EPILOGUE

In Praise of Neural Diversity

IN APRIL 2017, the international psychedelic community gathered in the
Oakland Convention Center for Psychedelic Science, an every-few-years-
or-so event organized by MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for
Psychedelic Studies, the nonprofit established by Rick Doblin in 1986
with the improbable goal of returning psychedelics to scientific and
cultural respectability. In 2016, Doblin himself seemed stunned at how
far and fast things had come and how close to hand victory now seemed.
Earlier in the year, the FDA had approved phase 3 trials of MDMA, and
psilocybin was not far behind. If the results of these trials come anywhere
near those of phase 2, the government will presumably have to
reschedule the two drugs, and then doctors will be able to prescribe them.
“We are not the counterculture,” Doblin told a reporter during the
conference. “We are the culture.”
What had been as recently as 2010 a modest gathering of psychonauts
and a handful of renegade researchers was now a six-day convention-
cum-conference that had drawn more than three thousand people from
all over the world to hear researchers from twenty-five countries present
their findings. Not that there weren’t also plenty of psychonauts and
legions of the psychedelically curious. Between the lectures and panels
and plenaries, they browsed a sprawling marketplace offering psychedelic
books, psychedelic artwork, and psychedelic music.
For me, the event turned out to be a kind of reunion, bringing together
most of the characters in my story under one roof. I was able to catch up
with virtually all the scientists I’d interviewed (though Robin Carhart-
Harris, with a baby on the way, had to skip), as well as several of the
underground guides with whom I’d worked.