Huxley's Hands

Residue of hallucinatory plants was recently discovered on the inner surface of an Egyptian drinking mug from the second century B.C., a mug bearing the face of the Egyptian god, Bes, associated with fertility and revelry. Other recent studies have shown that the Greeks and Romans ingested plants with psychedelic properties for reaching spiritual states or as part of medical treatment.

This finding expands the map of places where plants with psychedelic effects played an early role in medicinal and spiritual rituals. In the west, hallucinogenic mushrooms, morning glory seeds and the peyote cactus were used in Mesoamerica in rituals by the Maya, Aztec, Olmec and Zapotec cultures. Cultures in the Amazon basin partook of ayahuasca (“vine of the soul” in the Quechua language), a brew of plants with hallucinogenic properties. In the Vedic period of India, as mentioned in the Rigveda (1500 BCE), the juice of the plant soma was used in sacrificial rituals and said to impart divine power.

Sources: New York Times (Nov. 28, 2024 by Alexander Nazaryan; Tanasi et al Scientific Reports https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-78721-8; image

To me, recent news echoes like a throwback. I’m thinking of early psychedelics studies with patients in the 1950s conducted by Aldous Huxley’s friend the psychiatrist Dr. Humphry Osmond, known for coining the word psychedelic. Osmond is shown here on a casual day in the country (photo courtesy of the Humphry Osmond family).

Maybe some of us are experiencing psychedelic déjà vu. Is this like 1966 (when LSD became illegal, starting in California) or the mid ‘80s when MDMA joined the list of Schedule I drugs?

Not long ago, a constant online chorus heralded the momentum of psychedelic research rolling towards pending Federal Drug Administration approval of MDMA. Also known by its street name Ecstasy or molly, this substance was central to studies conducted this past decade by Lycos Therapeutics. The goal was to demonstrate that MDMA is beneficial for use in a clinical setting for treatment of Post-traumatic stress disorder.

Had it been approved for medical use and proven safe it would also overturn its current standing as a Schedule I drug defined (in part) as “with no currently acceptable medical use and a high potential for abuse,” as stated by the Drug Enforcement Agency.

But this month the FDA rejected the Lycos Therapeutics application on the grounds that, among other issues, the data did not lead to the conclusion that the drug is safe and effective. At a minimum, further studies would be needed. Even the design of the study was questioned, and one reason was because some researcher/therapists conducting sessions with subjects had previously or were currently taking MDMA (not necessarily in that same session’s timeframe, but still…).

And that brings me back to Dr. Humphry Osmond, one of the pioneers of psychedelic research before it became illegal in the 1970s. As I write in my book Aldous Huxley’s Hands: His Quest for Perception and the Origin and Return of Psychedelic Science, Dr. Osmond’searly work in the ‘50s involved mescalin, which he arranged to give to Huxley (at his request), and that experience inspired Huxley to write The Doors of Perception.

At the same time, Osmond and his psychiatric colleague Dr. John Smythies realized that mescalin induced an experience like schizophrenia, and that made it useful for studying schizophrenic patients. Dr. Osmond believed the therapist should try the drug in order to better understand the patient.

Now, this post is partly in reaction to today’s (August 24) New York Times Guest Opinion by science writer Caty Enders: “How Psychedelic Research Got High on Its Own Supply.” It also ran in the Sunday NYT. The enthusiasm for benefits of psychedelic use in conjunction with therapy, as Enders notes, has led to the use of MDMA by many researchers involved in this study (and purportedly in ongoing studies of other psychedelics). Such involvement arguably undercuts the objectivity of the researcher, hence the the title of the opinion piece, ‘…getting high on their own supply.’

In part this is out in the open. Some claim it is beneficial for researchers and therapists involved in psychedelic studies not to avoid, but to experience, the high. Dr. Rick Doblin is a high profile advocate of this view. He resigned this month as head of Lykos after FDA rejected its applications. Doblin, who founded the nonprofit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), is on record as asserting that therapists using MDMA with clients should experience the drug they are working with.

And that brings me back to the history of this viewpoint and Dr. Humphry Osmond, one of the pioneers of psychedelic research before it became illegal in the 1970s. As I write in my book, Osmond’searly work in the ‘50s involved the psychedelic mescalin, which he (along with colleague Dr. John Smythies) discovered how it induced a mental state similar to schizophrenia. To Osmond, this made it useful for studying schizophrenic patients. Moreover, he believed it was beneficial for the therapist to try the drug in order to experience a disturbance similar to, and helpful for understanding, the mental state of their patients.

Of course, I have no way to judge the merits of the study by Lykos Therapeutics. According to reports, there were a number of issues, including ethical questions, that caused the FDA to reject the data and results presented in the study.

Whoa, Ashley Ward! Your new book on the senses called Where We Meet the World held me mesmerized. Yes, you're scholarly but in a page-turning way. I couldn't help but think -- as you remind us how the sight- and hearing challenged develop strength in other senses to perceive the world -- of how Aldous Huxley, nearly blind since youth, found his way around his home and through life with a sense of hearing, touch and location largely dormant in the rest of us. You tour us through so many more senses than the five we usually think of. The way these and more cross over (as in synesthesia, where someone might hear music and perceive color) is, as you explain, pretty amazing! What about interoception? The sense of the body's internal state. Wow. Surprising, too, how one culture might give prominence to a sense that another culture might regard as secondary. A full-of-surprises book.

(photo credit, Mamadi Doumbouya, New York Times Magazine)

When a noted pioneer in the field of psychedelics walks the ultimate walk, it is high time to pay attention. That is what the New York Times Magazine did on April 9 in a four-page interview with Dr. Roland Griffiths, founding director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research.

For over a decade, Griffiths, 76, has investigated ways psychedelics can help treat psychological distress in patients with a life-threatening cancer diagnosis. Now he is such a patient himself, for he has been diagnosed with Stage 4 metastatic colon cancer. 

Yet in the interview with NYT Magazine’s Talk Editor David Marchese, it is evident that not despite but because of the diagnosis, Griffiths finds himself experiencing an unexpected and heightened kind of perception. An awareness, especially of how precious life is. He says he did not need extra trips to reach this state, but arguably his work with terminal patients and previous direct experience with psychedelics has given him a mind set of readiness for the final trip.

In the early 1960s - before research in the field was banned until it gradually resumed starting around year 2000) - among the many kinds of exploratory studies were those looking at the application of psychedelics as a psychological aid to terminal patients, studies then indicating positive results.

That was around the same time as Aldous Huxley made a final, personal choice. It was November 22, 1963, by sheer coincidence the same day as JFK’s assassination. The incident at Huxley’s home in the Hollywood Hills also dealt with death, but on Huxley’s terms. An exploration of the final moments of consciousness. 

As he lay dying of cancer when the end was near, he scribbled a note to his wife, Laura Archera Huxley, asking for an intramuscular dose of LSD. Apparently it was planned; the LSD was on hand. Unlike his reflection on the experience a decade earlier in his book The Doors of Perception, there was no reportage, no recording, no notes. We do not know his perception of this final act. But historically, it set a mark for someone of note and celebrity involved with psychedelic study to walk the walk, in Huxley’s case, creating an iconic biographical exit.

Now. following in Huxley’s tradition, one of the giants in modern psychedelic research, Dr. Roland Griffiths, has spoken out in the far-reaching forum of the New York Times Magazine, telling his story.

(Photo courtesy of The American Prospect)

Is a looming patent monopoly threatening  progress towards making psychedelics accessible for patient health? The current question concerns psilocybin, the active ingredient in so-called magic mushrooms. Below is a link to a recent article in The American Prospect by journalist Luke Goldstein. He explains how a corporate monopoly over a synthetic version of psilocybin could push access and prices beyond the reach of many people who need the medical benefits that have been clearly demonstrated in controlled studies at major universities. This isn't about recreational use (and doesn't mean you can't grow mushrooms in some cities where it is already decriminalized). But if you suffer from certain afflictions, such as depression, a monopolist block of competing providers could create drug treatments with no competitive curb on cost. This is the last thing individuals seeking treatment need, nor does a painfully strained health care system need another drug with a huge price tag (like the recently FDA approved and hugely costly drug for dementia that has shown little benefit). But Luke Goldstein says it much better than I can. Here is the link. Photo courtesy of The American Prospect.

Psychedelics are having more than a Moment. Michael Pollan’s new book -- about how science is harnessing the power of a trip -- hit No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list this weekend, a flashing sign that the altered-state substance psilocybin (found in psychoactive mushrooms) is going Mainstream.

The turning point is a pending Stage III clinical trial of psilocybin-assisted therapy for anxiety in terminal cancer patients. Yes, that’s a mouthful of a story, but not when told by a master of weaving facts and experience together like Michael Pollan. He achieves this heady blend in How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence.

 Pollan blends history, current research, and immersive journalism in his own vivid trip reports -- the interactive how-to heart of the book. One incident involves taking mushrooms on his own, another time he ingests LSD, then on a separate occasion he downs bits of a psychoactive Sonoran Dessert Toad, and finally in a group gathering he is introduced to the Amazonian plant brew ayahuasca.

True to the sweep of the topic, he credits trailblazers like LSD discoverer Albert Hofmann, renegade researcher Timothy Leary, and Doors of Perception author Aldous Huxley, the literary godfather of psychedelics and the subject of my own recent book, Aldous Huxley’s Hands: His Quest for Perception and the Origin and Return of Psychedelic Science.

Those three and others like Stan Grof were active prior to the 1970s ban. Bridging to the present, Pollan interviews key figures in the science of psychedelics (which some prefer to call entheogens or hallucinogens), including Stephen Ross of NYU, Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins, Charles Grob of Harbor-UCLA, Robin Carhart-Harris of Imperial College, London, and others. Pollan’s is not the first book to pull all this together but clearly the most accessible and timely.

One big takeaway is his lucid account of how psychedelic-assisted therapy works: In a clinical setting, after taking a dose of psilocybin, the subject experiences a radical disruption of habitual thinking, the latter known as the default mode network (DMN), and this disruption allows a change of mind. Patients often report undergoing a spiritual experience. Multiple studies are showing how a marked percentage of patients break through mental constraints of depression or obsession or alcoholism. On the other hand, legalization of wellness applications such as for enhancing creativity remains on the far horizon, while recreational use thrives underground.

Which brings me back to the immersive part of the book. Except for his first mild solo trip, Pollan is shepherded by underground guides of good repute. This is another important takeaway. I’d compare it to any risk sport (here, risky not in terms of addiction but behavior) because, especially if you are a novice, it’s important to trek with an experienced guide.

Speaking personally, I am a veteran of the first-wave of psychedelic users, having taken LSD several times in the early ‘60s during college in San Francisco. Usually I tripped with a friend who was an experienced guide, but one time I took a dubious dose alone with an almost disastrous result when I ended behind the wheel of a car. Luckily, I went on to indulge in other acid trips without incident.

This month marks the 75th anniversary of Albert Hoffman’s landmark bike ride --his self-experiment on a ride home from the Sandoz lab after ingesting lysergic acid diethylamide, aka LSD.

 Rarely mentioned in this 1943 birth story of LSD (it was synthesized for another purpose in 1938) is the fact that after taking it on April 19, 1943 Albert Hofmann asked a lab assistant to follow him home on another bike, just in case.

 Which brings me to the image of  someone keeping an eye on you, covering your back.

 But before I riff on this metaphor, I’d like to offer a capsule cultural history. LSD migrated from an initial psychiatric application and turned massively mainstream in the mid-1960s. This viral effect coincided with the huge youth wave of baby boomers and merged with widespread resistance to the war in Vietnam. In reaction to all this, LSD became illegal when it was designated as a Schedule I drug (meaning of no medical beneft, with a high risk of potential harm, thus illegal even for institutional research). Eventually other drugs would be added to the Schedule I list including psilocybin, the potent substance in psychoactive mushrooms.

 Ever since the infamous Schedule I came into effect, this decades-old crackdown on LSD etc. has been summed up as the War on Drugs.

But during the past decade-plus, this war has seen pockets of negotiated peace, allowing medical schools to resume research suspended decades ago. Such experimentation mainly involves psilocybin and MDMA (avoiding LSD’s bad rep as a once-socially out-of-control substance).

The results, so far, have been positive in two approved areas of psychedelic or hallucinogen research. One is medical (such as assisted therapy for depression and PTSD, and reducing anxiety in late stage cancer patients), and another  is related to study of religious or spiritual experience. A third is going on illegally but with a wink-wink, apparently because it is deemed too small to crack down on and that is “microdosing,” such as with LSD or with an older psychedelic made famous by Aldous Huxley called mescaline. Microdosing, reportedly popular in Silicon Valley, relates to the third reason psychedelics are reportedly beneficial: for fostering moments of break-through creativity.

 Here is where the psychedelic uphill bike ride gets steeper, and it is not likely to level out any time soon.

 Yes, the popular view is growing (along with acceptance of cannabis) that the war on psychedelic drugs should end, meaning reduce or eliminate penalties. There are two camps, both generally agreeing that such drugs, with or without limits, should be available for various uses.

One camp makes the libertarian argument of pure cognitive freedom—the right of any adult to use a substance whether or not it will benefit or harm their own mind or body.

 The other camp argues that, yes, psychedelics should be available but under professional or at least certified/tech supervision or guides, or at least regulated in some way, to reduce the chance of harmful outcomes to oneself and others.

  Cannabis led the way. Mushrooms could be next. Colorado is again in the vanguard, this time pushing for a local ballot measure in Denver to “free the fungi” – meaning, of course, psychedelic ‘shrooms. The advocates are making a cognitive freedom argument (one’s right to self-experiment if not harming others).

   Apart from legalities (like finding yourself with a felony conviction for possession), mushrooms can be grown at home or produced commercially, eaten fresh (“wet”) or dried for storage, with the latter bringing down harsher penalties because dried ‘shrooms are less like produce and more like product. The Colorado movement aims to start by downsizing possession from a felony to a misdemeanor.

  Moving from basement or backyard to lab, the psychoactive ingredient in ‘shrooms is psilocybin. Illegal for any use for decades, this changed in the past 20 years because psilocybin has become acceptable in university medical research. Studies are looking at applications for afflictions ranging from depression and addiction to anxiety in the last stage of cancer.

  Psilocybin is found in many species of mushrooms, though not all mushrooms have psychedelic properties -- just as not all are edible, and many are lethal. Some are deadly plus psychedelic, in which case dosage becomes a matter of tripping in life vs. tripping off to eternity.

 The usual ‘shrooms are brownish and skinny. A variant is the perky looking red and white-dotted fly agaric (amanita muscaria), shown here Mary Blair’s 1951 preliminary design for Disney’s Alice in Wonderland. (The original “Caterpillar Sitting on a Mushroom,” in gouache on board, is in the Hilbert Collection, and it recently caught my eye when it was on display at the Hilbert Museum. )

Well, back to the magic in magic mushrooms. Psilocybin has a research history dating to the middle of the last century, around the time of Aldous Huxley’s breakthrough book, The Doors of Perception.

  Huxley famously experimented with mescaline, LSD, Morning Glory seeds, etc., and later on with psilocybin. The first three were home-style experiments, but was introduced to psilocybin in the early 1960s when he briefly participated in a study conducted by then-Harvard professor Timothy Leary.

    As far as the experience itself, those who have experimented with psychedelic mushrooms often report a spiritual sense of wonder, a realization of oneness with the universe. Huxley’s experiments were a quest to induce a mystical experience, which he describes this way:

    “In the final stage of egolessness there is an “obscure knowledge” that All is in all—that All is actually each. This is as near, I take it, as a finite mind can ever come to “perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe.”   --Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

  That was Aldous writing in 1953 (the book was published in 1954). Many books have been written about both Huxley and psychedelics since then, including my own book, Aldous Huxley’s Hands: His Quest for Perception and the Origin and Return of Psychedelic Science.

   Now, two new books on psychedelics are forthcoming in May. One is Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change by Tao Lin. The other is Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. I hope to take a look at these two and write about them in a future blog.

  Picture it: the golden glow of late afternoon, and you, immersed in a hot tub on a cliff overlooking the Pacific….

 Now cut to 1962. That’s when Aldous Huxley was among the first visitors at a then-new retreat center called Esalen. Within months, this hippie hotel in Big Sur became the capital of the human potential movement and a center for spiritual techniques of all stripes.

  Enter the new and unlikely occupants of Esalen: the denizens of Silicon Valley. Workshops for the first “cohort,” as described on the new website, will take place next month, in March of 2018. More about how this came about in a minute.

  Since 1962, seekers and tourists have been drawn to this 27-acre site overlooking the Pacific, located a three-hour drive south of San Francisco. They have come to practice meditation and yoga and bathe in its natural hot springs, ideally at sunset. And let’s not forget Esalen’s history as a magnet for experimentation with psychedelic drugs.

  Such techniques were dear to Huxley in his life and work, as seen in three of his many books: The Perennial Philosophy, his expansive survey of world mysticism; The Doors of Perception, his personal interpretation of mescaline and LSD, and Island, his utopian final novel.

  About the time Esalen opened its doors Huxley had finished writing Island, in which he shows how the human potential movement might play out on an isolated Pacific Island society he calls Pala. By the end, though, Pala is taken over by a neighboring country eager to exploit it.

  Cultures thereby come and go. The locale of Esalen has a history dating back about six thousand years, and before hippies arrived, before software engineers arrived, it was the site of a spring sacred to a Native American people called the Esselen.

  Now back to the new overlords of Esalen. After a hiatus, the institute resumed operation in fall of  2017 with a new director and a new agenda, primarily as a retreat for workers in the I.T. field. Apparently they, and their big tech employers, see a need for life-code balance. Goodbye funky, hello optimization. Goodbye spiritual techniques, hello spiritual technology. Enter tech-plus-yoga, along with plenty of Tesla chargers.

  How did this change come about? Well, nature brought about an economic disruption and that ushered in change. It happened when spring storms in 2017 triggered landslides and wrecked the two-lane Highway 1 south of Carmel. Esalen was shuttered for many months. This wiped out the revenue from paying guests, making it vulnerable to a take-over.

  Looking back on Huxley’s life, as I did in my recent book Aldous Huxley’s Hands, I reflect on his sojourns to Esalen, In the latter part of his life he lived in southern California, but he was a visiting professor at UC Berkeley in the spring of 1962 – the year Esalen was founded. He also took part in a conference on Technology in the Modern World at UC Santa Barbara that same March. Those gigs placed him in reach of Esalen. I also know from records of his university talks that he cast a wary eye on the unintended consequences of technology.

  As I write today about the birth of Esalen in the early 1960s, I think about how I might have crossed paths with Huxley. I missed him by two years. In 1964, as a student at San Francisco State, I drove my VW bug south on Highway 1 to Big Sur and spent a weekend at Esalen. I tried to cast off inhibitions in a workshop, and I immersed myself in the steamy, sulfuric waters from the springs. Had it been two years earlier, I might have glanced over and seen Aldous, perhaps submerged to his shoulders, soaking in one of the individual hot tubs, watching the sun set over the Pacific.

Photo: esalen.org

Aldous Huxley spun a darkly satirical portrait of technology as a tool for social control in his 1932 dystopian novel Brave New World. In Island, his 1962 utopian novel, all good things come to an end when a powerful neighboring country seeks to capture Pala’s untapped resource, oil.

We know oil is a perennial trophy in the game of war, but a fought-over prize Huxley didn’t reckon with is looming on the horizon now — correction, it’s already here.

Last week in Davos, Switzerland at the World Economic Summit, billionaire philanthropist George Soros invoked Huxley’s name in connection with what he called a “global problem: the rise and monopolistic behavior of the giant I.T.-platform companies” such as Facebook and Google “which have caused a variety of problems of which we are only now beginning to become aware.”

Soros predicted that, apart from interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, a profit-driven alliance could arise between data-rich I.T. monopolies and authoritarian states that “may well result in a web of totalitarian control the likes of which not even Aldous Huxley or George Orwell could have imagined.”

Huxley expressed opinions about the perils of technology for social engineering long before social media was a glint in a programmer’s eye.

Considering his wariness and George Soros’s prediction of a dystopian I.T.-captured future, it seems ironic that I am about to post this essay with a Google image on my Tumblr blog and on my Facebook page (the latter the FB page for my book Aldous Huxleys Hands).

Because you are reading this -- and thanks for taking the time -- I suppose that makes both of us part of a surging problem.

Sources: