In 1970, U.S. Congress, in cooperation with the Richard Nixon administration, passed the Controlled Substances Act, far-reaching federal drug legislation that launched Nixon’s “War on Drugs.” The new law made it a federal crime to possess, sell or prescribe a number of psychoactive substances, including psychedelic agents such as LSD, psilocybin and mescaline.
At the time, psychedelics were not only having a moment of prominence in popular culture, thanks in large part to the efforts of cultural trickster and psychedelic evangelist Timothy Leary, they were also the subject of legitimate medical and psychological research in institutions across the country. The new law and Nixon’s War on Drugs effectively lowered a curtain on those research efforts, sending them underground or, in many cases, snuffing them out altogether.
The Controlled Substances Act and its structure of classifying illegal drugs is, of course, still in effect. But for at least the last 10 years, the taboo against exploring psychedelics and discovering their potential in healing has begun to lift. Thanks in large part to the non-profit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), which was founded in Santa Cruz, some psychedelics are now considered promising treatments against addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other debilitating conditions.
To whatever degree legitimate research into psychedelics was derailed for 50 years because of the War on Drugs, we are now nevertheless in a quiet but potentially fundamental revolution when it comes to psychedelics. At least in contrast to the often frivolous let-all-flowers-bloom approach of the late 1960s, the push toward psychedelics today is measured and sober-minded, mostly addressed in medical and scientific contexts as means for specific medical treatments. If Leary and the pioneering experimenters of the ’60s were heedlessly cannonballing off the high-dive, today’s psychedelic researchers and explorers are easing into the pool, bit by bit.
One of those researchers is Katherine MacLean, a neuroscientist with a Ph.D. in research psychology from UC Davis and a post-doc fellowship at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine where she worked in psychopharmacology alongside Roland Griffiths, one of the most prominent and respected psychedelic researchers in the field. (Griffithsdied in October at the age of 77).
On Sunday, MacLeanvisits Santa Cruz to talk about her research and her new memoir, “Midnight Water: A Psychedelic Memoir.” The event takes place at 3 p.m. at the Museum of Art & History.
MacLean brings both a professional and personal dimension to psychedelics to her work as a lecturer. She has facilitated more than a hundred psychedelic sessions with patients and test subjects as a faculty member at Johns Hopkins. And, as her memoir tells the story, she turned to psychedelics herself to deal with the grief of losing her younger sister, who died of cancer at the age of 29.
Lookout had a chance to chat with Maclean before her Sunday lecture in Santa Cruz. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Lookout: Give us your take on the current moment in psychedelics research. Are we in the midst of a revolution when it comes to the understanding of these substances? Or is that overstating the case? How would you characterize it?
MacLean: I think it’s mostly a re-igniting of the public’s awareness around something that has always been a part of American culture, at least since the 1950s. And it’s been part of South America’s and North America’s native culture for millenia. So I see it as kind of an energy that goes underground for a period of time and then kind of comes up to the surface again. This is a resurfacing of something very ancient and important to human culture.
Now, I actually diverge from the medical therapeutic model. Most of my book is about self-experimentation, self-discovery and spiritual discovery. So I hope to help educate the public that these substances are not just for medical purposes or for therapy. But they can also be for spiritual reasons and personal reasons, which I think is a less prominent view, but certainly among the underground of folks who have been carrying this lineage, that’s very much a primary focus. I’m not doing it because I have anxiety and depression. I’m doing it to know myself. I’m doing it to explore my understanding of what reality is.
Lookout: That’s certainly an unusual approach these days, at least to state publicly. Most of the media attention to psychedelics has come strictly from a therapeutic angle and you just don’t hear much in terms of exploring creativity or spirituality.
MacLean: I think that’s a product of the law, of certain ways that the FDA [Food and Drug Administration], the Drug Enforcement Agency and these government institutions oversee these particular molecules. Folks thinking that this has to be done in a medical context, I think that’s a stepping stone. It’s probably where things will start. And part of what I’m trying to plant the seeds of now is when folks realize, ‘Well, My depression is gone but now I’m curious, now I want to explore meditation and other kinds of avenues.’ So it’s not a shock to see the shift away from the medical model, which I think will happen. It’s inevitable, I believe.
Lookout: Many of the medical and therapeutic professionals I’ve spoken to about psychedelics say that they did not originally set out to study these substances, but that something happened along the way to an otherwise traditional medical education that caused them to pivot toward the study of these substances. Was that also the case with you?
MacLean: When I was accepted into grad school at UC Davis, it was 2004 and I distinctly remember a conversation I had with a giant in the field in neuroscience at Berkeley. And I said, ‘You know, I’m really interested in psychedelic research. I know it’s not really happening right now, except for one lab in Europe.’ And he said, ‘Psychedelic research will happen at Berkeley over my dead body.’
[At that time], there was still such a knee jerk rejection of psychedelics because of the trauma of what happened in the late ’60s and early ’70s. And all of this becoming illegal and getting wrapped up in the anti-war movement, which was really difficult for the country. And with all of these social events happening, even the researchers were like, we’re not going to touch this. And so I was very happy to [instead] focus on meditation research at the time I was at Davis because psychedelics were so taboo that I thought I may never get to do this.
Lookout: Was that demoralizing in some way, that you were blocked from studying what you wanted to study?
MacLean: I always had a kind of rebellious spirit. So I took it as a challenge. So when he said that, I was like, ‘Well watch me.’ But it didn’t even seem like something I could act on at the moment. I didn’t realize that Roland Griffiths at Hopkins was actively doing the research because he was so careful that there not be any media attention about it, not even within the scientific community. Nobody knew this was happening.
And so when his study was published in 2006 saying psilocybin can produce mystical experiences, I remember seeing that article and going to my mentor at UC Davis and saying, ‘This is where I’m going next.’ It was this miraculous moment where somebody is carrying the thread and I can pick it up. So the timing was perfect.
Lookout: Your new book, ‘Midnight Water’ is a more personal story, isn’t it? Tell me about the story behind the book.
MacLean: It begins with the death of my sister. She died of breast cancer when I was a faculty member at Hopkins, which prompted me to leave academia and go on a soul-searching journey to understand, how do I live with this grief? What is the meaning of life? How do I want to live day-to-day so that if I got a terminal diagnosis at a young age, I wouldn’t feel regret, that I would feel that I had really lived the life I wanted to live?
So, she had a young daughter and she was at the top of her field in business. When I witnessed everything being taken from her against her will, I realized wow, there’s no certainties in life. And I need to figure out how I want to live day-to-day so that my death is not a tragedy, but something that I can embrace regardless of how it happens.
So my sister really inspired that journey in my life. And the book launches from that point — it goes through some mushroom experiences I had to help process grief, and then the birth of my children, and then the final half of the book, or maybe one-third of the book, is about me coming to terms with my relationship with my father through MDMA.
And so it speaks to the two major molecules that the public is starting to be more aware of — psilocybin on the one hand and MDMA on the other. And with my father, there was just a lot of very difficult emotions, memories, experiences, that I needed to process before he died.
Lookout: Give me a sense of where we are on a timeline when it comes to the blooming of psychedelics in the culture. Do you feel we’re on the threshold of something big? How would characterize the next five to ten years?
MacLean: Well, for better or for worse, we’re not getting any better at reducing violence and trauma. So I think there will be a prominent place for MDMA in the medical world [to treat PTSD and depression/anxiety]. I see MDMA as becoming as common as chemotherapy or some of these other procedures, like hip replacement surgery. It’s something that just becomes so common that, at a certain point, given your life experience, this is the medicine that you’ll be offered. So I really have a lot of hope for MDMA.
Psilocybin is a little bit harder to predict as I kind of look out into the future. I really wonder if the public will ever be OK with the risk-benefit ratio of classic psychedelics, or are we always going to push a little bit and then have to step back and push a little bit and step back? I don’t think it’s a chemical that’s for everybody. And it may be that only 20 or 30 percent of the population ever gets interested in psilocybin. Whereas I could see MDMA being a lot more accepted.
[However], I hope it doesn’t become like coffee, that you can just go get your MDMA fix every day. But the nice thing about some of these stronger-acting chemicals is that you do experience the negative consequences if you overuse them. So they kind of have a bit of a feedback loop, especially MDMA. So we just have to be aware that overuse of these things is going to backfire.
Katherine MacLean talks about her new memoir, “Midnight Water: A Psychedelic Memoir,”Sunday at 3 p.m. at the Museum of Art & History. The event will also include musician Odeya Nini, and representatives fromThe Zendo Project, which provides psychedelic harm reduction at festivals, andShine Collective, which offer support groups for communities engaged in altered states of consciousness.