 LSD stands for Dextralized Surgical Acid Diethyl Amulet, a chemical derived from our fungus. This is not the psychedelic that they're thinking about or that they're having fun with. It kind of power washes you from the inside. This is something that does approximate a natural religious experience. You're taking it, you're minimizing it. You're damaging us. You're erasing our cultures. A gruesome spectacle of how drugs can ruin a brilliant mind. Who does live a life of pleasure and joy? There are a lot of people out there who just want to explore their own consciousness, want to have mystical experiences, and we feel like they should be able to do that. Everywhere around us, there are signs of a psychedelic renaissance in medicine, therapy, commerce, and the arts. These drugs are getting serious positive coverage in glossy magazines, best-selling books, literary memoirs, documentaries, and hit podcasts. I wanted to know what this was like, and so I arranged a series of guided trips. Ayahuasca is usually described as a grandmother spirit, and I met her. Performers like Reggie Watts, Melissa Etheridge, and the members of the Flaming Lips openly acknowledged the role of hallucinogens in their work. I was 16. I experienced LSD for the first time. So much came into perspective. I think the discussion of psychedelics and plant medicine is extremely important. And a flourishing psychedelic comedy scene is springing up all over the place. It kind of means like if someone just threw you out of an airplane, but it gave you a tranquilizer. I guess I'm toppling around through the atmosphere. Nearly every country in the world, including the United States, is a signatory to an international law banning the use, sale, cultivation, and possession of dangerous drugs that have no useful place in medicine. But federal prohibition of psychedelics, a term that refers to a broad category of consciousness and perception-altering substances, is also changing. The Food and Drug Administration is expected to approve therapy using psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms, and MDMA, the drug also known as ecstasy and molly. Oregon and Colorado have already decriminalized the recreational use of plant-based psychedelics. Word is that even the president, famous as a teetotaler for having an addict son, and as a major force behind the half-century long drug war, is very open-minded about medicinal use of psychedelics. The most recent pulsing day-glow sign that the psychedelic renaissance is here took place in Denver in late June at the Psychedelic Science 2023 Conference, organized and hosted by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS. This is about humans helping humans. Founded in the late 80s, MAPS has spent decades working to get FDA approval for MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD and related conditions. At the conference, a reported 13,000 people gathered to talk about what seemed like every possible topic related to the productive use of these substances. According to MAPS founder Rick Doblin, this is not the far-out radical reordering of society envisioned by Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychology lecturer turned psychedelic evangelist. We look at what happened in the 60s, and a lot of the things that came about from the psychedelics were frightening to the culture. Stand still. Reality, man, reality. I could see the center of the earth. In pursuit of mainstream acceptance and to gain the approval of federal regulators and establishment figures, MAPS is emphasizing the medical benefits of psychedelics over their potential to bring spiritual enlightenment and societal transformation. Large pharmaceutical companies have entered the field, putting much-needed capital into research. But they've also stirred controversy by attempting to patent compounds that the grassroots say shouldn't be commercialized because they belong to everyone, especially indigenous communities that use them first. But the biggest takeaway from the MAPS conference is that there's no inherent conflict between the science and spirituality of psychedelics, and that a former Republican governor, a current Democratic governor, religious seekers, tech bros, and unapologetic recreational users can be allies in pursuit of the same goal. This event may be remembered as the beginning of a new psychedelic renaissance with immense potential to radically change therapy, medicine, work, art, and community. Most people aren't prepared to face God, and no matter how religious you think you are, if someone says, come on, would you really like to look right in the eye of God and see where man is and where history is and how trivial and ridiculous and small human nature is? Most people don't want to face this. Nobody exemplifies the psychedelic of the 1960s quite like Leary, who thought these drugs would radically alter every aspect of human society. I believe that the revolution is a neurological revolution. It's a revolution of consciousness. I saw it more as a spiritual revolution. We want a good vibration. States started to ban LSD in the mid-60s, and the feds outlawed it in 1968, which is often blamed on Leary. He once theorized that an enemy state might drop LSD in the water supply, advising readers to sit back and enjoy the exciting educational experience under such a scenario. Leary's rhetoric, combined with hysteria over 60s youth culture, stoked fears that a psychedelic revolution had sinister implications. Perhaps LSD turned people into psychopathic killers like the Manson family, who combined LSD with amphetamines and other drugs. In 1969, TV personality Art Linkletters started a public campaign to discredit Leary and LSD, claiming a bad acid trip causes 20-year-old daughter to jump to her death from a six-floor window, even though an autopsy failed to turn up drugs in her system. Proof that Diane had mentioned Dr. Leary as one of the reasons why she thought that there was nothing wrong with LSD and believed what he said when he said it was God's gift to young people. I had hoped he would die. I had hoped he would be hung. Then I had hoped he'd stay in prison for life, and now I'm glad he's out. When you identify as a counterculture, you're sort of sending up a signal that the culture is going to be scared of it. And so there was that rebelliousness that Tim Leary had. We're determined to do it right this time, and to not, as a counterculture, stick a middle finger in the face of the conservative American mindset and say, we're going to make you all obsolete and make all your values obsolete. 74-year-old Charlie Winninger is a Gestalt therapist and the author of Listening to Ecstasy. He remembers the psychedelic movement of the 1960s. We actually traumatized the greatest generation by formatting the kind of revolution that we did. So we're not making that mistake again. We need to think about us as moving into the heart of the system rather than becoming a counterculture. Ironically, LSD first emerged from the heart of the system. It was synthesized in 1938 by Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman in the laboratories of what would later become pharma giant Novartis and used by psychiatrists and therapists to treat alcoholism and depression. Some of its most enthusiastic early adopters worked for the CIA. In the 1950s, the agency, typically without consent, dosed its own employees, soldiers, prisoners and mental patients with LSD as part of an experimental mind control program called MKUltra. Convinced that Soviet and Chinese communists had developed brainwashing techniques, U.S. intelligence agencies wanted to make sure that Americans had equal or better tools. 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. Before psychedelics became associated with hippies and radicals, psychiatrists and psychologists were incorporating them into their medical and research practices. Aldous Huxley helped make discussions of mescaline respectable when he published The Doors of Perception in 1954, describing the sacramental visions he had while tripping. Cary Grant testified to LSD's redemptive powers in Look magazine and Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Bill Wilson became a believer in the power of LSD to help alcoholics quit drinking. After the federal government banned non-medical use of psychedelics in 1970, clinical research basically halted. For psychiatrist Julie Holland, the author of a best-selling account of working in the mental ward at New York City's Bellevue Hospital, today's psychedelic renaissance presents the opportunity to resume that research. The field of psychiatry desperately needs new tools and a new way of thinking. And so to me, the psychedelic renaissance is really informing how we can transform and sort of upgrade the field of psychiatry. One thing the conference made clear is that the rejection of Timothy Leary's approach is partly strategic. MAP's focus on winning the approval of the scientific and medical establishment first mirrors the approach of marijuana reformers who demonstrated that legal medical cannabis could lead to recreational approval. All of this science has also helped build drug policy reform. We now have a majority, a vast majority of marijuana voters, of American voters who are in favor of the legalization of marijuana for adult use. While cannabis is still prohibited at the federal level, Doblin went straight to Washington. MAP's began funding research that looked at the safety and toxicity of MDMA in the late 80s, and its effort led to the first FDA sanctioned trial in 1994. Researchers have since accumulated robust evidence that this drug, known to clubbers as Mollierexacy, is an effective treatment for PTSD. Doblin predicts that MDMA will clear FDA approval by the summer of 2024. But it won't be like a normal drug that's approved. It will be approved only under direct supervision of therapists. And what we're hoping is that it will be only under direct supervision of therapists who have been trained in the method that we've used in phase three. And one of the big things for me is to try to help the politicians and the regulators understand that a big part of training therapists is having them have their own experience with the drugs that they're going to give to their patients. I had some pretty strong PTSD. I found true healing through psychedelic therapy. A Navy SEAL deployed to Afghanistan shortly after 9-11. Marcus Capone says traditional pharmaceuticals and talk therapy didn't help the severe PTSD and depression he experienced after leaving the military. But then he tried a plant-derived psychedelic called Ibugay, for which he had to travel to Mexico to use legally. That's a super intense drug. It's a very powerful, very long, very difficult experience. They try to tell people this is not like the psychedelic that they're thinking about or that they're having fun with. This is a very internal, kind of deep, kind of, you know, air, say power washes you from the inside if you want to look at it that way. And it's an experience that you go very deep into your history of life. When you come out of this experience, 12, 14, 18 hours later, you feel like the world has just been kind of lifted off your shoulders, especially if you were really struggling. After Capone's experience with Ibugay, he and his wife, Amber, co-founded Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions, a non-profit devoted to making psychedelic therapies available to military veterans. His cause has attracted some surprising advocates. I'm the dark, knuckle-dragging, right-wing, Republican, farmer governor of the state of Texas. I love Rick Doblin. In 2007, a special operations veteran experiencing a mental health breakdown showed up unannounced at then-Governor Rick Perry's mansion. Marcus Latrell, who was the author of Lone Survivor the Book and then the movie was made about his experiences, they lived with us at the Governor's Mansion for two-plus years. As we were, my wife and I were learning about post-traumatic stress and how poor our government was in dealing with this, frankly. It started to make a lot of sense to me that these are medicines that were taken away for political purposes back in the early 70s and that we need to reintegrate, study them, do the appropriate things, but the potential here is stunningly positive. In 2021, Perry lobbied for a state bill directing the Texas Health and Human Services Commission to study the efficacy of psilocybin as a treatment for veterans suffering from PTSD. Do you think people in your political tribe will be able to kind of grasp the message that you're sent? This is an education process and the short answer is yes. At the federal level, this is more supported by the Republicans and here's one of the reasons I think that there is a substantial number of farmer military special ops, Dan Crenshaw, Morgan Lentrell, Wesley Hunt, Jake Elsie, Tony Gonzalez, August Fluger. Those individuals have seen this firsthand. They know the trauma that has been inflicted on these individuals and they've also seen the results of the use of psychedelics in treating this trauma. Psychedelics have the potential to outperform SSRIs like Prozac in treating depression according to psychiatrist Jonathan Sporn. He's the founder and CEO of Gilgamesh Pharmaceuticals, a biotech company developing drugs that have psychedelic properties. A lot of people get on these SSRIs and complain that they feel as if the drugs are sort of more masking symptoms or sort of governing down their emotion. These psychedelic compounds, why are they so effective? Like how do they affect the brain? In some ultimate way, we don't know because some of the hypotheses that we have now about how these things are sort of affecting specific brain circuits or these drugs taking offline the default, what's called the default mode network, which is kind of this baseline system that's almost like rebooting your computer. MAP's focus on clinical trials is a sharp departure from Timothy Leary's approach, but it's not to the exclusion of recreational and spiritual applications. I think that the psychedelic renaissance is very much tied to the validation of psychedelics as a therapeutic modality within Western medicine. Shelby Hartman is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Psychedelics General Interest magazine Double Blind. She sees clinical research as the bridge to a broader cultural reawakening. So what we're actually seeing within science, maybe for the first time in generations, is sort of this bridging of this historical divide between spirituality and science. But not everyone is so eager to build that bridge. Activists who said they were speaking out on behalf of Indigenous peoples interrupted the conference to denounce MAP's approach. Nobody owns healing, but you know what? You don't own our culture. You can't take it from us. We deserve respect. The protesters interrupted Doblin's closing remarks to complain about what they said was cultural appropriation on the grounds that Indigenous people were using psychedelics long before LSD was synthesized in a lab. But the mystical and spiritual pervade all aspects of psychedelic culture. LSD's creator Albert Hoffman referred to it as a sacred drug, and fans of the drug DMT call it the God Molecule. Terrence McKenna popularized the Stone-Dape Theory that eating magic mushrooms transitioned our Homo erectus ancestors into Homo sapiens by bootstrapping human consciousness. Some movement figures today still talk about psychedelics as a solution to all the world's problems evoking Timothy Leary, who once claimed that they could help free the world from the white menopausal mendacious men who ran everything while hating beauty, sex, and life itself. The interest in spiritual and cultural transformation was on display in the conference's deep space area. Psychedelic means mind manifesting. To me, we're making all the things that are part of our inner selves become outward things that you can experience. Substances that help us to expand our mind also relates to then thinking more deeply about human nature, humankind, where we come from. The contrast with the fluorescent expo floor packed with booths hawking psychedelic paraphernalia was striking. We're actually, it's like we're having a yard sale today. We're selling a bunch of t-shirts from various projects we're doing. What we do is we premix our own proprietary substrate and we inoculate it in a clean room so that way we can guarantee a success rate. Not far from that were MDs and PhDs taking to the main stage to share their research. Maybe the spiritual explorers and the button-down researchers aren't so different after all. 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. Psychedelics and plant medicines more broadly going back thousands of years have been used as spiritual and ceremonial tools by Indigenous communities. And even in the clinical trials that are investigating psychedelics for depression and other indications, they're measuring the correlation between the profundity of a mystical experience that someone has while on a psychedelic and the therapeutic outcome. Nobody better bridges the divide between science and spirituality than psychopharmacologist Rowling Griffiths who's the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research, the movement's premier research center. Now for my scientific colleagues telling them that we see increases in mystical experience sometimes gets us pretty close to being thrown out of the room. Griffiths has spent much of his career studying the spiritual effects of psychedelics from a scientific perspective. What we know now is that psychedelics can occasion high probability these profound awakening experiences having meaning they can produce enduring positive changes in pro-social and ethical attitudes. After spending decades running experiments on how psychedelics can help cancer patients with anxiety and depression, Griffiths was diagnosed with Stage 4 metastatic colon cancer and says he's unlikely to survive into the new year. I came quickly to recognize that we can turn with great interest to investigate the present moment and in this case for me cultivate gratitude for this astonishing mystery in which we find ourselves. In moves that blur the line between conventional therapy and recreational use Colorado and Oregon voters have already decriminalized the possession and use of naturally occurring psychedelics like magic mushrooms. The month before the conference, Colorado Governor Jared Polis signed into law a regulatory framework for implementing the 2022 state ballot initiative legalizing psychedelic therapy. Well, it really took the mandate from the voters. So I don't think the politicians legislature would have done this just like cannabis. The people are ahead of the politicians. I think by and large people have said on cannabis the negative consequences opponents talked about never happened and we created tens of thousands of jobs that's helped pave the way in other states. I think if we fast forward 10 years we want to have that same story to tell on natural medicine and psychedelics so we want other states to be able to say look Colorado got it right. In the conference Exmo Hall there was a mix of major corporate players promoting medical products and high-end ketamine treatments for mushroom grown kids. All these vendors shared the goal of lowering barriers to access. Here local in Colorado we do have a lot of psilocybin business. People like to just watch the magic happen. A major point of contention is whether pharmaceutical companies can patent psychedelic compounds. In 2020 the $400 million giant Compass Pathways received a patent for a synthetic form of psilocybin meant to treat depression that was upheld in court following a legal challenge. The company is now in phase 3 trials with FDA approval expected some time over the next year. There is of course the potential for patents to be used in a way that is destructive or that is not in the public good and some of that has to do with human behavior. Some of it has to do with problems in patents that should never have been approved, getting approved. So my take on it is if you want innovation to remove patent protection you'll have very very little of it. Protesters warn that users should be aware of psychedelics in the hands of big pharma or medicines ripped from their natural context. You're gonna see the medicine having you because they're leaving beans and they don't like to be abused. They're gonna come back to you and harm you. Others say more commercialization and capital investment are the only way psychedelics can reach more people and achieve their potential. In 2019, bestselling author, podcast host and investor Tim Ferris pulled together half of the $17 million in commitments that led to the creation of a new psychedelic research center at Johns Hopkins University, including kicking in $2 million himself. This is for me by far the largest commitment to research and nonprofits that I've ever made. On the conference's main stage, Blake Mikoski, founder of Tom's Shoes, pledged $100 million toward future psychedelic research and education. There's a lot of powers to be that maybe don't want to see a natural medicine that can cure people so quickly. Where is that resistance coming from? Well, I think a lot of it is left over from resistance from the government in the 60s and 70s and the Timothy Leary days and the worry that everyone is gonna kind of drop in and drop out. We have to really change that stigma. So hopefully donors like myself who are very conservative are showing that this is not a political agenda this is helping vets, this is helping women with sexual abuse. Did you say you're conservative? I would say I'm moderate, I vote Democrat but I'm not like a hard left leaning from a political perspective. I'm much more in the middle and I feel that one of the things that I like about the psychedelic movement is it feels that it is really getting we saw Rick Perry at their talking today, it's really getting endorsed by people on both sides of the aisle. The future is psychedelic. Welcome to the psychedelic 20s. The support of regulators and politicians is just one component of gaining mainstream acceptance. Writers, podcasters, musicians and comedians are crucial in America's psychedelic reboot. Psychedelics to me are an experience of altered perception, internal and external perception, altered space-time relationship, somewhat dream-like. I think it was Alan Hobson at Harvard for a long time talking about the relationship between psychedelic-like states and dream-like states. I enjoy creating material for a psychedelic mind state, whether someone's on psychedelics or not. So I think of what I do is kind of dissociative humor. I do not write my best material while on psychedelics okay? In preparation for this roast actually, a couple of weeks ago, dropped MDMA, tried to write some jokes for a roast and I'm going to read one to you, okay? A cop, a rabbi, and a priest walk into a bar just kidding, they are all the same guy because we are all connected. DMT is always like, oh man, if I just would have pulled the thing out that it was telling me if I just would have remembered the thing. Oh, I'm going to save the planet. Better smoking again, I got a planet to save. Comedian Shane Moss has toured the country discussing his psychedelic experiences. I don't know what the psychedelic renaissance means to me. I can tell you that as someone who was born in 1980 and experienced much of the Reagan era, just say no to drugs in early 90's and PSAs and the frying egg and this is your brain on drugs type stuff. I never pictured a world where marijuana would be anywhere close to legal and it's mind blowing to me that mushrooms are being decriminalized everywhere. Psychedelics have become big enough where, I mean you participated in a roast of the psychedelic community. There's like the maps, the clinical side with the more buttoned up side. There's the festival side of it. There's the recreational user. There's the wellness. There's a spiritual community. There's the optimizers. Love the optimizers. I love the optimizers. What are the parts of the psychedelic community or kind of known psychedelic users that you find objectionable or annoying? I think some of the problematic errors in thinking within the community, some of the magical thinking a lot of the grifting in the space. I mean, I think that there's a lot of pretty dubious like supplements and things like that being pedaled and treatments and telling people you can like cure their cancer with coffee enemas. Scientists might be uncomfortable with the spiritualists, capitalists with the social justice activists, therapists with the optimizers and thrill seekers, progressive NPR listeners with the Joe Rogan fans. Many at this conference lean left and assume that wider use of psychedelics will mean people will shift politics their way. But what if these substances are politically neutral? It's easy to romanticize psychedelics but there are a lot of fundamental questions too about the degree to which psychedelics are reaffirming our biases as opposed to uprooting them and encouraging us to consider new perspectives. In other words, rather than leading to any specific conclusions psychedelics might be what pioneering researcher Stanislav Grof called non-specific amplifiers. Meaning that they heighten whatever thoughts or experiences users are already having. I try to tell people, I said this isn't partisan at all. Let's take our labels away on this one. This is about humankind. This is about taking care of individuals. This is about saving lives. It's about giving people their lives back. Doblin says that one thing we've learned is that it's crucial not to overstate the power of psychedelics for ill or for good. It's not like one dose miracle cure or one dose for enlightened. You have criminal damage or something. Yeah. People who have psychedelic experiences, it's no secret oftentimes emerge saying grandiose things like I've found, I've found the thing that's going to solve all the world's problems, right? If managing expectations in a more realistic way is key to policy and cultural success, so are institutions like Arrowith, a well-respected online clearinghouse for all sorts of information about psychedelics. Community building organizations such as the Psychedelic Assembly, which runs a work share library and event space in New York City, are also essential. We're a few blocks from the U.N. and Grand Central Station and we get people walking in all the time who are completely outside of the psychedelic community, they've never heard of these things. We've sort of become a bridge to the mainstream. There's also Psychedelics in Recovery, a group that is blending A.A. style counseling with acknowledgement of drugs in a way that Bill Wilson might be interested in, and Moms on Mushrooms, a grassroots organization trying to fill the void for curious parents. The community is for seasoned psychonauts who've been working with this medicine for years and the mom who is maybe curious but doesn't want to follow hashtag psilocybin on Instagram, which is a terrible idea. The Zendo project is a mainstay at RAVES festivals and other events where psychedelics are heavily used. They sit and help guide users through bad ways. We don't want to have a repeat of the 60s but if we're out there talking about hey there's risks, we can acknowledge what the risks are, there's things you can do to prevent those risks, there's education we can offer in our communities, there's compassionate care we can offer one another, then we're really setting the movement up for success because we're both acknowledging the risk and addressing it. Psychedelics in the end aren't a menace or a cure-all. They're a tool for treatment, self-improvement, exploration, and fun. I support a change in law to end federal criminal penalties for a possession of up to one ounce of marijuana leaving the states free to adopt whatever laws they wish concerning marijuana. Marijuana legalization looked like a sure thing in the late 1970s before a series of high-profile incidents provoked a backlash that took decades to overcome. Psychedelics are more powerful and frightening than weed. And yet, thanks to the mix of caution and optimism on display in Denver and the emphasis on doing the revolution right this time, turning on and tuning in won't mean dropping out.