Psychedelics and the New Future
In 1999 my brother Dan was a hero to a particular set of heroin and crack addicts who were trying to escape from their crumbling lives. They were jumping at the chance of a fresh start, the promise of a withdrawal-free recovery from their dependencies, one that Dan had offered them as a genuine, if unusual option. Dan had no training in drug rehabilitation, he had no past experience as an addict, in fact he had never shown any indication that this was a path he was even interested in, and yet here he was receiving dozens of calls from traumatized addicts around the world — and helping them. How did this happen?
Ten years earlier, on a hazy night in the corner of a lush garden in Jo’burg suburbia, the house lights off, Dan stood in front of me and my sister Kim, gazing down at his younger siblings. Brave siblings, too — Dan was notorious for his wild adventures into the unknown. We had been reared on and lurched along his brilliant impulses that flashed brightly and hazardously throughout our youth. That we had survived thus far was a testament only to Divine Will and lucky parenting. This time, however, something was different. After a year in the Amazon, Dan had returned to South Africa a changed man. His large blue eyes shone with a greater intensity than we had seen before, signaling for us yet again to brace ourselves — this was either going to be a hell of a lot of fun, extremely dangerous, or life changing.
Kim and I were seated on a blanket, our backs against a broad tree trunk, gazing back up at our elder brother, unable to move. This time it wasn’t Dan’s charisma captivating us. This time it was the potion he had given us to drink an hour earlier. He held in his hand a weathered Kiaat walking stick, gently motioning with it as he shared in whispered tones the wisdom of his Amazonian teacher and shaman, Don Augustin Rivas. It was 1989, I was 18, in my final year of high school, Kim was twenty and Dan, at 22, had stepped out of time and was guiding us down a path into the greatest unknown we had never known.
That was my first and last Ayahuasca journey. Everything changed. My eyes were opened to the veils and layers that underwrote phenomena, and I was struck into a deep and abiding state of awe. It was a spectacle of revelations, and it seared through my understanding of the world, shaping the relationship both to my brother and to my own path ahead. I never took Ayahuasca again simply because I was convinced, and remain so, that it would take a lifetime to wholly grasp all that I experienced that night. As Dan phrased it for us at the time, this was sacred plant medicine.
The decade that followed saw Dan focus all of his energy into the study of entheogens and medicinal psychedelics. This included him crafting a degree in botany and anthropology at the University of Cape Town, which culminated in an ethnobotanical thesis on the medicinal properties of the Fynbos biome. His explorations were not only academic. He augmented his studies through intrepid psychonautical sojourns that took him around the world, including several initiations into the desert, mountain and rainforest shamanic traditions of the Americas and Central Africa.
In the late 90’s Dan ventured to the jungles of Gabon to learn more about Tabernanthe iboga, the psychotropic shrub endemic to the region. It was the heart of the Bwiti tradition, and as custodians of the plant the Bwiti facilitated Dan’s iboga initiation, a 5-day ‘dieta’ in which, as Dan shared, he experienced a total dissolution and then gradual reassembly of his identity, serving as a prodigious internal shift. Dan understood that a neurological reset of that depth, with the commensurate emotional and psychological benefits, could provide personal healing and trauma recovery at an order of magnitude he never imagined possible.
While his explorations included psilocybin (which he generously shared with his siblings), San Pedro (that too), mescaline and other lesser known but occasionally lethal psychoactive plants, Dan’s connection to iboga and the gifts it carried became his primary cause. As is now well accepted in the medicinal psychedelic community, iboga’s unique dissociative characteristic as viewed by the West is the ability to provide a several week window of total release, sans withdrawal symptoms, for even the most hardened opioid addicts. A period of such liberation, especially when coupled with the individual’s commitment to free themselves from their dependence, is effectively a gift from the gods. Dan had presented himself to help facilitate this lifeline, but he elected to do so with a somewhat anthropological approach to set and setting — if you hoped to go clean with him as your guide, meet him in Libreville and from there he would take you into the rainforest to meet the Bwiti, an arduous journey for even the most seasoned adventurer. Once settled, you would go through an initiation yourself. He held deeply that the cultural, botanical and physiological context for imbibing the plant was elemental to the experience.
Later that year, when invited to present his findings at an Ibogaine conference at NYU, his lecture was titled ‘Technology transfer and Tabernanthe iboga treatments: the application of relevant traditional Bwiti techniques to a Western medical setting.’ Dan acknowledged that the pharmacological compounds will obviously work in the form of a pharmaceutical derivative, but aspects like the location in which the plant appears and spiritual tradition within which it is imbibed, plays a profound role for the whole human being having the experience. In short: it’s not just the chemicals.
***
On the 2nd of August, 2000, I was seated alone in a domed apartment of friends in the ancient town of Safed, the Upper Galilee, Israel. Staring at the landline phone that I had just let drop from my hand, I was enveloped by a humming that vibrated and shimmered off the arched walls. Clearly in a state of shock, my uncle had left a message for my friends instructing them to have me call home. Without thinking who might hear the message, in his distress he had simply said “have Guy phone his mother as soon as possible, his brother Dan was killed in a car accident.”
A river swelled up and around me and I was swept along… friends gathered, a sleepless night, my mother’s voice “come home”, a car ride to Jerusalem, more people, tears, ushered onto a plane, Jo’burg, the funeral, hundreds gathered, the seismic loss. Dan’s accident had happened on a starlit night deep in the South African Karoo on the outskirts of Graaff-Reinet, while he had slept in the back seat of his car, a young woman at the wheel. It was his 33rd birthday.
And then came the calls. Somehow, Dan’s iboga clients had been given my number. First it was the voice from San Francisco, shaken, distressed, “Hey man, you’re Dan’s brother? I’m so sorry about his death! That’s crazy man! Listen, can you help me out? I’m booked for Gabon and I’m so ready — how do we do this?”
Amsterdam, New York, Berlin, other calls came through, the same tone, the message on a bizarre repeat, accents blending into one simple appeal; “Who now will take us to meet the Bwiti?”
The reality was that Dan’s efforts had born fruit. These trips were clearly working and word of them had spread within the network of addicts who were seeking a way off their dependencies. Dan was getting bookings, and I was unexpectedly and abruptly on the receiving end of a great wave of need. There was, of course, no way I could help them.
Two decades have passed since Dan died, and in the interim interest in both medical psychedelics and indigenous wisdom has grown exponentially. Back in 1989 my high school buddies were quick to pick up that I had had a *weird weekend*, but I doubt there were more than a handful of people in South Africa who had heard the term ‘Ayahuasca’. Now, with Burning Man and the who’s who of California’s Silicon Valley descending upon Peru’s Sacred Valley in their private jets, all to gain accelerated access to the holy of holies in the form of psychoactive vision-inducing entheogens, the adage of trend following counterculture is in full force. The question has to be asked — is this a good thing?
In a way that emulates the mycelial network, with mushrooms flourishing at the slightest sign of a receptive environment, the psychedelic community has proliferated into a vast and diverse ecosystem, and it is global. With multiple subsets; promoters, detractors, academics, prospectors, traditionalists, visionaries, saints, wholesalers and retailers, this is clearly a broad church.
Stepping up to the pulpit is the newly formed Psychedelitech Inc, or PsyTech. This platform was spawned from the successful CannaTech, the international conference series that has formed the knowledge base and complex for the global medical cannabis industry. I’ve attended several CannaTech events in the past and was impressed by how they managed to gather a multitude of views and offerings under one roof. Like what CannaTech has done for medical cannabis, PsyTech’s vision is to establish the premier platform that brings therapists, academia, research and activist NGO’s, pharma and industry together to hash out a common goal for the future of medical psychedelics. It’s not a simple conversation, but one that definitely needs to happen.
On the 22nd of April, PsyTech held its maiden webinar, replacing a physical conference that was meant to take place a month earlier, but like everything else during this pandemic, the Coronavirus had forced us all online. Titled “Mainstreaming Psychedelics: Are We Ready?” the panel included three leading lights in the space. Dr Rosalind Watts, clinical lead of the Psilocybin for Depression study at the highly respected Imperial College London; Rick Doblin, one of the doyens of the movement who founded the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) back in 1986; and Christian Angermeyer of ATAI Life Sciences, an avowed psychedelic capitalist with the capital to prove it. The panel was moderated by the charismatic Dr Mark Braunstein, who presents under the epithet ‘The Cannabis Psychiatrist’.
Topics ranged from legislation and policy, public perception and promotion, for profit versus nonprofit, dosage and recommended therapeutic regimes. Interestingly, the dose issue for me was poignant, considering my experience with Ayahuasca. Dr Watts and Doblin debated on either two or three sessions, including 40 hours of integration therapy, which shows how relatively prudent the therapeutic approach is. There was even nuanced discussion regarding beneficial blends that only the most experienced would understand, such as including a curative for an intense psilocybin experience; a small dose of MDMA to lift the spirits.
Now, granted, this was not the first time I had considered the various sides of the debate regarding how psychedelics should enter mainstream society — providing insight, clarity and wisdom for the benefit of humanity and, ultimately, all the species we share this planet with — it was just the first time the conversation was happening outside of my head. These voices brought expertise, experience and authority to the debate, and I was astonished by a variety of counterpoint positions that I had never considered.
Conversations followed the webinar, one of them with Moshe Tov Kreps, an angel investor and financier behind PsyTech, who happens to be an old friend. In this exchange, I shared Dan’s locus regarding set and setting and what I had always considered his laudable approach to honouring the tradition, the wisdom keepers of the tribal community, and the rainforest itself, home of the plant. Kreps explained that while that position certainly had merit back in the 80’s and 90’s, as popularity grew over the last two decades and demand for psychedelic experiences blew up, the typical collateral damage that comes with any sudden influx of tourism, even of the most conscious sort, has had its impacts, many of them negative, on the indigenous communities and environments where these sacred plants were found.
This element underscores a perennial issue regarding how those in the psychedelic industry will navigate mainstreaming the gifts that these psychoactive species present to us in the West. These sacred plants have blessed indigenous societies for millennia. How do we find the equivalent derivative to, say, replace the current anti-depressants pumped out by big pharma with psilocybin compounds that will ultimately have the same effect, but will be healthier for the mind and body, without creating a dependency? And how do we do this without exploiting the native environments and people from where these plants propagate in their natural setting? More than that — how do we take it beyond simply ‘not’ exploiting… how do we integrate the appropriate care, the acknowledgement, the deep respect, into the process from their sacred seed to the illumination of our minds, the healing of our traumas? These are not to be mistaken as side issues. We are called upon to bring them front and centre and be present to the opportunities that lie ahead. As if reading the psychedeliscape, an activist group formulated the North Star Ethics Pledge to address this issue. It’s not binding, but it presents a clear line that highlights the motive and intent that the industry players need to reflect on.
There are now tens of millions of people around the world who have awakened to the extraordinary gifts that psychedelics bring. Potentially hundreds of millions more will in the next decade be lining up to receive the amrit, the elixir, the wisdom that they are clearly here to provide. Unlike anything before in our diet, these plants present us with the greatest opportunity: our ability to experience the world as we should, as a living being to which we are inextricably connected. Perhaps that is exactly why these plants are drawing us toward them — yet another appeal from nature to have the most dominant species on the planet grasp, possibly for the last chance, how to live on this Earth.
If psychedelics are to become the next big market, towards which many signs are pointing, then let’s make sure that this time it’s done with sacred reciprocity, with balance, and with our eyes wide open.
If you want to have your say on the matter, the next PsyTech webinar will be held May 6th, 13.00 EST — Put your Money where your Mind is: The Psychedelic Investment Landscape
