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