My wife and I are on holiday in New York this week. Here are some holiday snaps, or rather, four thoughts from my head.
Psychedelics as costly magic
Sharon Doni is a therapist and clinical director of the Israeli Center for Cult Victims. I came across her when she posted on Facebook about the rise in psychedelic cults and abusive facilitators in Israel. We had a great conversation, which I will share in the future, and she said this, which stuck in my mind:
People are drawn to psychedelics because it’s like magic. It’s a shortcut. But there’s something you need to remember about magic. There is a TV series called “Once Upon a Time” with a witch, and the witch often says that every magic comes with a price. And that’s a sentence I have really adopted. And I also realized: the bigger the magic, the bigger the price. Check the magic you’re taking because you want to realize what’s the price. If a facilitator appears God-like and says he’s going to save you from yourself, he’s going to be a father and brother to you and give you all the hidden knowledge you need…that’s very appealing magic, and there will be a high price for that.
We’re often wondering how psychedelics ‘work’ - neuroscientists, psychiatrists, therapists and pharmacists have put forward various theories of change. Curanderos and brujos, meanwhile, suggest that, sometimes at least, it’s a magical process, and magic can be a zero-sum game. You want to create a big effect - healing, harm, or some other effect - you need to pay a big price, or someone does. It is a dog-eat-dog world. Is that a voodoo way of thinking? Maybe. Sceptic as I am, I sometimes wonder if psychedelics really do involve magic in some zero-sum way, and what the psychic-societal impacts could be when that magic gets scaled up by Eli Lilly and the rest.
Psychedelic antinomianism
Reporting on the story of Dr Samuel Lee, the ‘spiritual psychiatrist’ who started working with (and taking) psychedelic drugs and became a full-on psychedelic guru, I interviewed a clinician who reported Lee, and the Within ketamine clinic where he worked in Austin, to the Texas Medical Board. This clinician told me how he often hired people to offer ketamine therapy, and then saw them get lost in the deep waters of psychedelic culture. He said:
When you employ therapists that have an interest in doing psychedelic-assisted therapy, a certain amount of them are either completely nuts to begin with or slip down a slope. It’s a certain percentage. I’ve had therapists that actually started out well, some of them straight out of school, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, by-the-book clinicians. Then they start doing underground work, they start working with a church or something, they dive off the deep end, it gets weird, they get into dual relationships and other sorts of unprofessionalism, and I have to fire them. I think that it’s an inherent challenge – people who go through profound psychedelic experiences sometimes feel like they’ve figured it out, they’ve heard the message, they know ‘the truth’.’
This quote reminds me of a fantastic paper by David E. Smith, founder of the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, on ‘the psychedelic syndrome’. I mentioned the concept a few weeks ago and someone has helpfully made a wikipedia page about it. Basically, Smith noticed that regular users of LSD around the Haight started to heavily believe in magic, vibes, energy, telepathy, curses, astrology and so on. He noted some workers at his clinic wouldn’t even come to work if their astrology reading was off that day.
The quote also hints at something very prevalent in New Age and psychedelic circles: antinomianism. This is a belief, often found in ecstatic Christianity, that because you’re so close to God, because you’re so 5D, the old laws don’t apply to you. As Crowley put it: ‘Do what you will shall be the whole of the law’.
Samuel Lee would say things like ‘drugs are legal according to God’s law’. Because Dr Lee is, in his own words, acting out of ‘pure love’, he cannot cause any harm. If clients die, they’re actually transitioning to a better place.
I notice, by the by, that Dr Lee is now required to put ‘this is not medical advice’ at the bottom of his videos. Imagine if every wellness guru had to do that.
The worst harms from the psychedelic renaissance are not from psychedelics
They’re from two related drugs - cannabis and ketamine. These are, I suggest, more dangerous than the classic psychedelics because they’re much more likely to be used daily and to lead to dependence.
According to Leung et al (2020), 22% of cannabis users qualify for Cannabis Use Disorder. That certainly included me in my teens - I needed to smoke cannabis every day. Regular users then become susceptible to something called Cannabinoid Hyperemesis Syndrome (CHS), or ‘scromiting’ - daily cannabis use inflames the cannabinoid receptors in your gut so that you experience severe nausea, vomiting and abdominal pains. CHS only recently got recognized by the International Classification of Disease, and it’s affecting a lot of people - approximately 2.7 million a year. The CDC says the group most affected is 15-24-year-olds. People can die from CHS, but you can also recover from it, if you quit weed for a while to give your gut a chance to stabilize.
And then there’s ketamine. In the UK, there are weekly stories about young people experiencing severe physical effects from ketamine addiction, particularly damage to their bladder. In the US, meanwhile, ketamine seems to be ever more popular among psychonauts for recreational use, and ketamine addiction is becoming a growing problem in places like Austin and San Francisco. There seems to be a serious misunderstanding of the risk of ketamine addiction in the US and I worry about a generation of tech psychonauts having to wear nappies because their bladders don’t work.
‘He would call it medicine’
The public understanding of the risks of ketamine is not helped by folks like the comedian Reggie Watts, a relentless psychedelic booster. Watts has promoted psychedelics through the Joe Rogan podcast, the Netflix documentary Have a Good Trip, a partnerships with MAPS, and so on. ‘I encourage all of you guys to get a [ketamine] prescription’, he told the audience at one concert. Watts consistently downplays the risks of ketamine or other drugs. On Rainn Wilson’s podcast, when Wilson brought up Matthew Perry’s death, Watts insisted: ‘Whatever he died of, it wasn’t ketamine’. On the Psychedelics Today podcast Watts said: ‘My message is ‘reduce the fear’.…Certain drugs [like ketamine] are very safe…People have fear of going into chaos…but…in the right context going off the rails is awesome.’
I have no problem with a person doing whatever drugs they want, and I have friends who can throw extraordinary amounts of drugs into their system without any obvious negative effects. But if you are a prominent psychedelic evangelist you have a responsibility to be accurate about the risks, or you are going to build up some bad karma.
In Watts’ case, he apparently loved to introduce friends and girlfriends to his lifestyle og intense drug experimentation - he’s like the guy in the pub who insists on getting everyone shots, but with him its ketamine lozenges. He told Joe Moore a story about an LA party where he handed out lozenges to guests at someone else’s party, and no one disappointed him by refusing. Is that a bit risky? No, because he’s ‘very good at dosing’.
At one such party, he met Katherine McCollough and (she said) gave her ketamine. They started a whirlwind romance and - according to a new Rolling Stone article by Cheyenne Roundtree - McCollough was introduced to Watts’ LA party lifestyle and on various occasions they took LSD, MDMA, DMT, MMCs, cocaine, Ritalin, Adderall, ketamine, Xanax, Valium, and Modafinil. What began as a dream romance soon spun out of control.
