Many of the researchers and therapists I interviewed are confident that psychedelic therapy will eventually become routine. Katherine MacLean hopes someday to establish a “psychedelic hospice,” a retreat center where the dying and their loved ones can use psychedelics to help them all let go. “If we limit psychedelics just to the patient, we’re sticking with the old medical model,” she said. “But psychedelics are so much more radical than that. I get nervous when people say they should only be prescribed by a doctor.”
In MacLean’s thinking, one hears echoes of the excitement of the sixties about the potential of psychedelics to help a wide range of people, and the impatience with the cumbersome structures of medicine. It was precisely this exuberance about psychedelics, and the frustration with the slow pace of science, that helped fuel the backlash against them.
Still, “the betterment of well people,” to borrow a phrase of Bob Jesse’s, is very much on the minds of most of the researchers I interviewed, some of whom were more reluctant to discuss it on the record than institutional outsiders like Jesse and MacLean. For them, medical acceptance is a first step to a broader cultural acceptance. Jesse would like to see the drugs administered by skilled guides working in “longitudinal multigenerational contexts”—which, as he describes them, sound a lot like church communities. Others envisage a time when people seeking a psychedelic experience—whether for reasons of mental health or spiritual seeking or simple curiosity—could go to something like a “mental-health club,” as Julie Holland, a psychiatrist formerly at Bellevue, described it: “Sort of like a cross between a spa/retreat and a gym where people can experience psychedelics in a safe, supportive environment.” All spoke of the importance of well-trained guides (N.Y.U. has had a training program in psychedelic therapy since 2008, directed by Jeffrey Guss, a coprincipal investigator for the psilocybin trials) and the need to help people afterward “integrate” the powerful experiences they have had in order to render them truly useful. This is not something that happens when these drugs are used recreationally. Bossis paraphrases Huston Smith on this point: “A spiritual experience does not by itself make a spiritual life.”
When I asked Rick Doblin if he worries about another backlash, he suggested that the culture has made much progress since the nineteen-sixties. “That was a very different time,” he said. “People wouldn’t even talk about cancer or death then. Women were tranquillized to give birth; men weren’t allowed in the delivery room. Yoga and meditation were totally weird. Now mindfulness is mainstream and everyone does yoga, and there are birthing centers and hospices all over. We’ve integrated all these things into our culture. And now I think we’re ready to integrate psychedelics.” He also points out that many of the people in charge of our institutions today have personal experience with psychedelics and so feel less threatened by them.
Bossis would like to believe in Doblin’s sunny forecast, and he hopes that “the legacy of this work” will be the routine use of psychedelics in palliative care. But he also thinks that the medical use of psychedelics could easily run into resistance. “This culture has a fear of death, a fear of transcendence, and a fear of the unknown, all of which are embodied in this work.” Psychedelics may be too disruptive for our society and institutions ever to embrace them.
The first time I raised the idea of “the betterment of well people” with Roland Griffiths, he shifted in his chair and chose his words carefully. “Culturally, right now, that’s a dangerous idea to promote,” he said. And yet, as we talked, it became clear that he, too, feels that many of us stand to benefit from these molecules and, even more, from the spiritual experiences they can make available.
“We are all terminal,” Griffiths said. “We’re all dealing with death. This will be far too valuable to limit to sick people.”
DA’SHAY PORTIS
Strong City
FROM Fourteen Hills
Jesus loves
peppermint
it’s clean and
fresh
I’ve used it.
where
he kisses me
it itches. No, it’s
my father’s
don’t touch it
I will take the four corners of my cloak and clothe you
I see your nakedness and I know you
don’t cry, I’ll protect you
play your harp, he will not harm you
in my father’s house
there are many rooms
I walk from room to room. pick up a copper gauntlet
drop two stone tablets. I walk from room to room, alone—
in the banquet hall there are golden plates, capers,
turkey legs. I see my face
or some child’s face.
some small, chocolate child
in a cheetah bra and panties
a matching set.
she pouts.
her lower lip
jutted out.
she’s bored.
her red lipstick, small lips
faded
cherry juice
down her chin
I walk from room to room, pick up a shawl,
drop down a cross
pick up His gall
drop down a power drill
I walk into the powder room.
It’s so white and nice.
It’s so white and clean.
in the corian cistern
filled with rainwater
two harem children
like kittens
lick one another
like lick lick lick
I watch them
their little cinnamon limbs
I look at my own skin
they could be my children
only a thin
clear curtain
keeps me
from reaching out
for them
from cradling her tiny head
under the chrome faucet
lathering her thick
chestnut hair
with our
mother’s
lavender
conditioner
I’d comb it through with my fingers
till it was slick and swollen with foam
but I don’t
instead I count the toilet paper squares
I fold them into cranes
I leave them for the girls
so when they’re done
with their evening ceremony
they’ll see them
and maybe remember me
from peppermint leaves god created a skin cream
that he rubbed on eve,
lifted and dipped her in uh stream
adam watched from the mulberry tree
adam watched a part of him leave
hollow and thin
a wisp of wind
while the good Lord
washed his lover’s
auburn skin
ANNA KOVATCHEVA
Sudba 1
FROM The Iowa Review
I REMEMBER THE LAST TIME I saw snow on the mountaintops; I was five. I remember learning the national anthem in school: Mila rodino, ti si . . . I remember that we are out of sugar, but there is none to buy. I remember how Baba likes her coffee. I remember the last walk I took before things began to change, on a winter morning that smelled like clean water. I remember saying goodbye to my mother, but I do not remember where she went. I remember sitting with Lili under a dirty orange overhang and telling secrets in the rain. I remember names for six of the planets. I remember how to make baklava. I remember Baba’s pills, where they are kept in the bathroom and how often she needs them. I remember some words of my own language, but others are missing, like pages torn from a book.
On my way home from the hospital, I see an old man shitting on the sidewalk. He squats over a closed manhole cover, his bare legs as white as his hair. He has that glazed look. I cross the street away from him, take out my GSM, and dial the hotline number stapled to every disuse
d telephone pole. I give the man’s location and hang up. A stray dog whines at me from an alley, tags on its collar jingling, but the poster for forgotten animal rescue has been rained through, and I can’t read the number.
Six days to launch.
I’m afraid I’m not too reliable anymore.
I do remember the first case. Fifty-two days to launch. A young man brought his mother in, stood in front of my desk with his hand tight around her upper arm. The woman had bobbed black hair, was fashionably dressed with a shawl swept artfully across her shoulders. I had seen her before, at a pastry café, sitting behind a computer and wearing wire-framed glasses.
We were having lunch, the young man said. All of a sudden she didn’t know who I was, or the word for salad. Please.
We rushed the woman in, ahead of a brittle Roma grandmother who had been waiting for hours. Her granddaughters muttered to one another, clutching their fidgeting babies. In the afternoon, I heard the nurses talking in the break room. No apparent physical cause for the woman’s sudden loss of memory. By the time her tests came back, there were four new cases: a small boy with a lisp, a white-socked widower who sold tomatoes at the market, a councilman with mob connections, and a waitress who worked in the city center.
The real fear of it was in what they forgot. Individual words or whole decades, they disappeared just the same. The boy no longer recognized his cat; the mobster forgot how to read. Like memory could just break on the kitchen floor, and any shard could go sliding under the counter and out of reach.
I called Lili then. I think it was nearly Christmas. When I walked home that night, small white lights dotted the bones of the trees.
Something’s happening, I told her. Don’t come home.
I’d caught her on the way to the bus station. I heard her put down her bag, heard Georgi barking. He knew what her suitcase by the door meant, and he hated being left behind.
Something, she repeated. I imagined her squinting her eyes shut.
A long pause, the dog barking. I think she had a dog. I think I remember a dog.
There’s something happening here. People are sick. Stay at home; I don’t want them to ground you.
Later, she would write: Every time I lose my keys, I’m afraid it’s the first sign, and they won’t let me go up. She was always losing her keys, usually in yesterday’s pockets. On the phone, she said, But it’s Christmas.
Tell your mother anything. Don’t come home.
Another pause. A nylon rustle I think came from her coat. It was a pink coat? Puffed up with down, shedding white wisps onto every shirt.
You’re sure? she asked.
No.
She sighed. I’ll think of something to tell Mama.
I hope it’s nothing, I said.
Merry Christmas, she said.
On December twenty-sixth, the quarantine began. Roadblocks appeared at every way into the city. I don’t think I saw them in person, but the television showed them. Policemen wearing paper masks over their faces, heavy guns across their bodies, halting the Christmas travelers trying to get back home.
The waitress had served the mobster his dinner. The mobster’s wife loved tomatoes. The lisping boy passed the market on his way home from school, had asked the old tomato man for change so he could ride the merry-go-round; the woman who sold apricots from the next stall remembered the exchange until she was found wandering the market with glassy eyes three weeks later, and she didn’t remember anything at all.
I don’t remember if I was scared at first. My grandmother had been ill for years: had forgotten how to dress herself, frequently mistook me for my mother. I was preoccupied making sure she stayed warm in a house we could not afford to heat with electricity. Three times a day while I was at work, bald Uncle Lyupcho came from next door and built up the fire in her bedroom. Lately, Uncle Lyupcho hasn’t been by; when I try to remember, it seems that his windows have been dark for weeks.
Space, said PM Imanev in his press conference. That’s where Lili is going.
Space, he said—That is where we can rise to new glory. The national anthem swelled behind him as he waved for the cameras, accepting the nation’s praise with his open palm.
We were far from the first; we were lagging far behind. The sky had been buzzing for decades: floating hotels, massive colony shuttles bound for new settlements. Mostly prison volunteers for the first few rounds, but once they carved the footholds, civilians donned space suits. On the news they showed night views of the earth, photographs from fifty years ago and from now: large dark patches shadowing today’s map, whole cities left behind. Walking outside in the mornings, I imagined I could hear the rising silence coming in across the globe, imagined I could feel us more and more alone. The television showed animals reclaiming Paris, deer pulling at the grass growing up from heavy cracks in the rue de Rivoli while the grounded poor hurried past with bowed heads and radiation burns.
Even our own population was shrinking, bleeding through open borders, filling those abandoned houses in the countrysides. Latest reports claimed that half of Bulgarians now lived abroad. Some eighteen thousand dual citizens had already taken off with other space programs, but those of us left behind stubbornly dug roots deeper into the ground.
On the television: This is no way for us to move forward, Imanev said. We must move upward.
Mobsters were convinced, money was borrowed, training programs created. Open calls for volunteers, and at the end of it all, one of the four chosen for our first flight since 1988 was Lili. The token civilian, pulled from the masses to prove the charges of nepotism wrong. Lili was nobody but was brilliant, hard-working. When we were little, she drew countless pictures of rockets, stars, planets of her own invention. She went through black crayons at alarming rates, painting the sky.
Forty-four days to launch.
Eighteen new patients have been reported in quarantined Vuzlevo this week, and now concerns have surfaced about the health of prospective cosmonaut Liliana Dancheva. Dancheva, a native of Vuzlevo, claims she has not returned home since late September, three months before the outbreak began at Christmas, but this has not allayed fears that she may still be a carrier of the unknown disease. If she is allowed to launch with the rest of her team on the twenty-fourth of February, Dancheva will become the first Bulgarian woman in space.
A panel of hastily fabricated specialists took the stage, debating possible scenarios. The anchor said they had reached out to Lili for comment, but had received none. In an e-release, the BNCA politely told the press to go fuck themselves.
I half-listened while I set the moka to brew. I took Baba her porridge and coffee, helped her stretch two pairs of wool socks over the cold hams of her feet. That morning she thought I was my aunt.
Have you studied for your history exam?
I assured her I had. I got the fire going and settled her in front of it. Books sat within arm’s reach on the table beside her, but I have no idea if she ever read from them when I was gone. When Uncle Lyupcho came, she told me, they sometimes played cards.
I have to go to work, Baba.
I kissed her cheek and pulled the blanket tighter over her shoulders.
Do your best on the exam, she said, and I promised her I would.
The young man brought his mother back. At the front door, a security guard in a rubber suit distributed masks. The paper crinkled as she breathed, eyes fixed on a point none of us could see.
She’s worse, her son insisted.
The doctors examined her, interviewed the son at length.
It just kept happening, he said. Some days she was almost normal, like she was learning the things she’d forgotten, and then—
He’d found her walking down the middle of the street in her bathrobe and one bedroom slipper, her other foot red with the cold, a rusted nail in her heel.
More tests.
We have to send them out, the doctor explained. It might take a while. With the roadblocks.
They gave the woman a tetanus sho
t and sent her home with extra masks for her son.
At the end of January, the paper reported on the story of a six-year-old girl who got lost in the woods chasing after her dog. Her father forgot to look for her until a stranger found her coat tangled in a bush. He knew where to take it from the name and address stitched into the pocket. When he returned it, the father burst into tears, holding the coat to his nose. The house behind him was piled with half-cleaned dishes, clothes sorted for the laundry and then abandoned. The girl’s body was found in the woods with a broken ankle, two weeks dead, muddy-gray and chewed by wolves.
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