What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us about Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence
Change Your Mind?
How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence.
Michael Pollan
Penguin Books, 2018
Paperback, 465 pages
Review by Joe Szimhart, July 2019
Michael Pollan is known for best sellers about food and culture (Cooked; The Omnivore’s Dilemma) but in this four-year study he tackles ingested substances that do far more than nourish our bodies. Psilocybin, mescaline, LSD, ayahuasca, DMT and similar tryptamines found in plants and animals (toad venom) have been classed as medicines, hallucinogens, entheogens, and recreational drugs. Pollan does a masterful job covering the history and use and abuse of these drugs, especially since the 1950s. Pollan is not the first author to cover this controversial territory, but he is one of the first to carefully and personally explore the revival of psychedelics as therapeutic medicines in scientific research. His exploration includes accounts of ‘trips” he took in recent years to better grasp the psychedelic effect on human perception and transcendence. Michael Pollan (born 1955) is a professor of writing and journalism at Harvard University and Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
My interest in this topic goes back the late 1960s when I ingested some of the psychedelics mentioned in How to Change Your Mind. More so, in 2018 I presented a talk about “entheogens and entactogens use in cults” at an International Cultic Studies Association conference in Philadelphia. Pollan’s research may have been familiar reading, but his insights drew me to purchase the book after browsing through it at an airport kiosk. Unlike medicines in legal pharmacies and street drugs (opioids, sedatives, and amphetamines), psychedelics penetrate mystical and spiritual realms of human experience. Pollan describes how the transcendent psychedelic experience, with most uses, dissolves and reconstructs our neurological “default mode network” that keeps us intact as a person. The “self” is but a construct and does not exist as we learn in Buddhist teaching and while tripping on LSD. That self will return after the tryptamines wear off for most users. Indeed, I knew several peers in the late 1960s who ended up in mental hospitals after using a psychedelic once. I knew one student who felt de-personalized for over a year after several LSD sessions: “Joe, I died. I’m not here,” he told me one day before class. Cult gurus might call his dilemma enlightenment. Me, I got bored with psychedelics after four sessions, no longer impressed by my mystical insights and dissolution of my reality. My mundane world is sacred enough. As Pollan reminds us, the profound insights expressed—I am one with the universe or love is all there is—appear to be trite and banal outside of a psychedelic experience. But the transcendent experience cannot be denied and therein lies the therapeutic value for those who feel stuck in the mud of existence.
The psychedelic experience of transcendence reduces judgement about good and evil, relieves fear of death, and offers a sense of feeling born-again after the “trip” ends. Awful (awe filled) oneness with the universe and God are common reports by trippers. The mythical Adam and Eve ate something in Eden that did the same for them: And their eyes were opened, and they knew (Genesis 3:7). Forgiveness of self and empathy with others increases. The awareness that the moment and environment in which we exist are sacred increases. Lives are transformed, at least temporarily. One trip can mark one’s soul and mind for life. No other medicine or therapy, including Holotropic Breathing and electroconvulsive therapy, can do that as well in one session. That is why scientists and governments have revisited the potential of psychedelics to treat severe addiction, end of life anxiety, and chronic depression. And Pollan tells us that no one wants to repeat the egotistical cult approaches to psychedelics of Al Hubbard (not L Ron), Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, or Charles Manson.
Pollan reports that before 1959, Gary Grant participated in sixty LSD therapy sessions and he said it made him a better person and actor. Robert F. Kennedy argued in 1966 to salvage LSD as a medicine for research but the government placed it on a schedule as illegal in 1968 anyway. Kennedy witnessed the dramatically positive effect one LSD therapy session had on his mentally ill wife Ethel Kennedy. The question I keep in mind as I write is this: Can a psychedelic therapy session help struggling, anxious ex-cult members recover a more meaningful sense of being? I will not pretend to answer this, but I will offer my opinion at the end of this review. Pollan mentioned the Council on Spiritual Practices (CSP) founded by Bob Jesse in 1993 that developed and promoted a “Code of Ethics for Spiritual Guides” that many underground spiritual guides have adopted and lately informs new scientific research in psychedelic therapy. “Set and setting” emerged as crucial for safe and meaningful psychedelic experience since and because of the heady days of experimentation by Tim Leary and Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters. Psychedelics increase transcendence but can also increase suggestibility and damaging experiences in the wrong setting or with the wrong guru or guide. Ask former followers who tripped with Charles Manson or Fred “Zen Master Rama” Lenz. “CSP supported the suit that resulted in the 2006 Supreme Court decision recognizing ayahuasca as a sacrament in the UDV Church” (p 416). Uniāo do Vegetal is a Christian spiritist sect founded in 1961 in Brazil. Cary Grant fortunately took LSD in ethical “set and setting” circumstances.
Pollan, an admitted materialist and atheist going into this research who remained so after, had only one psychedelic experience in his youth with psilocybin mushrooms for reference. During his research he partook of several psychedelics with appropriate guides. His descriptions and memory of these experiences reveal as much about Pollan as they do about the chemical effects that anyone can expect. And that is the point of the psychedelic story as a drug therapy: It is more than mere treatment of a symptom or a mood. You might encounter God or as William Blake wrote: To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour (Auguries of Innocence, written in 1803).
Underground spiritual guides fear that the medicalization of psychedelics might continue to criminalize the sacred value those substances have for making well folks “better.” Is it a sacrament or recreation? Is recreational use of Prozac or LSD ethical? Arguments for the sacred ayahuasca session, for example, continue to struggle with the line we draw between sacred and recreational. Spiritual tourism is a real thing as wealthy seekers travel to Amazonian jungles to trip with modernized shamans. Set and setting have changed. Americans do not speak tribal languages and they do not live in jungles hunting monkeys with blowguns. Pollan’s ayahuasca session—his last psychedelic journey—was with a woman in her eighties who had trained under Leo Zeff (died 1988) who was one of the earliest underground psychedelic therapists. Pollan does not reveal the location or the name of his guide, but I assume it was in America with an American.
People who volunteer for psychedelic therapy in research clinics tend to struggle with addiction, depression, and anxiety disorders because those clinics are not interested in making well people better or more spiritual. Big Pharma has little interest in investing in psychedelic therapy research. Why would they? Magic mushrooms grow wild, LSD is not new, and one session can radially “heal” someone unlike the newest class of anti-depressants since Prozac that have little more effect if any than placebo. Big Pharma is interested in therapies that require hundreds if not thousands of doses to manage pain, mood, and anxiety. In the end, taking a trip with a psychedelic is a personal choice. We learn from Pollan that intent carries a lot of weight during the psychedelic journey though surprises will occur. He was surprised how meaningful each session was despite his preliminary fear—the night of anxiety before every session—of losing his mind or remaining crazy after the trip. The medicine wanted him to be well or so it seemed.
Our relationship with psychedelics goes back thousands of years but we are yet learning from them. Would it be a good idea for a struggling ex-cult member to try a psychedelic therapy session? Probably not, but Pollan’s book would be a good primer for anyone who might consider that choice. He cautions us to understand the limits. Quoting Tom Insel, MD, the former head of the National Institute of Mental Health, on page 398: “There may be lots of promise here, but it’s really easy to forget about issues related to safety, issues related to rigor, issues related to reputational risks.”