Eric Wahlforss
Perhaps we’ve been going about this all wrong.
For as long as people of progressive political bent have existed, we’ve believed that the best way to spread our ideas was to talk openly and earnestly about them. This might involve writing a letter to the editor, sharing thoughts at a public event, or getting into an exchange with the guy who comes to fix the furnace wearing a “MAGA” hat.
It’s a lot of work, and it fails as often as it succeeds. But maybe there’s a better way. Maybe we should just encourage our fellow citizens to take psychedelic mushrooms and drop acid.
Author Michael Pollan broaches this subject in his groundbreaking new book, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, and Transcendence. As part of his research, he personally samples a range of psychedelic drugs, including LSD (a compound synthesized from a type of fungus), psilocybin (derived from a mushroom), 5-MeO-DMT (the venom of the Sonoran Desert toad) and ayahuasca (a tea made of Amazon basin plants).
Maybe we should just encourage our fellow citizens to take psychedelic mushrooms and drop acid.
Pollan, sixty-three, whose previous works include The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and In Defense of Food, explores the potential of these drugs to expand consciousness, fight addiction, make terminally ill people more accepting of death, and improve mental health. There’s even a brief mention of how psychedelics can influence people’s political perspectives.
“Was it that hippies gravitated to psychedelics, or do psychedelics create hippies,” the book quotes one neuroscientist asking. “Nixon thought it was the latter. He might have been right!”
Pollan says the neuroscientist, Robin Carhart-Harris, bases his speculation on his belief that certain drugs have “the power to overturn hierarchies in the mind and sponsor unconventional thinking that has the potential to reshape users’ attitudes toward authority of all kinds; that is, the compounds may have a political effect.”
Carhart-Harris, the head of psychedelic research at Imperial College London, is one of a surprisingly large number of scientists who have been quietly administering these drugs at laboratories around the world. Much of this research was shut down several decades ago when LSD became associated with the counterculture, but it has since quietly revived. Psychedelics have shown great promise in the treatment of addiction, depression, PTSD, and obsessive compulsive disorder.
These and other problems, Pollan explains, are caused by habitual and ingrained thought processes, which are governed by what is known as the “default mode network”—the part of the brain that contains the ego. A good psychedelic journey with an expert guide in a controlled setting can pull people out of their ruts, and help break destructive patterns of thinking.
Pollan, in How to Change Your Mind, also posits benefits to people who do not suffer from any identifiable form of mental illness. Drugs can create a mystical experience—a descriptor which is his view does not depend on notions of deity or the supernatural—that open up new ways of thinking and behaving.
For instance, Pollan relates, Carhart-Harris believes the use of psychedelics might “subtly shift people’s attitudes toward nature, which also underwent a sea change in the 1960s. When the influence of the DMN [default mode network] declines, so does our sense of separateness from our environment.”
Carhart-Harris’s team at Imperial College tested volunteers on their “nature relatedness,” as measured by their rate of agreement with such statements as, “I am not separate from nature, but a part of nature.” Those who took psychedelic drugs had higher scores, no pun intended.
The lifetime use of psychedelics positively predicted liberal political views, openness and feeling connected to nature.
This research was published last year in the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs in an article titled, “Psychedelics, Personality, and Political Perspectives.” According to the abstract, the lifetime use of psychedelics (but not cocaine or alcohol) “positively predicted liberal political views, openness and nature relatedness, and negatively predicted authoritarian political views.”
The scientists recommended further work to explore the link between “peak psychedelic experience and openness to new experiences, egalitarian political views, and concern for the environment.”
Pollan, in his book, expresses his hope that “the kinds of experiences I’ve had on psychedelics will not be limited to sick people and will someday become more widely available.” One of the experts he interviews imagines a network of treatment centers where people can go for structured sessions, a kind of full flowering of the current underground network of medical professionals and shamanistic guides that Pollan describes in his book .
Asked in a recent interview whether the current U.S. President fit the bill of someone whose rigid thought patterns might merit a trip or two, Pollan replied:
“For sure. But would he benefit from it? I don’t know. I think you have to have a certain level of insight, an openness, a certain willingness to consider other ways of being or be self-critical in a sense. I think you need a certain amount of openness to use the experience.”
Bill Lueders is managing editor of The Progressive.