A Socio-Cultural Examination of the Neo-Psychedelic Movement
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THE PHOENIX HAS RISEN FROM THE ASHES: A SOCIO-CULTURAL EXAMINATION OF THE NEO-PSYCHEDELIC MOVEMENT BY Shepherd M. Jenks, Jr. B. A., Liberal Arts, The Evergreen State College, 1981 M. A., Social and Cultural Anthropology, California Institute of Integral Studies, 1989 DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy American Studies The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico December, 1997 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS There are many people who made this dissertation possible. I first want to express gratitude to the Department of American Studies at the University of New Mexico for allowing me the freedom to study exactly what I wanted to study. I especially wish to thank the two primary members of my committee, Jane Young (Chair) and Rick Strassman for their editorial expertise, dedication, wisdom and patience. I also wish to thank the other two members of my committee, Gordon Hodge and Ruth Salvaggio, who came through for me at the end. I wish to thank the many members of the neo-psychedelic movement who offered me information, suport, and encouragement, in particular, Ralph Metzner, Terence McKenna, Michael Horowitz, Jerry Beck, Deborah Harlow, Tom Riedlinger, June Riedlinger, Lester Grinspoon, Jim DeKome, Kat Harrison, George Greer, Tom Lyttle, Ralph Melcher, and my brothers and sisters of the Earth Vision Circle. I wish to thank my two favorite academic compatriots, Peter Venturelli and Tim Rouse, for their humor, inspiration, and friendship. Finally, I wish to thank my parents, my sister, and my sons for their love, kindness, and patience in helping me to pursue my dreams. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. vi THE PHOENIX HAS RISEN FROM THE ASHES: A SOCIO-CULTURAL EXAMINATION OF THE NEO-PSYCHEDELIC MOVEMENT by Shepherd M. Jenks, Jr. B. A., Liberal Arts, The Evergreen State College, 1981 M. A.. Social and Cultural Anthropology, California Institute of Integral Studies, 1989 ABSTRACT There is a budding "neo-psychedelic movement" in the United States. This movement redefines and extends the original psychedelic movement that began in the 1950s, reached its zenith in the 1960s and declined in the 1970s. As in the original movement, the neo-psychedelic movement comprises large numbers of individuals and various groups that are devoted to the use, promotion and/or study of psychedelic drugs such as LSD, mescaline, psilocybin mushrooms, and MDMA (Ecstasy). These individuals and groups publicize their views and communicate with each other in a variety of newsletters, magazines, books, product catalogs, audio and video tapes, at conferences, and on the Internet. This movement continues to profess the benefits of psychedelic drugs in the face of severe penalties for their use, and a predominantly negative view of psychedelics disseminated by the government and the mainstream media. This dissertation examines the history, structure, beliefs, and behaviors of the neo-psychedelic movement within the overall context of American culture. The Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. vii movement is broken down into a wide variety of component parts, such as psychedelic celebrities/experts, psychedelic organizations, psychedelic research projects, and psychedelic artifacts. These component parts are then analyzed using an epistemological framework of four intersecting belief categories: 1) the entheogenic/ethnobotanical approach; 2) the scientific/psychotherapeutic approach; 3) the recreational approach; and 4) the cyberpsychedelic approach This dissertation concludes with a discussion of legal and illegal drug use, the debate over government drug policies, and the current and future impact of psychedelic drugs and the neo-psychedelic movement on American society. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................... vi CHAPTER 1 - INTRODUCTION ........................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 2 - BACKGROUND AND HISTORICAL INFORMATION ............. 10 CHAPTER 3 - A COMPONENTIAL DESCRIPTION OF THE NEO-PSYCHEDELIC MOVEMENT .......................................... 56 CHAPTER 4 - A PROPOSAL AND DISCUSSION OF AN EPISTEMOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK FOR THE NEO-PSYCHEDELIC MOVEMENT ...........................................140 CHAPTER 5 - CONCLUSION ........................................................................... 162 NOTES ................................................................................................................ 174 REFERENCES ................................................................................................... 179 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION From the standpoint of the established values of the older world, the psychedelic process is dangerous and insane-a deliberate psychotization, a suicidal undoing of the stability, conformity and equilibrium which man should be striving for. With its emphasis on consciousness, on internal, invisible, indescribable phenomena, with its multiplication of realities, the psychedelic experience is dreadfully incomprehensible to one committed to a rational, Protestant, achievement- oriented, behaviorist, equilibrated, conformist philosophy. But it makes perfect sense to one who is ready to experience the world in terms of the Einsteinian, exponential view of the universe (Leary 1964,17). Psychedelic drugs have played a complex, ambiguous, yet important role in American culture during the past fifty years. These drugs were first heralded as psychiatric wonder drugs (and even chemical weapons) in the late 1940s and early 1950s, then popularized as consciousness-expanding tools for the masses in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, and finally stigmatized as destructive pariahs by American society in the late 1960s and up until the present. Although psychedelic drugs have been a part of American society for decades, they are often associated solely with the 1960s. There are two major reasons for this association: 1) at this time psychedelics (primarily LSD) became known to the general American public through a largely negative media campaign, and 2) during the 1960s many young Americans were involved in the rebellious "Counterculture" movement, and these young people used psychedelic drugs in a highly visible manner as one way to profess their anti establishment commitment. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Although psychedelic drugs today remain as controversial as they ever were in the past, they continue to be an unusual phenomenon in the American cultural landscape. Since the mid-1980s a new and diffuse social movement has arisen on several fronts to keep these substances in the public mind. As in the original psychedelic movement, the "neo-psychedelic" movement comprises large numbers of individuals and various groups that are devoted to the use, worship, study and/or promotion of psychedelic drugs such as LSD, mescaline, psilocybin mushrooms, and MDMA (Ecstasy). This movement continues to profess the benefits of psychedelic drugs in the face of severe penalties for their use, and a predominantly negative view of psychedelics disseminated by the government and the mainstream media. The individuals and groups that comprise the neo-psychedelic movement publicize their views and communicate with each other in a variety of newsletters, magazines, books, product catalogs, audio and video tapes, at professional conferences, and in "cyberspace." The individuals in the neo psychedelic movement range from young people who take psychedelic drugs at all-night gatherings known as "raves," to people who take psychedelic drugs for "personal growth" in a psychotherapeutic context, to people known as "drug tourists" who travel to exotic locales around the world to ingest psychedelic substances with the "natives." The groups in the neo-psychedelic movement range from scientifically-oriented organizations such as the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), which promotes legitimate Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. scientific research with psychedelics, to religious organizations such as the Peyote Way Church of God, which worships the mescaline-containing peyote cactus as a divine sacrament. This dissertation is the product of research data about the neo-psychedelic movement that I have been collecting and analyzing for several years. During this study I have gathered data from three primary sources: 1) published materials written by the members of the neo-psychedelic movement itself or by various mainstream and alternative media sources; 2) two psychedelic conferences I attended; and 3) various sorts of cultural artifacts associated with the neo-psychedelic movement. I will first provide background and historical information about psychedelic drugs since the reader may be unfamiliar with this particularly complex and unusual class of psychoactive substance. Second, I will discuss the primary causes for the increased