Shroom Boom Bust

Psychedelics: Meds, Magical Thinking, or Modern-Day Divination?

In 2018, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) declared psilocybin, the hallucinogenic compound derived from certain mushrooms (often called “magic mushrooms”), a “Breakthrough Therapy.” The designation effectively “fast tracks” the drug through the process of development and review, and investors are calling psychedelics the “miracle drugs of the 21st century,” on a par with penicillin, “the miracle drug of the 20th century.” It’s a milestone reflecting either the advance or decline of medicine, depending on your perspective.

“Psychedelic” is a catchall term for a host of psychoactive substances that alter consciousness or cause hallucinations or other sensory disturbances. In addition to psilocybin, common psychedelics include LSD, a derivative from a fungus that grows on grains; mescaline, which comes from a cactus called peyote (pay-OH-tee); and DMT, which is found in some Amazonian plants and (among other uses) is brewed into a tea called ayahuasca (ah-yuh-WAS-ka).

Rechristened as Entheogens

Psychedelics burst on the scene in America in the 1950s and 1960s, mostly as recreational drugs in hippie culture. There were some early efforts to study them clinically, but those were shut down by the 1970 Controlled Substances Act. In the face of the “War on Drugs,” a few academics put forth the term “entheogen” as a replacement for “hallucinogen” and “psychedelic.” A combination of the Greek éntheos (god within) and genésthai (to generate), the term simultaneously distanced the mind-altering substances from their party-drug connotations and reframed the experiences they induce as something religious or spiritual in nature. From a PR standpoint, the neologism was brilliant.

During this same era, Roland Griffiths, a psychology and pharmacology student, found himself drawn to spiritual meditation practices, which in some pagan cultures have long included the use of hallucinogenic substances. In 1994, he tried Siddha Yoga, an ancient Hindu form of spiritual meditation. He had never been a religious person, but the experience opened up “a spiritual window that really shifted in a profound and important way my understanding of . . . the mystery of consciousness, the mystery of life, the nature of self, the nature of soul.”

Prior to this experience, the concepts of God, spirituality, and soul had very little meaning for him. Afterward, they took on great import. He knew the accepted methods of Western medicine were not amenable to understanding these kinds of phenomenological experiences, but he nevertheless became deeply curious about them. What was the nature of spiritual transformation? What might these experiences mean? As a scientist, he was also captivated by the idea that methodologies might have been developed in the ancient past to plumb the domains of consciousness and “inner space” through these meditative practices.

 He later met Bob Jesse, former vice president of Oracle software and founder of the Council on Spiritual Practices, a San Francisco Bay-area nonprofit dedicated to developing “approaches to primary religious experience.” It was a match made in entheogen heaven. By this time Griffiths was a professor of psychiatry and neurosciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine engaged in drug abuse research, and as he and Jesse talked about mystical experiences in connection with psychoactive substances, Griffiths realized he was in a position to study these phenomena as a psychopharmacologist.

Western Medicine Goes East

In 2000, Griffiths succeeded in obtaining regulatory approval for Johns Hopkins to resume clinical research with psychedelics. In 2006, he and his team reported on the first study: “Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance.” They followed up with studies using psilocybin to help smokers quit (2014) and to relieve depression and anxiety in cancer patients (2016), and in 2019, the Johns Hopkins Center on Psychedelic and Consciousness Research was officially launched with $17 million in private donations.

Griffiths explained the protocol to Jordan Peterson. Volunteer subjects must have had no prior psychedelic experience. The research team meets with each of them for eight preparation hours to develop rapport and trust. Since the psychedelic experience can be “hugely disorienting,” Griffiths explained, it’s important that study subjects feel confident their guides will take care of them.

For the treatment session, the volunteer lies on a couch and receives a blindfold to cut off visual inputs and earphones through which he hears music pre-selected by the research team. These are designed to reinforce the interiority of the experience. He’s given 5mg of psilocybin in a single capsule, a “heroic dose” in street vernacular. Two guides or “sitters” stay with him for the duration of the six-to-eight-hour “trip,” and afterward he describes and reflects on the experience.

Griffiths explained the researchers’ desires for the users. “We want them to go in and be deeply curious about what they have to learn. Let it go. Be open. Trust.” They advise that something “absolutely terrifying or anxiety producing” could emerge during the trip. This is not infrequent; in the first study about 30 percent of the volunteers reported feeling “extreme” fear during some portion of the experience.

Peterson pressed him on that point. “What’s the essential nature of the negative experience?” In response, Griffiths described how they coached volunteers to respond to a particular scenario, should it arise:

If during the session, a demonic figure comes up and starts to approach you, your job is to be interested and curious about it. . . . We would much rather have you approach it and in effect ask it what it’s doing there. What am I to learn from this?

We’ll return to the spiritualized interpretations in a moment, but don’t miss what is being done here in the name of science and medicine. Science has rightly gained credibility because of its objective, empirically verifiable methodologies. But in the case of these “plant medicines” (also a neologism), the inquiry and findings are entirely rooted in the subjective. Even setting aside the (not insignificant) fact that study subjects are under the influence of mind-altering chemicals, this is a significant departure from modern science.

Like Software, but Also Spiritual

While Griffiths and Johns Hopkins rechristen psychedelics as medicine, on the popular front, there’s Fantastic Fungi. The name refers to both an online community of believers and a feature-length 2019 documentary celebrating mushrooms as agents of healing, revelation, and human advancement. The film is at times engaging and is informative regarding nutritional, medicinal, and industrial uses, but it also presents mushrooms and mycelium (the fibrous underground root system) as magical, mystical, life-enhancing, even life-advancing entities.

Take, for example, the Stoned Ape Hypothesis, put forth by brothers Terence and Dennis McKenna. According to this theory, early hominids came out of the trees and discovered magic mushrooms growing in cow patties. The mushrooms opened up their minds to receive new information, thus giving birth to language and facilitating an evolutionary leap some two million years ago. The animation of this segment of the film is hilarious, but Dennis McKenna, an ethnopharmacologist (another neologism), explains it in all sciencey seriousness:

It’s not so simple to say that they ate psilocybin mushrooms and suddenly the brain mutated; I think it’s more complex than that, but I think it was a factor. It was like a software to program this neurologically modern hardware to think, to have cognition, to have language.

Not only did mushrooms stimulate evolution, they’re sacred. Fantastic Fungi presents mycelium as an intelligent, godlike network. The film opens with the mycelium speaking as the omniscient narrator:

There’s a feeling, a pulse of eternal knowledge. When you sense the oneness, you are with us. We brought life to Earth. You can’t see us, but we flourish all around you, everywhere, in everything. And even inside you, whether you believe in us or not. From your first breath to your last, in darkness and in the light, we are the oldest and youngest; we are the largest and smallest. We are the wisdom of a billion years. We are creation. We are resurrection! Condemnation and regeneration! We are—mushrooms.

Got that? In the beginning was the mushroom—immortal, invisible, eternal, and wise. The mycelium was, and is, and always will be.

Enlighten or Die

These things would be playful and funny if the entheogen evangelists were not life-and-death serious about their vision. The final third of Fantastic Fungi is a full-on appeal to change public opinion about psychedelics. They are a sacred gift. Bob Jesse says the experiences they induce are “something really precious . . . a great gift.” Paul Stamets, a believer, user, and mushroom farmer, calls them “sacraments of medicine. . . . Consider it to be your own personal church. You’re going to sit in awe of the universe.”

They are revelatory. “You realize that you’ve been limited all this time with your perspective of reality,” said Stamets. “Had reality been known to you at this level, early on, how much more evolved would we be as beings?” Johns Hopkins psychologist Bill Richards says, “In our evolution as a species, we’re at a point of coming to terms with a major paradigm change, a change in how we view what we call reality.” As he speaks, we see salmon majestically swimming upstream. The imagery is as beautiful as it is propagandistic. We are to see these men as courageous, trailblazing visionaries.

This new “revelation” presses upon us a moral imperative. Citing “love thy neighbor as thyself,” Griffiths drives home the urgency: “I could see this as being critical to the evolution of the species.” Hear that? Embrace the mushroom or you don’t love your neighbor. You risk death to the species.

An Anti-Gospel

Given the trends, psychedelics will likely become more common as therapeutic options. Terminal cancer patients were clearly moved by their experiences. Tony had “a feeling of such immense power . . . I’ve never felt anything like it before.” Judith felt “so beautiful . . . like I have never felt before . . . of being loved . . . of being important.” These are powerful draws. Who doesn’t want to feel powerful? Beautiful? Important? Loved?

Griffiths interprets the demonic apparitions as “a display of consciousness . . . a construct created by you.” But what if he’s wrong? Others, including former drug users and pagan spiritualists, tell us these drugs can open the mind to occultic realms we are not equipped to handle. What if they’re right? In what world is it advisable to ask a demon what we have to learn from it? St. Paul said even the devil can appear as an angel of light.

Griffiths et al. may mean well, but their prescription for human suffering is no gospel. In the name of compassion, they are exposing vulnerable people to dangerous deceptions. This is no advance, neither for medicine nor for ­humanity.