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A university student asked if I would answer some questions about Acid Test for a paper he was writing. Below are the questions and my responses:

Q: How would you describe to someone who has never done psychedelics, why they should?

A:I would never tell someone they SHOULD do psychedelics. These are powerful drugs with not always predictable effects, and with widely varying impact from time to time and person to person. What I would say is that the psychedelic experience CAN be extremely enlightening and helpful by allowing a more profound experience of reality. In a safe environment, with a properly respectful mindset, psychedelics allow you to step out of the iron grip of your own ego — the rote, oversimplified categorizations that you use to deal with an overwhelming universe by keeping yourself at safe remove — and to for once see the world, and yourself, as they really are.

Q: What are misconceptions about these drugs that could change people’s opinions?

A: Considering their spectacular effects, psychedelics are remarkably safe in a physiological sense. They are non-addictive and serious adverse physical side effects are very rare. The psychological dangers of taking them — which can be substantial — can be minimized by taking them in a safe and comfortable environment with someone who has a reassuring, positive attitude and ample psychedelic experience.

Q: Why did you feel the need to begin taking these psychedelics?

A: I never felt a “need” to take them. I wanted to try psychedelics because accounts I read of the psychedelic experience persuaded me that it might be a valuable tool for learning about myself and the world.

Q: What is your most intriguing finding throughout your research about psychedelics?

A: I think I would say it is that the fact that the remarkable power of psychedelics to heal people who suffer from addiction, depression, PTSD, anxiety and other serious mental disorders seems not to be so much about what the drug does on a synaptic level in the brain (as is the case with most psychiatric drugs), but rather it is a direct consequence of the experience the drug facilitates. People are being healed not through chemical interactions, but rather through genuine insights that come from seeing the world in a different, more profound way than “normal” consciousness generally permits. Albert Hofmann,  who discovered LSD, said something really deep on this subject: “LSD wanted to tell me something. It gave me an inner joy, an open mindedness, a gratefulness, open eyes and an internal sensitivity for the miracles of creation.”

Q: Why do you believe the government lied about psychedelics, particularly LSD?

A: This is a complicated and interesting question. Ultimately, I think that there is a significant part of Western culture that is overinvested in a simplistic and materialistic view of the world. Anything that challenges that severely limited worldview is seen as a threat, and the powerful sense of spiritual connectedness fostered by the psychedelic experience definitely challenges that worldview.

Q: Would you let your children do psychedelics?

A: I believe physical and mental maturity are prerequisites for the safe and beneficial use of psychedelics.

Q: At what age did you first do psychedelics?

A: I think I was 19.

Q: Has the stigma increased or decreased around these drugs?

A: I think the stigma is rapidly diminishing as the facts and reality of the beneficial uses of psychedelic drugs become clear in the many carefully controlled medical studies and clinical trials now underway.

Q: Do you believe that spiritual drug experiences will ever have a place in modern medicine?

A: Absolutely, and in just a few years. The use of MDMA for treating PTSD is already in the third and final phase of clinical trials and should be an available prescription therapy within five years. The use of psilocybin and LSD for conditions like smoking cessation and the treatment of depression, among other things, is not far behind in my estimation. As I mentioned, the healing these drugs provide is because of the spiritual experience they provide, not the direct chemical effects. As these drugs become available to psychiatrists, they will inevitably be used not just for life-threatening mental illness, but as well for people who are “normal” mentally but want to explore spiritually and improve their own healthy mental functioning.

Q: What is the craziest story you have about tripping?

A: I actually wrote an article about that. You can find it here: https://reset.me/…/tried-psychedelic-mushrooms-35-years-sa…/

This essay on how we would take better care of the world if we all knew we might be reincarnated is a nice thought, but I feel I have to add something Ian Stevenson — the most serious investigator of reincarnation claims — told me when I was researching Old Souls twenty years ago:

““In general, I tend not to claim too much for the spiritual benefits of proving reincarnation,” he said. “When I first went to India, I met with a swami there, a member of a monastic order. I told him about my work and how I thought it would be quite important if reincarnation could be proven, because it may help people to lead more moral lives if they knew they would come back after death. There was a long silence, a terrible silence, and finally he said, ‘Well, that’s very good, but here, reincarnation is a fact, and we have just as many scoundrels and thieves as you do in the West.’ I’m afraid that rather deflated my missionary zeal.””

I activated my Goodreads author account and the Goodreads bot sent me some questions to answer. Hey I put in the time, so I might as well post them here:

Gene Weingarten was rooting around in the past and came up with a 400-word essay I wrote for Tropic Magazine in the “Calendar Issue” that ran the last Sunday of the year in 1986. This was a gimmick issue, where we had full page calendars accompanied by a piece of art and a short essay relating to each month. My month was August. It’s very interesting to read something you wrote that you have no (or almost no) memory of having written. That sense of not knowing what the next sentence, the next word, is going to be is essential to the reading experience — and impossible for the author to duplicate — EXCEPT if it’s something he wrote 30 years earlier and hasn’t thought of since. As in this case.
Gene’s verdict was that it was 8% overwritten, and I can accept that. But as I read it, as if it were the first time I was ever seeing this particular grouping of words, I thought, “not bad.”

AUGUST IN MIAMI
1986

By August, the heat is like an injury you keep reinjuring. You begin to worry that all that pain has got to add up to something bad. It bakes your paint job and cracks your vinyl dash. It melts the asphalt and lingers spitefully at night. Your sheets are damp.

Each day is the same, and the ocean is flat, windless, heavy — molten lead. ‘ It rains, but the rain brings no relief, and mold grows in your closets and you think it’s growing between your toes and on your teeth. Flossing doesn’t help either, and you begin to feel that whatever is growing isn’t mold but malignancy.

And then you understand a hurricane, you understand the angry force that spawns it. The sun cauterizes the ocean, a hot poker on an open wound. Power hemorrhages from the sky day upon day. The threat is born, and the threat is fed.

It is a threat you have to wake up with in the morning and sleep with at night, like the missiles in the submarines swimming up the Gulf Stream, or the words “I want a divorce” in a bad marriage. And like all threats you live with, you forget about it until the sun pounds it into your brain again, or if your head is deep in the sand, it takes the man on the 11 o’clock news.

Will you pull down the storm shutters that have been rusted in place for a decade? Will you pack your bags and roll up the carpets and leave for who knows where at 3 in the morning? Because if you believe what August has been trying to tell you, you shouldn’t have built or bought a house here in the first place. And will your insurance cover the loss or even begin to? Will the causeways be clogged? Or just washed out to sea?

The heat of August threatens to go on in unchanging monotony to the end of time. Until it starts to push the sea over the sea wall and threatens to change everything instead. Change beyond recognition or redemption. For the only point of the month is the Storm, or the threat of the Storm and to walk through the heat is nothing against walking with that dark threat on your back: a disaster with no one to blame, the kind of random, unpredictable horror we hope to eliminate with our vaccines and C-sections, V-E Day and the Neighborhood Crime Watch.

Back to Newsbreak: The watch has become a warning. It takes 12 hours to get out, and the storm is, or may be, only nine hours away. Since it is the middle of the night, you go to sleep with the radio on and wake up to blue skies and wind and another threat that was just a bad dream.

And now you’ve got a whole season, two seasons, of cool, but not too cool, breezes — six months to pretend that nothing is out there, nothing threatens. Six months to forget.

A writer named David Cameron did something very clever: He copied a short story published in the New Yorker and sent it out, as a submission with a false name, to assorted and sundry literary journals. They all rejected it. Form letters. Then he submitted it to the New Yorker, which rejected the story they had previously published. Just to be sure, he did it again with another New Yorker story. Same results.

So what do aspiring writers conclude from this little experiment in masochism?

That pursuing publication is a hopeless, thankless, random enterprise in which merit counts for next to nothing?

Gee, now that I say that out loud, it sounds a little too defeatist. Don’t let the bastards get you down. YOUR story will be blessed. It will be so good, that even a system stacked against you will buckle and crumble when exposed to its brilliance.

So Carry On!

But don’t get your hopes up.