
Baltimore psychologist pioneers team using psychedelics as ‘sacred’ medicine - daddy_drank
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/10/baltimore-psychologist-pioneers-team-using-psychedelics-as-sacred-medicine
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Margh
I also believe psychedelics can transform lives in a hugely positive way;
since my first (and not last) experience with them last year my quality of
life has been constantly improving and remains at an all time high.

That said I found this article extremely difficult to read because of constant
references to religion and mysticism. There's a fine line between spirituality
and religion and this article consistently falls on what I perceive to be the
wrong side.

To anybody whose interest is piqued I give to you the same analogy that was
given to me: Life is like running through the underbrush of a forest, using
psychedelics is like climbing a nearby tree and seeing where you would like to
go.

------
junto
I have had some interesting experiences, the most challenging being DMT.

It worked in the following way. During our daily lives, all inputs from out
senses are filtered. I imagine that the brain filters the "raw steam" because
it is way to much data to consistently process effectively. I think this is
why you tend to notice things that have been moved in a room, even if you
might not immediately know what it was that had moved. I believe that game
programmers use these kind of visual screen drawing tricks all the time.

DMT gives you the ability to see the world without filters for a short period
of time. At some point during that unfiltered view the brain can't take it
anymore, and it reboots.

Both parts of this experience are both fascinating and terrifying. When you
reboot, there is no you. No ego. It takes a while for the brain to work out
what you are, before who you are, and then finally what the fuck just
happened!

It's nickname is "the businessman's trip". There is no come down.

~~~
throwaway458393
I've slowly begun to suspect that the filter and your ego are actually the
same thing.

~~~
junto
That's an interesting way of looking at it. I'd never considered that.

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richmarr
I'm amazed they manage to write this article without mentioning Nixon's "most
dangerous man in America", Timothy Leary... who apparently pre-dates William
Richards in the therapeutic study of psychedelics.

    
    
        Garcia-Romeu described the model in simple terms: 
        “Basically you give someone a really high dose and 
        they have a really transformative experience. And 
        you’ve prepared them for that and then after the 
        fact, you help them integrate it and they get on 
        with their lives.”
    

This sounds pretty much like a re-run of the 1961 Concord Prison Experiment
(but with hopefully fewer methodology issues).

There's a big question mark over Leary's science in my mind, but he's a
fascinating character and would add a ton of colour to this kind of story.

------
Scarblac
Psychedelics are #1 on the list of things I'm really curious about, but am too
scared of to ever try for real.

~~~
vtbg
Same here. I'd be afraid of "losing it".

~~~
chippy
If you consider it in terms of medicine. I would be afraid of performing any
kind of surgery on myself, but I would be less afraid and ultimately trusting
if a doctor did the same thing. If surgery is the wrong metaphor, how about
theraphy or other forms of psychotherapy, mind change, anxiety reduction etc.

In other words, don't try it. The fear of insanity is probably a good fear if
people think of doing it just for fun. But if the day comes when a doctor
takes you in a trip, your fear will be less, and the doctor will know how to
supervise you.

The key idea of this article is that research into psychedelics should be
allowed and encouraged. Timothy Leary never advocated for people to try them
for fun. Don't think of psychedelics as recreational things to try but as
powerful medicine which needs trained professionals to administer.

------
myire
Psychedelics are a research area with significant untapped therapeutic
potential, especially in difficult to treat diseases such as PTSD. The
Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) is a leader in
this field, with breakthrough studies on MDMA for PTSD in war veterans. For
those interested in psychedelic research, check out maps.org or
bibliography.maps.org.

------
mbrock
I don't want my scientists talking about "sacred knowledge." To me that points
to a problem with psychedelics.

~~~
sago
Religious studies is a secular, academic discipline. Your concern over words
like 'sacred' is a function of living in a cuture where apologists and
evangelists dominate such language. It isn't a necessary indicator that
there's a problem when such language is used.

Entheogen might mean 'generating god within' from a rather naive and
reductionist translation of the greek, but in the field it has a more specific
meaning relating to the use of a substance in a ritual context.

Entheogens, and using them in not-ritual contexts to try to replicate
experiences reported by ritual participants, is interesting and broadly
scientific. Religions are and have been wildly popular structures for guiding
and interpreting subjective experiences, and in many cases the framework for
pre-scientific medicine and mental health care. It is interesting to ask what
kind of mental states they are better at generating and what effects those
have.

To study that is not to admit that the religion has the right _story_ of _why_
those experiences arise and what they mean.

We can ask what the religious experience of 'transcendence' is and how it is
induced and what is happening in the brain without buying into the idea that
it is an experience of oneness with the infinity of the divine consciousness
(or whatever story any particular user wants to tell). Such an explanation
might be significant, without being true. In the same way one can study the
stories and language and behavior of a pyramid scheme without giving credit to
its claims.

If you've been bashed over the head with apologetics or evangelism, it can be
hard to tune into the use of the language in a more rigorous context, but it
has meaning and is not unscientific. Though there is, of course, room for an
argument over how much any social science or field of psychology is 'real'
science.

"Sacred knowledge" is neither meaningless, oxymoronic, nor mystical. Any more
than a discussion of "Erotic knowledge" in the context of sex-research would
be.

I'm reading this book at the moment, and so far it seems very good. Even the
bit quoted about Jung is handled with more reasonableness than the article
suggests (though I'm not sure I agree, yet).

~~~
mbrock
Well, I'm very interested in religion, religious experiences, anthropology,
and all this stuff.

That's different from a psychologist, in his role within the scientific
medical community, talking about "sacred medicine" and "sacred knowledge."

I might read the book... but I'm still wary of scientists starting to use
religious/mystical/visionary language.

~~~
sago
> That's different from ... talking about "sacred medicine"

You seem to be doubling down on interpreting 'sacred' in that context as the
scholar saying 'something I believe is supernatural'.

Social scientists studying religion should use religious language, and
scientists studying experience are fine to use mystical and visionary
language, if they are describing something emically: i.e. the subject reports
mystic or visionary experience. Terms like that even have an etic use, to
refer to the pattern of experiences that are described that way, where they
often become specific terms of art.

You didn't seem to engage with my point that you are misunderstanding the
term: it is triggering your 'woo' detector, which is giving a false positive
in this case.

"Sacred medicine" is not a problematic term, if you are studying medicine
practiced in a sacred context. I have a book on "Shamanic medicine" \- that
doesn't indicate the author is a true believing shaman, just that they are the
subject of his study. "Sacred knowledge" is a very good title for this book,
because it is an attempt to look at what knowledge of psychoactive drugs is
embedded into sacred frameworks cross-culturally, that can be reframed in a
modern scientific context.

I think the misunderstanding is very understandable, because religious vested
interests do a good job of preventing religious studies being widely known.
Partly their concern is to keep sensible folks like you saying this kind of
thing: words like 'sacred', 'mystic' and 'visionary' should not be used unless
you are a believer.

~~~
mbrock
Firstly I apologize for making semi-snide remarks without having read the
book. It does seem interesting and I appreciate your comments.

But I think you misunderstand my concerns. I'm not really concerned with woo
detectors. It's not that I think the word "sacred" implies some delusion or
some new age nonsense. The concept of the sacred is indeed well established in
theology and anthropology etc (I don't claim expertise in these subjects but I
am somewhat familiar with what the word means).

There's no way to sincerely apply the word "sacred" while remaining in the
sphere of secular discourse, as far as I can see. Scientists can study the
function of sacrality, but I don't think science can make claims of sacrality.

Psychology is not religious studies... Maybe there is something about the
framing I am missing here.

I think science is divorced from claims grounded in mystical insights. I think
it cannot involve itself with normative/aesthetic/spiritual stuff like saying
something is sacred.

And in any case, I do see problems with psychedelics and entheogebs related to
all this. Namely how can we take the insights and thoughts and feelings that
they tend to generate, and understand those things in a robustly secular way?

I don't have an answer. I've looked around. Lots of the people decades ago who
got into the stuff, as far as I can tell, went kinda nuts. Like professor Tim
Leary. Huge amounts of people end up in the meditation scene and go onto
Buddhism or Advaita monism. That's fine for them—and I'm personally very
interested in Buddhism, and to some extent a practitioner of the religion
(taken refuge vows; meditate; love the culture; etc), and but still I'm not
satisfied, from a scientific and psychological standpoint, with saying we need
to bring in concepts of sacredness or mysticism.

That has to do with claims, arguments, reason, the public sphere, and the
function of secular science.

I'm probably not expressing this very well.

~~~
sago
> Scientists can study the function of sacrality, but I don't think science
> can make claims of sacrality.

What's a claim of sacrality? A claim that a particular set of behavior is
concerned with the sacred is, as your second paragraph implied, an
unremarkable claim. No more impressive that claiming some behavior is
religious, or ritualistic.

This is where I'm struggling to understand you. Something is sacred, in the
context of religious studies, if it is something set apart by a community and
held deliberately in contrast with profane activities (following the Durkheim
kind of definition - the older definition of folks like Otto is well out of
favour now). To identify that certain activities, knowledge, experience, or
behavior is commonly sacred, is just an observation about how communities
organise their worldviews.

In a certain sense, no discussion of religion can be secular, by definition
(religious and secular are as slippery to define precisely as sacred and
profane). But in the sense that you can do secular religious studies, I don't
know why 'sacred' for you is a special kind of topic that can't be admitted to
the rest of the field.

On the 'people studying this go weird' tack. Yup! Very true. I think this is
an issue with religious studies generally, and lots of related fields
(biblical criticism, say). The people who are attracted to a field are
probably more likely to have some affinity for what they are studying, and
sometimes language can get a little to 'emic' for my taste. One does have to
be careful to distinguish between the views someone will advocate and the
positions they want to put forward as a scientist, or a secular scholar.
Though sometimes people will blur those boundaries. Mind you, I get the same
feeling from scientists and scholars with strong ideological opinions
generally, not just religious folks. But all that said, the term 'sacred' is
not unscientific that I can see, or at least, no more than any other term used
to describe human religious activity.

~~~
mbrock
For some reason I read Durkheim's book on the origins of religion. Back then I
was also reading stuff like William James on the variety of religious
experience. Very interesting stuff, and they're both great scholars.

Durkheim of course discusses the sacred at great length, tracing it in the
case of Polynesian tribes to the social concept of mana. (Just showing that
I've read the book!)

The reason he was able to present this theory in a convincing way that
advanced the state of the art in anthropology and sociology and religious
studies, it seems to me, is that he was well-trained in the scientific method
and scientific writing, so he was able to discuss it all on a scientific
basis—that is, I suppose, separating the etic from the emic.

Again I'm simply curious about how the scientist in the article manages
that... and I've seen a lot of people get into psychedelics and then kind of
lose their ability to talk clearly from a scientific, secular, non-mystic
perspective.

Maybe you'll see my point of view more clearly if I say that I have absolutely
nothing against the mystic perspective—I just think the value of science lies
in its refusal to really "go native." And I think religious studies and
religious psychology etc is more fascinating the more it sticks to the
scientific/philosophical project of secular explanation.

My initial knee-jerk reaction was about a psychologist publishing a book with
the title "Sacred Knowledge." I am probably mistaken about this reaction... it
was bolstered by the article's quotes about "sacred molecules" and empirical
proof of Jung and excitement about some guy who saw dancing gods on a drug
trip, fractal patterns, and so on.

I'm super interested in how we could, with philosophical and scientific rigor,
discuss whatever is the actual content of "mystical consciousness." James's
work was an empirical and mostly anecdotal study of life-changing mystical
experiences, and I thought it was very interesting. I think there are some
interesting aspects in Heideggerian phenomenology that would be relevant.
Mildly interesting: the reason why those deep learning pictures look like LSD
visuals.

If I were to start studying this stuff myself in any serious way, I would also
probably be likely to "go native" or "go weird" or blur the emic/etic, etc.

Still, the whole project is very interesting, and kind of seems to represent
the whole "Enlightenment project" in a way. Using secular science to treat and
collaborate on things that previously was the realm of shamans and priests.
Just, how does the scientist not become the priest, even after 100 doses of
entheogens?

------
amelius
What I wonder about most is why people seem to have become more depressed
than, say, 20 or 30 years ago.

Anyway, it will take a long time before the long-term effects of these
psychedelics can be determined. And that is, if a consistent result can even
be shown.

