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Winner of the William M. Jones Best Graduate Student Paper Award at the 2013 American Culture Association Conference
Introduction
In 2010, the magazine Playboy published an article on "The New Psychedelic Renaissance," which examined the state of psychedelic research throughout the world: Israel, Jordan, Canada, Brazil, Germany, Spain, Switzerland and Mexico, were some of the countries researching into the potential of MDMA, ayahuasca, LSD or ibogaine, in various applications such as end-of-life anxiety or opiate addiction. In the United States, psychedelic drugs like psilocybin (one of the main psychoactive agents of "magic mushrooms"), LSD, mescaline (an alkaloid contained in peyote cacti), and MDMA (aka "ecstasy") were used in research for end-of-life anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorders, cluster headaches and post-traumatic stress disorder of Iraq war veterans (Kotier)2. CNN also documented contemporary therapeutic research with psychedelics, underscoring its promising early results-notably by interviewing Steven Ross of the New York University psilocybin/cancer research team.
In 2005, Harvard gave its go-ahead for research on LSD and psilocybin. From a historical standpoint, this was a highly symbolic move because it was the first time in over forty years that the prestigious university was authorizing psychedelic studies. That ban had its chief origin in the notorious deeds of Timothy Leary,3 who began his career as the "High Priest" of LSD by introducing psilocybin and LSD to the psychology department -and to some of its students. The university took issue with their "unscientific methods" for studying psychedelics and with the liberties he and fel- low psychologist Richard Alpert (now known as Baba Ram Dass) were taking. Leary decided that it was a good time to start promoting LSD as something even better than therapeutic well-being: LSD and the psychedelic experience, he reasoned, could change the world for the better.
Half a century later, such claims might still sound surprising. Yet, back then, several influential figures saw psychedelics and their power to radically question ontological certainties as having an inherently revolutionary potential. During his time at Harvard, Leary ran psilocybin sessions with the novelist Aldous Huxley, as well as some the foremost Beat figures. Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Neil Cassady and Peter Orlovsky underwent the psychedelic experience, but it was Allen Ginsberg, who immediately realized that it was time to start a...