Where Psychedelic Medicines Are Headed

Ever since I was 18 years old, in 1972, for all of my adult life since then, I’ve devoted my life to trying to bring back psychedelic research, to become a psychedelic therapist, and also to go through my own psychedelic therapy.

In 1986, I started MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, as a nonprofit psychedelic pharmaceutical company that would also do public education and drug policy reform. Because I felt that psychedelics had been very much suppressed. MDMA had just been criminalized in 1985, but these substances had an incredible amount of therapeutic potential.

I’d been inspired to get involved with psychedelics by books like Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception and also Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. That was really the one that broke me through the anti-psychedelic propaganda, because I loved that book.

A friend of mine had loaned it to me, and when I returned it to him, he said the author had written part of the book on LSD. And I said, “That’s impossible. Nothing good comes from LSD.”

And he said, “No, it’s true.”

I checked it out, and it was true. Ken Kesey did write parts of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest while he was under the influence of LSD. So that’s what really made me start to question the education that I’d gotten, and it led me to try LSD and mescaline.

During those experiences, I had this intimation of ego dissolution and this larger world beyond just my own individual consciousness, how we’re part of something much bigger that goes back billions of years and connects us with all of life and all different kinds of people, and that we have way more in common than what separates us.

It felt to me like these experiences were so important to the survival of humanity, and also to me personally, and that they were so suppressed.

Nixon said that Timothy Leary was the most dangerous man in America. And that made me think, what is Timothy Leary doing right that would have Nixon so upset?

I felt it was a lot of this sense of how we’re all connected, and that that would undermine a certain kind of racism, prejudice and fundamentalism.

So basically, at 18 years old, I decided to devote my life to psychedelics, for what they could do for me and for others in the world.

In 1984, I had an opportunity to work with a friend whose partner was dying of cancer. It was very, very difficult for him, and he was in great pain.

He wanted to be able to express a kind of farewell, but he was on such a large amount of opiates that he was basically tranquilized and wasn’t really able to do much in the way of communicating.

My friend said to me, “How do we address this?”

And I said, “Well, let’s try MDMA.”

MDMA is 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, so it has the stimulant properties of methamphetamine. What it did was synergize with the opiates. It provided better pain control than the opiates alone, and it woke him up from this narcotic stupor.

And it was just like there were two people able to go over the history of their lives and their romantic lives together. It was so beautiful to see them connect in this way, also knowing that they were saying goodbye.

This fellow died three days later. But that was one of the most precious memories they had together, which the woman who survived was able to carry forward. She still talks to me these days about how fundamentally important that experience was for them.

I had one other experience that sticks in my mind a lot. It was a friend of mine, and her father was dying of cancer in his 50s. She was very close to her father, and they also decided to do MDMA together.

During this experience, the father really got this sense that he was so focused on the time he wasn’t going to have that every moment he did have was painful, sad and depressed.

And he realized that he was still alive. He wasn’t dead yet. He could focus on the time he did have and live as fully as he could.

That changed his mood so much that he was able to go on and really enjoy the time he had with his family.

A couple of weeks before he died, we had this discussion about how he wondered whether the resistance he had, this denial of death, was linked to his survival. Part of this MDMA experience was him accepting the reality of his own death.

So he was wondering, did that mean he would die sooner?

And then we talked about how he had actually outlived the timeframe his doctors had given him, and he had enjoyed his life more.

He realized that accepting the reality of death doesn’t mean that you’ll die sooner. And in fact, because he enjoyed his time more with his daughter and with his family, that probably helped him to live even longer.

I think that was a really important lesson. The denial of death, which people think is part of fighting the disease, may actually debilitate them. And the acceptance of death can lead to an appreciation for the joyous nature of the life they do have.

You can sort of take celebration out of tragedy and make the best of the moments that we do have.

And so I think the use of MDMA one day, and other psychedelics, of course, psilocybin and LSD, in hospice settings and at the end of life will be tremendous.

I also think that early on, when people are diagnosed with cancer or some other life-threatening illness, psychedelic experiences can help get them into this place of acceptance and appreciation and celebration, and take away a lot of the fears and anxieties.

There’s going to be a lot of use of psychedelics to help facilitate the dying process.

And also, you know, as they say, once you’re born, you start the dying process. I do think that throughout the lifespan, these experiences will have tremendous potential, and we can weave them into a lot of different therapeutic approaches.

Now, psychedelics, there’s a range of psychedelics. They all have different kinds of effects, but they’re more similar than different.

What they do is they kind of weaken the sense of who we are, the ego sense. Neuroscientists call that the default mode network. That’s sort of our resting state of scanning the world for what’s important to us as an individual.

And when that’s weakened, you kind of see how much we’re part of a much bigger picture. That links to these mystical senses of connection, and people can draw strength from that.

The most mystical experience I’ve ever had made it so that I was never as lonely afterward, because I always felt I was connected to this force of love throughout the universe.

So I think the use of psychedelics in helping people deal with the end of life is going to be one of the most important contributions that psychedelic psychotherapy will make as we go forward into the decades.