A few weeks back, there was an article in The Guardian by Ross Ellenhorn and Dimitri Mugianis called “Why is the American right suddenly so interested in psychedelic drugs?” that made some Twitter waves and led nicely into more drama at the Wonderland 2022 conference in Miami at which some journalists and academics were apparently excluded from the events.
I’ve never been to the conference, though I would absolutely go in the future if I had the opportunity to, even as it seems clear to me that this kind of censorship will not be helpful for the future of psychedelics (or pretty much anything, for that matter). I would like to take some space here, though, to respond, albeit a bit overdue, to the article in The Guardian and the conversation as a whole that it invokes.
The authors rightly point out (and express their “concern”) that the current psychedelic renaissance seems to be a bipartisan movement, both in its financial backing and its rhetorical advocacy. A number of “good” and “bad” names are thrown out to prove the point. Some loose connections are made from psychedelic use to violent personal or political action.
The real criticism, though, is more predictable: “Why is the American right so intrigued by these substances today? The most obvious answer is money.” And then: “To be truly beneficial, psychedelics should be integrated into a social vision of equality and justice, one that opposes the sacrifice of human life and health at the altar of military spending and empire building, one that values every life regardless of race, nationality, religion, gender or class.”
Now some of those values and aims sound reasonable and even good, but it should be pointed out, it must be pointed out, that they are coming from the ideas of the writers’ heads and don’t, in fact, have a damn thing to do with psychedelic medicine. It doesn’t take too much imagination to speculate that a right-winger might be capable of imposing ideologies or political programs on mushrooms or LSD; this is simply the opposite, and it has just as much ability to ruin the medicinal potential of psychedelics, which doesn’t seem to have a lot of respect, thankfully, for human ideologies, and is also not something we get to exercise all that much control over, which is some of what’s so great and beautiful about the substances.
Another way I saw this concern or conversation framed recently was on LinkedIn, a post that basically asked if capitalism and psychedelics can coincide. I responded at the time, in spite of my best instincts. The question and its framing reminded me of a comment a student of mine made a few years back in an intro-level university course I was teaching at the time. I don’t remember the topic as a whole, but I remember her claim: "Money is fake." It is the kind of thing one could easily imagine showing up on a bumper sticker, and you could also see where and why such an idea might coincide with a certain, hippyish crowd of psychonauts, who are drawn to utopian ideas and solutions to what are often inevitable human dilemmas.
Whenever someone even implicitly promises some sort of end to conflict, or some sort of program whereby everyone gets everything…beware. These ought to be explicitly distinguished from programs and proposals that aim to elevate those with more challenges than the rest of us (special needs populations, for example, or the poor). The difference between the former and the latter, of course, are that the former tend to take aim at those who have an advantage (rather than build a wheelchair ramp, attack those who can walk!), whereas the latter are more focused on solving a problem or providing for a need. A wheelchair ramp doesn’t, in any way, make the existence of the person who can walk and the person who can’t “equal,” but we ought to build the ramp anyway because it makes the life of the person in the wheelchair more livable.
I don’t remember how I responded to the student who wanted money to be fake, and I probably evaded rather than take the bait, but the part of her statement that is in some way true is that money is, of course, a human invention. Which is not, in any way, the same thing as being “fake.” Are condoms fake, too? How about birth control pills? Skyscrapers?
The implicit argument that a claim like ‘Money is fake’ is making, of course, is that if we got rid of money, we’d then also be rid of poverty or inequality. Which is just silly. What even the most serious critiques of so-called “Consumerism” never seem to reckon with is the way money actually expands access to resources and eliminates a ton of violent conflict. It’s not perfect, but getting rid of money would do nothing to the problems money aims to solve nor does it rid human beings of the needs (for food, for shelter, for care when we’re sick, for enjoyment, etc.) that money (imperfectly, for sure!) provides.
We ought to always ask questions like: what's the alternative to money? And if the answer is, everyone will cooperate with each other, provide their free labor, to make sure that all human needs get met, we can all roll our eyes together while singing Kumbayah, and then we’ll go back to thinking about whether we’re going to work for our dinner tonight (preparing it and so forth) or whether we’re going to buy it from somewhere. This doesn’t eliminate cooperation as a possibility! We can cooperate with our family or friends to create a meal for several people. The restaurants and grocery stores that we buy from also rely on cooperation.
A more honest reckoning about life without money would acknowledge that the needs don’t go away, and therefore without a tool for financial exchange, that means that we mostly we have to work for, or trade, our labor, to get what we want. Know how to build a house? If you don’t, you better be in good relationship with someone who does. Grow your own food? What about transportation? And if you need something you can’t make yourself or work with someone near you to make, what do you do then? Well, of course you seize it from someone else, forcefully. The strong profit from the weak. You see, it turns out that capitalism—i.e. the allowance of markets for financial exchange for goods and services—actually produces a ton of collaboration that we barely notice (or want to acknowledge).
But what do the most common critiques of Capitalism usually mean or aim at? And I think the answer to that is exploitation, the use of people, even their dehumanization, for financial or resource gain. And we ought not to gloss over that as a possibility and reality in this world, and of course it could (and probably will) happen with psychedelics just as it can happen with food and computers and land. Money and markets, like psychedelics, are largely morality-neutral tools. Of course people can approach them with ill intention! But that doesn’t mean we should eliminate money or disallow companies from selling medicinal psychedelic products as laws around legality loosen.
Again, what, exactly, would be a better way to distribute the resource? And who should get to decide? Of course these kinds of details are almost never publicly parsed out in articles such as the one in The Guardian because the “answer” is likely to be some sort of politically-dressed-up version of: well, we’ll start with the things in my hands, and I’ll give them to my friends, the good guys, and I’ll keep them from the bad guys, and so forth. “A tale as old as time,” Taylor Swift sings for us in a recent ballad.