How to Change Your Mind

for their use as well as a theoretical framework. Where Leary and the
counterculture ultimately parted ways with the first generation of
researchers was in deciding that no such container—whether medical,
religious, or scientific—was needed and that an unguided, do-it-yourself
approach to psychedelics was just fine. This is risky, as it turns out, and
probably a mistake. But how would we ever have discovered this, without
experimenting? Before 1943, our society had never had such powerful
mind-changing drugs available to it.
Other societies have had long and productive experience with
psychedelics, and their examples might have saved us a lot of trouble had
we only known and paid attention. The fact that we regard many of these
societies as “backward” probably kept us from learning from them. But
the biggest thing we might have learned is that these powerful medicines
can be dangerous—both to the individual and to the society—when they
don’t have a sturdy social container: a steadying set of rituals and rules—
protocols—governing their use, and the crucial involvement of a guide,
the figure that is usually called a shaman. Psychedelic therapy—the
Hubbard method—was groping toward a Westernized version of this
ideal, and it remains the closest thing we have to such a protocol. For
young Americans in the 1960s, for whom the psychedelic experience was
new in every way, the whole idea of involving elders was probably never
going to fly. But this is, I think, the great lesson of the 1960s experiment
with psychedelics: the importance of finding the proper context, or
container, for these powerful chemicals and experiences.
Speaking of lines, psychedelics in the 1960s did draw at least one of
them, and it has probably never before been quite so sharp or bright: the
line, I mean, between generations. Saying exactly how or what
psychedelics contributed to the counterculture of the 1960s is not an easy
task, there were so many other forces at work. With or without
psychedelics, there probably would have been a counterculture; the
Vietnam War and the draft made it more than likely. But the forms the
counterculture took and its distinctive styles—of music, art, writing,
design, and social relations—would surely have been completely different
were it not for these chemicals. Psychedelics also contributed to what
Todd Gitlin has called the “as if” mood of 1960s politics—the sense that
everything now was up for grabs, that nothing given was inviolate, and