Don’t Go There

Space

Dr Lafrance doesn’t insist that patients ‘surrender to the medicine’ when they’re not up for a challenging experience

By Thomas Houseago now showing with… Nick Cave and Brad Pitt at Sarah Hilden Museum, Tampere, Finland till 15 Jan 2023

In her preparatory sessions with clients, Dr Lafrance asks them what level of intensity they’re prepared to face.

“What if a wariness of some feelings is an expression of the inner healer?” the storied clinical psychologist who “aims to be a steward of reality” asks Vital students, in her lecture on frontline applications of psychedelic therapy.

And she doesn’t insist upon ‘surrender to the medicine.’

“Any opportunity for pro-active shame work we will take,” she points out, “but if someone is expressing reluctance about pushing through, we’ll wait. This contrasts with prevailing psychedelic wisdom/gubbins, which practically demands patients stare directly into the eyes of any monsters: “In the past I would’ve said ‘feel into the space with me’ now I’d just say ‘No, let’s not go there if you’re not sure’,” Dr Lafrance reports.

“What if a wariness of some feelings is an expression of the inner healer?”

This ‘self interrupter’ part that forbids examination of traumatic feelings (especially when tripping balls) “was downloaded for a reason,” says Dr Lafrance, “Let’s respect it and go slow because that in itself can be powerful… by helping them be less afraid in the future.”

So she’s fine with patients telling jokes, “which is awesome for people who have problems expressing joy and flexibility.”

Dr Lafrance even gives a pass to ‘spiritual bypassing’ which as far as I can tell means ‘having any sort of trip that isn’t a clinical healing-type one’. 

Those, as Vital students have been repeatedly told by big dogs like Dr Bill Richards, aren’t ever worth banking on anyway. 

“Therapy comes more from process than outcome in the session”

Indeed be wary of any dramatic, sudden, supposed healing advises Dr Lafrance.

“If they realise they’ll feel bad tomorrow for acting out of the ordinary, that’s a sign it might be time to work with the shame. But if they’re throwing all their clothes off and shouting ‘I’m so sick of hating my body!’ it might be worth asking them what ‘Tomorrow You’ is going to think of all this. They realise you’re not trying to shame them. And they’re very grateful.”

Dr Lafrance even assures patients not to feel they have to talk about things they really don’t want to. This is because “therapy comes more from process than outcome in the session,” she explains, “how did they engage with the parts of themselves and the therapist? That creates a different framework for engaging with the world.”

Anger is an NRG

Medical

How to take a (small) step closer to the dark side for more assertiveness and self-compassion

Adam Neate, ‘Retrato’ available from Flurorescent Smogg

The reconstructed self doesn’t take any crap.

“Assertion is a common after-effect of medicine work,” says Dr Lafrance coyly, in her eye-opening lecture to Vital students on hw psychedelic therapy goes down in the real.

Like the article says over in the Approach section of Zine #17 here, Dr Lafrance says therapists see two secondary emotions most commonly in the field.

“Empowerment skills, when they’ve perhaps not been done before, are usually too mousey… or too much”

Those two feelings she hears about the most are sadness, as one might expect from the depressed, and rage.

“Anger is a challenge for many people,” says Dr Lafrance, “but not all anger is destructive. There is healthy anger.”

This more righteous kind of fury can often be confused, shall we say, with assertiveness.

“Culturally we really struggle,” comments Dr Lafrance, “I’ve been in therapy for 20 years working on my capacity for anger, standing up for myself, and asking what I need.”

The rage-fuelled are shying away from vulnerability according to emotion focussed therapy, and it “shows up as these problematic reactions that fuel expression of symptoms,” says the clinical psychologist, somewhat eupehmistically.

“Empowerment skills, when they’ve perhaps not been done before, are usually too ‘mousey’, or too much,” explains the blonde boffin, “plus the most predictable reaction to unexpected criticism is defensiveness.”

Dr Lafrance provides scripted frameworks for the budding bearish buccaneer.

“I always assume user error. You know, because it helps me to cultivate more sophisticated skill”

She’s kind enough to share one with Vital students during the post-lecture Q&A, when I ask about help with my own fermenting… assertiveness.

“I always assume user error. You know, because it helps me to cultivate more sophisticated skill,” she advises. 

“If I'm expressing assertion, especially if it’s in a relationship where it’s kind of a novel experience, and it doesn't go well… then I ask myself: ‘What am I doing or not doing to contribute to this problem?’” 

That’s how she hit on the idea of detailled advice for pateints fumbling their way into self-confidence.

“I was encouraging people to express assertion, and it's not going well. So then I, as a therapist, asked myself ‘How did I contribute to that?’ Like, ‘Oh, shit, we didn't warn them.’ So I wrote, I wrote the script now that I give to all the clients.”

And it goes a little something like this:

‘I realised that I don't always say or tell the truth about how I feel. Or about what I need. It's hurting me.

And I realise that makes it so that I'm not always honest in relationships. Because I'm scared that I'll lose people important to me. Including you.

“Not all anger is destructive. There is healthy anger”

I really want to make a change in this way. I want to be more honest. And I want to have more faith.

Faith that heart-centered motivation is there at the forefront. And faith that this relationship can sustain the changes that are required for it to evolve. 

Would it be okay, if I started, in this relationship, being more honest about the things that hurt?

Or the things that anger me? Knowing that it's really because I want to find a new normal that will serve us both?’

You might as well give it a go, you’ve tried evrything else. Could avoid an ‘Iatrogenic’ – therapist-induced – divorce.

Trip for me babe… trip for you?

View fullsize

Integration

After a fortnight in the jungle, your relationships might never be the same

Soheila Sokhanvari, The Gift, from the exhibition Rebel Rebel at The Barbican, London till 22 Feb 2023

“I’ve a feeling we’re inadvertently harming a lot of family members. If your partner goes for a two week ayahuasca retreat in the jungle, your life is going to change.”

Thus warned Dr Adele Lafrance in her lecture to Vital students about how feedback from the frontlines is informing psychedelic therapy.

And the emotion-focussed therapy expert told the Vital cohort that things can get even more cluster-fucked than that, once psychedelic rhetoric sets in. 

“The concept of blame in psychedelic work is very delicate and potentially dangerous,” she says in her quietly subversive style, “there’s that fundamental belief that ‘we are all one’ and ‘inner conflict is related to outer conflict’.” 

Transcendent resolutions usually only happen in retreat brochures. “Healing can be disruptive,” points out the self-declared ‘steward for reality’ – “We don’t want to throw anyone under the bus.”

If handled correctly, “Holding the healing for the patient’s chosen, natural environment can encourage positive effects, lessen negatives, and evolve relationships,” says Dr Lafrance, improving key connections for the benefit of all concerned. 

“Neuroscience supports the healing power of supportive caregiver-loved one reactions,” she continues, encouraging “Working at letting go of blame narratives and fantasy as a tool, in particular those involving our primary caregivers… as for some reason, at this stage of evolution, humans are strongly affected by the context of attachment relationships.”

Psychedelic culture, its rhetoric at least, is infamous for butting up against reality: from free love to not doing any washing up in the hippy commune and the ‘all conflict is bad, mmm-kay?’ notion referred to by Dr Lafrance above.

“It’s a skill to hold space for absent family members”

And patient-voyagers often come crashing back down to Earth when they head back to the all-too-real environment of the office, family dinner table, or marriage bed.

“As a field we need to think how we’re managing systemic stress,” says the working doctor, “If we foster asymmetry of growth by only treating one person, it can have worse outcomes for the client – breakdown of a marriage, for example. There is a high chance of getting divorced, when if we treated both the relationship could have thrived.”

MDMA-assisted couples’ therapy is still a few years off. What can psychedelic therapists do to keep ‘systems’ like couples and families in union till then?

“It’s a skill to hold space for absent family members. And it can be an especially complex skill to deeply validate the client’s experience while still honouring the family member,” advises Dr Lafrance.

“We don’t want to throw anyone under the bus”

She’s a specialist in Emotion Focussed Therapy (EFT) which has its own branch for next of kin, Emotion Focussed Family Therapy (EFFT).

During Zoom lectures, “I normally have my hibiscus behind me,” says the congenial clinical psychologist, with no further explanation of her favourite flora’s current whereabouts, “I normally point at it while I say this; a client’s lineage makes up the whole plant. So, an example of what I might say [about their family] is, ‘Yes, they were not able – not didn’t care, or didn’t try. Let’s cultivate these experiences, so you can be the first flower in your family lineage to bloom.”

Cod spirituality around ‘respecting the ancestors’ is best kept in mind, rather than hectored at the client. "We don’t have to tell the patient, but it’s important for us to remember the cultural, religious and social influences that changed the directory of their lives.”

Here in the UK, family members have a legal right to a ‘needs assessment’ that can provide additional support, and a study on Multiple disassociation disorder (MDD) Dr Lafrance is consulting for here in Europe involves the family. “This could be a formal process during screening [in the USA] as things get legal, especially if they are under-resourced or unaware,” she says.

Those of us who are wary of social services padding about our home, or feel their help may be superfluous, might also find ourselves cast in a role of responsibility, where certain emotions are unwelcome.

And personally, I’ve seen more women presenting at services usually associated with men, like anger management (see the Kardashian sisters for a celeb example). It’s connected to a sense of overwhelment, usually from satisfying others’ needs before one’s own.

“We don’t want people to taint our experience when it’s so fresh, raw and vulnerable. So we tell the family that they can’t expect to hear all about it”

Says Dr Lafrance, “There are gender differences, unfortunately, that are still true you know, in terms of how we have been culturally conditioned to connect with emotions. Men still struggle more with sadness, fear and shame. Women, because of cultural conditioning, and socio-political movements meant to suppress female assertion, still struggle with healthy anger. So that's why I use this dichotomy: ‘Which one is true for you?’ Because it's not always gender specific, especially as we continue to evolve as a culture around questions related to gender roles.” 

The respected clinical psychologist also recommends discretion around any potent visions and insights voyagers may’ve enjoyed. “At the end of the session we’ll ask the client what they feel comfortable sharing that doesn’t compromise them, their needs, or their integrity, but is still informed by what a couple might need. We don’t want other people to taint an experience when it’s so fresh, raw and vulnerable. So we tell the family that they can’t expect to hear all about it.” Bear in mind that sharing you spoke to an omnipotent mushroom counts for that.

What if, like myself, you sometimes get carried away with the notion that everyone in your family would benefit from a little medicine work? 

“When I was in the jungle what came up over and over again was – you have to be in touch with reality”

In the post-lecture question and answer session, I asked Dr Lafrance how not to share too much with friends and family: “Yeah, in fact, that would be another point of direct intervention, actually. So thank you for bringing that up,” she replied, “If someone in the context of the ceremony, you know, or session says, like, ‘Oh my gosh, I wish my parents would do this, I wish my brother would do that, I wish my sister…’ then I will ask them to look more deeply into that.”

Doing so might enable the patient to “Release themselves, and release that person from, you know, having to be at the same stage of healing,” says Dr Lafrance, “Release self first, release other second. And if that comes up in integration sessions, I would do it the same way – like, ‘Yeah, check in with the part of you that is longing for that. Let's see what it needs. Let's see what it says’.”

Dr Lafrance can certainly tell you what the Grandmother Spirit had to say about her own familial ins-and-outs, during a lengthy ayauasca retreat.

“When I was in the jungle, that was one of the things that came up over and over again – like, you have to be in touch with reality.” 

Which is probably a better tip than ‘You must respect the ancestors.’ But like anything genuinely helpful, it’s not easy to take on board. 

“They are limited in their capacities,” she explains, “And it's not because they don't love you. It's not because they desperately want you to be different, that you're not going to be able to get what you're looking for. And so where else you're gonna get it? Inside. And I cried many tears over that, you know, sprawled out on the earth outside of the maloca. Like, not wanting that to be true.”

Ceremony in Jamaica with Sacred Transitions Retreats and New Psychonaut

Treasure Beach ‘The Cornwall of Jamaica’ is where I’d send anyone close to me pondering a first experience.

Take a look.

Kool-Aid Corner #17

To finish: trippy clippings, merry pranks, and psychedelic student life

Graph of the Week

A model of ‘psychedelic instrumentalisation’ by early humans, and of the evolutionary consequences of its intergenerational recurrence…

Figure 1: ’A model of psychedelics instrumentalisation by early humans, and of the evolutionary consequences of its intergenerational recurrence. The left side represents the process of instrumentalisation, which can occur repeatedly across the life-span of a generation of hominins. The right side represents the process of niche-construction supporting gene-culture coevolution across generations as populations construct and bequeath transformed ecological and social environments that exercise selective influences on following generations (Odling-Smee et al., 2003). The left side of the diagram portrays potential selective advantages conferred by psychedelic use under the socio-ecological conditions in which our ancestors evolved. The right side illustrates the process of selective feedback through which psychedelic instrumentalisation could have enhanced the creation and evolution of the human socio-cognitive niche. The four coloured boxes on the left represent the major aspects of the emerging human adaptive complex that created the socio-cognitive niche; these involve skills and processes potentially amplified by psychedelic instrumentalisation, with the two-directional arrows between the boxes representing the interconnectedness of these competence realms that coevolved in creating our unique adaptation mode. The emergence and persistence of this adaptive complex across human evolution permitted the progressive construction of socially modified environments (represented by the green box at the right side of the diagram) that in turn selected for enhancements in the same underlying human propensities and capabilities (represented by arrows with a plus [+] sign) that sustained the socio-cognitive niche.’

From: Psychedelics, Sociality, and Human Evolution by José Manuel Rodríguez Arce and Michael James Winkelman, published in Frontiers of Psychology, September 2021.

My bookshelf weighs a ton

Notable new purchases for the occult library. It’s supposed to be strictly second hand snap-ups only. But I’m flagging on that to be honest. It’s now more in the spirit of a second hand bookstore. This week: The Entropy of Bones by Ayize Jama-Everett

You’ll probably have to get it from/in America or off of Amazon

Ayize Jama-Everett handled the psychedelic racial awareness training on Vital. There’s a bit of a syncronicity here because I came across his name before in relation to my martial arts side hustle Battles of London (‘The brand making fight clothing cool’ says Men’s Health). I was going to hassle him for a short story for our print mag. But, y’know, lockdown.

Reading the signs, I bought this one because it had a snake on it.

The cover’s actually by John Jennings, a top-flight comic artist (and more) who Jama-Everett’s created a graphic novel with. Actually, one of the things I admire about The Entropy of Bones is that Jama-Everett must get told all the time ‘Why isn’t it a graphic novel?’ and that he’s nonethless written two others in the same vein (series, in fact).

Anyway, what’s really good about The Entropy of Bones is it’s about getting into your body. Which is admittedly also in danger of bnecoming psycedelic rhetoric, one of the unofficial themes of this Unofficial Vital Student Zine.

Plus there’s lots of other five star biz too, like: super-powered martial arts, smokeable psychedelic fungi, international-level decadence, weed farming and jungle drum ‘n’ bass.

Appliance of Science

Approach

Purists sneer at scientific tinkering. But lab studies showed Dr Nichols how psychedelics heal the body. Could he uncover the secret of profundity too?

By Ryoichi Kurokawa

Neuroscience is different to other aspects of psychedelic study, ‘since it is so spectacularly and usefully right over so many things.’

Raymond Tallis wrote those semi-satirical words in Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity. Neuroscience ‘is often given authority where it has none’ warns Tallis.

Grudgingly I admit all those long words and graphs might come across well in a formal context. During a presentation to drug legislators, for example. Certainly compared to showing a clip of Tales from the Trip on the the meeting room’s wall-mounted LCD screen. 

So it’s sweetly satisfying for heads to beat bureaucrats at their own game with the slew of pro-psychedelic neuroscience stats flooding out of respected institutions.

Granted, the arcane apparatus of the psychedelic experience itself remains beyond even the grasp of they who have mastered the most multisyllabic words from this incomprehensible, in-style, inculcation. 

“That’s still a wide open mystery,” confesses Dr Charles Nichols, eminent psychedelic pharmacologist and Vital neuroscience lecturer.

“Specific pathways may be involved in the psychedelic process”

Charles is the son of Dr David Nichols, chemist to the stars. David made the DMT for Rick Strassman, MDMA for MAPS and psilocybin for Johns Hopkins.

“Back in the 2000s my father’s lab looked at the cross talk downstream from when G-alpha-i protein interacts with a specific beta and gamma that activates a hormone called Src, which then activates a series of enzymes. That’s the very top effector.”

Right. No wonder nobody’s got to the bottom of it as yet. 

“Specific pathways may be involved,” Charles whispers conspiratorially to the cheap seats.

No talk of neuroscience in these pages is complete without a mention of Greatest Living Englishman Dr Robin Carhart-Harris.

Dr Carhart-Harris’ sympathetic yet rigorous research at scientific bastion Imperial College London brought the psychedelic experience its medical legitimacy. His REBUS, ‘relaxed beliefs under psychedelics’ model is widely considered the neatest summation of psychedelic neuroscience. (without wishing to damn it with faint praise). 

“My lab studies what psychedelics do that serotonin doesn’t”

For anyone too embarrassed to ask the scientific way to say ‘tripping’ is ‘Relax the precision of high-level priors or beliefs, thereby liberating bottom-up information flow, particularly via intrinsic sources such as the limbic system.’ Obviously.

Dr Charles Nichols is a pharmacologist developing new drugs. Unlike his celebrated psychedelic chemist dad Dr David, Charles has the benefit of Carhart-Harris’ research, or its slipstream at least.

Charles uses his prodigious skill with the pestle, mortar and petri dish to identify, isolate and augment certain properties within his arsenal of exotic designer psychedelics.

Specifically, “The study is my lab now is around what psychedelics do that serotonin itself doesn’t,” says Charles. 

Which is a lot.

He’s already found that mescaline-derived DOI has a tremendously positive effect on inflammatory conditions including asthma. And, he’s worked out that it’s not even one of the bits that makes you trip. Which has implications aplenty for widespread use. And the sensitive conversation around non-psychedelic psychedelics.

(Ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes wrote in 1938, “Some of the ills listed as responding to peyote were tuberculosis, pneumonia, scarlet fever, intestinal ills, diabetes, rheumatic pains, colds, grippe, fevers and venereal diseases.” Cheers Mark Gunther of Lucid News).

Psychedelics possess less ‘inhibitory’ effects on brain receptors that might suppress ‘excitatory’ ones, compared to serotonin. They hit the accelerator while cutting the brakes: boosting neurotransmission while hindering the body’s autonomous attempts to bring body chemistry back to ‘normal’.

“The profound and mystical effect itself is still a mystery”

This initiates a ‘synaptic cascade’ of excitatory messages. Once that gets to the Raphe nuclei in the brain stem connected to the whole brain, it’s blast off.

The resulting “downstream cross talk” takes an unusual route through the nervous system. Precisely what is a little vague. Zen meditation buff Dr Bryan Roth is on it with a system he calls ‘TRUPATH, an open-source biosensor platform for interrogating the GPCR transducerome’. He’s also the guy making the non-psychedelic psychedelics for DARPA.

“All psychedelics have a surprisingly different set of reactions with the 5-hydroxytryptamine receptors associated with serotonin,” says Charles, “but they all work on 5-hydroxytryptamine receptor 2a.” 

Neuroscientists gave it with the catchy nickname ‘5-HT2a’. Relax, they’ve got loads more.

Mescaline for example only activates two other receptors besides 5-HT2a. LSD’s “complex pharmacology” on the other hand means it interacts with 17 different receptors in total.

‘The phrase 5-HT2a agonist has supplanted psychedelic, which still carries faint whiffs of hippie-era hedonism,’ tech bible Wired tipped us off in its recent feature The High-Stakes Race to Engineer New Psychedelic Drugs.

Neuroplastic Smiles

Therapy

“Biology drives the effects of psychedelics but therapy shapes them,” says the latest scion in the Nichols psycho-pharmacological dynasty

Ron English, ‘Rabbit Grin’

The freshly ‘neuroplastic’ brain and new grey matter created during ‘neurogenesis’ both require careful curation from therapy afterwards, declares Dr Charles Nichols.

It’s notable that a hardcore neuroscientist stresses the importance of combining his drugs with talk therapy.

“If you don’t have therapy in the weeks after you may go back to that baseline state,” says the star chemist, “the process strengthens newly made connections and dampens old ones.”

It’s a clear decision he’s come to after a career formally studying the effects of mind-altering chemicals, under exhaustive laboratory conditions. And taking fatherly advice from dad David, the most prolific psychedelic chemist of his generation. 

‘Neuroplastic’ effects last for many days after the psychedelic experience itself. Little spiky nodules sticking out from the surface of brain cells called ‘dendrites’ grow in cells all over the brain. This provides fertile ground for fresher, healthier thinking patterns to germinate and grow. 

‘Neurogenesis’ is different. It’s the generation of new brain cells. Those ones your school nurse said you’d never get back. Admittedly establishment science is yet to entirely admit she was be wrong. Humans are only capable of neurogenesis in the hippocampus, boffins reckon. We get it from aerobic exercise, sex, worthwhile achievement and all the other good stuff.

No prizes whatsoever for guessing what else is said to cause neurogenesis. 

Say neurogenesis is real and not some figment of the ever-lively psychedelic imagination. Given it definitely happens in chimps and rats it probably is. These new brain cells require injecting with healthy thought patterns by integration tactics and therapy too.

What’s more, Dr Charles Nichols, born of David, categorically states that psilocybin is a more effective anti-depressant treatment than ketamine.

“If you don’t have therapy in the weeks after you may go back to that baseline state”

Although ketamine boasts impressive effects including its distinct ‘glutamate surge’ and anti-microbial properties, Charles’ rats felt psilocybin’s anti-depressant powers for much longer.

Real psychedelics use their own neuropathic pathway to create neuroplasticity, believes Charles, not the MTOR pathway usually associated with glutamate-derived GABA and any ketamine-led ‘surge’ thereof. 

Charles’ lab rats are still above their baseline satisfaction scores three months into the official testing period and counting. On ketamine they were back to baseline after one week. “Both will snap back but the difference is significant,” comments Charles.

Brain architecture and morality

Space

Keep those hearts open to differing emotions triggered by corporate psychedelia. And watch our for N-BOMes

By Daniel Amersham

DARPA, the Defence Advanced Research Project Agency AKA the US military, have funded UNC’s Dr Bryan Roth to the tune of $26 million for development of a non-psychedelic anti-depressant.

This jars with many in the space who prefer their medicines to not only come from plants but look like them too. The ketamine crew were jumping skyclad through bonfires at sunrise when they found out a fungus generated it (to kill worms) earlier this year. 

I don’t entirely blame them. Breaking up nature’s gifts feels hubristic. ‘Pharmahuasca’ contains only the big guns, DMT and MAO-inhibitors, of ayahuasca the jungle brew, which contains as many as 28 different ingredients in total. 

“Is this bullshit thing started by this random company going to replace psilocybin for example? I don’t think so,” Empath Ventures founder Brom Rector told Psychedelics Today recently, “In business you need to make a big improvement, otherwise no one really cares.”

The anecdote that rings true with me the most in this argument is ‘In hospital they could give you morphine that doesn’t make you high, but the proper stuff works best.’ THC in marijuana is thought to increase the efficacy of CBD, while the latter makes the former safer.

Pioneering psychedelic scientists like Vital neuroscience lecturer Dr Charles Nichols’ dad David, Albert Hoffman who discovered LSD, and Alexander ‘Sasha’ Shulgin reviver of MDMA are lionised in the space. 

Indeed Charles follows in the footsteps of his father Dr David Nichols: who coined the term ‘entactogen’ for MDMA, first synthesised pharmaceutical DMT for The Strass’ 1990s experiments. He also made the MDMA for MAPS and psilocybin for Johns Hopkins. 

Dr David Nichols is still working. Considered a leading expert in research into the neurotransmitter dopamine, his recent discoveries are already being trialled on Parkinson’s disease and schizophrenia. Charles inherited a library of over 100 new chemicals from his father upon beginning his own research.

“It takes a lot longer to work with these drugs mostly due to the extra level of testing the FDA requires”

Compass Pathways, not satisfied with supposedly trying to patent psilocybin, have developed 150 new psychedelics with the assistance of committed scientist Professor Jason Wallach. Wired ran a gushing profile of Wallach, who fits its brand image of the passionate inventor in its summer 2022 feature ‘The Race to Develop new Psychedelic Drugs'.

Wired journalist John Semley got less copy from Pathways CEO George Goldsmith and cofounder Lars Wilde: “Ask them what they had for breakfast and they’ll tell you how excited they are to build a new future for mental health,” wrote the frustrated hack.

Modern-day chemists and their backers get a far harder rap than the old guard, let alone more colourful contemporaries like billionaire Tyringham Initiative sponsor Anton Bilton, and Tokyo-based neuroscientist Andrew Gallimore whose book Reality Switch Technologies: Psychedelics as Tools for the Discovery and Exploration of New Worlds, on how to learn from DMT hyperspace visits lands very soon. 

Humanity’s developed a love-hate relationship with pharmacology. Sometimes we can’t get enough of its magic beans; later we become deeply suspicious of what it’s up to in its windowless labs. 

That’s not just a projection of our own shame. Several high-profile incidents over the decades have stoked the embers of misgiving. It was the Thalidomide scandal, where a generation of noticeably deformed children resulted from  a less than rigorous safety testing program, that put the kibosh on early LSD research. 

The chemical generation’s complex relationship with drug use, and a preference for talk therapy amongst… talk therapists that veers into militancy haven’t helped.

The pharma sector’s also deeply partial to bureaucracy in its many forms, and that rarely goes down well with those seeking caring and compassion. Anecdotally, there’s also the feeling that the corporadelic guys, with their lanyards and anodyne PR-speak are not really one of us.

Corpos drew groans at London’s Psych Symposium when a panel on decriminalisation was told we can’t be trusted to grow and eat our own magic mushrooms, because we can’t rate the dosage accurately enough. 

Besides, where are all these revolutionary new psychedelic-derived medicines? 

“It takes a lot longer to work with these drugs mostly due to the extra level of testing the FDA requires,” says Dr Nichols during his Vital lecture that opens the course’s Medical Overview of Psychedelics and Clinical Evaluation core module.

But it’s that level of investigation and learning that often yields major discoveries. In scientific circles LSD is noted for the knowledge about serotonin studying it led to.

Frankly why should everyone with asthma have to take a trip? Not everybody likes metaphysical poetry, ambient music, plus discovering the inner secrets of the universe… maybe the effing Death Door.

Besides space explorers are already enjoying the fruits of next-generation psychedelic research. And citizen scientists in the front line of consciousness exploration make for finer subjects than lab rats. 

Designer drugs combining psychedelic and empathogen (entactogen) effects are not your regular liberty cap and MDMA punch though. ’N-bombs’ or NBOMes to give them their scientific name are described as ‘ultra potent’ by the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience.

There’s a niche for the ambitious space holder.