Psychedelic Culture An Interview with Terence Mckenna

Psychedelic Culture
An Interview with Terence Mckenna

Bruce Eisner: When I was first talking about this issue, I wanted you to do something about psychedelics and culture. So the first question I have is, "How do you think psychedelics should be sensibly used in a culture or society?"

Terence McKenna: Well, it depends upon whether you're talking about a very small, racially coherent and homogeneous culture like a rain forest tribe, or a mega-culture like the contemporary United States. The ways in which psychedelics are to be used are obviously very different. In a small, aboriginal culture there's usually complete agreement on the basic myth that the culture is using to manage its image of itself in the world. In a complex culture -- a modern, high-tech industrial culture -- people tend to evolve themselves into tribal subsets that are little images of the original aboriginal cultural situation.

Basically, the psychedelics induce boundary-dissolving experiences. And if everyone in the culture values that experience, then the culture itself can build its values around about that dissolution, around the idea of journeys to and from a spirit world or something like that. In the high-tech industrial cultures, everyone is left to sort it out for themselves, and, of course, some people conclude that psychedelics let you talk to the space people, and other people conclude that the experience is neurological noise, and so forth and so on.

So in the case of our own culture, we're really still figuring out how to do psychedelics. A lot of people like to do low doses in complex social environments, like rave parties. Other people like to be one-on-one with a friend or someone they trust, or even by themselves, and do classic, in-the-wilderness-alone-type journeying. I think probably it's a matter of personality, what age you are, and what kind of values are being discussed or promoted around you.

B: Well, let's take a look at the future. Do you think that our culture eventually will integrate psychedelics in the same way that, say, one of these smaller tribal cultures -- ?

T: It may. Because of the creativity of people like Sasha Shulgin and the entire pharmacological community, there is going to be an endless number of new psychoactive and psychedelic drugs. Also, the more we learn about the botany of this planet, the more psychedelic substances we discover, and the more sources we find for the substances we already know.

The thing that seems to hold back the integration of psychedelics in our culture is the fact that we obtain these experiences through ingesting substances. The access to these states of mind is now at the edge of technology through virtual reality and the Internet and so forth -- people are trying to produce altered states of consciousness that don't require that you swallow a pill or drink a brew. This may mean that eventually we will have psychedelic experiences without drugs. This could be through virtual reality or through electromagnetic induction -- some kind of brain machine, something like that. In principle there is no reason why the experience has to come through a substance. But, in fact, at least to this stage of our development, that's been the most effective way that we have found.

B: Yeah. Just as a kind of aside, I remember talking with Leary and I suggested that perhaps the most powerful psychoactive of the future would be a little nano-machine that would go in and reprogram your brain the way that you wanted it to be reprogrammed. One of those little nano-machines that --

T: Nanosites. Well, there are all kinds of things -- for example, suppose that a drug company were to embrace the idea of recreational drugs and then put out two or three million dollars to produce a drug which did nothing more than let you remember your dreams. It wouldn't be marketed as a psychedelic. It wouldn't even be called a psychedelic, but in fact that might be the most psychedelic of all drugs. A lucid dreaming drug, or a remember-your-dreams-while-awake drug.

You see, over the past fifteen years or so the largest area where money is being spent in the high-tech democracies has gone from military research and development to the entertainment industry. I think that's a clear signal that psychedelic experiences by some means or another are going to be delivered to the public. Because the public is extremely hungry for this. This is why brain machines, which so far have not been that stunning without drugs, have nonetheless gotten a lot of venture capital interested in them. Because if you ever could make a brain machine that was as good as a drug, the world would beat a path to your door, and the culture would applaud you. You would not be run out on a rail. You would be hailed as an Edison or a Ford.

B: You don't think they would apply the Analogs Act to it?

T: That would be a cat fight that I would pay to sit in the front row to watch.

You know, in a way TV is an electronic drug. They have studied how it affects people. Your eyes glaze, your brain waves flatten, blood pools in your rear-end. It is the presentation of someone who has taken some kind of a drug. But the culture is totally accepting of TV because it is marketed as a home appliance, not a drug. This tells us something about the cultural biases and the strategies that might lead to an acceptance of these things.

B: You've made a major point of emphasizing the use of sacred plants over synthetic psychedelics. Do you think that synthetics have any place at all in the psychedelic medicine chest?

T: Oh yes, absolutely! My distinction between synthetics and naturally-occurring substances isn't an ontological one. In other words, I'm not saying that one side is good, the other bad. It's simply that usually with a naturally-occurring substance you have a history of human usage, and so, in a sense, you already have your human data which tells you that this substance doesn't cause birth defects, blindness, impotence, Parkinsonism, whatever. Because psychedelics are illegal we don't get that kind of information on new synthetics. Because no one is allowed to give them to human beings in a proper clinical situation. So new drugs -- they may be wonderful, they may be terrible -- but society is arranged in such a way that we just can't find out.

If all drugs were properly tested, and clinical trials were done and so forth, we might well discover that out of the examples set by nature we might make new and improved drugs. LSD is a perfect example of that. There are analogs of LSD active in the milligram range -- like chanoclavine and iso-ergine and these sorts of things. LSD is definitely a better drug and we can now see that LSD represents an engineering improvement on those things.

So I think there will be more and more of this. But we can't go forward with synthetic psychedelic chemistry until we get the social attitudes and the legal situation straightened out around these issues.

B: Yeah, I would like to talk about LSD next. I attended a book-signing of yours at the Capitola Book Cafe, and I was sitting in the back and listening to you, and you mentioned that you first tried LSD back in the early '70s. But that it never really triggered off a visual psychedelic experience for you. Do you think that might have had something to do with the dosage you took, or the quality or purity of the drug?

T: Well, I haven't revisited it in a while, but my impression -- I started taking LSD in the summer of '65. And it did all kinds of things, but I had in hand Havelock Ellis' "The Dance of Life," and Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception, and it never did the specific things described there. You know, the jeweled ruins dripping with alien life and all of that.
I did discover that I could smoke a lot of hash on LSD, and it pushed it much more in the direction that I wanted to go. So I ended up always doing that, and even eating hash with acid.

I may have a sort of unique physiology. Even at 300 micrograms what happens for me in terms of visuals -- hallucination -- on LSD is simply little things that look like disturbances in the wallpaper. Little fan-like, scale-like scintillations. They look to me more like they're something in the visual cortex, rather than what I would call a true hallucination.
Finally when I got to psilocybin, it was like, "Ah, this does what I've been looking for!" The LSD was very psychoanalytic. It was hard on me physically. I spent a lot of time lying around the day after. And psilocybin seemed to deliver the hallucinations with very little wrack and ruin on the body. And, of course, DMT is even more dramatic in that direction.
So that was when I got the idea that what I was interested in was the tryptamines.

B: That was actually going to be my next question, because you do emphasize that you prefer tryptamines over phenethylamines and the indole alkaloids. I think you pretty much covered that question, and possible, you know, that drugs are so idiosyncratic might possibly have something to do with it. I know that, for instance, say a drug like Ketamine -- some people have these amazing out-of-body experiences. For me, for instance, Ketamine is more of a body high, and has very little visual component to it. It reminds me of a super-PCP or something, but doesn't really deliver.
And other people, you know, think it's the ultimate.

T: Well, a similar situation exists with 5-MEO-DMT, on which I barely hallucinate at all. I've talked to people who say it's the most profound experience they've ever had.

But, you know, what you have to bear in mind is this: drug receptors are as individual a thing as height, hair color, eye color, and so forth. And it is simply true that we are born with affinities for certain drugs, and a lack of affinity for others.

The Irish are supposed to be able to drink. I can't drink. If I have two beers, then I'm worthless.

So I think that part of what growing into drug awareness means is not taking every drug and every combination around, but actually learning what works for you. Another good example is the tropanes. I would say that maybe 19 out of 20 people -- including myself -- should have nothing to do with that stuff. But there do seem to be people who can handle it.

B: Tropaines are -- ?

T: Oh, Daturas and things like that. Well, I just wouldn't go near that . I've had them several times in my life, and each time it's been nearly disastrous.

B: Well, it's because it's more like a delirient than a psychedelic, and there's very little recovery of memory . . .

T: That's right, but Ketamine is also considered a delirient. The thing about Ketamine, though, that has to be said that it has a vast range of presentational possibilities based on dose. Some people who do it quite frequently do as little as 50 milliliters. That is obviously a very, very different experience than 200 milliliters.

I did it about five or six times, and I always did quite high doses, and while it was happening it was very interesting but I could bring almost nothing out of it. And to me that's a requirement of a drug -- that you be able to talk about it afterwards.

A lot of people don't make that demand. Maybe they're not verbal to start with. You know, somebody will tell you that they took acid and then they took PCP and then they did something else, and then you say, "Well, how was it?" And they say, "Really weird!"

That's not really enough information to make me want to go there. I think one should spend at least as much time describing any given drug experience as actually having it.

B: Yeah, and I would have to say that some people should probably never take them at all.

T: I think that's absolutely true. The way I look at it is that what these things do -- whether you're for it or against it, -- what they do is dissolve boundaries, and most of us have our boundaries too high, too well defended. But some people can barely keep their boundaries in place, and they are not candidates for psychedelics.

People who are seeing visions on the natch, or people who have very low self-esteem, or people who are given to paranoia. These people should take themselves out of the game. In the same way that I don't try out for the NBA since I know that I wouldn't be good at it. They should just leave this to other people.

B: Exactly!
I'll give you one more drug question, and then we'll go to something else here.
I've never tried ayahuasca. Can you explain what I would get out of an experience with ayahuasca that say I wouldn't get with another major psychedelic?

T: Well, each one of these things is different. Even though ayahuasca is DMT made orally active in the presence of a MAO-inhibitor, to me the amazing thing about ayahuasca -- one of the amazing things, and this is unique to it -- it's the only psychedelic I know where after a major trip the next day you actually have more energy than you had going into it.

It's almost like a violation of the laws of physics. How can it be that we stayed up all night singing and hallucinating and raving, and now it's 9 o'clock in the morning, and you feel great? And you actually never have to pay that energy debt?

That is very interesting to me. The other thing about ayahuasca, which may happen on other psychedelics but probably rarely, is that it seems to be the one that is most friendly towards synethesia. In other words, you can see the songs you sing on ayahuasca, and that's a pretty general phenomenon.

So that makes ayahuasca an excellent vehicle for studying synethesia, and trying to understand how it works. Those are the things that makes it unique.

And then, of course, the other thing that may be attractive or repellent to people is that it is the most physical of psychedelics. In other words, if you get sick on LSD, there was something wrong with the LSD. But if you get sick on ayahuasca, it's working just fine.

Some people of a certain persuasion to feel that it's very important to have that full body involvement. It's not a head trip -- ayahuasca. It's a full body trip.

B: Yeah, well let's now change gears a little bit here.
Now you have predicted what you call an eschaton -- or end of time -- in the year 2012. Can you give us a picture of what that would be like? In 20 words or less!?

T: Well, at this time it's a little like asking somebody staring east at 2 am to describe the coming dawn. We're looking in the right direction, true. But it's still a little early to say just what it will be.

I think there's a general feeling in society that stretches from the wackiest of quasi-suicidal UFO cults right up into very sober, rational aspects of the technical community -- a general feeling that human historical development, or technological development, is in some kind of asymptotic acceleration. Nano technology, psychedelic chemistry, the Internet, the cloning of mammals, and whatever the rest of the list is -- all of these things synergizing each other are producing very, very rapidly a world almost incomprehensible to most people.
And there is no reason to suppose that this process is going to slow down. It has apparently been accelerating for as long as you care to think about it.

And so at this point it's really moving fast. At any point there could be a breakthrough -- cold fusion, real extraterrestrial contact, a nano-technological assembler, a telepathic drug, a longevity drug that stops aging. It could come from any of so many directions that I'm sure we'll be surprised.

But what we can almost count on is enormous breakthroughs in unexpected directions. In fact this is already happening and changing reality all around us.

I don't really know you all that well, but I'm sure you're probably pretty internetted and connected. So am I.

Three years ago, very few people even knew what the Internet was. And most people today don't know what it is, or hear about it, but are busy with their lives. Well, this is only one of many, many factors. If you seek the edge -- if you insist on taking the latest drugs, possessing the latest technology and being informed of the latest nano-tech breakthroughs -- then you are really living in a very different world than the people around you.

People are becoming frozen in time. I meet people who say they don't want to be connected. Life is already too complicated. Well, that's their business -- but what they are essentially doing is saying "Send me to the showers. Get me out of the game. The game has become too complicated for me to play or understand."

I don't want to be in that position. I think it's very exciting what's happening. Human experience is moving toward some kind of culmination. All the things that we have dreamed of for the past thousand years -- a physical paradise, a world of healthy, balanced human beings, a world of free access to information -- all of these things are pretty much on target and being delivered.

But one has to notice that this is going on. Of course, the psychedelic community is very aware of this, because in a sense the business of the psychedelic community is to notice what's going on. But the business of a lot of communities is to deny what's going on.

For example the political community. It doesn't lead us boldly into the future. It tries to deny that there is anywhere to go, and we should simply worry about health care maintenance, balanced budgets, and what is going on with Arafat and Netanyahu.

B: Right. When you think of the left-wing politics these days -- I saw Jerry Brown recently at the Digital Be-In, and he was making a big point that because of the technology there is a gap between the haves and the have-nots that is growing wider because the haves have access to this technology and the have-nots don't. He's concerned about that, and wanting to give it to the other people as well, to make it available to everybody.
That was his main point, but he wasn't too well received because the group that he was in was, you know, all the cutting-edge, high-tech computer people.

T: Well, I would actually take issue with him. I've heard this argument before -- that the rise of the Internet has created the most elite culture in history. But if the curve of the development of the modern automobile had followed the same developmental curve as the computer, automobiles would today cost $100 apiece, would go 50,000 miles an hour, and a tank of gas would take you to the moon.
It is true that today the Internet is a technology of elites. But I think that well before 2012 -- by 2005 or so -- the computer that sits on my desk today will be a stud earring, and it could sell for about two-hundred bucks.

This is an enormous empowering of third world and non-high-tech people.

But let me make another point about left-wing politics. Part of the problem there is that left-wing politics is as afraid of the future as right-wing politics. What we are hearing from the left is resource management, ecological catastrophe, necessary slow-down in the development of technology, and so forth. But these are a) things that are not going to happen, and b) it's no vision for the future.

So I think that both the right and the left have, in a sense, been transcended. What the right offers is consumer capitalism. A complete sell-out to the idea that you are what you own, and that's all there is. What the left is offering is a kind of purist rejectionism that may let you sleep at night but doesn't form the basis of any coherent political program to lead us into the future.

B: Yes. And I think you've probably made it clear already but we'll go over it one more time -- that you've written about what you call the "archaic revival." I was going to ask you how does that fit in with technology and the idea of progress?

T: My notion of where this could all lead if everything was managed right is to a world that looks very much to the exterior observer the way the world must have looked 15,000 years ago.

In other words, a very low level of visible technology, people living tribally in many kinds of ecosystems and environments, but -- and the "but" is very important -- when you translate your point of view from the outside of the situation into the inside, and look at the world through the eyes of these future people, you discover menus hanging in space behind closed eyelids. In other words, the entire material culture could be interiorized. It isn't necessary to own large numbers of things, and build very large, complex physical cities.

What we need to do is to limit our population, and integrate ourselves into the natural ecosystem.

My political program for the future is pretty simple, and I don't know whether it would be called right-wing, left-wing or what. But I've noticed that if each human being would parent only one child, the population of the planet would drop 50% in thirty years. In the next thirty years, it would drop 50% again. And so on.

You do that for 100 years, and the major political debate that everybody's interested in is "Are there enough people in the world?"

I think that is what we must do. Every man, every woman should parent only one child; this is the greatest political act we can do for the human community and the planet.

You know the only place it's been tried is in China, which is not where it is most likely to succeed. We need to say to the women of the high-tech industrial democracies, "If you will parent one child, you will have increased leisure time, you will have greater earning power, more expendable income and you will be a genuine hero. Not a false hero, a genuine hero."

We have to give people the idea that this is a good thing. I have heard all kinds of objections.

And I'm very interested in talking to young people mostly about psychedelics. Most people my own age -- I'm 50 -- have either long ago embraced psychedelics or long ago decided it wasn't for them. But there are numbers of kids -- people between 18 and 25 -- who are coming up in an even more compromised and distorted situation than I grew up in, they need information about psychedelics.

I'm very excited, for instance, by things like Salvia divinorum. Because it's legal, and because it is not chemically similar to any presently scheduled compound, and because it has a history of religious usage, and because it can be grown easily in most parts of the world.

I think we need to endlessly promote and bring forth things like this. New sources of the psychedelic experience. New chemical families. New botanical species.
And to make it clear to the establishment that there is no way this can be legislated out of existence, or controlled, or propagandized to silence. We are here to stay.
The psychedelics represent the unbroken thread of gnosis, back to the original human world before history. And I will promote that message as long as there is breath in my body. Because I think people need to hear it.
You know, there are different things going on in the politics of drugs. A lot of people think that the medical marijuana thing is a great thing. Well, on one level it is a great thing. But on the other hand, I don't want to trade the cops and judges in for doctors and hospital administrators. I don't want anybody making these decisions for me.

And then there's another group of people who want the concept of "recreational drugs" to be accepted by society. Well, that's fine. But that implies that all drugs are is recreational. They are not. -- I am not willing to be granted legalization because the establishment finally decided what I was doing was trivial.

These things are not trivial. So talking about recreational drug use and legalizing drugs that can be confined in that category -- that's not good enough either.

We have to actually confront that these things are transformative.

B: I wrote an essay called "Why We Get High." I played on the word "recreational," though I used Peter Stafford's term "re-creational."

T: Much better!

B: And the idea that the ultimate purpose of psychedelics might be considered re-creational in the sense that we re-create ourselves. And that they allow us to play in the way that children play, in the sense that they free us up from the stultified adult -- "adult" being the past participle of the verb "to grow."

I had a biology professor who said that humans should be better called Homo ludens than Homo sapiens, because "Homo ludens" means "playful man," and humans play longer than any other species -- except maybe for dolphins -- because dolphins and humans learn from that play. So "re-creational" and "play" are part of it.

But the term "recreational" is pejorative in the sense that people think of it in the same way as -- you know, go to a bar on Saturday night.

T: Right. It trivializes it in the minds of most people.

But I agree with you. Adulthood seems to be a freezing of the reflex to play. And then one is forever caught where one was standing at age 25 when one suddenly became intellectually and esthetically constipated.

B: Right. And later a lot of the psychologists like Maslow and Jung said that the purpose of our whole life is to keep growing with self-actualization and self-realization. You know, the earlier stages of the Freudian is kind of a place where it all ends according to the conventional psychology. But in the new psychology, we constantly grow.

T: That's right. Human life that isn't growing is human life that is dying.

B: Exactly!
One last question here. Aldous Huxley wrote Island about a third of a century ago. I've been working on a project -- the Island Foundation -- which one of its purposes is to link what you could call "the usual suspects." Also, we plan eventually to attempt to create a model psychedelic culture, a meme somewhere in the southern hemisphere, where we can start playing with some of these ideas -- a place free from the political constraints that we have here in the good ol' USA and the northern hemisphere.

What do you think about Island Foundations -- some of our plans?

T: As long as we are only a dissonant minority inside the belly of the beast, we basically represent a critique of that beast, but nothing more. I think it would be a fantastic thing to attempt on an island or somewhere remote to actually experiment with the lessons of psychedelics, with the insights of psychedelics, and I also predict that this would be perceived as a new level of threat by the establishment. Because, in a sense, that's what happened in the Haight-Ashbury in the '60s. Not on an island, and that was part of the problem. But it certainly was perceived as a threat by ordinary establishment organizations.

But this has to be done. We have to move beyond oligarchy, capitalism, consumerism and mass media.

B: You know I was fairly close friends with Tim Leary, and he had a great deal of faith in these multi-national corporations. He felt that at a certain point there was a critical mass that had turned on and that the psychedelics would touch everywhere, and transform even the multi-nationals. But there's some skepticism on my part about all of that.

I think that there has to be some kind of alternative -- a new vision that replaces this idea of transactions as the basis of human interaction, which even the most regressive seem to cultivate.

T: Well, it's interesting that you mentioned this. I think that we are going through a transition analogous to a transition that happened early in the 17th century. At the beginning of the 30 Years War, Europe was ruled by Popes and kings. At the end of the 30 Years War, it was ruled by parliaments and peoples. And the Church was told by national governments: "We will now take over the reins of the money-making enterprise. You feed the poor and bury the dead and provide spiritual counsel."

Now the corporations are saying to those same national entities: "Now you feed the poor and bury the dead and keep the roads repaired and clear the swamps. Meanwhile, we will take over the money-making enterprise."

But there are certain things about the world corporate state, as I call it, that I think are to be at least temporarily preferred over the old way of doing business. The first is that war is an instrument of national policy. It is not an instrument of corporate policy. Corporations do not like war because by and large it is bad for business.

It's not bad for the corporations building weapons, but most corporations don't build weapons. What capitalism likes is well-fed, hard-working, well-paid populations that do a lot of television watching and mall strolling.

The other thing is that corporations do not like are unregulated markets. This will work in favor of drug legalization, if that's what we want. In other words, corporations do not have moral agendas. Illegal drugs were almost a necessary part of the tool box of the nation state because that's where it raised its black capital and did the back-channel business of funding its intelligence agencies and that sort of thing. But unregulated markets are anathema to the world corporate state, and so I think we will eventually see -- because of that -- the legalization of all drugs.

Nevertheless, at the center of the world corporate state is a very bad policy or way of doing business, and that is the idea of the sale of commodities. That somehow raw materials must be fashioned into objects of greater worth and then sold through a market economy. If this is allowed to continue uncritiqued, every forest will be cut, all metals will be extracted, all watersheds will be polluted.

So likely we are going to see a movement toward virtual products and virtual markets. In other words, if what a corporation sells you is clip art, very few rain forests are cut down to support that. If what they sell you are game environments -- again these are environmentally-friendly things. But if capitalism continues to insist on dealing true things, then it will cut its own throat and will be replaced by something else.

At this point, I can't quite see what the "something else" will be. I am encouraged by the fact that though American capitalism is basically slash-and-burn capitalism, companies like Fujitsu -- which, interestingly, has a big stake in virtual reality -- they have a 500 year plan for the company.

You know, American corporations don't plan beyond the next quarter. So if capitalism can tame its wilder tendency -- the slash-and-burn tendency -- then it may have a certain longevity as a social system. If it cannot tame that tendency, then it will consume itself along with everything else in the next 50 years.

B: I think that we have gotten near the end. Is there anything more that you want to say to our readers? Or do you want to put a cap on it here?

T: I would just say that I want to make it explicitly clear that I am very optimistic about the human future, about the role of psychedelic substances -- both plants and products of the laboratory -- in the human future. I think we stand at the brink of the great, great adventure.

I went out last night and looked at the comet. We've been having a lot of overcast here, so it was the first time I had seen it, and it was so clear to me, looking at that thing, that above the chatter of argument about 2012 and legalize this and that, and is Terence McKenna full of shit, and so forth and so on, all of these discussions, it is very clear to me that we have arrived at the final act of the human drama on this planet.

It isn't the end of the human drama, but we have outlived this embryo, this human cradle, and now it's time to be up and about the great business of becoming citizens of the galaxy and at home with our own heart.