Information from an external source
In the meantime, I Marcel, has already written a lot about why psychedelics are a very strong remedy against various psychological disorders and that the overall acceptance of these "drugs", which means medicine in English, is still low at the moment, but will become better accepted as soon as the medical value is recognized. I have translated the message below from VOX.com so that you also get information from another source. In the source below, ayahuasca is mainly discussed as illegal psychedelic drugs, where we use legal psilocybin-containing truffles. Psilocibyne from mushrooms and truffles works in almost the same way as DMT from ayahuasca.
Read more about the here differences between ayahuasca and psilocybin-containing mushrooms and/or truffles.
The extraordinary therapeutic potential of psychedelic drugs, explained
I spent months talking to psychedelic guides and researchers. This is what I learned;
I was suddenly “on” on the second night of the ayahuasca ceremony.
As a teenager I saw myself melting into particles and eventually disappearing completely. I took off my sleep mask and saw the people around me shape-shifting into shadows. I thought I was dying, or maybe I was losing my grip on reality.
Suddenly Kat, my guide, appeared and started singing to me. I couldn't make out the words, but the cadence was soothing. After a minute or two the fear washed away and I went back to sleep peacefully.
The 12 of us—nine women and three men—who took ayahuasca at a private home in San Diego were led by two trained guides: Kat and her partner, whom I'll call Sarah because she requested anonymity for legal reasons. Together they have more than 20 years of experience with psychedelics, including ayahuasca, a plant-based mixture that contains the natural hallucinogen known as DMT.
Kat (her full name is Tina Kourtney) and Sarah work in a different city every month or so as a team serving up psychedelic medicine. Their primary role is to create a space where everyone feels safe enough to drop their emotional guards and open up to the drugs' potential to change their attitudes, mood, and behavior.
There is a lot of discomfort in these ceremonies, especially for people who have never experimented with psychedelics. The fear of what you might see or feel can be overwhelming. But guides like Kat are your haven in the storm. When things get turbulent, they respond with a steady, calm hand.
Although psychedelic drugs remain illegal, guided ceremonies or sessions take place across the country, especially in major cities such as New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Self-guidance has become a viable profession, both underground and above, as more Americans seek safe, structured environments to use psychedelics for spiritual growth and psychological healing. This new world of psychedelic therapy works as a kind of parallel mental health care. Access to the program remains limited, but it is evolving faster than you might expect.
A majority of Americans now support the legalization of marijuana, and while a 2016 public opinion poll on psychedelics suggested they were not as beneficial, it is possible that attitudes will change as research findings about their therapeutic potential enter the mainstream. (Author Michael Pollan's 2018 book How to Change Your Mind, about his own experiences with psychedelics, helped spread the word.)
But what would a world where psychedelics are legal look like? And what kind of cultural structures would we need to ensure that these drugs are used responsibly?
Psychedelic drugs like LSD seeped into American society in the 1960s, and the results were mixed at best. They certainly revolutionized culture, but ultimately they left us with draconian drug laws and a cultural backlash that pushed psychedelics into the underground.
Today, however, a renaissance is underway. At institutions such as John Hopkins University and New York University, clinical trials of psilocybin as a therapy for treatment-resistant depression, drug addiction and other anxiety disorders are showing promising results.
In October, the Food and Drug Administration took the extraordinary step of giving psilocybin therapy for depression a “breakthrough therapy” designation. That means the treatment has shown so much potential that the FDA has decided to accelerate the development and review process. It's a sign of how far research and public perception of psychedelics have come.
It is because of these advances that we need to think seriously about what comes next and how we would integrate psychedelics into the broader culture. I've spent the past three months talking to guides, researchers, and therapists who train clinicians for psychedelic therapy. I have participated in underground ceremonies and I have spoken to people who claim to have overcome their drug addiction after a single psychedelic experience.
Our current laws allow some toxic addictive substances and drugs, including booze and cigarettes. These are drugs that destroy lives and fuel addictions. And yet one of the most striking things about the recent (limited) psychedelic research is that the psychedelics do not appear to be addictive or have adverse effects when a guide is involved. Many researchers believe that these medications, when used under the supervision of trained professionals, could revolutionize mental health care.
Cultural movements
The countercultural movement of the 1960s was transformational in many ways.
It has catalyzed the environmental movement, the civil rights movement, contemporary feminism and the anti-war movement, among others. But it also produced a decades-long backlash against psychedelic drugs that until recently made it nearly impossible to conduct clinical research.
It wasn't until 1960 that psychedelics were fully legal and widely considered a promising line of psychological research. But just a few years later, the political and cultural winds had shifted so dramatically that the country was in full panic mode over psychedelics. In 1965, the federal government banned the production and sale of all psychedelic drugs, and soon after, the companies that made these research drugs stopped production.
Michael Pollan accounts for this in detail in How to Change Your Mind (a book I highly recommend), but the short version is that psychedelics could never escape the shadow of the countercultural revolution they created.
Timothy Leary, the apostate psychologist and psychedelic evangelist who told children to “turn on, tune in, and break down,” is the well-known scapegoat. Leary, the argument went, was too reckless, too confrontational and too scary for the mainstream. Leary was such a threat that at one point he was called "the most dangerous man in America" by President Richard Nixon.
But scapegoating Leary is too easy and hardly the only cause. The culture just wasn't ready for psychedelics in the '60s. The experiences these drugs induce are so powerful that they can amount to a kind of rite of passage. But when they appeared on the scene, the population had no experience of them, no idea of their significance. As Pollan told me in an interview earlier this year, “Young people were having such a radically new kind of experience that the culture couldn't handle it.”
Psychedelics were unleashed so quickly that there were no cultural structures to absorb them, no manual or norms around them. Cultures around the world – from the ancient Greeks to the indigenous cultures of the Amazon – have been taking psychedelics for thousands of years, and each developed rituals for them, led by experienced guides. With no established community in the US, people were left to fend for themselves. When you combine this with a general ignorance of the drugs themselves, it's not surprising that things went wrong.
But a lot has changed since the '60s. The political and cultural landscape is radically different and much more receptive to psychedelics. Rick Doblin, a long-time psychedelic doctor and the founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), made an interesting point to me when I recently sat down with him in Washington DC. (MAPS is a nonprofit research and education organization committed to promoting the safe use of psychedelics.)
“In the 60s,” he said, “the psychedelic counterculture was a direct challenge to the status quo… it was about abandoning the culture. Today, things like yoga and mindfulness meditation are fully integrated into popular culture. We integrated spirituality and all these things that were so strange and alien in the 1960s. So we've been culturally preparing for this for 50 years. “
At the same time, psychedelics can also play a role in addressing newer health threats such as the opioid crisis. (70,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses in 2017, more than the total number of Americans who died in Vietnam.) They are used to treat populations such as veterans with PTSD, or cancer patients facing mortality, or those struggling with depressive disorders.
Psychedelics become tools for healing rather than a threat to the social order. And the scientists and organizations and training institutes leading the way are working within the system to reduce the potential for backlash. This is very different from the approach in the 1960s, and so far it has been a success.
Your mind on psychedelics
Psilocybin has been the drug of choice for most researchers in recent years for several reasons. First, it has less cultural baggage than LSD and so study participants are more willing to work with it. Psilocybin also has strong safety data based on studies conducted before the ban, which is why the FDA has allowed a small number of small clinical trials to proceed.
Although the most recent studies are still preliminary and the sample size is quite small, the results so far are compelling. In a 2014 Johns Hopkins study, 80 percent of smokers who participated in psilocybin treatment remained completely abstinent six months after the trial. By comparison, the smoking cessation trial using Varenicline (a prescription medication for smoking addiction) has a success rate of about 35 percent.
In a separate 2016 study on cancer-related depression or anxiety, 83 percent of 51 participants reported a significant increase in well-being or satisfaction six months after a single dose of psilocybin. (67% said it was one of the most meaningful experiences of their lives.)
A typical psilocybin session lasts anywhere from four to six hours (compared to 12 hours with LSD), but it produces lasting reductions in depression and anxiety in patients. That's why researchers like Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins believe psychedelics are a completely new model for treating serious psychiatric conditions. Conventional treatments such as antidepressants do not work for many patients and can have numerous side effects.
This is a big reason why many researchers believe that psychedelics will eventually be moved by the FDA (more on this below) and legalized for medical use – although the timeline on this is far from clear. In November, officials in Oregon approved a 2020 ballot measure that would allow medical professionals to perform psilocybin-assisted therapy. If successful, Oregon would be the first state to let licensed therapists administer psilocybin. Other states such as California will likely follow suit.
To learn more about the broad medical potential of psychedelics, I recommend reading my colleague German Lopez's 2016 review of the science. Here I wanted to focus on how psilocybin works and why it is so powerful for the people who take it. To understand the clinical side, I traveled to Johns Hopkins to sit down with Alan Davis, a clinical psychologist, and Mary Cosimano, a research coordinator and trained guide. Both help lead the psilocybin sessions at Hopkins.
Researchers at Hopkins have worked with a number of populations since receiving FDA approval to study psilocybin in 2000 – healthy adults without any mental health problems, cancer patients suffering from anxiety and depression, smokers and even seasoned meditators.
An important part of the process at Hopkins is what they call “life review.” Before they deliver the medicine, they want to know who you are, where you are in your life, and what types of emotional or psychological walls you have built around yourself. The idea is to work with patients to identify what is holding them back in their lives and explore how they can overcome it.
Davis and Cosimano both say that psilocybin has benefited every population they have worked with. “It's not for everyone,” Cosimano said, “but for the right person at the right time, it can be positively transformative.” (They don't accept patients on the psychosis spectrum – it's just too dangerous.)
The psilocybin sessions are intense and in some cases last all day. The rooms they use are a strange mix of boring doctor decoration and New Age decoration. There is a vanilla-colored sofa covered with embroidered cushions and draped on both sides by South American art. Near the sofa, on a side table, is a ceremonial cup and mini sculptures of mushrooms; it's not quite an altar, but it might as well be.
The most important thing, Cosimano and Davis say, is to make the patient as comfortable as possible. They even encourage people to bring personal items, or letters from loved ones, or basically anything with deep emotional resonance. Like the underground guides, researchers do everything they can to create a safe psychological space.
Sessions can unfold in multiple directions depending on the depth of the experience (which is difficult to predict) and the mental state of the individual. Patients usually lie on the couch with a sleeping mask over their eyes. Cosimano, Davis and other clinical guides work as guides – holding the patient's hand and helping them process what they see and what it means. “I'm never bored here,” Cosimano told me. “Every session is different, every experience is different and I'm just blown away because I get to experience each person's journey.”
Yet it is not entirely clear to scientists what it is about these experiences that trigger such profound changes in attitude, mood and behavior. Is it a feeling of awe? Is it what the American philosopher William James called the "mystical experience," something so overwhelming that it shatters the authority of everyday consciousness and changes our perception of the world? In any case, what is clear is that psychedelic journeys often transcend the boundaries of language.
The best metaphor I've heard to describe what psychedelics do to the human mind comes from Robin Carhart-Harris, a psychedelic researcher at Imperial College London. He said we should think of the mind as a ski slope. Every ski slope develops grooves as more and more people come down the hill. As these grooves deepen over time, they become more difficult to ski around.
Like a ski slope, Carhart-Harris argues, our minds develop patterns as we sail around the world. These patterns become harder as you get older. After a while, you stop realizing how conditioned you've become – you just respond to stimuli in predictable ways. Ultimately, your brain becomes what Michael Pollan aptly calls an "insecurity-reducing machine," obsessed with securing the ego and locked in uncontrollable loops that reinforce self-destructive habits.
Taking psychedelics is like shaking the snow globe, Carhart-Harris said. It disrupts these patterns and unleashes cognitive barriers. It also works with what's called the Default Mode Network (DMN), the part of the brain associated with mental chatter, self-recording, memories and emotions. Every time you feel anxious about the future, or worry about the past, or engage in compulsive self-reflection, this part of the brain lights up. When researchers looked at images of brains on psychedelics, they found that the DMN shut down almost completely.
Think of it this way: you spend your entire life in this body, and because you are always at the center of your experience, you get caught up in your own drama, your own story. But if you pay close attention, for example in a deep meditation practice, you will discover that the experience of the self is an illusion. Yet the sensation that there is a “you” separate and apart from the world is very difficult to shake; it's as if we're programmed to see the world this way.
The only time I have ever been able to cut through this ego structure is under the influence of psychedelics (in my case ayahuasca). I was able to see myself from the outside, to see the world from the perspective of nowhere and everywhere at the same time, and suddenly this horror display of self-esteem stopped. And I believe I learned something about the world that I couldn't have learned any other way, something that changed how I think about, well, everything.
At Johns Hopkins, the drug experience is only part of the treatment. Equally important is the therapy that follows. People regularly tell researchers that the psilocybin session is the most personal and spiritually important experience of their lives, including childbirth and the loss of loved ones.
But there is a need, Davis said, “to understand these experiences and bring them into your daily life in a way that doesn't compromise meaning.” This does not necessarily have to be therapy or one-on-one guidance with a guide, but it is crucial to integrate the experience into your daily life, whether that is a new practice such as yoga or meditation, more time in spend time in nature, or simply build new relationships.
The point is that it's not enough to take the ride and move on; it's about establishing new habits, new mental patterns, new ways of being. Psychedelics can kickstart this process, but for many people that's all they can do.
When I returned from my first ayahuasca retreat, I struggled to process what had happened to me. I had no formal help, no instruction, no real support. It's shocking to slide back into your routine after having your inner world turned upside down. I've taken on new practices (like meditation) and that has helped me a lot in keeping me connected to that first encounter with psychedelics, but there are limits to what you can do on your own.
As schools like the California Institute of Integral Studies and psychedelic researchers like NYU's Elizabeth Nielson recognize the need for more integration, they are focusing on training professional therapists to work specifically with psychedelic users. Nielson is part of the Psychedelic Education and Continuing Care program, which does not provide psychotherapy but offers instruction to clinicians who want to learn more about psychedelics.
“People who have used psychedelics or will use psychedelics in the future will need help integrating their experiences, and many will feel safest doing so in a therapist's office,” she told me. “That means we need more therapists who understand these experiences and know how to have these kinds of conversations with patients.”
In the meantime, we've seen a parallel growth in a more informal support system for people experimenting with psychedelics, one that exists primarily underground.
Psychedelics and the underground
For decades, a community of guides has been working quietly in the shadows, ministering psychedelics to people across the country. And they're not that different from their above-ground counterparts – or at least not as different as you might expect. Many of them have spent years interning under traditional healers in places like Peru and Brazil and follow a strict code of conduct to formalize practices and ensure safety.
This was certainly true for Kat, the guide I was with in San Diego. She studied under a Peruvian mentor for eight years and estimates that she has used ayahuasca more than 900 times and led hundreds of ceremonies in Europe and the US.
She calls herself a 'tone setter', someone who controls the room. She usually puts everyone at ease by projecting a calm and reassuring presence. “I take the pulse of the room, and when I have to go to someone, I try to be as grounded as the earth itself — that kind of calm is contagious,” she said. “The most important thing is to be attuned to what is happening and how people are feeling and respond accordingly.”
Her role is a tightrope walk between letting people know what they are going through and intervening when they are too close to the abyss. When everyone is okay, she sits somewhere in the room singing medicine songs and keeping an eye on things. When someone starts to panic, Kat has to talk them down and do it in a way that doesn't overwhelm everyone in the room.
A few months ago she told me that a woman at one of her ceremonies was convinced that demons had taken over her body. She became hysterical and threatened to call 911. Situations like this happen all the time and the guide needs to sort it out right away.
Unlike the clinicians at Hopkins, Kat manages the travels of multiple people at once, sometimes dozens, and that comes with risks. I asked her, why this? Why risk making someone react in ways she can't control, or risk going to jail?
“Because it heals people,” she told me. “I see it every time I have a circle, every time I walk a group of people through this experience. People come in with one perspective and leave with another. Sometimes that means seeing the world with new eyes, and sometimes it means realizing that they are more than their addiction, that their flaws don't define them. “
Kat, now 43, has had many of her own battles. Before discovering ayahuasca on a trip to Peru 13 years ago, she had alcoholism, bulimia and bipolar disorder – at one point attempting suicide. “The drug wasn't a miracle cure,” she said, “but it set me on a different path, and I basically dedicated my entire life to this work.”
She tried traditional therapy for several years, mostly to treat her bipolar disorder and bulimia. When that didn't work, she turned to self-help workshops, from Radical Awakening seminars to Mastery in Transformational Training courses. “I was obsessed with finding some kind of relief,” she told me, “but nothing worked, nothing stuck.”
Everyone who shows up at Kat's ceremonies has their own reason for being there. Some are psychonauts – people who seek to explore altered states of consciousness through the use of psychedelics. Others, like Laura, a 35-year-old woman from Philadelphia, are drawn to plant medicine as a last-ditch effort to overcome an addiction.
In Laura's case, it was a 14-year addiction to heroin. “I was on the brink of death. I tried every conventional method you can think of – detox, counseling, rehab – and nothing worked,” she told me. Eventually, she found ibogaine, a psychedelic compound derived from the roots of a West African shrub. “Ibogaine was like a myth on the street, this miraculous modality that can reset your brain and save you from addiction.”
Laura told me that she finally went to her family and said, “Put a gun in my mouth and pull the trigger or send me to an ibogaine clinic.” They sent her to an ibogaine treatment center just north of Cancun, where she had a few sessions. She has been clean for eight years now.
Ibogaine is not as well researched as psilocybin or LSD, and it is relatively dangerous, but it is one of the most powerful known psychedelic drugs and there is preliminary research that suggests it may be an effective treatment for opioid and cocaine addiction.
Another woman, a 48-year-old from Kansas, whom I'll call April, told me she was addicted to Adderall, a stimulant prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, for 15 years. “It has eaten my entire life – every decision, every plan, basically every moment.” She tried several times to stop, but the withdrawal was too much. On a whim, she decided to look into psychedelics and found her way to Kat's website. A few weeks later she was in a ceremony.
Her first ayahuasca trip was in September, almost three months ago, and she hasn't touched Adderall since. “The experience was rough,” she said. “It was like I was seeing myself and my life through a mirror, and I could see all the masks I wear, how Adderall had become this crutch, this source of false energy that was pushing me through my life. I feel like it has recalibrated my entire being. '
These stories are inspiring, but it is not clear how representative they are. Psychedelics are not a magic elixir and there are physical and psychological risks to taking them indiscriminately, especially if you are on medication or have a psychiatric condition. But when used in a good environment with a trained guide, they can be remarkably therapeutic. (To my knowledge, there are no documented "bad trips" in the research literature.)
Kat believes that this work could be more effective if it were not forced underground. “If this were legal, I would spend more time with people before and after the experience. I would like to build my team and do this above ground like a normal company and take care of the people from start to finish. Because we're in this legal gray area, people often come into the ceremony and are immediately shot back into the world, and that can be traumatic. “
I asked Kat if she noticed a change in the types of people attending her ceremonies. It used to be mostly psychonauts, she told me, but lately it's people, old and young, who want to make peace with mortality or endure deep trauma. She is working with more and more veterans struggling with PTSD, many of whom say they have not found relief in traditional mental health care.
Still, she hesitated when I asked her about legalization. “They should absolutely be legal, but I'm not sure they should be legal tomorrow,” she said. “We need a solid foundation, a way to maintain respect for these medicines. If we lose that, if psychedelics become another substance like marijuana, I worry that we're going to blow this up and burn it out like we did in the '60s.
Kat's concern, shared by many people in this space, is that the ceremonial aspects surrounding psychedelics will be lost if they are legalized overnight. There is nothing inherently wrong with recreational use, but for those who regard psychedelics with a kind of sacred awe, there is a genuine fear that these substances will be trivialized if we don't make this transition wisely.
So how do we integrate psychedelics into culture?
Psychedelics, like all drugs, are used for good or bad outside the safe contexts of research facilities or private sessions with experienced guides. According to Geoff Bathje, a psychologist at Adler University who works with high-trauma patients, the question is: “What kind of harm reduction do we need to protect people?”
Several people I spoke to pointed to the “harm reduction” model. Harm reduction focuses on reducing the risks associated with drug use, as opposed to punitive models that aim to eliminate use altogether. It is a practical and humane approach that has worked well in Portugal, where all drugs for personal use have been decriminalized.
Although the harm reduction model is not usually associated with psychedelics, the principles are all the same.
For Bathje, it's about doing good drug education in the general population, “making sure people understand the risks of psychedelics – how they can be abused, how people can be exploited when under the influence, etc.” There are already national harm reduction groups like Zendo Project, sponsored by MAPS, that focus on peer-to-peer counseling for people experimenting with psychedelics.
Bathje and some of his colleagues have founded a harm reduction group in Chicago, Psychedelic Safety Support and Integration. The goal is to promote safety and help people process their psychedelic experiences. It is a critical container that brings in the community, spreads awareness about the risks associated with psychedelic drug use, and creates a space of connection.
Right now there is a divide between the harm reduction movement and the psychedelic research community. “You go to a psychedelic conference and it's focused on the science and the therapeutic potential,” Bathje said, “and the general assumption is that if we just produce good science, these drugs will be approved as drugs and everything will just fall into place fall ."
“If you attend a harm reduction conference,” he added, “it's all about cultural change and how politicians don't care about the science. The focus is much more on organizing and who has the power and how we can reduce risk and do things safely. “This is partly why the harm reduction movement can be useful for psychedelics. Science may be critical to legalization, but public health programs should help integrate these drugs into the broader culture.
Harm reduction groups like Bathje's and the Zendo Project are the best models we have for this kind of integration, and we should scale them up if psychedelics are legalized for medicinal use.
There are reasons to be cautious, but we should welcome the evolution of psychedelic research
After months of thinking about these issues and talking to people involved at almost every level, I am convinced that the new culture of therapeutic psychedelics is evolving rapidly. Just this week, a group of citizens in Denver collected enough signatures to pass a ballot measure decriminalizing magic mushrooms in the spring.
As Rick Doblin noted, the social and political environment today is very different than it was in the 1960s, and there is no reason to suspect a similar response. The cultural containers and knowledge are there, and they could increasingly be brought out of the shadows.
What this transition will look like on a larger scale and how long it will take is less clear. Advocates like Doblin seem wise to continue playing the long game. Given the progress of research, it is possible that psilocybin will be reclassified within the next three years from a schedule 1 drug (drugs with no known medical value) to a schedule 4 drug (drugs with a low risk of abuse and a known medical value). or four years.
However, the process of rescheduling medications is a bit confusing. Under federal law, the U.S. attorney general can decide to reschedule drugs, but they must first gather data and medical research from the secretary of health and human services before doing so. Congress can also pass laws to change drug scheduling and can override an attorney general if they wish.
It is unlikely that we will make much progress on this front under the current administration, but the political winds may shift quickly, especially if the investigation continues apace. That the Drug Enforcement Agency is already comfortable with the possibility of rescheduling psychedelics is a very positive sign.
“We are pleased that the investigation is moving forward at institutions like Johns Hopkins,” Rusty Payne, the DEA spokesman, told me in a telephone interview. “When the scientific and medical community comes to the DEA and says, 'This should be a drug, this should be reclassified as a schedule 4 or 5 instead of a schedule 1'; then we will act accordingly. “
Support for psychedelics is also one of those rare issues that can, in some cases, cut across conventional political lines. Rebekah Mercer, the billionaire Republican financier and co-owner of Breitbart, has donated $ 1 million to MAPS to fund their studies focused on veterans with PTSD. As research continues, we may see more bipartisan support like this.
A major remaining question has to do with access. If you spend any time in the psychedelic subculture, you can't help but notice that it is mostly made up of privileged white people. This is largely a product of who holds these spaces, how much they cost (from $600 to over $1,000 per session), where they are held and the networks of people who support them. The fact that many people simply do not know about the therapeutic potential of psychedelics is another barrier. All of this needs to change, and hopefully it will when psychedelics aren't relegated to the underground.
Within the psychedelic community itself, there are concerns about commodification. Companies such as Compass Pathways are trying to turn psilocybin into a pharmaceutical product. (Compass's psilocybin study is the one that received breakthrough therapy approval from the FDA in October.)
Compass started as a non-profit venture with an interest in starting a psychedelic hospice center, but has since pivoted to a for-profit approach. With major investors like Peter Thiel behind it, Compass can dominate the medical supply chain of psychedelics, from synthesis to therapy. It also hampers the research efforts of nonprofits like Usona that are developing their own psychedelic drugs. If the market is monopolized, or if a few pharmaceutical companies control critical patents, many people could be priced out of entry.
Despite all these concerns, we should welcome the evolution of psychedelic research. We need larger studies and we need to include more diverse populations to learn as much as possible about how these drugs work. Richard Friedman, a clinical psychiatrist at Cornell University, told me, “I'm all for optimism, but show me the data. I embrace the enthusiasm for the therapeutic potential of psychedelics...but whether it is warranted will be the answers. And nothing but the data. “
So far the data is encouraging, but there is still much we don't understand. But we know enough to say that psychedelics are powerful tools for reducing suffering for some people. And we simply don't have enough of these tools to justify their ban.