INTRODUCTION

What’s Happening in America?

This book offers the reader interviews with leading scientists in America who are investigating the effects on humans of the psychedelic medicines LSD, MDMA, psilocybin, and ayahuasca. Psychedelic Medicine is an expression of fifty years of my professional and personal interest in the medicinal and transformational benefits of psychedelics substances.

I received my first license to practice clinical psychology in 1966 while teaching psychology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. One evening a colleague invited me to his home where he offered me the opportunity to experience DMT (dimethyltriptamine). I took one puff of the normal appearing cigarette, immediately closed my eyes, lay back, and explored the very deepest core of my consciousness and the very borders of the universe.

I had a clear sense that within the infinite universes I was smaller than what I see while using an electron microscope. I experienced being and nothingness. The experience lasted about twelve minutes. I sat up and asked for another puff. Once again I embarked on inner-space travel. I became a dematerialized inner-space traveler transcending time. I soared through the universe in search of the Source. I had a clear sense that I was a part of, an expression of, the whole of it all. My journey had begun.

I began to research what science had to say about these medicines, and why the United States government declared them non grata to an extent that profoundly obstructed scientific research into them.

In the years following I had the good fortune to participate in experimental sessions with LSD, MDMA, mescaline, psilocybin, ketamine, and marijuana. These introspective experiences were exciting, educational, enhancing, frightening, spiritual, captivating, and healing.

Looking back at the past half century, and reading what the scientists in this book have brought us, it is abundantly clear that the American public has been denied access to medicines having potential to change the course of human history. For those of us who share the belief that within us all is innate wisdom, accessing the Deep Within is our life path. Many avenues to the Deep Within have been explored, including meditation, mindfulness, yoga, stimulus isolation tanks, anechoic chambers, monastic living, ingesting organic matter from the ground, and ingesting synthetic matter from laboratories.

America’s leading scientists in psychedelic research, interviewed in this book, bring data revealing that certain psychedelic medicines, administered by proper protocols, informed by research and clearly described, offer altered states of consciousness facilitating brilliant creativity and psychophysical healing. Witness the findings of deep healing led by Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins, Charles Grob at UCLA, Dave Nichols at Indiana University, and Michael Mithofer of MAPS. Witness also the creativity of astrophysicist Carl Sagan, Apple founder Steve Jobs, physicist Richard Feynman, DNA scientist Francis Crick, and neuroscientist John Lilly, all of whom utilized psychedelics in their professional work and discoveries.

Imagine taking a medicine that alters your mind and facilitates the generation of new thoughts and new ways of looking at the world.

Imagine taking a medicine that facilitates solving problems of life, be they personal or professional.

Imagine taking a medicine for the purpose of spiritual prophylaxis, the cleansing of the spirit that has been clogged up by life.

When we expand our consciousness we liberate ourselves from the slavery that is inherent in all cultural and institutional systems. The slavery derives from repetition of daily life until the behavior becomes institutionalized, thereby creating culture. Rigidified, institutionalized culture is the ultimate peer pressure, which stifles, dominates, and controls both creativity and consciousness expansion.

Once a person ingests a psychedelic medicine and experiences the Deep Within and expanded consciousness, there is no going back to narrow consciousness and constricted thinking. What has been seen cannot be unseen. Once we experience alternate realities we can never again say this is the only one reality. When we experience ourselves as electrochemical beings of light, as molecules stuck together taking material form, our lives take on new meaning.

Psychedelic medicine can facilitate our using the power of the mind to change our very genetic structure. We can change the slings and arrows of outrageous genetic misfortune into a Cupid’s bow of a sculpted self.

A Call for Transparency

April 3, 2012

Recently I was walking down a country road over at Wilbur Hot Springs in Colusa County, California, and I met a Danish couple—about twenty-five, twenty-six years old—and we began chatting. At one point they looked at me with the most innocent of eyes and said, “What is happening to your country?”

I looked around, and I said, “What?”

They said, “What has happened to your country? We know that something bad is happening to your country, but we don’t understand it. Can you tell us about it?”

The world seems to know that something has happened, and is happening, to our country. I’m sure you are aware of it. Or are you? It’s not an easy thing to grasp. Sometimes, when we see things happening to a country, or to our county or city, we might ask ourselves: Is this just me or am I the victim of some conspiratorial thinking? Is it just me and my little group of friends or is this actually happening? Well, it is actually happening. In this book, I’m going to expose part of what is happening—namely the long-term suppression of one kind of scientific information. Suppression of information is symptomatic.

Perhaps some of you who regularly listen to my radio program have asked yourselves why I’m doing this lengthy series on psychedelic medicines. My radio program is about mind, body, health, and politics. It’s about bringing you what I consider to be truth—meaning what’s really happening out there. What’s going on in the world of mind, body, health, and politics that the public is not being told about? That’s what I mean by truth—getting it all out there and being transparent. I believe in transparency. I believe we, the citizens, have a right to know everything—and I mean everything. I think secrets cause problems. They cause division among human beings, whereas transparency brings us together. We all want to be in the know. We don’t want to feel that we’re being excluded.

Information is power, and having more information can lead to having power over others, or having power to share with others. There has been suppression of information in our country for a long time. Our original Constitution was a landmark in the history of the world, but there’s a lot of work that needs to be done on it. And what’s new about that? Thomas Jefferson told us over two hundred years ago that the Constitution should be rewritten every twenty years, for every new generation, because otherwise it gets out of date. I’m not claiming to be saying anything new.

The area of psychedelic medicine has been suppressed from the public for so long and for so many reasons that we’re out of reasons. There are no good reasons for suppressing university research on medicine. There are just reasons. This lack of information is hurting people, because scientists are telling us that there is healing that can be achieved through the use of these medicines, and people are being denied this healing. At least if the information about the medicines were allowed to the public they would be able to make their own decisions. I ask myself: Why would the government suppress research? This is what I intend to explore.

What Determines Policy: Science or Ideology?

Former president Barack Obama told CNN medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta, MD, that our government’s health policy regarding marijuana should be directed by science and not ideology. This admonition by our learned former president is contrary to the prevailing reality of how our government functions and how laws are made.

Case in point: In 1930 Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon (of the Mellon banking family) appointed his relative Harry J. Anslinger to be commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Mr. Anslinger clearly favored religion and ideology over science. His ideology included a manic, obsessive hatred of people of color. As a result, for the past eighty-seven years the American people—and the world—have suffered from Mr. Anslinger’s racist ideology. Lives have been lost, families shattered, cities damaged, and entire governments such as Mexico’s have been threatened by Mr. Harry Anslinger’s successful creation of laws that enforced his ideology while ignoring science.

Anslinger, along with others, prosecuted the Chinese for using opium, the Mexicans for marijuana, and blacks for cocaine. Disinformation was spread that these minority people of color were using the drugs to seduce white women, and the public roared. By using the mass media as his forum (receiving much support from yellow journalism publisher William Randolph Hearst), Anslinger propelled the antimarijuana sentiment from state level to a national, and then international, movement. He used what he called his Gore Files—a collection of quotes from police reports—to graphically depict offenses caused by drug users.

By representing the United States before the United Nations, Harry Anslinger made certain substances illegal on a worldwide scale. Alcohol prohibition in the United States lasted thirteen years, during which time two issues became obvious. First, the American people were not going to be legislated out of drinking alcohol. Second, making alcohol illegal spawned a criminal enterprise that we call the mafia, whose gross revenue approached the nation’s entire (previously legal) alcoholic beverage industry. It’s hard to wrap your consciousness around that! Take every business in the United States that is involved with alcohol, from the production to the distribution to the sales—every bit of it: hard spirits, beer, and wine—and that is the amount of business that we gave to the criminal enterprise. It might not be a stretch to say that Harry Anslinger created the largest, most successful criminal enterprise the world has ever known. When Harry Anslinger waged a war on alcohol, and Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan subsequently declared a war on drugs, they were in fact declaring a war on people—mostly people of color. Eighty-seven years after Mr. Anslinger’s federal appointment and his creation of the marijuana tax laws of 1937, our jails are burdened with an ocean of people of color whose only crime was an act of ingesting a vegetable, marijuana, that comes from the ground.

While people of color make up about 30 percent of the United States’ population, they account for 60 percent of those imprisoned. The incarceration rates in America disproportionately impact men of color: 1 in every 15 African American men and 1 in every 36 Hispanic men are incarcerated in comparison to 1 in every 106 white men.

In recent decades, people around the United States have responded to this war against people by attempting to bring science into this ideological war. Pioneering groups such as the Drug Policy Alliance, National Organization to Reform Marijuana Law (NORML), the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), and the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) advance the cause of overturning drug laws driven by ideology.

When our forty-fourth American president, Barack Obama, called for the acceptance of science over ideology, we thought we saw the end of Harry Anslinger’s eighty-five-year rule. We were mistaken.

A Call to Freedom

Following Anslinger’s lead, most governments around the world have taken a strong position against the cause of personal freedom. By making certain substances illegal, even in the laboratory of science, they have curtailed basic rights and constitutional rights.

However, in recent years, the United States government has allowed a very limited amount of research into psychoactive substances. It is this political breakthrough that fueled many of the interviews provided in this book, which have been transcribed from my radio program Mind, Body, Health & Politics. My program is known for its wide-ranging discussions on political issues and health. The show’s format includes guest interviews, guest speakers, and listener call-ins, offering a forum and soundboard for listeners to interact with the hosts and their guests.

Within this platform, I have had the opportunity to interview leading scientists in the field of psychedelic research. Each of the scientists interviewed in this book has made monumental contributions to understanding human consciousness. Taken together, including the political climate in which they conducted their research, their work makes them heroic figures.

On the very frontiers of inner-space travel, these scientists have significantly impacted the philosophical and political cause of freedom. Freedom to explore oneself and to express one’s findings to anyone interested is one of the great causes of humanity.

The scientists interviewed in this book have dedicated their lives to doing their research within the law and presenting their findings to the world. It is reasonable to believe they risked their reputations, their convenience, and perhaps their lives.

It has been my great honor to interview each of them, and it is with much pleasure that I offer you their book.