Psychedelics: psychiatry becomes (bad) religion

Mary Carreón, the Editor-in-Chief of DoubleBlind Magazine's email newsletter, asked a revealing question yesterday: "(S)hould a priest really lose his collar for trying to deepen his connection to God?"

She was referring to the formal deposition (removal from the priesthood) of Rev. Hunter Priest, the Episcopalian cleric who participated in a Johns Hopkins psychedelic study and later left his pulpit to found a "Christian Psychedelic" not-for-profit advocacy group called Legare. I wrote about this recently.

When confronted with arguments like those of my Episcopal priest sister--namely that trying to deepen one's connection with God by using drugs is quite un-Christian, often illegal, and perhaps blasphemous--psychedelic drug advocates fall back to a "scientific-medical" framework, saying that so much human misery might be alleviated if only they were allowed to do research. But the "research" they end up conducting when they are allowed to do so always looks more like (very dark) religion, not science. This has been true since the 1950's.

Jules Evans offers what might be a preview of horrifying, random and unpredictable violence that will call up memories of Jonestown and the Manson murders, which we may see rise out of popularity of psychedelics with elite special forces military personnel who have become a "Fort Bragg Cartel." One story features 82nd Airborne paratrooper Enrique Roman-Martinez, who liked LSD so much he had it tattooed on his arm. He went camping with some military buddies in Fort Bragg, they dropped acid, he had a bad trip and disappeared. His head turned up floating in a lake the next day, apparently chopped off with an axe. His body was never found and his death is still unsolved.

Besides such horror shows, a massive increase in sexual abuse under guises of mental therapy is also predictable. Various mainstream and psychiatric/psychological media have commented about this risk.

So we are looking forward to dark insanity, and less trust of professionals claiming to cure it: not exactly the road to salvation imagined generations ago by Timothy Leary and Adelle Davis. When Mary Carreón writes of a deepening connection to God, maybe she means the Other Guy.

It's good that the Priest lost his collar. Let's throw some psychs in jail, too.