How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics

by Michael Pollan

LSD truly was an acid, dissolving almost everything with which it came into contact, beginning with the hierarchies of the mind (the superego, ego, and unconscious) and going on from there to society’s various structures of authority and then to lines of every imaginable kind: between patient and therapist, research and recreation, sickness and health, self and other, subject and object, the spiritual and the material.

But it surely is not the case that the forces unleashed by these chemicals are necessarily ungovernable. Even the most powerful acids can be carefully handled and put to use as tools for accomplishing important things.

Other societies have had long and productive experience with psychedelics, and their examples might have saved us a lot of trouble had we only known and paid attention. The fact that we regard many of these societies as “backward” probably kept us from learning from them. But the biggest thing we might have learned is that these powerful medicines can be dangerous—both to the individual and to the society—when they don’t have a sturdy social container: a steadying set of rituals and rules—protocols—governing their use, and the crucial involvement of a guide, the figure that is usually called a shaman. Psychedelic therapy—the Hubbard method—was groping toward a Westernized version of this ideal, and it remains the closest thing we have to such a protocol. For young Americans in the 1960s, for whom the psychedelic experience was new in every way, the whole idea of involving elders was probably never going to fly. But this is, I think, the great lesson of the 1960s experiment with psychedelics: the importance of finding the proper context, or container, for these powerful chemicals and experiences.

In May of that year, the Senate held hearings about the LSD problem. Timothy Leary and Sidney Cohen both testified, attempting valiantly to defend psychedelic research and draw lines between legitimate use and a black market that the government was now determined to crush. They found a surprisingly sympathetic ear in Senator Robert F. Kennedy, whose wife, Ethel, had reportedly been treated with LSD at Hollywood Hospital in Vancouver—one of Al Hubbard’s outposts. Grilling the FDA regulators about their plans to cancel many of the remaining research projects, Kennedy demanded to know, “Why if [these projects] were worthwhile six months ago, why aren’t they worthwhile now?” Kennedy said it would be a “loss to the nation” if psychedelics were banned from medicine because of illicit use. “Perhaps we have lost sight of the fact that [they] can be very, very helpful in our society if used properly.” But Kennedy got nowhere. Leary, and perhaps the drugs themselves, had made drawing such distinctions impossible.

And so it was not until the following day that the research program of the International Foundation for Advanced Study, along with virtually every other research program then under way in the United States, closed down. One psychedelic research program survived the purge: the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center at Spring Grove. Here, researchers such as Stanislav Grof, Bill Richards, Richard Yensen, and, until his death in 1971, Walter Pahnke (the Good Friday researcher) continued to explore the potential of psilocybin and LSD to treat alcoholism, schizophrenia, and the existential distress of cancer patients, among other indications. It remains something of a mystery why this large psychedelic research program was allowed to continue—as it did until 1976—when dozens of others were being closed down. Some researchers who weren’t so fortunate speculate that Spring Grove might have been making psychedelic therapy available to powerful people in Washington who recognized its value or hoped to learn from the research or perhaps wanted to retain their own access to the drugs. But the former staff members at the center I spoke to doubt this was the case. They did confirm, however, that the center’s director, Albert Kurland, MD, besides having a sterling reputation among federal officials, was exceptionally well connected in Washington and used his connections to keep the lights on—and obtain LSD, some of it from the government—for a decade after they had been switched off every...

Yet it turns out that the events of neither 1966 nor 1976 put an end to psychedelic research and therapy in America. Moving now underground, it went on, quietly and in secret. Coda In February 1979, virtually all the important figures in the first wave of American psychedelic research gathered for a reunion in Los Angeles at the home of Oscar Janiger. Someone made a videotape of the event, and though the quality is poor, most of the conversation is audible. Here in Janiger’s living room we see Humphry Osmond, Sidney Cohen, Myron Stolaroff, Willis Harman, Timothy Leary, and, sitting on the couch next to him, looking distinctly uncomfortable, Captain Al Hubbard. He’s seventy-seven (or eight), and he’s traveled from Casa Grande, Arizona, where he lives in a trailer park. He’s wearing his paramilitary getup, though I can’t tell if he’s carrying a sidearm. The old men reminisce, a bit stiffly at first. Some hard feelings hang in the air. But Leary, still charming, is remarkably generous, working to put everyone at ease. Their best days are behind them; the great project to which they devoted their lives lay in ruins. But something important was accomplished, they all believe—else they wouldn’t be here at this reunion. Sidney Cohen, dressed in a jacket and tie, asks the question on everyone’s mind—“What does it all mean?”—and then ventures an answer: “It stirred people up. It cracked their frame of reference by the thousands—millions perhaps. And anything that does that is prett...

Al Hubbard listens intently to all this but has little to add; he fiddles with a hardback book in his lap. At one point, he pipes up to suggest the work should go on, drug laws be damned: We should “just keep on doing it. Wake people up! Let them see for themselves what they are. I think old Carter could stand a good dose!” Carter’s defense secretary, Harold Brown, and CIA director, Stansfield Turner, too. But Hubbard’s not at all sure he wants to be on this couch with Timothy Leary and is less willing than the others to let bygones be bygones, or Leary off the hook, no matter how solicitous he is of the Captain. “Oh, Al! I owe everything to you,” Leary offers at one point, beaming his most excellent s...

By now, I had interviewed at length more than a dozen people who had gone on guided psychedelic journeys, and it was impossible to listen to their stories without wondering what the journey would be like for one’s self. For many of them, these were among the two or three most profound experiences of their lives, in several cases changing them in positive and lasting ways. To become more “open”—especially at this age, when the grooves of mental habit have been etched so deep as to seem inescapable—was an appealing prospect. And then there was the possibility, however remote, of having some kind of spiritual epiphany. Many of the people I’d interviewed had started out stone-cold materialists and atheists, no more spiritually developed than I, and yet several had had “mystical experiences” that left them with the unshakable conviction that there was something more to this world than we know—a “beyond” of some kind that transcended the material universe I presume to constitute the whole shebang. I thought often about one of the cancer patients I interviewed, an avowed atheist who had nevertheless found herself “bathed in God’s love.”

Yet not everything I’d heard from these people made me eager to follow them onto the couch. Many had been borne by psilocybin deep into their pasts, a few of them traveling all the way back to scenes of unremembered childhood trauma. These journeys had been wrenching, shaking the travelers to their core, but they had been cathartic too. Clearly these medicines—as guides both above- and belowground invariably call the drugs they administer—powerfully stir the psychic pot, surfacing all sorts of repressed material, some of it terrifying and ugly. Did I really want to go there? No!—to be perfectly honest. You should know I have never been one for deep or sustained introspection. My usual orientation is more forward than back, or down, and I generally prefer to leave my psychic depths undisturbed, assuming they exist. (There’s quite enough to deal with up here on the surface; maybe that’s why I became a journalist rather than a novelist or poet.) All that stuff down there in the psychic basement has been stowed there for a reason, and unless you’re looking for something specific to help solve a problem, why would anyone willingly go down those steps and switch on that light?

At such times, I begin seriously to entertain the possibility that somewhere deep beneath the equable presence I present, there exists a shadow me made up of forces roiling, anarchic, and potentially mad. Just how thin is the skin of my sanity? There are times when I wonder. Perhaps we all do. But did I really want to find out? R. D. Laing once said there are three things human beings are afraid of: death, other people, and their own minds. Put me down as two for three. But there are moments when curiosity gets the better of fear. I guess for me such a moment had arrived.