Timothy Leary’s Not Dead
Timothy Leary is in space. Of course, he is, you might be thinking. This is the guy who lauded the therapeutic potential of psychedelic drugs like LSD and told everyone to “turn on, tune in, drop out.” He also said more useful things, especially today, like “think for yourself and question authority.” In addition, back when he was considering cryogenics, he pronounced wisely, “I’ve left specific instructions that I do not want to be brought back during a Republican administration.” But, all that aside, he really is, well okay was, in space. After he died, an event he had videotaped “for posterity,” seven grams of his ashes were shot out of this world along with those of Star Trek‘s Gene Roddenberry and others on a Pegasus rocket. It circled the earth for six years and then burned up in the atmosphere when the orbit decayed past sustainability.
If Tim or some essence of him were still spinning around our planet, he might look down, smile, and say, “I told you so.” This because Michael Pollan has just published a new book titled How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us about Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. Pollan writes about the subject as well in “The New Science of Psychedelics” in The Wall Street Journal. In the article, Pollan marvels at the turnaround from the 1960s in which psychedelics now “can actually make you sane” instead of crazy. More specifically,
Recent trials of psilocybin, a close pharmacological cousin to LSD, have demonstrated that a single guided psychedelic session can alleviate depression when drugs like Prozac have failed; can help alcoholics and smokers break the grip of a lifelong habit; and can help cancer patients deal with their “existential distress” at the prospect of dying. [Perhaps it can help with the correct use of semicolons, too, but no word on that yet.] At the same time, studies imaging the brains of people on psychedelics have opened a new window onto the study of consciousness, as well as the nature of the self and spiritual experience. The hoary ’60s platitude that psychedelics would help unlock the secrets of consciousness may turn out to be not so preposterous after all.
Pollan also notes that, before Leary made LSD the “trip de rigueur” of the counterculture, there had been over one thousand studies of it involving forty thousand experimental subjects. Psychedelics were used in parts of Canada in the 1950s as a standard treatment for alcoholism and had a significant benefit. In a more recent study by Johns Hopkins, eighty percent of the volunteers were confirmed to have quit smoking six months after their psychedelic session. Here’s a taste of what these subjects experienced:
“The universe was so great, and there were so many things to do and see in it that killing yourself seemed like a dumb idea,” a woman in her 60s told me. During her journey, she grew feathers and flew back in time to witness various scenes in European history; she also died three times, watched her soul rise from her body on a funeral pyre on the Ganges, and found herself “standing on the edge of the universe, witnessing the dawn of creation.”
“It put smoking in a whole new context,” she said. It “seemed very unimportant; it seemed kind of stupid, to be honest.”
Pollan writes that “what may be the most exciting reason to pursue the new science of psychedelics” is that it “may yield a grand unified theory of mental illnesses, or at least of the common disorders that psychedelics show promise in alleviating: depression, addiction, anxiety and obsession.” He notes that psychedelics accomplish their observed benefits by rebooting the brain, jogging it out of “its accustomed grooves,” including the “garden-variety unhappiness” that plagues many people.
If he were still circumnavigating above us, Tim could take this as another ITYS [I told you so] opportunity, pointing to his axiom “if you don’t like what you’re doing, you can always pick up your needle and move to another groove.” (I’m regretting at this moment my long-ago decision to relegate all my vinyl and my turntable to the trash heap of digital doom.)
These new findings suggest a seemingly effortless way to avoid the anxiety-inducing and depressing effect of what’s happening around us. So, next time you think you should switch on the news, resist the impulse and follow Tim’s updated advice: “turn on, tune OUT, drop a tab.” You might find yourself happier and healthier. Of course, to do this legally, we’ll all have to emigrate to The Netherlands, which, all things considered, has other very compelling attractions at this moment.
