“After a 40-year virtual ban on research involving psychedelic drugs, scientists look anew at their potential in treating pain and anxiety“. This Boston Globe piece highlights the resurgent interest in psychedelics for therapeutic purposes. Current research includes claims that the powerful South American hallucinogen ibogaine is a quick fix for addictions and that MDMA (Ecstasy) can ease a fearful and pain-ridden dying.
The occasion for the Globe‘s interest is a research grant awarded to Harvard psychiatrist John Halpern, which the article observes
“…represents a chance to reduce the stigma hanging over the field. Back in the 1960s, Harvard professor Timothy Leary helped spur the backlash against psychedelic drugs with ethically questionable experiments and by advocating recreational LSD use to ”turn on, tune in, drop out.” Halpern, by contrast, is a respected researcher…”
This in my opinion is an irresponsible attack on Harvard faculty colleagues Leary and Richard Alpert, who were interested in systematic disciplined use of LSD as a learning tool. Mind expansion with psychedelics was never promoted as “recreational” as much as profoundly exploratory and revelatory. It is absurd to blame the victims — who were drummed out of academia — for the prejudicial backlash against hallucinogenic drugs, given the fundamental challenge they represented to the dominant paradigms.
It is no surprise, either, that psychedelic research got quickly assimilated to the social change movement which was simultaneously mounting equally profound challenges in areas including sexuality, peace, freedom and social structure. It really was a long time ago, and perhaps younger observers can be forgiven if some of the more dramatic manifestations of change in the ’60’s and early ’70’s are seen only as foolish and absurd when decontextualized as they so often are. Forget the times and you forget the real reasons no one is talking about changing society through psychedelics today. Some would say that the backlash has been utterly successfully in making us forget and decontextualize. As I wrote in the despairing days after Bush was returned to the White House for a second term in 2004, the only effective way I could see to speak truth to that obscene power was to create a fullscale countercultural backlash again, not a challenge narrowly confined to the political process.
It would be interesting to know if it is the Globe reporter’s take, or Dr. Halpern’s political attempt to distance himself from his forebears. An organization that closely and responsibly tracks these issues is the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS. In this article, MAPS founder Rick Doblin similarly distances himself from Leary’s position that psychedelic use will change society. I suppose that, in the Age of Bush, it would be hard enough getting dispassionate research funded without appearing to be an advocate. So Leary ends up being a convenient straw man.
