The Tripper's Dilemma

How To Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression and Transcendence

By Michael Pollan
Penguin Press

Best known as the author of the best-selling Omnivore's Dilemma and other food-related books in a food-conscious culture (at least among those with the income to buy books on the subject), Michael Pollan caught another wave with this comprehensive volume on a subject whose time has come back.  With the widespread legalization of cannabis, it was a good bet--but a risk nevertheless--that the total reign of silence on psychedelics was due to be broken.

Pollan did that with a revealing and objective account of the history of psychedelics in the 20th century and the revival of research and other uses in the present.  In between he narrates some of his own recent experiences with organic and chemically created psychedelics.   He makes deft use of figures like fungi scientist Paul Stamets who span the first wave of interest in the 60s and today's revival.  The result is a 450 page book that the New York Times has named one of the ten best published in 2018.

By the time Pollan was a college student in the late 1970s, the psychedelic period was largely over.   At the start Pollan seems perhaps too preemptively embarrassed  by that era's subsequent reputation, seemingly fearful of scaring readers away.  But he is judicious and forthright in the historical narrative: how the explosion of LSD, magic mushrooms and mescaline out of the research laboratory and into youth culture, as well as the messianic excesses of Timothy Leary and others,  led to a total ban of psychedelics, including scientific research, that's lasted for decades.  Where would soldiers from Vietnam come from, or willing cogs in the profit-making machine?  It couldn't be allowed.  This despite the unsurprising fact that most of the scare stories about LSD were untrue (nobody went blind staring into the sun on an acid trip) and that the research was promising, especially in treating addiction and mental illnesses.

However when I was in my senior year of college in 1967-68, that period was in full bloom, though on my perhaps backward Midwestern campus we were still mostly catching up with cannabis culture.  Nevertheless, we were listening to psychedelic music, seeing psychedelic art, wearing psychedelic clothes, and noting the mind-expansion enthusiasm of the Beatles and so many others.  In my off-campus house I carefully read The Psychedelic Experience by Leary, Ralph Metzner and Richard Albert (later, Ram Das)--all clearly labeled as Ph.D'--with its tribute to Jung and its programmatic LSD trip advice, particularly in selecting the right "set and setting" for the experience.  It was serious, if not sober, stuff.

The first opportunity I had to actually do LSD didn't come until the following winter of '68, and though I considered the decision carefully, in the end I unaccountably jumped in without any regard to set and setting or a programmed trip.  I was one of a group of younger and paradoxically more experienced students, who simply dropped acid and went about a normal Saturday night, that included going together to a movie.  I don't recall what movie it was, but it definitely contained violence that upset me, especially given the Vietnam and assassinations times. Going to this film seemed a terrible decision, and I realized I couldn't really trust the people I was with. So I deliberately brought myself down. That I was able to do so with relative ease made me suspect the substance I'd taken wasn't LSD, either wholly or at all.

I had three more subsequent experiences with substances I was told were LSD or mescaline, and they were largely the same.  I had a few experiential insights in a Colorado wilds on the supposed mescaline, and a fine time tripping to Abbey Road in Berkeley while trying to ignore the intense head trip discussion in the next room,  but in general the same two factors pertained: I doubted the substance was pure LSD or mescaline, and I couldn't trust my environment (or in one case I had to cope with somebody else's crisis.)  In terms of a psychedelic experience, I went farther in my senior year with too much Humboldt cannabis of a strength I wasn't used to, or it too could have been adulterated.  (Ironically perhaps, I've lived more than 20 years in Humboldt County now without so much as a toke.)

So it is especially interesting to me that today's trips tend to be controlled, with experienced "guides" in safe--if sometimes seemingly soporific--environments.  (Compare Pollan's descriptions of his trips with Sting's account of taking ayahuasca in Brazil in his autobiography Broken Music.) Purity of product can still be a question, although as with today's cannabis, there's more sophisticated control possible.

Pollan reviews the substantive research into what can generally be called the medical potentials of psychedelics in the 1950s and 60s.  Though such research was described in such readily available books as the 1967 paperback LSD: The Problem-Solving Psychedelic, the cultural myth of that time tended to emphasize CIA-backed mind control research and the clueless psychologists that questioned volunteer Ken Kesey, tripping his brains out at Stanford (as referenced in LSD's first and only literary classic of the period, Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.)

Pollan draws a government-broken line between that research and the now ongoing and growing research into the psychedelic potential for a range of psychological and even physical conditions. (Aging baby boomers may be particularly interested in the results being obtained with terminal patients who lose their fear of death.)

He reveals lesser known influences that outlived the 60s to extend their effects to today, such as the role these substances paid in the creative breakthroughs by Steve Jobs and others that led in part to the computer and tech explosion, and the inspiration they provided the legendary Bill K. to start his Alcoholics Anonymous program, the basis for many such programs since.

Pollan can't avoid the philosophical and (broadly speaking) spiritual effects of these experiences, though at times it seems he'd like to.  But eventually he comes clean, suggesting that even as psychedelics are useful in a wide range of medical conditions--even perhaps a miracle cure for some, or at least a radical redefinition of them--their utility transcends and perhaps redefines science.  That power to rearrange how the world is understood, more than anything, permeated the psychedelic 60s and early 70s, so that they changed the culture, which in turn suggested these insights and their effects to many of us whether or not we dropped that pure acid in the proper set and setting.

  Pollan is annoyingly, though understandably defensive at the beginning of the book, but it took some courage and discernment to tell this story as fairly and fully as he does. The evidence he provides more than suggests that psychedelics can be of great and perhaps transformative benefit, in medical settings and beyond.

 Because the fearful establishment of the 60s was right in one respect: psychedelics can foster big changes: in perception, attitude, consciousness, and relationships to the self, others, the world and all of reality. They can help change minds, and thereby, eventually, change the world.  Had they not been so thoroughly suppressed but allowed to mature, how different the past fifty years might have been.