 I think there's a lot of existential angst and psychedelics have, for millennia, represented hope in transition moments. Erica Dick is a professor at the University of Saskatchewan who studies the history of psychedelics with a special interest in the legacy of Humphrey Osmond, the British-born psychiatrist who coined the term psychedelic, gave Aldous Huxley his first dose of mescaline and conducted pathbreaking work using LSD to help alcoholic stop drinking. Among Osmond's best-known patients was Bill W, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. Reason sat down with Dick at the Psychedelic Science 2023 conference held in Denver this June where a reported 13,000 people gathered to talk about all aspects of today's psychedelic renaissance. We talked about why drugs such as MDMA, psilocybin and LSD are making a comeback, how tensions are rising between Indigenous people and medical practitioners, and whether prohibitionists have finally lost the war on drugs. What does the psychedelic renaissance mean to you? I'm a historian who's been studying the psychedelics for over 20 years, and so the psychedelic renaissance is actually kind of a confusing term because it's quite new. And yet it invokes this sort of deep history and this really deep cultural transformation. And as a historian, I guess I'm a little bit nervous about that as to whether or not we've really reached that point where we can call this a renaissance moment. But I'm also really curious about what it means in terms of what we're trying to revive and what we're trying to resurrect from the past that might be worthwhile in terms of sort of charting a psychedelic future. And I think there's rich opportunity to think about some of the different ways that psychedelics and psychedelic thinking has really come to bear meaning in this historical moment. Well, let's talk about the LSD was synthesized in 1938. It started getting used about 60 years ago, right? 43, whatever, I'm an English major. But then in the 50s and 60s, there was this first moment where psychedelics were being used in a wide variety of contexts wide variety of reasons. What are the lessons that we should be learning from that moment? Yeah, this kind of awakening moment when the word psychedelic is first coined and kind of coalesces around a variety of medical experimentation is this awakening moment, I think for psychedelics in the 20th century. And yet there were lots of challenges in that moment prior to the kind of countercultural uptake of these substances as well. Challenges in how to measure experience, whose experiences matter, who should we draw those experiences from, whether it's indigenous communities, or midwives, or even spiritualists and people working on paranormal questions with respect to psychedelics. And I think we haven't really answered that question. And then as psychedelics moved underground, those questions lay dormant. And there's a tendency, I think, to kind of push against the past and suggest that now we're doing it anew or in a fresh way. But I like the concept of renaissance that also reminds us to think about what we missed in the past and maybe resurrecting some of those pieces. So I think that kind of wild landscape for experimentation of the 1950s is something we should embrace here again. Can you talk about Humphrey Osmond, who's the guy who coined the term psychedelic, skipped around the globe, ended up in Canada where he was doing a lot of this work. What is his contribution or what is his role to the psychedelic, I guess, moment in the 50s? But then what should we be learning from him now? Humphrey Osmond is such a fascinating character, not only for deeply investing in the word itself, psychedelic, which is to bring light to the psyche or delos to bring to light. We introduced it in 1956 by saying to fathom hell or sore angelic, you'll need a pinch of psychedelic. It's the first uttering of it. It's like an advertising jingle. It is a bit. And he played around with this concept and you can find different rhyming couplets online and Aldous Huxley, his friend, came up with his own sort of matches. But I think when I interviewed Humphrey Osmond in the early 2000s, the conversation around psychedelics was quite different at that time and he wasn't getting, his phone wasn't ringing off the hook. But I asked him what his proudest moment was or what he thought his legacy might be. And these are always awkward questions for people, I think, at the best of times. But what he told me was surprising. He said that he was really proud of helping to found schizophrenics anonymous. And I've been reflecting on that for some time and wondered whether this was because he didn't want to talk about psychedelics in that moment because they were considered taboo. But I actually think there's more to it. I think that for him, like his good friend Aldous Huxley, who wrote Doors of Perception, psychedelics really were a doorway. They were a tool and something he felt helped us to think differently about a whole variety of problems. For him, co-founding schizophrenics anonymous was seeing some kind of dignity in what we today might call neurodiversity and finding peer groups and investing in communities that could think about that was an enduring legacy of psychedelics for him. I think there's something really powerful and reflecting on that and thinking about what psychedelics have to offer us today, whether it's simply getting them across a regulatory line so that they can become medicines or whether by thinking with psychedelics, we might actually think differently about human behavior and neurodiversity and tolerance of all kinds. Yeah, expand a little bit on that. What does it mean to use psychedelics? Is it a way to model different states of kind of normal human consciousness so that we instead of saying, okay, here there are three ways of doing it right, now there's a hundred? Yeah, I think, I mean, Osmond was criticized for investing in what he thought of as a model psychosis by using masculine and later LSD and then later again. At the time, sometimes they were called psychotomimetics? Exactly. So mimicking psychosis. And he wrote about that quite extensively in the early 1950s, suggesting that staff should be taking psychotomimetics, that staff should be experiencing what he described as kind of an empathetic pathway or a way to empathize with their patients. And we've got to remember that in the 1950s, throughout much of the Western world, patients with schizophrenia were in institutions. And here he was the superintendent of one of the largest institutions in Western Canada with 4,000 patients and just over 2,000 beds. So he was dealing with this Herculean task of trying to reform psychiatry. And for him, trying to understand those patients who he felt were difficult to connect with was a really huge insight. So I think that connects with why he thinks this is part of the enduring legacy. Why do you think psychedelics are having such a moment right now? I think that there is a cultural searching for some kind of answers. And if we want to think about it in terms of mental health and unwellness, we've seen a lot of investment in psychiatry, in psychopharmacology, in the mental health industry, if you will. And we have not seen a corresponding decline in the burden of mental health and disease around the world. They're actually running at, you know, at sort of crossroads. Can I ask, do you think, I mean, is that kind of an iatrogenic effect where it's like, well, we have a lot more psychologists and a lot more therapists. So they need work. I mean, are they creating make work projects for themselves? Or is there an actual observable increase in mental illness? I think it's tempting to see this as an iatrogenic problem that the more psychiatrists we have, the more problems we have. But I don't know what it's like here in parts of the United States, but there are long wait lists to see psychiatrists. And there are major problems in gaining access to mental health professionals. So I think, I think it's not as simple as seeing it that way, somewhat unfortunately in many respects. But I think there's a collective kind of existential crisis going on. In the 1950s, there was a Cold War. Nuclear weaponry was just being dispatched. I mean, I think there were real existential reasons why people were anxious. And there was also a corresponding increase in general wealth too, right? Absolutely. So people were bumping up hierarchy of needs. Absolutely. So what, you know, so how, how do psychedelics play into this current moment, which in some ways then reflects a kind of 1950s mentality. People are worried about the end of the world for X, Y and Z reasons. People have a lot of money. People have more time on their hands than they used to because work is easier, etc. How do psychedelics help help us now? Or how should we think about them in this context? I think psychedelics again represent that kind of lusting after some kind of curiosity, something that helps us think outside of the orthodox box or think outside the orthodoxy. And whether psychedelics become a medicine or a way to think with a tool, a doorway, I think they represent a kind of hopefulness right now in a moment when people are grieving from the world being on fire and a pandemic ravaging the globe. I think there's a lot of existential angst and psychedelics have, for millennia, represented hope in transition moments. And I think it's now merging with our western cultural sensitivities around that kind of search and quality that we have. So Osmond and Aldous Huxley had one vision of who should be administering and who should be receiving psychedelics in the 60s between people like Timothy Leary and Ken Keesey and others. That kind of got radically democratized from a kind of more or less priest class or clinician class giving patients something to everybody should be doing it and everybody has a right to do it. How did that shift in the 60s play out to a point where the psychedelic research kind of went dark for a couple of decades? Yeah, I think psychedelic research went dark for a couple of different reasons, one of which was the infighting within the scientific community and efforts to try to define how best to evaluate the risk profile of psychedelics. And this plays into the counterculture in interesting ways because you have other figures like Timothy Leary and Ken Keesey who are, you know, they play a different role in terms of democratizing or liberalizing access to psychedelics, but they do it in a way that we might consider quite reckless, that abandons these concerns for safety, that does not necessarily consider the ethics of whether or not you want to take that much acid at a Grateful Dead concert or with those people. And so you have these two extremes and I think they come together to produce a kind of epic clash, a clash of values but also a clash of trust, trust in social capital if you are trusting the underground suppliers or trust in the scientific community to determine whether or not these are safe substances. And that's all within the psychedelic community. And then, you know, do you buy the narrative that, you know, then, you know, so there's that happening within psychedelics, but then the outside world in the form of governments and whatnot comes in and just says like, okay, it's all over. Yeah, I think there's a lot of really interesting work being done now from, you know, lots of scholars are looking at the prohibition narrative and unpacking the war on drugs to suggest that in fact this is a ruse, that this was a war on people, a war on poverty, a war on race. And I think there's lots of good evidence emerging to suggest that there are some pretty clear lines that, you know, certain communities were policed more heavily. And now this is where the adage comes in that the more police you have, the more crimes you might find. And certainly by dispatching police into certain communities, lots of people went to jail for what we might see today as fairly petty drug crimes. And I think that contributed to some of the kind of disparities that we see in some of the folly of that prohibition narrative that doesn't really add up. So Osmond died in 2004, right? And you were talking about speaking with him, you know, right around that time. And psychedelics were still kind of held in, you know, low repute of, you know, what has happened, what's changed so that they're now, you know, there's, you know, 10,000, 11,000 people at this conference. You know, there are movies and TV shows and bestselling books about psychedelics. Everybody's microdosing. What happened? I think there's a couple of different things that have led to this upsurge in interest in psychedelics since its prohibition and kind of dying out already, you know, recognized in the 1980s and whatnot. And I think one is the poking holes in the war on drugs. We've seen this a lot with cannabis reforms. We've seen a number of lobby efforts to try to pull back that curtain a little bit and change the script on what's dangerous and what's okay to take. We also have a Western world at least that has been introduced to pharmacology in a dramatic way. Everybody has taken some kind of pharmaceutical. We have a different kind of drug literacy. And I think if Marshall McLuhan were here, he would have a lot to say about the global network that we live in with social media and the internet. Now you and I can share our favorite stories or our favorite recipes for sharing information about psychedelics across time and space in a way that was unimaginable in the 1960s. And I think this has also created a kind of cultural upsurge of interest in psychedelics that can't be policed in the same ways. You are really sticking to the Canadians, aren't you? Invoking McLuhan? I did you like that? I just planted that in there. I was going to say something about Wayne Gretzky, but Mark Messier though claims that mushrooms was really what made him an excellent hockey player. I can talk hockey if you need me to. Yeah, I don't know, but I don't know if I have a Steve Nass story. It's been a long time since you wanted a championship, so yeah, no, that's funny. I mean to actually keep in this vein, Canada has a different relationship to alcohol prohibition than the United States does and also to psychedelic and other types of drugs. What's the status of psychedelics in Canada at this point? Currently in Canada, psychedelics are strictly prohibited. They continue to be fully criminalized, although of course, much like places like the United States and a few other jurisdictions, there are clinical trials, there are special exemptions, some of which are patient-based and a few others are physician-initiated. Canada, again, similar to the U.S., there's a tortured history with native populations and native populations often are talked about as people who started using these drugs and whatnot. How is that playing out in Canada and how do you think that informs or should inform discussions about psychedelics being legalized or normalized? There's a lot of talk about the indigenous roots of psychedelics and in Canada, although there are some examples of what's now described as psychedelic plants, there's not as much of a rich history as you find in a few other places and so I think there's a temptation to overplay this or even romanticize it a little bit, but I think going forward regardless of the scale of use, I think there are really important lessons to be taken from when we start thinking about harm reduction. If we sort of skip to the end and imagine a world in which psychedelics are being consumed legally or not, indigenous communities need to be part of that conversation as we think about harm reduction and indigenous ideas about addiction and use have to be incorporated into that, I think. What are the major benefits of a world in which psychedelic use or psychedelics are normalized? The major benefits of a world in which psychedelics are legalized. Or normalized, let's say normalized. It's a big question. I think it should probably cause us to think differently about our traffic laws and it may have to open up a whole variety of different harm reduction communications, maybe about guns and bicycles, but jokes aside, I think working with psychedelics, there's a risk perhaps of taking the magic out of the mushrooms by regulating them too quickly, as we've heard Roland Griffiths warn us about. There's a risk in moving things through and creating just another marketplace for another pharmaceutical. I think there's more that psychedelics have to offer if we let them take their own pace and if we think about the way that psychedelics might help us to imagine different possibilities when it comes to alleviating stress or welcoming neurodiversity. Are you worried that psychedelics are being too much put into a kind of medical model or that they're a therapeutic as opposed to something more expansive? I think that psychedelics have a lot to offer in the therapeutic context, but I think people are going to take psychedelics outside of that therapeutic context and there's a risk of destabilizing their regulation or keeping them sort of within that mainstream conversation without harmonizing these two aspects from the beginning. What do you think are the major impediments to a world in which psychedelics are either normalized or legalized or just more widely used? I think some of the major impediments to legalizing or regularizing psychedelics, I think it's hard to know just yet. I think there's a lot of speculation and of course we use history to try to paint those pictures of people perhaps jumping off of buildings, although that was overplayed, people staring at the sun also overplayed. Some of those risks that become almost laughable now, but there were real risks too. There are real ethical questions to be considered here and I think we need to be really careful and cautious about how we take these steps forward before we have any real clarity on the kinds of risks that are at stake. Talk a little bit more about neurodiversity in a psychedelic context. What do you mean by neurodiversity and how do psychedelics help us either kind of understand or live with that or actually kind of support it? Even though ideas of the model psychosis were later abandoned and there was clear evidence that psychedelics or LSD for example does not produce a schizophrenic-like state, I think the idea that you could empathize with someone going through a psychotic episode was still a powerful concept. Or this idea that maybe there can still be humanity in thinking differently or in having disorganized thoughts and behavior. I think there's still really there are still a lot of lessons to be gleaned there from the empathetic pathways and opening this up to thinking about neurodiversity might be a radically different way of imagining the burden of mental health and illness. Imagine if we thought neurodiversity that people who think differently behave differently was actually part of the spectrum of humanity rather than the spectrum of pathology. Imagine what that would do for changing our healthcare systems or our interventions. I don't think it's necessarily like a simple answer, but I think it's a kind of a radical departure from the ways in which we have been cleaving to a reductionist model that tries to manage deficits and disorders rather than embrace them. Osman towards the end of his life to stick on him was investigating what was called parapsychology. In this movement, broadly speaking, there's one way to think about it, there's a couple of tracks. There's the scientific, materialist, medical research track, and then there's the super woo-woo, like we are touching the face of God. Is that tension a good thing, a bad thing, and where do you fall in those camps? I like to think of myself as an observer of these camps more than a participant with my feet firmly. This is the Canadian in you, obviously. This is my pragmatism, yeah. No, no, pacifist Mennonite. But seriously, I think there's a temptation to think about funding structures. If I want to apply for a grant, I need to speak the language of the reviewers, and that typically means that I'm going to move away from, as you described the woo-woo, or move away from some of the New Age ideas, or some of the parapsychology, or some of the stuff that seems beyond the pale. I think there's information to be gleaned there, and there are relationships to be built that can nourish this conversation, this movement or project, if you will. I don't think everything is going to stick, but I think by clinging to these divisive categories, we're going to miss a lot. I'm not sure that our disciplinary divisions and silos have served us well, and certainly not in this moment. One of the factors that undermine the use, or at least the interest in psychedelics in the late 60s, you mentioned people jumping off, being taking LSD and supposedly jumping off the buildings, dying in the link ladder, the students from various universities who stared into the sun until they burned out their eyes and things like that. Is that kind of story, however real or however kind of manufactured it is, is that the type of thing that would stop what we're seeing now with psychedelics, or what do you think would be the types of events that would shut down all of the movement towards psychedelics? I think it's interesting to imagine what kind of story it would take to stop psychedelics in its tracks right now. There are lots of stories and we have greater access to news media than ever before in terms of pretty horrific things that have happened with or without psychedelics, and lots of times without psychedelics. It's hard to imagine the 2023 version of staring at the sun or some equivalent to that. I worry sometimes that psychedelics might go off the rails by collapsing our faith into particular individuals, rather than seeing this as a more dynamic movement. I say that with some trepidation because I don't want to suggest that anybody has ultimate control, but it does strike me as interesting that there are certain characters and certain individuals who are really pushing this movement. I think the movement is in need of more diversity at this point. Who are those people? Who are they? You want me to name names? Yeah, this doubles as a congressional investigation. Name names. Well, I'm going to back my way into that answer by saying, we recognize certain leaders from the past, whether those are the Humphrey Osmonds and Aldous Huxleys who are described as somewhat elitist in some respects, or the Timothy Leary's who let the genie out of the bottle, or the Ken Keesey who never had the genie in the bottle in first place. When we fast forward to today, and I think there are some key interlocutor figures along the way as well. People like Laura Huxley, people like Stan Groff, we might think of the Shulgens as really important players who kept the psychedelic dream alive in some respects and did the best they could in the context they were working in. And today we have real champions of psychedelics who've got very sort of loud voices in this conversation. It'll be interesting to see how history treats them, whether they are considered objective. So that's somebody like a Michael Pollan would be one? I'd say Rick Doblin. Rick Doblin. Yeah, Michael Pollan. Tim Ferriss. Joe Rogan. We have some loud voices that, and I, you know, amplified voices I should say, not loud, but voices with a lot of social capital in this field. And some are to a greater and lesser degree held in check by things like peer review or controlled trial analogy. And yet the sort of social capital accumulating is really interesting because it kind of moves into new territory. It's not the same as trying to measure the efficacy of psilocybin through randomized controlled trial. You know, Mike Tyson can tell Joe Rogan what he thinks and he influences more people than many of those scientific studies ever will. Let's talk briefly about Bill W and the intersection of psychedelics or LSD in the late fifties and Alcoholics Anonymous. What is the lesson to be learned from that episode where Bill W, the founder, co-founder of AA, talked openly and publicly within the AA newsletters and whatnot about how I am taking LSD and it's really helping me stay off of booze and just become more interesting? What happened with that and what is the lesson to be drawn from that type of episode? I think Bill Wilson's legacy with respect to psychedelics and alcoholism is two-fold. One is that despite being the last member, the last co-founder, he broke the pledge of abstinence to try psychedelics and found it really helpful, particularly for overcoming difficult steps for staying with the program. That's key and I think, you know, helped to serve as a bit of a role model for trying this. But the other part was forging an association with an avowed non-medical intervention provided the addiction studies, the LSD or, sorry, the psychedelic addiction studies with an incredibly important community partnership, a non-medical partnership. This optimized people's results, they stuck with the therapy and they stuck with the follow-up and that integration period cannot be under emphasized. I think that partnership really helped to produce those outrageous results that we saw published, the 70 to 90 percent success rates. It wasn't just psychedelics, it was psychedelics and group therapy. I guess to kind of go back to celebrities or whatnot, you know, around the same period, you know, there are the well-known stories of Carrie Grant, people like Esther Williams, these golden age of Hollywood movie stars who were, you know, I guess in their 50s at the time, suddenly raving about psychedelics. Is that analogous to what we see now when, you know, at this conference, Aaron Rodgers, the football player, the American football player talk, you know, is it similar? You know, and how important is that kind of activity in normalizing something that was a subculture? I think it's interesting to think about the context of celebrity endorsements in the 1950s. I'm not sure that they carried the same kind of gravitas that we can imagine today with the power of social media and the speed and the sort of the pace of information that flows today. But nonetheless, it's important that we know that Ethel Kennedy and Esther Williams and Carrie Grant were treated, some of whom were treated in Canada at this place called Hollywood Hospital, named for the Holly Hawk Bushes, not for Hollywood, but it happened to be a connection, CanCon. And it played me, I was like, I got to say it. I'm not sure that it traveled as much. And in some ways, there are stories particularly emanating from Hollywood Hospital and actually from a number of places along the Pacific Northwest, where some of the celebrities actually were a bit quiet about it until later. Perhaps I think it's an attempt to retain the psychedelic status, but we're quite about it at first in part because they didn't want to admit their alcoholism, or in some cases, other underlying disorders that they felt would compromise their careers as film stars. Is the shift from being a counterculture or an underground culture to an above culture or the culture, what are the big risks involved? Because it seems like psychedelics are coming, you know, they're they're coming up from underground and they're everywhere. People are talking about them. Every, you know, every other candy bar has some kind of mushroom in it, you know, et cetera. Like what, you know, what are the risks and what are the benefits of that kind of shift? I'm really a bit suspicious or skeptical, I should say, about the kind of joining of underground and above ground information. And my impression so far is that those two are not really joining, but they're still a bit at odds with one another, that there's a kind of sanitized or above ground production of knowledge about psychedelics that carries a different kind of weight than some of the underground work. And I think there's a risk in separating those in part because some of the underground work are done by populations who have been criminalized for a long time, and who are not included in trials, and whose evidence and experience is not necessarily forming part of the standard narrative. I think there's a risk of both exacerbating the divisions, but also not integrating psychedelics into the culture in a sustainable way if we ignore the practices of those who've been using it for decades. Can you put a little bit more meat on those bones? What are some of the groups that you're talking about that are, you know, so far underground, you know, and they may never be allowed to be or be recognized above ground? We've seen for decades women working as underground therapists, for example, and some of these knowledge keepers, if you will, or some of these voices are being muted, I think, in the conversation. They didn't subscribe to particular trials. They were doing it all on their own. Let's abandon that information and, you know, sanitize it in some respects. And I think there's a risk there. I think we've also seen some tensions around Indigenous uses of psychedelics, both in terms of where psychedelics grow, so the organics, peyote fields, for example, as well as Indigenous religious practices and the regulated religious practices. There are tensions about what's authentic, what's romanticized, what's appropriated. And I think, you know, sort of pushing past beyond that, I think we need to reconcile with those issues before we sort of figure out how to regulate psychedelics and then go back and reconcile those divisions. Final question, have you used psychedelics personally? And if so, what's your favorite psychedelic? I have two cheeky answers for you. Okay. I defended my PhD in 2005 on the topic of the history of psychedelics, and I was asked this question then, and I was already warned by my supervisor that if I had taken psychedelics, I shouldn't tell anybody because this could compromise my integrity as a researcher. And so I told him, as I walked up the steps to my defense, that I didn't inhale. And he seemed satisfied with this answer, to which I thought, he has not read my dissertation. What I learned from the Shulgens was when Alexander Shulgen or Sasha Shulgen was asked this question, which psychedelic is your favorite, he said, it's the one I haven't discovered yet. And that's always kind of, it's sort of stuck with me as perhaps the one I haven't tried yet, or, you know, finding that, to me, psychedelics represent a kind of hopeful curiosity. And so I'm going to cheekily answer your question by not answering your question. Erica Dick, thanks for talking. Thanks very much.