In late 2012, best-selling author and journalist Michael Pollan (“The Omnivore Dilemma”) was at a dinner party in Berkeley, California. Among her peers was a prominent developmental psychiatrist, in her 60s, who spoke at length about a recent trip with LSD. This caught Pollan’s ears.
His first thought, as he shared during a recent video interview: “People like it that are you taking LSD? ”The psychiatrist went on to explain that the drug gave him a better understanding of children’s thinking.
“His hypothesis,” Pollan said, “was that the effects of psychedelics, LSD in this case, give us a taste of what childhood consciousness would be like: this kind of 360-degree information capture, not especially focused, fascinated by everything. ”
Pollan had already heard of clinical trials in which doctors gave psilocybin to cancer patients to help them cope with their fear of death. Now, I was very curious about psychedelic therapy. This 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 on Tuesday. Pollan is an executive producer (along with Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney) and the main presence on camera.
A reflective and broad look at psychedelic therapy, the series is based on accounts of its sacramental use for centuries and its uncomfortable history in modern society, especially in the United States. In particular, it focuses on four substances: LSD, mescaline, MDMA (known as Ecstasy or Molly) and psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) and the ways in which they are used to treat patients with diseases, including post-traumatic stress disorder. stress disorder, addiction, depression, anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
One such patient is Lori Tipton, a New Orleans woman who suffered a job-like misfortune. His brother died of an overdose. His mother murdered two people and then committed suicide; Tipton found the bodies. She was raped by an acquaintance. Not surprisingly, he developed severe PTSD.
“I really felt like I couldn’t access the joy of my life, even when it was right in front of me,” Tipton said in a video interview. He was constantly thinking about suicide. When he learned of a clinical trial of MDMA, held in 2018, he thought he had nothing to lose.
I can relate to some of that. I was diagnosed with PTSD and clinical depression a few years ago after my life partner, Kate, was diagnosed with terminal brain disease and died about 18 months later, in 2020. I didn’t have much interest in living. When I ran out of options, my doctor prescribed me a weekly regimen of sketchamine, which is a close relative of dissociative hallucinogenic ketamine.
Like many, I had experimented with hallucinogens, including mushrooms and LSD, in my youth. I was partying, not looking. I never thought to go back. But the treatment started to help me almost immediately.
Pollan, 67, never experienced the young man. Known primarily as an expert on plants and healthy eating – his latest book, “This is Your Mind on Plants,” comes out in paperback on July 19 – he arrived at the psychedelics in the afternoon. He was too young to pursue the summer of love, and by the 1970s, the war on drugs and anti-LSD hysteria had nullified what had been a fertile period of scientific research in the 1950s. .
But once he started studying and experimenting, he became pretty quick.
“At this age, sometimes you need to get your grooves removed,” he tells the Netflix series. “We need to think about these substances in a very clear way and throw away the inherited thinking about it and ask ourselves, ‘What is this for?'”
Tall and bald with the complexion of a swimmer, Pollan is not Timothy Leary – he doesn’t ask anyone to give up – and the medical tests described and shown in “How to Change Your Mind” should not be confused with the free movement of Ken Kesey. acid tests of the 1960s. Then, when psychedelics left the lab and entered the counterculture, the power structure was frightened.
“The kids went to the toilets and the American boys refused to go to war,” Pollan said. “President Nixon certainly believed that LSD was responsible for a lot of things, and maybe he was right. It was a very disruptive force in society, and that’s why I think the media after 1965 is going against it. after being incredibly enthusiastic before 1965 “.
Junk science spread nonsense about the twisted chromosomes of LSD. The drug was declared illegal in California in 1967, and then nationwide in 1970. Researchers were not banned from continuing their work with psychedelics, but stigma made this work very rare until re-emerged in the 2000s. Today, clinical trials are approved by the FDA and DEA
“From the early’ 70s to the early ’90s, there was no approved psychedelic research in human subjects,” said Charles Grob, a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at UCLA, who has written extensively on psychedelic therapy. “Since then, the development of research has resurfaced and evolved slowly, until recent years when professional and public interest in the subject seems to have exploded.”
Given the evolving attitudes, a challenge facing filmmakers, including directors Alison Ellwood and Lucy Walker, was how to represent the psychedelic experience in a sophisticated way, without stumbling upon the territory of a film. Exploitation film of the 60s.
“We didn’t want to fall into the trap of using psychedelic visual troops: wild colors, rainbow stripes, transformational images,” Ellwood wrote in an email. “We wanted to maintain the most personal, intimate and experiential visual style. We wanted people watching the series who didn’t have their own psychedelic experiences to be able to relate to the images. “
An imaginative scene recreates the famous bicycle ride by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, who first synthesized LSD in 1936 but did not discover its psychedelic effects until 1943 (accidentally). Feeling weird after ingesting 250 micrograms, Hofmann rode his bike during the peak of his trip. In “How to Change Your Mind,” we see the surrounding buildings bend and falter as he rides. The path below him blurs. Tombstones in a cemetery sway.
Tipton’s experience in his MDMA clinical trials was more controlled but no less profound. The results after three sessions, he said, went beyond what he could have imagined.
“As the sessions progressed, I worked with therapists to stay embodied and fully present in my emotions while remembering some of the most difficult experiences of my life,” Tipton said. “By doing this, I was able to find a new perspective, one that had eluded me for years. And from this place I was able to find empathy, forgiveness and understanding for many people in my life, but most importantly for myself. “
His descriptions sounded familiar. In 2020, I started going to my doctor’s office once a week to ingest three nasal spray inhalers and sit for two hours, pausing only to take my blood pressure in half. I was not amazed, but I found myself talking to Kate as if she were in the room.
I saw my pain as something separate from my being, something more like love than death. I didn’t identify with my pain in the same way.
It was certainly a spiritual experience. Then, two hours later, a little dazed but on the other hand, back to normal, he was ready to go home. After a few such sessions, combined with conversation therapy, I began to see a light at the end of the tunnel. Sketamine is technically not psychedelic, but it had certainly made me change my mind.
It is safe to say that Pollan’s has also changed. He recently became a co-founder of the Center for the Science of Psychedelics at the University of California Berkeley. Part of its author’s website now serves as an information center for people who want to learn more. It seems that the word of his effort is spreading. His book on the subject was verified in a recent episode of the HBO Max series “Hacks.” The Netflix series has already reached the Top 10 streamer in the United States.
Gradually, the laws of the country begin to reflect evolving attitudes. Last year, Oregon voters passed a voting initiative ordering the Oregon Health Authority to license and regulate “psilocybin products and the provision of psilocybin services.” It looks likely Colorado will vote for a similar initiative this fall.
For Pollan, these efforts touch a personal nerve.
“The ego is a membrane between you and the world,” he said. “He is defensive and very useful. It does a lot, but it also intervenes between us and other things and gives us this subject-object duality. When the ego disappears, there is nothing between you and the world. “
“Getting perspective on your ego is something you work on in psychotherapy,” he added. “But that happened to me over the course of an afternoon, and that’s what’s remarkable.”
