interviewed had told me about—the so-called rat park experiment. It’s
well known in the field of drug abuse research that rats in a cage given
access to drugs of various kinds will quickly addict themselves, pressing
the little levers for the drug on offer in preference to food, often to the
point of death. Much less well known, however, is the fact that if the cage
is “enriched” with opportunities for play, interaction with other rats, and
exposure to nature, the same rats will utterly ignore the drugs and so
never become addicted. The rat park experiments lend support to the
idea that the propensity to addiction might have less to do with genes or
chemistry than with one’s personal history and environment.
Now comes a class of chemicals that may have the power to change
how we experience our personal history and environment, no matter how
impoverished or painful they may be. “Do you see the world as a prison or
a playground?” is the key question Matt Johnson takes away from the rat
park experiment. If addiction represents a radical narrowing of one’s
perspective and behavior and emotional repertoire, the psychedelic
journey has the potential to reverse that constriction, open people up to
the possibility of change by disrupting and enriching their interior
environment.
“People come out of these experiences seeing the world a little more
like a playground.”
• • •
ONE GOOD WORD to describe the experiences of both the Apollo astronauts
and the volunteers on their psilocybin journeys is “awe,” a human
emotion that can perhaps help weave together the disparate strands of
psychological interpretation proposed by the psychedelic researchers
with whom I spoke. It was Peter Hendricks, a young psychologist at the
University of Alabama conducting a trial using psilocybin to treat cocaine
addicts, who first suggested to me that the experience of awe might offer
the psychological key to explain the power of psychedelics to alter deeply
rooted patterns of behavior.
“People who are addicted know they’re harming themselves—their
health, their careers, their social well-being—but they often fail to see the
damage their behavior is doing to others.” Addiction is, among other