The Moral Case For Psychedelics
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For the majority of my life, I believed that drugs were immoral and shameful. The anti-drug campaigns in high school taught me that mind-altering substances were a direct route to addiction and failure. I equated getting high with rebellion and immodest behavior.
I learned that there was pride in being “above the influence” of illicit psychoactive drugs, though regular alcohol consumption was acceptable. Nancy Reagan’s “just say no” campaign ended well before I entered kindergarten, but the culture I grew up in represented her anti-drug ideas to a T. The apparent moral high ground was inside the tightly guarded gates of sobriety — that is, with a free pass given to drinking copious amounts of alcohol.
I did not feel the consequences of the War on Drugs from affluent suburban Connecticut. Drug consumption was conspicuous in High School, but for some reason, my caucasian peer group was not arrested or prosecuted for drug crimes that caused millions of minorities to be locked up.
Meanwhile, the medical establishment sanctioned other drugs and called them medicines. Antidepressants, amphetamines, sleeping pills, and pain killers were all widely administered and classified as good. Anything outside of the establishment was illegal and immoral.
I learned that MDMA was a rave culture drug that melted your brain. I learned that mushrooms could make you go crazy, or that LSD would stay lodged in your spine years after the drug has left your system. These depictions spread through rumors, but also through drug education materials taught through school and police institutions.
Today, I believe that psychedelics — LSD, Mushrooms, Ayahuasca, DMT, and more — are moral and should be fully legalized for recreational use under safe conditions for responsible and informed adults. Even more so, this group of substances represents one of the best hopes for humanity in preventing existential collapse and ensuring our collective evolutionary growth as a species.
This essay is my first foray into the world of psychedelic advocacy. This topic has been a personal obsession for several years, and I’m excited to be sharing it.
Nature
We can say in absolute terms: it is human nature to seek a change of mindstate. In its most basic form, people wish to spend more time feeling good and less time feeling bad. To be happy, according to many practical definitions, is to live with an elevated mood more or most of the time.
Spiritual inclinations can partly be explained as intentions to transcend the daily grind. Meditation and prayer can quiet or change our thoughts and give us new perspectives or inner peace.
Since the very beginning of history, humans have been ingesting substances as a reliable means to unlock elevated states of mind. There is well documented archeological evidence that early African hunter-gatherer societies consumed psychedelic mushrooms, yielding possible evolutionary advantages through improved vision or cognition.
Even more so, these tribes incorporated hallucinogenic sacraments as part of shamanic trance ceremonies to connect with the divine and ensure harmony among the community. Hallucinogens constituted a significant driver of human culture and art in our earliest days.
Crucially, the tendency to seek intoxication isn’t even just human — it is animal. The practice of animals deliberately seeking and consuming psychoactives is thoroughly documented throughout the natural world. Cats get high on catnip. Elephants get drunk off of fermented fruits. Without question, there is a biological drive that causes animals and humans to go beyond their typical states of mind.
The source of this behavior is multifaceted; the relief from boredom, the seeking of physical pleasure, new evolutionary and adaptive mechanisms and the development of mating strategies. Even more so, there is a clear link between altered states of human consciousness and religious and spiritual motivations.
In any event, the idea of a “Drug-Free World,” as the United Nations envisioned in 1998, is an absurdity and fundamentally anti-science. If we pay any attention to the mounds of evidence in front of us, the drive to consume psychoactives is biologically deterministic. Intoxication is linked to our evolutionary history, biology, and psychology. The government attempts to stifle it, but this behavior always comes out one way or another.
Trying to rid the world of drugs is like trying to free the world of sex.
History
The Spanish conquistadors arrived in Mexico in 1517, and within two years, defeated the Aztec empire in Tenochtitlan, now modern day Mexico City. With characteristic colonial brutality, the Spanish massacred the local population and established a Spanish colony overseas.
The Aztecs, like many indigenous cultures, included medicinal sacraments as part of their religious culture. They consumed “Teonanacatl,” “flesh of the Gods,” or as we now know it, psilocybin mushrooms, as part of their ceremonies. Psilocybin was a tool for healing and inner transformation.
Today, a vast body of scientific research acknowledges the potency and potential of psychedelic mushrooms. As one example, Johns Hopkins published a study demonstrating that high doses of psilocybin showed promise in smoking cessation, calming the existential angst of terminal cancer patients, inducing spiritual insights, improving general well-being and far more. The study reports that the potential for abuse is low, neurotoxicity is absent, and mushrooms are not addictive.
Our tribal ancestors knew a few things.
After the siege of Tenochtitlan, the Spanish Catholic Church quickly learned of the power of Aztec sacraments to access ecstatic states of mind. With mushrooms, the individual could experience visions and connect to the divine without the strict mediation and translation of a Catholic priestly class. Such liberty threatened the power of the Empire to control the spirituality, cosmology, and identity of its population. It quickly declared the mushrooms sacrilegious and suppressed them with violent consequences.
The same trend was visible throughout the Colonial New World; European discovery and suppression of hallucinogenic plants like Peyote, Ayahuasca, and San Pedro. All of these plants are part of various indigenous traditions; a body of clinical research demonstrates their enormous potential to heal body, mind, and soul.
The European colonial chapter illustrates a common theme throughout history: the desire of governments and institutions to destroy perceived threats to power, including religious and spiritual movements. Free or rebellious thinking was a threat to ideology. Because psychedelics have the power to yield an extraordinary amount of free and unique thought among any individual, they have been consistently declared sacrilegious.
At the same token, governments have consistently sanctioned other mind-alternants as acceptable and morally superior to their banned counterparts. Look no further than alcohol, one of the most neurotoxic substances regularly consumed today. Our society makes a judgment that drinking sits well within the realm of acceptability, despite its destructive health effects, despite its tendency to accompany unruly or ill-informed behavior, despite its addictive qualities. I don’t make this point to shame or judge those who choose to drink — these are just the facts.
The former attorney general, Jeff Sessions, recently stated that “good people don’t smoke marijuana.” He said nothing about alcohol and its legality, implying the clear hierarchical judgment that the Federal Government makes about alcohol versus cannabis.
The institutionally-sanctioned drugs that are legally consumed in society today — alcohol, caffeine, tobacco, sugar, (which we can loosely consider as a drug considering its addictive nature), have been culturally reinforced for centuries. They constituted the economic basis for one of the greatest crimes in history: the African slave trade. Millions of Africans were forced into slavery to cross the Atlantic Ocean and support a growing export economy to Europe. Millions of lives were destroyed to feed the addictions and palates of increasingly wealthy European societies.
The dichotomy is apparent: the European colonial power directly encouraged and facilitated their citizenry in the consumption of addictive (read: profitable) substances, all to increase their wealth and reinforce the economic, political, and religious status quo. They violently discouraged a Mexican mushroom that liberated the mind of the individual and contradicted Catholic Church doctrine. They brutalized large populations of African and indigenous human beings to accomplish their chemical agendas.
As the industrial revolution picked up in Europe, this divide became only more apparent. Alcohol and caffeine only reinforced the behavior and social culture of the factory worker — get drunk at night, get buzzed in the morning, and back to work. An elevated hallucinogenic state might contradict the entire identity construct of a worker and lead him to not show up to work or church.
This cultural and molecular hierarchy leads us to today, where governments around the world stigmatize and ban drugs that challenge the conventional order.
For a recent example, we need not look further than LSD. Synthesized in 1942 in a lab in Basel, Switzerland, LSD induces many of the same benefits as the plant-based hallucinogens — altered states of consciousness, heightened creativity, greater awareness of self, and spiritual transformation. A cultural movement started — Timothy Leary’s “turn on, tune in, drop out,” — the hippies began to wake up, the institutions went nuts, and voila, LSD was banned and registered as schedule 1, considered to have zero medical benefits. The colonial legacy of drug suppression echoes through the centuries.
Morality
Some argue that we shouldn’t assign morality to any drug at all. After all, a drug is a material compound, and evaluating right and wrong is a non-physical game. We run the risk of assuming pharmacological determinism; the fallacy that inebriated humans behave the way they do because they took the drug. For example, people don’t get into bar fights because they drank alcohol — they get into fights because of their anger issues and insecurities. We would be remiss to assign biochemical causality, even if there are legitimate correlations and reductions in inhibition.
Intoxicated (and sober) human beings are influenced by their surroundings, by the people in their environment, by their emotional state, by their own free will. Drugs are only one part of the equation.
Even more so, as Hamilton Morris, drug researcher and the producer of the show Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia persuasively argues, mature adults should have cognitive liberty, the right to take risks with their bodies. Without a doubt, many drugs are dangerous and risky — nobody could argue to the contrary. However, governments should not have the authority to decide whether an autonomous, functioning adult should have control over what they ingest.
If a drug like LSD has benefits and risks, an adult should have the right to make an informed decision about it. When it is legal and regulated, there is opportunity for the government to educate people and prevent adverse outcomes.
With that said, different drugs have different effects on humans. The psychedelic class of drugs regularly induces states of bliss, tranquility, and creativity, allow for deep emotional processing, as well as a variety of long term clinical benefits, without any of the neurotoxic effects characteristic of more popular drugs. Cocaine induces states of enormous confidence or energy, but to the contrary of Sigmund Freud (he famously wrote “I need a lot of Cocaine” and argued for its medicinal benefits), it has dangerous and addictive effects.
Drugs have the potential to make our lives better or worse. Drugs can make us healthy or sick, empower or destroy, create or break relationships. In other words, intoxicants have consequences.
Psychedelics are powerful substances and are risky under the wrong conditions. With that said, the positives broadly outway the negatives when taken responsibly.
For the remainder of this essay, I’ll focus on three areas where psychedelics can broadly help humanity: mental health, spirituality, and human development. For specifics, I am referring to the class of drugs listed on The Third Wave (with the exception of cannabis).
Mind
It’s safe to say that society is better off with a healthier and happier population. Mentally healthy people find meaning and purpose in life, treat people around them with dignity, and are more likely to engage in prosocial behavior that benefits all of society.
Today, mental health in the United States is in crisis. Depression and anxiety rates are up. Suicides are up. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is rampant.
Western psychiatric and psychological institutions — for all of their scientific confidence and intellectual bravado — lack the complete answers or solutions to address the situation. Psychiatrists commonly prescribe antidepressants to a variety of conditions, masking negative symptoms and often producing nasty side effects or dependency themselves. With all due respect to psychiatry- which unequivocally helps many people out of difficult situations- our current pharmaceutical toolkit fails to address the emotional root of the mental health problem.
In the psychological realm, there are more therapies than ever to address our suffering. While psychotherapy undoubtedly is a critical step in human development, personal awareness, and inner healing, it also isn’t effective in addressing many mental pathologies. Post-traumatic stress disorder is notably treatment-resistant; many veterans with PTSD still struggle with symptoms years after they have worked with a therapist.
Psychotherapeutic or psychoanalytic methods alone often aren’t enough to access our unconscious depths, where core emotional traumas lie. Jung and Freud attempted this with dream interpretation and free association, but these methods — while important — are challenging to replicate and don’t work for many patients.
While society collectively struggles to heal our psyches, another story persists in the psychedelic world. From the available evidence (clinical and self-reported), psychedelics administered under a safe setting broadly improve mental health.
The clinical literature indicates that the psychedelic class of drugs broadly outperforms placebo or non-chemical therapeutic interventions for a variety of chronic psychological conditions — including persistent psychosomatic issues.
Mushrooms have been reported to alleviate severe cluster headaches. MDMA (loosely categorized with psychedelics) reduces post-traumatic stress disorder. LSD calms OCD and general anxiety disorders. More powerful substances like Ayahuasca and Ibogaine lead people out of intense addiction — a malignant condition that Western Medicine completely fails to address.
I live next to a halfway house in San Francisco, where individuals suffering from addiction live together and work to re-enter society. I spoke with the director once — she told me that their success rates hovered around 10%. (Macro-statistics on recovery and relapse are hazy, but the situation is not favorable no matter how you spin it.)
We need to do better than this.
Researchers believe that psychedelics are so effective because they are able to open our minds to a much greater degree. We can’t access our deepest emotions and traumas in ordinary waking consciousness, often even if we try. With psychedelics, the doors and blocks open, and we can genuinely begin to process our inner turmoil.
Though the DEA enforces LSD, MDMA, and psilocybin as schedule 1 — “no currently accepted medical treatment use in the U.S.” — the evidence speaks clearly in favor of the healing benefits of these drugs.
Note that fentanyl — the synthetic opioid ravaging the American landscape with overdose fatalities — is classified as schedule 2, inferring that a drug that killed twenty thousand people in 2018 is safer than LSD, a drug so chemically benign that overdoses are virtually unheard of.
The juxtaposition is so absurd to the point that you wonder whether the government deliberately engages in self-sabotage.
With that said, people are starting to wake up. MDMA for PTSD is entering phase three clinical trials with the Food and Drug administration — meaning that the government is considering legal prescriptions for suffering individuals. Colorado and Oregon will soon vote on whether to legalize psilocybin, while the FDA acknowledged that mushrooms are a potential “breakthrough therapy.”
The future of psychiatry and psychology is psychedelic. Or at least it should be if our government can get its head straight.
Certain mental health professionals feel threatened by psychedelics because they feel that their authority and expertise is undermined by the wildly effective results of these drugs. Though I spoke to the limitations of therapy and pharmaceuticals earlier, I believe that if therapists are allowed to work with psychedelics in their practice, patients will experience radically better results than in sober therapy or unguided consumption. Indeed, much of the clinical research conducted around psychedelics includes intensive psychotherapy during treatment.
In short, chronic suffering is unnecessary. Psychedelics present the way out.
Spirit
Many people who take psychedelics experience enormous spiritual transcendence and religious connection. Individuals often report communing with God, getting past their ego, or achieving a profound sense of inner truth. These are not universal reports by any means, but they are ubiquitious.
Western secular liberals are often uncomfortable with spirituality because it contradicts their materialistic, Cartesian frame of reality. Science defeated fundamentalist religion during the Enlightenment because empiricism disproved so many of the false mythical claims made by the Church. Subsequently, many intelligent, rational people dismiss spirituality as superstition and pseudoscience.
Psychedelics re-introduce spirituality into the cosmological equation because they so clearly pass the test of the mechanistic, scientific worldview. Scientists can isolate them to a chemical compound and reliably effect a change in human consciousness. Researchers can observe the neurochemical results of users under a brain scan.
All the while, users who take high doses blast off into the psychonautic stratosphere, perhaps exploring the visceral depths of their minds and souls, perhaps meeting spirits, angels, devils, aliens, or family members who have passed away. They hear voices, speak with God, or dissolve into a flash of white light. It is direct experience in the truest sense.
At lower doses, people experience powerful insights and realizations; they have a new ability to process and make sense of their lives.
The rationalists among us engage in reductionism and dismiss the psychedelic subjective perceptions as “only brain chemistry.” But ordinary waking reality is also chemistry — that doesn’t make it unreal. People often report that their psychedelic experiences feel more real than sobriety.
We would be remiss in throwing out these interior journeys. Even if spiritual experiences on psychedelics are purely illusory (and I’ll bet every ounce of my credibility that they aren’t), the personal consequences are profound. Many people call their trip one of the five most important experiences of their lives. Individuals find greater meaning and purpose. Moreover, often the loosen or let go of their purely rational view of the world.
Psychedelics don’t contradict science, but they do show vastly different ways of looking at reality. We ought to take seriously their ability to induce mystical states.
All the while, Westerners are experiencing a crisis of purpose, of identity, and meaning. This crisis is the same as the one I referred to earlier, by the way; mental health and psycho-spirituality are intricately related. Even the most rationalist among us have to find meaning to be happy — nihilism is a losing game. The vast majority of people who take psychedelics find more meaning in their lives, even the ones who experience bad trips.
More Americans are leaving the Church, and it’s not clear where they turn from there. Religion addresses meaning, identity, and purpose. People are lost without these things. According to Nietzsche, God is long dead.
Psychedelics may yet resurrect Him.
Development
An extensive body of research demonstrates that children move through a series of hierarchical growth stages as they advance into puberty and eventually into adulthood. These stages are physical, but also perceptual and psychomotor.
At the earliest level, a newborn is incapable of telling the difference between herself and the external world — the ego structure has yet to develop. As the baby grows into a toddler, she learns to adopt language, differentiate as a separate self, recognize that there are other humans with different or competing interests, and socialize and play. The development process continues until the child evolves into a functioning adult.
Previous conceptions of human development argued that development mostly stops in early adulthood, in sync with physical maturity. You become who you are around age 21, and so it is.
This school of thought has been replaced by a contemporary body of research, which argues that development in human consciousness doesn’t end at a certain age. It is a continuous process; the potentiality to keep developing is always there. For more information on this topic, please refer to the work of Robert Kegan.
As psychologist Clare Graves states, “The psychology of the mature human being is an unfolding, emergent, oscillating, spiraling process, marked by progressive subordination of older, lower-order behavior systems to newer, higher-order systems as man’s existential problems change.”
Development is quantified by various psychometric scores, including levels of empathy, emotional intelligence, and psychological resilience. It is also largely qualified by the individual’s perception of and relationship with society, reality and the cosmos at large. The majority of the human race falls under three developmental stages — ego-centric, ethnocentric, and world-centric.
At certain lower stages of development, the individual is ego-centric, only able to empathize with his or herself. There are other humans, but they don’t matter so much. This is narcissism, well on display in many parts of the world today.
The next stage is ethnocentric, where people of the same race, religion, or ethnicity develop intense emotional bonds with each other. They consider their tribe to be superior to all other tribes, and in many instances justify hate or violence through their tribe’s unique relationship with the divine. Ethnocentric is the stage of religious fundamentalism. It is also a stage of racism, of ethnic warfare, and of genocide.
Finally, the most advanced of the three stages is world-centric. Individuals at a world-centric level begin to empathize with all races, ethnicities, and religions. They start to see the big picture, the importance of the whole, identifying with the entire human race. This level is the origin of pluralism, environmentalism, feminism, and universal human rights.
There are even higher stages from there.
Many of the problems that the world faces today — environmental degradation, intense social discord, political disarray, religious war — are due to conflicts between groups and leaders who are at different stages of development. The future of our species depends on our collective growth through and beyond these stages.
In order to grow, we need to overcome our old ways. We need a way to transcend old perceptions.
Psychedelics have a powerful ability to help people experience that kind of transcendence and level up. The evidence of this is clear — humans who have consumed these hallucinogens are more likely to see others’ perspectives, less likely to buy into absolutism, more likely to sense the importance of the natural environment, and a whole lot more.
States become traits, as they say. After a powerful psychedelic experience, it’s important to bring the insights back into your daily life. One properly integrated psychedelic experience can massively change a person’s life for the better. From there- it can transform a group, perhaps even a society.
Psychedelics are a moral urgency because we need rapid advances in human development and consciousness more than ever. The human race is militarily and technologically more powerful than ever, and we will drive ourselves off a cliff without proper discretion. Our environment will collapse, civilizations will go to war, or even worse. Psychedelics can allow us to see these things more clearly, but more importantly, they empower us to respond in creative and productive ways. We can build social impact startups and non-profits, launch advocacy campaigns, create radical new projects, and more. These ideas come from individual transcendence. From newly awakened leaders.
The psychedelic experience is one of the most important tools we have to develop ourselves and think creatively about global problems. As individuals, we can find our role to play in the broader human experience. When we concentrate on our personal development, we realize that we DO have the power to take responsibility for the common good of humanity.
Self
It took me some time to develop the courage to write this essay and share it publicly. Last month, I realized that this topic is far too critical for me to let it sit. I concluded that there are people around me who can dramatically stand to benefit from the use of psychedelics, and I needed to share my research and opinions vocally. So here we are.
I started experimenting with psychedelics several years ago, and it has significantly changed my life for the better. With psychedelics, I have engaged in intense emotional healing and learned to understand my talents, idiosyncrasies, and weaknesses at far more profound levels. I look at reality and the world in radically different ways and have found a way to integrate my spiritual intuitions with practical and analytical functions. I have strengthened my identity in enormous ways.
I’m enthusiastic about these drugs, but I also recognize that there are risks. They need to be taken seriously, and with caution. For beginners, they should only be taken in quiet settings (ideally in nature) with close friends.
There is also the factor of the legality. Psychedelics are still illegal, so be careful.
I find that occasional use of psychedelics gives me a dramatic edge in running my water technology startup and serving in leadership formy Burning Man camp. Microdosing — taking sub-perceptual amounts of LSD or mushrooms and engaging in regular day-to-day activities — is especially useful as a tool for productivity and emotional regulation.
I’ve also experienced vivid moments of electric transendence beyond anything I could have previously conceived.
This essay is my first step in “coming out” as psychedelic. It is the beginning of my pursuit of a path in psychedelic advocacy, ideally in the public sphere. I sincerely believe that we need more educated voices who are speaking up about this stuff, and I’m going to do my best to support organizations like MAPS in their efforts for clinical testing and eventual legalization.
Part of my fear of publishing this essay was the career risk that it might present for me. There are still plenty of parties that look skeptically upon this topic.
To those people, I say the following: your organization is dealing with intractable problems. You have challenges that you don’t know how to solve. Maybe you have ambitious business goals and are looking for a competitive edge.
If you discriminate against people who use psychedelics, you are closing the door on a deep talent pool that can help you solve those problems. In other words — you’re missing out, and your competitors will get them.
If you haven’t tried psychedelics before, but are just feeling blocked, stuck, or lost in life, I’d like to challenge you: give them a try. Start with small doses of LSD or mushrooms.
I am PSYCHED to be publishing this essay. The timing feels right, and I’m hoping to make as much of a positive difference as I can.
So it begins: my mission in psychedelic advocacy starts now. Let’s get this going.
For further reading:
Websites:
Books:
The Acid Test — Tom Shroder
A Theory of Everything — Ken Wilber
Food of the Gods- Terence Mckenna
Narconomics- Tom Wainwright
The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide — James Fadiman
How to Change Your Mind — Michael Pollan
