Psychedelics: Renaissance without historical perspective – 12/23/2023 – Psychedelic Turn

Next year promises: if nothing goes wrong, the first psychedelic-supported psychotherapy (PAP) should be authorized in the United States. From there it will spread throughout the world, relieving the traumatized, depressed or merely unhappy, and the 2020s will mark the re-entry of consciousness alterers into official medicine – if nothing goes wrong.

The 1960s will finally be overcome, which began with Timothy Leary experimenting with hallucinogenic mushrooms and LSD and ended with the lysergic guru arrested for possession of narcotics. The 1970s would see the rise of the War on Drugs, dragging any legally possible benefit of psychedelics into the depths of obscurantism.

This mental habit of compartmentalizing history into discrete periods is curious, the 60s, 70s, 20s… A collection has just come out from MIT Press that puts this craze into perspective: “Expanding Landscapes – A Global History of Psychedelics” Expanding – A Global History of Psychedelics), edited by Erika Dyck and Chris Elcock.

The 20 chapters of the volume, including one by Brazilian historians Henrique Carneiro and Júlio Delmanto, make it clear that psychedelia did not begin in the 60s, in the USA, nor even in the 50s, with “The Doors of Perception” by Aldous Huxley. There is archaeological evidence that the mescaline that opened the mind of the British had already been used, with the peyote cactus, some 6 thousand years before.

The same would be true of dimethyltryptamine (DMT) from ayahuasca, 4,700 years ago. And psilocybin from fungi Psilocybewell 4,000 years before Gordon Wasson published his account in Life magazine in 1957 of “magic mushrooms” in use by the Mazatec people of Mexico.

It is hoped that this rich (pre-)history will not be eclipsed again by the chronicle of the 2020s. The present decade indeed deserves some attention, as long as it is identified as the tail of a long tradition of chemical expansion of consciousness.

The year 2023, now in its throes, saw Australia and Canada open doors – narrow, come on – for the therapeutic use of psychedelics. It also hosted the largest psychedelic conference of all time, attracting more than 12 thousand interested parties to Denver, Colorado.

A few months earlier, in November 2022, this North American state approved the decriminalization of so-called “natural medicines” (psilocybin, DMT, ibogaine and mescaline) for personal use. The same law provides for the authorization, from 2024, of treatment centers (until June 1, 2026, only with psilocybin).

The legislation has similarities with that of Oregon, also approved by popular initiative referendum, voted two years earlier, in 2020. The regulations were then detailed, and in 2023 the first “facilitation” centers began to operate, which the law requires not confused with psychiatric or psychological therapies.

All of these substances remain banned at the federal level. This is where the first mishap may arise, as warned by doctor and jurist Mason Marks, from Harvard University, in an article dated December 8 in JAMA, a journal of the American Medical Association.

He argues that confusion with medical and psychotherapeutic practices already occurs in both states, which would be on a collision course with federal bodies. This is because the claim of therapeutic benefits, for example in the advertising of licensed facilitators, would open the door for fines from agencies such as the FDA (pharmaceuticals) and DEA (drugs).

Even if FDA authorization to treat post-traumatic stress disorder with psychotherapy assisted by MDMA (ecstasy) comes out in 2024, as expected, Marks warns that the DEA should only remove the pharmaceutical-grade compound from the list of prohibited substances, not any candy for sale to partygoers.

Next, it may be psilocybin’s turn to be approved. But, also in this case, only the formulations used in clinical tests, such as COMP360 from the company Compass Pathways, will leave the infamous Schedule 1, not the mushrooms that bequeathed the active ingredient to medicine. Oregon facilitators, who are only licensed to administer the natural product, will remain subject to federal sanctions.

This is, obviously, an injustice to those who provide the service and to the voters who approved Measure 109 in 2020. Furthermore, it is an injustice to the Mazatecas and all the people who discovered, selected, cultivated and preserved these organisms, as did so many power plants, well into the 20th and 21st centuries.

As usual, Western biomedicine proceeds as if every discovery emanated from it alone. Take the case of fungi Psilocybe: many people will have heard of Gordon Wasson (1898-1986), the stunt banker and mycologist who traveled to Huautla and ingested teonanácatl by the hands of Maria Sabina, but who knows who Gastón Guzmán (1932-2016) was?

I read about him in a text by his daughter Laura Guzmán Dávalos, after finding out that I would share a table with her at the 10th Brazilian Mycology Congress, from February 19th to 23rd in Belo Horizonte. A mycologist like her father, she narrates how he came into contact with Wasson during the American’s adventure among the Mazatecas and would become a prolific fungus researcher, having described more than 220 species, 15 of them new to science.

He was one of the greatest experts on “magic” mushrooms, but the Mexican’s name does not appear in volumes on the history of psychedelia, as it should, alongside the Yankee Wasson. It is the illusion of perspective common among those who find themselves at the center of everything, generally a large city in the USA or Europe: historical reality and valid knowledge only gain universal citizenship when they become the object of publication in periodicals published in English.

Similarly, the notoriety acquired by the North American counterculture of the 1960s obliterated not only the deep history of psychedelic investigations over millennia, long before the colonization of America by Europeans. Clinical research and experimental therapies with psychedelics such as LSD from the 1950s, conducted in the USA and elsewhere, were also forgotten.

LSD even had a presence in Brazil, recall Carneiro and Delmanto in chapter 16 of Dyck and Elcock. Synthesized in the Swiss laboratory Sandoz, lysergic acid was distributed to researchers and doctors around the world to experiment with the new drug, and here LSD found use in psychotherapy and studies by doctors such as Murilo Gomes and Clóvis Martins

.

However, when discussing psychedelia in Brazil, it is the late 1970s counterculture, desbunde and tropicalism that come to mind. The studies and therapies of the 1950s and 1960s would remain forgotten, if it weren’t for the detailed work of Júlio Delmanto in the book “The Social History of LSD in Brazil”.

Still, there’s a good chance the 2020s will become known as the height of the so-called psychedelic renaissance. Things are indeed accelerating, and, if nothing goes wrong, some significant steps will be taken by the end of the decade.

In fact, it’s not even a renaissance, as psychedelics have always been around. If they are reborn, it is only for the narrow perspective of biomedicine, the one in which things can still go wrong.

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NOTICE TO NAVIGATORS – Psychedelics are still experimental therapies and, certainly, do not constitute a panacea for all psychological disorders, nor should they be the subject of self-medication. Speak to your therapist or doctor before venturing into the area.

About the trend towards legalizing the therapeutic and adult use of psychedelics in the USA, see the report “Free Mushrooms” in the December 2022 edition of Piauí magazine.

To learn more about the history and new developments in science in this area, including in Brazil, look for my book “Psychonauts – Travels with Brazilian Psychedelic Science”.