Member-only story
Psychedelics Changed My Life. Can They Change the World?
Psychedelics are making a comeback. Are we ready for them this time?
In 1987, my older brother Jeremy discovered magic mushrooms. He came in one day and showed me a bag of golden tops he had picked in the bush north of Melbourne. He talked excitedly about his experience, how the mushrooms seemed to function as a non-specific amplifier of consciousness, turning up the volume on colour and sensation, magnifying thoughts and impressions so that new vistas and understandings opened up.
This sounded good to me. I was at an impasse in my life. Two years before, I had emerged deeply miserable from my tour of duty in the Australian state school system, after which I had spent a gap year working in a computer retail store under a tyrannically fastidious boss. For want of better ideas, I had then taken up a Science/Law degree, where I languished in classes on contract law and inorganic chemistry, unbearably restless and miserable. I felt trapped in a life of excruciating and meaningless mundanity, and I could see no way out.
If I had expected that taking mushrooms would constitute a fun diversion from my boredom, I was soon in for a rude awakening. Almost as soon as the mushrooms took effect, I was steered straight into the core of my anxieties. Trying to suppress a rising dread, I fled the rather toxic…
