The most important question nobody is publicly asking about psychedelics; or why we need to get off our laurels and help medical workers with psychedelics.
Can psychedelics gain universal support when aiding medical workers traumatized by SARS2?
Before COVID-19 / SARS-2 (SARS2), it was a truly herculean task to advocate for psychedelics. And to the heroes who came before me: you deserve sculptures, you deserve books, and you deserve, frankly, songs and feasts. Like the olden days. But you do not deserve eternal leadership roles. To quote — again — the great James Fadiman: “I have been looking to the next psychedelic generation to say to us “what a tired bunch of old farts you are with this or that journal, this association, and your so called research when god is all around you!” and I want to say to them “carry me out of the palace, you win, tear down the walls, get back to basics — I mean I’d appreciate if you wouldn’t shoot me — but please take my job!”
That quotation never meant more to me as it did recently participating in the recent Microdose conference on psychedelics and investments. I never have witnessed a group of people try to ignore the elephant so desperately. People who have carefully laid plans are often suspicious of people who prefer binoculars to maps. While binoculars can get you in trouble, maps require you trust the cartographer. I think, in this case, some of the cartographers might be high.
I say that because I saw SARS2 cripple the video conferencing system, I saw the virus change the way people talked about fundraising, and I saw it come up as a topic of culture. But in the 40% (roughly) of the conference I attended, nobody said anything close to this:
Medical workers traumatized by SARS2 deserve a fast track ticket to psychedelic psychotherapy; and the cultural cachet of healing these heroes is invaluable, so it’s a possible opportunity to reach across all aisles and have a motivation for legalizing psychedelics like never before. RIGHT NOW.
I want to propose three ways I think the role of post SARS2 medical workers offers a better role in the zeitgeist than the pathways currently with momentum:
Incentive — While most people don’t want to impede research into veterans, most people don’t want to interfere with end of life care, and most people don’t lose too much sleep over interviewing people who chose to do psychedelics; these arguments don’t have a personalized, in it together feeling to the average person who hears them, which is what chiefly drives many politicians. However, if focused on medical workers who need to get back to work, a therapy like MDMA, could be openly advocated for by staunch anti-drug advocates, if what they’re arguing for is their own eventually access to medical care. The marketing would be something more refined, but like this: “Medical workers traumatized by SARS2 are getting access to MDMA because it’s very helpful in accelerating therapy. Do you want medical workers sidelined by trauma, or back in the field serving you?”
Invective — The strategy shaped by most of the leaders in this field was shaped in a time when the mere mention of psychedelics brought about great invective. People are still traumatized from this, I think. I can roughly imagine. I grew up with parents so conservative about drugs, that my mom cried for two hours when she found a bag of weed in my sock drawer. I was 26 and we were in a house I had just bought with money from a company I started. I get the negative affect people have about drugs and the power they feel when they get to morally railroad someone else on what they think is a shared memetic map of drugs and what they are and mean. “Just Say No” and MAPS came about in the same era, and I can only imagine the bravery it took to plow forward.
But that doesn’t mean that tactics and strategies for today should be tailored to incentive that simply doesn’t exist today. Donald Trump appears to give no shits about psychedelics, and if approving a landmark legislation to heal medical workers got him ratings, the data suggests that he would be supportive. Most people with access to the internet would quickly find that psychedelics aren’t as scary as they once were. And with the nearly unbelievable rise of cannabis, people see “drugs” pervasive in culture, media, and lifestyle. So why would the best policy for a post SARS2 legalization of psychedelics be a concerted effort on subject lines that exclusively circumvent invective against psychedelics.
Hot Trending When will we go back to being focused on the suffering and deaths of soldiers? Probably not very soon. The “cleanup” of SARS2 will dominate the cultural headlines for years. We have lost nearly the same amount of people in a few months of SARS2 as we did in a decade of Vietnam.
Without spelling out the argument, the algorithms that control media now are based on hot trending, which is a combination of relevance factors, and engagement factors. So to soar on social media, it’s a much better storyline to talk about traumatized medical workers than it is wounded and recovering soldiers.
Sadly — and preposterously — the same is true of hospice. When quick death is lurking around the corner, people’s sympathy for slow death is intemperate.
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So if we reconcile Incentive, Invective, and Hot Trending — it looks to me like the chessboard changed recently.
None of this is to say the absurdly oversimplified solution that might be easy to assume I would advocate for: start a new nonprofit, try to convince MAPS or someone else to start SARS2 related trials, try to write a book about it, etc. All of those are great ideas, but my point isn’t about starting something.
Neither is my point about finishing something. If I were leading or had the honor to advise any of the leaders of any current studies, I would say exactly why they are saying right now. I would keep the train on its tracks. I personally, professionally, and as a member of the species want all of the current work to go forward and succeed with great determination.
To personalize it, I grew up with a father who earned three Purple Hearts in Vietnam, and worked his way back up to be a community leader, humbly serving a community through a career as an educator and outreach leader in a church. At my house, we got the magazine Disabled American Veterans monthly, and alongside religious journals, it rounded out a view that veterans both need healing and to be healers. We also got Wired, and I have spent my life working in startups.
Those three views together make me deeply personally connected to healing veterans. I have seen the lasting impact of three tours in special forces first hand, and what I would give for a time machine to give my own father access to psychedelics in a safe, regulated, and careful way back when he was recently out of the service. That is, and was, his birthright, I believe.
And it was these studies that led me to my interest in psychedelics, and broke through what looked like an iron curtain of loathing invective from the leadership class of America against the rabble-rousing psychedelic enthusiasts.
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As another grand caveat, I don’t expect my professional background to provide any bona fides to the long-established and hard-earned leaders of the psychedelic community; but I do expect that a carefully written voice earns a seat at the table, given the twitternet age in which we live. A humble man does not have to be sloughed with the burden of only having humble ideas.
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So where do we go from here?
We can look back to the civil rights movement, I think. While the good cop / bad cop mechanism at play between R.D. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X was effective at the time — and echoed through hundreds of regional chiefdoms in similarly conjoined pairs of community leaders — it was not a long term political tactic. It fit that movement then.
But I think today what would be beneficial is to recognize two different cultures and approaches to psychedelics. One is going to be true to a longer term, elder focused, tribe focused modality of approaching things. This is an innovation in the current political and financial economies. It is hard work. It requires that people find new ways to think about things, and come up with new modalities of thinking about everything from employment to contracts, from mailing lists to privacy. Another culture is going to be more adaptive, and probably a lot more mainstream in its approach to entrepreneurship and development.
One is going to say “It’s important to do things differently when building companies to support psychedelics. People have been working on this legalization and this approach for thirty years. Please don’t mess with it.”
The other is going to say “Focus on relevant, adaptable approaches to the current cultural context. Use the best practices of high growth companies and try to scale fast and hard. Base as much as possible on analytics and data.”
Let’s call these The Healer and The Host. And let’s pretend they just sell food. The Healer is focused on building new systems and new ways of providing food. The Healer sources from local, organic farms; The Healer has a long term, small staff that has insurance, trust, and stability; The Healer does things the best way they can do them and that’s where The Healer’s merits comes from, internally.
The Host is focused on serving as many as people as possible the best meal they can serve, given the circumstances. The Host is a bit opportunistic because the moral goal is to serve as many people they can the best thing they can in the circumstances; not serve a small group of people the best thing they possibly could.
Ultimately, the psychedelic movement is going to need Healers & Hosts.
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To answer the question this piece starts with: Can psychedelics gain universal support when aiding medical workers traumatized by SARS2?
I think it’s worth noting that most people support the FDA fast tracking almost everything that can help right now. We live not in a different time, but a new time.
Of course: I don’t know the answer to that question.
But I think that The Healers probably shouldn’t care much. It’s just another category of people who need scientific — or even sacred — assistance.
But to The Hosts, considering it is imperative. The pathway to creating a sense of broad, shared incentive; the escape from historical invective; and the capacity to hot trend on media about healing medical works is not an opportunity a good Host could possible ignore.