Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science
latimes.com
latimes.com
[0] https://asc-cybernetics.org/foundations/history/MacyPeople.h...
Also, there is this letter from Hoffman to Jobs:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/read-the-never-before-pub_b_2...
Do you have a source or any additional keywords I might be able to use to search for it?
"It must be changing something about the internal communication in my brain. Whatever my inner process is that lets me solve problems, it works differently, or maybe different parts of my brain are used, " said Herbert, 42, an early employee of Cisco Systems who says he solved his toughest technical problems while tripping to drum solos by the Grateful Dead – who were among the many artists inspired by LSD.
"When I'm on LSD and hearing something that's pure rhythm, it takes me to another world and into anther brain state where I've stopped thinking and started knowing," said Herbert who intervened to ban drug testing of technologists at Cisco Systems.
https://web.archive.org/web/20180223065640/https://www.wired...
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Kevin Herbert - https://maps.org/news-letters/v18n1/v18n1-MAPS_21-23.pdf
It was cool to see your mention of Ginsberg and the Beats, my wife and I just stopped through City Lights and the small, but pretty neat, Beat museum that's nearby.
Anyway, congrats on the book, I look forward to reading it!
I remember an old and dear chemist friend of mine there who made me aware of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). I still have his copy of Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History he lent me after taking a sociology course on drugs in society, if I recall correctly.
Yet the standard of rigor for alcohol, weed, SSRIs and tiktok is somehow not as stringent.
Only one of these is conventionally understood to confer a net benefit in its most common use cases, and the SSRIs have been subject to extensive testing and approval processes.
I disagree with the sibling commenter that alcohol does not dramatically alter your perception of reality. He simply isn't drinking enough. Likewise it is more than possible to limit the psychedelic dose so that it does not lead to heedlessness; Shulgin noted that many users prefer what he called a "plus-two" instead of the highly disorienting "plus-three".
While the medical application of psychedelics is probably going to be subject to the same rigorous approval process that characterizes the medical application of other things, the primary benefits attributed to conventional psychedelics are not easily reconciled with the usual endpoints of contemporary medicine. People claim to have experienced improvements in moral character, reasoning about certain problems, interpersonal trust, and other behavior changes which are not considered targets of treatment by contemporary medicine. There have been a few limited studies looking at psychedelics for depression and anxiety, but the improvements are just OK, though the prospect of just taking a drug once instead of daily is certainly attractive.
Meanwhile, the non-prescription use of psychedelics has been "experimented" with in a few cases, particularly in the Netherlands, Oregon, and Florida. Unfortunately, while incidents of psychedelic-influenced misbehavior are rare in general, they seem to become more common when the availability of these drugs is decriminalized. My hypothesis is that people are more likely to be reckless when they are not afraid of getting caught. A system of licensure for users would hopefully help prevent this.
SSRIs barely beat placebo and have a significant side effect profile
We keep using them because they sorta work a little, which is better than placebos, even if marginally, and we don't really have better tools.
Seems we might have now. Psilocybin and ketamine research is looking very promising
Weed, you might have a point, but it's also fairly evidently far more benign than alcohol and tobacco, and has been pretty clearly unjustly demonized for decades in an attempt to target specific populations, so it's not unreasonable for the pendulum to overcorrect a bit before we find a comfortable equilibrium.
... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody - or at least some force - is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.
These two things radically shifted my life perspective and resolved a lot of inner issues, both after just a single time.
Particularly the psychedelic experience is great for sparking realizations that things like hate, xenophobia, racism, etc. are all so absurd and non-productive.
Point is there are no absolutes and a lot of romanticism and anecdotes around it when we need science. But it's difficult to be anything but subjective about it if you have experienced it. I suspect any critical thinking becomes biased and that relationship requires some analysis as well.
Boring take I know but to pose a question: at the level of society if it is normalised, does taking psychedelics have a general positive or a general negative outcome?
For me, despite regularly taking high doses of psychedelics (so far LSD and psilocybin), none of them have been huge life-shattering trips. They're just recreational experiences.
Maybe I'm just neurodivergent in a very specific way that isn't easily impacted by psychedelics. They're still my favorite substances and I still enjoy them, but it hasn't made that big of an impact on my life, other than being something to spend my money on, like you say.
Or maybe people with self-proclaimed life-shattering experiences are just extrapolating more out of their trip than what actually happened.
I'm sure plenty of people have legitimately improved their lives this way, but I don't believe the hype.
I remember one trip I was reading this book called Be Here Now by Ram Dass. Very new-agey, acid culture type thing. A very spiritually intense book
I remember having this lingering feeling of "I probably shouldn't be doing these" because of some mental health history on my mother's side of the family. I remember there was this part of it about how people go insane off of psychedelics, turning the page and seeing this lightning bolt hitting a giant tower and seeing a bunch of people falling to the ground out of it. And right when I saw that, I heard the loudest thunder I have ever heard in my entire life (it was raining outside). Like it shook the whole fucking house
Afterwards I looked up the dude who wrote the book, saw he was a "new age" guy with a white robe on and sort of felt like I was tricked, and that the lightning was some type of coincidence. In hindsight I see this as pride from my part. Also that was the last time I did a psychedelic. There's this saying with them where "you get the message and hang up the phone", that was my cue
I was an atheist up to this point but that scared this fear into me that there's something out there. You can rationalize and come up with reasons to deny that (it isn't hard), but I'd rather not personally. At least, I feel more at peace now after accepting that there is
That was absolutely unexpected effect. I still don't know what to think about it.
I'm not a psychodelic enthusiast
After LSD he just "forgot" to take them
Do you think the two events could be otherwise related?
As you then say "Point is there are no absolutes and a lot of romanticism and anecdotes around it when we need science."
>...does taking psychedelics have a general positive or a general negative outcome?
It's a great question, but banning it, so the quality of the chemical supplied then may be suspect, and the dosages may be wildly different - and seeing what happens over 60+ years was an incorrect move.
If everyone took them in a context conducive to healing/therapy it would be positive. Unfortunately that's rarely the case (though it's becoming more common).
> when we need science.
Do SSRIs beat placebo?
After many years of experimenting with pretty much every conventional and 'research' drug, MDMA is the only one that stands out to me personally as having a lasting impact on how I view the world.
The people using microdosing to be more effective at work, well... good grief.
I think this is overly dismissive. I don’t think we should all be taking drugs to squeeze every bit out of ourselves out into the next jira ticket, but elsewhere in the thread there’s a comment discussing fundamental breakthroughs in networking technology that came about after an LSD trip. If someone believes that microdosing improves the creativity and overall satisfaction with their job, is that a bad thing?
Objectively, those people are normalizing performance-enhancing drugs and the usual vicious cycle that goes with it.
Less objectively, they also tend to be the typically soul-less nerds who have made the technology industry so malicious.
You should run for office with that platform and see how far it carries you.
I think that's about as detailed as I can get without revealing private information.
It was a remarkable experience and fundamentally changed the way I think about the human mind, extreme political views, political dialogue, and most of all how therapy should work.
I don’t believe that mindset exists.
All I’m saying is that if someone is to make extraordinary claims “this drug is great against racism”, they should be able to back it up with more than “well I wasn’t racist before, and I’m still not, and besides we’re all one so why would someone else be?”
I’m well aware of the claim. I’m the one who protested it to begin with. And I still have found no evidence that the parent hadn’t realized any of those beforehand.
This is the exact kind of behavior that gets the psychs-solve-everything crowd dismissed.
If someone were to grow up in an economy built on coal mining with 13 year old miners, and you’re really effective at organizing 13 year old coal miners, then you’re gonna be very productive.
Even though everything that you’re doing is existentially bad for everybody, they are all ignorant of it’s harms. So even if temporally coal mining with miners might be the only thing that anyone is aware of to do that is “productive.”
You can make no “mistakes” and still lose just from ignorance
I had a chip on my shoulder, so to speak.
MDMA may also be the only, or among the few, things that really work in and for couples therapy (it's also not a panacea). Banning it is a travesty.
There's an interesting alternative world chronicled in part by Michael Pollan in How to Change Your Mind, and by others, in which psychedelics are integrated into therapy, psychiatry, and other forms of medicine and improvement.
MDMA can cause permanent tolerance and brain damage, and even though there has been plenty of research and testing by harm-reduction communities (like Bluelight), it's still not fully understood how this works or how to guarantee the substance's safety. This is probably why it should stay banned, at least for now.
LSD and psilocybin are much safer, in my opinion. I would probably say LSD is the safest, since high doses of psilocybin can render me unconscious, but that could just be me.
Simply unbanning MDMA with no further action though wouldn't be very productive right now when it still is quite unknown. I hope more research and clinical trials can be done in the future, with all sorts of things and not just MDMA.
But all you have to do is spend a little time around drug users or pay attention to the discourse in psychedelic friendly circles (Joe Rogan and Russell Brand anyone?) to see that drugs are not some kind of magic enlightenment in a pill. If they were there’d be more enlightened drug users.
You can code a game, a database, an OS, a framework, a LLM etc. with one tool.
Personally I think a great many of the problem outcomes with psychedelics is related to consumerism and the desire for quick fixes. A society blanketed with pharmaceutical advertising and indoctrinated with the notion that pills fix health problems will tend to generate individuals who think taking some drug will 'fix' them. A typical outcome for such people is that they try some psychedelic, have a great time, and then run back to the well for another taste, and then have a horrible grim experience, reliving some past personal trauma or consumed with morbid thoughts of death and darkness, etc. - the so-called 'bad trip'. Let alone people who take so much they completely dissociate with sensory reality, a very dangerous situation as they may fall off cliffs, walk into traffic, etc.
More often than not, people indoctrinated into consumerist drug use will instead turn to alcohol, opiates, cocaine, amphetamines, benzos, etc. - all drugs with fairly predictable feel-good effects, a variety of negative health effects, and high addiction potential - but not much risk of a 'bad trip'. In contrast, psychedelics have potential for combatting addiction to such drugs because they lead to introspection, self-reflection, and the realization that the short-term feel-good effects of addictive drugs are not worth the long-term consequences - the degradation of ones' mental and physical capabilities, degraded social relationships, loss of emotional control and so on.
Curious about selectivity against 5-HT3 as well as the nausea can be a problem.
Some people wish for non hallucinogenic 5-HT2A activation and that seems like a bizzarely detached from reality pipe dream. Like, sure, maybe it's technically possible, but are you going to find a compound that selective (likely not) and is it actually going to remove all psychomometic effects (lol no, how do you think these things work)?
There's always tradeoffs, it's like the weirdly detached desire to "reduce hallucinations" in language models but keep the same level of performance. Like, how do you think it's going to learn? You can't just magically make an unbiased perfect estimator with no variance for some limited capacity and data, your variance must live somewhere and in language models it tends to (generally) live in the higher level correlations between concepts.
A good dose of basic mathematics and information theory really could set these fields straight.
In any case, some of the future here looks exciting.
Do you have a source for that? I'm a cardiac sonographer and I've never heard of aortic hypertrophy.
> Some people wish for non hallucinogenic 5-HT2A activation and that seems like a bizzarely detached from reality pipe dream.
https://psychedelichealth.co.uk/2023/06/13/non-hallucinogeni...
It's like looking for a flu medicine and judging it by if makes a fever go down because a fever is an arbitrary human-measurable metric. Has some quality of life impacts but is second player to the actual health impacts of conditions including fever (especially ones with long term impacts) and is extremely superficial.
I think that's the idea, maybe you can avoid visual cortex stuff but you can't magically get no psychomometic effects unless somehow the medication is perfectly shooting some kind of entropic gap.
I'm sure it's possible but I feel like it's much better as an accidentally discovered thing or a second or third generation medication thing, not a first priority, if that makes sense.
It's almost impossible to imagine the one aspect of the dreamlike state dominating the mind without the disruption of the other, but even if the senses are perfectly unperturbed I would think the unconstrained and disordered psyche alone could be very upsetting or confusing.
That would be a nice feature aiui; some people I know got into the habit of always taking psychedelics with ondansetron to try to avoid the nausea.
Impure LSD, and some RC substitutes, often do cause stomach problems. They can also cause death.
CBD actual has some mild antiemesis properties as well and can be as immediately effective as Zofran if inhaled. I once backpacked with a dab pen and CBD due to having constant nausea, the crystal CBD isolate was easier to source and refill (since it's hemp derived) and the dab pen meant that I got nausea relief in seconds.
Unfortunately CBD in ultra high doses can contribute to serotonin syndrome IIUC due to 5-HT1A activation (which is how it exerts anti-emetic effects IIUC/IIRC). So that of course is always a big problem and I think can make polypharmacy with it a bit more difficult (though I am of course not a doctor and this is not medical advice).
That said CBD does help w.r.t. some social inhibitions due to autism IIRC and when I was dabbing between 300 mg - 1 g a day I definitely noticed a very calm, warm, low-key "peace" about the world that I very much appreciated. That was very nice indeed.
Also, ginger can be nice for oral nausea as IIRC, however it does not cross the gut barrier as well so it takes more (and sometimes the spiciness can be a problem). It also inhibits a bunch of CYP enzymes as well which is something to consider (I guess many things do, but I tend to use it more as an emergency backup of emergency backups when I don't have anything else available to me. Order generally is Zofran -> CBD (200-300 mg sublingual if not urgent) -> Pepto -> Slightly more Pepto+Ginger depending upon urgency/availability. Refilling prescriptions can be a problem due to the overwhelm of autism for me, so I try to dole/parse it out sparing, at least as I am able to. <3 :'))))
Happy to answer any questions, sorry this was an autistic infodump, really like this topic here.b<3 :'))))
Like, this attitude of "oh NOW we see, we were just dumb 40 years ago! Everything will be better because NOW we get it" strikes me as exactly the same attitude that caused this problem in the first place.
The regulators etc thought they knew better and "fixed" the errors of the past by starting the war on drugs.
I guess to me, like, just focus on science and principles like free speech and the funding of interesting hypotheses. I feel like we're just demonizing a new group here and not learning the lesson of: "stop demonizing."
Your other points I understand. This particular one I find controversial as one of the unkowns is what is an ideal setting? I've got friends that will drop a tab, and go for a beer - just as impossible for me as sitting in a 'controlled environment' [therapeutic setting] with a shrink, or a Man-retreat for ex-military types. I'd like to just have easy access to a known quality, and strength of chemical, that I can happily take, wheresoever I prefer.
I'm fairly libertarian on drugs, but I do think there is a big difference when it comes to psychedelics. The potential harms aren't only to the person doing it, but for people around them who might be victims of their psychotic break. It's safest if there is someone around to administer a benzodiazepine or antipsychotic if necessary.
Fyi research apparently shows that mentally unwell people are more likely to be physically harmful to others as compared with the average. Sounded weird to me but apparently there's some data.