Psychedelic Science 2017

Psychedelic Science 2017 was a six-day conference in Oakland that made the psychedelic research revival visible as both a scientific project and a contest over who could define the experience. More than three thousand people attended, including researchers, therapists, underground guides, psychonauts, funders, and entrepreneurs. The gathering’s most consequential scene was a panel featuring former heads of the American Psychiatric Association and the National Institute of Mental Health: psychedelic therapy, once pushed to the margins, had entered the mental-health establishment’s conversation, but acceptance came with conditions and a warning against carelessness.

A Revival Becomes a Public Gathering

In April 2017, the international psychedelic community assembled at the Oakland Convention Center for Psychedelic Science, an event held every few years and organized by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, the nonprofit Rick Doblin had established in 1986 to return psychedelics to scientific and cultural respectability. The scale of the gathering registered how rapidly the climate had changed. What had been a modest meeting in 2010, attended by psychonauts and a handful of renegade researchers, had become a six-day conference drawing over three thousand people from around the world. Researchers from twenty-five countries presented findings amid lectures, panels, and plenaries; outside those sessions, attendees browsed a large marketplace of psychedelic books, art, and music.

The event also marked an institutional turn. Earlier that year, the Food and Drug Administration had approved Phase 3 trials of MDMA, while psilocybin seemed likely to follow. At the conference, Rick Doblin described the change in public standing with a concise reversal: “We are not the counterculture. We are the culture.” The line captured the distance traveled from the period when sanctioned psychedelic therapy disappeared under cultural pressure, without implying that medical approval or broad agreement had already been secured.

For the book’s narrator, the gathering functioned as a reunion as well as a conference. Scientists interviewed during the reporting came together under one roof, alongside underground guides with whom the narrator had worked. Researchers and guides, shamans and veteran psychonauts, therapists hoping to incorporate psychedelics into their practices, funders, filmmakers, and prospective businesspeople shared the same event. There were concerns about the new attorney general’s efforts to revive the drug war, but the prevailing mood was celebratory. The mixture itself showed that the movement’s new visibility had not erased the distinct communities and traditions gathered around psychedelic use.

The Establishment’s Recognition—and Its Warning

The session many attendees remembered most was the plenary called “Future of Psychedelic Psychiatry.” Its significance lay in who sat onstage: Paul Summergrad, the former head of the American Psychiatric Association, and Tom Insel, the former head of the National Institute of Mental Health. George Goldsmith, an entrepreneur and health-industry consultant based in London, organized and moderated the panel. With his wife, physician Ekaterina Malievskaia, Goldsmith had been devoting substantial energy and resources to winning approval for psilocybin-assisted therapy in the European Union.

To the standing-room audience, the presence of Summergrad and Insel signaled recognition by the mental-health establishment. Insel contrasted mental health care’s record with the achievements of other branches of medicine, arguing that it had failed to reduce mortality from serious psychiatric disorders. He pointed to psychedelic therapy as a promising new model, and singled out the emphasis on psychotherapy alongside the drug as a novel approach. Yet he also noted that this model might be difficult for regulators accustomed to assessing drugs in isolation.

Asked by Goldsmith what advice he would give the researchers in the room, Insel answered, “Don’t screw it up!” He elaborated that the promise of the field did not remove the need for safety, rigor, and attention to reputational risk. Psychedelics might need to be rebranded in the public mind, he argued, and researchers would have to keep their work distinct from recreational use. A careless study or a disastrous patient experience, he and Summergrad warned, could damage the prospects of the entire field. The panel thus offered no uncomplicated endorsement: recognition brought the possibility of legitimacy, but also exposed the work to stricter institutional expectations and the consequences of failure.

The Question of the Right Container

That tension had older roots. In 1956–1957, Humphry Osmond, Al Hubbard, and Aldous Huxley advanced a model of psychedelic therapy that asked psychiatry to reconsider both its treatment structure and its account of healing. Rather than indefinite weekly sessions, the model centered on a single high-dose experience intended to produce a conversion-like change, requiring a reimagining of the customary roles of patient and therapist. Its spiritual dimensions and reliance on the conditions surrounding the drug made it difficult to assimilate to a profession increasingly committed to biochemical explanations of the mind.

The conference’s new institutional attention revived, rather than settled, the question of how such experiences should be organized. The first generation of researchers had tested different frameworks for containing the drugs’ effects, each with its own theory and protocols. The contrast drawn in the book is between those efforts to provide medical, religious, or scientific guidance and the do-it-yourself approach associated with Timothy Leary and the counterculture. The latter rejected the need for a formal container, a choice the narrative presents as risky, especially in the absence of established protocols and guides. The underground continued to preserve another strand of practice: many of the guides interviewed by the narrator traced professional lineages to earlier researchers and therapists, including Al Hubbard, Stanislav Grof, Timothy Leary, or Leo Zeff. The conference’s gathering of underground guides and university scientists made that continuity tangible without making their methods or status interchangeable.

Medicalization and the Uses Beyond Illness

The conference did not resolve whether medical treatment should be the sole legitimate future for psychedelics. Bob Jesse, present in the audience, worried that the medicalization advocated by establishment figures could become an overly narrow path. In the broader debate described around the event, some researchers regarded acceptance in medicine as a first step toward cultural acceptance: Rick Doblin favored outright legalization, while Jesse and Katherine MacLean imagined more carefully controlled access. Jesse proposed trained guides working in sustained, multigenerational settings reminiscent of churches where experienced elders administer ayahuasca in group ritual.

Other possibilities extended beyond treatment in a clinic. Julie Holland, a psychiatrist who had worked with Stephen Ross at Bellevue, envisioned a mental-health club combining elements of a spa or retreat and a gym, where people could occasionally have psychedelic experiences in a supportive setting. Even researchers less willing to discuss the idea publicly were considering the betterment of people who were not ill. These proposals echoed the expansive ambitions of the 1960s and made some mainstream colleagues uneasy—precisely the kind of expansion the panel’s cautions seemed designed to contain.

Whatever the setting, advocates stressed the need for trained guides and for integration afterward. Tony Bossis invoked Huston Smith’s distinction between undergoing a spiritual experience and building a spiritual life: the experience alone did not guarantee lasting meaning or benefit. Psychedelic Science 2017 therefore left its audience with two linked questions. Could psychedelic therapy satisfy the standards required for medical recognition, and could that recognition make room for forms of guided use beyond the clinic? Its celebratory return to public respectability made both questions newly urgent.