Being Bullish and Bearish About Psychedelics Seems Like the Only Sane Position

on the forthcoming legalization of entheogens

Soon, many psychedelic drugs will probably be legalized. My feelings about this are generally positive, but somewhat mixed. These are notes towards some of my more mixed sentiments.

1: Lunatics Abound

Recently, I did a therapeutic MDMA trip, with supervision by a guide, to relieve some divorce-related resentment. The MDMA trip worked fantastically; a chunk of the rage about my relationship dissipated nicely. During the trip, I also talked about my current dating life, in order to get some clarity about it.

Following this, the guide leaked some of the information I’d divulged during the session to a woman I’d talked about while I was tripping. If he were a licensed therapist, this is information he shouldn’t have given up under subpoena—but he just reached out to her via Twitter DM. It seemed like he was trying to flirt with her in a weird polyamorous way. (This was not an effective strategy.)

There are lots of things wrong with the current mental health system. But much of the basic ethics are in place. Like, you can generally count on your insurance-covered therapist to not flirt with romantic prospects you talk about. Meanwhile, the psychedelic world is the wild west; even guides with good reputations commit abuses way worse than what I’ve just described.

This is a problem now. But it’s also a potential problem in the future: some psychedelic advocates of this stripe will definitely be among the leadership of organizations that promote and study psychedelics as they become more mainstream. Whether or not their ethics improve with their level of responsibility is an open question. I am pessimistic.

Also, those who are psychedelic advocates, who will enter into leadership roles, are also people who have an unusually good time on psychedelics. There’s a lot of individual variance in how much people enjoy these substances; the average consumer may have an underwhelming experience as compared to the average advocate.

2: Targeted Interventions Could Be Better Than We Think

Historically, psychedelics have been used for rites of passage, spiritual experiences, or a fun night out. And that’s all fine and good. But there’s another emerging front. We don’t yet know the power of psychedelics when used in well-calibrated, targeted applications to treat specific issues. I suspect that, if anything, we are underrating the hype here.

I’d tried to quit smoking for most of a decade, in various ways. Sometimes I’d quit for almost a year, but then I’d stumble into some glamorous cigarette opportunity, and then I’d be right back to it. Then I did a targeted psilocybin trip one time, and I don’t smoke anymore. Also, one targeted LSD trip restored my sense of smell post-COVID.

How much further can this go? What in the hell is going on with that woman who took a megadose of LSD and then her chronic pain disappeared? What’s this stuff about phantom limb syndrome? How many lives could we save with fast-access frontline ketamine treatment for suicidal inpatients?

It’s conceivable that there are inestimably massive amounts of human misery caused by cognitive stuckness that precisely structured psychedelic treatment could quite simply dispose of.

3: Higher Openness Is Not an Unalloyed Good

Preliminary evidence seems to indicate that psychedelic use can increase the psychological trait of openness. This also tracks with your observations of all your friends who’ve become much weirder after doing a lot of psychedelics.

Sometimes this is really, really good. I think an early mushroom trip did a lot to break me out of my anxiety and fear-based conditioning after an unsafe childhood. Lots of depressed people are trapped in doomy premises about their lives created by their minds overfitting to their current miseries.

However, high psychological openness is not without its side effects. Some psychological constriction—a tendency to resist new experiences and stick to what you know—makes it much easier to form meaning, given that meaning is usually found in contingent relationships that need to be maintained and preferred above others. (Coherent structures of belief tend to follow from a reasonably well-ordered life.) If you view many possible lives as morally and aesthetically equivalent, you can end up unmoored, vacillant, and watery in the long term.

This is something that I’ve observed. And I’m not even talking about those I know who have fried their brains, which is a small population, but one that definitely exists.

4: The Best Ones Maybe Haven’t Been Invented Yet

Psychedelic advocates evangelize based on the outrageously positive results that (sometimes) result from the use of drugs we already know about. What I’m more excited about is the class of drugs to follow. I know, for example, of someone working on a safer version of MDMA, something that could temporarily increase your sense of emotional safety—for therapeutic or fun reasons—while being as safe as caffeine. This could legitimately be a transformative technology.

What are the full possibilities here? I don’t really know. But I’m willing to bet that there are thousands of potential drugs that are better than, say, alcohol.

5: But Drugs Are Usually a Backstop, Right?

Ultimately, I think the concept of ‘personal mental health’ is overburdened. I am definitely a believer in working on your traumas, learning to love yourself, etcetera. However, your ability to sustainably achieve eudaimonia is downstream of the overall shape of society, and how that manifests in your set of relationships. If your immediate habitat wants you to be self-destructive, or benumbed, or alienated, that’s likely the local minima you’ll be biting down on. (A lot of my ability to work on my psychological wounds was down to relationships I had with compassionate peers.)

The conditions for happiness mostly do not lie within. The belief that they do is part of the atomized society that creates our mental health issues.

In some ways, then, our mental health system is a backstop for our somewhat unhealthy civilization. Sure, for some—many, even—SSRIs are a strict improvement on the alternatives. But for others, they’re the liferaft that keeps you afloat in an awful job you shouldn’t be doing, a lifestyle that isn’t anchored to anything real and true, etcetera. They prop up the status quo, rather than encouraging you to break from your current lifestyle.

One can easily see psychedelics largely going the same way: making people more chill and relaxed with quarterly doses so they can tolerate hollowed-out lives. Sure, some people go do mushrooms and change their lives for the better after the vision quest. But some others just regress straight back to the mean, go back to their destructive milieu, fall into the demands of an unfortunate environment, etcetera. And maybe it’s even worse, with the comedown of having, temporarily, felt some sort of inner libration.

Note that this might be okay, or maybe even the optimal outcome in the near future. Maybe a better backstop is one of the best things we can do right now. But I think those who believe that psychedelic legalization will bring about a societal change in consciousness should also have this in mind.

6: Market Forces May Lead to Bad Psychedelic Experiences

This isn’t a new point I’m making, but it’s important enough to be worth restating. Generally, the best psychedelic experiences are administered by caring, compassionate people who are highly trained. There aren’t a ton of these people. It’s not easy to skillfully take advantage of temporary read/write access to otherwise unavailable parts of the mind. And you can quite easily mess that up.

Quite obviously, success in an emergent psychedelic economy will depend on being scalable. But the best psychedelic experiences don’t really scale. One could argue that this is similar to basically everything: restaurants, therapy, whatever—but the stakes are quite high with potentially transformative mystical experiences. A really shitty trip can do some damage, or, occasionally, a lot of damage.

7: Legalization Will Lead to More Abuse

With increased availability of psychedelics, there will be more abuse—maybe not a lot, but certainly some. Toddlers having bad acid trips after stumbling into the badly-kept stashes of their parents. Unstable people sailing off into full-blown schizophrenia. Addicts trying to quit drugs with psychedelics and then simply ending up with another addiction. (It does happen.)

Depending on the scale, this may not change the overall cost-benefit analysis much. But we should be honest about this inevitability.

8: The Creation of Reference States Can Actually Be Totally Transformative

Caveat to the above point about individual mental health. There is one thing that psychedelics can do that’s not relationship-dependent that’s also genuinely mind-blowing, which is the creation of reference states. (Thank you to Mark Estefanos for reminding me of this.)

There are many people alive who’ve never experienced a sense of expansive compassion, or a feeling of sensory lushness, or wonder at their own body. Moreover, they live in a habitual state that totally walls off those domains of experience. They just can’t get there.

Psychedelics can give you these experiences for the first time. And, yeah, they won’t sustain these states on their own. But, sometimes, having the way pointed out is the necessary first step. They can give you a trajectory, and the first-hand knowledge that your consciousness can be radically different. Unlearning helplessness is, on its own merits, tremendously valuable.

9: Psychedelics Probably Saved My Life, But

I’m writing all of this from a position of gratitude for the existence of these substances. Every aspect of my life that I think of as important—the way I relate to people, my personal narrative, the way I feel in my body, my phenomenology, my entrepreneurial sensibility—has been informed positively by psychedelic use, even by imperfect psychedelic use.

But I’m, I think, one of those aforementioned people who has an unusually good time on psychedelics. Don’t know why, but that’s just the way it is. Like, if you somehow slipped me a couple of tabs of acid on a random day of my life, I wouldn’t be happy about it, but I’d manage to steer it in a pleasant-ish direction, even if I was in a lousy state of mind at the time.

I am not naive enough to expect that my experiences are totally typical.