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One hazy dawn this summer at the Meadow in the Mountains festival in southern Bulgaria, the earth tilted and Amber (some names have been changed to protect people’s identities), a 20-year-old east Londoner, laughed as the sun rose and the clouds slid off the hillside. For years, she’d been terrified of what would happen if she took acid, but she felt it was time.
“I was on a good level,” said Amber, who described being perched on top of a giant wooden honeycomb art installation, staring at another construction made to look like a dragon. “There was this dragon carved out of wood, and in its mouth were these flag things. The dragon looked over these mountains. We met these people who were just so funny. I was with this guy I’d never met and we talked for eight hours straight, sitting on top of this honeycomb, with this dragon breathing fire. It was ridiculous. I felt like I was in another world. It was like a fairyland.”
The rise in clinical testing of psychedelics for depression and PTSD, and Silicon Valley execs microdosing LSD to keep on top of their game, has been well documented in the media, largely because these are drugs more associated with the counterculture, tree huggers, and jail time than science labs and corporate elites. But outside of the corporate types and clinics, is there a psychedelic renaissance happening on the streets? And if the Snapchat generation is learning how to tune in, turn on, and drop out, why now?
The data is conclusive. Tripping is up, most notably among young people. US government statistics show 1.31 million 18- to 25-year-olds admitted taking LSD in 2017 compared with 317,000 in 2004—almost a fourfold increase since the mid 2000s. And it’s not just in the US. Even among 12th graders, the use of LSD is edging up. In Britain, LSD use has jumped to levels among young people not seen since 2000, and the use of ketamine, the hallucinogenic anesthetic famous for spaced-out K-holes, has tripled in the last three years.
We were drinking tea in Amber’s dad’s garden shed, which is kitted out with a sound system and floor-to-ceiling vintage vinyl. I wanted to know why Amber and hundreds of thousands of young people like her around the world are using psychedelics such as LSD, magic mushrooms, ketamine, and DMT in greater numbers than we’ve seen in decades. Is the growing use of psychedelics an escapist response to our broken political and economic systems, a search for meaning in a universe so perverse that Prince and Bowie can die in the same year a racist replaced Obama?
One of the popular motivations for taking psychedelics recorded by the Global Drug Survey was simply to have fun, a key element of tripping that often gets lost. Harry, a 22-year-old lab supervisor from Arizona, told me: “The most impactful experiences you’re going have taking MDMA or mushrooms are going to be in the woods with a bunch of your friends and strangers, laughing hysterically and being a total fool. That is the cathartic thing. That is what some people are missing.”
It’s this union of the sacred, the secular, the functional, the ridiculous, and the bizarre that characterizes modern-day psychedelic culture. So easily typecast as naïve, utopian, and half-baked, there is, in my mind, an undeniable value in pure enjoyment, the political power of the party, and the psychedelic experience as a force to unite and inspire.
And why should those attempting to view the world and themselves honestly, critically, with empathy and idealism—however misguided their conclusions, impractical their methods, or unlikely their outcomes—be subject to greater derision than the cynical profiteers, the polluters, and the narcissists?
Within 20 years, I believe MDMA, magic mushrooms, and LSD will be available legally in the US and the EU, and beyond, and that many millions more people will use these drugs. They will do so with more knowledge, and more safely, than any generation before them. It is almost certain they will do so with more cultural legitimacy, and less legal pressure than any prior generation, and I believe that’s a positive development.
But if rising recreational psychedelic use is an escapist response to our overworked, vapid, screen-locked culture, then what does the future hold?
Flash-forward even just to 2038. First, the utopian view. Automation will have radically altered our work-life balance and our economies; minimum-income experiments will solidify into economic orthodoxy, and a new, broader-based, time-rich class will emerge from the ashes of capitalism.
Drug laws have been overhauled, and psychedelics are available and affordable to all who want them, whether medically or recreationally. Psychedelic holiday camps will open. In LED-lit parks beneath climate-controlling geodesic domes, happy, well-balanced citizens will puff on DMT vapes or slap on a short-acting transdermal mushroom patch for a quick psychic lift. Choirs of angelic nano-drones gently strum on celestial harps, on command.
Or maybe not. Capitalism is doggedly popular, and populist authoritarians are on the rise. Perhaps the drug divide will reflect increasing social divides. The rich and middle classes remain even freer to indulge their every chemical whim, insulated from the law thanks to their privilege, while poor drug users, exposed to heightened security and police patrols, are jailed for the same offenses. Maybe life will continue on its dystopian trajectory, with legal clinical or recreational use of MDMA or LSD granted only to the upper classes, to the well-insured and the wealthy.
Will psychedelic drug use remain off-grid, under the radar? I don’t know. But it’s as clear as the LSD crystals forming in a two-liter flask somewhere in a hidden laboratory, right now, that we’ve only just come up on this trip—and there’s still a long road ahead.
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Additional reporting by Max Daly
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