Virginia Wright: Interview Archive

People have reached for consciousness-altering substances for as far back as the written record goes. Cave art and old manuscripts show mushrooms and other methods used to loosen the ordinary mind and reach for some union with the self and with something larger. The modern thread, where these compounds get studied as a tool for psychotherapy, picks up around the 1940s. That is when Albert Hofmann first synthesized LSD.

One thing worth settling early, because it confused me when I first came into this work, is what the word psychedelic even means. It is not a clinical or measurable term. It is a literary one, put together in the late 1940s during an exchange of letters between Aldous Huxley and Osmond, who were tossing names back and forth. Osmond's reply to Huxley has stuck with me: 'To fathom hell or soar angelic, just take a pinch of psychedelic.' The couplet gets at why they rejected the word hallucinogen. These drugs do not simply produce illusions. The people studying them felt the drugs could surface things that were real inside a person, parts of the psyche, and could open a sense of connection to the wider universe.

Osmond and Huxley wanted a word that gave language to something they had already observed, that these substances might move a person forward in spiritual and psychological growth. The flip side of that same quote is honest about the danger. LSD does not hand you a pleasant high. You can go to heaven or to hell on it, and the same is true across the psychedelics. Researchers have reported this throughout the last century and this one.

Because there is no scientific definition, people draw the lines differently. MAPS tends to stay close to Stan Grof's framework, since the founder studied under him. One test Grof uses is whether the experience moves you toward a more holistic, or as he puts it holotropic, state, meaning more in tune with yourself and with the world around you. Grof has written several books that are easy to find, and there is a free paper online I would point anyone to on this subject, The Psychology of the Future: Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research. He traces where LSD and the other compounds sit inside the longer history of psychology.

There is a second trait that sets these drugs apart from most others. The effect swings enormously from one person to the next on an identical dose, and stranger still, it swings within the same person from one occasion to another. Very few substances behave that way. That observation is where the idea of set and setting comes from, the view that the result is not purely chemical but leans heavily on your surroundings and on the intention you bring in before you take anything. Setting is the easy part to picture. A calm place, someone watching to make sure you have food and water and are safe, art and music and nature nearby, people you care about: that session will go very differently than the same person taking the same dose somewhere loud, polluted, surrounded by angry strangers.

By the 1940s and 1950s these compounds were being used, shared, and studied. Time and Life ran favorable coverage, and the educated classes talked about them as something that might do for mental healing what penicillin had done for the body. The tone did not turn negative until the drugs got tangled up in the culture wars of the 1960s. That decade had everything surfacing at once, civil rights, women's rights, the environmental movement, the push to end the war in Vietnam, gay and lesbian rights, all of it colliding with the political order of the day. Drugs ran straight through the middle of it. Nixon called Timothy Leary the most dangerous man in America, which at the height of the Vietnam war was a striking thing to say, but there was a feeling that the drugs were feeding the unrest.

A split in the psychedelic world opened around then and has never really closed. Leary, the designated bad boy of the scene, argued the substances should go out broadly to everyone. Others held, and still hold, that compounds this strong belong with the shaman, the therapist, the doctor. The counterargument is that a person has the right to decide what goes into their own body. On physical risk, psychedelics are not where the worry lies. LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, even ayahuasca, which is brewed from two plant compounds and hits fast, mostly pass through the body. The real power, and the real risk, is psychological.

One by one these drugs were made illegal, marijuana included at the time, though that is a separate story, since it too became Schedule One, meaning the government classified it as having no medical use and high potential for abuse. As each one was banned it was pulled out of the labs, so researchers could no longer obtain them at all. The casualty was the research, not the use. People kept taking psychedelics; they just bought them on the street, and prohibition compounds the harm. What gets sold as Molly or ecstasy often is not MDMA. A recent study across five East Coast states found only about 25 percent of what was sold under those names contained any MDMA at all. The pure compound carries a fairly benign risk profile. In MDMA's case, across 600 instances of clinical use, under controlled conditions where you know what you are taking and you are not dancing all night without water, no adverse effects turned up, a lower risk than many prescription drugs now on the market. With the research reopening, early work is showing the compounds can interrupt addiction.

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