or doubt for a short time, and it doesn't leave you. That's why I haven't done it in three years; I still have that experience.

A different take:

There seems little doubt to me that psilocybin is a very queer substance. Whether its effect on the brain merely simulates profound spirituality or whether it actually recreates it chemically is a philosophical conundrum we won’t solve very soon. But that we recognize it somehow as transcendent, that it can be measured in brain scans as indistinguishable from genuine meditative calm, and that it seems, more than any other chemical, to alert one to the divine: well, these seem to be part of the universe as we find it.

What frustrates me is the cultural baggage of the Leary era, the easy ways of dismissing it, the abuse rather than use, the social utopianism rather than the internal peace. It’s too interesting a subject for that kind of treatment. And too important.

A reader writes:

You may want to consider a Poseur Alert for your most recent reader: "After I came down from my Oregon sky odyssey, I felt a brief urge to return – to escape back – into the third-eye-pleasure-dome." Give me a freaking break. I can't think of many recent Poseur Alerts that top the pomposity of that sentence!

Another writes:

"I love acid.  If I had some, I'd take some and hole up this weekend, watching old movies on TV.  But the idea that it gives you some deep insight into the world is bogus."

I'm the guy who sent that to you.  Since no one seems to be agreeing with me, I'd like to try to defend it a little bit.

There isn't any doubt that psychedelics seem to bestow insights on those who take them. Almost everyone who trips says that they got a lot out of it. What I'm questioning is how real that is. I'm saying that as a person who has tripped many many times, and who has done so in the company of a great many people.

These drugs distort our perceptions. It's very difficult to get a handle on how much time has passed when you're tripping, for example. What I'm arguing now is that they also distort our ability to accurately determine how significant ideas are. They tend to make things seem more significant than they really are.

Obviously, it's pretty hard to get a handle on whether or not such an exaggeration actually happens. Who's to say how significant an idea really is? The only meaningful way to gauge it, I think, is to try to see if people really do grow and bring back things from the trip that make them better people. My contention is that acid and shrooms don't really help much.

First, people don't really change that much after they trip. This is something that people talk about in books about psychedelics – Ram Dass, for example. He said that the problem with psychedelics is that you always come back down. That's why he started to study religion. And second, if you hang around with people who have taken psychedelics, they don't seem to be unusually wise.

You wrote about the documentary "Into Great Silence" when it came out. I think that if we were able to talk to the monks who have devoted themselves to prayer and to that lifestyle, we'd pick up on something from them – that they'd be unusually calm, that they'd be centered. You simply don't get the same feeling from people who take psychedelics. In fact, if you hang around with people who take too many of them, you often get a fairly negative vibe off of people.

The problem is that those monks are probably on the right track. And that means that becoming wise takes time and practice. It would really be great if you could get it from a pill, or even from a book. But I just don't think it works that way.

I'm someone who bought into what you might call psychedelic spirituality in a big way as a teenager, and I had a couple of very large experiences that seemed more or less miraculous at the time. But I always came down.

I know that the claims of the people you're quoting aren't terribly extravagant. But when I was a kid, people were really pushing the idea that psychedelics lead to spiritual enlightenment. I don't know if it's fair to call it a con, because I think the people who were putting those ideas forward believed them. But I do think it was a big wrong turn. At least it was for me personally. I think that the notion that psychedelics impart wisdom is a Bad Idea, in very much the same way that the notion that Che was a really great guy is a Bad Idea. They are things that are easy to believe in so you don't challenge things too much. I think I would have been better off watching a screening of Into Great Silence.

I really love psychedelics. As far as I'm concerned, you haven't really lived until you've seen Fanny and Alexander while you're tripping. I'm just skeptical of the people who come down from the mountain with special insights.

Another adds to the "Medicinal Mushrooms" thread:

This morning while visiting Johns Hopkins I came across a call for volunteers "with a cancer diagnosis to participate in a scientific study of self-exploration and personal meaning' using 'entheogen psilocybin." I came across it because my wife is a cancer survivor and we spend lots of time (now thankfully, just for follow-ups) visiting various doctors on their campuses.

Draw whatever conclusions from this what you will. The physical toll of cancer and its treatments are horrible. The psychological toll on the patient and even on the family are pretty awful, too. While I must note that my wife would never in a million years take mushrooms, even for the benefit of a study like this, I'm glad some other poor couple that is also dealing with this hell might come across it. Who knows if a mushroom trip would help a cancer patient with self exploration and personal meaning. The fact that we are open to considering that it might is a good thing.

The Dish touched upon that treatment here. More science on the subject here and here.

A reader writes:

My inaugural psilocybin trip happened with a cast of fellow actors under the guidance of one of the last surviving Merry Pranksters.  Tom Wolfe described the particulars better than I ever could, so I’ll skip them here to comment on the larger discussion of Journey v. Escape.

After I came down from my Oregon sky odyssey, I felt a brief urge to return – to escape back – into the third-eye pleasure-dome.  But a new feeling from the same trip quicklycountered that reflex. Put simply, the trip left me with a new sense of reverence for the trip itself.  No, not in an evangelical you-must-try-this sense, but reverence in the sense that this experience was to be remembered, treasured and only repeated with certain people, landscapes, music, skies or stages in life.  In other words, I wouldn’t want to spend every waking minute on psilocybin because I value what I brought back from the trip too much.  The potency of the trip commanded a strange new spiritual respect, not bottomless desire.  Sure, I’d love to go back “on the bus” some day, but I’m not organizing my life around that goal.  The experience was too beautiful to make it an earthly goal.

This kind of reverence is categorically different from the fixations of addiction, where the drug-taker only reveres the drug.  I suspect it’s why few people talk of shrooms with the same vocabulary as heroin, cocaine or cigarettes.  Dependence, tolerance, toxicity – these have nothing whatever to do with it.  As with marijuana, our drug policy places shrooms at level of criminality that is inversely proportionate to the personal and public health risk it poses.

(Illustration: A Molecular spacefill of Psilocybin.)

A final bit of housekeeping on this thread. A reader writes:

The fact that your correspondent is unfamiliar with a journal is hardly damning (and it’s amusing that he or she misnamed the other journal, which goes simply by “Neurology.”). The Journal of Neurology is actually a perfectly respectable peer-reviewed scientific journal. And the funny part is that The Journal of Neurology is a society journal (European Neurological Society); it is increasingly common for society journals to be handled through commercial publishers. Its publisher, Springer-Verlag, is one of the largest and most respected scientific publishers in the world; good journals can be found among commercial publishers as well as scientific societies.

I do agree that the originally cited article, an isolated case, doesn’t amount to much in isolation, and that a PubMed search doesn’t show much in the way of harmful physical side-effects of psilocybin.

P.S. I even have neuropathy! And I’ve published in Neurology, but not in the Journal of Neurology.

A reader writes:

I thought that I would weigh in on the mushroom debate. I am a private practice neurologist who treats patients with neuropathy.  Neuropathy is a debilitating and often painful condition in which there is no cure. There is only maintainence therapy that often is insufficient to alleviate pain. I am neither an advocate for nor am I a critique of psilocybin as a treatment for neuropathy – I simply do not know whether it is effective.

What I am critical of is the multitude of errant information on the Internet.

A reader referenced “The Journal of Neurology” on a study that purports psilocybin causes brain damage.  I am unaware of this claim, although I know there are a lot of mushroom species that are toxic to our bodies.  As a board certified neurologist, I am also unaware of “The Journal of Neurology.” The website references a publishing company rather than a peer-reviewed society that publishes the journal such as the American Academy of Neurology which publishes “The Neurology Journal” – a subtle difference in name.  I would challenge the reader to research the claim of the article that psilocybin causes brain demyelination in the National Library of Medicine database – Pubmed.  There are no references in this database to support the claim.

Another writes:

I was intrigued to read this dissent regarding the horrors legalized drugs can unleash. The reader had me until this line: "The idea that it gives you some deep insight into the world is bogus."

I've done psychedelics a handful of times. Each time, I have come to know myself better. I've come to understand a lot about where I view myself in terms of humanity, the world, and the universe. I finally was able to come around to understanding, for example, that the debate I'd been having with myself for a long time – whether or not I believe in God – was less important than what I think of the life that exists either because or in spite of God. I know that sounds like old stoner claptrap, but these are insights I either couldn't comprehend formerly or had spent most of my life fighting.

Honestly, the reader's worry about "wisdom" achieved through drug use is well-founded; there is no substitute for gaining knowledge through experiences. Neither is there a shortcut around mediation or healthy living. Psychedelics, I believe, should never be used as such. To me, a trip is more a chance to reorient oneself – to gain a specific kind of perspective while having a ridiculously wild ride. But let's be honest about it, too: taking mushrooms or acid a few times a year is very, very different than holing oneself up in a bedroom for a week and devouring a double hit ever twelve hours.

Your reader is right to say that ignoring the negatives is never going to convince anyone. However, with all the fear-mongering and misinformation about drugs already out there, I don't feel that discussing the positives of drug use (be they marijuana, psychedelics, or something else) is glossing over the negatives; it's simply providing a counterbalance. So long as we are honest that, yes, some drugs (heroin and meth chief among them) are completely evil, and that, yes, some drugs have both negative and positive effects, we can have a real discussion, rather than neutering it with "Drugs are bad, mmmkay?"

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

Look, I know psilocybin is probably not going to hurt in small doses, but this logic is really really terrible. Natural does not mean good. Natural does not mean safe. Natural does not mean that it’s going to fix you. And it’s really dangerous to believe any of those things.

Another:

When I saw the reader’s description of their use of psilocybin to treat a demyelinating condition, I immediately googled it and came up with only papers about mushroom use leading to demyelinating episodes.  Here’s a link (PDF) to a scary one, where the demyelination occurred in the brain and not peripheral nerves. I just thought I’d pass this along in case people who have a similar condition might see that and think, “Ooh, I ought to try that!”