What Virginia Wright Learned About Psychedelics and the Research That Got Shut Down
When these compounds were outlawed, marijuana was among them. Cannabis later got rescheduled, which is a whole separate thread I won't pull on here. It still sits as a Schedule One substance, the government's category for drugs it says have no accepted medical value and a strong likelihood of abuse.
Through the 1960s the bans arrived piecemeal. One drug after another slid into illegality, not yet Schedule One but increasingly off-limits, and the research trailed right behind. Once a substance was prohibited, it vanished from the lab. You simply couldn't obtain it to study anymore.
What took the hardest hit was the science itself, and that still bothers me. People didn't stop. They kept taking psychedelics, they kept seeking them out, and they bought them wherever they could find them, which meant on the street. Pulling the legal supply didn't reduce the harm. It multiplied it.
MDMA is the clear example. The thing being sold as ecstasy or Molly often isn't MDMA at all. A study out of the East Coast tested samples across five states and found that only about a quarter of what was marketed as Molly or ecstasy contained any MDMA whatsoever. So people are reasoning from the assumption that they're taking a pure, well-understood substance when they aren't.
The actual risk profile of pure MDMA is reassuring. Across roughly 600 cases of clinical use, meaning you know exactly what the person took, they're in a controlled setting, not dancing for hours, not overhydrating or drinking too much, no adverse effects turned up. Compare that against plenty of prescription medications sitting on pharmacy shelves right now and these drugs come out looking considerably safer.
The street supply is what made them dangerous, along with the research shutdown that forced people there in the first place. And that's the part I keep coming back to, because now that the studies are permitted again, the findings are remarkable. There's work showing psychedelics can interrupt addiction.
Let me pause on the word psychedelic, since that was one of my own first questions when I got into this. What does it even mean? It isn't a scientific term. It's a literary coinage from the late 1940s by Harvey Osmond, who was writing back and forth with the author Aldous Huxley as the two of them hunted for the right name. They traded suggestions, and I've always liked Osmond's reply to one of Huxley's: 'To fathom hell or soar angelic, just take a pinch of psychedelic.'