Down the Rabbit Hole

In this week's back issues: the rise and fall of the psychedelic revolution

​​​​Welcome back to Culture Club, a feature where David and I write about what we’ve been reading, watching, playing, and listening to, for paid subscribers. Please enjoy this free preview, and consider upgrading to support two struggling journalists at once! — Talia

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“Alice in Wonderland” blotter acid

This week, scientists at Johns Hopkins released a study on the therapeutic potential of psychedelic drugs to treat conditions ranging from depression and addiction to stroke and deafness. It’s a topic that’s been in the news a lot recently, and it’s one that has long fascinated me, ever since I discovered Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in high school. So it was perhaps inevitable that I found myself deep in an online psychedelic rabbit hole this weekend. There was plenty to explore.

In “The Psychedelic Miracle”, published six years ago in Rolling Stone, the author Gabriel Mac explored his own journey through the underground network of doctors and healers who are “risking everything to unleash the healing power of MDMA, ayahuasca and other hallucinogens.” It’s a terrific read, and I encourage you all to take some time with it. But there was one particular section that caught my eye:

From the 1950s to the early Seventies, more than 40,000 cases of psychedelic treatment were studied in 1,000 different papers in the medical literature, covering everything from addiction to PTSD to OCD to antisocial disorders and autism. Despite encouraging results, says Grob, the “wild, uninhibited enthusiasm of the Sixties” contributed to some bad recreational outcomes that gave legislators ammunition to ban psychedelics from research for decades.

It reminded me of the final words in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which have always stayed with me: “WE BLEW IT!”

For this Sunday night read I’ve selected a series of articles from the fifties, sixties, and seventies that chart the rise and fall of the psychedelic revolution … or what could have been a revolution if things had gone differently. There are few iconic pieces that you may have read before—Hunter S. Thompson’s “The Hippies”; Joan Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”; David Felton and David Dalton’s “Charles Manson: The Incredible Story of the Most Dangerous Man Alive”—but also some less familiar finds. So turn on, tune in … and then share this with all the old hippie/boomer dads in your life. Happy Father’s Day!

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Seeking the Magic Mushroom 
By Robert Gordon Wasson 
Life, May 13, 1957

On the night of June 29-20, 1955, in a Mexican village so remote from the world that most of the people still speak no Spanish, my friend Allan Richardson and I shared with a family of Indian friends a celebration of “holy communion” where “divine” mushrooms were first adored and then consumed. The Indians mingled Christian and pre-Christian elements in their religious practices in a way disconcerting for the Christians but natural for them. The rite was led by two women, mother and daughter, both of them curanderas, or shamans. The proceedings went on in the Mixeteco language. The mushrooms were of a species with hallucinogenic powers; that is, they cause the eater to see visions. We chewed and swallowed these acrid mushrooms, saw visions, and emerged awestruck. We had come from afar to attend a mushroom rite but had expected nothing so staggering as the virtuosity of the performing curanderas and the astonishing effects of the mushrooms. Richardson and I were the first white men in recorded history to eat the divine mushrooms, which for centuries have been a secret of certain Indian people living far from the great world in southern Mexico. No anthropologists had ever described the scene that we witnessed.

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Fly Trans-Love Airways
By Renata Adler
The New Yorker, February 17, 1967

The new waifs, who, like many others in an age of ambiguities, are drawn to any expression of certainty or confidence, any semblance of vitality or inner happiness, have, under pressure and on the strength of such promises, gradually dropped out, in the Leary sense, to the point where they are economically unfit, devoutly bent on powerlessness, and where they can be used. They are used by the Left and the drug cultists to swell their ranks. They are used by politicians of the Right to attack the Left, And they are used by their more conventional peers just to brighten the landscape and slow down the race a little. The waifs drift about the centers of longhair activism, proselytizing for LSD and Methedrine (with arguments only slightly more extreme than the ones liberals use on behalf of fluoridation), and there is a strong possibility that although they speak of ruling the world with Love, they will simply vanish, like the children of the Children’s Crusade, leaving just a trace of color and gentleness in their wake.