The case against psychedelics

Part I: Do better

You alright loves?

I have to confess — Weil has defeated me (at least for the moment). I bit off way more than I could chew with my previous post and I’ve struggled subsequently to write something non-obvious but still coherent. So I’ve decided as an act of self-care to put The Weekly Weil on hiatus. Instead, the universe (via word mage John Pistelli) provided me with an opportunity to write what I know.

m.j.e.

xxx

The case against psychedelics

DALL-E’s interpretation of Jesus as a psychedelic mushroom.

All ideas — ancient and modern, scientific or metaphysical — should be subject to thoughtful criticism. This includes the idea that the use of psychedelic (or other psychoactive) substances (to treat mental illness, as part of a spiritual practice or just for fun) is on net beneficial. As a non-binary queen, I believe there is a lot of room for nuance between the position that no-one should use these substances under any circumstances and the position that we should be putting LSD in the tap water. The last thing I want is for this to become another issue in the mind-destroying culture wars. I am a believer in Mill’s ‘experiments in living’, but also about being honest about the results yielded by such experiments.

I don’t claim to be neutral on the matter, but I will try to be fair in my assessment of the various arguments against the use of psychedelics.¹ To warm up, Part I will focus on what I consider to be a set of rather flimsy arguments from the Compact article John Pistelli referenced here. Part II will focus on more piercing criticisms, including those made by Dr. Pistelli in the past. Pointers to other serious arguments would be appreciated.

Part I - Do Better

In my view, The Pseudo-Religion of Psychedelics by Travis Kitchens contains more insinuations than arguments, but I’ve tried to summarise the claims and will respond to each in turn.

1. The use of psychedelics is a pseudo-religion

The article spends an inordinate amount of time on the claims made by Brian Muraresku in his book The Immortality Key about the alleged use of psychedelics by the ancient Greeks and early Christians. I have not read the book, but from what I’ve heard I find the claims about as plausible as any other faddish archeological discovery. However, these claims are a matter of historical curiosity and does not have any direct bearing on whether, and how, people should be using these substances today.²

In a broader sense I’ll concede that psychedelics can be a pseudo-religion, just like crossfit, liberalism or Taylor Swift. Timothy Leary is not responsible for the spiritual void at the heart of modernity.

2. Mystical experiences induced by psychedelics are inauthentic

Kitchens references Muraresku’s arguments that psychedelics can be a more direct route to God than traditional religion:

The middleman is organized religion and its “army of spokesmen” who have forgotten their ancient pharmacological roots. As opposed to their hollow rituals, [Muraresku] says, psychedelics introduce you to “a God that makes sense”; “A God that you can actually experience”; “A God that erases depression and anxiety like a cosmic surgeon, obliterates the fear of death, and sends a shock wave of love through your fragile heart.” In other words, God in easy-to-digest pill form.

I don’t know whether the selectiveness is on the part of Muraresku or Kitchens, but I find this to be a very misleading characterisation of the psychedelic experience, which in many cases is not at all easy to digest. Nevertheless, it is true that many religious people have the sense that chemically-induced mysticism is inauthentic or even dangerous. Simone Weil cautioned against it³:

The different kinds of vices — the used of drugs in the literal or metaphorical use of the word — all represent a search for a state where the beauty of the world will be sensible (tangible). The error consists precisely in the search for a special state. False mysticism is also a form of this error. If this error enters the soul deeply enough, one cannot help succumbing to it.

In an appendix to my copy The Doors of Perception, Huxley dispenses with these qualms:

[I]t is a matter of historical record that most contemplatives work systematically to modify their body chemistry, with a view to creating the internal conditions favourable to spiritual insight. When they were not starving themselves into low blood sugar and a vitamin deficiency, or beating themselves into intoxication by histamine, adrenalin and decomposed protein, they were cultivating insomnia and praying for long periods in uncomfortable positions in order the create the psycho-physical symptoms of stress.

It is not clear to me how one could draw a neat line between true and false mystical experiences. There are of course believers and non-believers that consider any kind of mysticism suspect. I’ll leave it to the members of a particular faith to consider whether or not the use of psychedelics is consistent with their doctrines, but I don’t find any of these pronouncements binding.

3. Some people make outlandish claims about the benefits of psychedelics

Kitchens continues:

The most enthusiastic and visible psychedelic salesman, a billionaire futurist from Germany named Christian Angermayer, cites Muraresku’s work to justify claims like “Jesus did psychedelics, probably DMT”—as he told one interviewer. The Immortality Key, Angermayer says, proves that psychedelics were the original “business model” behind the Catholic church.

He also claims that his products will end war, political gridlock, mental illness, deaths of despair, the opioid crisis, depression, and “diseases we don’t even have a name for yet,” things like “not feeling at home in the world anymore” and “being afraid of the future.”

I have never heard of this person before, but it sounds like a pretty classic case of a bored rich guy going through a midlife crisis and getting high on his own supply. I don’t want to dismiss this risk but will note that it’s one that advocates for the responsible use of psychedelics are well aware of. Michael Pollan writes in How to Change your Mind:

It is one of the many paradoxes of psychedelics that these drugs can sponsor an ego-dissolving experience that in some people quickly leads to massive ego inflation. Having been let in on a great secret of the universe, the recipient of this knowledges is bound to feel special, chosen for great things.

As for overselling the potential benefits of psychedelics, I’d simply point out that we live under late capitalism and are routinely promised that a kitchen appliance will change our lives. Just because something is overhyped, doesn’t necessarily mean it is without value.

4. Scientific research into the benefits of the psychedelics is flawed

According to Kitchens, a book by Matthew Oram has shown that scientific research into psychedelics was not halted by the Nixon administration in the 1970s for political reasons, but because of “[e]xcessive exuberance on the part of researchers, poor study design, and consistently inconclusive results”. I’ve not read Oram’s book, but these explanations do not appear mutually exclusive to me.

This time around, researchers such as Roland Griffiths have been at pains to avoid the pitfalls that plagued previous attempts to study the effects of psychedelics in an objective and scientific manner. There is of course good reason to be skeptical about psychological and biomedical research in general, in light of the numerous cases of malpractice uncovered in recent years, from strong conclusions made on the basis of weak evidence to outright fraud. However, Kitchens fails to cite a single criticism of recent psychedelic research to bolster his claim that “[l]ittle has changed” since the Swinging Sixties.

4. Psychedelics “are coasting through FDA approval”

Another assertion without evidence. The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) has indeed recently submitted a New Drug Approval request to the FDA for the use of MDMA to treat PTSD. However, I would hardly call 30 years of research “coasting”. The FDA has been criticised from all sides for being either too cautious or too reckless, but I’ve yet to see credible evidence that their approach to psychedelics is especially egregious.

5. Experimental psychedelic treatments shouldn’t be publicly funded

Kitchens calls for more skepticism about programs such as the Kentucky Ibogaine Initiative that has been funded through opioid settlement money. My knowledge of ibogaine is admittedly limited to claims by true believers, but given the paltry existing options to effectively deal with opioid addiction, funding experimental treatments — and being transparent about the results — does not strike me as a ludicrous use of public funds. My own preference is for a more libertarian approach that does not require extensive government involvement, but that is a separate debate.

6. Big Pharma lied to us about opioids, so they are probably lying to us about psychedelics

This warning would have been a lot more plausible if millions of people have not been using psychedelics for decades already. Although this has not exactly resulted in the dawn of the Age of Aquarius, I’m not aware of credible evidence that the negative effects are in any way comparable to the social harms caused by various forms of opioids.

7. “Psychedelic research has long been the hobby horse of a self-styled spiritual elite” (who are under the influence of Aleister Crowley?)

The quoted statement conflates serious scientific research (whatever its flaws) with self-experimentation and metaphysical speculation by psychedelic enthusiasts in an effort to discredit the whole enterprise. There is indeed an ongoing debate among enthusiasts as to whether the use of these substances should be restricted to an intellectual and artistic elite with the proper formation, or whether a more democratic approach should be taken. But these debates indicate that those who believe in the potential benefits of psychedelics do not necessarily slavishly advocate for their widespread use.

Kitchener next attemts a charge of guilt-by-association:

[William] James’s theories influenced not just D.H. Lawrence and AldousHuxley but the occultist Aleister Crowley, who sought to leverage science to achieve the aims of magic and ancient religion: immortality and union with God. Crowley formulated his program in a short and oft-repeated maxim that anticipates the methodology of psychedelic research: “We place no reliance on virgin or pigeon, our method is science, our aim is religion.”

Again, this assertion is made without any actual critique of the methodology of psychedelic research.

This is not to deny that the fingerprints of Crowley are all over the drug-fuelled Sixties counterculture, but it is worth keeping in mind that we all live in Crowley’s world. There is a valid critique to be made of certain tendencies within psychedelic subcultures, but that is not the same as implying that the use of psychedelics is by nature Luciferian.

8. Famous psychonaut Aldous Huxley wanted to “reset Western culture”

It should be clear to anyone who has read The Doors of Perception and Huxley’s other work that Kitchens is sketching a seriously misleading picture of Huxley’s views:

The only solution, Huxley came to believe, was a psychedelic religion that would introduce enough psychic disorder to disrupt our behavior patterns and reset Western culture. In 1954’s The Doors of Perception, he praises psychedelics for making it possible “to be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world”

Huxley can be criticised for his parapsychological beliefs, but he was certainly no revolutionary agitating for ‘psychic disorder’. He believed in a ‘perennial philosophy’ communicated by mystics of all faiths and merely considered psychedelics to be a convenient method to induce such mystical experiences. He was also rather pragmatic on the question of the relationship between mysticism and superstition:

Can one have the flowering of mysticism without the dung of superstition? I don't know whether you can. There's a very interesting chapter in Conze's book on Buddhism saying that as a matter of historical fact these extremely elevated mystical-philosophical doctrines of the Mahayana have always been associated
with grossest forms of superstition. Can it be avoided? I don't know. I mean, he is inclined to think you don't get to one except growing out of the other. I hope it's possible to have an aseptic mysticism, but I don't know if it is. I think certain people can have it, but whether there can be a sort of general atmosphere on the
basis of a non-superstitious and non-dogmatic set of beliefs, I have no idea. I profoundly hope so, but at certain times I rather doubt it.

Huxley definitely played an important role in making psychedelics more respectable in the first half of the 20th century and I would welcome more active debate about his religious views. But I find the portrayal of psychedelics as part of a devious plot to destroy Western civilisation unpersuasive.

9. The inventor of LSD had mixed feelings about its use

Kitchens quotes from Albert Hoffman's correspondence:

“I must admit,” he wrote in a letter to his friend Ernst Jünger, “that the fundamental question very much occupies me, whether the use of these types of drugs, namely of substances that so deeply affect our minds, could not indeed represent a forbidden transgression of limits.”

Again I view this as an indication that the use of psychedelics is compatible with maintaining a healthy sense of humility, skepticism and even ambivalence. More on this to come!

10. Psychedelics enables more effective enslavement to capitalism

Kitchens concludes:

An experience of transcendence instantly occasioned by a drug but leading to no systemic change isn’t revolutionary. It is instead a powerful tool for the captains of industry who need a never-ending supply of laborers just happy enough to show up and clock in.

So after numerous spurious suggestions that psychedelics represent a potentially harmful, even sinister, force, the article concludes with the pseudo-Marxist argument that actually these drugs have no revolutionary effect and they are simply a means for capitalists to produce a more compliant workforce? This claim would be more plausible in an article about amphetamines or other drugs routinely prescribed to people struggling to meet the demands of capitalism, rather than one purportedly about the kinds of drugs which were popularised by the slogan turn on, tune in, drop out…

Nevertheless, many advocates for the responsible use of psychedelics are indeed concerned about what has been described as psychedelic capitalism. People are at risk of being exploited not as workers, but as vulnerable seekers, who without the proper guidance could be left spiritually adrift and unable to make a productive contribution to world around then. For more about this and ways to mitigate this risk, stay tuned for Part II.

1. If you’re not yet clued in, babes, I’m a regular to frequent user of psychedelic substances (depending on whether or not you count cannabis). I do, however, have many misgivings about the psychedelic community, which I’ll mainly touch on in my next post. I’m also open to the idea that my own relationship with these substances could be suboptimal.

2. I do concede that there is an unfortunate lack of skeptical thinking (and overlap with woo woo spirituality) among many psychedelic enthusiasts — a point I’ll return to in my next post.

3. Although Weil also described the Elysian mysteries as true initiations, so one can only speculate what she would have made of Muraresku’s claims.