'It blew my head off. But not in the way I thought it might.' Paula Bronstein / Getty
I was a good kid. I barely touched drugs when I was a teenager. Nor when I was at university. But then, when I was 28, I discovered LSD.
It blew my head off. But not in the way I thought it might. There were no hallucinations, there was no Day-Glo assortment of colours. It was something much more profound. Basically, it was paradise, and it was paradise all the more so for being so adjacent to everyday reality.
The first time I did LSD I was in a family house — a house I’d been to thousands of times before. But suddenly, everything about the place was imbued with new layers of meaning. Touching the chairs that my grandparents and great-grandparents had sat in, I discovered a new understanding of these figures who had always been somewhat remote to me.
My thoughts were still recognisably my own, but rather than having, say, three or four at once, I now seemed to have 11 — each occupying its own dimension, as if in some kind of stereo effect. I would be thinking about different phases of my childhood and the music I was listening to and the room I was in and the dynamics I had with each person around me. At the same time, I felt a calm self-assurance. Having spent my twenties (in retrospect) in the grip of different anxieties, I could now, with the aid of the LSD, see myself far more fully, far more richly. I could see that there were worlds and worlds inside myself — as there are for everyone.
Inevitably, I suppose, that started a journey. The lab-created psychedelics such as LSD and MDMA showed the immense resources latent within a person, and the drop of acid, like a scientist putting a bit of fluid onto a slide, illuminated what was already there. The plant medicines, such as ayahuasca, were where it really got trippy, since these were entirely natural compounds. They seemed to be part of an intelligence that existed throughout the natural world. If I took kambo — a frog venom — I found myself seeing the world like a frog; if peyote, like a cactus. Each one seemed to have their own personality, to have a message directed at a particular psychological tangle in my own life.
Towards the peak of my psychedelic exuberance, in 2017, I realised that I was only a small part of a bigger movement, “a breath, sweeping through the cognoscenti”, as I wrote at the time. So many people I was coming across in this space — perfectly sane, balanced people — had psychedelic experiences that changed their lives. And, for a while, it felt like a dizzying scavenger hunt.
After my LSD experience I began to hear about ayahuasca — which, at the time, still seemed like an urban legend. Soon, I would find myself at a beach cafe near a group actually preparing for an ayahuasca ceremony, complete with Amazonian shamans in full regalia. And then when I was exchanging Facebook friendships with these ayahuascans, I discovered that the one friend we had in common was the most interesting guy I knew in college who turned out to be running a group, based in New York, for taking an African plant, iboga. Inevitably, not long after, iboga would blow my head off.
“All these people I meet all seem to be on the same page — with a united outlook, which is very different from how any of us were raised,” I wrote, trying to understand what was going on. “We believe in self-work, a kind of unremitting self-awareness and self-improvement. We are people of faith, which isn’t religious. It’s more that we believe everything anybody has ever said.” We were part of what became known as the “psychedelic renaissance” — a wave of young people, largely millennials, discovering that psychedelics had been seriously misrepresented in the aftermath of the Sixties culture wars and enthusiastically embracing them as a means for self-knowledge and self-growth.
Within the psychedelic community there were a few widespread, entrenched beliefs. One was that, throughout history, psychedelics had been a core part of the spiritual life of many societies. That is, the use of psychedelics was the norm, and our abstinent society was the exception. This was certainly true in indigenous societies all over the world. The classics professor Carl Ruck had very convincingly argued that the Eleusinian Mysteries in Ancient Greece partook of psychedelic ergot, a fungus that is also in LSD, while a few years ago Brian Muraresku was at least intriguing in claiming that early Christian rites, the Eucharist included, involved psychedelics. In the Fifties, the banker R. Gordon Wasson had been startled to come across a thriving mushroom sect in Mexico, and I experienced a mature, coherent religion in Gabon that centred on plant medicines.
Another belief was that the culture wars had basically gone the wrong way. After its lab discovery in 1943, LSD had been practised in clinical settings throughout the Fifties and had been the therapeutic wonder drug of the era (you can see some of the videos of its use on YouTube). The belief was that the genie had escaped the bottle a bit too fast — above all, through the showmanship of Timothy Leary — and that resulted in a severe backlash. In 1970, the Nixon Administration gave LSD a Schedule I status, right alongside heroin, and then for good measure threw in plant medicines like peyote and ibogaine. Baby Boomers spoke wistfully of their LSD trips — a surprisingly large number of Americans claim to have dropped acid at one point or another in their lives — but, basically, the War on Drugs had stamped out both the clinical use of psychedelics as well as a great deal of psychonautic exploration. The belief in the millennial community was that this had vastly set the culture back. So much of the great art of the Sixties, the music above all, had been psychedelically inflected: the Beatles, for instance, dropped acid innumerable times during that period, with Paul McCartney saying “it started to find its way into everything we did, really”. Stories abounded that the Prague Spring had been a psychedelic event, that Kennedy had been turned on to LSD in 1963 and that it had driven his pursuit of peace in the Cold War, and that Silicon Valley was largely created on the back of psychedelic experiences.
I had a similar experience. Even early in my journey, the psychedelics helped me immensely. Writing had always seemed like a massive anxiety attack — it took me months to agonise over a play. But after trying LSD, I found it came easily, I sounded like myself, and writing became a pleasure. I haven’t had writers’ block since (although the anxiety never entirely goes away). My fear had been that psychedelics would cause me to “drop out”, to become some kind of a hippie, but, actually, they gave me a new relationship to work — I could understand much better that a job needn’t be all of my identity. Meanwhile, there were no deleterious effects from the psychedelics. To this day, I’ve never had a bad experience with any one of them.
The most influential book to make the case for the mainstreamisation of psychedelics was Michael Pollan’s How To Change Your Mind (2018). Pollan told the story of the clinical use of psychedelics in the mid-20th century, and the “restart”, which was a series of studies starting in the 2000s by Johns Hopkins University that found that psychedelics could produce mystical experiences, reduce anxiety in terminally ill cancer patients, all with next-to-no-negative impacts. What seemed to have disappeared completely was the bad science of the War on Drugs — for instance, the myth that MDMA created a dopamine deficiency, which was based on a bottle mix-up during a study. Enough people were doing psychedelics, both in clinical settings and on their own, without going crazy or suffering flashbacks. So many of the arguments against the psychedelics just didn’t hold up. And then the clinical benefits did seem very real and were borne out in study after study.
I suppose the peak of my psychedelic journey occurred when I was stone-cold sober. I was working on a documentary about ibogaine — a derivative of iboga — and accompanied a heroin addict from San Francisco to a clinic in Mexico. The place was called “Clear Sky” because, apparently, an addict right after his treatment looked up outside and said “oh a clear sky” — it was the first thought, really, that he had had of the outside world after years of being in the grip of his addiction. My experience was very similar. I had seen how the addict I was accompanying was living — unable to sit through a meal without going to the bathroom to smoke heroin off tinfoil, driving to the airport with a car that would shut down completely if it ever came to a complete stop. And then I saw him a few days later, after the ibogaine trip. He had cut his hair for the first time in a decade. His voice had a different timbre and his eyes had a different light. He had no cravings for heroin at all — it was, in the language of the clinic, an interruption that could allow him to reset his life.
One of the medical practitioners I met during the making of the documentary, a former ER doctor, described the first time he saw an ibogaine treatment as “a miracle”. I felt the same way. There weren’t very good numbers on how well the ibogaine cure had worked but the clinic estimated that the recovery rate was about 40% after a year compared to around 5% in the mainstream recovery industry. If there weren’t good numbers to go by, I was at least somewhat persuaded by what I read in the clinic guestbook. “Take this moment, breathe the air, hug the staff, feel the tears coursing down your cheek. You have waited so long for this.” “I woke up from treatment if reborn, alive with senses I hadn’t felt in years,” wrote another. A third simply wrote: “Ibogaine saved my life.”
The psychedelic renaissance has since lost some of its momentum. There were a number of decriminalisation initiatives in different states, and a number of companies attempting to put psychedelics through clinical trials. A ketamine spray for the treatment of depression was approved by the FDA in 2019 and ketamine treatments have become widespread among therapists. Psilocybin (magic mushrooms) continues to perform well in clinical trials, above all in alleviating depression. Microdosing has become widespread, most famously in Silicon Valley. But California’s governor vetoed a decriminalisation bill and, more significantly, the FDA asked the company Lykos Therapeutics to redo their phase 3 trial for MDMA. Lykos’ offence had more to do with the fact that one of the therapists had had a sexual relationship with a patient six months after that phase of the study concluded — but it was enough for The New York Times to more or less declare the drug renaissance dead: “How Psychedelic Research Got High On Its Own Supply,” one recent article was titled. But even avowed practitioners have had to recognise setbacks. “The media pendulum is swinging,” Pollan said in an interview. “The wind has definitely gone out of its sails,” said researcher Rick Strassman.
Psychedelics disappeared from my life as well — and, as it happens, really around the time that the psychedelic renaissance was cresting. I can almost remember the moment when I knew that I wouldn’t have much to do with psychedelics again. It was during the pandemic, and it felt like a tide was going out. I had never had a directly negative experience with a psychedelic, but there were some adverse effects. Through my epiphanic period, I had probably developed a false optimism which turned out to be unsustainable. I had also come across some of the darker sides of the psychedelic renaissance — self-appointed “gurus” and “shamans” who allowed their transcendent psychedelic experiences to inflate their own egos and then enjoyed manipulative control over people who participated in their ceremonies. Looking back — and I think about this every day — it is very hard for me to say whether psychedelics have made my life better or worse.
But if I had a choice I would do it all again the same way. The psychedelics represented a journey into the unknown and the more complicated aspects of the self. They showed me that there was far more to the world than I ever would have suspected. And that seemed to be more or less the same place that the culture-at-large had got to. The sense with the Sixties was that it had been too much too soon — that society wasn’t able to handle the insights of psychedelics. We may have already started to feel the same way about the “psychedelic renaissance”, that psychedelics are so powerful that they can’t be casually disseminated on a mass scale.
That is not necessarily an indictment of psychedelics. They really are, as Aldous Huxley put it, “the doors of perception”. If psychedelics are too much for us (and they often are), that may say more about our own limitations than it does about the psychedelics themselves.
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SubscribeThe interesting for me is that I never have any kind of visualizations while on psychedelics. Nor do I have any euphoria, either with a psychedelic like psilocybin or something like cannabis. What instead usually happens when I’m on a psychedelic is a total collapse in cognition, literally a loss of consciousness; the metaphor that I hit upon was that my brain was like a trainyard, and my consciousness is like the man in the switching tower, telling my trains of thought where to go. While high, the little man in the tower is out to lunch, and my trains of thought go wherever. Some of them just keep to their usual scheduled routes, but others rapidly go off the rails and some even collide. In other words, my attention disappears, and I become incapable of metacognition–I enter a realm of pure thought, where I am not able to think about my thoughts. What’s interesting is that external stimuli can reroute my cognition and sometimes snap it back on track. I find that music is a potent driver of my brain when the signalman is on vacation, but any external stimulus can do the trick.
I think this has implications for AI, as AI “hallucinations” are very reminiscent of the experiences I have while on psilocybin, and it suggests that the way to “fix” the hallucination problem in AI is to somehow “embody” them so that they receive input from the external, objective world that can error-correct their thought processes and get their cognition back on track when it falls into a degenerative loop, as mine does while high.
Additionally, it suggests that I have some kind of dopamine dysfunction, as it’s dopamine receptors that produce both the euphoria and the visualizations. My experience with psilocybin, then, can be described as neither religious nor spiritual, but rather metaneurochemical, in that it has revealed to me certain interesting suggestions about the internal functioning of my brain.
My experiences with psilocybin were also neither religious nor spiritual. 5-MEO-DMT, on the other hand….
Why do you take it?
An excellent story!
Nice article but I dont see how you can say you are unsure of whether psychedelics positively or negatively impacted you. Id like to hear more about the negatives that balance up all the positives described here.
Just to share my own story, I did some big mushroom trips during the draconian lockdowns when thankfully I lived in the country. I had some beautiful trips staring in to an outdoor fire, making nice breakthroughs in music ( really helped me learn irish traditional music on fiddle). Also encountered sadness, grief for past relationships, some fear, some wild stuff too that is hard to drscribe. Thankfully have a strong mindfulness/meditation training to help here., I microdosed a lot also for these years also. I would say cured me off a sort of unseen depression also. After since starting a family didnt do much for last few years but have started microdosing again this year and find it really helps me be in the present with my kids and generally lighten my mood. Would urge caution with big trips but really i think that microdosing would benefit almost everyone. The appaling behaviour of regulators in stopping a very natural cure for depression is disgusting really
Interesting. I have historically been more of a “macrodosing” guy, but I might have to try microdosing, as so many people speak well of it. In fact, a good friend of mine (who is something of a psychonaut) once told me that he had “over microdosed”.
Over microdosed…!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I think he meant that he intended to microdose, but that he rather “over-egged the cake”. If you knew the guy, it would actually make quite a bit of sense.
Yeah, im just not in the mood for big journeys at the minute.
Yeah, I get it. Everything in its right place.
I sensed that he must have said that during the editing process to avoid advocating for it or for liability reasons. It was so completely out of left field!
Let me say that this discussion is for academic purposes only. Nobody here is advocating taking psychedelic substances.
An excellent and worthwhile article. For a moment I had to question it’s relevance to “current affairs” before remembering that expanding one’s consciousness is ALWAYS relevant as a means of pulling us out of the cultural and societal mire a lot of us find ourselves in.
For what it’s worth, my own experiences with psychedelics have been uniformly positive and yes, they did change my life for the better. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend controlled, responsible use of plant psychedelics to anyone wishing to improve their life and outlook.
I’m reminded of the report published by David Nutt et.al. in 2010 recording the personal & societal harms resulting from the use of various illegal and legal substances. Alcohol came out as most harmful (mainly because of it’s widespread use) with a rating of 72/100. Heroin and crack cocaine not far behind with around 54-55/100. Psilocybin mushrooms scored a paltry 5. I suspect even that’s probably an overestimation.
Thanks to UnHerd for publishing this.
The MDMA phase 3 trial needed to be repeated because there has been no meaningful placebo control as the people who take placebo automatically know they did not get the drug. Obviously the writer had a moving personal experience, and I have no objections to the use of psychedelics. The impact, however, is more a consequence of centuries of enlightened which narrows perceptions and sense of being to commonsensical and relegates revelation to either insanity or drug use. The writer does not seem to consider the possibility that transformative experiences of that kind don’t depend on use of chemicals. And the books arguing that the ancients resorted to the same methods can’t seem to imagine the very thing he describes on his first trip, that another world is right there as are its numerous thoughts and experiences. We just fight it with all we got.
I read i think either Van Der Kalk or Shulgin about blind trials with MDMA and Pscilocybin. Sounds like BS to me – how on earth could you NOT NOTICE you are tripping balls or wired??
I vote for a group-trip Unherd event.
Yeah, with Champagne Socialist as the shaman!
We’re about to have Trump’s most questionable appointee, RFK, take over the healthcare system. This will mean four years of leeches and snake oil, but it also means that MDMA and other psychoactive compounds could be back on the treatment table. It will be…interesting.
This is truly a fascinating topic, and I’m glad that Unheard published this article. I have somewhat peripheral interest in this in non-religious or spiritual manner).
I find it very interesting, especially considering the @right-wing hippie’s observation about losing cognition. Many people experience this—losing cognitive function and instead falling back into their embodiment, emotions, sensory perceptions, and underlying instincts. If a person is not well-integrated or stable, this is where anxiety, psychosis, or paranoia, hallucinations, and delusions can manifest.
What’s particularly important, especially since you mentioned AI, is that AI operates in a very linear, logical way. It lacks an embedded emotional process; instead, it is purely computational. Psychedelic drugs wouldn’t have an effect on AI because AI doesn’t possess organic chemistry. Its functions are based on electromagnetism, light, electricity, and certain chemical reactions, but it doesn’t have the organic neurochemistry that enables human language, emotions, and the connections between them.
However, what would be truly interesting is if these drugs could be used for the education of psychic abilities—helping people become aware of when they lose cognition, compared to those who might lose emotions and become more logical, or those who might lose both emotions and cognition and become highly sensory or strangely those who may lose all except instinct. If an educational or therapeutic framework could be added—where people don’t just use psychedelics passively but intentionally learn about their psyche in the process to scale up for exploration—it could be a valuable tool for self-exploration. This would be especially interesting as we move toward the legalization of many of these substances.
When I said “education” rather than research, I mean the administrators must also be able to use the substance on themselves so they have subjective experience not just objectifying others and making external analysis (obviously not at the same time). There is a huge difference and one of the reasons this is a controversial issue. People making decisions do not know what they are making decision on.
Yes on a mass scale psychedelics are never going to work, especially in an individualistic hedonistic chaotic mass culture.
They might work for small groups, in small esoteric cultures, which provide a context and symbolic value for experiences, and come with built in rules , codes, standards and restraints.
I don’t think anyone is advocating tipping a 44 gallon drum of LSD into the city’s water supply.
A knee is designed to move in a certain way.
When you move the knee outside of the way the various components have strength there can be bad results.
“Designed”? Who designed the knee?
Darwin, of course.
Evolution.
This is a deeply irresponsible article. Ayahuasca can result in death or permanent psychological damage. A responsible publisher would not publish such a piece without making this clear.
Where does it sit in the hierachy of alcohol, horse riding, motocross, heroin, rugby and qi-gong on the list of harms? DMT is a potential hazard but at least its short acting. My advise is do not take it unless you are exp’d with LSD, shrooms etc and be aware that any active DMT dose is a “hero” dose.
I’d start with “plant based” (Psilocybin, DMT) and only move to “artificial” (LSD, Ketamine) later. That said, I’d probably leave Salvia till the second group even though it is plant based.
I’ve looked long and hard, but I am unaware of an instance where Ayahuasca caused death.
Here are three such tragic deaths: Henry Miller, age 19, Colombia, 2014; Jarrad Antonovich, age 46, New South Wales, 2021; Maureen Rainford, age 54, Bolivia, 2024. I’ll not post the links but they should be easy to find. For lasting psychological damage, see here: https://medium.com/the-shadow/hot-take-psilocybin-was-the-biggest-mistake-of-my-life-f93cf6598974
I know a bit about the Antonovich case, as it happened in Australia. He and I may have even attended the same ayahuasca ceremony on one occasion, as he looks familar (not the one at which he died though). His problem was that he took kambo frog poison before taking ayahuasca. If anything was going to kill him, it was that (I have had it myself on a number of occasions, but would leave several days between taking it and taking aya). Can’t comment on the other two, save to note that Miller apparently also took scopolamine as well (if true, that could have been the fatal one). There was a story commonly reported about a guy named Matthew Dawson-Clarke, who died “on a trip to South America to do an ayahuasca ceremony”. The fact is, he never actually took ayahuasca – he died after ingesting some kind of tobacco drink taken in preparation for the ayahuasca.
I cannot speak from a scientific perspective, only a personal. I was drinking a bottle of vodka a day ten years ago. AA worked but I kept relapsing after moving to the city. I had a single low dose of LSD and 100mg MDMA in a single session back in 2015. Two days later I reached out to swig from a bottle and … stopped. I realised I didn’t need it anymore. No urges, no distorted thinking, no drama. I haven’t touched a drop since and neither have I wanted to take LSD or MDMA again either. We need more research into psychedelics and addiction. I am not the only one.
Lovwly , thanks
Huxley was quoting Blake –
“ If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
It’s a bit of a clumsy metaphor (cleansing a door?) but had some staying power, as it’s how The Doors found their name. Huxley’s not suggesting that psychedelics are the doors of perception – they’re the cleansing agent. A headfuck Windolene.
Most of my friends took drugs in the 90’s. Too many casualties for me to view it as an overall positive, really. We weren’t very “mindful” about it, it was all done with determined hedonism and (a few annoying hippies aside) certainly wasn’t an attempt to gain insight. We wanna get loaded and have a good time!
We wanna get loaded and have a good time! You say that as if it’s a bad thing!
I have seen the therapeutic uses of Ibogaine, shrooms and dmt help with depression, and as a “reset” with addiction. The issue with addiction is as much staying clean as getting clean. The factors that keep addictions nagging at you are usually mental health with some from genes and environment. So i doubt there is a “silver bullet” for this. If you are/were a committed waster the body high from shrooms, mescaline etc seems too much like intoxication to be good for you. And even “clean” MDMA is exactly what it says on the lable – methyline dioxy methamphetamine. So “spacy” speed. Very similar to meth or dexamphetamine and a lot easier to live with than racemic speed. I cannot see any therapeutic use for such stimulants and am very sceptical about thc too.
Iboga is particularly good at dealing with addictions. It even made me realize that I had one.
I’ve been to heaven and hell with psychedelics, and in my estimation, they ultimately change very little. Your brain lights up like a Christmas tree, you think you understand the universe, and then you go back to the exact same lifestyle. I don’t mean it can’t be used to heal trauma or overcome addictions. That part is true. But for a “normal” person, I’ve never once witnessed any psychonauts actually become better people. It was actually a bit absurd to hear friends preach about how they met God on DMT and how miraculous it was, and then do absolutely nothing different with their life. No extra charity work or volunteering, no calling grandma more often, nothing. It’s sometimes fun and sometimes scary but almost always, ultimately, masturbatory.
I have always considered psychedelic trips to be like a holiday. You might live your whole life in one town, but occasionally you might go somewhere exotic for a week. When you get back, you may go back to doing the “same old things”, but you are still somehow “changed”. As to “extra charity work, volunteering, or calling grandma more often”, no psychedelic (and I have taken A LOT) has made me want to correspond to someone else’s idea of what “being a good person” is. Rather, they have always reinforced my view that being “me” is perfectly fine.