“We are going to have an adventure,” he says.
And he is not lying.
At 11:15 a.m., Mara swallows 110 mgs of pharmacologically pure MDMA, lies down in bed, and looks at the angels on the ceiling. Marilyn follows her daughter’s upward gaze. She too spots the medallion, and utters one final prayer.
“Please be angels of mercy,” she says. “Please, please, please.”
2.
While the work Allan does remains illegal and underground, that is now starting to change. We are teetering on the threshold of a major psychedelic renaissance. For the first time in forty years, and without resistance from the law, in countries all over the world and cities all over America, some of the most infamous substances in history are again being put to the test. Scientists in Israel, Jordan, and Canada are looking at the therapeutic potential of MDMA. In Brazil, Germany, and Spain researchers have begun untangling ayahuasca, a plant that contains DMT — arguably the most potent hallucinogen on earth. In Switzerland, it’s LSD as a treatment for the anxiety produced by life-threatening illness. In Mexico and Canada, it’s ibogaine (another powerful plant-derived psychedelic) for opiate addiction. In Russia, it’s ketamine (a tranquilizer known to produce dissociative states) for heroin addiction. Here at home, scientists at the Johns Hopkins University have concluded a long-term psilocybin study that examined the purported “mystical experiences” people have while hallucinating. At UCLA, they’ve already completed an end-of-life anxiety psilocybin study, while teams at NYU and Johns Hopkins are beginning ones of their own. At the University of Arizona, it’s psilocybin as a treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder. At Harvard, having finished up neurotoxicity studies on both MDMA and peyote, researchers are about to get underway with LSD for cluster headaches and MDMA for end-of-life anxiety. Down in South Carolina, working with combat veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan among other trauma victims, researchers already completed one study of MDMA as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and are about to begin another.
Moreover, the majority of scientists involved feel their work is no longer governmentally frowned upon nor the easiest way never to get tenure. Roland Griffiths, a Johns Hopkins professor of psychiatry and neuroscience and a psychedelic researcher himself, says, “I think institutional resistance to this research was much stronger than governmental policy. For three decades, just proposing a psychedelic study was an academic career-ender — the electric third rail for any serious scientist. But that’s just no longer true.”
“The difference,” says Rick Doblin, “is we’re getting it right this time.” And Doblin would know. As a Harvard PhD and the founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) — a nonprofit drug company whose goal is the eventual manufacture of psychedelics — Doblin sits at the forefront of this new movement. For the past twenty-five years, he’s worked to get governments all over the world to reconsider their stance on these drugs, to get psychedelics back into the laboratory, and, perhaps most critically, to help design experiments rigorous enough that even the most adamant of opponents would be forced into reconsidering their position.
What Doblin means by “getting it right” is not just a reference to experimental execution; it’s also to overall attitude. “We lost this battle the first time around because of arrogance,” he says. “Tim Leary wanted LSD to bring down the establishment. Terrance McKenna said ‘psychedelics are inherently opposed to culture.’ That was the arrogance. Theirs was an entirely romantic notion, but also isolationist and uncomfortably superior. I’m trying to reverse that trend. I want to mainstream psychedelic medicine. My motto is: Tune in, turn on, and go to the bake sale.”
Doblin isn’t kidding. On the day I meet him, just after getting breakfast at the local bagel shop, we’re walking back to his house. He lives in Belmont, Massachusetts, a town so idyllically quaint that neighboring Cambridge — home of Harvard and MIT — seems I. M. Pei modern by comparison. Belmont is tree-lined and plaid-friendly, one of the last places one would describe as revolutionary. But looks can be deceiving. A woman stops Doblin not far from the bagel shop. She’s in her late forties, well-dressed, the poster child of an overprotective suburban mother.
“Rick,” she shouts from down the block, “did you see that great special on LSD on the History Channel the other night?”
What follows is a ten-minute discussion about the current state of psychedelic affairs. The woman knows much about this work and seems entirely in favor of it. When she leaves, Doblin tells me he belongs to one of the most popular temples in town.
“And that,” he says with a smile, “was the rabbi’s wife.”
“The who?”
“I don’t ever hide what I do. It’s a small community. Everybody knows everybody’s business. Most people are really supportive.”
Doblin believes the support he gets is the best kind. “It’s based on knowledge, compassion, and social justice,” he says. “OCD and end-of-life anxiety — these are very difficult conditions to cure — but the research clearly shows that psychedelics can help with both. We’ve got vets coming back from Iraq with intractable post-traumatic stress syndrome. The government doesn’t know what to do for these people. But MDMA-assisted psychotherapy works for them as well. Cluster headaches are also called ‘suicide headaches’ for the level of pain they produce and their frequency of occurrence. They’re another incurable. But treating them with LSD looks really promising right now.”
Doblin raises a hand and sweeps it around the neighborhood.
“People around here know all this. Belmont is a small part of the future I’m working toward. This may be the only town in America where’s it’s not usual to find people discussing the benefits of psychedelic therapy at a PTA meeting.”
3.
Mara grits her teeth and stares at the angels. It’s been over an hour since she took Ecstasy, and all that’s happened since hasn’t been pleasant. Her pain level has risen. Her noon dose of methadone didn’t help. It’s now 1:00 p.m. Everyone in the green room begins to discuss options. At 110 mgs, Mara’s starter pill is 15 mgs shy of the standard therapeutic dose. In most studies, patients are given an initial hit of 125 mgs and 75 mgs an hour later. Allan believes that doubling that starter would be safe. Mara doesn’t want to give up so soon. She swallows another 110 mgs of MDMA and asks, “Is spiritual transformation ever easy?”
The reason Mara believes psychedelics can produce spiritual transformation has little do with her own story and everything to do with her mother’s. Marilyn had been born with the congenital deformity pectus excavatum, a dent in the center of her chest, roughly the size of a golf ball. Her organs were pushed to one side, her rib cage jutted out. In her early thirties, Marilyn met psychotherapist and pioneer of mind-body medicine Ron Kurtz. He opined that the dent was the result of trapped childhood emotion. Release the emotion, he said, and the dent goes away.
Marilyn tried everything to release the emotion, and then she tried LSD therapy. Her session also took place in the green room, also beneath the angels. She had a blindfold across her face and a “sitter” — the technical term for someone who stays sober and guides the trip (a scaled-down version of the job Allan now does) — by her side. A half hour after taking the drug and much to her surprise, Marilyn felt her brain split in two — and she began to wail. Primal screams came pouring out. Eventually the screams softened to chants and for the next four hours, Marilyn made spontaneous repetitions of the sound aaaaah — though, in those moments, calling her “Marilyn” might be something of a misnomer. “I no longer perceived any boundaries separating me from my surroundings. I was sound and love and peace. Every emotion I had ever felt seemed insignificant by comparison. At that moment I knew what was meant by mystical experience, by transcendence. For me, it had nothing to do with faith or religion or belief in God. I had experienced God.”
And when she was done, the dent in her chest was almost gone. Her rib cage flattened, her organs shifted
toward traditional spots. Marilyn had gone on a twelve-hour mental trip and come back a physically different person. And when Mara agreed to try psychedelic therapy, her hope wasn’t just for emotional release. What Marilyn experienced is known as spontaneous healing and classified, at least in the Judeo-Western traditions, as a miracle. This was why Mara dropped that second pill; this was the kind of miracle she was after.
For similar reasons, on a small side table in the green room, Lindsay has arranged a display of gifts from Mara’s former students: a twinkle of votive candles, a sea bed of crystals, carved stones, colorful beads, all encircling a bronze statue of Ganesh, the elephant-headed god of wisdom and transcendence in the Hindu canon. Ganesh carries a bronze umbrella. An hour after Mara takes her second pill, the afternoon sun begins to slant through the windows. Sunlight dapples across the wall and spotlights the umbrella. Ganesh glows gold. Maybe it’s a sign, maybe it’s the drugs, but for the first time in a year, Mara’s pain is gone.
Paul Winter is on the stereo. Mara closes her eyes and floats off with the music. Lindsay sees peace on her friend’s face for the first time in, well, she doesn’t remember how long. Marilyn glances back at the angels on the ceiling.
“Thank you,” she says, “thank you, thank you, thank you.”
An hour later, the MDMA’s effects are fading. Mara doesn’t think she needs Allan’s help any longer.
“That was great,” she says. “I think I’m ready to go deeper next time.”
Everybody hugs everybody and Allan walks out the front door. Mara watches him go, the sight of sunlight giving her an idea. It’s been over a month since she’s been outside and now wants to go for a walk. She and Lindsay cross the street and sit down on an iron bench in a small park, under the shade of a towering oak. They talk boys and first sexual experiences and Lindsay’s upcoming wedding. Mara doesn’t feel sick. She just feels like herself — a feeling she was not sure she would ever have again. Lindsay has something of a contact high. She’s been having personal problems. Now she opens up, and what everyone involved will soon call the best part of the day arrives: Mara starts giving Lindsay personal advice.
“It meant so much to her,” Lindsay says later, “to be helpful, to feel useful, to get to be normal again.”
Two hours pass and they head back inside the house. Mara has an appetite for the first time in weeks. She eats a large meal, takes her pain meds, and feels a slight jolt — either a wave of anxiety or her heart skipping a beat. She begins to sweat. Nausea comes next. And then pain. Marilyn helps her upstairs to the bath. Warm water doesn’t help. More methadone doesn’t help. Mara’s palpitations return; her tics and twitches arrive next. Now her body feels like a marionette, some madman pulling the strings.
A bad night passes. In the early morning, Lindsay heads to the airport. She lives in Oakland and has to fly back home to get married. Mara can barely say good-bye. Ten minutes later, Marilyn checks Mara’s heart rate again — which is when she decides to take her daughter to the emergency room. When they leave the house, both of them wonder: Will Mara come home again?
4.
We now suspect that humans learned about psychedelics the same way we learned about most early medicines — from copying animal behavior. There’s plenty to copy. Everywhere scientists have looked, they’ve found animals who love to party. Bees stoned on orchid nectar; goats gobbling magic mushrooms; birds chomping marijuana seeds; rats on opium; also mice, lizards, flies, spiders, and cockroaches on opium; felines crazy for catnip; cows loco for loco grass; moths preferring the incredibly hallucinogenic datura flower; mandrills taking the even stronger iboga root. So prevalent is this behavior that researchers now believe, as UCLA psychopharmacologist Ronald Siegel wrote in his 1989 book Intoxication: The Universal Drive for Mind-Altering Substances: “The pursuit of intoxication with drugs is a primary motivational force in the behavior of organisms.”
And, just like us, animals are known to take specific drugs for specific purposes. Among the Navajo, the bear is revered for teaching them about osha, a root effective against stomach pains and bacterial infections. Wild carrot, as we learned from birds, repels mites. Horses in pain will hunt for willow stems, because that’s where aspirin comes from. The zoological use of hallucinogens is no different. Herbivores may have first ingested these psychoactives when the threat of starvation gave them no other choice, but later on sought them out for different rewards.
The same is true for humans. For millennia, psychedelics sat at the center of most spiritual traditions. For example, the Eleusinian Mysteries of the Greeks — arguably the most famous initiation rite in history — required drinking kykeon: a grainy beverage containing the rye ergot from which LSD was later derived. The Aztecs prayed to Teonanácatl, literally “god mushroom,” while the sacred Hindu text, the Rig Veda, contains 120 verses devoted to the rootless, leafless (aka a mushroom) plant soma, including 8.48.1-15: “We have drunk Soma; we have become immortal; we have gone to the light; we have found the Gods.”
All of which is to say: One of the least-understood facts about psychedelics is how well understood these drugs actually are. Ralph Metzner, psychologist and pioneering LSD explorer, explains: “Anthropologists now know that by the time our modern inquiry into psychedelics began, humanity had already accumulated an encyclopedia’s worth of knowledge on the subject.”
The modern inquiry into psychedelics dates to 1874, when philosopher Benjamin Paul Blood produced a short pamphlet on the effects of nitrous oxide. Blood’s writings inspired Harvard psychologist William James into a trial-and-error investigation of his own, later summarizing his conclusions in an 1882 essay: “The keynote of the experience is the tremendously exciting sense of an intense metaphysical illumination.” In 1887, Parke-Davis and Company began distributing peyote to anyone who was curious. Many were curious. By the turn of the century, mescaline — the psychoactive inside of peyote — had been synthesized, jump-starting three decades of phenomenological investigations into what author Hunter S. Thompson called “ZANG,” as in: “Good mescaline comes on slow. The first hour is all waiting, then about halfway through the second hour you start cursing the creep who burned you because nothing is happening . . . and then ZANG!”
Then, in 1938, Albert Hofmann, a Swiss chemist working for Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, went looking for a new way to boost circulation and ended up synthesizing LSD. Sandoz began distributing LSD free of charge to scientists around the world, listing two possible uses in the accompanying literature. LSD had potential as a psychotomimetic — a drug that mimics psychosis, thus giving researchers a better way to understand the schizoid state — and, perhaps, as a therapeutic tool.
By the middle of the 1950s, not long after Aldous Huxley told the world about mescaline in The Doors of Perception, University of California at Irvine psychiatrist Oscar Janiger — appropriately nicknamed “Oz” — was giving acid to celebrities like Cary Grant and Jack Nicholson in the hopes of learning more about creativity. Around the same time, Humphry Osmond — the British psychiatrist who coined the term psychedelic — suggested LSD might be used to treat alcoholism. His idea was later backed up experimentally, with the most famous example being the 1962 Saskatchewan Study, wherein Canadian scientists found that 65 percent of their research group stopped drinking for a year and a half (the duration of the study) after one LSD experience. Says NYU’s Stephen Ross: “Addiction was the number one reason psychedelics were administered during this period. Thousands of people were involved. All the research showed the same thing: Afterward, addicts tended toward abstinence. Sometimes sobriety lasted weeks, sometimes months.” Addiction remains one of the top public health concerns in America, but despite such tantalizing potential, most of this research has been buried for forty years.
Most date the start of that burial to 1960, when Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary traveled to Mexico to try magic mushrooms for the first time, later saying he learned more about the brain “in the five hours after taking these mushrooms . . . t
han . . . in the preceding fifteen years of doing research in psychology.” Over the next few years, Leary began conducting research on psychedelics, first at Harvard and, after he was thrown out, at an estate on the East Coast. Along the way, he dosed hundreds, maybe thousands, including Ken Kesey and the rest of the Merry Pranksters. The fire that was the sixties had been lit — which is what most remember from this period. But psychedelic research didn’t go away. By the time that party was over — LSD was banned in 1968, psilocybin soon after, though most point to the 1970 Controlled Substance Act (and the resulting exportation of US drug policy to the rest of the world) as the real end — there had been dozens of books written, six major conferences, and more than 1,000 papers published about research conducted on over 40,000 patients.
“Nixon shut it all down,” says Doblin. “He called Leary ‘the most dangerous man in America.’ That’s what we remember. But all this work was the beginning of modern brain science: the serotonin revolution, our first real picture of the subconscious, potential cures for some of the most serious conditions in the world. It’s kind of incredible most people don’t know this.”
5.
Marilyn takes Mara to Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. By the time she checks in, most of her symptoms have subsided. The initial ER examination report reads: “awake, alert, and in no obvious distress.” But still, tests come back with problems, and she ends up staying two weeks. When she’s finally discharged, now fourteen pounds lighter and on fifteen different meds, the first thing she wants to do is take more Ecstasy.
Her mother isn’t so sure, though she understands the logic. “Some of this is Mara’s search for a miracle, but mostly it’s about the pain . . . On MDMA, she didn’t hurt, she could move, she got to be herself.”
Again Marilyn consults with Allan. Together they try to backtrack the crisis. Mara’s symptoms could have been triggered by MDMA, but they both feel methadone a more likely culprit. Lindsay believes she measured wrong and the dose she’d given Mara after returning from the park — immediately after which Mara’s bad symptoms arrived — was really an overdose. Mara is taking significantly less methadone, which seems a good sign, but is also on twice as many meds as before. Allan consults with outside doctors. The main issue is Lovenox, an anticoagulant. MDMA increases blood pressure, and combining it with Lovenox increases the chance of a hemorrhage. They think stopping Lovenox the night before the session should cure that problem, but there’s another concern: Mara still wanted to go deeper, meaning a stronger dose of MDMA. Could it kill her? No one knows for sure.
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