and widely available, in the form of a novel hybrid of pharmacology and
psychotherapy. George Goldsmith envisions a network of psychedelic
treatment centers, facilities in attractive natural settings where patients
will go for their guided sessions. He has formed a company called
Compass Pathways to build these centers in the belief they can offer a
treatment for a range of mental illnesses sufficiently effective and
economical that Europe’s national health services will reimburse for
them. Goldsmith has so far raised three million pounds to fund and
organize psilocybin trials (starting with treatment-resistant depression)
at multiple sites in Europe. Already he is working with designers at IDEO,
the international design firm, to redesign the entire experience of
psychedelic therapy. Paul Summergrad and Tom Insel have both joined
his advisory board.
Katherine MacLean, the former Hopkins researcher who wrote the
landmark paper on openness, hopes someday to establish a “psychedelic
hospice,” a retreat center somewhere out in nature where not only the
dying but their loved ones can use psychedelics to help them let go—the
patient and the loved ones both.
“If we limit psychedelics just to the patient,” she explains, “we’re
sticking to the old medical model. But psychedelics are more radical than
that. I get nervous when people say they should only be prescribed by a
doctor. I imagine a broader application.”
In MacLean’s words it’s easy to hear echoes of the 1960s experience
with psychedelics—the excitement about their potential to help not only
the sick but everyone else too. This kind of thinking—or talking—makes
some of her mainstream colleagues nervous. It’s exactly the kind of talk
that Insel and Summergrad were warning the community against. Good
luck with that.
“The betterment of well people” is very much on the minds of most of
the researchers I interviewed, even if some of them were more reluctant
to discuss it on the record than institutional outsiders like Bob Jesse and
Rick Doblin and Katherine MacLean. For them, medical acceptance is a
first step toward a much broader cultural acceptance—outright
legalization, in Doblin’s view, or something more carefully controlled in
MacLean’s and Jesse’s. Jesse would like to see the drugs administered by
trained guides working in what he calls “longitudinal multigenerational
contexts,” which, as he describes them, sound a lot like churches. (Think
frankie
(Frankie)
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