http://commongroundmag.com/2008/05/pinchbeck0805.html
by Daniel Pinchbeck
May 2008
The 2008 World Psychedelic Forum was an almost shockingly respectable
affair. Held in Basel, Switzerland, in a spacious convention center
next to the five-star Swissôtel Basel, the event drew 1,500 visitors
for a two-day symposium on the past and present state of psychedelic
thought and research. Despite flashes of eccentricity and DayGlo, you
could have easily thought you were at a conference for alternative
medicine or some abstruse but uncontroversial hobby. I felt honored
to be one of the speakers, part of a high-profile group which
included the Czech LSD researcher and theorist Stanislav Grof; Ralph
Metzner, a well-known author and teacher and one of Leary's original
partners at Harvard; botanists Dennis McKenna, Christian Raetsch and
Kat Harrison; MAPS director Rick Doblin; anthropologist and author
Jeremy Narby; visionary artists Alex and Allyson Grey; and many more.
The Gaia Media Foundation organized the forum, following upon their
successful LSD conference, marking the 100th birthday of LSD chemist
Albert Hofmann, two years ago. The 2008 event mingled nostalgia and
insularity, futurism and hope, in equal measures. On the nostalgia
side, Timothy Leary's archivist Michael Horowitz mounted an exhibit
of psychedelic art and media imagery, much of it from the heyday of
late-sixties flower power, while Carolyn (Mountain Girl) Garcia gave
a heartfelt speech about her journeys with the Merry Pranksters and
the early Haight Ashbury days of the Grateful Dead. Although Hofmann
is still alive, he declined to attend the festivities. A proper Swiss
bourgeois, he didn't approve of the conference being scheduled for
Easter weekend.
Sixty-five years since Hofmann's first accidental dose, new frontiers
in psychedelic research are opening up, represented at the Forum by
an array of therapists and scientists from institutions across
Europe, the U.S. and Canada. After a 35-year blockade on the subject,
psychedelic research with human subjects is being permitted again. In
Switzerland, a new study explores LSD as a tool of psychotherapy
the first such study to be allowed since the early 1970s. After years
of persistent effort, the Multidisciplinary Association of
Psychedelic Studies (maps.org) has succeeded in shepherding a number
of projects through the regulatory system. Studies underway in the
United States include research on use of psilocybin as a treatment
for cluster headaches, and on MDMA (Ecstasy) as a treatment for
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, a complex likely to haunt tens of
thousands of veterans as they return from the Iraq War.
Today, there is potential for psychedelics to be reintroduced into
mainstream culture, not as drastic catalysts of social upheaval but
as tools that can help people overcome serious problems. In the
future, MAPS sees itself becoming a "nonprofit pharmaceutical
company" that distributes psychedelics to qualified professionals. On
a deeper, almost subconscious level, cultural and political
resistance to the scrupulous study and use of psychedelics seems to
have dissipated. A recent study conducted by John Hopkins, giving
psilocybin to subjects who had never taken a psychedelic before,
found that most subjects had long-lasting positive changes in their
worldview. CNN and The Wall Street Journal gave prominent coverage to
the results of this study.
Beyond the scientific framework, there is compelling anecdotal data
on the benefits of psychedelic use for creative processes,
intellectual work and personal development. Recently, British
newspapers reported that Francis Crick may have been taking low doses
of LSD when he discovered the double helix shape of the DNA molecule
(although he refused to allow this to be published before his death).
The Nobel Prize winning biochemist Kary Mullis openly discussed the
inspiration he gained from psychedelics. Many pioneers of the
Internet and the personal computer experimented with psychedelics.
And of course, the anthemic music, film, literature and visual
culture of the late-1960s remains iconic.
During his speech at the conference, Dr. Tom Roberts, a psychology
professor at Northern Illinois University, proposed that the
rediscovery of psychedelics in modern culture is creating a "second
Reformation." During the first Reformation, the Bible, which was only
available to a priest class able to read Latin, was translated,
printed and distributed to the masses, who were then able to read and
interpret the "word of God" for themselves. By providing direct
access to the mystical experience described in sacred texts from
around the world, this "second Reformation" will, eventually,
eliminate the need for a priest class that stands between the
individual and personal revelation. Of course, such a deep shift in
cultural perspective is a long process the first Reformation
developed over a few hundred years.
At this point in time, those of us who see validity in the
psychedelic experience can feel cautiously optimistic that we are
reaching some tipping point in cultural perception. The discourse
around hallucinogens has become far more sophisticated and measured
than it was a generation ago. While Timothy Leary argued psychedelics
were a shortcut to "enlightenment" and that everyone should "turn on"
and "drop out," researchers today consider psychedelics to be
powerful tools that have negative effects if used improperly, like
all tools. But these substances may also have tremendous benefits for
the individual and society, when we become mature enough to make use of them.
--
Daniel Pinchbeck is the author of Breaking Open the Head: A
Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism
(Broadway Books, 2002) and 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl
(Tarcher/Penguin, 2006). His features have appeared in The New York
Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Esquire, Wired and many other publications.
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