Illustration by Michael Burmesch
Psychedelics illustration
As a teenager and in my early 20s, LSD intrigued me. I had three experiences with the illicit consciousness-altering chemical that represent a slice of the psychedelic spectrum: terror, silliness and profound connection.
The terror occurred when, after a large dose at a concert, a dark abyss opened at my side and I feared falling in. Fortunately, a friend recognized that I was on the edge and calmly talked me down. Several years passed until my next dose, at an “acid party” throbbing with music and colorful characters. While driving home at 3 a.m., the stoplight ahead changed from yellow to red, and I realized I had no idea if that light was two feet or two blocks away. Silliness: I may have stopped in mid-block waiting for the light to go green, a warning about driving while under the influence of any substance.
And finally, connection. While hiking on acid with friends in the foothills overlooking San Francisco Bay, I experienced the vivid red of the redwood trees and the tweed-like texture of the ground and the oneness of it all. It was the psychedelic experience I always sought and afterward, I stopped searching.
That was 35 years ago when psychedelic drugs had long been relegated to society’s outlaws. Lately, a rising tide of renewed interest has led to scientific studies, medical applications and psychedelic vacations (in countries with looser laws). The vacations are like taking a cruise, but the ship sets out from the port of your mind. I know a retired Milwaukee physician who purchased a batch of psilocybin mushrooms and is waiting for the time to trip. And then there is Brad Ehlert, a retired Milwaukee ad man who spent seven days at a “psilocybin-assisted retreat” in Jamaica.
Operated by a firm called MycoMeditations, his retreat unfolded at a seaside resort with a psychologist, a nurse and a team of “trip sitters” on hand. The staff supervised each participant in the group of 14 vacationers who were given tiered doses of magic mushrooms in capsule form. According to Ehlert, most of his fellow participants endured some “challenging” as well as some positive trips. His were all good. “It’s hard to put into words,” he recalls. “I walked to the ocean and had a sense that every beautiful day I’d had in my life congealed into that moment.”
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Changing Minds
Ehlert never dabbled in illegal drugs during his youth. His curiosity about psychedelics was first stirred by a PBS documentary on an experimental program that gave LSD to terminally ill patients. “The point was that their fear of death and peace of mind were strongly affected,” he recalls. And then came the ground-changer, the book that heralded the reemergence of psychedelia as science, Michael Pollan’s 2018 book How to Change Your Mind.
Pollan is perhaps America’s most respected contemporary nonfiction writer. Whether writing on gardening, agribusiness or American eating habits, Pollan has always been concerned with overcoming our alienation from the natural world. With How to Change Your Mind, Pollan took a step beyond by exploring psychedelic experiences through LSD, psylocibin, ayahuasca and an extract from desert toads called 5-MeO-DMT. Like many of his readers, Pollan, age 66, was a child in the ‘60s who never took a trip.
How to Change Your Mind recovers LSD’s lost early history as a promising prescription for treating depression, addiction and anxiety. Like psylocibin and other organic consciousness-altering substances, LSD appealed to mystics and seekers, but when it and other psychedelics became party drugs during the ‘60s counterculture, careless dosing in unhospitable settings triggered dangerous behavior and psychological breakdowns. A bad example was set by Harvard psychologist-turned-guru Timothy Leary, whose slipshod science and cult of personality were satirized in T.C. Boyle’s novel Outside Looking In. By the end of the ‘60s psychedelics were banned from research as well as personal use.
However, Pollan discovered that the environment was shifting. A 1993 federal law permitting Native Americans to use peyote sacramentally led to a unanimous 2006 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court allowing religious sects to import and use ayahuasca, a psychoactive derived from a South American shrub banned under federal law as a Schedule 1 substance alongside heroin, LSD and marijuana. By this time science had joined religion, conducting double-blind, placebo-controlled tests at Johns Hopkins and New York University on psychedelics legally available for study. Medical researchers were wondering if their predecessors in the 1950s and ‘60s were onto something.
Some of that research has been conducted since 2014 by a team at the University of Wisconsin Madison led by Christopher Nicholas, Randy Brown and Paul Hutson. “We initially completed the first ever pharmacokinetics study of psilocybin in which we examined never before tested high doses of psilocybin. The rationale was to determine the safety and pharmacokinetic profile of these doses as some mental health and substance abuse disorders might require higher doses than what are typically used in current clinical trials,” Nicholas says. “We are now running the first trial of psilocybin for opioid use disorder and will be starting a similar study for methamphetamine use disorder.”
Working with the Wisconsin-based Usona Institute for investigating the therapeutic effects of psylocibin, Nicholas and his colleagues are also conducting trials to treat major depressive disorder. In addition, their team is the site for FDA approved Phase 3 trials conducted through the national Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) focused on treating PTSD with MDMA, the psychoactive drug known to partygoers as Ecstasy. In 2017 the FDA designated MDMA as a “breakthrough therapy” for PTSD. Likewise, the FDA approved psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression.
UW Madison is going deeper into clinical research with the formation last year of the Transdisciplinary Center for Research in Psychoactive Substances. Trials on psychedelics are conducted in a setting that resembles a comfortable living room from an interior design magazine.
Seeking Wellness
While clinical trials for psilocybin and MDMA continue, one drug with psychedelic properties, Ketamine, has long been approved for clinical use, initially as an anesthetic. Justin Lubin’s Perspective Wellness is using Ketamine to treat Milwaukeeans for psychological and emotional pain related to mental health conditions like depression, anxiety, and PTSD.
“We’re trying to create a little slice of California in Milwaukee—the non-judgmental energy of creating a safe place for people to have their psychedelic experience,” Lubin says. Coming from a background in managing community mental health clinics, Lubin received training in Ketamine-assisted psychotherapy at California’s Ketamine Training Center and Polaris Institute. Perspective Wellness, operating at Shalem Healing (3338 N. Martin Luther King Drive) before moving to their own building in Wauwatosa this spring, applies a rigorous medical and neurobiological framework to the critical lessons learned by psychedelic explorers of the past: the mindset of the traveler and the setting for the trip are essential.
Prospective clients at Perspective Wellness must answer a battery of questions and meet with a psychologist and a psychiatric nurse practitioner. Ruled out are people with a history of psychosis, uncontrolled high blood pressure, or a history of cardiovascular diseases like stroke or aneurysm. Ketamine causes a bump up in blood pressure, usually no more than a workout at the gym, but the clinic is careful.
At the initial Ketamine session, the client sits in a comfortably upholstered chair and lets a 100mg tablet dissolve in their mouth. “Ketamine is very music-oriented and we use a wonderfully curated selection of music to move people into different spaces,” Lubin explains. “We’re very conservative about how we do things. Our philosophy is slow and low. We start with a minimum dosage and see how it goes. We go upwards very carefully.”
Three sessions are recommended for each client. Blood pressure and vital signs are checked, yet the atmosphere is different—much less medicalized—from clinics where ketamine is administered through an IV drip. Before and after each session, clients engage in individual preparation and integration sessions, which are an important part of the treatment.
At client Brad Ehlert’s recent session at Perspective Wellness, “the Ketamine experience was purer, clearer, more meaningful and gentler than mushrooms,” he says. “Also, the afterglow is much more noticeable three days later. Great sleep, feeling connected to the world, energetic, fantastic mood.”
Meaningful Life?
The patent has expired on Ketamine, so the cost is low. Sensing an emerging market slip from its grasp, Big Pharma is busy developing patentable Ketamine variants which they hope to sell at higher prices.
Even when science turned its back, the psychedelic ideal was kept alive culturally in the ‘80s with a wave of neo-psychedelic bands (including Milwaukee’s Plasticland) and in the Ecstasy-fueled rave scene of the ‘90s. “I became interested in psychedelics at first for recreational use with friends at concerts,” says Matt Simpson, an “empowerment coach” who coordinates the Milwaukee Psychedelic Society. “But from those early experiences, I found relief from emotional and behavioral challenges and became curious about the therapeutic value which ultimately led me to the jungles of Costa Rica for an ayahuasca retreat in 2014.”
Simpson’s experiences led to his book, Worth the Fight, and his Worth the Fight podcast. “Psychedelic medicine helped me cure my depression, addiction and the childhood sexual trauma that once was at root of all my dis-ease,” he explaines. “Plant medicine healing helped me cultivate self-love and a more meaningful, service-driven life, ultimately.” He advocates treating veterans with PTSD with plant-based psychedelics.
The Milwaukee Psychedelic Society meets for monthly discussions. “We aim to serve as a local lighthouse for those seeking information about psychedelic healing and integration,” Simpson says. The meetups draw around 20 participants, men and women ranging widely in age with most falling under the Generation X heading. Simpson describes them as “mostly educated professionals that are ultra-curious about all the buzz and excitement centered around the promising research.”
The first wave of psychedelic research fell casualty to the War on Drugs. Acknowledging the failure of that war, public thought has shifted to embrace medical marijuana, legal CBD products derived from cannabis plants and psychedelics. As in the early 1960s, psychedelics are seen as a way accessing the frontier of consciousness and a prescription for specific disorders. Whether seeking mystical oneness or mental health, it all comes down to a desire for personal transformation.
