Psychedelic overground

Space

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

Inevitably, models gather in St Tropez for a charity fundraiser hosted by Christian Angermeyer’s Aurora Institute

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.

War and peace

Medical

Ketamine’s been used as an anti-depressant for decades. Its effect on neurotransmitter glutamate may hold the key to understanding mental health

Vintage war poster from Antikbar Art

Ketamine’s actually been used as an antidepressant for many years, even in the NHS.

With D-list celebrities queuing up for ketamine, it’s even easier to write it off as a D-list consciousness expander. But that’d be both distastefully othering and ignorant of ketamine’s rich heritage.

Ketamine’s disinhibiting dissociative ‘emergent states’ comparable to psychedelic visions were noticed during its use as a battlefield anaesthetic in the Vietnam War. As were similar visions caused by its predecessor PCP AKA angel dust. The effects were studied in humans back in 1964.

Loads more scientific double-blind investigations have been conducted into ketamine compared to proper psychedelics. Ketamine could work even better when combined with a designer drug in the same family, cycloserine, used to treat tuberculosis and kidney disease. 

But ketamine’s authentic heritage treating mental health issues, plus its clarifying insights, aren’t all that’s worth bearing in mind before cocking any more snoops at the ketamine crew. 21st century neuroscience – and mycology – have dug up some astounding K-facts that endorse its use as a bio-psychological healing too.

According to the superb Psychedelic Science Review, ketamine causes and mediates release of neurotransmitters in a ‘glutamate surge’ that essentially causes neuroplasticity.

Ketamine could be “the most neuroplastic drug” as a psychiatrist commented in the Q&A after ketamine therapist Veronika Gold’s Vital lecture. Market anti-depressants only prompt limited aspects of this cascading process known as ‘brain derived neurotropic factor’ which isn’t dissimilar to the effects derived from healthy actives like cardio-vascular exercise. Un-mediated glutamate causes auto-immune and neurodegenerative diseases like ADHD, Parkinson’s and a raft of other conditions that psychedelics are associated with treating. Proper psychedelics are thought to do something similar but haven’t been lab-tested nearly as much as ketamine, so scientists can’t say for sure.

As above, so below

Integration

A fungus using K to clear parasites could hold the secret to the brain-body disease connection

Bacteria operating in fracal patterns observed by the late Dr Eschel Ben-Jacob

Pochonia Chlamydosporia is a fungus recently discovered to use ketamine for flushing parasites out of its host plant’s roots.

Discovered and hyped only recently, there are two eyebrow-raising elements to this. 

Firstly ketamine is a ‘designer drug’, or as elite space commando and neuroscientist Andrew Gallimore wrote on Twitter, “a perfect example of a purely synthetic molecule. The arylcyclohexylamines, of which ketamine is the prototypic example, are a product entirely of the human mind... Oh wait…”

Did the fungus get hold of it via the mycelial network? Is biology categorisable to the extent that a substance arrived at in lab tests can be naturally occurring but not yet discovered? Or did the Reality Switch Technologies Gallimore writes about come into play, somehow?

Some ketamine killing parasitic worm eggs

Secondly: Pochonia Chlamydosporia uses ketamine as an anti-microbial agent. A robust two-parter in Psychedelic Science Review dug out a 1987 study where ketamine did a great job killing bacterial heart lining infections in rabbits – and stopped the rabies virus breeding in rats.

In 2002 ketamine was tested against market antibiotics and crushed Staphylococcus aureus, a common opportunistic bacteria that causes all kinds of nastiness, from pimples and impetigo to MRSA and pneumonia… and has become 80% resistant to antibiotics since penicillin was invented in 1943.

The 2020 report from the un-putdownable Parasites & Vectors journal tested ketamine against agricultural anti-wormer ivermectin, which used to be advertised on TV back in the West Country to give you an idea of how widespread its farming use is. Ketamine performed equally well.

But what has actually captured the imaginations of many in the space is that this means ketamine counts as a ‘plant medicine’. I eagerly await the complex mythologies, concept albums, groundbreaking scientific discoveries, artistic genres, philosophical insights, and bespoke geometric fabric designs that shall surely now emerge from the ketamine subculture, such as it currently is.