An NFL quarterback, a progeny of Hollywood royalty and a former governor of Texas walk into a hotel where the world’s most significant conference on psychedelics is underway. It may sound like something from a television show, but it’s real. As The Washington Post reported, the speakers at the Psychedelic Science 2023 conference, which wrapped up on Friday in Denver, included NFL star Aaron Rodgers, rapper Jaden Smith and former Texas governor and energy secretary Rick Perry.
Their presence at the conference exemplifies a larger transformation in how we as a society think about the cultural, legal and medical role of psychedelic substances like psilocybin, LSD, ayahuasca and MDMA.
The conference is part of a drumbeat of news about these drugs, from new breakthroughs in the science itself to the decision of voters in Colorado and Oregon to legalize adult use of psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms. Given recent opinion polls, it seems clear that it is not just the laws and science around psychedelics that are changing, but also the culture: Americans are moving away from stigmatizing the drugs and toward recognizing that they potentially have real benefits for the treatment of addiction, depression and PTSD.
But this new landscape demands more than just new laws. It also requires a new category for psychedelics. Are they recreational drugs? Are they medicines? Are they religious sacraments? History and science argue that they are all three — and more — and how we categorize them is going to be important in determining their place in American society.
The history of drugs is, in large part, a history of humans attempting and failing to categorize substances that readily evade the labels we place on them. In 1623, for instance, the early modern English philosopher Francis Bacon classified opiates as “narcotic” drugs — a surprisingly contemporary-sounding label from a figure who lived at the same time as Shakespeare. But Bacon then suggested that coffee, too, “appears to be a kind of Opiate.” His reasoning? Though coffee “adds Strength and Vigour both to the Mind and Body” it also “disorders the Senses” when taken in high doses.
For centuries, this ambiguity persisted. And psychedelics like peyote — a cactus long used as a medicine and sacrament in parts of Mexico and Texas — were the most ambiguous of all.
Some of the earliest Spanish writers in colonial Mexico who described peyote tended to do so in terms of its medicinal role, with one, for instance, describing its virtues as a cure for sore necks. Others noted that the cactus was consumed for use in divination, framing it in Christian terms as a potential tool of the devil. Perhaps the sole point of agreement was that peyote didn’t fit into known categories. As one 16th-century Mexican poet put it: “The peyote, Lord, watch out for it! This is a thing not found in Spain.”
A century later, traveling among the Indigenous societies of the Peruvian Amazon, a Jesuit missionary named Pablo Maroni seemed equally confused as to how to categorize the psychedelic compound ayahuasca. The DMT-bearing brew, Maroni warned, could “deprive one of one’s senses, or even of one’s life.” But Maroni also wrote that Amazonian healers used ayahuasca to “to cure common ailments, especially headaches.”
Into the 19th century, psychedelic compounds remained impossible to categorize — or to ban. Despite pressure from government authorities in colonial Mexico and the United States, peyote continued to pop up in unexpected places, from the rites of the Native American Church to experiments by scientists like the psychologist William James.
By the 1920s, however, authorities were starting to lump psychedelics together in the same category that had come to define heroin and cocaine: illicit drugs. In the early 1920s, for instance, anti-drug campaigners sought a federal ban on peyote in the United States. Newspapers at the time warned of “peyote orgies” and spoke of the severe “demoralizing effects” of what one account called “the Indian cocaine.”
This was the era of Prohibition, when a huge range of substances came to be painted as responsible for a parade of ills, from addiction and disorder to eugenics-inspired ideas like “social degeneration.” It was also the era when the Federal Bureau of Narcotics — the predecessor to today’s Drug Enforcement Administration — came into being. The Bureau was established in 1930 under the leadership of Harry J. Anslinger, a former Prohibition agent and fervent anti-drug crusader. As the FBN and later the DEA expanded their authority, the list of substances classified as “illicit drugs” grew with them.
Even in this environment, however, psychedelic substances managed to escape bans, in part because they were impossible to classify. That provided enough ambiguity for some to argue that they had scientific value and should remain legal. One early theory, championed by a group of psychiatrists, neurologists and consciousness-researchers, held that psychedelics mirrored the symptoms of schizophrenia. This misguided claim gave rise to the short-lived category of psychotomimetics, or “psychosis-mimicking” drugs.
As early trials of psychedelic therapy began to show promising results — and as scientists began sampling the drugs themselves — a new paradigm emerged. In 1957, one of those scientists, Humphry Osmond, proposed a more neutral term: psychedelic, derived from the ancient Greek for “mind-manifesting.” Thus began yet another failed attempt to put psychedelics in a conceptual box: the utopian era of psychedelic science, typified by the Harvard lecturer Timothy Leary who claimed, in 1961, that LSD offered a pathway to “drug-induced satori”: a kind of chemical enlightenment.
The fierce backlash to the overheated claims of Leary and his compatriots helped prompt bans at the state and federal level. In 1970, Congress officially classified psychedelics as “Schedule One” drugs. This designation meant that they were deemed to have no medicinal benefits and “a high potential for abuse.” Substances which, just a decade before, had been celebrated as potentially revolutionary psychiatric treatments were now in the same category as heroin and methamphetamine.
As the DEA celebrates its 50th anniversary in July, and as psychedelics continue their march toward cultural and legal acceptance, the time is ripe to rethink not just the laws around psychedelics, but the conceptual boxes we place them in.
Why is a new category needed? Not only are the existing categories inadequate on the level of science and history — they are also downright harmful. Psychedelics like psilocybin have a remarkably benign safety profile relative to other Schedule One drugs, not to mention very different social, cultural and historical roles. Lumping psychedelics together with powerful opioids like fentanyl misdirects resources, diminishes buy-in from the public and undercuts the legitimacy of federal drug laws. In short, it does real harm to attempts to regulate the category of drugs responsible for the vast majority of overdose deaths: synthetic opioids.
Yet attempting to cram psychedelics into other boxes — legal pharmaceuticals, “plant medicines” or religious sacraments — poses problems of its own. Although efforts to bring psychedelics to market as FDA-approved psychiatric treatments are well underway, it is doubtful whether the category of “prescription drug” will ever be able to contain them, because of their varied uses. And though psychedelics have been used in religious rites for thousands of years, this has never been their sole function — nor can it be, in a world in which a significant percentage of the global population self-identifies as atheist.
As we redefine our society’s stance toward these fascinatingly protean substances, then, we should be mindful of their category-defying history.
Psychedelics have been an integral part of human culture and experience since long before the concept of “drugs” even emerged. Perhaps one lesson of these mind-expanding substances is that to truly harness their potential, we will need to expand the ways we think and talk about them, too.
