The Drugs That Changed Our Minds

by Lauren Slater

  In asking each subject to create a clear intention that informs and shapes her psilocybin experience, researchers are separating recreational drug use from therapeutic drug discovery. They are also linking their clinical investigations to history, mirroring the way psychedelics were used by Grof and others in the 1960s and 70s, and, going back still further, the way they were and are used by ancient and indigenous Indian tribes, evoking seriousness and sacredness. In some sense, then, the ‘new’ work with psychedelics is actually very old, springing not just from studies done forty or fifty years ago but from rituals that date back to 500 ce. It’s as if the mushrooms play the part of an oracle that will reveal some sort of truth to those who seek its secrets.

  In order to emphasise the noetic quality of the quest, Griffiths gives his subjects their psilocybin in a goblet, which he believes further connects the use of the drug to its ancient roots. Vincent clasped the goblet coolly. In it lay a fat capsule of psilocybin. Her guides, Mary and Taylor, sat by her side. She had been instructed to bring some meaningful mementos from home, pictures of loved ones and trinkets. After she swallowed the drug, she and Mary and Taylor looked at the objects together while Vincent explained what each one meant. During this time Vincent was hyper-aware of her mind, waiting and waiting for the drug to hit. Her photographs assumed a grainy appearance and began to disassemble into dots, and then came a dizziness. Vincent felt faint. Mary suggested that she lie on the sofa. Mary then put headphones and an eye mask on her. Through the headphones poured the most exquisite music Vincent had ever heard – concertos and chanting, the music physical, palpable, lifting her up on crystal crescendos and then dropping her back into dark depths that frightened Vincent at first. Then colours came and the feeling of space, deep space, as Vincent faced a massive and monolithic structure that was dark, impersonal and cold. She saw a gold shield, a huge black vault and then motifs so drenched in stunning colour that Vincent wept for their beauty. Where’s the God? Vincent asked. Where’s the human? Where’s the connection? She posed her questions to an endless expanse of space and at first got no answers.

  What she did get, however, was a collage of images – a fish, a rabbit, a huge pirate ship, a castle – and then a massive dark force coming closer and closer. In a moment of pure courage, Vincent reached out to touch the monstrosity, only to have it turn soft as fog. As she experienced this, a superhero in a red cape blew by and, from time to time, a white cartoon crab made an appearance, clacking away.

  At one point Vincent believed the drug had worn off. She sat up, took off her eye mask, and went to the lavatory. When she returned she looked again at the pictures she had brought with her. Then the eye mask went back on and more music poured through her, at first just the plucking of a guitar, followed by rhythms of greater and greater depth. ‘The music became heavier and heavier and loaded with global pain,’ Vincent said. She felt the agony of everyone in the world and she saw that her pain was but a fleck in a huge and complex network of suffering. The crab came back, and Vincent would later come to understand that this was her cancer, this silly little thing that did not have nearly the resonance, the meaning, of the dazzling deep space, of the gorgeous tapestry of swirling colours, of the hugeness of history and the accumulation of tears. Consciousness, it seemed, had a continuity to it that could well extend beyond her death. But this realisation is not what truly comforted Vincent. The crab was what did it for her. Through the crab, with the crab, Vincent saw that her illness and death were not nearly the big deal that she had made them out to be. ‘I was told to lighten up a little,’ she said. ‘To lighten up a lot. I was told to have a sense of humour; after all, the crab was a cartoon.’

  When her trip was over, six hours after it had begun, Vincent was changed. Though personally an atheist, she had felt connected to something larger than herself, ‘some kind of communal energy’. She could understand that the world wouldn’t come to an end just because she did. Her mandate was to laugh about it. ‘You die and you say, “I’m here. I’m home. I’m back”.’ Through psilocybin, Vincent found a quilt in a corner of the universe, a safe space she believed she would go to when her time came.

  The Ultimate Existential Medicine

  Vincent was the last subject in Griffiths’s study of terminal cancer patients, but Griffiths is in no way finished with his inquiries into psychedelics and how they might help, or even heal, the human brain. He is now exploring the role of psilocybin in smoking addiction, giving it to people hooked on cigarettes to see if it might help them stop. So far he’s found that it does. Out of fifteen nicotine-addicted subjects, 80 per cent have kicked their habit for six months or more. William, one of Griffiths’s subjects in the cigarette study, puts it this way: ‘Psilocybin reveals to you how pointless your addiction is. You see the majesty of the world, and polluting it and yourself comes to seem like sin.’

  Vincent and William both used the drug as a lens through which they peered into worlds that gave new perspective to their conundrums. As with the Indians whom Gordon Wasson observed, if you pose to psilocybin a problem, any problem, it reflects back to you visions, voices, entryways and exits. Your whole mind swirls in a glittering test tube; all your fixed notions melt in the high heat of a trip, cleansed so that you can suddenly see around corners and down slopes previously too steep to navigate. The problem Carol Vincent posed to psilocybin had to do with fear of death. The response was a deep knowledge of universal unity which revealed to her that her own infinitesimal speck was a part of the warp and weft that would change shape upon her passing, but would also endure forever. What William got when he posed to psilocybin the problem of his nicotine addiction was a sense of the sacredness of his life and all life, to which, he saw, he was deeply connected. In filling the lobes of his lungs with tar, he was in some ineffable sense charring the very chain of life to which he was irretrievably linked.

  It would seem that psilocybin could be used for almost any struggle. As an illuminator, it is, as Grob has said, ‘the ultimate existential medicine’. And while at present it is limited to the laboratory and cannot be obtained legally by the ordinary citizen looking for a quest, there may well come a time when it is more widely available as an indispensable aid to people with a broad range of conflicts. Indeed it is Rick Doblin’s mission to legalise psychedelics for ‘things that are not diseases, like personal growth, spirituality, couples counselling.’ Given that the drug seems to reveal to people the sacred interconnectedness of all life forms, psilocybin might indeed prove useful in everything from the treatment of violence and antisocial behaviour to chronic pain and clinical depression or agoraphobia and generalised anxiety disorder.

  How can a single drug have so many potential applications? The answer to this lies partly in the nature of most mental illness, which is characterised by mental rigidity and stereotypical thought patterns, the monotonous ‘I hate myself’ of depression or the repetitive fears of contamination in OCD. ‘Psilocybin can be of benefit for these types of troubles,’ Doblin said. ‘The drug breaks down neurotic defences and allows people trapped in bad psychiatric states to think flexibly, to think openly, to be open to novel experience.’

  Although he believes there will come a time when psilocybin will be legally available to clinicians and patients who might best benefit from it, Doblin acknowledges that this is a way off. The excesses of the 1960s are fading but still with us. Griffiths hopes for a time when spiritually minded people can use the psychedelic to enhance and deepen their journeys. Charles Grob wants to see centres for the dying where the drug can be safely administered to those seeking serenity on their way out. These ideas are not new so much as they are a return to questions and quests from the past. All of these visions and views spring both from ancient shamanic traditions and from the more recent work done in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, before psychedelics were made illegal.

  Griffiths has said that understanding the effects of drugs like psilocybin, indeed understanding the effects of all psychedelics, may be t
he key to the survival of our species. His comment goes well beyond the idea of psilocybin for the psychiatric patient or for the dying or for the seeker of spiritual truths, and places psilocybin at the very centre of our troubled world, as the potential answer to what ails us all. But could a psychedelic really save our place in a shredded planet, a world so saturated with CO2 that the glaciers are slipping into the sea as thousands of animals go extinct, a world where civilians are shot down in the streets, where radicals put bombs on planes and take down towers in the name of religion? We live in a time of rampant corruption and continuous violence, of profound poverty and obscene wealth, spinning, it sometimes seems, into an abyss. What role could psychedelics possibly play for us in such a world?

  Perhaps, actually, a profound one. The early psychedelic pioneers like Grof and Pahnke, along with newcomers like Griffiths and Grob, have accumulated literally hundreds, maybe thousands, of case studies in which subjects ingest either LSD or psilocybin. And one after the other the subjects almost invariably experience the sacred quality of consciousness and come to see how it seeps beyond the circle of our own skulls to infuse all living things, thereby promoting a deep sense of interconnectedness along with a belief in the divine. No one who has taken these drugs under these researchers’ supervision has come away from the experience thinking he is grand and big. In fact the result is just the opposite. People tend to experience themselves as small, as a mote absorbed into some larger and sacred framework. They consistently report feelings of deep empathy for others. Carol Vincent, listening to black spirituals while on a psychedelic, claimed to feel the pain of all the slaves we had stolen and forced to work, and wept for what had happened; others have reported feeling a newfound empathy for friends, spouses, children. It appears that the drug imparts beneficence, brings out the best in the humans who use it, eradicates the hubris at the heart of so many of our troubles and leaves in its place an open humility from which love and kindness easily flow.

  Imagine, then, and just for kicks, our politicians taking psilocybin, not at a London bash but in a place where set and setting have been carefully constructed; imagine the United Nations doing the same. Imagine even terrorists taking a substance that showed them how small they were in a world where everyone is intimately connected. What kind of priming would be necessary to bring about such revelations in our leaders? And even with proper priming, would the drug reveal such truths to a scar-hardened warrior? Or might the opposite happen? Does the drug conform to the psyche of the person who takes it, so that fighters would experience the valour of violence while cancer patients, already laid low by their diagnoses, experience their diminutiveness? Or does the drug really lead us to a Platonic destination where an ineffable yet solid truth resides, a truth of the sacredness of consciousness and the utter significance of love? If this is true, then perhaps Griffiths is right and psilocybin really could change the world, by changing consciousness – one mind at a time.

  7

  MDMA (Ecstasy)

  The Marriage Medicine

  Sanctuary

  Their marriage was coming apart. They were fighting over this and that, pointing, pacing, shouting, slamming and then the silence, which was maybe worst of all, how it just continued on and on, minutes stretching out into an hour and then a whole day, as the rain dripped down or the sun perversely shone, laying bars of light along the maple floor.

  Their names: Kelly and Thomas Shuge. Their stats: forty-four and fifty-three, respectively. Their marriage: twenty-three years, going on gold (or was it silver?) – worth saving, that much they knew. But the fights cast a pall they couldn’t seem to stop, and had forced their love into some cramped corner, where it dwindled down even as Kelly’s terminal cancer grew and grew, throwing a suffocating blanket over the life they’d built together for so many years.

  Kelly was a talker. She always had been. She talked with friends on the phone. She talked over glasses of wine and on a stool at the kitchen worktop with her legs crossed. She’d talk about her day or her darkness with equal ease, something Thomas had never been able to do. He kept quiet and let pain blow over. Like wind or weather, it always eventually went away. Why bother with all that digging? The world was going to do what the world was going to do, and you’d best save your energy for the grind. Thomas had broad hands and worked with wood. He could take a piece of raw pine and shape it into a ship, or a table, or a bed with a half-moon headboard. Kelly loved to watch him work. She loved the way he dipped a rag in fragrant stain and wiped it over the piece, his hand slowly circling as the hue deepened to bronze or chestnut brown.

  Kelly had been diagnosed with cancer five years earlier; it wasn’t news, but still she wanted to talk about it. She wanted to talk about her fears, her hope, her highs and lows, about the chemo treatment and the different types of tumours, whether there was something in the water that could have caused this; she had a lot to say, and she kept saying it and saying it until Thomas thought his head would explode and he sought solace elsewhere.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Kelly would cry after him, but he never answered because he didn’t know. Where was he going? Without her, what would he do? Sometimes he’d wake up in the middle of the night and see her sleeping next to him, her body shawled in shadow as if she’d already left, as if he could put his hand right through her and come out empty on the other side, and the ache in his throat was so severe he had trouble breathing. Sanctuary. That was a word that came to him often these days. He’d picture a place in the forest, a cleared spot ringed by trees, a place to put his head. Her head. Somewhere they could go, together.

  Things got bad enough between them that, despite her illness, Kelly thought about divorce. They saw a couples counsellor but didn’t get anywhere. It was all tit for tat, both of them skating on the surface of things, stuck in their if onlys. And then one day, Kelly’s oncologist told her about therapists who were using a drug called MDMA (illegally under current law in both the United States and the UK) to help couples communicate more effectively while also mediating the anxiety and trauma of an end-stage diagnosis.

  MDMA, known in the mainstream as ecstasy or simply E, is not your average anti-anxiety medication. It shares not a single molecule with our old standbys like lorazepam, diazepam, alprazolam or clonazepam. MDMA amplifies the sensual world, so that music sounds richer, a touch tingles more intensely and ordinary thoughts drop away in favour of keener insights and understanding. While MDMA shares similarities with psilocybin (both are used to ease end-of-life anxiety in patients with cancer diagnoses), the drugs also differ in important ways. Psilocybin is a hallucinogen, which means that it causes its imbiber to see and hear things that are not really there: rays of light, figures from your past, dark matter, fluorescent swirls and geometric patterns, silvered plateaus and melting meadows that appear to go on for miles. On MDMA you will not experience any of this because, while it is a psychedelic, it is not a hallucinogen. MDMA bathes the brain in oxytocin, which is why users feel so much affinity for those around them, and also why it is so effective at treating trauma. Traumatised patients on MDMA are able to recall their horror in an atmosphere of total trust. Psilocybin, by contrast, would probably not be suggested for a trauma victim because it dissolves the ego, the border between you and the external world, which a trauma victim might find deeply frightening.

  In the Beginning

  The German pharmaceutical company Merck synthesised MDMA in 1912. After it was patented, however, the drug was all but forgotten. The goal of the researchers had been to come up with a good vasoconstrictor to reduce bleeding, something that MDMA does not do. Therefore, much like lithium, it was shelved for years, unused. No one knows who the first human to take MDMA was. It was used briefly in a classified study sponsored by the US military in the 1950s, but only on animals, ranging from mice to monkeys. The first documented appearance on the street was in Chicago, in 1970, when tablets containing MDMA were confiscated, and the drug began to seep into the culture at large in the early t
o mid-1970s. Alexander Shulgin, a Californian chemist who would come to be known as the ‘godfather of psychedelics’, concocted his own batch of MDMA and took it in ever higher doses. In his laboratory notes from September 1976, Shulgin wrote: ‘I feel absolutely clean inside, and there is nothing but pure euphoria. I have never felt so great or believed this to be possible. The cleanliness, clarity and marvellous feeling of solid inner strength continued throughout the rest of the day and evening. I am overcome by the profundity of the experience.’

  He wasn’t the only one. Therapists caught on to the drug as well, and because the US government had not yet criminalised it, a small but significant subset of them began to use it as a therapeutic aid with their patients. Some, like psychologist and psychotherapist Leo Zeff, another pioneer in the field of psychedelics, took careful and copious notes that give us a remarkably clear picture of how MDMA affected patients in psychotherapy. On MDMA, patients were able to easily retrieve otherwise inaccessible memories, some of them traumatic, and to explore these frightening recollections in a state of absolute serenity. Previously self-hating patients enjoyed total self-acceptance and got to see the world without the lacerating edge of cynicism that so often accompanies neurotic suffering.

  Ann Shulgin, Alexander’s wife and a practising therapist, also began using MDMA in couples therapy, finding that MDMA had the power to restore vibrancy and energy to worn-out pair bonds, not only during the actual high but also after the drug had worn off, with her patients often able to integrate the psychedelic point of view into their quotidian lives. As of yet there are no quantitative data to tell us how many couples have taken MDMA, and for what particular problems, or, most significantly, what the outcomes have been. All we have are qualitative accounts that describe how previously polarised couples were able to trust each other again deeply, perhaps in part because MDMA improves one’s ability to listen empathically, enabling couples to verbalise their root issues. MDMA appears to unclog the plumbing between two individuals so that positive feelings flow freely.