“You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying?
We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did.”
~ John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon
The Threat to The American Way:
During the 60s and early 70s, thousands of Americans were suffering due to the tens of thousands of young Americans dying in the Vietnam War. The war was justified by the idea of stopping the spread of communism.
The justification for the countless American, Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian people dying was the world will be a better place if The American Way won.
But is that true?
Domestically, the Civil Rights Movement was forcing Americans to face the reality of their country’s human rights violations against black people since the country’s inception. The Gay Liberation movement and Second Wave Feminism were also exposing American Culture for treating women and queer people like second-class citizens.
Americans across the country were questioning the moral right of America to spread our values around the world; when so many Americans domestically were suffering.
How could America bomb countries across the world in the name of freedom when so many Americans at home never felt?
The American Way was engaged in an identity-defining fight not just in Vietnam but on American soil. The country was consumed with protests, riots, intellectual critiques, and for many at the top of the hierarchy the ever-looming fear of the loss of power.
The Rise of the Counterculture:
Emerging from universities across America; a culture of young people and professors decided that it was time to rethink The American Way. These young people were uninterested in traveling across the ocean to kill Vietnamese people, hating black people and queer people for existing, and viewing women as second-class citizens.
They became known as the Counterculture, many of whom were members of The Anti-war movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the Gay Liberation movement, and Second Wave Feminism. Obviously, this group ran in-direct confrontation with the dominant American culture.
The thing that made the Counterculture different from other social activism was the importance of drugs, in specific, psychedelics in this movement. Many claimed that psychedelics were the inspiration for the philosophical change in American politics and culture.
The Start of our Conversation:
Before diving any further into the history of psychedelics in the United States, I want to address whether there was some foundation to the Counterculture's claims of psychedelics' mind-altering power.
Is there any science or research behind the claim that psychedelics can make people less nationalist, racist, or homophobic?
Or were these people already more progressive than the rest of America and psychedelic usage was just a community bonding event that brought them together with other progressives?
Throughout the rest of this paper, I want to speak on my experiences with psychedelics, an anecdote of a former white supremacist's testimony, and look at some of the research done on psychedelics. T
hen return to why psychedelics were such a threat to America.
My Spiritual Experience of LSD:
I was people-watching at a Minneapolis queer club, infamously known for its attendees’ usage of psychedelics. Wanting the full experience, I did a dose of LSD and mentally prepared myself for a crazy night.
What I wasn’t ready for was the beautiful community and lack of individuality.
Race, religion, sexuality, gender identity, and body size, none of these seemed to matter to the people there. Everyone was dancing together in what resembled a supernatural religious experience.
At first, I joined the group with my friends. Soon strangers came in and joined our group. One by one a new person would join and a friend was lost in the crowd.
I found myself in a pool of people that I had never met before; gay people, trans, immigrants, and different races; the only thing we had in common was we were having fun and felt connected together. Even though they were strangers, I felt comfortable and connected to them.
There was a shared oneness that broke through the barriers of individualized ego. This interconnective experience made me forget where I ended and the next person began. My individualized identity soon melted away into the collective human experience with all the people surrounding me.
This experience of loss of individuality isn’t unique to me. A 2020 study by Matthias Forstmann and colleagues wrote:
“recent use of psychedelic substances in a naturalistic setting is associated with experiences of personal transformation, a sense of altered moral values, increased feelings of social connectedness, and a more positive mood.”
Psychedelics Cures Hate:
Arno Michaelis, a former Neo-Nazi, and white supremacist spoke on how psychedelics turned him away from racism in his book, The Gift of Our Wounds: A Sikh and a Former White Supremacist Find Forgiveness After Hate.
Arno was invited to a house party with a diverse group of college students in the 90s; during that time he was in question internally over his involvement with the local Neo-Nazi group. During the party, Arno consumed psychedelics.
He speaks on how during the trip he became embarrassed about how stupid his racist views were and became ashamed of his neo-nazi tattoos. He forgot the ideologies that cause him divisiveness from others and then broke down in shame for all the suffering he caused.
The psychedelic trip was a life-changing moment for him. The experience caused him to denounce racism and white supremacy and commit his life to reforming others who fell down a similar path as himself.
Arno was impacted by feelings of social connectedness and altered moral values that are associated with psychedelics.
The Feelings of Oneness
Psychedelics are theorized to achieve this by reducing activity in areas of the brain known to be critical for accurate self-processing. Dulling this area in the brain blurs the lines between ourselves and the external world causing feelings of oceanic boundlessness or oneness; with others during and after the psychedelic state.
A participant in an experiment by Dr. Rollan Griffiths described their experience on psychedelics as:
“experienced a feeling of no boundaries where I didn’t know where I ended and where my surroundings began… Somehow I was able to comprehend oneness”
That feeling of oneness is essential in melting away the arbitrary differences that separated our personal selves from others. This oceanic boundless allows you to forget about divisive moralistic measures such as race, religion, nationality, gender, and sexual orientation.
Creating a feeling of collective human experience that supersedes all those previous divisive identities. This is how psychedelics alter the moral values of those who use them.
Once you have a feeling of interconnection with a queer person, how can you still be homophobic?
Once you have experienced the same oceanic boundless feeling with someone of a different race, how can you still feel that race divides?
Once you felt bound to the greater human collective consciousness, why would national identity matter?
How Psychedelics Run in Conflict with Power Structures.
Scientific America wrote about how our brains evolved to make split-second judgments of others as friends or foes and the benefits that provided to our ancestors. This in-group/ out-group response is still hardwired into our neural system and as stated before is the biological foundation for things like nationalism, racism, and other forms of “othering”.
While the urge to fall into group identity has biological roots; in many ways, it is as much social. Who we decide is a part of our group and who is a part of “the others” are determined by the society and culture that we are born into.
Who we accept or push away can be taught and changed throughout our lifetime. Therefore someone can unlearn their nationalism, racism, and homophobia through many years of purposely opening themselves to new ideas and morals.
Many of these same benefits can be reaped through a couple of experiences with psychedelics. Psychedelics allows the brain to be more receptive to new ideas and concepts.
Parker Singleton, a doctorate student at Cornell University, stated in her study of psychedelics:
“Normally, our thoughts and incoming information are filtered by our prior experience, But if you take that filtering and suppression away, you are looking at the world with new eyes. You get a totally new perspective.”
Openness to new ideas is dangerous to established cultural norms, traditions, and power structures. People start asking themselves questions like:
“ Why do I hate this group of people that hasn’t done anything to me” or “Maybe my country isn’t the good guy in this war”.
Hence why it was a threat to the power structures in the United States in the 60s and 70s.
The Villianization of Psychedelics:
My opening quote is John Ehrlichman, President Nixon’s Advisor, admitting on the government's lies to the public that created the War on Drugs.
The Nixon Administration and later the Reagan, Bush Sr. Clinton, Bush, and Bush Jr. administrations all knew that cannabis was used to villainize racial minorities, queer people, and hippies during the 60s and 70s and was hardly a dangerous drug.
Especially when comparing the dangers of cannabis to drugs like alcohol., nicotine or pharmaceuticals. The name marijuana itself was used instead of cannabis to make the drug sound Mexican and to play on anti-immigration sentiments.
Psychedelics represented a completely different threat altogether than weed and harmless drugs. Psychadelic directly threatened The American Way and the traditions and morals that came with it.
Just like marijuana; the American government and culture found ways to villainize psychedelics out of their fear of what it can do to the dominant society. Moral panic and fear-mongering of psychedelics were spread across the country without any founding in research or empirical data.
The New Jersey Narcotic Drug Commission claimed that psychedelics were more dangerous than the Vietnam War. The FDA claimed✎ EditSign psychedelics were as dangerous as heroin. We’re all familiar with the fear-mongering ads and campaigns about what psychedelics do to our minds. Between 1966–68 targeted campaigns tied psychedelics users to criminals and other morally deviant behaviors.
Of course, none of this was based on any type of empirical data:
In the Global Commission on Drug Policy report, psychedelics, specifically LSD and psilocybin (magic mushrooms) were deemed mostly benign and users have a statically non-existent threat to others while using the drugs.
Frontiers in Psychiatry released a report finding that psychedelics are safer than cannabis, nicotine, and far safer than alcohol. Ironically alcohol, which is easily available for consumption, is rated closer to heroin and crack for it’s possible danger to one self and others than it did to any previously mentioned drug.
But again the laws on psychedelics were never to protect American citizens from psychedelics. The laws were designed to protect American norms and traditions from psychedelics.
Ending this Trip:
As the studies I cited early stated, psychedelics literally change the way their users approached politics and morality. Users of psychedelics become more attached to the universality of humanness and less attached to their specific national, sexual, gender, and racial identities.
After using psychedelics it then becomes really tough to convince these people to kill Vietnamese or Iraqi people. If you feel oneness with humans and the universe as a whole; it becomes really hard to make you hate gay people, trans people, or any other demographic that America has mistreated over its history of injustices.
Internally, the way psychedelics alter the own users' experience about the self; the user themselves are less likely to adhere to cultural norms. After trips; users claim to have a better grasp on personal identity.
Meaning after doing a trip; users are probably less likely to pretend to be straight if they’re queer, pretend to want monogamy if they’re really not into to loving one person, try convincing someone to go to war when they feel oneness with people around the world or want to work 40 hours a week at their job when they’ll rather be painting.
Hopefully, by now you see the danger that has on hegemonic power structures.
How does heteronormativity holds its institutional grasp when people are ok with being queer and have sexually fluid identities?
How do “family values” work when you’re allowed to love more than one person at once?
What happens to capitalism and the military when people come down from a trip and stop feeling they have a moral responsibility to go through life doing as their told?
That’s why psychedelics are illegal and that’s why we need to restart the conversations around it.
To end the conversation here is a quote from Frankfurt philosopher Herbert Marcuse that speaks on the true danger that psychedelics hold on society. Marcuse tells us that the inner revolution that psychadelics cause starts an external revolution for a better world and that is the true reason why those in power are scared of them.
Herbert Marcuse in An Essay on Liberation:
Today’s rebels want to see, hear, feel new things in a new way: they link liberation with the dissolution of ordinary and orderly perception. The “trip” involves the dissolution of the ego shaped by the established society — an artificial and short-lived dissolution. But the artificial and “private” liberation anticipates, in a distorted manner, an exigency of the social liberation: the revolution must be at the same time a revolution in perception which will accompany the material and intellectual reconstruction of society, creating the new aesthetic environment.
