This was how the conversation began. I was on a boat, sailing past the dense nightlights of downtown San Francisco, heading toward the Golden Gate Bridge. The speaker was Dr. Stanislav Grof, well into his eighties, originally from Czechoslovakia but revered as a spiritual founder of the American psychedelic movement.
Grof, a psychiatrist, was in fact one of the people most closely associated with the first campaign—mounted more than fifty years ago—to bring psychedelic drugs, especially LSD, into mainstream life. Broad and solid, he was still handsome, unbowed by age, with a full head of dirty blond hair. Tonight, he was dressed for the chill in a blue windbreaker, his wife, Brigitte, hovering somewhere behind him, impatient to escort him onto the prow so that they could embrace as we passed beneath the bridge. But I didn’t know that yet, so I continued asking Grof questions, scribbling down his oracular comments in my notebook as fast as I could. It was only much later, working through the archives at UCLA, that I would find an old Christmas card from Stan Grof, stashed away for posterity among Aldous Huxley’s papers.
I had come to California on an assignment to write about the psychedelic research conference taking place in Oakland that week. All year, headlines had snaked through mainstream publications, describing the new craze in Silicon Valley that had tech workers swallowing tiny doses of LSD and magic mushrooms in the morning before heading off to work; veterans seeking treatment with MDMA to help their PTSD; clinics legally treating the depressed with ketamine. We were, it was becoming clear, living through a psychedelic renaissance. For the first time since the late 1960s, psychedelic science was back, poised to make not only social change but also, potentially, an enormous profit.
But I had an ulterior motive for coming west: I was trying to find out if the newly resurgent interest in psychedelic drugs had to do with our cultural shift away from one kind of attention. I had a suspicion, in other words, that a widespread craving to recover something we had lost, some way of being, was one of the reasons why psychedelics were beckoning so many new users, just at the moment when tech was saturating our lives.
I had spent ten years on one kind of drug, a darling of the pharmaceutical industry, but the only real insight it had given me was that I had to stop taking it. I was now drawn to the possibility that a different kind of drug altogether actually could offer a bridge to a profound new way of seeing the world. So here I was, sailing toward the Golden Gate Bridge in the darkness, a boatful of the psychedelic faithful huddled for warmth all around me.
The occasion for which we had gathered was the first meeting of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS, to occur in four years. Thousands had turned up for the more than five days of presentations: this was the largest psychedelic research conference in the world, and MAPS the single most powerful player in advancing the psychedelic agenda. Scientists from schools like Johns Hopkins and NYU had come to present their research on such topics as using psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) to assuage end-of-life anxiety, to help deepen meditation practices, to search for the shared underpinnings of spiritual life, and—in a new study—to explore a possible cure for depression. The conference reflected the swelling interest and funding directed toward psychedelic drugs, more so now than at any time since LSD was first made illegal in the United States in 1966.
Grof himself was presenting the next day, talking about his many forays deep into the human unconscious. Grof had often played the role of goad, urging psychiatry ever deeper, to destinations that made many of his colleagues uncomfortable. For example, he argued that our psyches are indelibly shaped not only by our early childhood experiences, as has long been understood, but also by what happens to us in the womb, as well as during birth itself, a conclusion he reached during one of his early LSD trips. I didn’t expect the opportunity to talk so closely that night to Grof, who was revered by the psychedelic community and thus rarely to be found alone. I had to ask him more, while I could.
“Why now?” I asked. “Why are psychedelic drugs seeing such an explosion of interest again?”
“The belief that you can make yourself happy by achieving something in the world: that view is getting dimmer and dimmer,” Grof answered right away, in his soft, Czech tones.
Grof and his late wife, Christina, who died in 2014, coined a phrase to describe the state we are in. It is, they said, a “spiritual emergency,” and nothing less. It is a spiritual emergency when we are motivated to forget that we are all interconnected, to one another, and to the natural environment we occupy.
“We’re not going to make it if we keep doing what we’re doing,” Grof told me.
It was my impression that a great number of the people on that boat, not to mention the thousands who had gathered in Oakland for the week, shared this particular outlook.
that I stood on that boat with Dr. Grof, I didn’t know much about Aldous Huxley, or the world of psychedelics at all. I was at the very beginning of the search. What I knew, I knew primarily from two sources. The first and most powerful: long conversations with my old boyfriend David, whom I had lived with on Ninth Street during the Adderall years. Since then, he had gravitated more and more toward psychedelic experiences, attending dozens of ceremonies in places such as Topanga Canyon, Los Angeles; or Williamsburg, Brooklyn; Mexico and Peru. He was struggling to make money but laughed morbidly that even when he was broke, he would charge ayahuasca ceremonies on his credit card. He was actively remaking himself. We would meet for dinner every few months and he’d tell me all about what he was going through. I still regarded it all as fundamentally alien, these conversations about Amazonian jungle teas and shamans, intergenerational trauma revealed through plant spirits. But I could, in fact, see it for myself: David was filled with a new kind of insight, and, more strikingly, a new kind of peace. In fact, we were much closer now than we’d ever been as a couple.
The second source of information that had propelled me to Oakland was an article Michael Pollan had written in The New Yorker a few years before. In it, Pollan reported on the new vanguard of psychedelic science: the research going on at Johns Hopkins and NYU, treating end-of-life patients with powerful, psychedelic trips. Pollan described how these patients, ravaged by cancer, facing death, emerged from even a single psilocybin experience with a newfound peace, a radical new perspective on their own place in the order of things. It was an astonishing piece of writing, and it spoke to one of the questions that mattered most to me, that moved me more than any other: the possibility, or, rather, the near certainty, that the way we are living our lives is simply not quite right. The possibility that there might be another way out of, or through, our modern predicament. And that it wasn’t so far away, this alternative route. Indeed, it was already inside of us, dormant, waiting to be woken up.
on the BART train across the bay, I asked directions from a handsome young blond, an undergrad at Berkeley. I was curious to know if he’d heard about the conference that was starting the next day in Oakland, all about psychedelics. “Oh, is it connected to Bicycle Day?” he asked. “Bicycle Day?” I looked at him blankly. “Yes, the day Albert Hofmann discovered LSD. April nineteenth. Today.” He went on to explain: this was the day, in 1943, when Albert Hofmann, the scientist at Sandoz Labs, had decided to ingest one of his experimental strands.
It was on his bicycle ride home, beset with colorful hallucinations, that Hofmann realized that this compound, lysergic acid diethylamide-25, was not like the rest. Hence: Bicycle Day, the birthday of LSD, which came into the world as World War II raged through Europe. I’d been schooled by a twenty-year-old who knew more about my current beat than I did. Perhaps an East Coast blind spot, then. It would prove to be the first of many: I was about to be introduced to a community dense with codes and signals, one with a kind of password, a question forever in the subtext: Are you one of us?
It started first thing the next morning, when I wheeled my suitcase into the Oakland Marriott to join the throngs buzzing through the cavernous conference rooms. The crowd was striking: all around me middle-aged academics in blazers mixed with the rainbow-haired, occasionally barefoot demographic more typically associated with such events as Burning Man and Coachella, which was taking place that same weekend, approximately five hundred miles south in the California desert. And yet this event too, it was clear, though composed of sober speeches and PowerPoint presentations, had the same raucous, joyful spirit of a like-minded community seeking refuge within itself, taking a much-needed break from the outside world, from the people who did not yet understand.
I wondered whether Michael Pollan himself was somewhere in these crowds, walking around with his own reporter’s tools, gathering his own impressions of the colorful crowd. I had heard he was writing a magnum opus on psychedelics, and I looked for his familiar face, his thoughtful smile and wire-frame glasses, in the welcome reception. I didn’t see him there; nor was I able to secure one last cup of coffee. Instead, I made my way to the twenty-first floor to claim a seat at the workshop I’d signed up for, on the history and culture of psychedelics. Right away, I was drawn to a young woman in purple silk pants and a multicolored head scarf, doing yoga poses against the window, a panoramic view of downtown Oakland behind her. She was from Boulder, Colorado, she told me. With one leg still in the air, she told me that she was a psychotherapist who treats her patients with MDMA—also known as Ecstasy—part of the burgeoning underground of clinicians who do the same.
“Aren’t you afraid you’ll be caught?” I asked.
“It’s my ethical duty to help clients in the highest way I can—so there’s a protection around that,” she said. “That’s how my mentor talks about it.”
She was on the vanguard of a movement that was still illegal, but perhaps not for much longer. MAPS’s foremost campaign was devoted to getting the Federal Drug Administration’s approval for the therapeutic use of MDMA for patients with PTSD. This was no longer a distant dream: research, already promising, would enter Phase 3 trials later that year, the final phase on any medication’s journey through the FDA. By then, MAPS would have raised more than $50 million to do the science themselves.
“People who have been in talk therapy for forty years suddenly see results with one session of MDMA,” she was telling me.
“And you’re not afraid? Even though you are telling all this to the reporter in the room?” I asked her, gesturing again to my media badge.
“This feels like a safe space,” she said.
Indeed, I would encounter a surprising lack of reticence from the people I spoke to over the course of the next five days. I was repeatedly offered drugs, even after I had mentioned the publication for which I was reporting. It was as if the drugs themselves offered a talismanic protection, and under their care, nobody could be exposed to harm or persecution. Everywhere I went, people sought me out in order to express their love for and faith in the power of psychedelics.
What we were waiting in line for was the evening entertainment, an event billed as the “comedy banquet.” Once inside the enormous ballroom, I spotted a seat next to an attractive young couple, dressed up for the occasion, the guy in beard and black suit, and his beautiful girlfriend in a short black dress and fishnet tights. Almost as soon as I’d introduced myself, the man turned to me. “I’m really, really worried about how you’re going to cover this conference,” he said. His breath was powerful. I inhaled carefully. Exhaled.
“Interesting. What are you worried about?” I asked him. I was trying hard for compassion after a long reporting day.
“That you’ll do what the media always does and focus on the druggies and hippies and make it seem like this is all about partying, when for some of us, these drugs are life or death,” he said.
“Life or death? How so?” I asked. Tears began running down his face as he explained that he had PTSD from an abusive childhood and the only thing that allowed him to function at all was his regular use of ayahuasca, the powerful tea made from Amazonian tree vines. He excused himself and left for the bathroom. His girlfriend slid into the seat next to me. “He’ll be okay,” she said. “You have to understand it’s so hard for him to even talk to someone like you, who went to college, and who could even think about his PTSD from anything like an intellectualized place.”
I slipped away before dessert, but I was grateful for the encounter. It had underlined in the most visceral terms the extent to which these substances had transcended their 1960s Haight-Ashbury, “turn on, tune in, and drop out” origins to become a way of life that for many is nothing less than crucial—“life or death”—when there are few great options in Western medicine that reliably help most people with mental illness, and do so with tolerable side effects. For many, big pharma has not panned out.
And this is the point: the extent of suffering and illness in our rich, modern society was exactly why the proceedings could not be dismissed as 1960s-style excess, or the fantasies of a drugged-out community. If anything, the presence of Donald Trump in the White House, and the ever-present crackle of mania emanating from his Twitter feed, so profoundly interrupting our country’s sense of itself, had the effect of further casting the psychedelic campaign in an utterly reasonable light. Against the backdrop of our current moment and its constant, crisis-like pitch, why not revisit—now with gold-standard science—the substances that had reorganized and revolutionized so many lives? It’s easy to wonder: What do we, in fact, have to lose?
That is where I think we became skilled—using a psychedelic and then concentrating on it,” Amanda Feilding was telling me from across a conference room table. “I liked to be at that sweet point where I had more energy, more inspiration, but at the same time, I was in control of directing the attention so one could make use of it.”
Feilding, also known as the Countess of Wemyss and March, is a British eccentric par excellence, prone to being photographed with a bird on her shoulder, head swathed in elaborate head scarves and turbans. Now in her seventies, she was dressed in her signature shade of emerald green, recounting for me her early years of research into psychedelic substances. Feilding had spent her life experimenting with them, first and mainly with LSD, starting in the 1960s, with which she began to make a kind of scientific study of her own acid trips, wanting to explore where she could go with her own creativity and concentration, and what might be the neural underpinnings for its powerful effect. She was an avid player of Go, which is considered the most elaborate board game in the world, with the largest possible number of moves. She began to discover that just the right amount of LSD, neither too much nor too little, gave her the winning advantage over her Go opponent, if he or she had not taken the drug.
Feilding’s partner in this early research was a Dutchman, an amateur scientist, named Bart Huges; together, they advanced the idea that LSD redirects blood flow away from the domineering ego, toward more unconscious realms of the mind. These days, fifty years later, what Feilding referred to as “the ego” is approximately known in neuroscience as “the default mode network.” It was, circa 2017, one of the most omnipresent phrases emerging from neuroscience labs, the official-sounding terminology for the brain regions that are active when we are not specifically occupied by any one task or another, the patterns of activity our brains fall back on when we are daydreaming, or ruminating, when we are blankly staring into space on the subway, not responding or reacting to anything in particular. These are the patterns of activities our brains resort to, in some sense setting the baseline tone of our lives.
But in the 1960s, Feilding had no such default mode network to contend with, only the Freudian language that was then still in vogue. Gradually, she expanded her repertoire, her battle to stretch beyond the censoring dictates of the ego. In fact, it’s difficult to talk about Feilding without mentioning that in 1970, she drilled a hole in her own skull, a procedure known as trepanation, which some believe is a means to achieving an expansion of consciousness. One can, if one is curious, find a video on the Internet of Feilding performing this operation on herself, with no apparent physical pain. On the contrary, she appears to be in exceedingly good cheer as the blood runs down her face. I would add here that the hole is not visible beneath the hair, and that the woman herself doesn’t appear to have lost a single ounce of earth-bound ambition through her extra orifice.
Feilding, nearly fifty years later, is still driven by precisely the same motivation as carried her through her youth: to wear down society’s “taboo” on psychedelics. She spread out on the conference table between us glossy images made in brain labs: the fruits of the research that the Beckley Foundation, which she founded and had helped support, in collaboration with Imperial College London, among other schools. One showed a comparison between brain activity on LSD and brain activity without. Blurry trails of neon orange coat almost the whole of the LSD brain, demonstrating the increase in “connectivity” that occurs on the drug, allowing neurons to communicate with one another that would not otherwise confer. This, Feilding argued, might explain why LSD is said to open up whole new channels of thought and inquiry, allowing users to break out of stale patterns and discover, in some cases, enormous creative insight and innovation. In another photograph, Feilding pointed out a cluster of glowing, neon specks: they were brand-new brain cells that seemed to spring up the morning after an ayahuasca session, “neurogenesis,” to use that vaguely biblical term. If true, the implication was significant: ayahuasca as a means to a new kind of mind, not the old, stuck-in-its-ways one you’d gone through your whole life with. But she was perhaps most excited about a new study she planned to launch at the end of the year, returning to her roots: the game of Go. She would test the effect of tiny doses of LSD on players’ performance at Go, the ultimate test, she argued, of creative concentration.
“We have to reintegrate these compounds into society—and in order to do that, we have to use the very best science,” Feilding was saying. “I never think that psychedelics are for everyone. But they can be very usefully used. I’m sure you know that William James was one of the first to express it. He said our daily consciousness is just a trickle and it’s separated from a much wider consciousness through the filmiest of screens…” She mentioned that William James was friends with her grandparents. That, in fact, it was said that Henry James had based The Portrait of a Lady on her fierce, independent-minded grandmother Clotilde Brewster. I smiled when I heard William James’s name spoken aloud in that conference room. I understood by then that James was the golden thread that would eventually run through all my best conversations about attention.
as any to mention that at that point in time, I had had little exposure to psychedelics myself. But not none. The first time I took magic mushrooms, I was in Central Park. I was twenty years old. I lay in the grass, staring up at my college boyfriend who had climbed into the tree above me. We stayed that way for hours, lost in our own thoughts, together. I came to a kind of epiphany that day: you don’t need to worry now about your various ambitions. Just live. Those words rushed through my mind, unbidden. I hadn’t even known how much worry I had spent on the question, until the apparent answer appeared to me. I never quite internalized them, I don’t think, but I had never forgotten them. So it was not the case that I had no idea what everyone was talking about. But, a decade-plus later, I tended to shy away from full-blown participant status, even as those drugs or, to use the terminology, the “plant medicines,” seemed to be everywhere, preferring instead to listen to other people’s stories. I was too frightened to actually do something such as ayahuasca myself, to vomit for hours, to endure a narcissistic shaman convinced of his own divinity (I cynically imagined), to be trapped all night in the group dynamic, to encounter god knows what unconscious material, and then—and this was the real fear—to be the one person who didn’t seem quite able to make it back to terra firma.
Yet I was magnetized by the ideas emanating from the new psychedelic science, sensing, like those around me this week in Oakland, the fundamental wrongness pervading so many aspects of our culture, of our habits and our selves. I wanted to throw off my own distractedness, self-obsession, and frivolity. I wanted to carry out my days purposefully, rather than disappearing into meaningless hours of Internet nothingness. Yet I couldn’t help but notice that I resisted anything that threatened to really change me.
It was one of the first questions James Fadiman, the psychologist and writer, asked me as we sat across from each other at a restaurant near the Oakland Marriott. We had escaped for an hour so I could interview him about microdosing—the practice of taking a fraction of the typical dose of psychedelics, so small you don’t experience any of the classic features of a psychedelic trip, just the faintest stirrings of a kind of vibrancy and well-being.
Fadiman studied my face. “Okay, good. Because honestly this wouldn’t work. When I work with journalists who really have no experience, it’s too tricky. Imagine if only one of us knew something about sex, and I talked about things I like to do to women…” Fadiman was grinning at me impishly. He was well into his seventies, but with the air of a much younger man, or one who doesn’t defer to concepts like age. Everywhere he went, conference attendees swarmed him, wanting to discuss his microdosing project. Like Amanda Feilding, Fadiman was a member of the psychedelic old guard. He swallowed his first psilocybin capsule on a street corner in Paris in the early 1960s. It was given to him by Richard Alpert, now known as the spiritual leader Ram Dass, who had been his professor at Harvard. Within a few years, Fadiman had wound his way into the burgeoning psychedelic research occurring in Menlo Park, California, around Stanford University.
Fadiman, who had returned from Paris to get his PhD in psychology at Stanford, was in the middle of running a three-day off-campus study on LSD and problem solving when a letter arrived from the United States government declaring acid illegal in California. The famous story has it that, having read the contents, he looked up and announced: “I think we got this letter tomorrow.” Researchers and subjects finished out the day, wrapping up the study. It was the last one they would be able to do without breaking the law.
Fadiman now faced the altered landscape of prohibition. Though he was reasonably close to Ken Kesey and Tim Leary and other players in the world of renegade psychedelic research, he found he didn’t desire to join his fate to theirs. “I wasn’t an outlaw,” he told me. “I couldn’t handle those hours.” Instead, for the next four decades, he went straight, patching together a career of other things: teaching in the Stanford engineering department, consulting, writing a psychology textbook.
“Did it bother you that you weren’t doing what you really felt you were meant to be doing?” I asked him.
“Not in a profound depressed sense,” he said. “It’s a little bit as if you always wanted to move to California. But life’s kind of interesting and New York has a lot of special things and then when it all breaks down you think I hate it here and you listen to ‘California Dreamin’ ’—but on the whole you manage.”
At seventy-four, Fadiman was back in the center of things, the man most closely associated with the wild popularity of microdosing. The practice of taking tiny, sub-hallucinatory doses of psychedelics is now the subject of countless articles and Internet videos, all touting the boost to productivity and creativity that such doses of mushrooms and LSD can bestow. Silicon Valley executives (with pseudonyms) regularly tell reporters about the upsides of their new socially acceptable psychedelic regime. Thousands are turning to psychedelics, particularly in microdose form, ironically enough to enhance their performance at work, burnish their professional gold stars, increase their productivity, and earn more money.
For the last several years, Fadiman had been asking that “citizen scientists” write to him with detailed descriptions of following “the Fadiman protocol” for their microdosing regime: one day on, two days off. He told me he had more than a thousand such reports, and that people see improvements in energy, mood, intellectual clarity, headaches, even menstrual cramps. Yet what most interested me in what Fadiman described was the robust improvement that people described when it came to their ability to pay attention. Attention—or, rather, distraction—was the second most common reason provided by Fadiman’s citizen scientists for their decision to microdose, second only to depression. In fact, Fadiman told me, there might never have been a market for Ritalin had Sandoz Labs been able to study the benefits of microdosing.
“If you’re one of these people—and many of us are—you have a list of what you want to get done. And certain items keep moving. Each day they move onto the new list. And you don’t get to them. And if you look at that carefully, what you’ll notice is there is some emotional issue around that,” he said. “Procrastination is our way of avoiding putting attention on a topic. One of the reports we get on microdosing is that people are not procrastinating. When they have an item that comes up on their list, they are not caught up in the distractions from attention. They simply move ahead and do it.”
“Why do you think?” I asked.
“They’re able to not get caught up in their own extraneous thought loops, if I can create a totally nontechnical term. They have a heightened ability to focus their attention where they wish—and keep it there.”
Fadiman told me he had almost run out of interest in the exacting, placebo-controlled scientific studies that must be done to carry microdosing to the next level of knowledge. Wherever he goes now, he runs into graduate students eager to play that role, to carry forward what he has only just picked back up, the legacy of all that was left unfinished when the 1960s came to a close and Richard Nixon moved into the White House and declared LSD a Schedule I substance. The group here in Oakland, under the auspices of MAPS, is conscious of all the strategic mistakes that were made in the sixties, all the trouble and disruptiveness that accrued around figures such as Ken Kesey and Tim Leary, practically guaranteeing government intervention. Now, many of the leading psychedelic advocates are not interested in conducting themselves like outlaws.
The director of MAPS, Rick Doblin, a sincere sixtysomething with a PhD from Harvard’s Kennedy School, walked around the Marriott in a suit and tie. Doblin’s life since 1986 has been devoted to the effort to push psychedelics back into legal use and mainstream life. It was his singular focus, his raison d’être, and yet, despite the decades he’d spent on the campaign, long stretches of time with no progress, he remained the eternal optimist. He greeted everyone with the same warm smile and with a palpable readiness to engage with them as deeply as they would like him to.
“We are not the counterculture,” he repeatedly intoned that week. “We are the culture.” It had become his mantra. Doblin was devoting the majority of his resources to MDMA, in part because he believed that MDMA didn’t have the cultural baggage of LSD, with its anti-war, anti-government trappings, left over from the sixties. He had found that administering Ecstasy to people suffering from trauma, including dozens of veterans, allowed access to the most difficult, even intolerable memories, bypassing the searing pain to be able to look at the experience anew, to contend with it, reframe it, begin to weave it back into the story of one’s life.
When I met him in his hotel suite, Doblin made his points to me with laser-focused urgency, sitting on the sofa across from me. “This is a time of incredible peril for the human species and for the health of the planet,” he said, the late-afternoon sun streaming in through the window. “There’s this sense of crisis, and at the same time, the recognition that the solution is going to be spiritual and psychological, rather than material.”
When psychedelics first came on the scene in the fifties, Doblin argues, American culture wasn’t ready for them. It was taboo to talk about death; hospice was a radical idea. Even yoga was viewed suspiciously, “as if sitting in the lotus position meant you were no longer a Christian.” Now, the culture has shifted, and so too has psychedelic strategy. Doblin wanted to emphasize that his life’s work “is not for the hippies, it’s not for the crazies out in California. This is for the red states, this is for people facing ‘despair deaths.’ This is for the mainstream.”
until it was Saturday afternoon, and I was sitting cross-legged on the carpet of the Marriott’s grand ballroom with the rest of the overflow crowd. We were jammed together to listen to the slim, slight man onstage, who spoke with quiet intensity in a charmingly hybrid Hungarian-Canadian accent. This was Gabor Maté, a physician based in Vancouver, an expert in addiction, and an authority on the subject of how our culture at large had begun to fray. In fact, this was the subject of his talk today.
I got out my notebook and my tape recorder and settled in. Three years before, I had seen Maté’s name somewhere—in a table of contents? On a conference program?—and it had pulled me to it as if it glowed on the page. I had sensed then that I would encounter him, or, rather, that I would seek him out and write about him, even though, at that time, I barely knew anything about him at all. A cursory Google search had revealed a very public persona, a man in his sixties, at least, with olive skin and melancholy eyes, often to be found on stages, in front of cameras, talking about trauma.
“Ten years ago, close to the end of my clinical work as a physician, if you told me I’d be addressing hundreds of people at a psychedelic conference, I wouldn’t have known what drugs you were taking,” Maté began now. “If we look at the society we live in, I’m speaking of the United States, which uses up a huge proportion of the world’s resources and is ever hungry for more, so in this resource-splurging, incredibly wealthy culture, we have fifty percent of the adult population with chronic illness, seventy percent of adults are on some kind of medication…If in a laboratory we were growing microorganisms and if fifty to seventy percent of them were ill, what would you call that culture? We live in a toxic culture. We live in a culture that makes people sick.”
Maté told us that in the past ten years of his life, he had come to understand that in the context of this toxic society, psychedelics were a powerful tool, perhaps the most powerful, for reconnecting with oneself, which is the essence of moving past trauma. Trauma. There it was again. I would soon understand that “trauma” was the word that defines Maté’s work, his worldview, the dark pain, the scar tissue, that he is forever probing to find.
“Two years ago at the tender age of seventy-one, I participated in a psilocybin experience in San Francisco,” he continued. “I was lying on the mat and the woman I was working with was sitting beside me, and all of a sudden I just started sobbing. I saw her, I was present as an adult, I knew I was in San Francisco, I knew that I was having a plant experience and I knew that this woman was a healer, but at the same time, I was a six-month-old infant and she was my mother. So two aspects were present: my deepest emotional childhood memories and my awareness as an adult. And I said to her words that I’m sure I would have wanted to say to my mother at six months of age as a Jewish infant of the Nazi occupation of Budapest, when our life was under threat almost daily, and the words that came out of my mouth, articulated to this therapist, were: I’m sorry for having made your life so difficult.”
When his speech was over, Maté welcomed questions at the mic. A woman with long dark hair, in a shiny red 1950s-style jacket and big black sunglasses, approached.
“As an indigenous person, even standing here, my heart is pounding in my chest like a jackrabbit because what I want to say is not necessarily going to make anybody happy,” she began. “What I want to say is that cultural appropriation is a form of re-traumatization to indigenous people.” Her voice shook as it hit the upper registers.
She wanted, she said, for Maté to speak to the issue of “cultural appropriation” when it came to using plants such as ayahuasca or peyote, increasingly sought out by affluent white Americans and Europeans, who travel to foreign countries to take part in ancient healing traditions not their own.
“Listen, I get it, if that’s what you heard me say, I can see why it would break your heart. I totally understand,” Maté said. He went on. “Here’s what I’m noticing from you right now: you’re speaking from a deep wound. But I cannot stand here and heal your wound.”
“That’s not what I’m asking for,” the woman replied, growing visibly more upset. She turned at that point to face the sizable audience. “I’m asking for everyone here to just be accountable for your own white privilege.” These last words she shouted while gesticulating toward us with one hand. We sat there, in our overwhelming whiteness, in our uncomfortable, riveted silence, as she crossed the ballroom and pushed out through the doors. Soon after, Maté took his own leave, rushing, he explained, to catch the flight to his next gig.
When I returned to New York, I spent the next week trying to track Maté down on the phone. I did not realize how difficult this task would be: he was, it seemed, forever on the move, off to his next conference, his next meeting, his next keynote address. Finally, I reached him one Sunday afternoon at his home in Vancouver. I wanted to interview him for a short article I was writing. I told Maté that my piece was about psychedelics, but that I was also working on a book where I hoped to expand these ideas. “A book about psychedelics?” he asked.
“No, about attention,” I said.
“You do know I wrote a whole book about attention deficit disorder?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s one of the reasons I so much wanted to talk to you.”
This was April. I ask myself if I knew then, on some level, that eventually I would follow Maté to Central America, that soon enough, in his company, I would find myself on a mattress surrounded by people throwing up in plastic buckets. Did I know that then? Yes. I think I did.