FROM META-SIN TO MEDICINE:

A PROGRAMME FOR FUTURE

RESEARCH INTO THE HEALING
POWER OF PSYCHEDELICS
Cameron Adams
In traditional societies around the world, psychedelic substances have
been used for medicinal purposes. This has also been the case in
Europe and America, until the psychedelic clampdown of the 1960s.
Though there was a whole raft of arguments legitimising the prohibition
of psychedelics, mainly focused around health concerns, scientific
evidence at the time contradicted this. In fact continuing research shows
that psychedelics are generally safe and humans have probably had a
very long evolutionary relationship with them. It is not scientifically
reasonable from a public safety perspective to make psychedelics
illegal; very few, if any, people die using them and any negative longterm effects have failed to materialise.1 If it was about safety, driving
and bathrooms would be illegal, being far more dangerous than
psychedelics. The former boasts 32,955 deaths in the past 11 years in
the UK alone, 2 while in 2008 approximately 21.8 million Americans
were injured in the latter.3 Instead, this is frankly a moral issue. The
illegality of psychedelics is based not on medical merits but on a concept
of sinful behaviour.
This essay is about where research can go when we exclude the
concept of sin from psychedelics and accept the fact of their use.

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Though psychedelic use ranges from recreational to sacramental, here

I am concerned with psychedelics as medicine. I do not see this as more
important, it is just where my personal interest lies. Much of what I write
here is speculative; educated guesses about potential avenues of future
study. In other words it is a statement of a few hypotheses that could be
tested when research with psychedelics is freed from paranoid control.
This idea of sin is better understood through the lens of biological
citizenship.4 This is the concept that citizenship requires engagement
with socially defined rules, such as language, paying taxes, etc. Among
these acts of engagement are biological factors; biology has ceased to
be something fateful, and has become knowable, mutable, improvable
and manipulable through procedures such as plastic surgery or genetic
testing. If one has a family history of breast cancer, for instance,
prophylactic mastectomy is now available;5 a body part is removed
because it might develop cancer. The birth process is heavily involved
in biological citizenship where foetuses are regularly tested for genetic
diseases and the parents are expected to make a choice about whether
or not to go to term if any are found. Further, women seeking an
abortion in some states of the US will now be legally required to receive
a transvaginal sonogram administered via a phallic wand, which many
women equate with rape.6 So, we are becoming engaged in our biology
in a way mandated by social and political forces. Biological processes
cease to be exclusively biological; they become social or anti-social. In
current Euro-American culture, psychedelics are seen to be anti-social.
They are wrong, not because of any intrinsic properties, but because
their use defines someone as either us or them.
As I have alluded to earlier, science has established that psychedelics,
that is classic tryptamine and phenethylamine psychedelics, are
exceedingly safe biologically; far safer than alcohol as measured by
therapeutic index (the ratio between active dose and deadly dose).
Remembering that the lower the number, the more deadly, alcohols TI
is approximately 10 while that of mescaline is 24. Generally, psychedelics
are even safer than mescaline with DMT, LSD, and psilocybin having
TIs of 50, 1,000 and 1,000 respectively.7 Additionally, no psychological

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deterioration, and even increased psychological functioning, is found.1,8-10

Finally, the abuse potential of these substances appears to be quite low
as their most common pattern of use does not include frequent dosing.11
We are currently experiencing a re-emergence of the use of medicinal
psychedelics. The most salient medicinal psychedelic, in popular media
and in academic publication, is ayahuasca, though medicinal use is not
limited to this decoction. One way of looking at psychedelic medicine,
as understood through the work on ayahuasca, is that:
although referred to as a medicine, ayahuasca [and other psychedelics
by extension] is clearly not used as an ordinary pharmacological
medicament. Instead medicine alluded to more holistic concepts of
being a sacrament or a healing plant.12 p200
In fact, the users of ayahuasca said that it may or may not heal you
and the results are unpredictable; we shouldnt think of ayahuasca as
a pharmaceutical substance, but as a psychological catalyst which
unfolds within fields of sociocultural ideas.12 p202 This is a fancy way of
saying that healing is a function of set and setting. Ayahuasca enhanced
the users emotional and mental states so they could understand or even
see the source of their poor health. The psychedelic influenced them in
making positive changes in their lives which helped them heal. Much of
the interpretation of psychedelics as medicine seems to be of this nature.
For example, If you look at the MAPS website of current psychedelic
research13 what you see is primarily behavioural and psychological
conditions being studied. This is telling of how we have approached
these medicines. It is our cultural bias as to how we think they work.
To unravel and repair this bias we first need to know that disease and
illness are not the same thing. One way of looking at them is, illness is
what the patient feels when he goes to the doctor and disease is what he
leaves the doctors office with.(Cassell 1978 in 14 p548). Illness includes
the signs and symptoms, and how you feel about whats going on with
you. Disease is a structural or functional biological problem. Thus, they
tend to overlap quite a bit but they are not the same thing. You can
have either without the other. The classic example is asymptomatic high

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blood pressure. Until one is diagnosed and prescribed medicine, they

often are unaware of the condition. They have a disease with no illness.
You can also have illnesses without diseases. Illnesses are social whereas
diseases are biological.
Now if we review the studies of psychedelic medicine, as exemplified
by the ayahuasca study, we see that the bias is toward investigating the
use of psychedelics for illness as opposed to disease. It could be said of
the end-of-life anxiety study with psilocybin,15 for example, that nobody
has been healed. The fact that they have less anxiety about dying is
irrelevant because they will still die. This is a rather narrow perspective.
I would argue that the psilocybin trip cures the illness of dying but
that we have not explored the substances effect upon the disease. It is
important to keep this in mind when studying psychedelic medicine,
especially here at the beginning. There is this sense that they are best
for psychological problems, often perceived to be more illness than
disease. Yet there are biological factors of psychological issues. Thus,
it is our cultural bias that leads us to study psychedelics in regards to
illness alone.
Yet, psychedelics may do more. In the addiction literature, it is
argued that exposure to new substances hijack our evolved reward
centres of the brain and thus we develop pathological relationships to
them. However, our relationship to psychedelics is probably not new as
many are ancient and relatively simple in that they need no processing
to be consumed.16 Our long-term relationship with some psychedelics
means that we must have evolved mechanisms to deal with them. Unlike
with heroin or cocaine, which are recent arrivals to our consumption
patterns, the use of psychedelics cannot be seen as simply maladaptive
or bizarre. They may, in fact, become a kind of food.
We need food because we do not make all of the substances we
need; thats what makes up the essential vitamins, minerals and amino
acids. These are things that you have to get from outside; they are
exogenous. Further, much of what we eat garlic, basil, many herbs
is medicinal. We are continually taking low doses of these medicinal
substances that are quite beneficial to our health. Likewise, coca leaf and

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khat have large amounts of many minerals, vitamins and amino acids
while many alkaloids are based, chemically, on tryptophan or tyrosine.
These essential proteins may become available after we eat them.16 Some
drugs are nutritionally sound.
Neurotransmitters require exogenous nutrients to be synthesised in
our brains; some require up to 36 amino acids and several enzymes (each
of which need to be synthesised first) to be completed.17,18 Tryptamines
(LSD, psilocybin, DMT, etc) are variants on serotonin19 and the
phenethylamines (mescaline, MDMA, etc) are variants on dopamine.20
Consuming these complete, or nearly so, neurotransmitters saves on our
nutritional and energetic requirements. Further, while they are acting
in our brains, we temporarily dont need our own, giving those that use
them an evolutionary advantage in nutrition.21
By approaching psychedelics as medicinal foods instead of drugs
we can better understand how they are related to the interleaving of
disease and illness over evolutionary time. For example, any ape out
there who ate a few psilocybin containing mushrooms would know their
effects; and their body would know what that felt like. Stress depletes
neurotransmitters. When the neurotransmitters drop below a certain
point, bodily harm can occur.16 Much like the cravings for sugar and
fats,16 the depletion of neurotransmitters would lead to a craving for them
in the diet. Though stress effects appear to be illness, their relationship
to neurotransmitters implies a disease process, and thus psychedelics
can be said to be addressing a disease as well. The taking of psychedelics
may produce a buffer zone to help us deal with stress in both illness and
disease aspects.
In this vein, Timothy Leary, in 1965, did an experiment with giving
psilocybin to incarcerated criminals to see if it reduced their recidivism
rates.22 The six-month follow-up showed the rates to be significantly
lower than that of the regular prison population. But by the 34-year
follow-up it looks like there was no real change in the rates. It has been
suggested that the data were poor due to the relative shortness of the
study (or perhaps their interpretation was overzealous). However, using
nutrition as a model, the effects may not have been a psychological

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restructuring but, exactly as it appears, something that faded over

time. This looks a lot like nutritional supplementation that gets used
by the body and then needs to be re-consumed. In fact, the results are
similar to a study where violent criminals were given essential fatty acid
(EFAs) supplements. They calmed down just because they had a better
diet. This led to the idea that criminality may be related to nutritional
deficiencies.23 The effect faded over time because they maintained the
same nutritional deficiencies that led to criminal behaviour in the first
place. Likewise, pigs supplemented with EFAs had more monoamines
(dopamine and serotonin-like chemicals including tryptamines and
phenethylamines) in the frontal cortex.24 So having more EFAs in
your diet creates more of these neurotransmitters. It may just be more
nutritionally sound, in a crisis situation, to take the monoamines (most
psychedelics) in the first place and then supplement with improved diet.
So there is this relationship between diet, neurotransmitters and
psychedelics, which are involved in the way the body regulates and
builds itself even though it just seems, on the surface, that psychedelics
are working in a psychological way. Another good example of this
interleaving is ibogaine addiction therapy. One gets a powerful
psychedelic and introspective experience, it also blocks your biological
craving for opiates and other drugs and on top of that it seems to allow
near instantaneous habit formation or a brain reset.25 Ibogaine seems to
work on illness and disease simultaneously through introspective and
chemical pathway effects.
Beyond the simple reductionism of chemistry and nutrition, a
useful tool for looking at the interface between illness and disease is
salutogenesis;26,27 the causes of good health. Typically in biomedicine we
focus on pathogenesis; the causes of poor health such as viruses, poor
diet, bacteria, etc. A focus on pathogenesis leads to addressing biological
problems at the expense of social, meaning rich aspects of being sick.
The ultimate goal of the pathogenic model is to reverse the biological
insult and then the job is done. However, it does not spend much effort
and attention to bringing the person above the baseline of health.
Salutogenic forces are those that will bring us above the baseline and

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therefore give us a buffer zone where we can withstand biological insults

without getting sick. In short the focus of biomedicine is on avoiding
sickness instead of enhancing health.
The key to salutogenesis is related to illness. Feeling as if one is part
of a larger whole and that there is purpose to ones life appears to be
related to lower incidence of heart attack, fewer sick days from work,
and lower mortality in general.28 This experience has been dubbed
sense of coherence and underlies the maintenance of good health just
as pathogens, or agents of disease, are associated with poor health.29,30
If we look at the ayahuasca research I mentioned above,12 salutogenesis
is invoked and ayahuasca is described as a generalized resistance
resource that addresses psychosocial stressors.12 p192 In fact, users of
ayahuasca have been found to be more stable and resilient psychologically
than controls in sustained psychological testing.9 Psilocybin has also
been found to have strong salutogenic qualities through its inducing
classic mystical experiences.31,32 A classic mystical experience includes,
among other aspects, union with God, the source, everything, or a
deep sense of being part of ecology that leaves individuals with a sense
of purpose and belonging. The overlaps with sense of coherence are
obvious. Psychedelics, it would seem, increase sense of coherence on
top of enhancing neurotransmitters and thus reducing their nutritional
costs, especially in poor diet and high stress situations.
Sense of coherence may be a strong force for combatting illness,
but there are social forces related to psychedelic use that can subvert
it. Schizmogenesis is the origin of rifts between members of the same
community.33 These rifts develop in a variety of ways, and in traditional
tribal level societies they often lead to the splitting of a community into
two. However in modern state-level society this is not possible; where
do we locate Britain II? Because of the inability to create autonomous
communities people get caught in a double bind; a damned if you
do, damned if you dont situation. With regard to psychedelics, the
schizmogenic forces take the form of information manipulation.
In the case of psychedelic medicines, biological citizenship is a
schizmogenic force. Scientific research, as discussed above, shows that

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psychedelics are among the safest psychoactive substances a person can

take.34 Most users of these substances know this. However, in terms of
being a member of the global community, these substances are antisocial (for example, see how the UN Single Convention on Narcotic
Drugs as discussed in Feilding, this volume, has led to the prevention of
access to medicines in the third world in order to stop the scourge of
psychoactive recreation). Media aligned with mainstream society (which
is a large majority of available media) supports this political and moral
stance; psychedelics are said to cause you to jump out of windows or go
permanently insane. This information war leads those who are aware
of the scientific material and who have personal experience to question
the integrity of those in power who berate them with apocryphal or
sensationalised stories of drug use. Those in mainstream society never
question the high levels of information saturation, or propaganda, of
the media and thus think the drug community is irrational and falsely
justifying their use; they are good citizens of a moralistic regime. This
is classic schizmogenesis; both sides see the worst in, and cant trust
any communications from the other; on this or any topic. The double
bind that develops is that one must hide their use from the mainstream
and either quit that which they find salutogenic to the detriment of their
health or live a life of criminality. These stressors, in turn, can cause
negative health effects that subvert the salutogenic potentials of these
substances. The fact that people find strong healing effects in such
unsupported environments seems to me a minor miracle. This may also
explain why it is in shamanic contexts that psychedelic healing is most
dramatic; the negative schizmogenic forces are simply not of the same
force in the jungles of Peru.
By looking at multiple threads of information a programme of study
emerges. The biological effects of psychedelics, with regards to health,
are woefully understudied. If it is true that we have evolved in relation to
psychedelics and that our bodies have learned to use them productively
over millennia, the nutritional possibilities of psychedelics should be
better understood. Perhaps psychedelics could be incorporated as a
tonic to quickly bring ones monoamine health to a functioning level,

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which can then be supplemented by improved diet. With a sophisticated

understanding of illness and disease as well as salutogenesis, a series of
studies could be made with psychedelics to assess the specifics of the
articulations of these two different threads of poor health. These insights
could hold the secret for bringing public health above a level where the
most basic of health insults make us sick. Finally, the nature of political
and moral aspects of self-medication are thrown into stark contrast with
psychedelics. Biological citizenship gives us the perspective from which
to address the human rights aspects of banning potential medicines on
moral grounds. The political need to legislate against substances that for
the length of human existence have provided healing, spiritual insight
and, yes, even recreation, leads to conflicts in society that need not
be. Understanding the schizmogenic forces surrounding as politically
charged a topic as the sin of psychedelics will help us understand more
subtle sources of social rifts and may even be a catalyst for broader
community healing.

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