BREAKING CONVENTION
At a recent conference GARY LACHMAN found that the doctors have retaken the psychedelic asylum
Exactly when the history of psychedelics began is precisely the kind of question one might ask at a conference on psychedelics. If you’d asked it at ‘Breaking Convention: the Fourth International Conference on Psychedelic Consciousness’, held 30 June to 2 July 2017 at the University of Greenwich, London, you would probably have got a number of answers, each different and all hotly debated. One answer is that psychedelic history began in 1956 when Humphrey Osmond – the English psychiatrist who facilitated Aldous Huxley’s famous mescaline trip (see FT28-32), recorded in The Doors
of Perception – coined the word. Trying to determine exactly what the drug did to Huxley, Osmond wrote: “To fathom hell or soar angelic, just take a pinch of psychedelic.”
The term, meaning “mindaltering,” quickly caught on. A decade later, a nascent youth culture and its leaders – the Beatles – were singing the praises of what was being called “the psychedelic revolution.” Criminalisation of the “sacrament” of LSD in 1966, combined with its indiscriminate use – most visible in the disastrous “summer of love” of 1967 (see FT356:40-47) – however, soon led to what had started life as a fascinating tool for inner exploration becoming taboo.
Fifty years on from the aborted “psychedelic revolution” some things have changed – mainstream attitudes toward the medical and psychotherapeutic uses of some psychedelic drugs for one. But other attitudes remain, as the organisers of the three-day conference admit. While they welcome the idea that medical use of psychedelics seems imminent – “We’re going mainstream, baby,” the conference schedule announced – other, more millenarian sentiments are not forgotten. “1967 was a psychedelic-led, Technicolor dream of potential, but the authorities refused to join the dance.” But don’t despair. “Now at the 50th Anniversary of the Summer of Love we find the Psychedelic Renaissance in full swing.” 1 If prescription doses of MDMA (Ecstasy) and other mindalterers will soon be available on the NHS, there is still a stubborn community of psychedelic revolutionaries determined to keep the spirit of ’67 alive and kicking.
In fact, the impression I got as I made my way from one overwarm lecture hall to another – for talks on the benefits of ketamine, darkness therapy, the magical use of LSD, Bruce Parry’s adventures with indigenous folk, psychedelics and midwifery, among many others – was that a tussle between two orthodoxies was shaping up in the psychedelic community. One, the medical and therapeutic mentality, represented most conspicuously by MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies), a kind of psychedelic trade union, wants to turn psychedelic drugs into
medicines, licensed and regulated by the authorities, and made available through prescription to people suffering from depression and other related disorders. These are the people who want to make taking drugs safe, and they are the ones that the straights will most likely cotton on to.
The other orthodoxy grows out of the shamanic tradition of using drugs in a religious, spiritual context. The popular image of this is Carlos Castaneda’s dubious Don Juan (see FT117:42
44, 238:56-57) but these days it’s represented by a whole cadre of indigenous mystical teachers, mostly from South America. These are the ones who want to keep psychedelics like ayahuasca sacred. While the “safe” advocates see psychedelic use as healing in a personal way, the “sacred” advocates expand this to include the entire planet. Through psychedelics and the adoption of the lifestyles of the indigenous, non-Western, non-modern peoples associated with them, the 21st century psychedelic revolutionaries, rightly or wrongly, see the hope of the future. They too want to make taking drugs “safe,” but what is important here
A tussle between two orthodoxies was shaping up in the psychedelic community