Rugby lads on ibogaine, reality stars in hyperreality and tarot cards swapped for toys. Turns out the revolution will be fun

With celebs like Sharon Osborn extolling the virtues of ketamine therapy get ready for the neighbourhood popping their heads through the door of your clinic.

The psychedelic renaissance has flowed beyond the dinner party circuit on to the high street. Ketamine treatment is even more of a talking point than the toad thing. KAP got a shout out from UK TV’s Loose Women co-host Frankie Bridge (the striking one out of The Saturdays who had short hair) and Hello! mag went large.

Dr Leary’s orbiting urn would spin at an angle that defied conventional physics to see trite psychedelic lifestyle design clichés replaced by… trite lifestyle design clichés.

Sports stars have been hot on their daytime TV counterparts’ heels: gridiron megastar Aaron Rogers puts a late career surge down to ayahuasca and other football players extol psychedelic healing for concussion and stubborn injuries. Combat sports are beloved of thugs but played by gentlemen so being miles ahead doesn’t count.

Even the middle market are getting out there. Gen-X footwear designer Patrick Cox spoke about his new life as an Ibizan 5-MEO DMT facilitator to Hadley Freeman in The Guardian this summer. Ever intrepid, Freeman ‘smoked toad’ [sic] despite her editor’s express instructions.

A Vital study group chum undergoing ketamine therapy recently declared that sock puppets had been added to her clinic’s table of tripping props (with the spirit animal cards and crystals). She spent the session happily playing with them. 

Maybe this doesn’t sound ‘mystical’ enough to those of us with well-thumbed copies of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. 

Chatting away to the guides during the medicine experience, or wanting to go outside, can be a distraction from the work you’re there to do apparently. After you’ve come down you could be disappointed you didn’t get any of that done. I don’t disagree that it could feel like a waste of time for all concerned.

“Wit is the ability to find hidden similarities linking two ideas which are contrasted with each other”

But on psychedelics ‘what comes up, comes up’ to use the platitudinous truism. TV’s Dr Bill Richards, the veteran John Hopkins’ researcher featured in Netflix’s How to Change Your Mind said laughter “May be what’s needed” in his own Vital lecture.

I rubbished Freudian psychoanalysis in issue #11 by ranting about how the only therapeutic system that’s been established as ‘fact’ for 100 years has poisoned our intellectual conversation and our mental healing.

Turns out Freud wrote about the importance of humour in 1905’s The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious. Before putting pen to paper he took the opportunity to discuss the subject with hilarious cards from his Viennese social whirl.  The many positive conclusions included, ‘Wit is the ability to… find hidden similarities… linking two ideas which in some way are contrasted with each other.’

Laughter is the yang of meditative, non-dual understanding’s yin. The unconscious plays a leading role both in devising clever quips and responding to them in real time, without conscious analysis. On top of healing relational trauma, laughter and play in adults are also ‘positively correlated’ with increased sociability, spontaneity, tension release, innovation, de-stressing, longevity, immunity, energy levels, teamwork and parasympathetic nervous system activation. 

“Whether I was crying or laughing, was not too important”

And never mind the cave paintings, because psychedelics gave us jokes. The 2021 research paper Psychedelics, Sociality, and Human Evolution says, ‘In particular, the interpersonal and prosocial effects of psilocybin may have mediated the expansion of social bonding mechanisms such as laughter, music, storytelling, and religion.’ 

LSDExperience.com a compendium of the finest, trip writing includes this anonymous quote: “Whether I was crying or laughing was really not too important, except on the conventional level. The important point was that the tree of my emotions was being vigorously shaken and liberated of some withered leaves which had hung on too long.”

Spiritual emergencies, fearful reactions, and sudden life changes are likely to be of more concern for ketamine entrepreneurs and therapists than the number of mystical versus humorous experiences per week going down in their clinic. But not for nothing does the Bible call humour ‘the best medicine.’ It could be comparable to spirituality, or philosophy for coming to terms with complex and contrasting themes.

At dinner, or on the high street.

It’s legislators who seem out on the fringes now.