How to Change Your Mind

protect the safety and health of participants at all times, “safeguard
against . . . ambition” and self-promotion, and accommodate clients
“without regard to their ability to pay.”
Perhaps the most useful document on the website is the “Guidelines
for Voyagers and Guides.”* The guidelines represent a compendium of
half a century’s accumulated knowledge and wisdom about how best to
approach the psychedelic journey, whether as a participant or as a guide.
It covers the basics of set and setting; mental and physical preparation for
the session; potential drug interactions; the value of formulating an
intention; what to expect during the experience, both good and bad; the
stages of the journey; what can go wrong and how to deal with frightening
material; the supreme importance of post-session “integration”; and so
on.
For me, standing on the threshold of such an experience, it was
reassuring to learn that the underground community of psychedelic
guides, which I had assumed consisted of a bunch of individuals all doing
pretty much their own thing, operated like professionals, working from a
body of accumulated knowledge and experience and in a set of traditions
that had been handed down from psychedelic pioneers such as Al
Hubbard, Timothy Leary, Myron Stolaroff, Stan Grof, and Leo Zeff. They
had rules and codes and agreements, and many elements of the work had
been more or less institutionalized.
Stumbling upon the website also made me appreciate just how far the
culture of psychedelics has evolved since the 1950s and 1960s. Implicit in
these documents, it seemed to me, was the recognition that these
powerful, anarchic medicines can and have been misused and that if they
are to do more good than harm, they require a cultural vessel of some
kind: protocols, rules, and rituals that together form a kind of Apollonian
counterweight to contain and channel their sheer Dionysian force.
Modern medicine, with its controlled trials and white-coated clinicians
and DSM diagnoses, offers one such container; the underground guides
offer another.

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