Among the Bufo Toads and Sea-sponges
by Stuart Walton
MIT Press, 224pp, ISBN 9780262547666, £32.00
Aidan Lyon, Psychedelic Experience: Revealing the Mind
Oxford University Press, 381pp, ISBN 9780198843757, £30.00
The status of psychedelic drugs, as they have been known since the 1950s, has undergone a shift in the most recent epoch. During the countercultures of the Beat and hippie eras, materials such as LSD, mescaline and the various hallucinogenic mushrooms and succulents were interesting for the cognitive disruptions and reconstructions they effected. There were shamanistic faith systems that used the plant alkaloids in their ceremonies, but for the mass of First World college students and social dissidents who took them, they were a subversive entertainment that redefined one of the primary motivations of drug use. They were nothing like other drugs. Pacing about the room in a state of trembling stimulation, or subsiding into the euphoric gaga of a trance state, had their obvious appeal as an alternative to getting drunk again. But what might be the use of psychedelic experiences? An ideology of self-discovery came into being to justify them, as did a litany of cautionary tales that harped on the standard trope of people accidentally killing themselves because they imagined they could fly, or becoming irreversibly unhinged like Syd Barrett.
Almost the sole focus of writing about psychotropic intoxicants in the present generation is the therapeutic uses to which they might be put: to alleviate anxiety, depression, the more severe symptoms of Parkinson's disease, post-traumatic stress, addictive behaviours, Tourette's, just about anything. Microdosing LSD has evidently brought a sense of human perspective to the android labour in Silicon Valley. We would all be better off, it seems, if we were a degree or two further along the spectrum from the zero point of cold, raw sobriety. We wouldn't need to drink as much. Other people would seem nicer.
While these researches are potentially very promising, and deserve to be fully funded by governments overseeing a global mental illness pandemic, they leave psychedelic drugs in a limbo state, as though there were nothing other than medicinal use left in them. In this respect, they have undertaken the usual itinerary of controlled intoxicants in reverse. Most recreational materials began as medicinal agents, and had their hedonic potential teased out of them in vastly divergent subcultural contexts throughout history. Psychedelics have gone from experimental amusements to putative agents in the armoury of psychiatric medicine.
Two new books represent the twin poles of this history. Erika Dyck's copiously illustrated account of the principal substances traces their ethnography and medical science as context for her primary focus, which is the countercultural scene in the United States of the 1960s. This terrain has already been very thoroughly trodden, but is enlivened here by some suitably trippy use of colour in the page design, modulating from throbbing-hot sodium to warmly glowing peach, or between lustrous emerald and gentle lemon, and back, as the eye travels along the lines. But nor is Psychedelics lacking in moments of analytical insight.
Dyck opens by defining the effects of these drugs as 'non-ordinary states of consciousness', which seems so airy in its semantic inflation as to be propositionally weightless. She is on firmer ground in making a persuasive case that psychoactive substances have always been a matter of social division and contestation. Only the elites of Pharaonic Egypt, for instance, were permitted to use hallucinogenic mushrooms, which were said to have been gifted to dynastic royalty by the god Osiris. They kept the secret to themselves. Whatever the agent at the Eleusinian Mysteries of Athens was — ergotised rye beer? — it was reserved, on pain of death, for exclusive use in ecstatic collective ceremonial. Contemporary drug legislation itself was nothing other than an attempt to remove psychoactive materials from common ownership, the experiential equivalent of the early-modern land enclosures.
When the field researches of the pioneering ethnobotanist Gordon Wasson, who travelled around Mexico with his Russian wife Valentina in search of Stropharia cubensis, the psilocybin mushroom, became the subject of a famous piece of photojournalism in Life magazine in May 1957, a wave of psychedelic tourism was unleashed. It made a cultural martyr of the Mazatec shaman Maria Sabina, who had initiated the Wassons into the ritualistic use of psilocybin, at the cost of ostracism by her own Indigenous people and her eventual destitution. The pathos of much of this history lies in how unsuspectingly ready the Indigenous were to assist American researchers. Dyck includes a beautiful picture from 1949 of another mid-century pathbreaker, Richard Evans Schultes, having a dose of psychoactive Amazonian tobacco administered to him by a young local man in the Caño Guacayá region of Colombia. While Schultes rests a steadying hand on the man's shoulder, his host prepares to whiffle the snuff forcefully through a thin reed inserted in the anthropologist's nostril.
Woven into the mythology of non-native psychedelic experience are the indispensable horror stories, which all began as comic cuts: Albert Hofmann's neighbour appearing to him as a sinister witch under the world's first acid trip in 1943; the British abstract artist Basil Beaumont on mescaline seeing his doctor as 'a most diabolical goat'; Sartre on the same substance being pursued by an evil lobster out of Dalí. The Manson family took acid at its founder's behest. Long before homicidal hippies got hold of it, the CIA conducted reckless experiments with LSD as a potential mind-control agent for use in Cold War black ops. As late as the 1980s, as Dyck relates, medical authorities in both the Netherlands and communist Czechoslovakia continued institutional research into the use of LSD among mental patients. The results could as easily be traumatic as beneficial.
If there is slightly too much emphasis on the American hippie scene in Psychedelics, it is worth recalling that its opposition to mainstream culture played out against the backdrop of the country's doomed embroilment in Vietnam. The notion of 'dropping out', classically associated with the counterculture's class clown, Timothy Leary, was not primarily about demanding the right to lie recumbent in a California field while the Grateful Dead jammed on for a week at a time, but represented a refusal of engagement with the perverted sociopolitical mores of the day, a late spasm of Bartlebyesque abstention. In contrast to that, in 1970, Elvis Presley offered his services as an establishment fink for the Nixon administration's racialised War on Drugs. Young America had to be guided back at least to the straight, if not the narrow.
Dyck ends among the bufo toads and psychedelic sea-sponges of a natural world still vulnerable to exploitation. The last thing we need is another wave of psycho-tourism. A possible alternative lies in the philosophy academic Aidan Lyon's book, which is a lengthy investigation into what might constitute psychedelic experience as such. The definitions here are even more elastic than Erika Dyck dares propose. Suddenly remembering a word you have been laboriously trying to think of counts as psychedelic. Anything that reveals a hitherto hidden aspect of the mind is drawn into this generous purview, and is treated to the full rigour of analytic speculation in the Anglophone manner. As a result, there seems to be little point for Lyon in dwelling too long on traditional intoxicant experiences, which may not in themselves be strictly revelatory in the sense sought by his subtitle.
Lyon advances suggestive arguments about the nature of concentrated attention, as in meditation, or the most supple recourses of memory, and even if the substances are only one aspect of a heterogeneous theme, and not the most prominent aspect at that, drugs are allowed their moment under the microscope. There is an authoritative account of the timing of a psilocybin experience, and a useful definition of the effects of MDMA, which is probably not a classic psychedelic in the same way as is, say, mescaline. 'One way of describing these similarities and differences,' Lyon writes, 'is that a classic psychedelic forces elements of your unconscious into awareness, while MDMA makes it easier for you to allow them into your awareness.' That at least rings true, but the subjective dimension is generally absent from this book, all the way to accounts of mystical experience and creative inspiration, all of which are confined to reports and quotes from the legions of other people to whom they happen. In that the academic fashion for writing about altered states at second hand has largely passed away, Lyon's book, for all that it draws on the latest neuroscience, feels curiously dated.
Whether psychedelic substances truly reveal anything about the user's mind, and how one would know it if they did, are questions that Lyon makes an honest, if vicarious, attempt to answer. The search for self-knowledge through drug use is probably as vexed an enterprise as the hope that it might trigger creativity, a bourgeois myth already held together with string in the era of the 19th-century Decadents. Such putative wisdom is the user's equivalent of ectoplasm, and with more or less the same use-value. Meanwhile, how can it be that a quantity of psilocybin mushrooms can induce a spellbinding, gorgeously sensuous seven-hour excursion into dreamland on one occasion, and then, taken three months later in the same quantity, in the same place, with the same person, result in a horripilating nightmare? This — more than 'Who am I?' — is what we really need to know. Or are the two questions connected?