(MAHA) Make America Hallucinate Again

How MAPS went MAGA

Just got back from the MAPS Psychedelic Science Conference in Denver.

Even though I’ve been tracking most of the relevant cultural moves along the way, (and delivered a talk on many of them at the event) I was still kinda rocked by the shifting tides sweeping through those halls.

But before we get into all that, wanted to give some shoutouts of my personal highlights that you might enjoy hearing about too.

Ripples Collective. I first met Dr. Leor Roseman, one of the founders, years ago when he was working at Imperial College in London (he’s now at Exeter). Back then, in the simpler BeforeTimes, Leor and his team were doing research on the conflict resolution/healing effects of ayahuasca on Palestinian and Israeli peace activists.

In a world of psychedelic hype Leor’s work felt grounded, principled and deeply needed on the front lines of global conflict. If anyone asked me after one of my public critiques of this field, “well, who’s doing it right?” I’d offer that project up as one example of several.

So we’ve stayed in loose touch over the years and have bumped into each other at the odd conference. This week I got to learn how that work has developed over time into the Ripples Alliance. Still on the front lines, but expanded into a genius blend of archetypal theater, creative projects, song, music, poetry and movement.

In short, they’ve moved far beyond relying on “the medicine” doing all the heavy lifting to redemptive co-creative culture around profound intergenerational conflict and trauma.

One example he shared briefly with me was a psychodramatic exercise (where participants “play act” various roles and then explore the relationships and dynamics from within these imaginal characters’ perspectives) of a shiva (Jewish) and azza (arabic) funeral service in a house.

Some participants play the role of the grieving family sitting with the “body,” some hang in the kitchen smoking cigarettes and making small talk. Sometimes they tell stories and crack jokes about “the deceased.” Sometimes they weep and wail.

Afterwards, they debrief and learn what came up, and what it might mean going forwards for all of them as they grapple with grief and loss that are all too real

Compared to the standard therapy of “pop your pill, put on a blindfold and lie on a therapist couch listening to Muzak” this stuff is fascinatingly creative and cool.

Gran, just sending it.

#takefive

Then at the end of his formal talk, Leor asked if the audience wanted to see some of their riffs in action.

They did, so he did.

And he began a spoken word piece that was truly inspired.

(and for the record: the hit rate on psychedelic poetry is vanishingly slim! 99% of it is self indulgent drivel with Dr. Seuss rhyme-schemes)

But this was not that.

He invoked all the shamans, rabbis, prophets and mystics from the Holy Land and beyond. He wove an invitation for anyone listening to step into the mystery and the unnamed lineage that ties all this together.

He returned to a chorus with a chest thumping mantra,

Hmm?

Wow!

Aho!

Ah hah!

Round and round as he prowled the floor.

Like McConaughey’s improv bit in Wolf of Wallstreet, but shamanic rather than venal.

It was dope.

I’m just glad to know good folks like that are bringing the full spectrum of what’s possible to some of the populations that need it most.

If anyone is gutted by what’s happening right now in the Middle East, and feels for the humanity beyond the politics, seriously consider learning more and possibly supporting Ripples. I can’t think of a better spot to park some grassroots philanthropy.

ripplescollective.com

***

But truth be told, I didn’t see all of Leor’s talk because I was bouncing between his room and the other early morning presentation I’d promised to see. The prior night I’d had dinner with these sweet young Greek Ph.Ds who’ve been reconstituting the ancient Eleusinian brew of kykeon.

Since I’d wrote about that crazy tale in the opening of Stealing Fire, where one of Socrates’ senior rascal students stole some of the sacred potion and threw a house party in Athens and got the death sentence for his transgressions…I felt some affinity for these guys.

And as they shared what they’re up to, it feels like they might be on the cusp of recreating a potion that did more to shape Western Civilization than any other (Eleusis persisted across two thousand years of empires).

What’s made this so hard up until now was that the suspected chief ingredient, ergot fungus from fermented rye stalks, just didn’t seem to pack enough punch to account for the Mysteries they supposedly delivered.

These guys have been combing ancient texts for clues and experimenting with different processes to see if they get somewhere new. Currently, they’re exploring the MAO entourage effects of adding pennyroyal to the mix (similar to the two part ayahuasca recipe, or terpenes in cannabis that unlock more potency when combined).

And they’ve been running a lye based extraction/refinement process to further concentrate the LSA from the ergot into psychoactive results.

So what for ages and ages appeared lost to history, might be close to a rebirth of its own. Stay tuned!

And lastly, I popped into a talk by Norman Ohler who wrote the book Blitzed, about Nazis doing amphetamines.

(he was on Rogan in 2017, you might have heard about some of those factoids back then).

But last year, he came out with the sequel, Tripped, which delved past Go-pills fueling the Blitzkrieg and into Hitler’s own personal proclivities.

As well as Operation Paperclip where all that smuggled Nazi knowhow came to the States and seeded the CIAs MKUltra mind control experiments.

Super interesting! And (you don’t get to say this about many German intellectuals) he was loose, funny, and seemed always on the brink of letting you in on a joke that he was still chuckling about. Fun to listen to.

Turns out, Hitler was hooked on Oxy from ‘41 onwards!

#suckithillbillies

His Doctor Feelgood had been pumping him with supervitamins, but as the war took a turn in ‘41, concluded that ol’ Adolph needed a little more oomph in his Bulletproof syringe

So Hitler got gakked off his face, while trying to take over the world.

(and this was the guy who was a teetotalling vegan just a few years prior!)

With the aforementioned amphetamines to get him over the hump when he really needed it

⚡️SS⚡️peedball

Gotta give it to him. That’s a lot more motivation than your average Trainspotting poppy head!

Then Ohler told the story of finding his way into the Sandoz chemical archives, just over the border into Switzerland. Turns out that in the 1920s and 30s Sandoz had paid poor Swiss farmers to deliberately cultivate the ergot fungus (rather than it ruining their crops). They earned more to poison their rye on purpose, than they ever had to harvest it safely.

That’s how Sandoz (now rebranded as Novartis) cooked those very same stalks from LSA (the natural) to LSD (the chemical). All while inadvertently unleashing the Big Pharma/Clandestine Intelligence ops that kicked off the countercultural revolution.

#fromspookstokooks

***

Which brings us finally (and thematically) to the central point of this essay today.

The political and donor sands in this space have shifted.

The tie died, Steal Your Face, Birkensocks, crowd is out.

Veterans

Venture Capitalists

and the Vatican

are in.

The psychedelic renaissance going forwards is three things:

Capitalized

Conservative

and

Christian.

How on earth did it all come to this?

IMPT NOTE: what follows is not an indictment of this shift. I have friends and colleagues on all sides of this thing, but do want to point out what feels like a crucial conversation for us to have openly.

Nor does this diminish the thousands of good hearted sincere academics and therapists doing on the ground work around the world. There’s tons of well-intentioned and noble efforts happening and they all need more support, not less.

I am discussing a tiny but highly influential subset of funders, power brokers and policy writers that are influencing the landscape everyone else is trying to navigate blind, and without clear line of sight into these dynamics.

You might be stoked and rooting for this shift. You might not have noticed it yet, and have other thoughts. Either way, I’m gonna do my best to neutrally point it out and you can come to your own conclusions.

(where I do have a point of view I will state it plainly)

Here goes…

After the last Psychedelic Sciences conference in 2023–the one that had politicians, celebrities like Jayden Smith and Aaron Rodgers, and plenty of the Big Dumb Hat/NFT crowd, and (in hindsight) a bit more exuberance than was necessarily prudent–I wrote an update that I called “Psychedelic Fascism: Too Big To Fail?”

I think it was the most liked and commented essay I’ve ever written on this platform.

Oh, how those were earlier and more innocent times!

I meant that title provocatively, but technically to indicate a situation where the guiding forces of the movement were potentially suppressing or ignoring moral quandaries and individual injustices because the Greater Good of the movement was “too big to fail.”

So, tops down, hegemonic group think fashi-light vs. actual Brownshirts and goosesteppers.

(or red hats and proud boys)

Like I said, earlier and more innocent times!

an excerpt from the conclusion:

[all of these expedient decisions by movement leaders] really makes you wonder if Too Big To Fail now, practically guarantees an even more spectacular failure later.

Just a little further downstream, with a whole lot more momentum and consequences.

Enron again, but with rainbows this time.

(update: it failed not even two months later with the FDA denial of Phase III results)

To be fair, and/or clear: the old guard Boomer pioneers of this movement must feel like they are so close to the Promised Land that anything that stands between them and realizing their mission needs to be reduced, sidestepped or eliminated.

They might not have much time left, and the “fierce urgency of now” is ringing in their ears to get it done in their lifetimes.

So getting tangled up in university politics that might trigger ugly, public cancel campaigns in the culture wars? Best to suppress, or let the unlucky few caught in the snares chew their own legs off to escape.

Or taking on compromised capital and shifting from non-profit status to public benefit corporations and “conventional” pharma company investment models?

“Well, we’re all realists,” they might argue, “and the potential good for all those suffering veterans (to say nothing of solving climate change and rescuing democracy) is so great that we need that corporate investment to scale.

So we can do so much more good.”

I believe that Rick Doblin’s a genuinely good guy who, despite the critiques from the sidelines, has done his best to herd all the psychedelic Cheshire Cats across the goal line in a way that few could’ve pulled off.

But fuck me.

If all of that psychedelic insight and compassion accrued over decades hasn’t given us collective courage and discernment to tell light from shadow (in ourselves and others)…

Then what good are all those mind expanding drugs in the first place?

The nearer our destination, it seems, the more we’re trip-sliding away…

***

Taken to its inevitable and logical conclusion, that “Too Big To Fail” rationalization ends up in Psychedelic Fascism.

After all, if the Ends, are literally saving the world, then the means, any means, turn out to be justifiable.

Collateral damage in an infinitely defensible project of ushering in Heaven on Earth.

And the more that we experience Hell on Earth, whether in boiling oceans, cooking heat domes, violent conflicts or desperate refugees, the more tempting whispers of Heaven are gonna sound.

And the less patient with anyone, and the less accountable to ourselves, we’re all gonna get.

Here’s an artist's rendition of Harvard prof Clayton Christensen’s moral principle of “if you don’t want to slip, don’t go where it’s slippery.”

(For those of you keeping score at home, Team Psychedelic Renaissance is in the yellow and red jersey).

(Do not be fooled by the apparent steez, they are not breakdancing).

So that was my update two years ago.

By the end of that summer, the whole movement turned, and what had been prematurely celebrated as inevitable legalization, crashed on the rocks of a muckraking podcast in New York magazine, bad-faith whisper campaigns and scared bureaucrats.

But here’s what I noticed when I went back to see if I could riff on that title and those themes for this week’s update–the term Psychedelic Fascism itself.

It no longer means the thing I intended it to mean back then: (tops down suppression of individual rights where ends justify the means towards a Greater Good )

Since January, it’s gone from metaphor to warning sign.

And that should give us all pause, and a possible rethink.

***

Part Two will dive into what’s changed since the beginning of the year, what trends got us to this point, and what we might be able to expect in the coming three years.