PSYCHEDELICS : A BRIEF HISTORY

By His Grace and Blessing I write….

The Psychedelic ; A brief history

Carl Jung one of the most eminent and greatest psychologists of the 20^th century once remarked and I  quote….  ”The true source of evil can be evaluated only when we recognize the shadow quality and  integrate them into our conscious awareness. War is the likely outcome if we fail to recognize our shadow qualities. Greatest danger to civilization lay not in the weapons that we have at our disposal but in our inability to understand ourselves, for it is this ignorance and failure to face our weaknesses and destructiveness that causes what should be an internal battle to manifest itself in the external world”.

Jung talks about our shadows and our projections. The world we construct is nothing but a mirror of our internal self which we project on to the world outside.

The experience with psychedelic substances is the way to understand ourselves. It’s a journey to inside. This understanding will usher a new Superhuman of Nietzsche( The German Philosopher who once remarked that “God is long Dead” and wanted to replace God with Superhuman of his construct). So lets embark on this journey  first with an understanding of the history of psychedelics ….

The History of psychedelics through ages and till 2010….

Psychedelic have been around human culture since before the recorded human history. There are at least 4 cultures which still thrive and which have woven psychedelics experiences into the fabric of their culture…The Curanderos who use Psilocybin mushrooms, Ayahuasca users of the Amazon Basin , Huichol use of Peyote and Shamanic use of Amanita Muscaria in Siberia.  These substances have always been used to connect people to their cultures and to the cosmos as a whole. The first scientific experiment with any sort of synthesized chemicals of psychedelic nature was undertaken in 1799 by Humphry Davy who discovered Nitrous Oxide ( Laughing Gas) and inhaled it in large quantities to see its impact on the brain. His experiences were similar to the modern and classical psychedelic experiences. The modern psychedelic revolution took off with the synthesis of LSD by Albert Hofman in 1938.

The LSD of Hofman found its way into the Spring Grove Mental Health facility in US where with federal funding it was used in trials to treat the patients. The preliminary results on people suffering from alcohol addiction, irrational fears, dementia etc were found to be very promising. The then Director of National Institute of Mental Health of America Dr Stanley Yolles recommended investigation into use of LSD as a drug. Dr Yolles was the highest authority on use of any medicine for treatment of mental diseases in USA. More than 6 international conferences on psychedelics were held and more than a 1000 papers published in various medical journals during the decade of 1950-60. Everything around LSD seemed to be moving in a very promising manner. Then something overturned everything against psychedelics bringing an abrupt and inglorious end to such a promising field of science.

The trouble started with Harvard Psychology professor Dr Timothy Learry who gave the slogan “ Turn On, Tune in , and Drop Out”. The words of Leary became the slogan of counter culture movement in America. Leary wrote in Psychedelic Experience …

” Awareness can expand beyond the range of your ego, yourself and your familiar identity, beyond everything you have learned, beyond your notions of space and time, beyond the differences which usually separate people from each other and from the world around them”…

These words of Leary and subsequent experience of youth with psychedelics fueled a revolution of thought which was not to the taste of the people entrenched in powerful positions. Psychedelic drugs became intertwined with rock and roll hippie movement, anti Vietnam protests, racial equality, environmental issues and rights of women. People started questioning everything that the governments wanted them to believe blindly, young people refused to participate and support US government in its Vietnam operations. The soldiers who experimented with psychedelics also questioned the rational of mass killings and wars. The position of the Masters of Mankind (a term coined by Adam Smith to refer to merchants and manufacturers of England in Smith’s times and a term Noam Chomsky used to refer to MNCs, huge financial corporations, retail empires, and the like in our times) who thrived on false narratives and profited out of big military industrial complex built around war became untenable and non justifiable.

All the above led to backlash from the vested interests which caused immense suffering. The mainstream media became the propaganda machinery for the government and demonized all the psychedelic substances. The whole narrative was controlled by the people in power and false stories around psychedelic were planted into the media. Media participated in spinning a web of lies and created confusion and illusions around these substances. The state sponsored media blamed  psychedelics for rape of TV actress by Ape fed psychedelics, for prostitution, for people going blind gazing at sun , for birth defects, chromosome defects  etc. There was no scientific evidence to all these claims of the mainstream media but the government didn’t want science to win the war. Science was completely suppressed like the way it was suppressed in 1616 by Roman Catholic Church when they banned use of telescopes (In 1616, It was made illegal for people to report what they saw through the lens of a telescope , specifically the revelation that earth was not the centre of the universe as it didn’t conform to the Christian viewpoint). All the scientific research papers on psychedelics were removed from journals. President Nixon called Leary the most dangerous man in America and sentenced him to prison. Nixon fired Dr Yolles, Director of the National Institute on Mental Health from service and also replaced the Mental Health Institute with DEA (Infamous Drug Enforcement Agency now in many Hollywood Films). Under US pressure, 34 UN members banned use of psychedelic substances and later all the 184 signatories to the UN charter banned use of psychedelic substances. All funding for research on psychedelic dried up and all approvals for scientific testing withdrawn.

The whole idea was to bring discredit to psychedelics by unleashing virulent propaganda machinery, by repeating false stories about these substances and by creating fear psychosis around them to the point of molding the public opinion against them. The State was ready to lose the debate but won the propaganda war. The main objective of State today and then and anywhere anytime in the world is to manage the public opinion because it is always afraid. It knows that if people were to discover the real nature of things (of say underhand defense deals with public’s money, of belligerent attacks without any verifiable proofs, of fabricated enemy threats to create fear, of castigating the whole communities and blaming them for everything that is wrong, of selling the economic interests of the majority to a few in the name of liberalism etc), they might act on this knowledge. I am reminded and feel very strongly to quote Joseph Goebbles, the Nazi Propaganda minister ..

”It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words and words can be molded until they clothe the ideas in disguise”

In the case of psychedelics the propaganda war was highly successful and it killed all initiatives on psychedelics that could have gone a long way in transforming human consciousness and could have immensely benefited mankind through their therapeutic effects.

To be continued in the next blog on …Psychedelic ..why now? And future of psychedelics

By  His Grace and Blessing I will continue writing.…

Image :  The image is representative of a thinking man with the most powerful seat of power: White House in the background  The man is trying to work through maze created by masters of mankind and may be he thinking of psychedelics .