Science is finally telling us something that a lot of us already knew. Psychedelics are good for us! Mushrooms for mental health! Ah, the healing powers of Mother Earth’s wonder drug – psilocybin! What an incredible world we live in – where the best medicines are right at our fingertips! LSD-advocating psychologist, Timothy Leary, had it right after all. Perhaps that’s why Nixon thought he was the most dangerous man in America. Tom Robbins called Leary a ‘brave neuronaut’ for taking steps into psychedelic mind expansion, back in the 1960s.
Back in the ‘60s the idea of mind expansion wasn’t good for business. The last thing anyone wanted back then was people tripping off their nut, getting well, thinking outside the box…(wow, you should feel this box, I can hear the colours) and questioning authority. It was when we were busy making lots of lovely pills. Pills that made us quiet. Pills that helped us stay ‘under the line’. The system doesn’t want you taking substances that make you question its shit! ‘They’ want to hurry up the sedation! Knock us out. They don’t want to turn us on and turn us up. Nope. Numb us. Turn us down. Make us less ‘dangerous’. More compliant.
Sixty years ago, Leary, who famously dosed himself a lot, believed that LSD had potential for therapeutic use in psychiatry. We are only just talking about it with seriousness now. Psychedelics scare people. By people, I mean ‘straight’ people. It’s ironic because they’re the people who probably need it the most. It used to be one of my favourite things in my twenties – going tripping with a ‘straight’ person. I just loved watching their mind bend. Better than anything on Netflix.
But research is showing that psychedelic assisted therapy is very effective in treating depression, anxiety and addiction. It is also extremely effective in helping people who suffer with post-traumatic stress disorders. In the US, the treatment is expected to receive regulatory approval by 2021. That bodes well for us. But it needs to happen now. If treatments like these are shown to have such huge success rates, then isn’t it cruel or inhumane not to extend them to those suffering, asap?
Perhaps there really is magic in the mushrooms.
Thought leaders in Silicon Valley are mad for micro dosing. It’s the way they stay ahead of the creative curve and boost their work performance. In one article, I read that you can pay $2k a month and you get your own psychedelic-trip coach guru to guide you through the windy pathways of your mind. Kind of like a cerebral sherpa. Steve Jobs was rumoured to love the limit-busting power of psychedelics, ribbing his rival Bill Gates for being unimaginative. I mean how much better would Windows have been if Gatesy tripped out! We’d be running Wormholes 10 – Zooming our meetings into parallel universes.
It’s often the social uses and consequential bad PR of prohibited substances like psychedelics that hinder them being approved for medicinal use. Even if it means lots of people get well, it’s not good politics. Which seems pretty crazy. You have to be brave to push for change. And if there’s one thing our current leaders aren’t, it’s brave. Or interesting. Or able to think beyond the next election into that hazy thing on the horizon called a fucking future. Shit, please dose parliament. Let’s micro dose Canberra and see if we can’t bring on some compassion, some vision and some bloody awesome live streaming when they speak from the floor!
‘Madame speaker…why is Mr Morrison curled up in the foetal position?’
‘He’s feeling into the budget’.
To find out more about psychedelic assisted therapy and what world leading experts have to say go to mindmedicineaustralia.org
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