High Definition
An conversation about psychedelics, politics and policy
This piece was originally published in Buffalo №11 .
It seems psychedelic drugs are having a moment. Historically the stuff of successive subcultures, psychedelics have typically figured in the popular imagination through a surreal smorgasbord of signifiers; bell-bottoms, flower power, Day-Glo, field raves, hippies, tie-dyed trippers, Bez, nudists, Martin Sharp album covers, free love, Hendrix humping his white Stratocaster through the world’s longest national anthem.
The drugs’ long history of association with creatives living on the edge is hard to shake. Hunter S. Thompson’s mescaline-fuelled madness looms large over counter-culture, as does existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s much-chronicled, crab-infested bad trip. To indulge in psychedelics could mean opening the doors to blissful hallucination, wondrous disembodiment and potential insanity. They weren’t legal or easy to obtain — and they definitely weren’t for everyone.
That perception is changing — and quickly. Currently in vogue but perennially in-season, psychedelics have become increasingly accessible and acceptable. Right now, it’s possible to source LSD or 2CB on the dark web, sign up for psilocybin tours in The Netherlands, join the waitlist for high-end ayahuasca retreats or even volunteer for a clinical trials on the undiscovered benefits of MDMA. You could say these mind-bending substances have graduated from direct message to a group chat. Every day, someone new is joining the conversation.
It would be prudent to imagine popular culture as responsible for this renaissance. After all, psychedelia, the artistic younger cousin of those steeped in the psychedelic scene, is popping up everywhere from the music of Tame Impala to the Gucci suits of Harry Styles. Combine this with a booming bourgeois wellness scene that’s currently obsessed with micro-dosing and it seems to line up.
But the real boon for reality-shifting tabs, pills, powders and mushrooms comes from somewhere decidedly more academic. Somewhat ironically for a set of scheduled substances still outlawed in many Western democracies, it’s government-sanctioned science that’s redefining the role of psychedelics for the post-Brexit generation.
Last year saw the world’s first Psychedelic Research Centre open at The Imperial College of London, already famous for a clinical trial that investigated the use of psilocybin — aka magic mushrooms — to treat depression. Across the pond, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), has completed highly publicised and totally shareable studies on the therapeutic uses of MDMA for PTSD and LSD for anxiety. Throw journalist-evangelists like Michael Pollan and Tim Ferriss into the mix and you’ve got one serious cocktail.
So what’s the future of psychedelics? Are they a fashionable phase or here to stay? To find out, JONATHAN SEIDLER talked to two expert voyagers that have taken more trips than most.
MIKE JAY is widely considered to be one of the UK’s leading researchers and authors on psychedelics. Having experimented with acid and mushrooms in the decidedly un-hippie post-punk era, Jay became intrigued with the universes surrounding these drugs and has made them the focus of multiple articles, essays and books, including a recent history of mescaline. He’s also curated exhibitions on psychedelics for The Wellcome Collection and Bethlem Museum.
STEPHEN REID, a multidisciplinary scientist and thinker, co-founded the Psychedelic Society in Hoxton. After his first MDMA experience at Glastonbury in 2011, he’s been involved in spreading the gospel of these substances through environmental and political activism. Reid also runs monthly experience retreats, where curious newcomers try psilocybin-containing truffle in the Netherlands.
JS: Let’s start with the good stuff. How did you get into this? Was it through a drug experience?
SR: I think it only really takes one strong positive and positive drug experience to start questioning the possibility that everyone everything one has been taught about psychoactive substances and plants at school and through mainstream society and culture is nonsense.
I had what was my first mystical spiritual type experience, I suppose. Feeling this like a sense of unity and interconnectedness, a sense of cosmic connection with the stars, clear and Starry Night. It just totally blew me away and from that moment I became especially fascinated with with psychedelic substances. I got to reading a lot more, but I wasn’t very technologically literate. I quickly became aware I could get hold of basically anything I wanted through dark net.
MJ: My first experience was sort of acid and mushrooms, in what was with hindsight, you know, not a very psychedelic period. It was that sort of post-punk period, after all that sort of 60s hippie shit had kind of got really boring, what kind of before rave culture started .
I was like an early adopter on the internet. I was on early newsgroups and stuff in the early ’90s. And I started writing bits of stuff about drugs and internet culture before everyone else was. It’s kind of hard to remember now that there was a sort of public news blackout about drugs. There wasn’t anything that wasn’t anti drug propaganda.
What interests me about what you both said is that people often associate psychedelics with a certain culture, but they probably don’t think about the Internet as one of them.
SR: I think in recent times has been a very significant shift. Formerly it was people that either had the expertise in growing food, (thinking about mushrooms in particular) or chemistry, or linking to people with those skills that have access to psychedelic plants and substances.
Whereas more recently with the advent of the dark net, and I’m sure there were like, ways of obtaining these substances through the internet.
I didn’t know how to grow mushrooms. I didn’t know LSD chemistry, I wasn’t doing that side of things myself, nor did I know anyone directly that had those skills. But because I was very comfortable with, cryptography and Tor and this kind of stuff, then I was then able to obtain substances on it.
MJ: Yeah, I think psychedelic culture was kind of like an internet before the internet, you know, back in the ’90s. There was a huge kind of zine culture, building on the whole free festival culture before that. And I think that’s why as soon as the message boards and newsgroups got going, drugs was one of the first subjects to be colonized. There was a ready made subculture who developed their own kind of analog ways of corresponding who jumped onto the digital world.
So I think it’s been part of that from the beginning, but I totally agree with Stephen and I think the dark web has been a real game changer. Until then, psychedelics were a bit random and the choice was limited. I think it was always a bit of a fantasy, like the coffee shop, having everything that you could possibly want available to order. And that has now happened! So I think drug culture responds to changes in supply, as well as changes in demand. The dark web is a whole new world and takes it to a whole new level.
SR: I can see how psychedelics were available to certain types of people within a certain subculture. In my case I can I was well outside of that subculture, but because I had those technological skills I was able to plug into it, as thousands of others have done across the world.
Have drugs become more democratic, then?
MJ: It’s an interesting lens. Looking at the festival, for example, that’s a place where a huge number of people who are no longer part of that subculture can become part of it for one or two long weekends over the summer. The culture has mostly moved online, but it also still has physical nexuses.
Unless society does undergo a profound shift, particularly in regards to our relationship to the natural world over the next decade (or even sooner) civilization as we know it is not going to be able to continue — Stephen Reid
Mike, you mentioned once that psychedelics are always sexy, but it seems like there’s more articles and scientific studies around them than ever.
MJ: There’s been a huge shift in mainstream culture. For a very long time, psychedelics were only ever talked about as a problem. The associations were with nervous breakdowns and psychosis and mental illness. We’ve now changed, for many different reasons to a mainstream culture in which they’re not in that box anymore. They’re in the box that’s all about wellness and self actualization, and all these other things that we’re talking about.
This has definitely set up a kind of virtuous circle, if you like. Lots of people who were only hearing negative news about psychedelics are now hearing lots of positive news. And that’s encouraging them to take psychedelics, which because of the dark web are much easier to get hold of. Those people have positive experiences and they tell other people about them and so it spread. And I think that’s been the story of the last decade.
SR: I think what was leading it is science, the modern wave of psychedelic science. You’ve got MAPS putting MDMA through three clinical trials in the United States. Science, whether we like it or not, still has enormous credibility in our modern Western culture. So really I think that’s the root of it. And from there, of course this kind of wellness industry has grown, which is clearly not all good.
Right, like Gwenyth Paltrow et al. What are the negative aspects associated with everybody jumping on board at the same time and psychedelics becoming ‘on-trend?’
SR: There’s just a danger of it being a huge missed opportunity. For me, these two things — personal wellness and societal wellness — are not separable, but they are in some way distinct. That’s the ability for psychedelics to affect change, not simply the level of the individual, but the level of society or culture. And it seems to me that unless society does undergo a profound shift, particularly in regards to our relationship to the natural world over the next decade (or even sooner) civilization as we know it is not going to be able to continue.
And that is really the promise of psychedelics to me; that they can act as catalysts for an extremely deep shift in culture.
Does it matter how people are engaging with psychedelics? Whether on a superficial, wellness level or a deeper scientific or spiritual one?
SR: I mean, it’s not rocket science. It’s important to be in a good state of mind, at a safe place, have a trip sitter if you’re going to have a high dose. But there’s a risk of psychedelics becoming slightly overdone at this point. People are being told it’s necessary that you pay thousands of pounds to go on a facilitative retreat. Well actually, it’s been my experience, as has been for plenty of others across the ages that if you simply get hold of something you know is good quality and you take it somewhere that you feel comfortable, then there’s every possibility that you will have a positive experience.
MJ: I think I’m also surprised there. I mean, it seems to me that there are not as many people picking mushrooms as they used to. Let’s not forget that mushrooms are available freely everywhere.
SR: I would love to be part of stimulating a kind of renaissance in homegrown mushrooms, such that people see they don’t need to buy packaged products or go on expensive retreats. A huge part of the magic of that is the process of actually seeing them grow and develop over a period of weeks. I think all of that actually helps to significantly improve the experience.
I was going to ask about regulation. Is there going to be a point where Europe or the UK regulate psychedelics and would this be useful or damaging?
MJ: I think the point about mushrooms is when you’ve got quote unquote Big Psychedelic, or pharmaceutical companies trying to lock down the market on kind of clinically approved psilocybin. You know, medications that are kind of predicated on the fact that nobody can get hold of these mushrooms in any other way. So I think this is a crucial question about regulation. The way it’s being led by medical science is that the people who are driving this often, for understandable kind of PR reasons, are very, very keen to say the use of psychedelics by medical professionals is totally different from recreational use. [It becomes] a very special kind of technical, medical and professional application. And my view is that it would be great if psychedelics were legally regulated, and people could use them in all kinds of contexts, [whether that’s] their own unstructured contexts or medications or therapy of different kinds.
By relative historical standards, most of us live pretty safe and comfortable lives. We have our screens, we have our devices and we’re constantly being fed stuff. But that brings [with it] a feeling of ‘hang on, this is not really me reaching my full potential. There’s more to life than this.’ I think that is a broader cultural feeling to do with how mediated our culture has become. People respond to that in lots of different ways. But I definitely think one of the ways in which people do that is by wanting to take psychedelics, to have a really powerful, intense, unmediated experience where you find out things about yourself that you wouldn’t have found out in any other way — Mike Jay
SR: I haven’t followed cannabis regulation in the US that closely, but I sense that in some states at least, regulation has been introduced which favours big business over small local organic production. And that’s a real shame and a missed opportunity. So I think the jury is out. It’s an important time for us to be kind of engaged with these debates to try and bend it in the right direction. There are some people linked to MAPS just starting a new initiative with a kind of Code of Conduct for psychedelic businesses, which I think is a really valuable contribution. But the thing that means I’m not losing sleep over this is the fact that whatever the laws, it will always be possible for people to grow small amounts of mushrooms in their own home.
It strikes me as similar to the CBD revolution we’re experiencing at the moment, that’s actually being driven by the idea of ‘productivity’, which is a really weird way of thinking about drugs in general.
MJ: I think this is true of wellness generally. It relates to a bigger thing in our culture, which is that by relative historical standards, most of us live pretty safe and comfortable lives. We have our screens, we have our devices and we’re constantly being fed stuff. But that brings [with it] a feeling of ‘hang on, this is not really me reaching my full potential. There’s more to life than this.’ I think that is a broader cultural feeling to do with how mediated our culture has become. People respond to that in lots of different ways. But I definitely think one of the ways in which people do that is by wanting to take psychedelics, to have a really powerful, intense, unmediated experience where you find out things about yourself that you wouldn’t have found out in any other way.
From a cultural perspective, we are definitely seeing a confluence of the tropes ‘hippieism’ across fashion and art in a big way. I’m wondering if you think psychedelics play a part in that, or whether it’s just coincidental?
MJ: No, I think there’s an appetite for an experience that is somehow bigger, more powerful, more intense and more real than we get in our daily lives. Putting it in the wider context of the experience economy that’s becoming a larger a sector of consumerism, that’s what a lot of people want. And I think psychedelics are a kind of an emblem or a symbol of something to share. They’re the idea of summit experience, [which is] why they become very good memes or tropes for other parts of the culture that are trying to capture those ideas.
