A Really Good Day

by Ayelet Waldman

  It is also ironic—given how disparaging I am of those who use drugs in a manner I consider careless, and how uncomfortable I am being associated with them—that the scientists currently doing FDA- and DEA-sanctioned research on the benefits of psychedelic drugs by and large feel the same way about me.*10 Though many psychedelic researchers agreed to be interviewed for this book, few would let me quote them, even anonymously. Most feared that any association with a “personal experiment” with illegally sourced drugs would tarnish their hard-won credibility.

  Their concern, by the way, is not unfounded. Drug-policy reform organizations have, in my experience, also worked very hard to distance themselves from the specter of psychonauts like Leary and Kesey. When I was a consultant for the Drug Policy Alliance, my colleagues were rigorously analytical attorneys, many of whom had never even tried illegal drugs. They were activists on the issue of drug policy reform because American drug policy has been a catastrophe for poor people and people of color, because they were patriotic devotees of the United States Constitution, and because they believed that the power to dictate what a person does with her consciousness should never belong to the government, even if the only thing they themselves had ever done to alter their consciousnesses was to attempt to come to grips with the rule against perpetuities. The students in my seminar on drug policy were by and large similarly motivated, as was my co-instructor. Certainly, the various organizations and individuals on whose behalf I have written amicus briefs on a wide range of drug policy issues have been models of propriety. All these people are fighting for your right to party, not their own.

  Many of the standard-bearers of the fight for the reform of the laws pertaining to psychedelics are similarly thoughtful, reasonable, and circumspect. Jim Fadiman is, in my experience, a lion of good sense and levelheadedness. The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), which is, like the Heffter Research Institute, a prominent and well-known funder of psychedelic research, has the most reasonable of mission statements. It reads: “We envision a world where psychedelics and marijuana are safely and legally available for beneficial uses, and where research is governed by rigorous scientific evaluation of their risks and benefits.” The founder of MAPS, Rick Doblin, has a Ph.D. from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government*11 and has done thorough and critical follow-up studies of early psychedelic research.

  Though Fadiman, Doblin, and others are open about having used psychedelic drugs, this does not, to my mind, render them unreliable or discredit their work. True, their interest in the therapeutic use of psychedelic drugs stems from their own transformative personal experiences,*12 but I imagine the same can be said of psychotherapists, most of whom have themselves gone through therapy as part of their training. All the practitioners by whom I’ve been treated have made personal use of the skills they taught me. My mindfulness-based therapist meditated, my cognitive behavioral therapist cultivated her own psychological flexibility, redirected her thoughts and behaviors, and used nonviolent communication. I have no idea if my psychopharmacologist took psychiatric medications, but with all those samples lying around, how likely is it that he never tried a little something?

  Still, for every sober and sensible Jim Fadiman or Rick Doblin, there’s someone like Amanda Feilding, the countess of Wemyss and March, one of the most important funders of research into the therapeutic uses of psychedelics, who in 1970 cheerfully drilled a hole into her skull.

  Amanda Feilding believed that trepanation, the opening of the skull to reveal the dura mater, the membrane surrounding the brain, could cure all manner of ills. Boring such a hole, she wrote, increases cranial blood volume, allowing access to a higher state of consciousness. Feilding was such a firm believer in the beneficial powers of trepanation that she made a movie of herself drilling a hole in her skull with a dentist’s drill. Her guru in this madness? One Bart Hughes, a librarian by trade.

  And yet the countess, wearer of floppy hats, owner of fluffy dogs, and survivor of DIY brain surgery, created and funds the Beckley Foundation, named after her estate. This charitable trust devoted to drug policy reform has done tremendously important work, supporting scientific research and initiatives, including studies at University College London on the potential therapeutic effects of cannabis, and at Johns Hopkins University on the usefulness of psilocybin in treating nicotine and other drug addiction. At Imperial College London, the Beckley Foundation is currently funding a study using BOLD (blood-oxygen-level dependent) fMRI to measure the effects of psilocybin on brain activity. Though horrified by the holes in Feilding’s head, I’m impressed with her foundation’s endeavors, and with her persistence in pursuing the scientific study of psychedelics. I believe that, without her tenacity, we would not currently be experiencing the resurgence of interest in studying the benefits of these drugs. She has, in addition to perseverance, the gift of convincing others to join her efforts. An open letter from the Beckley Foundation calling for an end to the global war on drugs was signed by dozens of people, including, among others, Nobel Prize winners and presidents from around the world.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” If that is the case, then surely one shouldn’t condemn someone merely because one (or a dozen) of those ideas is bat-shit crazy. Still, I find it disconcerting to watch a video of a pretty young woman with whom I share an agenda, both personal and political, drilling a hole in her head and reveling in the resulting “expanded consciousness.” Nothing makes me embrace my constricted consciousness more than the sight of the blood running into her smile.

  * * *

  *1  Harvard Law School is known to alumni and others as the Law School, as if no others exist.

  *2  See, e.g., Theodore Kaczynski.

  *3  Leary’s sojourn abroad was preceded by the suicide of his wife, his marriage to and divorce from another woman, and the arrest of his thesis adviser and purported lover for solicitation of sex in a public restroom.

  *4  By some accounts, a man named Michael Hollingshead, described by one of my sources as a “charming psychopath,” gave Leary a mayonnaise jar full of LSD, which he had obtained from a New York City psychiatrist who had himself ordered the drug directly from Sandoz Pharmaceuticals.

  *5  http://www.thecrimson.com/​article/​1962/​12/​13/​letter-from-alpert-leary-pfollowing-is/.

  *6  The survivor of many a publicity tour, I can only say that this isn’t the worst solution I’ve encountered to the malaise of trudging from city to city, flogging one’s book.

  *7  And, more important, the inspiration for Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem’s bus in The Muppet Movie.

  *8  Robert Greenfield, Timothy Leary: A Biography, p. 302.

  *9  Or in her underwear. Reports differ.

  *10  Perhaps this is not irony but, rather, poetic justice.

  *11  Harvard! Again! You might be forgiven for wondering what the heck’s going on there.

  *12  As did Hofmann’s, as well as that of other early proponents of LSD-enhanced psychotherapy, such as Stanislav Grof.

  Day 18

  Normal Day

  Physical Sensations: None.

  Mood: Even-tempered. Pleasant.

  Conflict: None.

  Sleep: Adequate. Seven Hours.

  Work: Remarkably productive.

  Pain: Minor.

  It’s a relief to have another Normal Day that feels so good. I was worried that the microdose of LSD was having the effect of making Microdose Day happy but activated (raising fears of hypomania), Transition Day marvelous, and Normal Day unreliable. But today was a really good day, and I’m under the influence of nothing at all.

  As someone who never took a math class after eleventh grade, and who satisfied her college natural-science distribution requirement with a class called The Origins of Human Sexual Behavior, I find it remarkable not only that I spent this re
ally good day reading complicated articles in scientific journals, the results of the various psilocybin studies that are currently in process at UCLA, Johns Hopkins, and NYU, but that I found them so fascinating.

  Though my microdosing experiment shares little with these research projects—my dose is a fraction of the ones being studied, and their goals are far more ambitious than the slight mood modification I seek—these studies are compelling and instructive. Moreover, they have relieved any residual anxieties I had about the safety of my project. It’s encouraging that legitimate researchers whose approving institutions demand careful consideration of all risks are comfortable administering much higher doses of a drug that operates nearly identically to and is no more or less dangerous than LSD. I will die eventually, but it’s not going to be from two drops of diluted acid every three days.

  After a long hiatus, approval for human-subject research on psychedelic drugs was given by the FDA. The first such study was with the drug N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) at the University of New Mexico, conducted by Rick Strassman and published in 1994. Since then, clinical research has slowly and carefully resumed. In the first human study addressing a clinical use (a so-called Phase Two clinical protocol), the researcher Charles S. Grob, M.D., and his colleagues at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center investigated whether psilocybin could reduce anxiety, depression, and pain in patients with terminal cancer. Annie Levy, one of the participants in this twelve-subject pilot study, a middle-aged woman with short gray curls and large, luminous eyes, recalled that before the study began she was anxious and terrified. She had lost her faith, was being irritable with her husband. “I was worried about the process of dying, about suffering and being in pain.”

  In a room decorated with purple fabric wall hangings and fresh orchids, Annie and the other research subjects were given .2mg/kg of psilocybin, a moderate dose sufficient to make them feel the effects of the drug.*1 Annie lay in bed, wearing an eye mask and listening to music. Afterward, she told an interviewer, “As soon as it started working, I knew I had nothing to be afraid of, because it connected me with the universe.” She recounted a remarkable emotional experience. “I was lying on this hospital bed and it felt like the bed had turned into this circle of hands that was holding me. I was being supported.”

  Her husband recalled that when they returned home “it was like someone had put on a lightbulb inside of Annie’s head. She was literally glowing.”

  At the conclusion of the experience (approximately six hours after consuming the dose), Annie and the other subjects were evaluated and given the opportunity to discuss and process their experiences with a trained researcher. They continued to meet with the researcher periodically over the next six months—for discussion only, not for further drug treatment. None of the subjects experienced any negative physical or emotional consequences of the psilocybin. On the contrary, their despair and anxiety were substantially alleviated. The effects on Annie of this single psychedelic experience lasted until her death in 2009. Her remaining days were, more often than not, really good days.

  Researchers at Johns Hopkins and NYU, also working with subjects diagnosed with terminal cancer, have used higher doses of psilocybin and seen similarly striking results. The author Michael Pollan, in an insightful and thoroughly researched article published in The New Yorker, interviewed researchers and subjects of both the NYU and Johns Hopkins studies. Stephen Ross, the lead scientist at NYU, told him: “I thought the first ten or twenty people were plants—that they must be faking it. They were saying things like ‘I understand love is the most powerful force on the planet,’ or ‘I had an encounter with my cancer, this black cloud of smoke.’ People who had been palpably scared of death—they lost their fear. The fact that a drug given once can have such an effect for so long is an unprecedented finding. We have never had anything like it in the psychiatric field.”

  The results are remarkable, as is the excitement of the researchers involved. What I find particularly interesting, however, is their focus. Their interest is specifically in the mystical experience engendered by psilocybin, which is what they believe inspires the dramatic reduction of anxiety and depression and the increase in well-being. Roland Griffiths, the psychopharmacologist in charge of the Johns Hopkins Medical School studies, came to the research, he told an interviewer, after meditation “opened up a spiritual window” for him and made him “curious about the nature of mystical experience and spiritual transformation.”*2 As Pollan wrote, “Griffiths believes that the long-term effectiveness of the drug is due to its ability to occasion…a transformative experience, but not by changing the brain’s long-term chemistry, as a conventional psychiatric drug like Prozac does.”

  Similarly, the insights engendered by psilocybin-induced mystical experiences are theorized to be behind the remarkable recent results in studies on alcohol and tobacco addiction. The initial success of these studies should, perhaps, be no surprise, given the overtly spiritual nature of the most popular treatment for alcoholism: Alcoholics Anonymous. Most people know that the Twelve Step program instructs people to seek aid from a “higher power” in overcoming dependence. Few are aware, however, that AA was founded on a drug-induced mystical experience.

  In 1934, Bill W., cofounder of AA, was treated for his alcoholism with a hallucinogenic belladonna alkaloid. The resulting mystical experience led him to become sober and inspired him to write the book and cofound the organization that have changed the lives of so many millions around the world. In the 1950s, Bill W. underwent LSD therapy, and found his experience so inspiring that he sought to have the drug made part of the AA program. His board of directors overruled him. More than half a century later, it appears that Bill W. is finally being vindicated.*3

  Though microdosing causes no mystical experiences, I am drawn to these studies, not because I am by nature a spiritual person, but because I am a skeptic. I am an atheist who believes that religion in all its forms is a delusion, occasionally benign, more often vicious, violent, and cruel. I was raised in this belief as some are raised in the belief in God. In my home, atheism was a dogma as rigid as evangelical Christianity or Wahhabist Islam. The most religious of Jewish parents sometimes tell their children that if they marry non-Jews the parents will “sit shiva” for them; they will cut off contact and mourn them as if they are dead. My father once told me that if I rejected the atheism with which I was brought up and became an Orthodox Jew, he would sit shiva for me.

  When reading accounts by LSD explorers, you can’t avoid the tales of their spiritual awakenings. When Ram Dass was a young man, he described himself just as I describe myself: “Inured to religion…I didn’t have one whiff of God.” Psychedelics led him to gain access to the divine, as they led Aldous Huxley and even the sober Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann. Jim Fadiman writes of “Spiritual Journeys,” and the importance of the spiritual in his own life.

  I keep asking the psychonauts and researchers I interview if they believe that the mystical experiences that transform the lives of people with end-stage cancer and the lives of Harvard professors like Ram Dass are real. When Aldous Huxley writes in The Doors of Perception that psychedelic drugs gave him “a glimpse of the unbearable splendour of ultimate Reality,” does that ultimate reality exist outside himself, or was he just suffering from a delusion that it did? Isn’t it more likely that the many people from various religious traditions who use psychedelics to gain access to the divine are merely confusing brain-centered hallucinations with God? Most of the time, the reply I get is “What difference does it make?” If the experience is transformative, why do I care so much about whether it is “real”? What do I even mean by “real”?

  I was going on at perhaps tiresome length to my husband about how frustrating I find those anti-ontological, circular answers to rational questions, when I noticed a peculiar expression on his face.

  “What?” I said.

  “It’s not like you’ve never had spiritual experiences,” he said.

  I bristled. “I have
never in my life had a spiritual experience,” I said. “Never.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said blandly.

  “What?”

  “Esalen?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “Esalen.”

  Esalen Institute, a “holistic learning and retreat center” in Big Sur, is a place where you can go on a “modern day vision quest,” take a class in the “Energetics of Consciousness,” or study the “Alchemy of Love and Aliveness.” It is an overtly spiritual place, where meditation and yoga first gained a foothold in the West. It’s also where many of the early researchers into the therapeutic uses of LSD and other psychedelics gathered to exchange information and insight. So what was I, the condescending rationalist, doing at Esalen? I could spin some yarn about how Big Sur, on the Central Coast of California, where the Santa Lucia Mountains drop abruptly into the Pacific, is one of the most beautiful places on earth. I could blame it on how much I love a good massage (Esalen hosts one of the best massage schools in the world). I could describe the stunningly beautiful hot baths, cantilevered out over the crashing surf below. I could complain about how hard it is to find a reasonably priced place to hole up and write, especially one that feeds you three delicious, wholesome meals a day made from food plucked from the garden. All that is true, but it’s not the whole truth.

  The truth is that part of me has for a long time been in a tentative rebellion against my parents’ credo.

  About a dozen years ago, when I went to Esalen, I told myself that I was depressed and stressed out, and needed time to be alone and to work. But the truth is, I was looking for something more. I spent my first two days as I would have expected to: working, eating, soaking in the hot tubs, taking ecstatic-dance (silly but fun) and yoga classes. On the third day, I woke up, danced myself into a sweat, had some breakfast, and then wandered out to the meditation yurt. I settled myself on a pillow in front of a window. Outside the window was a little canyon leading to the sea, its banks blanketed by orange flowers. I looked out at the view for a while, marveling at how pretty it was, the contrast between the flowers and the green grass, the deep-blue sky and the gray surf.