MAPS Canada School of Psychedelics

Talk abstract

Psychedelic medicine grapples with the issue of “bad trips” - painful or challenging psychedelic experiences - within the framework of regulatory systems obsessed with a narrow and inhumane concept of “safety.” That is, one that permits the sale and cultural celebration of a class 1 carcinogen (alcohol), but refuses access to toxicologically harmless psilocybin to dying cancer patients on the grounds that it is too “risky” for them. Since this framework recognizes only an essentially behaviourist version of distress - does a person’s distress convert into litigious behaviour or behaviour that creates financial and legal liabilities? - in order to defend against any claims made against it, psychedelic medicine is not incentivized - even disincentivized - to contend with the inside of that experience, its phenomenology and its metaphysical dimensions. At best, it tends to rely on admonitions for research trial designers, therapy protocol designers, and individual users to be careful about set and setting. There are other, better frameworks for working with these experiences and making sense of why they happen which have been developed in cultural contexts that have long practice working with these experiences, namely, certain Indigenous communities with traditional use of spirit medicines, certain non-Indigenous grassroots psychedelic communities, and certain religious and spiritual communities that have refined practices to elicit, navigate, and integrate “special” or “extraordinary” experiences. Still, within these, are open questions, and even to the extent that such questions have answers, they need translating into other cultural contexts so that there can be a robust, public discourse on them. Namely, whereas psychedelic western biomedicine may wish to imagine that any psychedelic experience can be made full of love and light, at least in its aftermath, if only the circumstances and interpretation are correct, some traditions, say, of ayahuasca shamanism, acknowledge malevolent spiritual forces. How does this malevolence arise? How can we understand the theodicy it presents? If we can approach these questions in academic psychedelic research, and not just within communities of practice, then all strata of the psychedelic world stand to benefit: advancement of the metaphysical modelling of being going on among psychonauts and in particular psychedelic traditions, greater rapprochement may occur between academic and grassroots communities, and western biomedical uses of psychedelics could better understand their limitations and be designed to deal meaningfully with their perceived dangers.