Tomorrowland (20 page)

The modern inquiry into psychedelics dates to 1874, when philosopher Benjamin Paul Blood produced a short pamphlet on the effects of nitrous oxide. Blood’s writings inspired Harvard psychologist William James into a trial-and-error investigation of his own, later summarizing his conclusions in an 1882 essay: “The keynote of the experience is the tremendously exciting sense of an intense metaphysical illumination.” In 1887, Parke-Davis and Company began distributing peyote to anyone who was curious. Many were curious. By the turn of the century, mescaline — the psychoactive inside of peyote — had been synthesized, jump-starting three decades of phenomenological investigations into what author Hunter S. Thompson called “
ZANG
,” as in: “Good mescaline comes on slow. The first hour is all waiting, then about halfway through the second hour you start cursing the creep who burned you because nothing is happening . . . and then
ZANG!
”

Then, in 1938, Albert Hofmann, a Swiss chemist working for Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, went looking for a new way to boost circulation and ended up synthesizing LSD. Sandoz began distributing LSD free of charge to scientists around the world, listing two possible uses in the accompanying literature. LSD had potential as a psychotomimetic — a drug that mimics psychosis, thus giving researchers a better way to understand the schizoid state — and, perhaps, as a therapeutic tool.

By the middle of the 1950s, not long after Aldous Huxley told
the world about mescaline in
The Doors of Perception
, University of California at Irvine psychiatrist Oscar Janiger — appropriately nicknamed “Oz” — was giving acid to celebrities like Cary Grant and Jack Nicholson in the hopes of learning more about creativity. Around the same time, Humphry Osmond — the British psychiatrist who coined the term
psychedelic
— suggested LSD might be used to treat alcoholism. His idea was later backed up experimentally, with the most famous example being the 1962 Saskatchewan Study, wherein Canadian scientists found that 65 percent of their research group stopped drinking for a year and a half (the duration of the study) after one LSD experience. Says NYU’s Stephen Ross: “Addiction was the number one reason psychedelics were administered during this period. Thousands of people were involved. All the research showed the same thing: Afterward, addicts tended toward abstinence. Sometimes sobriety lasted weeks, sometimes months.” Addiction remains one of the top public health concerns in America, but despite such tantalizing potential, most of this research has been buried for forty years.

Most date the start of that burial to 1960, when Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary traveled to Mexico to try magic mushrooms for the first time, later saying he learned more about the brain “in the five hours after taking these mushrooms . . . than . . . in the preceding fifteen years of doing research in psychology.” Over the next few years, Leary began conducting research on psychedelics, first at Harvard and, after he was thrown out, at an estate on the East Coast. Along the way, he dosed hundreds, maybe thousands, including Ken Kesey and the rest of the Merry Pranksters. The fire that was the sixties had been lit — which is what most remember from this period. But psychedelic research didn’t go away. By the time that party was over — LSD was banned in 1968, psilocybin soon after, though most point to the 1970 Controlled Substance Act (and the resulting exportation of US drug policy to the rest of the world) as the real end — there had been dozens of books written, six major conferences, and
more than 1,000 papers published about research conducted on over 40,000 patients.

“Nixon shut it all down,” says Doblin. “He called Leary ‘the most dangerous man in America.’ That’s what we remember. But all this work was the beginning of modern brain science: the serotonin revolution, our first real picture of the subconscious, potential cures for some of the most serious conditions in the world. It’s kind of incredible most people don’t know this.”

5.

Marilyn takes Mara to Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. By the time she checks in, most of her symptoms have subsided. The initial ER examination report reads: “awake, alert, and in no obvious distress.” But still, tests come back with problems, and she ends up staying two weeks. When she’s finally discharged, now fourteen pounds lighter and on fifteen different meds, the first thing she wants to do is take more Ecstasy.

Her mother isn’t so sure, though she understands the logic. “Some of this is Mara’s search for a miracle, but mostly it’s about the pain . . . On MDMA, she didn’t hurt, she could move, she got to be herself.”

Again Marilyn consults with Allan. Together they try to backtrack the crisis. Mara’s symptoms could have been triggered by MDMA, but they both feel methadone a more likely culprit. Lindsay believes she measured wrong and the dose she’d given Mara after returning from the park — immediately after which Mara’s bad symptoms arrived — was really an overdose. Mara is taking significantly less methadone, which seems a good sign, but is also on twice as many meds as before. Allan consults with outside doctors. The main issue is Lovenox, an anticoagulant. MDMA increases blood pressure, and combining it with Lovenox increases the chance of a hemorrhage. They think stopping Lovenox the night before the session should cure that problem, but there’s another
concern: Mara still wanted to go deeper, meaning a stronger dose of MDMA. Could it kill her? No one knows for sure.

In her master’s thesis on outdoor adventure education, Mara wrote: “Risk is an essential element in adventure programming . . . To shelter youth from reality, with all its dangers and uncertainties, is to deny them real life.” And she practices what she preaches.

A week after checking out of the hospital, as June sweeps into July, at 10:45 a.m., Mara drops 140 mgs of MDMA, adding a booster pill of another 55 mgs about an hour later.

“Buy the ticket,” said Hunter S. Thompson, “take the ride.”

6.

Rick Doblin is fifty-six years old, with a strong, stocky frame, curly brown hair, a wide forehead, and a face creased with laugh lines. His demeanor is mostly high school guidance counselor, though his stories are often Burning Man. He was born Jewish, in Oak Park, Illinois, and raised, he says, “under the shadow of the Holocaust.” This produced a teenager who eschewed sports and girls for books about civil disobedience. At fourteen, he had already devoted his life to social justice. By sixteen, he’d decided to become a draft resister, meaning he would always have a criminal record and “couldn’t be a lawyer or a doctor or do most of the things a good Jewish boy was supposed to do.”

Instead, Doblin enrolled in the New College in Florida. He was then seventeen years old. “I had yet to speak to a girl,” he says. “I thought the Beatles wrote silly love songs.” To this day, he’s never drunk alcohol or coffee or smoked a cigarette or tasted a fizzy drink, but back then it was 1971 and Doblin believed the hype. “Acid scared me,” he says. “I was sure one hit made you crazy.” Then he got to the New College and discovered a nudist colony at the campus pool and psychedelic dance parties going on all night and, well, it didn’t take him long to get over that fear.

“LSD was an eye-opener,” he says, laughing. “When I was younger, like everything else, I took my bar mitzvah very seriously. I had all these questions about religion that I wanted answered. I expected a spiritually transformative experience. When it didn’t happen, I got really pissed off at God. A decade later I did psychedelics for the first time and all I could think was: LSD is what my bar mitzvah should have been like. This was what I wanted.”

Doblin was instantly obsessed. There were more trips and more research. He stumbled across John Lilly’s
Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer
— Lilly’s attempt to map the mind while on acid and inside an isolation tank — and Stanislav Grof’s
Realms of the Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research
(Grof was one of the main LSD researchers during the 1950s and 1960s). “Psychedelics were exactly what I was looking for,” Doblin says. “Here was a scientific way of bringing together spirituality, therapy, and values. You could journey deep into the psyche and come back with important moral lessons free from prejudice. Talk about a tool for social justice. I thought then, and think now, psychedelics, used properly, are a powerful antidote to Hitler. ”

Antidote or not, Doblin was too late for that trip. “The drug war had shut everything down. Researchers were moving onto dreaming, meditation, fasting, chanting, holotrophic breathwork — ways to alter your consciousness without drugs. And it wasn’t the establishment’s fault; it was our fault, the counterculture’s fault. We had it in our grasp and lost it.” So Doblin dropped out of college, took more drugs, raised a wolf as a pet, underwent intensive primal scream therapy, underwent plenty of other therapies, learned to build houses for grounding purposes — whatever he could do really to distract himself from the fact that psychedelic research was the only thing he wanted to pursue.

In 1982, he caught a break. MDMA had just arrived on the scene, and Doblin was enthralled. “It was a great tool to liberate inner love, to promote self-acceptance and deep honesty. I knew immediately it had amazing therapeutic potential, but it was already
being sold in bars. Too many people were doing it. Obviously, a government crackdown was coming. But I knew that if we could get out ahead of that, this was our chance to make up for all that arrogance, this was our chance to do something different.”

The DEA’s MDMA crackdown began in early 1984, but Doblin was ready for them. He’d met Laura Huxley, the widow of Aldous, and through her a psychedelic community he never knew existed. “It was then I realized psychedelic researchers hadn’t disappeared, they had merely gone underground.” He used these newfound connections to initiate a number of serious research studies and, in the hopes of winning the PR battle, began sending MDMA to the world’s spiritual leaders. About a dozen of them tried it. In a 1985 story, “The Ecstasy Debate,”
Newsweek
quoted famed Roman Catholic theologian, Brother David Steindl-Rast, about his experience: “A monk spends his whole life cultivating this same awakened attitude [MDMA] gives you.”

One of the studies Doblin was then trying to get the government to approve involved one subject: his own grandmother. She was dying at the time, suffering unipolar depression along the way. He wanted to try treating her with MDMA, but his parents refused to let him break the law. “Here was this very sick old woman who desperately needed help,” recalls Doblin. “We had a drug that could help her — a drug that thousands of other people had already taken safely — and a law that prohibited it.”

In 1986, Doblin started The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) and — in an attempt to keep Ecstasy legally available to doctors — helped sue the government. He lost that battle. In 1988, the DEA added MDMA to Schedule I, alongside heroin and PCP and other drugs “with high potential for abuse” and “no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.” This meant that if Doblin wanted to reverse that decision he had to convince the FDA that MDMA was both safe and medically useful.

Doblin finished college and decided to go to graduate school to pursue his passion. But this was 1988, and no graduate schools
were interested in letting him study psychedelic research. “I realized the politics were in the way of the science,” he says, “so I decided to study the politics.” He enrolled in Harvard’s Kennedy School of Public Policy, eventually getting his PhD, but before that happened, in 1989, the FDA made an internal decision that forever changed the fate of psychedelic research. “They underwent a sea change,” says Doblin. “They decided to depoliticize their work and strictly review drugs based on scientific merit.”

“Rick figured out the secret,” says Mark Kleinman, director of the drug policy analysis program at UCLA and, before he switched universities, one of Doblin’s professors at Harvard. “He discovered that the FDA was going to play it straight.” And for the first time in two decades, psychedelic research was no longer a pipe dream — suddenly it was in the pipeline.

7.

Mara’s second MDMA experience goes deeper than her first. She talks about her issues with intimacy, her fear of losing control, her dread of betrayal. She begins to speak about her recent refusal of medical updates. “I could find out, but I don’t want to be defined in those terms — as a lost cause. Whatever happens, cancer gave me an opportunity to seek God.”

But the MDMA does not help her find God. By early evening, the drug is wearing off. Allan will be out of town for a few weeks, so more work is temporarily on hold — but Mara’s disease is not. By the end of July, her dose of Dilaudid has increased thirtyfold. She is then two months away from the date the doctors told her not to expect to live past. Allan and his psychedelics still seem like her only hope, but MDMA isn’t getting the job done. Mara wants to switch to stronger stuff.

Again, there is discussion. Allan has LSD, but feels that the kind of breakthrough Mara desires requires a breakdown of her emotional defenses — which could trigger a greater fear of death.
Mara has rarely spoken of that fear, though she once told Lindsay her concern wasn’t dying. “I’m an only child,” she’d said. “I’m terrified of leaving my parents. I’m terrified about what will happen to them if I die.” Even so, for their next session, Allan feels mushrooms are the better idea, and his opinion wins out.

While there remains quite a bit scientists don’t know about the medical uses for psilocybin, one surer thing is its efficacy in treating end-of-life anxiety. Freud believed “existential anxiety” a primary motivational force in humans. In 1973, Ernest Becker won the Pulitzer Prize for arguing that its flipside, which he called the “denial of death,” is the reason for all our behavior — the reason we created society in the first place. A long line of scientists have also pointed out that there’s only one cure to end-of-life anxiety: Attach the finite self to an infinite other. This, they believe, is one of the biological purposes of religion — a way to ease our fear of death. It may also explain why psychedelics can ease the human condition. Psychedelics are known to produce a mystical experience known as unity. Exactly as it sounds, unity is the undeniable feeling of being one with everything. And if you’re one with everything, death becomes irrelevant.