the “strength of the experience and the effect” on drinking behavior. The
New Mexico results were encouraging enough to warrant a much larger
phase 2 trial, involving 180 volunteers, which Bogenschutz is now
conducting at NYU in collaboration with Stephen Ross and Jeffrey Guss.
“Alcoholism can be understood as a spiritual disorder,” Ross told me
the first time we met, in the treatment room at NYU. “Over time you lose
your connection to everything but this compound. Life loses all meaning.
At the end, nothing is more important than that bottle, not even your wife
and your kids. Eventually, there is nothing you won’t sacrifice for it.”
It was Ross who first told me the story of Bill W., the founder of AA,
how he got sober after a mystical experience on belladonna and in the
1950s sought to introduce LSD into the fellowship. To use a drug to
promote sobriety might sound counterintuitive, even crazy, yet it makes a
certain sense when you consider how reliably psychedelics can sponsor
spiritual breakthroughs as well as the conviction, central to the AA
philosophy, that before she can hope to recover, the alcoholic must first
acknowledge her “powerlessness.” AA takes a dim view of the human ego
and, like psychedelic therapy, attempts to shift the addict’s attention from
the self to a “higher power” as well as to the consolations of fellowship—
the sense of interconnectedness.
Michael Bogenschutz put me in touch with a woman I’ll call Terry
McDaniels, a volunteer in his alcoholism pilot study in New Mexico—a
surprising introduction, I came to think, because hers wasn’t the kind of
unqualified success story researchers like to give journalists. I spoke to
McDaniels by phone from her trailer park outside Albuquerque, where
she lives on disability a few trailers down from her daughter. She hasn’t
been able to work since 1997, when “my ex-husband beat my head in with
a cast-iron skillet. Since that occurred, I’ve had a real problem with my
memory.”
McDaniels, who was born in 1954, has had a tough life, going back to
her childhood, when her parents left her for long periods in the
indifferent care of older siblings. “Even to this day I have a hard time
laughing.” She told me she spends many of her days mired in feelings of
regret, anger, envy, self-loathing, and, especially, a deep sense of guilt
toward her children. “I feel very bad I haven’t given them the life I could
have if I had stayed away from drink. I think about that other life I might
have had all the time.”
frankie
(Frankie)
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