I came across a video this weekend of an event in 1990, presented by Rick Doblin, and featuring Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Laura Huxley and Terence McKenna, discussing psychedelics, freedom and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
What a line-up!
It struck me that, with all respect to the many very smart and interesting people in the movement today, Doblin is the only figure in the present psychedelic renaissance of the historical stature of these other psychonauts - he’s the last of the free-wheeling charismatics, as psychedelics become professonionalized, safer and, no doubt, more boring.
As sociologist Nicholas Langlitz has put it, the psychedelic movement is passing from its Dionysian charismatic stage to a more bureaucratic stage, as these substances become embedded in the healthcare system. That means more safeguards, more data-tracking, more rules, and less of the wild, free, dangerous and creative Dionysiac experimentation that characterized the underground of the 60s-2000s.
That shift is necessary and inevitable as psychedelics become part of mainstream healthcare. Patients need controlled spaces to lose control. As part of that, lesser figures criticize the past and underground practices, and sometimes criticize MAPS culture, which I think it’s fair to say has sometimes had one foot in the underground.
That’s just how it is, it’s part of the historical shift from the charismatic to the bureaucratic. And maybe that feels like historically-insignificant figures criticizing the Great Man who has pulled the movement this far - like the tiny Lilliputtians trying to tie down Gulliver.
As a safety advocate I am one of those Lilliputtians, tiny figures of no historical importance ourselves, just part of an inevitable historical process of bureaucratization, making psychedelics more safe, boring and normal. But as a historian of ecstatic experiences, I feel a lot of respect for Rick Doblin for what he achieved over the last 40 years. The psychedelic renaissance wouldn’t have happened without him. He is truly indefatigable - next month he’s giving a talk in Antarctica!
While digging around in the vaults of YouTube, I also came across a fascinating video of Timothy Leary from the 1980s. Psychonauts often blame the war on drugs on Nixon’s racism. But Nixon’s crackdown on psychedelics, in particular, was more likely provoked by one man - TV presenter Art Linklater - whose daughter jumped from a balcony and died in 1969. Linklater blamed her suicide on LSD, although an autopsy found none in her bloodstream. He then suggested she had become destabilized taking it some months before. Linklater was a friend of President Nixon’s, and he visited the White House two weeks after his daughter’s death and gave an impassioned talk on the dangers of psychedelics.
Check out this extraordinary piece of TV, where Linklater confronts Leary a decade later, and says he would like to see him hung! Leary literally tries to escape the TV studio.
We’ve come a long way…People are still harmed by psychedelics sometimes, as well as often helped, but we’re trying to learn about the harms, how to minimize them and help people recover, rather than slamming the door on research and treatment.
After the paywall, Tucker Carlson on Nick Land and John Lilly; Larry Ellison and the One Database to Rule Them All; TikTok and Israel; DMT and stroke victims; The Spectator comes out in support of MDMA; and a new Story of Recovery.
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