An Interview
Bruce Eisner - May 1996
Interview in Santa Cruz's Hawk Magzaine
http://web.archive.org/web/19980121231818/www.cruzio.com/~hawk/
In May, I made my way to the western edge of Santa Cruz to meet Bruce Eisner, author of "Ecstasy: the MDMA story", and founder of the "Island Group", an informal psychedelic cultural think tank.
After chatting about Bruce's recent visit to Tim Leary, Leary's plans for cryogenically preserving his brain upon his death, (an event that has sadly come to pass since), shamanic use of drugs in primitive cultures, and other "New Age" topics, I turned on the tape and Bruce shared his thoughts about MDMA, drugs and the work of building a psychedelic culture.
CCN:Bruce, could you describe the circumstances that led to the discovery of MDMA?
BE:Well, MDMA was first synthesized in 1912, and it was during a search the Merck Chemical Company was doing for appetite suppressants. And they patented everything that they synthesized. So they patented MDMA in 1912.
Then it was really not used at all, not by or on any life form, until the '50s when they started experimenting with dogs, to see what the lethal dose was. They would keep increasing the dose until finally it was too much. That's true of any drug, you know, that you can create a lethal dose by continuing to increase the dosage level.
CCN:In 1912, then, did they do any trials on people or animals?
BE:No.
CCN:They just synthesized it.
BE:And patented it.
CCN:And put it in a file somewhere.
BE:Yep. And they patented it in the United States, which made it an orphan drug in the sense that it couldn't be patented later on.
Once a drug goes through its patent process it eventually becomes public domain. That means you have only a certain period of time that a drug can stay as a patented drug and then it becomes open to anybody using it, just like any kind of intellectual property.
> And so that's why it's called an orphan drug. Orphan drugs are drugs that don't have patents, you can't patent them. So pharmaceutical companies don't like to pursue research with a lot of orphan drugs because they can't get an exclusive on it and keep the price up.
CCN:Who was the first human to use it?
BE:The first person reported to use MDMA was Alexander Shulgin, and this was in the early '70s.
Shulgin is a chemist who wrote a book called PIHKAL: Phenethylamines I Have Known And Loved, and he currently is doing a sequel to it called Tryptamines I Have Known And Loved.
It's a big book, almost all of it is a biography of him and how he met his wife and all the experiments they did in the process from the mid-'60s when he was working for Dow Chemical Company and they made a whole bunch of money on fertilizer and they gave him a lab and free reign to do whatever he liked and he started synthesizing all kind of psychedelics because he'd used mescaline in 1964 and found it was one of the most profound experiences of his life.
CCN:So he looked at the file on MDMA in the '70s and said, "Well, it takes a ton of this stuff to kill a dog from these reports from the '50s. I think I'll have some"?
BE:Yeah, well he was trying a lot of different things.
He believes in what he calls the double -- you've heard of double blind studies? He calls them double conscious. And by double conscious he means, you know about it, somebody else knows about it, you try it on yourself.
So he's tried hundreds and hundreds of compounds that he synthesized himself. Now what he did is he would take a series of drugs and he would explore the effects of each of them.
Occasionally he'd find a bad one, but most of them were either neutral or good. So, you know, he basically would write these things down. And MDMA, it turned out - now MDMA is part of a greater series of drugs that you can call the MDA family, MDA is the prototype. MDMA is a member of the family, but it has very different effects, although somewhat similar to MDA.
But MDMA had different qualities than MDA in the sense that it's less psychedelic and more what's called a pure empathogen or entactogen. That is, it tends to make people very extroverted and empathetic toward other people, interpersonally, and at the same time it has less of the visual distortions and changes.
MDA is closer to the major psychedelics like LSD and psillosybin in the sense that it does produce some visual changes and tends to make people look more introspective, but still much more extroverted than LSD or psillosybin and these other things.
But MDMA was more a pure empathogen. And it's also shorter acting. It only lasts for three hours whereas MDA lasts for six hours. So when he discovered its effects he shared it with a group of people that he was experimenting with. He had a whole circle of friends who all collaborated in his informal experiments.
Now that included Claudio Narango, the Chilean psychiatrist, and Myron Stolaroff, and there was a fellow named Leo Zeff. Zeff was a psychiatrist who's considered the greatest LSD psychedelic therapist of all time. And once he used it, he then went around and started formally turning psychologists and psychiatrists who were predisposed to that type of new therapeutic approach to using psychiatric compounds.
And so Zeff was kind of a Johnny Appleseed of MDMA. In the middle '70s to the late '70s there was a lot of experimentation but at the same time any compound that wasn't scheduled in the U.S. schedule of controlled substances was legal.
And so MDMA was at that time not a controlled substance. Later on, you know, they passed the Analogs Act, which made it so that any compound that was similar to another compound, either in structure or its effect, or any drug which gets you high, is made illegal.
CCN:So there is a group of researchers in various fields such as chemistry and psychiatry working with hallucinogens and these new drugs you refer to as empathogens and entactogens.
How big is this community of researchers, and what are they after?
BE:Well, it's not very large.
Now don't forget, LSD was researched quite a bit in the '60s, and then they made LSD illegal in '66. All the researchers gave back all their drugs at that point, you know, and there was a lot of promising stuff with LSD that took place prior to it being made illegal, and now researchers are trying to get that opened up again.
The thing about MDMA and these psychologic compounds is that they're a completely different approach to doing therapeutic work than are drugs that are commonly used by psychiatrists.
Drugs that are used by psychiatrists tend to be drugs that you take every day, and their effects are taken by changing the chemistry of the body and the brain on an ongoing basis.
Like Prozac or the antidepressants, Lithium, the antischizophrenics, antipsychotics like Thorazine and Stelozine. All those types of things have to be used every day or three times a day or whatever.
And this is a different approach. It was what you call a psychodynamic approach, under the theory that if you could put people through certain kinds of experiences which are created by these compounds, these psychoactive compounds, you can help a person to work through a lot of the psychological problems they're having so they become happier with themselves and they're able to function in the world.
CCN:These drugs are part of the tools that therapists use to fix people, to correct problems.
BE:Well, yeah, they would like them to be. But they're not.
It's illegal. Any therapist who uses them, not only would they be criminally charged but they would lose their license and so forth.
So they're not used very much.
Now recently, about four or five years ago, the government decided to reconsider this, and they started allowing for very very limited experimentation.
About a year ago Charles Grob starting doing a study at UCLA with MDMA. And he's already had some interesting results. He just patented MDA for use with senile dementia because it increases blood flow in the brain significantly, and continues into old age.
So that was the first patent for use.
CCN:The theraputic work with MDMA seems to have a different focus than the therapy most people are familiar with. It's taking people who are not necessarily broken and giving them some tools to look around inside.
BE:Yeah, well in my book I spell out four main uses for Ecstasy.
More recently I wrote an essay which is published on the Web called "Why We Get High." The essay asks the question "Why We Get High," and "Why do we do it?" and as a society, as a culture, we have never really asked that question very much.
Why do people use these drugs? And I mentioned these four different uses and one is therapy, which is the fixing things model. I think a lot of people are opposed to the idea of the medical model. In my view, people are perfect the way they are, but there are problems that people have, and some of it's genetic and some of it's socialization and so forth.
So that's the first model and when we think about doing any kind of drug therapy, we think of a therapeutic model. That's the first reason we use drugs.
Now there's a group of people, Maslow calls them, and I would call them too, the self-actualizing types. They're the people who are exceptional people in our society. More intellectually endowed, more creative than the normal people, who produce more works and new inventions and new discoveries and new works of art and literature and so forth, and also who are more interested in spiritual development.
Maslow said that that's part of self-actualization. So this is another reason why people use these compounds.
It's certainly not part of that first group, you know, to fix somebody. It's somebody who's already okay, but let's see if we can even get better. The idea is just to be more, to grow. It's called personal growth.
CCN:To expand.
BE:Yeah, right, exactly. And also for spiritual development too. Some people find that these compounds can be used as part of their spiritual path.
CCN:That seems to be a pretty controversial notion. There are a lot of people who belong to major religions and a lot of people who spend years studying things like Tantric Yoga or Sufism or something like that to attain religious states or religious insight or direct contact with God, however they want to phrase it, who would say that no drug could give you a shortcut to this level of understanding or gnosis.
BE:Yeah, see, I would disagree with that.
We're not here talking about heroin or cocaine or alcohol or nicotine or any of those things. We're talking about a special kind of drug which we call psychedelics or empathogens, entactogens.
If you look all through history, you see that for instance tribal cultures have used these kinds of compounds in a spiritual way. Shamans, Eastern cultures, and so forth have used these compounds as part of their spiritual practice.
I would also suggest that the widespread use of LSD in the '60s led to a lot of spiritual searching for that generation and maybe the next. And in a technological culture, it's very, very difficult for people to alter their consciousness through other means, and sometimes these compounds also can be used to push people along who had been involved in a certain practice.
When I went to India in the '60s, I was a young hippie back then, and I was on a spiritual quest, and I ended up in India and I met a young guy whose father was a yogi. He had studied in an ashram for 20 years, sitting in meditation.
He took LSD and he had his first full-blown spiritual experience and he said, "You know, I've been seeking this all my life. I've been working toward it, and maybe that helped me get to the high state that I got to, but it was LSD that really pushed me all the way."
And so these things could be used as supplements.
CCN:These drugs can be used as supplements to a spiritual quest.
BE:Yeah, or they can be used as a primary path.
I mean there was a guy named R.C. Zachner who wrote a whole book where he criticized people calling LSD a spiritual tool specifically. But I think he was pretty well refuted by Walter Houston Clark and by Houston Smith and a lot of other theologists. There was a recent issue of Gnosis magazine in which I contributed an article. The whole issue was dedicated to Psychedelics: Are they spiritual tools or not spiritual tools? And there's people who have views on one side or another.
But the point I'm going to keep throwing back at you is that without psychedelics it seems to me that our society would be much less open to all of these other things. We don't see psychedelics as an end point, but as a beginning point. They awaken a lot of people's spiritual interests initially and then some people move on to other ways.
Now this kind of relates to, for instance, the way that I look at MDMA as a tool. MDMA gives you access, to some people at least, to alternative states of consciousness in their normal waking state.
Now those are temporary states, but it's how you get back to that, that's the question. How do you alter your behavior? How do you alter your consciousness? How do you alter those things so that you can stay in a state or get closer to a state that you might have liked when you were in an alternative state of consciousness?
CCN:Do you mean feeling the exact same way, as if certain receptors have been clogged with a certain drug, or are you talking about getting back to an understanding state, or an informed space, or a deeper feeling for the things that were discovered while on the drug?
In other words, getting back to an MDMA state isn't the same as being on MDMA all the time?
BE:Yeah, and you wouldn't necessarily want to be on MDMA all the time.
But you may want to be more empathetic or you may want to be more compassionate, and see if you can access a little bit of that in your normal waking state. It seems to me that if these things can help people to be more empathetic or more compassionate or help with lowering the level of violence in our culture or making us more collaborative and those kinds of things, then they're proper tools.
I don't advocate, in fact I suggest that not everybody take these compounds. They're not for everybody. They're only for the people that don't have any preexisting mental disorders for one thing. They're not for people that have a high need to control their psyches. They're for more intelligent and more creative people rather than for people who are pretty much content with ordinary life. So I'm not saying that they're for everybody, but they're very good tools for certain types of people and certain types of uses.
And I don't like to say, well, we're going to either meditate or we're going to take psychedelics or we're going to do yoga or we're going to do feedback or we're going to do Gestalt work or whatever. I say let's use whatever tools we have and see how they can work together. So they're just part of a repertoire of ways of altering consciousness and transforming consciousness and behavior.
CCN:All right, so we've discussed using drugs to fix broken people, and using drugs as part of a self-actualization process.
BE:Well actually, just one more thing on this fixing people, and it is that the therapists who did use it had remarkably good results with a lot of people.
CCN:What other uses are there beyond medical/theraputic and as an aid to self-actualization?
BE:Okay, the third use that I mentioned was as a creativity tool.
CCN:To enhance creativity?
BE:Yeah. They did one early study I mentioned in my book with writers, where they gave them low dosages of MDMA and they found that it helped with writer's block. Other people have used it for developing paintings, sculptures, all kinds of different art forms. And it can break you through to a new way of thinking, and that's the essence of creativity - to be able to see things in new ways, to get a different viewpoint on things.
That's what all of these compounds are. If you look at the metaphor of a microscope, if you look at something with different lenses, you get different viewpoints on it. Now all those viewpoints are different. Not one of them is necessarily right or wrong, there's just different magnifications.
But it seems to me that the more viewpoints you have on reality and of your experience, the deeper and richer your experience grows. So that's the essence behind it. And so people, using it for creativity, they get different views.
For instance in LSD there was a famous study where artists looked at a Kachina doll and painted it when they were normal and then they painted it again when they were on LSD, and some of the paintings that were done on LSD are now like worth hundreds of thousands of dollars because the artists are saying that they're quite exceptional, they're quite different than the ones that were done normal.
The same thing is true of MDMA, but it's not such a visual thing because it tends to be more internal rather than visual.
CCN:Okay, these drugs can stimulate an artist, and be used as creativity enhancing tools. What's use number 4?
BE:Okay, now let me get to the final category, which is recreational, and in my essay I just wrote, "Why We Get High," that was the bottom line.
And I actually started writing the essay about a year and a half ago. I had some ideas, because I had studied creativity and I had studied consciousness. Society first of all looks down on the idea of recreational drug use except if it's alcohol or tobacco, which is legal.
Psychoactive drugs can produce many vacations from ordinary reality which can be quite pleasurable and can be de-stressing, that means lowering the stress level for people. They can help people to get together as groups and work together more effectively, these kinds of things. MDMA parties, before they were illegal, were wonderful experiences.
So the recreational use is something that has been put down by society, but I had it listed as one of the uses because it definitely is. When I really got into why these things are so good at helping people to get out of their old ways, is that they help people to play again.
There was a biology professor I had when I was at UCSC who said, "Well, I think that humans shouldn't be called homo sapiens, wise man, they should be called homo ludens, playful man, because humans play longer than any other species except maybe dolphins and whales."
And the reason why they do it is because play is part of the learning process. But then when we get older, we stop playing so much and we lose the ability to be spontaneous, the ability to have fun and let go and start using our imagination and so forth. And really the thing that's so amazing about recreational use is it allows one to go out and play and to be like a child again in a way, and in a way to learn new behaviors which then can be useful in bringing back into your ordinary life.
And it kind of goes along with the idea that, you know, "What is the purpose of the universe?" The purpose of the universe, everybody's really speculated on that, but Alan Watts pointed out that the Hindus called the universe Maya, or the illusion, or the play, and the ultimate purpose of it all really was that the universe was a piece of art.
So recreational use, I think, is a valid use.
CCN:Would you say that humans have a predisposition or an actual drive to get high?
BE:Yes, they do. It's also in my essay, but it's been well documented.
Ronald Siegel wrote an entire book called Intoxication where he proposed that intoxication is the fourth drive; right after sex, food and thirst is the drive for getting high, and he shows that all animal species use intoxicants. All different human societies in prehistory, and around the world in current times, have intoxicants.
Also children try to intoxicate themselves through spinning around. There's just this need to do it. It's a drive.
And so then that's why I said well what is the purpose of all that?
CCN:If this is in fact a biological drive of some sort, and it's still part of the human makeup, would you say then that a possible conclusion is this drive works, is an advantage, in an evolutionary sense?
Is it a viable evolutionary strategy to have some number of humans getting looped on various things at various times?
BE:What's interesting is, if you look at the human brain, there are keyholes for all these new compounds that are being discovered.
In other words, the brain is designed to have plug-ins. Like Netscape has plug-ins, right? It has built-in places, receptors for all of these different compounds, and there's receptors for ones that haven't even been discovered yet.
It's natural. It's part of our evolution. And developing new pharmaceuticals and new ways of expanding consciousness is also part of evolution. In fact it may be essential to our survival.
It's the drive towards consciousness. It expresses itself in many forms. I believe it's absolutely essential to us.
CCN:Let's see. There's an establishment group of scientific researchers who publish in journals and form associations, and there's also an underground of chemistry majors who are making new drugs literally every day.
These underground researchers aren't really feeding back into the scientific community but they are feeding back into the underground culture, for instance the raves, and unfortunately things like crack houses, melted brains from bad analogs, and whatnot.
What's your take on that?
BE:I think it's very sad.
The reason it has to be a counterculture is because the society itself and the culture itself is so messed up with the way that it regards drugs.
I hate using the word "drugs", you know. "Drugs" has become a dirty word, and if I use the word "drugs" I'm all of a sudden evil in a way, in many people's views. And yet it's the criminalization of drugs that's the tragedy. That's the thing that's really creating a lot of the problems that we are facing with regards to these things.
Of course, it wasn't until just the turn of the last century that any drug was illegal in the United States. There were no illegal drugs before the 1890s.
I mean drugs have been criminalized in other cultures throughout the world. Every drug at one time or another has been illegal, including tobacco and alcohol and coffee. There have even been draconian laws where they chopped your hand off or cut your head off for any of those things. But in our society it really didn't start until the turn of the century, with the opium dens in the 1890s, and what it's led to.
We even instituted a Constitutional amendment to ban alcohol in the 1920s, and that led to speakeasys, and bathtub gin that killed people, and underground cultures and all these kinds of things. The same thing has happened now with other drugs, because in those days those were not available, but now they are.
So society is repeating the same thing again. Now you mentioned these underground chemists and these underground cultures. I think, first of all, that these underground cultures are an expression of a very, very strong need, especially among young people, for breaking out of the mold that the culture's trying to put them into.
In other cultures we were mentioning before, shamanic and tribal cultures, there's always been established ways that people can have these types of experiences within ritual context, you know - shamanic healers or doctors, or spirit doctors or initiation rituals and these kinds of things.
But those rituals don't exist in our society. Our post-industrial society with the dollar and Capitalism as the center has dehumanized us and fragmented our communities and those are the symptoms.
These things like raves and the Dead scene and these other countercultures are means that young people have of trying to find new ways. They're trying to find a different way of doing things. They see the ecology of the planet being destroyed, the world population clock ticking away and wars breaking out and so forth, and they want to find some way of dealing with all that.
Now as far as the underground chemists go, they're not really discovering that many new ones, really. It was Shulgin who got most of the new ones. They may make them up from recipes that are sitting around.
A lot of times they can't get the proper chemicals to make them from and so they make stuff that's not good, not pure, and that's tragic in itself. In the quality of street compounds, the more the government's cracked down on it the worse they've gotten. And actually among the youth the heroin and speed scene has really increased, because those things are not gone after as much and as easily controlled as the compounds that I was talking about.
So when people can't get pure Ecstasy they start doing speed to stay up at dance shows, and the whole idea of "Just say no" makes them interested in everything. So they start experimenting with heroin or speed or these types of things which are just really not very good but easy to find and easy to abuse.
Now you have to distinguish, when you talk about drugs, you always have to make two distinctions.
One is between different types of drugs, and every drug, no matter how heinous and bad we think of it, has proper uses.
Heroin can be used to control pain. Coke just used very mildly can be somewhat good for older people, a pick-me-up, an alternative to too much coffee or something like that.
There's intelligent, judicious use, moderate use of any compound, and then there is abuse. But we don't distinguish that. We say any amount is abuse, and that's not right.
The second one is not distinguishing between drugs that are more positive or beneficial and less prone to abuse and ones that are more harmful and more prone to abuse.
A drug like alcohol or heroin is much easier to get addicted to than MDMA, since MDMA, if you keep using it doesn't have any effect. So when the government studied it they said well it has almost zero abuse potential. It can't be abused very often. There's only a small group of fanatics who might be able to abuse it, but it's not addictive. Same with LSD.
So I see the rave culture as starting out kind of the same way that the '60s counterculture started out, as a reaction against what you called earlier on the dominator culture, and later on, as it became more of a mass movement, it became a victim to commercialization -- because we are living in a capitalist society, and so as soon as anything becomes a mass movement all of a sudden somehow these people start moving in on us, such as the herbal ecstasy people.
They said "Oh, we have this herbal ecstasy," you know. They didn't tell people that it had tons too much ephedrine in it, and it didn't really do what ecstasy did at all.
And they continue to sell it even though the FDA recently stated that it was very harmful, and they've made millions of dollars off of it.
The rave promoters have turned what was once kind of a burgeoning psychedelic movement into a new disco scene of the '90s, a dance scene that's promoted by big promoters and they have special rave clothes and huge rave sweatbox shows in big stadiums and so forth.
It's kind of going the same way that rock music went. You know, rock music kind of went along with the '60s counterculture, and later on it became, you know... You turn on the Grammy Awards now and there it is along with the Academy Awards and everything else as part as the establishment.
And now the same thing is happening with raves.
But I think the young people will continually invent new ways of expressing these things.
CCN:Let's take a look at the primitive shamanic society, which seems to be the model proposed most often for a way to integrate psychedelic drug use into our post-industrial whatever society. The natives in the Amazon have their shamans. We have psychiatrists or guides or therapists or whatever you want to call them, in our new, hypothetical psychedelic culture.
We create a ritual framework and shamans. Are there still recreational drug users in the society or do the rituals in which somebody has a load of Ibogaine blown up their nose, or a Datura paste rubbed on their forehead at the shrink's office, or whatever, does that meet the drive to get high?
BE:Um, I think in those earlier cultures people really didn't think about recreational usage of drugs too much.
Maybe they did, I don't know.
Maybe there was a little band of young people who broke away from the shamans and went and did it on their own. I don't know.
You know, we kind of compartmentalize things into therapy, recreational, spiritual and so forth, but maybe they didn't think in those ways.
All I know is you'll find very little drug abuse in any of those societies.
CCN:You also find the societies remain somewhat static.
BE:Yeah, I don't want to romanticize that.
I think that we just need to learn from these things. What I always think about is creating a synthesis of new ideas and technology and looking at them with the wisdom of the past.
In other words, you don't reject all the past. Technological society, as the twentieth century dawned and we had the birth of the scientific ethic, you know, replacing religion and so forth. We kind of tended to throw out all that stuff and say all that stuff was pre-scientific, you know, and therefore all useless.
There is great wisdom to be learned there. But at the same time, I'm not saying let's go backwards. I'm saying let's take the best of what we can learn from back then and combine it with modern technology and modern culture. Certainly we can envision new ideas that never existed back then.
We may evolve into a new culture that's completely different than either of those two, but I suspect that there will be more of a need for people to get together eyeball-to-eyeball and communicate outside of nuclear families.
CCN:Let's bring all these drug scenes together.
We have the scientific drug scene where you have the Ph.D.s and the scientists testing dosages on themselves and other test subjects and the experimental therapists who want to use this mainly for therapeutic uses.
Then we have the underground scene, people self-dosing from compounds concocted in dorm basements or cheap student rentals in university towns.
How are we, today, right now, supposed to handle this? Can these two scenes really co-exist?
Most of the people who are promoting MDMA on the scientific side and, in fact, in your book, are proposing scenarios where a therapist or a guide or a shaman or other words to describe a licensed expert, guide the trip of the user.
And like I say, the underground scene is more of a spontaneous, "I'm going to drop half a hit of acid and go troll for babes at this party" type of thing.
Society really seems to lean towards these licensed guided tours, and in the archaic societies, the shaman was the guide.
Can these drugs be used both ways without too many problems, too many stresses on society? Is the guide necessary?
BE:Well, I actually gave a whole lecture once on guides - use of the guide - and guides come in many forms.
Internal guides. There's external guides, and so forth. There are people in your life, friends who can be guides. On first experiences, it's highly recommended, although not essential.
What you want to avoid are people having life-threatening crises, or you would like to be able to minimalize people's psychological discomfort. Those two things.
CCN:Is that what freaks out the law abiding "squares" in society, when talking about drugs like LSD or MDMA? The fact that unbridled use of things like acid and the weird drugs like STP in the '60s and '70s, cause the periodic, and spectacular cases of "psychological discomfort"?
BE:Psychological discomfort's not always a bad thing? But certainly you don't want to have people having a bad time, and so the use of guides has always been recommended.
In the '60s that was much more well known because we always had set, setting and guide. That was the three essentials of the experience and that was pretty well known.
I think that in our society - because of this "Just say no!" and the lack of drug education in schools, and even the lack of dissemination of information like I'm giving you right now - that's not very well known.
You know, kids take drugs and go to a party or go to a rave and most of the time things work out pretty well. One of the things that's probably an important factor in that was that LSD in the '60s came in 250 microgram hits and now they come in 50 microgram hits, and so when somebody takes a hit it's likely to have a little bit of a buzz but not the same thing as they did in the '60s, where there were a lot of freakouts.
In the late '60s when people started using things that same kind of way, they were also using them in all kinds of contexts that weren't always appropriate.
The best way to take MDMA is not necessarily at a rave. You might want to take it there once in a while, but some of the most profound experiences people have with ecstasy are in smaller groups or by themselves or in a couple or something like that.
But kids repeatedly take them at raves over and over again. It's the only way that they can take them, because they don't know anything else. So I think that these two things can come together.
I think that there is a certain body of knowledge among young people about usage of things - like take it with their friends or hang together as a group. These kind of ethics that do evolve, but the bottom line is there's not enough information out there, you know, and that kids aren't really accessing information the same ways that they used to.
I mean they don't read books like they used to. And certainly they don't see things on TV about it, and that's how they mainly get information. Their music doesn't talk about it too much. And so they have to get it by word of mouth from their friends.
And that's maybe one of the reasons why you and I are doing this interview today. Maybe we can spread some good information about these things.
CCN:There is a lack of information. In fact, there is quite a bit of misinformation, and there is a constant barrage of programming demonizing use of drugs.
This is not helped by people leaping from buildings while on acid, or twenty-year-olds having heart attacks at raves and dropping dead.
BE:Everybody has idiosyncratic reactions to psychoactive compounds.
Some people are allergic to them. Say you took a drug and you were allergic to it. If you didn't have somebody around, it might be a bad thing. The first time you take a drug it's probably wiser to have somebody around to watch you, call 911 or something, or talk you through it or whatever, you know, in case something really serious happened.
I mean there was a kid who died at a rave, a kid from UCSC, and there's a website up - his father put it up. And he took MDMA and some other compounds, maybe speed, some other things, and went to a rave.
He went home afterwards. His friends saw he was having a really bad time. They were afraid to do anything about it because they knew they were illegal substances, and the kid died.
And the father now blames myself and all the MDMA people who say positive things about it for all of that. I actually had a conversation through e-mail with him about it and said "Well, you know, look at the drug laws. That's what killed your son. If we didn't have these drug laws, you know, we'd have a lot more wise use and he might have learned about it in school, you know.
"He might have had a class in school that taught him how to intelligently use drugs and maybe the kids would have learned, maybe even taken them once with a guide, a teacher or something, and tried them out.
"Wouldn't that have been better than having to take it at a rave with a bunch of kids that didn't know what they were doing, be afraid of telling anybody about it and having your son die?"
So that's the bottom line right there. See what I'm saying?
CCN:Yeah. Because everything but alcohol and tobacco and sugar is illegitimate as a drug. There are problems with measure and purity of the dosage, the lack of information about usage, all of the things that come with the criminalization of these drugs.
If we lived in a society where let's say people were taught in school, "You have a drive to get intoxicated. Let's look at the different intoxicants and what they do, and let's talk about set and setting and dosage." Give people the framework to do their self-exploration.
Would you, or a parent, feel a little bit more comfortable about the recreational no-guide type of trip?
BE:Yes.
There's the idea of having psychedelic exploration centers set up, and that was an idea that was actually first proposed by a doctor in the '50s and later on by Richard Alpert who became Ram Dass in the '60s, to set up psychedelic exploration centers where people could be trained in the use of psychoactive compounds.
And I use the driver license model. You know, you take a kid and you put him behind the wheel. He's never learned to drive, you know, and cracks up. And even in the first year that a kid's licensed, the tendencies to have an accident are maybe ten times greater than once they've gotten the hang of it.
Well, the training for use of psychoactive compounds, both in the schools and in these contexts of maybe centers set up with new kinds of professionals who were trained in using these things and informing people about them would be a great way to counter a lot of these problems.
Once somebody's trained in the use of the drug then you could say, "Okay, well he can go off and use it now." You know how it works, you know what to expect, and you've used it once or twice.
It's like driving a car. You pass your driver's test and now you can go out and drive.
CCN:So let's say I go to the big mushroom-shaped building downtown and I sit down and I have my two sessions with a professional guide, and then I'm licensed for use with MDMA and now I can go to a drugstore, show them proof of my license, and I can buy pure MDMA from them in easy-to-use dosages.
BE:Yeah. Wouldn't be a bad thing. [laughs]
CCN:This gets us around to the attitude of the FDA.
In the '60s and the '70s it seemed that the FDA and the government, the establishment forces, were going to criminalize any drug that people took recreationally.
For instance, if you look at Schedule 1, it's loaded with things that many experienced drug users see as benign, with low potential for abuse, especially when compared to alcohol and tobacco.
But now I get the feeling from your book and a few other areas that the FDA's attitudes, at least toward hallucinogens and some of these synthetic compounds is changing.
BE:Well, it's changing a little bit but very, very slowly.
Glacial is a word I guess you would use to describe it. In other words, there's so much red tape involved in researching any of these things, and there's very little funding for it.
There's a group called MAPS and another group called the Heffter Research Foundation, and they're both set up to fund these kinds of things because there's no public monies for them.
But research is kind of a red herring in a way, because these things could be researched in the next 30 or 40 years but the beneficial effects would be lost. Certainly the way things have moved have been very slow.
In Switzerland, on the other hand, research which opened up about three or four years before the United States changed its attitude, has progressed much more rapidly. Medical doctors were given the right to use drugs for research purposes and for therapeutic purposes much more quickly and with a lot less red tape.
In the United States you have to have a locked vault with a guard day and night. Everything has to be numbered. The protocols have to go through sixteen different committees. And the cost of that is incredibly expensive, to do any kind of research, and the research is in very limited areas.
It starts out in fixing people. It starts out in things like that, rather than looking at some of these more interesting or different areas like creativity or spiritual or self-actualization things.
It certainly doesn't open things up to recreational use.
CCN:Indeed. An example would be marijuana. Marijuana is a weed and can't really be patented in its natural form by a pharmaceutical company. So who's going to pay for the research in the FDA framework to prove or disprove that marijuana is or isn't a benevolent little recreational drug that also has certain medical uses.
Why are pharmaceutical companies going to prove this weed will increase the appetite of terminal cancer patients when people can just grow it themselves?
BE:Well, actually, there is a pharmaceutical form of marijuana that is available through pharmacies. It's called Marinol.
CCN:Right, but it's very expensive. Growing a weed in your backyard is free.
BE:It is expensive so it's profitable for the pharmaceutical companies.
Yeah, I mean there are studies being funded for medical uses of marijuana. I'm interested in medical uses, I'm interested in hemp, I'm interested in all that stuff, but I think the bottom line is the drug laws themselves.
You know, harm reduction is one of the newest ways that people are looking at drug abuse in other countries. For instance in Holland, where they basically tolerate almost any drug use and you can actually go to a store and buy psychedelics and you can buy hash and things like that. Even though the government hasn't formally legalized them, they've focused in on harm reduction.
What's the harm that's coming out of all this stuff, rather than throwing people in prisons.
And in this country, for instance, nine students chained themselves up at UCSC to protest the fact that for the first time in history California is going to be spending more money on prisons than on education, and the goal of these mandatory sentencing things and so forth, the amount of money that's being pumped into prisons, interdiction, you know, all these things, all this money, it's a big waste of money.
And all of the research stuff is great. I mean I'm glad that they're doing research. I wish that they did more of it.
But our group is really looking more at creating an alternative culture. We want to focus in more on say what most people think of when they use psychedelics, taking them out at a beach or with their lover in their house, not in some office with a shrink on a couch.
Of course I'm exaggerating that. They make them nice now. They have nice little environments and things for the therapy.
But still, if you have to go to the medical doctors, I wouldn't like it very much. But at least let the psychologists have them.
But they want to give it all to the medical doctors. Doctors want to have control over every drug. They even want to take the vitamins back. They want to make vitamins prescription drugs, you know.
More money for the pharmaceutical companies, more money for the medical establishment. And the opposite of that is, of course, that we have to come up with an intelligent use within a different kind of culture, and that's what I want to work on.
CCN:In terms of why are most drugs illegal, and the general hysteria created by the drug laws, it almost seems there's a little social engineering going on.
One thing that is true about people who use psychedelics is that they change. In fact, for a lot of people who use psychedelics, that's the whole point. Research indicated that LSD allowed people to reprogram themselves, and sometimes in ways not favored by the established powers or church and state.
Maybe one of the things the government is really trying to do is regulate certain kinds of consciousness.
You mentioned the early rave scenes in the U.K. where all these people from different classes came together in a big warehouse and danced happily together, their hearts opened by MDMA or whatever.
How could, for instance, Hitler turn a society of tree-hugging, dancing, open-hearted people into the Third Reich?
And how could America do whatever things that it wants to do - which require a compliant, authority-loving and God-fearing people? If you had a bunch of people who said, "I don't want to join the Army to go fight in Vietnam because I took a few acid trips and I started to see the Viet Cong as my brother," or so on.
Could it be that one of the maybe unstated goals of the FDA - and this seems apparent given the craziness of what's on Schedule I - could it be that maybe one of the tools, one of the things the government wants to do with the FDA is to regulate consciousness itself.
BE:Yeah, I pointed that out in my article that I wrote called "Watch Your Head" that was published in _Omni_ magazine back in the mid- '80s, and I was talking then about the Analog Drug Act that was passed.
I think I mentioned earlier, the Analog Drug Act was purportedly to get these - what they call designer drugs, which are like synthetic heroins - which were dangerous, that were made bad - and what it did was it also caused every other drug in the world, and it bordered on making consciousness illegal, and suggested that they could almost go that far, making altered states of consciousness illegal.
Because they're saying that any substance which produces changes in mental states, should be illegal and even any states of consciousness themselves might be construed as illegal.
So you start talking about brain machines or anything that can alter your state of consciousness, and yeah, television, computers, and essentially that's what it really boils down to.
There's a strong need for a society to have stability. I mean a society which is totally chaotic doesn't exist, it falls apart. So society has that need to maintain itself and try to maintain some kind of stability and close consistency from history.
Then there's always this other element which is trying to shake all that stuff up, and the balance kind of goes back forth. In the '60s the balance fell one way and then we saw the big reaction to it with Reagan and everything since then.
Now this fear of altered states of consciousness didn't just start in this country, but it goes back all through history. Because what society really wants is to have altered states of consciousness controlled by their major religions, which are like big corporations, in a way.
I mean before there were big corporations there were the big religions - you know, Christianity, Buddhism. They had the monopoly on altered states of consciousness. You had an altered state in a church, you know, on Sunday.
The rest of the week you worked. If you were to have altered state of consciousness outside the church that wouldn't be good for being a good worker in that particular society. So society has a need to try to control its populace so that they will be good cogs in the machine so to speak.
CCN:Well, that's sort of a matter of perception, too.
A recent book called _Cyberia_ came out which had a couple of lines from industry leaders about the difference between what they call the pocket-protector crowd and the tie-dye crowd and how the defense industry, for instance, was losing a certain creative potential because you have these brilliant people, the self-actualizers, who are a very intelligent, well-educated class who would be useful for making bombs and tanks and things, who instead were going to work for companies that didn't do urine tests, companies like Sun and Intel.
So it could be that the perception that some of these altered states of consciousness make you less of a contributor to the nine-to-five workday is an incorrect perception.
BE:I think it is incorrect, and certainly think society may accommodate itself to these altered states through generational change.
I mean one generation may see all these things as very ominous because it's not part of the way they grew up, but the next generation just accepts it as part of life.
But yeah, I don't think it's counter-productive. I think it's actually right in line with evolution that we evolve in our consciousness. In fact, I believe that consciousness is an emerging quality of life.
Humans were really one of the first creatures on our planet to develop our consciousness. Before it was all the biological imperative. The DNA, you know, carried it forth from generation to generation.
All of a sudden the brain evolves to a certain point and this self-reflection thing called consciousness is reached and we wake up, and, to me, in my viewpoint of things, that's why the universe evolved itself, so that it could develop consciousness as a way of appreciating itself.
Consciousness and evolution of consciousness is a positive thing, but it can be threatening to people who haven't been raised in that particular context, you know?
CCN:Your mom and dad get drunk on wine, but, you know, they don't want you to smoke dope.
BE:Yeah, part of the old cold war ethic.
The cold war ethic was we were in this battle with the Russians and anything that jeopardized our advancement industrially or productively or monetarily.
CCN:Weakened our national will.
BE:Weakened our national will, was bad. But at the same point all the economists were showing that the money that you spent for guns was taking away from money spent for butter and that's what built up over time.
We're seeing the economic fallout of that currently of all the trillions of dollars wasted, you know, spent on guns, on military things.
And yet at that time it was looked upon as imperative because you were battling this great enemy outside. Our technology moves along through military means but it also can move along through corporate means and through other means.
And certainly consciousness is a bit more comfortable with corporate ethics. But as far as companies want to control their workers, it becomes this hierarchical model - you know, everything's from the top down.
There's the big boss on top and then there's the people below and they all take orders and what I think we really need to do is move towards kind of a network approach toward developing our culture or society where we see ourselves as small, powerful communities and people and everything is kind of networked together.
The power does not flow from the top down, but from the bottom up.
And I think there's going also be a battle between the rights of the individual, you know, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and the rights of the state and the need of the state to control people in order to preserve the state, to preserve our national interests and that kind of thing.
That's kind of going away with the new way the world is evolving, but the federal government and so forth, they all want to maintain that old structure. But things are changing.
Things are changing.
CCN:Let's talk about making that change come about. Let's talk about the Island Group.
You formed an association called the Island Group, and according to some of your materials it's dedicated to "a new psychedelic vision" and to the creation of "a psychedelic culture."
What is a psychedelic culture? When I think of a psychedelic culture I think of the parking lot at a Grateful Dead show and I'm not sure that I want to live there.
BE:No, I don't think I would either.
Well, I've been involved in the Santa Cruz community since I moved here in 1976. I came here to go back to school after I dropped out, in the '70s, and went to India and so forth.
And I went back to school here and I went out to Switzerland after writing a paper about LSD purity, and that was where I met Albert Hofmann, and brought him to UC Santa Cruz and we did a big conference here. Ram Dass and all the researchers and everybody came together for the first time in ten years.
And then we did groups here for many years. And I eventually evolved the idea of calling this the Island Group, although we didn't really start up the Island Group officially until 1990.
The idea came about during a mushroom trip that I had in 1977 at the end of putting together this conference along with Peter Stafford and Lynn Francis and a few other friends of mine. I went after the mushrooms the last day of the conference rather than go to the big brunch for all the people who were involved in the conference. I went out and did mushrooms, and I'd been reading _Island_ and Leary's book, _Intelligence Agents_, where he talks about how intelligence moves from east to west.
And I was out by the ocean looking westward, and I said well how much further west can I go? It would be to an island somewhere. And it was this idea that creating utopia would be going more westward, maybe, than California.
Going to some island. What do I do the rest of my life? In the '60s I was part of the hippie movement, and hippies kind of had this feeling that we were going to change the world overnight.
It would be this wonderful revolution, you start living according to different ways - and that didn't happen. So I said, well, this is maybe a life's work for me. And so in 1990 I started Island Group and we did some more conferences.
We did the Bridge Conference in '91 and we did Bicycle Day in '93 here at UCSC. And '91 at Stanford, which was a large psychedelic conference. We brought Tim Leary here twice. For three years we had meetings at my house with people from all different areas. We had people from all the different areas that we mentioned which were new idea areas and ancient idea areas.
We had shaman people come in and talk about shamanism, we had Ralph Abraham talking about chaos theory, and so forth. And we would get together and talk and meet.
And the whole ethic of Island really is just to meet locally, face-to-face and to link globally, because there are these other similar communities all over the world.
Well, one thing that I've learned in developing my Island website - Island Web - is that there are people everywhere who feel kind of disconnected from that community and who can connect up through the Internet, and through the Worldwide Web.
So we have members from all around the world who e-mail, and through our periodicals and so forth, and at the same time we're encouraging groups in other areas to get together and to meet face-to-face and to talk about what we can do to create a new culture.
We don't say we have all the answers. But we say that people need to get together and try to look at things differently. And certainly we do have a long-range goal of creating a pilot or memetic community, a meme that can be. You know, we believe that if something works, if behaviors work, they tend to spread all over, like the hundredth monkey.
So there was a guy, Dawkins, who came up with the idea of memetics, which is how behavior spreads, and a meme is a new idea in what all of this is a cluster of memes.
So what we're proposing to do is to create a community somewhere, hopefully away from the influence of the American legal and political system, where we can try things out, and if they work then they would be adopted.
CCN:In a physical community or ?
BE:Well, right now we don't have the money for an actual community, so what we want to do is, through the Worldwide Web we're creating a world community, through linking globally.
And here locally, in Santa Cruz, where we are located currently, there is a large number of people who share a lot of the visions that we have. There's not a lot of cohesion among them all.
They tend to be mavericks. They tend to be individualists. It's kind of like the old Left, you know. There was like a zillion splinters groups, because nobody wanted to work together.
So we're try to at least get people to network together to bring them together to talk about things. What I've discovered in holding these meetings was that there was a great need for people to just talk about experiences they had along with psychedelics.
A lot of them felt very isolated, didn't have anybody to talk to about these experiences, and they would get together and they'd talk for hours and hours and hours about things that they'd experienced, and they'd go "Oh yeah, I had that too, and I did this and I did that," and in a way I could try to move the group beyond that to talk about other new ideas and about how we could, you know, work for the beginning, not the ending.
There's a great deal of emphasis among people who lecture about psychedelics on way, out far out experiences, you know, and Huxley always pointed out that what was important was to be able to take those experiences and bring them into the world with love and work.
He had always been trying to attain this experience called the Clear Light, and then one day he finally achieved it and he talked to his wife, Laura, and he said, "The clear light is an ice cube." That was a code word.
She'd written this book called _You Are Not The Target_ and ice cube is a place where you get stuck. And he said, "The clear light is an ice cube. What's important is love and work in the world."
So it's not just going out there and having the vision. It's taking the vision and bringing it back into the community to create new things, to create new ways of living together, to create new works of art, new inventions, new ways of using technology that aren't harmful to our environment and so forth.
And that's the ultimate goal of it all.
It's not to be a spaced-out, wild-eyed, crazy person. It's to be someone who can be spaced-out and wild-eyed some of the time, but some of the time being a loving, compassionate human being and a hard-working person and a person who does a lot and accomplishes a lot and feels good about themselves and has high self-esteem and is happy and lives an ordinary life.
You know, that's the Zen thing. Before enlightenment a man chops wood and carries water. Afterward, he chops wood and carries water.
So learning to chop wood and carry water, there was a little bit more going on inside.
CCN:So a psychedelic culture for you is one in which people are able to come back from their journeys and integrate what they've learned into their day-to-day lives.
BE:Yeah. Well one of the things, for instance, with LSD, is that people always complain, "Well, I came down and it was really hard. And then I went to work the next day and it was awful. I couldn't deal with anything and everything seemed wrong and I would get out into traffic and it seemed horrible."
Where somebody on ecstasy, you know, people would take ecstasy in a small group and then three days later they would all be caught behind each others' backs reverting to acting mean and abusive and so forth.
But the culture itself reinforces those types of negative patterns.
Those are built right into the culture. I mean one can change oneself and adjust to the culture to some extent, but then there's the point where you have to adjust the culture to fit the experience, too.
And there was a book called _100 Years of Psychotherapy and the World is Getting Worse_. And in the book he points out that we've spent all this time doing all this psychotherapy and introspection and everything, but we've neglected to change things out there.
So it's a balance, changing inside, changing outside. One of the reasons why I developed Island Group was because in the early '80s before MDMA was illegal, we would conduct large groups - this is pre-raves - groups with hundreds of people, all using MDMA.
And these were wonderful groups. And then we would have these people coming back and saying, "Oh, you know, I couldn't maintain it. Life didn't fit in with all that and everything," and I said, "Well, you know, what we need to do is really create a new culture that supports these kinds of experiences."
It all goes back to like what we were talking about before, about drug use among kids. The culture doesn't support it. The society doesn't have scripts for it. It doesn't have routines.
CCN:Well, outside of incarceration.
BE:Outside of incarceration, right.
Incarceration doesn't really work, it's expensive. And so that's what Island Group is really aiming at is to create a culture that fits in with the visions that people have on psychedelics and on MDMA and any other ways they have of altering their consciousnesses that they consider holy or secret or spiritual.
And with the rate of population growth and rising violence, everybody senses that there's this need for this different way of living together.
And I'm not saying that I have any of the answers, but Island Group is saying let's start asking the questions and let's start experimenting and let's start trying to do something different.
CCN:So it's not like the '60s with Leary's mantra saying, "Tune in, turn on and drop out."
The point is not to drop out but to bring something back and contribute to a better society. Not drop out, but come back.
BE:Well dropping out might not be a bad idea for some people for a while.
That's part of their transition towards becoming something different. I mean, like for instance, say you're this guy in a big corporation and you're making $250,000 a year and you have to work 80 hours a week and you hate your job, you hate what you're doing, you make lots of money, consuming huge amounts of things, not even having time to play with them. They may need to drop out and they need to just minimize their consumption of things.
They may need to get more in harmony with the earth and so forth in a way that's dropping out of what they're into. But in a way then what we're saying is okay, dropping out is just a temporary thing, but you've got to come back in and you've got to start chopping wood and carrying water and doing the work.
Doing psychedelics is not an excuse for not doing anything for the rest of your life. Society doesn't owe you a living. You need to genuinely join your community to produce your things for the common group.
So there's got to be that element to it. Just here locally in Santa Cruz, before the Dead blew up we had all the Deadheads coming here and following the soup kitchens and then the mayor wrote to the Dead asking them if they'd give us money for them.
They were blaming them for all of the people coming here.
Well, you know, that is not, in a way, that's not a lifestyle. Maybe a transition thing for some people. But it's not something you do for the rest of your life, just drop out.
CCN:Well, that's why I made that remark about psychedelic culture being the parking lot of a Dead show, because as you mention, the downtown of Santa Cruz is filled with, maybe not Deadheads, but young people living out of cars, trucks and vans with a lot of Dead stickers and out of state plates smelling like sandlewood and wearing hippy garb.
The general perception is they are dropped out, and they're just hanging around clogging the sidewalks and bothering the straights.
BE:Basically, you have to look at it individually.
You can't sit there and judge somebody else and say some individual life is wrong and bad because they did this or that.
Some people would say, "Well, this society's so screwed up, so bad, so messed up, that I'm going to ignore it and do my own thing and just trip around with the Dead or travel around," you know. And maybe that's legitimate, I don't know.
It doesn't feel right to me, though.
CCN:It's not sustainable if everybody does it.
BE:It's not sustainable, no.
CCN:Because then there's no soup kitchen. It requires the working straights.
BE:Right. They're complaining about all these people working, you know.
They're saying, "Oh you worker bees and these guys working" and they're the people who are feeding them. There's this, it becomes this split, this dichotomy. And then the other guys are saying "Oh look at these bums," you know, and then these other ones are going "Look at these worker bees, these clones. They're all clones."
And I think what all of it is is symptomatic of a kind of split way of thinking about things. There's this tendency toward extreme viewpoints, and you've got to learn to find moderation, balance, not either/or, but maybe a little bit of both, or all, you know?
CCN:Well, the psychedelic culture that you want to create, is it a more diverse culture than we have right now?
Because right now there is a tension between the worker bees and the parasites, even if the parasites are only temporary drop-outs who later rejoin society, get jobs, pay taxes, and so on.
BE:Well, first of all I have to preface that by saying it's not a society that I want to create.
A society that would come from one person, you know, is not the idea. I mean it's cocreating. In other words, my idea is there's no fearless leader and hierarchial thing, that we all cocreate this new culture.
What I'm inviting people to do is join me on my journey.
And then to get back to your question, yeah, it would be more harmonious.
CCN:More harmonious. It would be more accepting of other people's journeys or paths.
BE:Yeah. If you go back to the example of Holland we talked about earlier. Acceptance and toleration there is like an ethic, you know, and people can do different things and they can all get along together.
And I think we need a little bit more of that in this country.
As scarcity becomes worse, people's tolerance goes away. You look at the Salem witch trials. There was a period of economic scarcity at that point right when it all happened, when they started trying to find scapegoats and witches.
So a lot of it has to do with the level of the world economy, the fact that the economy of the United States is changing because we're globalizing.
There's a feeling of scarcity, a feeling of deprivation, so there's this kind of need to kind of scapegoat and lack of toleration for other points of view and other ways of living.
What I'm saying is, I think a new culture might hopefully be one that would be much more tolerant and which would embrace people having their own particular lifestyles, which would be more decentralized.
For instance, we could even imagine a way that the United States might be structured. Right now, political power flows down, all the powers of Washington, and the states that are supposedly next, and the communities with the least.
What if communities had the greatest power and the states had the next amount and the top government had the least? People could go into communities they liked and live there, and if a bunch of rednecks all wanted to be together in South Carolina and burn crosses and all that they could do that over there and you could go to Hawaii on the Big Island and live a different lifestyle and the people in South Carolina wouldn't really have much to say about how you lived.
CCN:There's a lot to be said about a certain layer of uniformity, or a certain limit beyond which the cops get called.
What if young Adolph, who rallies these folks in South Carolina and says, "This hippie community over there in California, they're a bunch of godless degenerates, blah blah blah, and it's our path to make them conform to the true way of living."
BE:Well that's funny because in the '60s Leary wrote this thing when he was in prison called "Seeds of the 'Sixties" and he said, "What we were trying to do at Harvard was to find a cure for human nature and we thought we'd found it in the psychedelics."
And that's the basic dilemma that we're facing is with human nature and the human psyche. Arthur Clarke said that we have the basic paranoid streak and that basic paranoid streak may have correlations in the brain. It may have correlations in even the psyche, who knows?
But what we've got to do is learn ways of understanding the brain and the mind and of learning to use our brain more wholistically and cohesively. I don't think we know very much about the brain.
I studied psychology for years and I came to the conclusion that psychology didn't really know very much. It wasn't really very exciting. And we really don't know much about all this stuff.
We're living in a time kind of like, as far as aviation goes, maybe 50 years before the Wright brothers, you know, where they had all those kooky inventions and they were trying to jump off a cliff and had all of that, and they didn't really know how to fly yet.
And we're developing all these kind of interesting drugs and consciousness devices and models of consciousness and new ways of living together as experiments, but we haven't really found a way for our brain to work yet.
That's a challenge that we're facing as we move into the new millenium - is actually making a science out of it all in a way, making a science out of mysticism, making some mysticism out of science, you know.
The two of them aren't opposed. Only in the last thousand years, ever since the turn of the millenium, the last millenium, we've been seeing this big split between the scientists and the mystics. The logical, the rational person on one side, and the mystic, the religious person, the creative artist and so forth on the other.
But I think in the new millenium we're going to see the joining of those two things. There's a lot of splits, multiple breaks in our psyche that are part of our evolution, and all of these things had evolutionary purposes.
There was a time when we needed to fight each other in the world, and one could argue now that the reason why there's warfare is to get the population to stop exploding. We need to control the population, so something like that arises.
But I see that in the future that we need to learn to use our brains and our minds more precisely, more scientifically, and to learn more about them.
CCN:It will become an evolutionary survival advantage, to learn more about our brains.
BE:Oh yeah, most definitely.
I think the person or individual or group of people who can learn to use their brains more effectively are the ones who are going to win out, although there is a great deal of threat from these other types of people.
We're living in a perilous time. We're in very interesting times. And we're living at a point where we don't know how things are going to go.
I tend to be a cautious optimist, and hope and believe, really, that humans really are going to evolve much further than we already have and we're not going to blow ourselves up.
But if we do, then some other life-form may evolve on the planet and continue on. Who knows?
CCN:That's the metacomedy.
BE:Yeah, the metacomedy. You know, maybe that we're just the second act.
CCN:I'd like to look again at the psychedelic culture. There's a a basic question of viability.
Huxley's _Island_ was a very moving book, it does paint a nice picture of a working psychedelic culture, and then it does have a tragic ending.
It seems that a psychedelic culture is at a certain disadvantage when dealing with an aggressive culture which devalues life.
BE:Did you ever see the movie _Time Machine_?
There was a movie based on H.G. Wells' "Time Machine" where they had the guy going into the future and there's the Morlocks and there's the Flower People, and the Morlocks come and they prey after them.
Yeah, I think it's very difficult for us to have two extremes like that. As long as there are people who are going to want to control things and want to dominate other people, we're going to have serious problems.
I don't think you can escape that fact. I'm not saying that people have to roll over and come to all the dominator people. You need to preserve your space.
There's an unresolved situation here. There's no way to really say, you know. Maybe there will be some bigger and badder Hitler that will come along that will make this, our old Hitler, seem like the Prince of Flowers.
Who can tell? I think the next ten years are going to be very interesting. And I think it's in the next ten years that we're going to see some of the resolution to all that, no question. But I don't have the answers.
CCN:It's an ongoing process of reconciling the psychedelic with the nonpsychedelic cultures.
Okay. So no matter what, in the psychedelic culture, we're all going to be chopping wood and carrying water.
BE:Well, for a while at least. As long as we're alive. Who knows? If our brains get frozen, maybe we'll do it again. And maybe we won't even have to do that.
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"... the basic dilemma that we're facing is with human nature and the human psyche.."
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