Clinical spirituality research is an area where psychedelics’ placebo-enhancing effects play a very prominent role. This research’s guidelines for set, setting, and suggestion have been rigorously standardized, resulting in the marshaling of psychedelics’ placebo-enhancing effects toward a particular end. These guidelines are an outgrowth of those developed by the original University of Maryland research group in Spring Grove during the 1960s. At that time, the Spring Grove group demonstrated a relationship between a particular experience—the “peak-psychedelic” effect—and psychotherapeutic benefits in alcoholics and the terminally ill. The results using this model were impressive then, just as they are now using updated...

Understanding psychedelics as amplifiers of the placebo response helps explain their ever-widening scope of applications—from accelerating one’s spiritual growth to reducing tobacco use. Manageable doses of these drugs may thus be conceptualized as optimizing placebo’s contribution to their observed benefits. The biological correlates of successful outcomes may therefore relate as much to indirect psychedelic-effected changes in the placebo response as to direct effects of the drugs. A “mystical/peak experience” is now believed to be the common denominator underlying the benefits reported in current research across a wide variety of conditions. However, I believe that an enhanced placebo response is a...

In last week’s post, I promised to discuss high-dose psychedelic work. However, as I began writing this week’s post, I saw that it would be beneficial to first discuss not-high-doses. These are what I refer to as manageable doses. Modern clinical research with psychedelics is generating uniformly and markedly beneficial results, both practical and heuristic. Researchers are deliberately administering modest doses of drugs, in combination with rigorously structured set and setting. In this context, modest doses maximize sessions’ effects toward desired outcomes and away from negative ones. These results enable psychedelic research to progress within the mainstream, albeit at its...

The three pillars of the psychedelic drug experience—set, setting, and dose—are the topics for this and the next blog post. They are inextricably intertwined. Channeling the set and setting toward well-defined goals acceptable by the mainstream requires staying within “manageable” doses of drug. By carefully regulating dose, set, and setting, we are now witnessing the publication of a remarkable series of beneficial and heuristically useful outcomes to psychedelic drug projects. In addition, such studies report a very low incidence of serious adverse effects. Posttraumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, eating disorders, anxiety, depression, creativity, spirituality, end-of-life palliation—the list seems to grow...

How do the current presentation and reception of psychedelic drugs reflect lessons learned from the backlash against these drugs in the 1960s? And what does this say about their future? In this week’s blog I describe some ways in which psychedelics and their effects are being mainstreamed and attaining political correctness through their biomedicalization. However, by this process, I see a potential risk in limiting our understanding and application of the full range their effects. The media In the current revival of interest in psychedelics, the media have up until now taken a balanced and positive approach to anything psychedelic....

September 12, 2017 “At the very least, we must enlarge the discussion about psychedelics.” Dr. Willis Harman, one of the pioneers of research into the effects of psychedelics on creativity, made this declaration to me while I was in the early stages of performing my DMT studies. We were walking along the central California coast during a break in an invitational conference on psychedelics at Esalen Institute. I was nervously prattling on about God knows what, and he cut right through the fog with his characteristic precision. It was great advice, and has been one of the touchstones of my...

Welcome to my blog! Here I will be sharing findings, opinions, and questions ranging over a wide gamut of topics. Science, religion, politics, among others. I invite your comments, criticisms, and questions. Onward and upward!