Lessons for the Psychedelic Movement from the LGBTQ Equality Movement
On the unavoidable spirituality of social change
The “Psychedelic Renaissance” has had a few hiccups of late, most recently the FDA’s rejection, earlier this month, of a set of clinical trials using MDMA to treat post-traumatic stress disorder. We’re not headed back to the Dark Ages, but the sense of inevitability that many in the movement once felt has definitely been called into question.
Which is a good thing, because social change (and if psychedelic use becomes normalized, that will be one) is never inevitable, and thinking that rationality and progress are sure to triumph over fear and longstanding tradition is a great way to lose some battles.
I first learned this in a previous career, working as an LGBTQ activist for ten years. So I’d like to devote this week’s newsletter to some perhaps unexpected lessons that the LGBTQ movement learned that might inform the next phase of work in the psychedelic space.
1.
First, a bit about me, which you can skip if you want to get right to the substantive points.
From 2003-2013, I worked as a professional LGBTQ activist, and played a very, very small role in the massive changes that took place during that time. Over the course of a decade, I founded two Jewish LGBTQ organizations, wrote a bestselling book called God vs. Gay? The Religious Case for Equality, worked for two large funders and several smaller projects, and spoke at over 100 religious and educational institutions during the campaign for marriage equality. Although I was never more than a bit player myself, I had a front row seat watching some of the leading activists and organizations that played a significant role in the changes of that period.
Flash forward ten years, and I’m getting involved in the psychedelic field after an intervening decade spent working in the meditation space (along with journalism and writing – since, of course, both/and). I’m not a scientist, but I am a scholar of religion (PhD in Jewish thought), rabbi, writer, meditation teacher, journalist, and of course a former activist. For me, this work is continuous with my work in the meditation world – psychedelics are just a different technology of personal transformation that, one hopes, might lead to some larger-scale shifts as well. So, after about a year mostly listening, learning, and getting to know the terrain, I joined the Emory Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality as a Field Scholar, where I’m co-editing an anthology on psychedelic mystical experiences, and am working on a couple of additional projects focused on religious communities and psychedelic practice. As with mindfulness ten years ago, there’s a motley crew of idealists, scientists, capitalists, philanthropists, and more than a few opportunists too, but the potential is real, and the field is developing quickly. The energy in the space is exciting.
I expected the similarities between the emerging psychedelics field and the once-emerging mindfulness field. But I was surprised to see so many echoes of the LGBTQ equality movement in this quite different context. I’ll focus on a few of them now.
2.
First, the LGBTQ movement learned the hard way that appeals to rights, data, and other left-brained categories of thought were insufficient for the task at hand. In the 1990s and early 2000s, having emerged from the devastation of AIDS, empowered gay and lesbian activists (as we called ourselves then) fought once again for our rights, as our pioneers and heroes did three decades prior. These campaigns had some success, but often faltered as well. Our opponents fought back not with subtle constitutional arguments but with slurs, prejudices, and lies – like today’s anti-LGBTQ bigots, in fact, accusing us of being “groomers” or worse. We thought we were fighting a legal battle, but in fact we were enmeshed in a culture war.
We knew the facts were on our side. We knew that we weren’t child molesters. We know that many (though not all) gay people simply wanted to live their lives and love the people they loved without fear of legal or societal reprisal. We knew that “conversion therapy” was a sham, that many (though not all) gay people experienced their sexuality as a trait, not a “lifestyle.”
But the battle wasn’t going to be won on the facts. After a whole lot of market research – one of the distinctive features of this movement, as the histories of it has shown – it became clear that, in addition to the legal work, shifting cultural and religious attitudes would be essential. This had already begun, with media moments like Ellen and Will & Grace, but in the 2000s, it became a primary focus. Activism in religious communities, in cultural spaces, in historically marginalized communities, and even the focus on marriage were all fruits of this realization. We had to fight fire with fire – meaning not negative vitriol, but meeting their emotional claims with our emotional claims.
The “movable middle” – those Americans who hadn’t quite made up their minds about gay people, but unlike the haters were open to persuasion – were going to be won over by getting to know us, whether directly or through the media, and discovering for themselves the truths of our lives, through stories and conversations and “feel/felt/found” narratives from allies (who could say to the undecided, ‘I know how you feel, because I once felt that way, but then I found…’). Alongside the successful legal strategies of the 2000s and 2010s, activists focused on things like storytelling, recognizing fears and working through them, reaching people where they are, and other emotional modalities. The 14th Amendment may have moved the Supreme Court, but #loveislove moved America.
Today’s psychedelic activists are as sure of the facts as we were. And they’re right – the evidence of the efficacy of MDMA, psilocybin, ketamine, and other compounds is extensive. But facts will not be enough. Of course, it’s understandable that Lykos – the MAPS-affiliated corporation that sought to get MDMA approved by the FDA – thought that facts and data would prevail in a governmental drug approval process. Yet even there, various critics were able to stoke fears and biases among the FDA’s advisory committee that, on sober reflection, were clearly based more in emotion than fact. Such committees, it’s important to note, are made of up of non-experts, a format the FDA has itself been trying to do away with, and reading over the notes of the advisory committee meeting (astonishingly, a formal report is not prepared), it’s plain to see how these non-experts were swayed by longstanding, possibly unconscious, fears and assumptions about psychedelic compounds.
For example, one of the concerns expressed several times was about unblinding: namely, that participants knew whether they were receiving MDMA or a psychedelic. This issue – which is obviously unavoidable in the case of a psychoactive drug, since a user knows within an hour whether they’ve received the drug or a placebo – had already been dealt with by the FDA in constructing and approving the trial design. Yet it was discussed by the advisory committee as if it were some huge flaw in the study that no one had noticed before, and it continues to be talked about this way in media reports.
(Another strange coincidence: Unblinding is also the primary “problem” with many studies on hormone therapy for transgender people. If you dig deep into the Cass Report, which questioned the studies showing the efficacy of such therapy, you’ll find that its most frequent criticism is, yep, unblinding. As with psychedelics, though, how could a double-blind study of hormone therapy ever be conducted? Obviously the subject will know soon enough whether they’ve been given hormones or a placebo. It’s a weird coincidence that this same issue has been used to attack both psychedelics and trans therapies.)
This is not to say that there weren’t some flaws in Lykos’s experimental design. Yet the substance and tone of both the advisory committee meeting, and a previous hearing by an independent body, seemed to suggest a deep unease with MDMA that seems way out of proportion to the relatively small substantive issues that were raised. Which, zooming back out of the details, make sense. This is Molly we’re talking about, right? Ecstasy? And now – in the words of one of my Emory colleagues – we’re going to give it to Grandma?
Belatedly, Lykos and its allies enlisted veterans’ organizations and sympathetic politicians to highlight the life-changing impact of MDMA therapy, and distinguish it from rolling hard at Burning Man. But the advisory committee had put the FDA in a box.
More broadly, I see fear-based and stereotype-based language recurring frequently in psychedelic debates. Media coverage still makes jokes about tripping to save the planet, or tripping to quell anxiety. Even advocates still use flippant terms like ‘magic mushrooms.’ Despite Michael Pollan’s blockbuster 2018 book, psychedelics can still seem like another TechBro affectation, rather than medicines that can help save lives. Rationality and data won’t do it. There needs, to this relative newcomer anyway, to be a lot more engagement with the fears and misconceptions we’ve inherited from decades of the war on drugs. Advocates, critics, and decisionmakers all are swayed by their emotional responses, which are themselves conditioned by decades of cultural programming. Which sounds quite familiar…
3.
Another, related connection between LGBTQ equality and the campaign to normalize and partially legalize psychedelics is the way each struggle implicates religion.
In the LGBTQ case, the relationship is obvious: twenty years ago and now, most objections to LGBTQ people are grounded in conservative religion, and even religious moderates — the “movable middle” again — had serious reservations about gays and lesbians that were not reducible simply to bigotry or homophobia. There is no way around the thicket of religion; one must go through it.
The relationship of psychedelics to religion is more complex, but ultimately similar. True, for millennia, psychoactive compounds have been used by indigenous people around the world for spiritual and mental/physical healing (a distinction that is often not present in such cultures anyway). But in Western religious traditions, “mind-altering drugs” are nearly as taboo as non-normative sexuality is. Some, such as Islam, prohibit the consumption of any intoxicants. Others are slightly more lenient, but still, even moderately religious people harbor suspicions of altered states, hedonism, escapism, ‘New Age’ spirituality, the ‘counterculture,’ and so on. And the suspicion spreads from there: I’ve found it as much among basically secular liberals as among religious conservatives.
For conservatives, I want to suggest that some of these concerns are actually well-founded. Fundamentalist religions depend upon their claims of exclusivity: that there is only one valid way to God, and that way is through the specific religion. (Ironically, the fundamentalisms of the world are all alike in saying everyone else is wrong.) Psychedelics — and for fundamentalists, even techniques such as meditation and yoga — are inherently suspect because they offer paths to transcendence other than the orthodox one. But it’s not only fundamentalists. After all, psychedelics do often offer different perspectives on reality from the ones held by most “normal” Americans. So the normies aren’t entirely wrong to be suspicious of them.
Nor can these spiritual, ontological, and existential issues be neatly cabined away from ‘purely’ medical applications. Studies have shown that the more spiritual, existential, religious, and theological (SERT is the acronym of choice) content arises in psychedelic experiences, the more likely one is to heal from mental health challenges. Sometimes this SERT content arises uninvited and unwanted, which can be especially challenging for people from traditional religious contexts. As this brilliant TEDx talk by my colleague Fayzan Rab explores, religious experiencers often bounce between therapists who don’t get their religion, and clerics who don’t get their psychedelic experience. Taking psilocybin implicates the spiritual and religious dimensions in a way that taking an SSRI is not.
I’m not claiming that these tensions are consciously articulated by everyone who dismisses “hallucinogens” as escapist or delusory. But I am proposing that they underlie society’s often reflexive, inchoate animus against them, and that they need to be faced directly in order to overcome the conscious and unconscious biases evidenced even in the ostensibly secular context of an FDA regulatory process. (At times, these issues did surface explicitly, as anti-Lykos activists accused the company of being a “cult” and accused its founder, Rick Doblin, of having “messianic” ideas. It’s hard to imagine such religious invective appearing in any other regulatory approval process.)
The irony is that many people describe their psychedelic experiences as among the most spiritually profound of their lives, just as coming out was for me thirty years ago: I thought that embracing my sexuality would be the end of my religious life, but in fact it was the beginning of it. Precisely that which fundamentalists fear can, ironically, be a gateway to greater religious and spiritual feeling, as well as health and even wisdom. These stories have to be told, not pushed to the side. We need to hear more from the technologists, teachers, activists, artists, and inventors who have had their work inspired by these compounds. We need a more robust discussion of the spiritutal aspects of some psychedelic experiences, and how they can be worked with in a skillful and mature way. We need to address the elephants in the room.
It’s not that all uses of psychedelics must be spiritual or supernatural. As with meditation, one may enter into psychedelic practice with an entirely secular mindset, and emerge the same way. In the lab, the safety and efficacy of MDMA can be evaluated without any reference to spirituality. But in the public square, the many faces of psychedelics — recreational, spiritual, medicinal — are all quite visible. It’s counterproductive not to face them directly.
4.
Obviously, there are many differences between the current struggle for psychedelics acceptance and the ongoing struggle for LGBTQ equality. For one thing, psychedelics can be dangerous if used incorrectly and without assistance; there are solid, science-based reasons to proceed with caution. For another, psychedelic use is a choice; gender identity and sexual orientation are usually not, at least not in the same way. (Then again, veterans’ groups and others have rightly pointed out that denying effective treatments for PTSD will cost lives, so perhaps ‘choice’ is the wrong term here.)
Perhaps the biggest difference that I’ve seen, though, is that psychedelic activists have had the privilege of hubris. Yes, all of us with experience with banned substances know the stigma, risk, and threat of incarceration that accompany their use. But those still don’t compare to the stigma, risk, and threat of violence that trans people experience every day, and that every gay person experienced a generation ago. Fifteen years ago, there were moments in those well air-conditioned conference rooms that winning gay marriage seemed inevitable. But I think inside each one of us was the gnawing doubt that it wasn’t. We knew what some people still thought about us, because we’d experienced it directly. We didn’t take anything for granted.
Well, that took longer than I expected! Thanks for coming to the end. I’ve been hesitant to write much about psychedelics for this very reason — there’s always a lot to say, I think, and the less that’s said, the less I get it right. Tough for a former editor, now self-editor.
In other news, I had the lead article in Rolling Stone this week, on the odious North Carolina politician Mark Robinson. Different context, but the same religion-politics-activism nexus as this piece.
Some stuff I’ve read this week and recommend:
- / did a great piece on the threats to a fair election this year in Georgia. Sobering reading.
The Rolling Stone piece I mentioned in the article, entitled “People Are Trying Magic Mushrooms for Depression — and Accidentally Meeting God,” is worth a read.
Have I shared
‘s piece on Laura Loomer yet? Fantastic.
Finally, I’m not going to write a whole newsletter about this, but I am not on board with Halloween decorations in August. People, it is still summer. Horny Season, not Spooky Season. This holiday creep has to stop. Okay, I said it. See you next week.
Jay, I so appreciate this post-all of it!
"AI yields more bad trips than medicines do." Your captions are worth the price of admission.