Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca

INTRODUCTION

What’s Happening in America?

This book offers the reader interviews with leading scientists in America who are investigating the effects on humans of the psychedelic medicines LSD, MDMA, psilocybin, and ayahuasca. Psychedelic Medicine is an expression of fifty years of my professional and personal interest in the medicinal and transformational benefits of psychedelics substances.

I received my first license to practice clinical psychology in 1966 while teaching psychology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. One evening a colleague invited me to his home where he offered me the opportunity to experience DMT (dimethyltriptamine). I took one puff of the normal appearing cigarette, immediately closed my eyes, lay back, and explored the very deepest core of my consciousness and the very borders of the universe.

I had a clear sense that within the infinite universes I was smaller than what I see while using an electron microscope. I experienced being and nothingness. The experience lasted about twelve minutes. I sat up and asked for another puff. Once again I embarked on inner-space travel. I became a dematerialized inner-space traveler transcending time. I soared through the universe in search of the Source. I had a clear sense that I was a part of, an expression of, the whole of it all. My journey had begun.

I began to research what science had to say about these medicines, and why the United States government declared them non grata to an extent that profoundly obstructed scientific research into them.

In the years following I had the good fortune to participate in experimental sessions with LSD, MDMA, mescaline, psilocybin, ketamine, and marijuana. These introspective experiences were exciting, educational, enhancing, frightening, spiritual, captivating, and healing.

Looking back at the past half century, and reading what the scientists in this book have brought us, it is abundantly clear that the American public has been denied access to medicines having potential to change the course of human history. For those of us who share the belief that within us all is innate wisdom, accessing the Deep Within is our life path. Many avenues to the Deep Within have been explored, including meditation, mindfulness, yoga, stimulus isolation tanks, anechoic chambers, monastic living, ingesting organic matter from the ground, and ingesting synthetic matter from laboratories.

America’s leading scientists in psychedelic research, interviewed in this book, bring data revealing that certain psychedelic medicines, administered by proper protocols, informed by research and clearly described, offer altered states of consciousness facilitating brilliant creativity and psychophysical healing. Witness the findings of deep healing led by Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins, Charles Grob at UCLA, Dave Nichols at Indiana University, and Michael Mithofer of MAPS. Witness also the creativity of astrophysicist Carl Sagan, Apple founder Steve Jobs, physicist Richard Feynman, DNA scientist Francis Crick, and neuroscientist John Lilly, all of whom utilized psychedelics in their professional work and discoveries.

Imagine taking a medicine that alters your mind and facilitates the generation of new thoughts and new ways of looking at the world.

Imagine taking a medicine that facilitates solving problems of life, be they personal or professional.

Imagine taking a medicine for the purpose of spiritual prophylaxis, the cleansing of the spirit that has been clogged up by life.

When we expand our consciousness we liberate ourselves from the slavery that is inherent in all cultural and institutional systems. The slavery derives from repetition of daily life until the behavior becomes institutionalized, thereby creating culture. Rigidified, institutionalized culture is the ultimate peer pressure, which stifles, dominates, and controls both creativity and consciousness expansion.

Once a person ingests a psychedelic medicine and experiences the Deep Within and expanded consciousness, there is no going back to narrow consciousness and constricted thinking. What has been seen cannot be unseen. Once we experience alternate realities we can never again say this is the only one reality. When we experience ourselves as electrochemical beings of light, as molecules stuck together taking material form, our lives take on new meaning.

Psychedelic medicine can facilitate our using the power of the mind to change our very genetic structure. We can change the slings and arrows of outrageous genetic misfortune into a Cupid’s bow of a sculpted self.

A Call for Transparency

April 3, 2012

Recently I was walking down a country road over at Wilbur Hot Springs in Colusa County, California, and I met a Danish couple—about twenty-five, twenty-six years old—and we began chatting. At one point they looked at me with the most innocent of eyes and said, What is happening to your country?

I looked around, and I said, What?

They said, What has happened to your country? We know that something bad is happening to your country, but we don’t understand it. Can you tell us about it?

The world seems to know that something has happened, and is happening, to our country. I’m sure you are aware of it. Or are you? It’s not an easy thing to grasp. Sometimes, when we see things happening to a country, or to our county or city, we might ask ourselves: Is this just me or am I the victim of some conspiratorial thinking? Is it just me and my little group of friends or is this actually happening? Well, it is actually happening. In this book, I’m going to expose part of what is happening—namely the long-term suppression of one kind of scientific information. Suppression of information is symptomatic.

Perhaps some of you who regularly listen to my radio program have asked yourselves why I’m doing this lengthy series on psychedelic medicines. My radio program is about mind, body, health, and politics. It’s about bringing you what I consider to be truth—meaning what’s really happening out there. What’s going on in the world of mind, body, health, and politics that the public is not being told about? That’s what I mean by truth—getting it all out there and being transparent. I believe in transparency. I believe we, the citizens, have a right to know everything—and I mean everything. I think secrets cause problems. They cause division among human beings, whereas transparency brings us together. We all want to be in the know. We don’t want to feel that we’re being excluded.

Information is power, and having more information can lead to having power over others, or having power to share with others. There has been suppression of information in our country for a long time. Our original Constitution was a landmark in the history of the world, but there’s a lot of work that needs to be done on it. And what’s new about that? Thomas Jefferson told us over two hundred years ago that the Constitution should be rewritten every twenty years, for every new generation, because otherwise it gets out of date. I’m not claiming to be saying anything new.

The area of psychedelic medicine has been suppressed from the public for so long and for so many reasons that we’re out of reasons. There are no good reasons for suppressing university research on medicine. There are just reasons. This lack of information is hurting people, because scientists are telling us that there is healing that can be achieved through the use of these medicines, and people are being denied this healing. At least if the information about the medicines were allowed to the public they would be able to make their own decisions. I ask myself: Why would the government suppress research? This is what I intend to explore.

What Determines Policy: Science or Ideology?

Former president Barack Obama told CNN medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta, MD, that our government’s health policy regarding marijuana should be directed by science and not ideology. This admonition by our learned former president is contrary to the prevailing reality of how our government functions and how laws are made.

Case in point: In 1930 Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon (of the Mellon banking family) appointed his relative Harry J. Anslinger to be commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Mr. Anslinger clearly favored religion and ideology over science. His ideology included a manic, obsessive hatred of people of color. As a result, for the past eighty-seven years the American people—and the world—have suffered from Mr. Anslinger’s racist ideology. Lives have been lost, families shattered, cities damaged, and entire governments such as Mexico’s have been threatened by Mr. Harry Anslinger’s successful creation of laws that enforced his ideology while ignoring science.

Anslinger, along with others, prosecuted the Chinese for using opium, the Mexicans for marijuana, and blacks for cocaine. Disinformation was spread that these minority people of color were using the drugs to seduce white women, and the public roared. By using the mass media as his forum (receiving much support from yellow journalism publisher William Randolph Hearst), Anslinger propelled the antimarijuana sentiment from state level to a national, and then international, movement. He used what he called his Gore Files—a collection of quotes from police reports—to graphically depict offenses caused by drug users.

By representing the United States before the United Nations, Harry Anslinger made certain substances illegal on a worldwide scale. Alcohol prohibition in the United States lasted thirteen years, during which time two issues became obvious. First, the American people were not going to be legislated out of drinking alcohol. Second, making alcohol illegal spawned a criminal enterprise that we call the mafia, whose gross revenue approached the nation’s entire (previously legal) alcoholic beverage industry. It’s hard to wrap your consciousness around that! Take every business in the United States that is involved with alcohol, from the production to the distribution to the sales—every bit of it: hard spirits, beer, and wine—and that is the amount of business that we gave to the criminal enterprise. It might not be a stretch to say that Harry Anslinger created the largest, most successful criminal enterprise the world has ever known. When Harry Anslinger waged a war on alcohol, and Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan subsequently declared a war on drugs, they were in fact declaring a war on people—mostly people of color. Eighty-seven years after Mr. Anslinger’s federal appointment and his creation of the marijuana tax laws of 1937, our jails are burdened with an ocean of people of color whose only crime was an act of ingesting a vegetable, marijuana, that comes from the ground.

While people of color make up about 30 percent of the United States’ population, they account for 60 percent of those imprisoned. The incarceration rates in America disproportionately impact men of color: 1 in every 15 African American men and 1 in every 36 Hispanic men are incarcerated in comparison to 1 in every 106 white men.

In recent decades, people around the United States have responded to this war against people by attempting to bring science into this ideological war. Pioneering groups such as the Drug Policy Alliance, National Organization to Reform Marijuana Law (NORML), the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), and the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) advance the cause of overturning drug laws driven by ideology.

When our forty-fourth American president, Barack Obama, called for the acceptance of science over ideology, we thought we saw the end of Harry Anslinger’s eighty-five-year rule. We were mistaken.

A Call to Freedom

Following Anslinger’s lead, most governments around the world have taken a strong position against the cause of personal freedom. By making certain substances illegal, even in the laboratory of science, they have curtailed basic rights and constitutional rights.

However, in recent years, the United States government has allowed a very limited amount of research into psychoactive substances. It is this political breakthrough that fueled many of the interviews provided in this book, which have been transcribed from my radio program Mind, Body, Health & Politics. My program is known for its wide-ranging discussions on political issues and health. The show’s format includes guest interviews, guest speakers, and listener call-ins, offering a forum and soundboard for listeners to interact with the hosts and their guests.

Within this platform, I have had the opportunity to interview leading scientists in the field of psychedelic research. Each of the scientists interviewed in this book has made monumental contributions to understanding human consciousness. Taken together, including the political climate in which they conducted their research, their work makes them heroic figures.

On the very frontiers of inner-space travel, these scientists have significantly impacted the philosophical and political cause of freedom. Freedom to explore oneself and to express one’s findings to anyone interested is one of the great causes of humanity.

The scientists interviewed in this book have dedicated their lives to doing their research within the law and presenting their findings to the world. It is reasonable to believe they risked their reputations, their convenience, and perhaps their lives.

It has been my great honor to interview each of them, and it is with much pleasure that I offer you their book.

ONE

LSD

A Powerful Tool

Substance: LSD-25 (lysergic acid diethylamide), also known as acid and LSD

Schedule: I*1

A Brief History of LSD

LSD—lysergic acid diethylamide—was first synthesized on November 16, 1938, by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann at Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland, as part of a large research program searching for medically useful ergot-alkaloid derivatives. LSD’s psychedelic properties were discovered five years later, when Hofmann himself accidentally ingested an unknown quantity of the chemical.

The first intentional ingestion of LSD occurred some years later in 1943, when Hofmann himself ingested 250 micrograms—yes, micrograms.†1 He said this would be a threshold dose based on the dosages of other ergot alkaloids. Well, Hofmann found the effects to be much stronger than he anticipated. After ingesting the LSD, Hofmann got on his bicycle to go home. This came to be known as one of the most famous bike rides in all of history.

Sandoz Laboratories introduced LSD as a psychiatric drug in 1947. Then, beginning in the 1950s, the United States Central Intelligence Agency began a research program code-named Project MKUltra. Experiments included administering LSD to CIA employees, military personnel, doctors, other government agents, prostitutes, mentally ill patients, and members of the general public. Some believe—in fact, many believe—they usually studied subjects’ reactions without the subjects’ knowledge.

The project was revealed in the U.S. Congressional Rockefeller Commission Report (on CIA activities in the United States) in 1975. In 1963, Sandoz’s patents expired. The same year, in 1963, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration classified LSD as an Investigational New Drug, which meant there were new restrictions on medical and scientific use. Several figures, including Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, and others, began to advocate the consumption of LSD, and it became central to the counterculture of the 1960s. Then, on October 24, 1968, possession of LSD was made illegal in the United States.

The last FDA-approved study of LSD in patients ended in 1980, while a study with healthy volunteers was made in the late ’80s. For the most part, research into LSD has been suppressed in this country. Why is that? By classifying LSD as a Schedule I substance, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) holds that LSD meets the following three criteria:

1) It is deemed to have a high potential for abuse.

2) It has no legitimate medical use and treatment.

3) There is a lack of accepted safety for its use under medical supervision.

Leading the Way

Four Pioneering Researchers on LSD

When it comes to LSD, there are four prominent scientists we will be talking with: David Nichols, PhD, an American pharmacologist and medicinal chemist; Amanda Feilding, Countess of Wemyss and March, an English artist, scientist, and drug-policy reformer; Stanislav Grof, MD, PhD, a Czech psychiatrist, one of the founders of the field of transpersonal psychology and a researcher into the use of nonordinary states of consciousness; and James Fadiman, PhD, an American psychologist, author, researcher, and lecturer in psychedelic studies.

A Seminar for the Like-minded

In the mid-1980s, the Esalen Institute held a special—by invitation only—seminar, inviting the very few scientists in the United States who were allowed by the U.S. government to conduct research on psychedelic medicines.

It was at this seminar that I first met Dave Nichols, PhD, a professor of medicinal chemistry and molecular pharmacology at Purdue University. Nichols is our country’s, if not the world’s, leading scientist on the subject of LSD. Mild-mannered and straightforward, with no agenda other than pure science, he was the perfect person to conduct research on a topic that garnered so much controversy. Being one of the only—if not the only—scientists allowed to research LSD, a great deal of weight has been on Nichols’s shoulders. Here, we shall find out some of what he has to report.

The Biochemistry of Changes in Consciousness

David Nichols, PhD

November 15, 2011

DAVID NICHOLS, PHD, holds the Robert C. and Charlotte P. Anderson distinguished chair in pharmacology at Purdue University College of Pharmacy. He is also a distinguished professor of medicinal chemistry and molecular pharmacology and is an adjunct professor of pharmacology and toxicology at the Indiana University School of Medicine. Dave has published nearly three hundred scientific articles and is recognized as one of the world’s foremost authorities on the chemistry and pharmacology of psychedelics.

Learning from the Past, Working in the Present

Early Research Cut Short by DEA Scheduling

Dr. Richard Louis Miller (RLM): Welcome to Mind, Body, Health & Politics, Dave.

David Nichols, PhD (DN): Good morning.

RLM: The DEA holds that LSD meets the criteria for Schedule I substances, that is, it is deemed to have a high potential for abuse, has no legitimate medical use and treatment, and there is a lack of accepted safety for its use under medical supervision. What does your research have to say?

DN: To begin with, the DEA’s definition of high potential for abuse really means that people will take it without a prescription. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it has the possibility of getting people addicted. On the safety issue, LSD has never killed anyone directly from overdose. It’s a fairly benign substance from a physiological point of view. Now, that doesn’t mean that it can’t lead to psychological problems, but from a physiological point of view it’s pretty safe. Also, lack of medical uses were really never documented. The research was nipped in the bud.

LSD’s Mark on the Field of Behavioral Psychology

DN: There was a lot of enthusiasm when LSD sprang on the scene in the early 1950s. In fact, it catalyzed a lot of neuroscience research. The selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors [SSRIs] we use now for treating depression probably wouldn’t have arrived as quickly as they did if LSD hadn’t been discovered. Because of the profound effects of LSD on the human psyche, it really was the first point at which neuroscientists realized that there was a connection between brain chemistry and behavior. Prior to that time, if a child became schizophrenic, they would blame the parents or the mother, figuring the parents failed or that breastfeeding had failed.

There was no recognition that brain chemistry had anything to do with behavior. That seems kind of amazing today, but that actually was the situation. It was only within a few years of the discovery of LSD that serotonin was discovered in the brain. Looking at those two structures, researchers realized LSD actually has the same kind of chemical template as serotonin, and serotonin was in the brain, and LSD produces these dramatic behavioral changes—so they realized maybe there is some relationship between brain serotonin and behavior.

Early LSD Research: A Scattershot Approach with Promising Prospects

DN: With all of the enthusiasm and excitement, they tried LSD in almost any imaginable condition: for autism . . . alcoholism . . . sexual dysfunction. You name it, they tried it—to see what it could do. It was usually given by poorly trained therapists, or lay therapists, or self-proclaimed therapists, because you could get the drug easily.

There were thousands of papers published on the uses of LSD, but they weren’t done to rigorous standards. So we don’t really know what can be done. There certainly were tantalizing hints that LSD might be useful in treating alcoholism or substance abuse. One of the best-documented uses was for treating anxiety and depression in terminal cancer patients. Between 60 and 70 percent had alleviation of symptoms and, in some cases, a reduction in need for pain medication. Under proper medical supervision, the safety of LSD was not really an issue. When used in a proper and appropriate medical context, the incidence of adverse effects is very small.

How University Research Is Suppressed

Lack of Funding and Champions for the Cause

RLM: Why is the research still so limited among serious university researchers like yourself?

DN: Research is driven by funding mechanisms. For almost thirty years, I was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse [NIDA] to study hallucinogens, or psychedelics. My research is fundamentally focused on how they work in the brain. How do they produce their effects? When there is widespread use in the population, NIDA says we should throw some money at it. So for cocaine, MDMA, and new synthetic cannabinoids like Spice, they say, We need to look at that. So they put money there. People were not using hallucinogens to that great of an extent. That’s part of it. Also, government agencies are driven by in-house programs that study marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, and so forth—all the substances that are serious problems in their view—so that’s where they put the money. Hallucinogens are not really something they’re that concerned with.

Since these substances became controlled, and especially Schedule I, you have to receive a special license to study them. You have to say exactly how you’re going to use LSD, how much you’re going to use, and how long you’re going to use it. That all has to be approved by the DEA, and I believe they now even include the FDA in requiring approval. The approval process can take anywhere from six months to two years, and then you have to have a