PHYCHEDELICS-AN ILLEGAL EXPERIENCE

When we talk about the psychedelic experience, it’s not clear we’re all talking about the same thing.

The way to do psychedelics is, I believe, at higher doses than most people are comfortable with, and rarely, and with great attention to set and setting.

The psychedelic experience is as central to understanding your humanness as having sex, or having a child, or having responsibilities, or having hopes and dreams, and yet it is illegal.

These boundary-dissolving hallucinogens that give you a sense of unity with your fellow man and nature are somehow forbidden. This is an outrage! It’s a sign of cultural immaturity, and the fact that we tolerate it is a sign that we are living in a society as oppressed as any society in the past.

Get it straight. This is about an experience. Not my experience, your experience. This is about an experience which you have, like getting laid, or going to Africa. You must do the experience, otherwise it’s just whistling past the graveyard.

This is part of our birthright, perhaps the most important part of our birthright. These substances will deliver. It is the confoundment of psychology and science generally, and that’s why it’s so touchy for cultural institutions, but you are not a cultural institution, you are a free and independent human being, and these things have your name written on them in big gold letters.”