Who Gets To Decide The Right Way To Use Psychedelics?
The Psychedelic Blog is an independent media brand covering drugs, altered states & the culture surrounding them.
This week: Why Psychedelic culture recreated the very hierarchies it claims to oppose.
Psychedelic culture likes to think of itself as anti-system, anti-hierarchy & anti-status games. Spend enough time around the space, though, & you’ll realize it has managed to recreate all 3 with impressive speed.
There are acceptable & unacceptable reasons to do Psychedelics. Some motivations are approved, others earn the kind of facial expression normally reserved for people who clap when the plane lands.
The hierarchy looks something like this:
- Healing trauma? Beautiful work.
- Processing grief? Important & necessary.
- Exploring spirituality? Sacred.
- Repairing a marriage? Wonderful.
- Connecting with nature? Fantastic.
- Curiosity? Getting a little questionable.
- Creativity? Depends who’s asking.
- Fun? Absolutely not.
- Productivity? You capitalist pig.
- Optimization? Straight to jail.
Somewhere along the way, a space that prides itself on questioning cultural assumptions built its own moral ranking system for altered states. Apparently there are approved reasons to explore consciousness & unapproved reasons to explore consciousness.
I don’t buy it.
The Silicon Valley founder using Ketamine for productivity.
I’ll never forget having lunch with a well-known person in the Psychedelic space when she said, “There are too many billionaires.”
Notice what she didn’t say: “There are too many poor people.”
That’s because this worldview emanates from resentment, not compassion. The tech founder is immediately guilty by association, and their desire to alter consciousness is immediately treated as suspect.
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know I have nothing positive to say about Ketamine. It’s a high-risk dissociative that should never have been rebranded as a ‘Psychedelic’ in the first place. So I don’t do Ketamine.
But I also don’t give a shit who someone else is, or why they do.
The former Marine working with Ibogaine to heal from combat memories.
Up until very recently, we sent young men, many from disadvantaged economic backgrounds, to face unspeakable horrors. Upon their return, they were told:
- Alcohol? You bet.
- Opioids? Not a problem.
- Painkillers? Why not.
- SSRIs? Yep.
- Psychedelics? Absolutely not, druggie.
The result? 17 veterans a day killing themselves. (I’ve had several veterans reach out to me to say that figure is a conservative estimate.)
Fortunately, Ibogaine is finally becoming accessible. The fact that we made veterans who served their country fly to places like Costa Rica or Honduras for treatment, often at clinics where safety & legitimacy were questionable at best, is a scar on our culture.
The Burning Man artist chasing awe in the desert with, well, a bunch of Psychedelics.
You couldn’t pay me to attend Burning Man. It encapsulates everything I hate in one experience: absurd traffic, large groups of strangers & at least some incredibly performative people. Not for me.
Ironically, some of the coolest people I’ve met are Burners. More importantly, Burning Man exposes a hypocrisy in our culture. People love to judge the outlandish costumes, the freedom, and the drug use while wearing a costume to work every day themselves (think the Patagonia sleeveless bomber vest that signals, “See, I’m just like you!”), spending their time completely beholden to someone else’s schedule, and consuming caffeine & alcohol compulsively (those are drugs too, ya know).
The only difference between a Burner & a 9-to-5er is the Burner knows he’s wearing a costume.
The suburban mom microdosing Psilocybin.
No one bats an eye if this archetype gets wine drunk by noon, but god forbid they decide not to destroy their health while helping manage the day.
“Mommy needs her Chardonnay” is a punchline. “Mommy needs 100mg of mushrooms” & suddenly we’re calling CPS.
The rule was never “don’t alter your consciousness.” The rule was “use only state-approved substances.”
The biohacker optimizing cognition by microdosing LSD.
LSD is a perceptual tool…it resembles a technology more than a drug.
People get strangely uncomfortable when altered states are used for enhancement rather than healing, as if improving cognition is somehow less noble than repairing it.
Apparently taking a substance to process childhood trauma is brave, but taking one to think more clearly makes you a villain.
The athlete microdosing Psilocybin or LSD in search of flow state.
People celebrate runners chasing the runner’s high, surfers chasing the perfect wave & climbers chasing flow.
Add 100mg of mushrooms to the equation & suddenly we’re convening an ethics committee.
The couple taking MDMA to enhance their marriage.
I am willing to bet that in about 5 years there will be a 60 Minutes segment that goes something like:
“You know it as Ecstasy: a club drug associated with raves, glow sticks & electronic music festivals. So imagine our surprise when we discovered that married couples across America are using it to connect, explore, have difficult conversations, and, well...yes, have sex.”
60 Minutes is usually about 5 years late to everything…which is why they’re just now figuring out veterans are flying to Mexico for Ibogaine.
The reality is far less scandalous than people imagine: couples have used substances to connect with one another for thousands of years.
We just decided alcohol was romantic & MDMA was degenerate.
The friends using Psilocybin & laughing around a campfire.
A group of friends getting blackout drunk around a fire is so normal nobody thinks twice about it.
Swap the beer for mushrooms & suddenly everyone becomes a neuroscientist.
The musician using LSD to break through creative blocks.
Humanity celebrates the output while pretending to be horrified by the inputs. We love the album, the novel, the invention & the breakthrough insight.
We just prefer not to ask too many questions about where they came from.
The terminal cancer patient using Psilocybin to make peace with death.
Modern medicine will spend millions helping someone live another six weeks.
Helping them die with less fear, however, remains controversial.
The middle-aged man taking Mescaline because he wants to know what Mescaline feels like.
Perhaps the strangest thing about modern Psychedelic culture is the belief that adults need a reason. Maybe he isn’t healing trauma, finding God or optimizing productivity.
Maybe he’s just curious what Mescaline feels like…that should be enough.
The retiree traveling to Peru for an Ayahuasca retreat after decades of curiosity.
Apparently there are acceptable ways to age:
- Buy a motorcycle
- Sail around the world
- Learn Italian
Trying Ayahuasca at 67 raises eyebrows for some reason.
The atheist encountering Bufo & returning with a very different view of reality.
I avoid debates about God, atheism & religion...I find them boring. Academic exercises in futility where people use different applied definitions of the same word & end up talking past one another.
Also, people do realize they can experience the divine (or whatever they want to call it), right? Sign me up for that. Experience beats litigating a textbook.
I’ve yet to encounter someone who has communed with the God Molecule & remained completely closed off to the idea that there is something larger governing this world.
An atheist who has never transcended baseline consciousness explaining the limits of reality is like a man explaining the rigors of childbirth.
The grieving parent communing with Changa in search of clarity after losing a child.
There are losses so large that language stops being useful.
At that point, I have very little interest in telling another human which doors they are or are not allowed to knock on.
The things that actually matter are surprisingly boring:
- Safely sourced substances.
- Honest screening for contraindications & preexisting conditions.
- A qualified guide or facilitator when the situation calls for one.
- Not driving because you’ve become temporarily convinced you’re communicating with the operating system of the universe.
- A basic level of respect for substances powerful enough to rearrange your understanding of reality.
Beyond that, whether someone journeys for healing, grief, creativity, God, curiosity, awe, productivity or because they’ve been wondering about mescaline since reading about it in college is none of my business.
Adults don’t need permission to alter consciousness.
They certainly don’t need permission from people who spent the last decade arguing that nobody should be telling adults what they can & cannot put into their own bodies.