good for today’s researchers to disdain his “antics” and blame him for
derailing the first wave of research, and yet, as Doblin points out with a
smile, “there would be no second wave if Leary hadn’t turned on a whole
generation.” Indeed. Consider the case of Paul Summergrad, who has
spoken publicly of his own youthful use of psychedelics. In a videotaped
interview with Ram Dass that was shown at the 2015 meeting of the
American Psychiatric Association, he told his colleagues that an acid trip
he took in college had been formative in his intellectual development.
(Jeffrey Lieberman, another past president of the American Psychiatric
Association, has also written of the insights gleaned from his youthful
experiments with LSD.*)
And yet, and yet . . . As much as I want to believe Doblin’s sunny
forecast, it’s not hard to imagine things easily going off the rails. Tony
Bossis agrees, as much as he hopes that psychedelics will someday be
routine in palliative care.
“We don’t die well in America. Ask people where do you want to die,
and they will tell you, at home with their loved ones. But most of us die in
an ICU. The biggest taboo in America is the conversation about death.
Sure, it’s gotten better; now we have hospices, which didn’t exist not so
long ago. But to a doctor, it’s still an insult to let a patient go.” In his view,
psychedelics have the potential not only to open up that difficult
conversation but to change the experience of dying itself. If the medical
community will embrace them.
“This culture has a fear of death, a fear of transcendence, and a fear of
the unknown, all of which are embodied in this work.” Psychedelics may
by their very nature be too disruptive for our institutions ever to embrace
them. Institutions generally like to mediate the individual’s access to
authority of whatever kind—whether medical or spiritual—whereas the
psychedelic experience offers something akin to direct revelation, making
it inherently antinomian. And yet some cultures have successfully devised
ritual forms to contain and harness the Dionysian energies of
psychedelics; think of the Eleusinian mysteries of ancient Greece or the
shamanic ceremonies surrounding peyote or ayahuasca in the Americas
today. It is not impossible.
The first time I raised Jesse’s idea of the betterment of well people
with Roland Griffiths, he seemed to squirm a bit in his chair and then
chose his words with care. “Culturally right now, that is a dangerous idea
frankie
(Frankie)
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