In late 2012, best-selling author and journalist Michael Pollan (“The Omnivore Dilemma”) was at a dinner party in Berkeley, Calif. At his fellow diners was a prominent developmental psychiatrist in his 60s, who talked at some length about his recent LSD journey. Polan’s ears were pricked by this.
His first thought, as he shared during a recent video interview: “People like He Taking LSD?” The psychiatrist further explained that the drug gave him a better understanding of the way children think.
“Her hypothesis,” Pollan said, “is whether the effects of psychedelics, in that case LSD, give us a taste of what child consciousness would be like—the kind of 360-degree-taking information, not particularly focused, fascinated. from everything.”
Pollan had already heard of clinical trials in which doctors were giving psilocybin to cancer patients to help them cope with their fear of death. Now, he was really curious about psychedelic therapy. That curiosity became an article in The New Yorker (“The Trip Treatment,” 2015). The article became a book, “How to Change Your Mind” (2019).
And now the book has become a four-part Netflix series of the same name, which debuted Tuesday. Pollan is an executive producer (along with Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney) and a primary on-camera presence.
A thoughtful and comprehensive look at psychedelic therapy, the series draws on accounts of their centuries-old religious use and their uneasy history in modern society, particularly in the United States. Specifically, it focuses on four substances – LSD, mescaline, MDMA (known as ecstasy or molly) and psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) – and the way they are used for maladies, including post-traumatic. for the treatment of patients with Stress disorders, addiction, depression, anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
One of those patients is Lori Tipton, a New Orleans woman who suffered a job-like misfortune. His brother died of an overdose. His mother killed two people and then killed herself; Tipton found the body. An acquaintance raped her. Not surprisingly, she developed severe PTSD.
“I really felt like I couldn’t use the joy in my life, even when it was right in front of me,” Tipton said in a video interview. She was constantly thinking about suicide. When she heard about the clinical trials for MDMA conducted in 2018, she felt she had nothing to lose.
I can relate to some of these. A few years ago I learned that my life partner, Kate, had been diagnosed with a terminal brain disease and died about 18 months later, in 2020. I was not much interested in living. Running out of options, my doctor prescribed me a weekly regimen of esketamine, a close relative of the dissociative hallucinogen ketamine.
Like many people, I experimented with hallucinogens in my youth, including mushrooms and LSD. I was partying, not looking. I never planned to go back there. But the treatment started helping me almost immediately.
Polan, 67, never experimented young. Known primarily as an expert on plants and healthy eating—his latest book, “This Is Your Mind on Plants,” out in paperback on July 19—he came across psychedelics late in life. He was too young to indulge in the heat of love, and by the 1970s, the war on drugs and anti-LSD hysteria had ended a fertile period of scientific research in the ’50s.
But once they started studying, and experimenting, they quickly converted.
“At this age sometimes you need to get out of your groove,” he says in the Netflix series. “We have to think about these substances in a very clear way and take out the inherited thinking about it and ask, ‘What is this good for?
Tall and bald with a swimmer’s build, Polan is no Timothy Leary—he’s not asking anyone to leave—and with Ken Kesey’s freewheeling medical tests described and shown in “How to Change Your Mind” Not to be confused with the acid test of the 60s. Subsequently, when psychedelics left the lab and entered the counterculture, the power structure collapsed.
“The kids were going to communes, and the American boys were refusing to go to war,” Pollan said. “President Nixon certainly believed that LSD was to blame, and he may have been right. It was a very disruptive force in society, and so I think the media after 1965 were incredibly enthusiastic about it before 1965. After being turned against it.
Junk science spread rubbish about LSD scrambling chromosomes. The drug was made illegal in California in 1966 and again nationally in 1970. The researchers were not prohibited from continuing their work with psychedelics, but stigma made such work extremely rare until it re-emerged in the 2000s. Today, clinical trials are approved by the FDA and the DEA.
“From the early ’70s to the ’90s, there was no accepted psychedelic research in human subjects,” said Charles Grob, professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at UCLA, who has written extensively about psychedelic therapy. “Since then, research development has re-emerged and evolved slowly, until the past few years when professional and public interest in the subject has exploded.”
Given the emerging perspectives, a challenge facing filmmakers including directors Alison Ellwood and Lucy Walker was how to portray the psychedelic experience in a sophisticated way, without stumbling into the realm of ’60s exploitation film.
“We didn’t want to fall into the trap of using psychedelic visual tropes – wild colors, rainbow streaks, morphing images,” Elwood wrote in an email. “We wanted to keep the visual style more personal, intimate and experiential. We wanted people watching the series, who don’t have psychedelic experiences of their own, to be able to relate to the visuals.”
An imaginative view recreates the famous bicycle ride taken by Swiss chemist Albert Hoffmann, who first synthesized LSD in 1936 but didn’t (accidentally) discover its psychedelic effects until 1943. Feeling awkward after eating 250 micrograms, Hoffman rode his bike during the peak of his travels. In “How to Change Your Mind,” we see the buildings around him tilt and stagger as he rides. The road below it becomes blurry. Tomb sway in a cemetery.
Tipton’s experience in his clinical MDMA trials was more controlled but no less profound. He said that after three seasons the results were beyond his imagination.
“As the sessions progressed, I worked with therapists to recount some of the most difficult experiences of my life and fully present my feelings,” Tipton said. “In doing so, I was able to find a new perspective that I hadn’t found in years. And from this place I can find empathy, forgiveness, and understanding for the many people in my life, but most importantly for myself.”
His details sounded familiar. In 2020, I started going to my doctor’s office once a week to take three nasal spray inhalers and sit for two hours, which slashed my blood pressure in half. I didn’t hallucinate, but I found myself conversing with Kate as if she were in the room.
I saw my sorrow as something separate from my existence and more like love than death. I didn’t recognize my pain in the same way.
No doubt it was a spiritual experience. Then, two hours later, I was a little nervous but otherwise back to normal, I was ready to go home. After a few sessions like this, along with talk therapy, I began to see a light at the end of the tunnel. Esketamine isn’t technically psychedelic, but it definitely changed my mind.
It’s safe to say that Polan has changed, too. He most recently became a co-founder of the University of California Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics. Part of his author website now serves as an informative clearinghouse for those interested in learning more. The word of his efforts seems to be spreading. The name of his book on the subject was checked out in a recent episode of the HBO Max series “Hacks”. The Netflix series has already made it to the top 10 of streamers in the United States.
Gradually, the laws of the land are beginning to reflect evolving attitudes. Last year, Oregon voters approved a ballot initiative that directs the Oregon Health Authority to license and regulate “the provision of psilocybin products and psilocybin services.” Colorado is likely to vote on a similar initiative this fall.
For Polan, such efforts strike a personal nerve.
“The ego is a membrane between you and the world,” he said. “It is protective and it is very useful. It does a lot, but it also stands between us and other things and gives us this subjective duality. When the ego is gone, between you and the world Nothing remains.
“Getting perspective on your ego is something you work on in psychotherapy,” he said. “But it happened to me over the course of one afternoon, and that’s what’s remarkable about it.”
(This story has not been edited by seemayo staff and is published from a rss feed)