My FIRST OPINION in STATnews

My opinion essay appears today in STAT NEWS. Here are some excerpts. I hope you will read and enjoy the full essay.

«In the years since my first session, it’s been gratifying to see psychedelics becoming more widely accepted.

But the field is hurtling in an alarming direction. Over the past decade or so, the mythmaking and profiteering around psychedelics — from boutique retreats to the venture-capital stampede toward pharmaceutical monopolies — has followed a trajectory similar to the rest of modern medicine, which prioritizes throughput over human considerations.»

……

«British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond, who took part in a peyote ceremony with a First Nations group the Red Pheasant Band in Saskatchewan, Canada, in 1956, intuited the necessity of community, empathy, and ego renunciation during the psychedelic process. He wrote:

“Peyote acts not by emphasizing one’s own self but by expanding it into the selves of others, with a deepening empathy. … The self is dissolved and, in being dissolved, enriched. It becomes aware of the nobility of other selves and so of itself.”

The importance of the integration process cannot be overstated. Psychedelics are non-specific amplifiers of existing personality traits. Traits like humility, creativity, and kindness are amplified by psychedelics, as are the dark triad traits, such as Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy.

In the absence of a community process which provides emotional and psychological checks and balances, participants can carry distorted perceptions about themselves into quotidian world. The criminal mania of cult leader and prolific psychedelic user Charles Manson, who murdered seven people in 1969, is often cited by researchers as an example of the worst possible outcome of psychedelic use untempered by an ego-deflating ritual process. Elon Musk, another self-identified psychedelic user, exemplifies the actions of someone who has not adhered to the most basic principles of responsible psychedelic use.»

You can access the full essay here.

Thanks for reading. My book, Seeing What Is There, is available now from booksellers.