As one old saw goes, in the 60s, we thought computers would enslave us, and drugs would set us free.
Jury still out on computers, but clearly the drug thing did not work out as hoped.
Obviously psychedelics have had a major impact on every corner of the culture, and I don’t think there’s any doubt that they figured prominently in the birth of the environmental movement.
There’s been a lot of research showing positive impacts on substance abuse, depression and other negative behaviors..
But I long ago gave up on the idea that psychedelics, especially in uncontrolled settings, could actually make people into, well, better people.
If you’re a jerk, they can just make you into an even bigger jerk.
For personal growth, there is ultimately no substitute for the old fashioned way – dealing with anxiety, boredom, suffering and mortality, and opening to the growth opportunities that present in every day living, working, loving or not, accepting death, (or not, and dying anyway).
That said, there can undeniably be moments, catalyzed by certain substances, that can bump us to another, more genuine path.
There’s some science to back up the woo-woo. In 2017, the Journal of Psychopharmacology published a study showing that using LSD, psilocybin and mescaline — “classic psychedelics” — led to a boost in self-reported “pro-environmental” behaviors. The study even controlled for other substances that don’t cause tracers, like cannabis, and for personality traits that might predispose participants to being green, like “openness to experience, conscientiousness, conservatism.” The result, while correlative and not causative, suggests that long-term psychedelic use changes how people think about their place in the natural world.
Enough people to turn the tide on climate change? Not anytime soon, but early findings are intriguing. Another study, “From Egoism to Ecoism,” found a positive link between lifetime psychedelic use and “feeling close and kindly towards nature,” especially for participants who experienced “ego-dissolution,” wherein the sense of self dies during the hallucinogenic experience.
“Psychedelics are default mode network dampeners” that “lower our awareness of the individual self,” says Joel Brierre, who leads retreats at the Tandava Center in Mexico, where participants ingest a powerful psychedelic known as 5-MeO-DMT. Mode network dampeners battle the brain system that keeps us from paying attention to the world around us; Brierre says many of his clients have emerged with new resolve to live cleaner, greener lives.
There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical. The last time psychedelics had a major moment was the 1960s, which is also when the modern environmental movement was born. Whether that’s a coincidence hasn’t been examined scientifically, but those who did drugs and marched for the end of all wars certainly found themselves disappointed in the long run.
“All these utopian hopes associated with psychedelics in the ‘60s didn’t pan out,” says Nicolas Langlitz, an anthropologist and science historian with The New School for Social Research who has studied the history of psychedelics. “The question is why they would pan out 50 years later.”
Psychedelics enthusiasts say a lot is different today: The climate crisis is reaching an unprecedented level of urgency, hallucinogens-as-medicine are more mainstream, and a growing body of research suggests psychedelics can change the way people think, feel and act.
“When you feel self-love and self-acceptance, that can lower the activity in your amygdala and increase blood flow in the prefrontal cortex, so that you’re able to entertain difficult emotional truths you might not otherwise entertain,” says Luke Pustejovksy, founder of Tactogen, a startup that develops empathogenic drugs derived from and sometimes mirroring the results of psychedelics. “Ecocide is the most difficult truth for anyone to entertain.”
Ravenhill says her psychedelics use does exactly what Pustejovsky is describing: “It’s enabled me to have more capacity, conceptually and emotionally, to be able to hold climate change. Because I’m able to hold it, to understand it, I’m able to do more about it.”
For psychedelics to realize their full potential, research suggests that “set and setting” are critical. Taking mushrooms on a comfortable couch with an eye mask on might do nothing for a person’s nature-relatedness. Taking them in nature can more obviously present the user with an all-encompassing alternative to a dominant ego.
“Seeing yourself as part of an interconnected wider community of life that makes up the natural world — it seems psychedelics can reliably elicit that state,” says Sam Gandy, who co-authored the egoism study and is an ecologist with Ecosulis, a UK-based company focused on ecosystem recovery. “But nature connectedness doesn’t necessarily translate to behavioral change.”
While it’s a leap to suggest psychedelics could knock humanity into some kind of tipping point on climate action, they might serve as a valuable nudge for people who are already inclined towards sustainability, says Imperial College Centre for Psychedelic Researchstudent Hannes Kettner, also a co-author on the egoism study.
“People who take psychedelics are not necessarily the people who need the most convincing,” Kettner says. “Where I see the potential is where people are already moving in that direction but get a particular impetus, feel a stronger urgency and more of an emotional connection to the environment.”
That sense of connection is key, says Rosalind Watts, a clinical psychologist who has led psilocybin trials for Imperial College London and who co-founded the UK’s first psychedelic integration group. During a trial on psilocybin’s potential to treat depression, Watts says participants “immediately reported that the drug made them feel more connected to nature,” even in a hospital setting. But while one session can reset your brain, she cautions that “a year later it won’t have changed that much, because the root cause, the societal container, is the issue.” In other words, consumerism.
In 2022, Watts launched ACER (Accept, Connect, Embody, Restore) — an online “integration community” whose participants follow a 13-month process to connect more deeply to the self, others and nature. The idea is to mimic the way psychedelics foster connection to communities and the natural world.
Not sure this is a black-vs-white issue. First off, there are a few Netflix + youtube videos featuring Michael Pollan who has authored books featured in interviews on NPR + PBS. Before Nixon declared “war on drugs”, American medical researchers were making good process helping alcoholics give up booze (well, much better than attending Alcoholics Anonymous). On top of that, allowing people with fatal cancers to experience LSD or Peyote (usually just one time) helped them lose their fear of death (which seemed to me to be the most humane thing to do). I probably do not need to mention that drug abuse in Portugal fell by more than 90% when that country declared “drug consumption” a “medical problem” rather than a “criminal problem”. As soon as drugs were decriminalized, the profit was ripped out which made selling drugs by gangs not worth the risk (because there was no reward)