Freeing Psychedelics: A Battle for Sanity in An Insane World
- Mollie McGurk
- Oct 13, 2023
- 8 min read
Updated: Feb 15, 2024
Propaganda, tribalism, and a hunger for hope. Why the psychedelic movement needs to be led by the people, for the people.
It’s no coincidence that there is a renewed interest in psychedelics at a time when the world is experiencing more chaos than peace. The very systems our society has built in the name of progress have become parasitic to the health and wellbeing of individuals and communities. Humanity needs healing – but we cannot rely on the same system that made us sick to control our access to the cure.
Most media cover the psychedelic renaissance with an optimistic narrative: it’s going to revolutionize mental health care. Behind the stirring headlines is the far less sultry story of how corporations are posed to cash in by acting as gatekeepers, some even looking to patent naturally-occurring psychedelic compounds. Many of the same voices hailing psychedelic medicine as so revolutionary are also writing the rules about who will have access. Kafkaesque bureaucracy and exorbitant costs for licensing and treatment threaten to make participation in this “revolution” a privilege for only a select few.
Carefully choreographed messaging has always been used to frame our reality as it best suits those in power. From the decades long drug war to today’s culture wars, fear and hate are the go-to tools in creating rifts that disempower people. Linguist, philosopher, and activist Noam Chomsky has spoken extensively on both propaganda and the drug war as means of social control. He describes manipulating the narrative as key to keeping the populace from getting in the way of the agenda:
You have to ensure that ignorant and meddlesome outsiders — meaning we, the people — don’t interfere with the work of the serious people who run public affairs in the interests of the privileged.
Psychedelics represent a pivotal opportunity for us to recover our sense of humanity. They hold the power to heal on a deep and lasting level, while opening our hearts and minds to pioneering solutions for the many issues we face. Ensuring equitable access to psychedelics may very well be the new battleground for sanity in an increasingly insane world.
Adrift in Dystopia
Optimism can feel like an act of defiance when there is no shortage of reasons to feel existential dread. The fear of political, social, and environmental catastrophes looms large in our collective psyche. Yet we are so ensnared by a system designed to tear us apart that we fail to recognize how much of this trauma we share.
The everyday experience of most citizens is laced with very real feelings of failure and anxiety that fuels our vulnerability. We are force-fed imagery of the American dream while most of us live paycheck-to-paycheck – if we are even “lucky” enough to be employed. Protections for workers are being chipped away as part of a broad assault on human rights. Attempts at unionizing are thwarted across the nation at the same time that child labor laws are rolled back. Inflation rises while wages stagnate and income disparity widens. The increasing cost of living is unsustainable, leaving us with impossible choices every day. We stay in soul-crushing jobs for low pay because we need health insurance. We forego bills so we can feed our children. Now, rapid advances in AI with no ethical oversight will eliminate jobs and restructure the economy while posing an existential threat to humanity itself.
We try to make sense of our changing world. We are bombarded with hyper-negative news coverage rife with misinformation and opinion paraded as fact. Raging culture wars, designed to shock and distract, amplify the most extreme voices on the far ends of the ideological spectrum. The Us versus Them rhetoric is perpetuated by dangerously divisive algorithms molding everyone’s reality with propaganda that spurs misplaced outrage. The who’s-who of the blame game depends on what media you consume and what online content you are served.
We step outside into nature to re-center ourselves. A blissful moment of warm sun on our faces is bittersweet, as we realize it’s another day of record-breaking heat. We’re told if everyone would just dish out more of that money we don’t have to “go green,” we can make a difference. The fate of the planet is in our hands while the corporations that created the climate crisis do nothing but get richer.
If you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed by it all, they’ve got a pill for that. Also, a second one for the side effects of the first one. Here’s a third one to boost the efficacy of the first one if it wasn’t doing the trick. Oh, but don’t do drugs, drugs are bad.
The Great Gaslighting
This prevailing dysfunction has taken its toll. An overwhelming mental health crisis claims over 100 lives per day and tortures countless more. That health insurance that we slaved at a dead-end job for barely covers therapy – never mind “alternative” treatments.
The opioid epidemic rages while the big pharma pushers escape accountability. The criminalization of addiction means people receive punishment, not help. It keeps lower income families conveniently
caught up in a cycle of poverty while it keeps cheap labor flowing into prisons. In many ways, the war on drugs exemplifies the dynamic at play between us and the power structure that shapes our experience. After all, it has always been a war on people – an effective method of subjugation and control dressed up as a valiant effort to keep us safe. As Chomsky explains:
The drug war not only gets rid of the superfluous population, it frightens everybody else. Drugs play a role similar to communism or terrorism, people huddle beneath the umbrella of authority for protection from the menace.
President Richard Nixon’s domestic policy advisor, John Ehrlichman, served a year and a half in federal prison for his role in the Watergate scandal. When journalist Dan Baum asked him about Nixon’s war on drugs years later, he had no reason to hold back. Ehrlichman explained that the Nixon administration had decided their greatest enemies were the antiwar protesters and black people, but of course, you can’t target them directly:
By getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
The atrocities of the drug war and its crimes against humanity cannot be overstated. Now, the light being shone on the therapeutic effects of psychoactive drugs in mitigating dependency on other drugs, all within the same Schedule I classification, further underlines the absurd ignorance of it all.
Ethnobotanist and activist Terence McKenna argued that being pro-psychedelic is anti-drug by its very nature. Confirming what many already knew, clinical trials are now providing the evidence that psychedelics are effective in treating addiction along with a litany of other conditions. Unfortunately, the renewed scientific research in these substances is a double-edged sword. It offers hard data demonstrating benefits while dismantling myths about harm, but it also helps pave the way for corporate-led medicalization of naturally occurring substances.
Humans have used psychoactive drugs for millennia and they are ingrained in the ancient traditions and spiritual practices of indigenous people throughout the world. Meanwhile, the native communities from whence these medicines came are, predictably, left out of the conversation almost entirely by the titans of industry.
Marlena Robbins, a member of the Navajo nation and student fellow at the UC Berkeley’s Center for the Science of Psychedelics, pointed out that the injustice is layered in its irony. Not only are indigenous groups being excluded, and their knowledge exploited, but they are one of the communities least likely to afford these sacred medicines under the medicalized structure:
Psychedelics being the new gold rush for a lot of these corporations is limiting access for those who need it most: for communities of color, for Indigenous people, for BIPOC communities, and making it financially inaccessible.
An Appeal to Our Humanity
Our inability to have respectful discourse with one another is by design. Yet our human need for connection is so much stronger than the specters behind the curtain who keep us in-fighting.
There is a genuine Us versus Them dynamic at play: it is we, the people, versus a system that seeks to divide and conquer. The narrative around the failed drug war is crumbling and the psychedelic movement is helping to make that happen. Advocating for drug decriminalization and broader access to psychedelics is critically important to repairing communities ravaged by trauma, and truly, an entire gaslit nation of stressed-out citizens.
Václav Havel was a writer, dissident, and first democratically elected President of Czechoslovakia after the fall of Communism. Havel’s evolution from playwright to political leader began in the midst of Czechoslovakia’s counterculture movement of the 1960s and 70s, when authorities responded with brutal oppression. When the popular psychedelic band The Plastic People of the Universe were imprisoned, Havel launched a petition that would become the human rights initiative Charter 77. Havel’s continued activism landed him in prison for 4 years and played a leading role in the Velvet Revolution that peacefully defeated Soviet rule. This began his political career in which he would later veto a bill that would have banned possession of drugs for personal use, citing his concern over human rights violations.
Havel spoke before U.S. Congress just two months into his presidency, where he shared his thoughts on the fate of mankind. Havel described democracy as an ideal that we can only reach towards, so long as human nature remains the same. He cited the need for us to change our fundamental way of Being:
The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human modesty, and in human responsibility. Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will emerge for the better in the sphere of our Being as humans, and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed, whether it be ecological, social, demographic, or a general breakdown of civilization, will be unavoidable.
Psychedelics may not be a panacea to solve all of today’s problems, but they are an extremely powerful tool in transforming the sphere of human consciousness. They can remind us of the empathy, compassion, and connection that is so lacking in our modern world. Psychedelics can open new avenues of thought that bring humans back in harmony with themselves and the world around them. They can inspire immense transformation.
Unfortunately, this is also why they are still considered a danger that must be strictly regulated. Corporations want to monopolize profit while governments want to avoid any social shake-ups. The counterculture movement decades ago was seen as a threat to the very structure that keeps them so powerful while keeping the masses miserable but complacent. As McKenna said:
Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behavior and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.
Power to the People
When Timothy Leary spoke those infamous words, “turn on, tune in, drop out,” a mantra was born – ripe for misinterpretation and political fodder. ‘Drop out’ proved especially jarring to the establishment. The lead mastermind behind the war on drugs himself President Nixon is said to have called Leary the most dangerous man in America.
By Leary’s own definition, dropping out meant detaching oneself from the tribal game and social conditioning to become an agent of change. As he explained in his autobiography Flashbacks:
‘Drop Out’ suggested an active, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments. ‘Drop Out’ meant self-reliance, a discovery of one's singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change.
A dysfunctional system is grinding us down while trying to convince us that the enemy is among us. We are increasingly divided at a time when we need each other the most. Psychedelics hold profound promise in repairing our sense of self and community – even our sense of hope.
Grassroots organizing brings people together for raw conversations about the issues we collectively face. It allows us to foster understanding and to remind each other that we’re not alone. Most importantly, it’s a platform to overcome this learned helplessness and effect real change, together.
We can’t afford to let this moment pass us by without having our voices heard. Our greatest asset is our ability to rise above the noise and advocate for a better future for all.
Comments