How to Change Your Mind

by Michael Pollan

  CHAPTER ONE

  A Renaissance

  IF THE START of the modern renaissance of psychedelic research can be dated with any precision, one good place to do it would be the year 2006. Not that this was obvious to many people at the time. There was no law passed or regulation lifted or discovery announced to mark the historical shift. But as three unrelated events unfolded during the course of that year—the first in Basel, Switzerland, the second in Washington, D.C., and the third in Baltimore, Maryland—sensitive ears could make out the sound of ice beginning to crack.

  The first event, which looked back but also forward like a kind of historical hinge, was the centennial of the birth of Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who, in 1943, accidentally found that he had discovered (five years earlier) the psychoactive molecule that came to be known as LSD. This was an unusual centennial in that the man being feted was very much in attendance. Entering his second century, Hofmann appeared in remarkably good shape, physically spry and mentally sharp, and he was able to take an active part in the festivities, which included a birthday ceremony followed by a three-day symposium. The symposium’s opening ceremony was on January 13, two days after Hofmann’s 100th birthday (he would live to be 102). Two thousand people packed the hall at the Basel Congress Center, rising to applaud as a stooped stick of a man in a dark suit and a necktie, barely five feet tall, slowly crossed the stage and took his seat.

  Two hundred journalists from around the world were in attendance, along with more than a thousand healers, seekers, mystics, psychiatrists, pharmacologists, consciousness researchers, and neuroscientists, most of them people whose lives had been profoundly altered by the remarkable molecule that this man had derived from a fungus half a century before. They had come to celebrate him and what his friend the Swiss poet and physician Walter Vogt called “the only joyous invention of the twentieth century.” Among the people in the hall, this did not qualify as hyperbole. According to one of the American scientists in attendance, many had come “to worship” Albert Hofmann, and indeed the event bore many of the hallmarks of a religious observance.

  Although virtually every person in that hall knew the story of LSD’s discovery by heart, Hofmann was asked to recite the creation myth one more time. (He tells the story, memorably, in his 1979 memoir, LSD, My Problem Child.) As a young chemist working in a unit of Sandoz Laboratories charged with isolating the compounds in medicinal plants to find new drugs, Hofmann had been tasked with synthesizing, one by one, the molecules in the alkaloids produced by ergot. Ergot is a fungus that can infect grain, often rye, occasionally causing those who consume bread made from it to appear mad or possessed. (One theory of the Salem witch trials blames ergot poisoning for the behavior of the women accused.) But midwives had long used ergot to induce labor and stanch bleeding postpartum, so Sandoz was hoping to isolate a marketable drug from the fungus’s alkaloids. In the fall of 1938, Hofmann made the twenty-fifth molecule in this series, naming it lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD-25 for short. Preliminary testing of the compound on animals did not show much promise (they became restless, but that was about it), so the formula for LSD-25 was put on the shelf.

  And there it remained for five years, until one April day in 1943, in the middle of the war, when Hofmann had “a peculiar presentiment” that LSD-25 deserved a second look. Here his account takes a slightly mystical turn. Normally, when a compound showing no promise was discarded, he explained, it was discarded for good. But Hofmann “liked the chemical structure of the LSD molecule,” and something about it told him that “this substance could possess properties other than those established in the first investigations.” Another mysterious anomaly occurred when he synthesized LSD-25 for the second time. Despite the meticulous precautions he always took when working with a substance as toxic as ergot, Hofmann must somehow have absorbed a bit of the chemical through his skin, because he “was interrupted in my work by unusual sensations.”

  Hofmann went home, lay down on a couch, and “in a dreamlike state, with eyes closed . . . I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors.” Thus unfolds the world’s first LSD trip, in neutral Switzerland during the darkest days of World War II. It is also the only LSD trip ever taken that was entirely innocent of expectation.

  Intrigued, Hofmann decided a few days later to conduct an experiment on himself—not an uncommon practice at the time. Proceeding with what he thought was extreme caution, he ingested 0.25 milligrams—a milligram is one-thousandth of a gram—of LSD dissolved in a glass of water. This would represent a minuscule dose of any other drug, but LSD, it turns out, is one of the most potent psychoactive compounds ever discovered, active at doses measured in micrograms—that is, one thousandth of a milligram. This surprising fact would soon inspire scientists to look for, and eventually find, the brain receptors and the endogenous chemical—serotonin—that activates them like a key in a lock, as a way to explain how such a small number of molecules could have such a profound effect on the mind. In this and other ways, Hofmann’s discovery helped to launch modern brain science in the 1950s.

  Now unfolds the world’s first bad acid trip as Hofmann is plunged into what he is certain is irretrievable madness. He tells his lab assistant he needs to get home, and with the use of automobiles restricted during wartime, he somehow manages to pedal home by bicycle and lie down while his assistant summons the doctor. (Today LSD devotees celebrate “Bicycle Day” each year on April 19.) Hofmann describes how “familiar objects and pieces of furniture assumed grotesque, threatening forms. They were in continuous motion, animated as if driven by an inner restlessness.” He experienced the disintegration of the outer world and the dissolution of his own ego. “A demon had invaded me, had taken possession of my body, mind, and soul. I jumped up and screamed, trying to free myself from him, but then sank down again and lay helpless on the sofa.” Hofmann became convinced he was going to be rendered permanently insane or might actually be dying. “My ego was suspended somewhere in space and I saw my body lying dead on the sofa.” When the doctor arrived and examined him, however, he found that all of Hofmann’s vital signs—heartbeat, blood pressure, breathing—were perfectly normal. The only indication something was amiss were his pupils, which were dilated in the extreme.

  Once the acute effects wore off, Hofmann felt the “afterglow” that frequently follows a psychedelic experience, the exact opposite of a hangover. When he walked out into his garden after a spring rain, “everything glistened and sparkled in a fresh light. The world was as if newly created.” We’ve since learned that the experience of psychedelics is powerfully influenced by one’s expectation; no other class of drugs are more suggestible in their effects. Because Hofmann’s experiences with LSD are the only ones we have that are uncontaminated by previous accounts, it’s interesting to note they exhibit neither the Eastern nor the Christian flavorings that would soon become conventions of the genre. However, his experience of familiar objects coming to life and the world “as if newly created”—the same rapturous Adamic moment that Aldous Huxley would describe so vividly a decade later in The Doors of Perception—would become commonplaces of the psychedelic experience.

  Hofmann came back from his trip convinced, first, that LSD had somehow found him rather than the other way around and, second, that LSD would someday be of great value to medicine and especially psychiatry, possibly by offering researchers a model of schizophrenia. It never occurred to him that his “problem child,” as he eventually would regard LSD, would also become a “pleasure drug” and a drug of abuse.

  Yet Hofmann also came to regard the youth culture’s adoption of LSD in the 1960s as an understandable response to the emptiness of what he described as a materialist, industrialized, and spiritually impoverished society that had lost its connection to nature. This master of chemistry—perhaps the most materialist of all disciplines—emerged from his experience with LSD-25 convinced
the molecule offered civilization not only a potential therapeutic but also a spiritual balm—by opening a crack “in the edifice of materialist rationality.” (In the words of his friend and translator, Jonathan Ott.)

  Like so many who followed after him, the brilliant chemist became something of a mystic, preaching a gospel of spiritual renewal and reconnection with nature. Presented with a bouquet of roses that 2006 day in Basel, the scientist told the assembled that “the feeling of co-creatureliness with all things alive should enter our consciousness more fully and counterbalance the materialistic and nonsensical technological developments in order to enable us to return to the roses, to the flowers, to nature, where we belong.” The audience erupted in applause.

  A skeptical witness to the event would not be entirely wrong to regard the little man on the stage as the founder of a new religion and the audience as his congregation. But if this is a religion, it’s one with a significant difference. Typically, only the founder of a religion and perhaps a few early acolytes can lay claim to the kind of authority that flows from a direct experience of the sacred. For everyone coming after, there is the comparatively thin gruel of the stories, the symbolism of the sacrament, and faith. History attenuates the original power of it all, which now must be mediated by the priests. But the extraordinary promise on offer in the Church of Psychedelics is that anyone at any time may gain access to the primary religious experience by means of the sacrament, which happens to be a psychoactive molecule. Faith is rendered superfluous.

  Running alongside the celebration’s spiritual undercurrent, however, there also, perhaps somewhat incongruously, came science. During the weekend symposium following the observation of Hofmann’s birthday, researchers from a variety of disciplines—including neuroscience, psychiatry, pharmacology, and consciousness studies, as well as the arts—explored the impact of Hofmann’s invention on society and culture and its potential for expanding our understanding of consciousness and treating several intractable mental disorders. A handful of research projects, studying the effects of psychedelics on humans, had been approved or were under way in Switzerland and the United States, and scientists at the symposium voiced their hope that the long hiatus in psychedelic research might finally be coming to an end. Irrational exuberance seems to be an occupational hazard among people working in this area, but in 2006 there was good reason to think the weather might actually be turning.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE SECOND WATERSHED EVENT of 2006 came only five weeks later when the U.S. Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision written by the new chief justice, John G. Roberts Jr., ruled that the UDV, a tiny religious sect that uses a hallucinogenic tea called ayahuasca as its sacrament, could import the drink to the United States, even though it contains the schedule 1 substance dimethyltryptamine, or DMT. The ruling was based on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, which had sought to clarify the right (under the First Amendment’s religious freedom clause) of Native Americans to use peyote in their ceremonies, as they have done for generations. The 1993 law says that only if the government has a “compelling interest” can it interfere with one’s practice of religion. In the UDV case, the Bush administration had argued that only Native Americans, because of their “unique relationship” to the government, had the right to use psychedelics as part of their worship, and even in their case this right could be abridged by the state.

  The Court soundly rejected the government’s argument, interpreting the 1993 law to mean that, absent a compelling state interest, the federal government cannot prohibit a recognized religious group from using psychedelic substances in their observances. Evidently, this includes relatively new and tiny religious groups specifically organized around a psychedelic sacrament, or “plant medicine,” as the ayahuasqueros call their tea. The UDV is a Christian spiritist sect founded in 1961 in Brazil by José Gabriel da Costa, a rubber tapper inspired by revelations he experienced after receiving ayahuasca from an Amazonian shaman two years before. The church claims 17,000 members in six countries, but at the time of the ruling there were only 130 American members of the UDV. (The initials stand for União do Vegetal, or Union of the Plants, because ayahuasca is made by brewing together two Amazonian plant species, Banisteriopsis caapi and Psychotria viridis.)

  The Court’s decision inspired something of a religious awakening around ayahuasca in America. Today there are close to 525 American members of the church, with communities in nine locations. To supply them, the UDV has begun growing the plants needed to make the tea in Hawaii and shipping it to groups on the mainland without interference. But the number of Americans participating in ayahuasca ceremonies outside the UDV has also mushroomed in the years since, and any given night there are probably dozens if not hundreds of ceremonies taking place somewhere in America (with concentrations in the San Francisco Bay Area and Brooklyn). Federal prosecutions for possession or importation of ayahuasca appear to have stopped, at least for the time being.

  With its 2006 decision, the Supreme Court seems to have opened up a religious path—narrow, perhaps, but firmly rooted in the Bill of Rights—to the legal recognition of psychedelic drugs, at least when they’re being used as a sacrament by a religious community. It remains to be seen how wide or well trod that path will become, but it does make you wonder what the government, and the Court, will do when an American José Gabriel da Costa steps forward and attempts to turn his or her own psychedelic revelations into a new religion intent on using a psychoactive chemical as its sacrament. The jurisprudence of “cognitive liberty,” as some in the psychedelic community call it, is still scant and limited (to religion), but now it had been affirmed, opening a new crack in the edifice of the drug war.

  * * *

  • • •

  OF THE THREE 2006 EVENTS that helped bring psychedelics out of their decades-long slumber, by far the most far-reaching in its impact was the publication that summer of the paper in Psychopharmacology described in the prologue—the one Bob Jesse e-mailed me at the time but that I didn’t bother to open. This event, too, had a distinctly spiritual cast, even though the experiment it reported was the work of a rigorous and highly regarded scientist: Roland Griffiths. It just so happens that Griffiths, a most unlikely psychedelic researcher, was inspired to investigate the power of psilocybin to occasion a “mystical-type” experience by a mystical experience of his own.

  Griffiths’s landmark paper, “Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type Experiences Having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance,” was the first rigorously designed, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical study in more than four decades—if not ever—to examine the psychological effects of a psychedelic. It received a small torrent of press coverage, most of it so enthusiastic as to make you wonder if the moral panic around psychedelics that took hold in the late 1960s might finally have run its course. No doubt the positive tenor of the coverage owed much to the fact that, at Griffiths’s urging, the journal had invited several of the world’s most prominent drug researchers—some of them decorated soldiers in the drug war—to comment on the study, giving the journalists covering the study plenty of ideological cover.

  All of the commentators treated the publication as a major event. Herbert D. Kleber, a former deputy to William Bennett, George H. W. Bush’s drug czar, and later director of the Division on Substance Abuse at Columbia University, applauded the paper for its methodological rigor and acknowledged there might be “major therapeutic possibilities” in psychedelic research “merit[ing] NIH support.” Charles “Bob” Schuster, who had served two Republican presidents as director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), noted that the term “psychedelic” implies a mind-expanding experience and expressed his “hope that this landmark paper will also be ‘field expanding.’” He suggested that this “fascinating” class of drugs, and the spiritual experience they occasion, might prove useful in treating addiction.

&nbs
p; Griffiths’s paper and its reception served to reinforce an important distinction between the so-called classical psychedelics—psilocybin, LSD, DMT, and mescaline—and the more common drugs of abuse, with their demonstrated toxicity and potential for addiction. The American drug research establishment, such as it is, had signaled in the pages of one of its leading journals that these psychedelic drugs deserved to be treated very differently and had demonstrated, in the words of one commentator, “that, when used appropriately, these compounds can produce remarkable, possibly beneficial, effects that certainly deserve further study.”

  The story of how this paper came to be sheds an interesting light on the fraught relationship between science and that other realm of human inquiry that science has historically disdained and generally wants nothing to do with: spirituality. For in designing this, the first modern study of psilocybin, Griffiths had decided to focus not on a potential therapeutic application of the drug—the path taken by other researchers hoping to rehabilitate other banned substances, like MDMA—but rather on the spiritual effects of the experience on so-called healthy normals. What good was that?