Tomorrowland (19 page)

Today, the doorbell rings. Allan and that starter dose have arrived. Mara’s excited. Lindsay is hopeful. Marilyn thinks she might throw up. Her mind won’t stop racing.
This starter dose is just a best guess, right? Can I even trust Allan?
But Allan is buoyant, gloriously optimistic, not patronizing or pitying like the other therapists Mara has met. His demeanor calms everyone. As he walks into the room, Allan takes the pills from his pocket and holds them up.

“We are going to have an adventure,” he says.

And he is not lying.

At 11:15 a.m., Mara swallows 110 mgs of pharmacologically pure MDMA, lies down in bed, and looks at the angels on the ceiling. Marilyn follows her daughter’s upward gaze. She too spots the medallion, and utters one final prayer.

“Please be angels of mercy,” she says. “Please, please, please.”

2.

While the work Allan does remains illegal and underground, that is now starting to change. We are teetering on the threshold of a major psychedelic renaissance. For the first time in forty years, and without resistance from the law, in countries all over the world and cities all over America, some of the most infamous substances in history are again being put to the test. Scientists in Israel, Jordan, and Canada are looking at the therapeutic potential of MDMA. In Brazil, Germany, and Spain researchers have begun untangling ayahuasca, a plant that contains DMT — arguably the most potent hallucinogen on earth. In Switzerland, it’s LSD as a treatment for the anxiety produced by life-threatening illness. In Mexico and Canada, it’s ibogaine (another powerful
plant-derived psychedelic) for opiate addiction. In Russia, it’s ketamine (a tranquilizer known to produce dissociative states) for heroin addiction. Here at home, scientists at the Johns Hopkins University have concluded a long-term psilocybin study that examined the purported “mystical experiences” people have while hallucinating. At UCLA, they’ve already completed an end-of-life anxiety psilocybin study, while teams at NYU and Johns Hopkins are beginning ones of their own. At the University of Arizona, it’s psilocybin as a treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder. At Harvard, having finished up neurotoxicity studies on both MDMA and peyote, researchers are about to get underway with LSD for cluster headaches and MDMA for end-of-life anxiety. Down in South Carolina, working with combat veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan among other trauma victims, researchers already completed one study of MDMA as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and are about to begin another.

Moreover, the majority of scientists involved feel their work is no longer governmentally frowned upon nor the easiest way never to get tenure. Roland Griffiths, a Johns Hopkins professor of psychiatry and neuroscience and a psychedelic researcher himself, says, “I think institutional resistance to this research was much stronger than governmental policy. For three decades, just proposing a psychedelic study was an academic career-ender — the electric third rail for any serious scientist. But that’s just no longer true.”

“The difference,” says Rick Doblin, “is we’re getting it right this time.” And Doblin would know. As a Harvard PhD and the founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) — a nonprofit drug company whose goal is the eventual manufacture of psychedelics — Doblin sits at the forefront of this new movement. For the past twenty-five years, he’s worked to get governments all over the world to reconsider their stance on these drugs, to get psychedelics back into the laboratory, and, perhaps most critically, to help design experiments rigorous
enough that even the most adamant of opponents would be forced into reconsidering their position.

What Doblin means by “getting it right” is not just a reference to experimental execution; it’s also to overall attitude. “We lost this battle the first time around because of arrogance,” he says. “Tim Leary wanted LSD to bring down the establishment. Terrance McKenna said ‘psychedelics are inherently opposed to culture.’ That was the arrogance. Theirs was an entirely romantic notion, but also isolationist and uncomfortably superior. I’m trying to reverse that trend. I want to mainstream psychedelic medicine. My motto is: Tune in, turn on, and go to the bake sale.”

Doblin isn’t kidding. On the day I meet him, just after getting breakfast at the local bagel shop, we’re walking back to his house. He lives in Belmont, Massachusetts, a town so idyllically quaint that neighboring Cambridge — home of Harvard and MIT — seems I. M. Pei modern by comparison. Belmont is tree-lined and plaid-friendly, one of the last places one would describe as revolutionary. But looks can be deceiving. A woman stops Doblin not far from the bagel shop. She’s in her late forties, well-dressed, the poster child of an overprotective suburban mother.

“Rick,” she shouts from down the block, “did you see that great special on LSD on the History Channel the other night?”

What follows is a ten-minute discussion about the current state of psychedelic affairs. The woman knows much about this work and seems entirely in favor of it. When she leaves, Doblin tells me he belongs to one of the most popular temples in town.

“And that,” he says with a smile, “was the rabbi’s wife.”

“The who?”

“I don’t ever hide what I do. It’s a small community. Everybody knows everybody’s business. Most people are really supportive.”

Doblin believes the support he gets is the best kind. “It’s based on knowledge, compassion, and social justice,” he says. “OCD and end-of-life anxiety — these are very difficult conditions to cure — but the research clearly shows that psychedelics can help with both. We’ve got vets coming back from Iraq with intractable
post-traumatic stress syndrome. The government doesn’t know what to do for these people. But MDMA-assisted psychotherapy works for them as well. Cluster headaches are also called ‘suicide headaches’ for the level of pain they produce and their frequency of occurrence. They’re another incurable. But treating them with LSD looks really promising right now.”

Doblin raises a hand and sweeps it around the neighborhood.

“People around here know all this. Belmont is a small part of the future I’m working toward. This may be the only town in America where’s it’s not usual to find people discussing the benefits of psychedelic therapy at a PTA meeting.”

3.

Mara grits her teeth and stares at the angels. It’s been over an hour since she took Ecstasy, and all that’s happened since hasn’t been pleasant. Her pain level has risen. Her noon dose of methadone didn’t help. It’s now 1:00 p.m. Everyone in the green room begins to discuss options. At 110 mgs, Mara’s starter pill is 15 mgs shy of the standard therapeutic dose. In most studies, patients are given an initial hit of 125 mgs and 75 mgs an hour later. Allan believes that doubling that starter would be safe. Mara doesn’t want to give up so soon. She swallows another 110 mgs of MDMA and asks, “Is spiritual transformation ever easy?”

The reason Mara believes psychedelics can produce spiritual transformation has little do with her own story and everything to do with her mother’s. Marilyn had been born with the congenital deformity
pectus excavatum
, a dent in the center of her chest, roughly the size of a golf ball. Her organs were pushed to one side, her rib cage jutted out. In her early thirties, Marilyn met psychotherapist and pioneer of mind-body medicine Ron Kurtz. He opined that the dent was the result of trapped childhood emotion. Release the emotion, he said, and the dent goes away.

Marilyn tried everything to release the emotion, and then
she tried LSD therapy. Her session also took place in the green room, also beneath the angels. She had a blindfold across her face and a “sitter” — the technical term for someone who stays sober and guides the trip (a scaled-down version of the job Allan now does) — by her side. A half hour after taking the drug and much to her surprise, Marilyn felt her brain split in two — and she began to wail. Primal screams came pouring out. Eventually the screams softened to chants and for the next four hours, Marilyn made spontaneous repetitions of the sound
aaaaah
— though, in those moments, calling her “Marilyn” might be something of a misnomer. “I no longer perceived any boundaries separating me from my surroundings. I was sound and love and peace. Every emotion I had ever felt seemed insignificant by comparison. At that moment I knew what was meant by mystical experience, by transcendence. For me, it had nothing to do with faith or religion or belief in God. I had
experienced
God.”

And when she was done, the dent in her chest was almost gone. Her rib cage flattened, her organs shifted toward traditional spots. Marilyn had gone on a twelve-hour mental trip and come back a physically different person. And when Mara agreed to try psychedelic therapy, her hope wasn’t just for emotional release. What Marilyn experienced is known as spontaneous healing and classified, at least in the Judeo-Western traditions, as a miracle. This was why Mara dropped that second pill; this was the kind of miracle she was after.

For similar reasons, on a small side table in the green room, Lindsay has arranged a display of gifts from Mara’s former students: a twinkle of votive candles, a sea bed of crystals, carved stones, colorful beads, all encircling a bronze statue of Ganesh, the elephant-headed god of wisdom and transcendence in the Hindu canon. Ganesh carries a bronze umbrella. An hour after Mara takes her second pill, the afternoon sun begins to slant through the windows. Sunlight dapples across the wall and spotlights the umbrella. Ganesh glows gold. Maybe it’s a sign, maybe it’s the drugs, but for the first time in a year, Mara’s pain is gone.

Paul Winter is on the stereo. Mara closes her eyes and floats off with the music. Lindsay sees peace on her friend’s face for the first time in, well, she doesn’t remember how long. Marilyn glances back at the angels on the ceiling.

“Thank you,” she says, “thank you, thank you, thank you.”

An hour later, the MDMA’s effects are fading. Mara doesn’t think she needs Allan’s help any longer.

“That was great,” she says. “I think I’m ready to go deeper next time.”

Everybody hugs everybody and Allan walks out the front door. Mara watches him go, the sight of sunlight giving her an idea. It’s been over a month since she’s been outside and now wants to go for a walk. She and Lindsay cross the street and sit down on an iron bench in a small park, under the shade of a towering oak. They talk boys and first sexual experiences and Lindsay’s upcoming wedding. Mara doesn’t feel sick. She just feels like herself — a feeling she was not sure she would ever have again. Lindsay has something of a contact high. She’s been having personal problems. Now she opens up, and what everyone involved will soon call the best part of the day arrives: Mara starts giving Lindsay personal advice.

“It meant so much to her,” Lindsay says later, “to be helpful, to feel useful, to get to be normal again.”

Two hours pass and they head back inside the house. Mara has an appetite for the first time in weeks. She eats a large meal, takes her pain meds, and feels a slight jolt — either a wave of anxiety or her heart skipping a beat. She begins to sweat. Nausea comes next. And then pain. Marilyn helps her upstairs to the bath. Warm water doesn’t help. More methadone doesn’t help. Mara’s palpitations return; her tics and twitches arrive next. Now her body feels like a marionette, some madman pulling the strings.

A bad night passes. In the early morning, Lindsay heads to the airport. She lives in Oakland and has to fly back home to get married. Mara can barely say good-bye. Ten minutes later, Marilyn checks Mara’s heart rate again — which is when she decides to
take her daughter to the emergency room. When they leave the house, both of them wonder: Will Mara come home again?

4.

We now suspect that humans learned about psychedelics the same way we learned about most early medicines — from copying animal behavior. There’s plenty to copy. Everywhere scientists have looked, they’ve found animals who love to party. Bees stoned on orchid nectar; goats gobbling magic mushrooms; birds chomping marijuana seeds; rats on opium; also mice, lizards, flies, spiders, and cockroaches on opium; felines crazy for catnip; cows loco for loco grass; moths preferring the incredibly hallucinogenic datura flower; mandrills taking the even stronger iboga root. So prevalent is this behavior that researchers now believe, as UCLA psychopharmacologist Ronald Siegel wrote in his 1989 book
Intoxication: The Universal Drive for Mind-Altering Substances:
“The pursuit of intoxication with drugs is a primary motivational force in the behavior of organisms.”

And, just like us, animals are known to take specific drugs for specific purposes. Among the Navajo, the bear is revered for teaching them about osha, a root effective against stomach pains and bacterial infections. Wild carrot, as we learned from birds, repels mites. Horses in pain will hunt for willow stems, because that’s where aspirin comes from. The zoological use of hallucinogens is no different. Herbivores may have first ingested these psychoactives when the threat of starvation gave them no other choice, but later on sought them out for different rewards.

The same is true for humans. For millennia, psychedelics sat at the center of most spiritual traditions. For example, the Eleusinian Mysteries of the Greeks — arguably the most famous initiation rite in history — required drinking
kykeon:
a grainy beverage containing the rye ergot from which LSD was later derived. The Aztecs prayed to Teonanácatl, literally “god mushroom,” while
the sacred Hindu text, the Rig Veda, contains 120 verses devoted to the rootless, leafless (aka a mushroom) plant
soma
, including 8.48.1-15: “We have drunk Soma; we have become immortal; we have gone to the light; we have found the Gods.”

All of which is to say: One of the least-understood facts about psychedelics is how well understood these drugs actually are. Ralph Metzner, psychologist and pioneering LSD explorer, explains: “Anthropologists now know that by the time our modern inquiry into psychedelics began, humanity had already accumulated an encyclopedia’s worth of knowledge on the subject.”