Post Tag: Perspective

I keep hearing the same explanation for decades of lost psychedelic research: Timothy Leary frightened the public and ruined everything. The lesson for the rest of us is to behave.

We should stop repeating this story. It shifts responsibility from the people who imposed and maintained prohibition to a man who challenged them. It also reduces the losses to missed research. Religious freedom, self-exploration and human flourishing belong in this history too.

In 2018, Michael Pollan acknowledged that the moral panic around LSD probably would have happened without Leary. He then said: “But on the research side, it really was Leary who provoked the psychiatric establishment to turn against LSD.”^[1] I think that gives Leary’s mistakes too much weight.

A broader version goes further: Leary single-handedly set psychedelic research back forty years. Even critics of drug prohibition repeat it.

Leary deserves a fairer hearing. Before he became a countercultural celebrity, he studied personality and human relationships. At Harvard, he and Richard Alpert investigated how psilocybin changed consciousness and recorded volunteers’ accounts. Taking those experiences seriously was a worthwhile scientific undertaking.^[3]

His Concord Prison Experiment asked whether psychedelic sessions could help prisoners avoid returning to prison. Later scrutiny undermined its claims about reduced reoffending. Its ambition still matters: he sought ways to help people change their lives.^[4]

He also brought questions about consciousness and personal freedom into public discussion. Who should be allowed to explore these experiences? Who should decide their meaning? These questions remain with us. His interest in them deserves attention alongside his mistakes.

Harvard colleagues raised serious concerns about participant safety, weak research controls and investigators taking psilocybin during studies.^[3] Those practices deserve criticism. His influence on the backlash deserves scrutiny. Neither establishes that he cost science forty years.

Leary did not control Congress, regulatory agencies, university budgets or pharmaceutical companies. Explaining their decisions requires examining their records. A judgment about his character cannot substitute for that work.

The crackdown on psychedelics extended a much older system of prohibition. San Francisco’s 1875 opium-den ordinance targeted a practice associated with Chinese immigrants. Racist claims about cocaine and Black people helped build support for drug control. Anti-Mexican prejudice appeared in the campaign against marijuana.^[5]

In the 1937 marijuana tax hearings, Harry Anslinger submitted a letter seeking federal action against a supposed menace among “degenerate Spanish-speaking residents.” The prejudice was part of the case presented to Congress.^[6]

LSD later became associated with youth rebellion and opposition to the Vietnam War.^[7] Officials confronted that movement with laws and agencies already accustomed to treating drug users as threats to public order. Leary did not build that system.

Research declined through several decisions and pressures. The 1962 drug amendments strengthened requirements for proving effectiveness. Psychedelic psychotherapy fit awkwardly into trials designed to isolate a drug’s effects: participants could often identify what they had taken, and the therapy depended on relationships and setting.^[8]

Historian Matthew Oram found that federal agencies helped sustain LSD studies after Sandoz withdrew its sponsorship in 1966. Some continued into the mid-1970s. He gives greater weight to difficulties in testing the treatment and declining psychiatric interest than to criminal prohibition in explaining the early collapse.^[8]

That history must also account for the burden of conducting research under drug prohibition. The 1970 Controlled Substances Act placed LSD in Schedule I.^[9] Research remained legally possible, but the system imposed controlled-drug permissions and handling requirements on top of ordinary research oversight.

Researchers have documented the consequences. A guide published in 2024 describes separate federal registration, state licenses where required, inspections, secure storage, drug-accountability records and further submissions for additional substances. Some state requirements for suppliers could add months.^[10] In 2013, laboratory researchers had already described licensing delays and repeated paperwork as obstacles to their work.^[11]

Those requirements consume staff time and money before a study produces a finding. Legal permission means little to a researcher who cannot afford the process. Calling the work “not banned” leaves out how difficult and expensive the rules made it.

We lost opportunities to test claims, identify harms and build knowledge. No one can calculate the treatments that uninterrupted research might have produced.

Drug-war propaganda has shaped public understanding, including within the psychedelic field. Those of us who write, teach and speak about psychedelics should examine the stories we pass on.

The Leary story teaches a political lesson too: stay respectable, avoid controversy, and perhaps authorities will leave you alone. It encourages the field to distance itself from religious practice, counterculture and uses that medicine cannot explain. I think that asks us to surrender too much.

People should not need a diagnosis to justify exploring consciousness. Religious use, creativity and philosophical inquiry are central human concerns. Medicine can help people suffer less without becoming the sole judge of which experiences matter.

Human flourishing includes learning how to live, finding meaning and building relationships. Communities can help people make sense of powerful experiences and examine what follows. Freedom to explore should not depend on proving that an experience produced a better patient, parent or citizen.

The same principle challenges psychedelic exceptionalism. Winning acceptance for psilocybin while leaving other drug users subject to punishment preserves the drug war’s central injustice. Different substances carry different risks. Those differences should guide care and regulation, not determine whose dignity counts.

Consent, honest information and accountability for harm belong in every setting. They do not require us to treat people who use drugs as criminals.

The drug war cost people their freedom, separated families and restricted religious and cultural practices. Its losses cannot be measured only in delayed medicines. A psychedelic field concerned with human flourishing must reckon with the punishment of people whose choices it does not admire.

The officials who enacted and maintained prohibition made choices. We should hold them responsible for those choices and stop blaming Leary.

Sources

1. Tim Adams, “Michael Pollan: ‘I was a very reluctant psychonaut,’” The Guardian, May 12, 2018, archived on Pollan’s website.
2. Harvard Department of Psychology, “Timothy Leary.”
3. Rick Doblin, “Dr. Leary’s Concord Prison Experiment: A 34-Year Follow-up Study,” Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 30, no. 4 (1998): 419-426.
4. Jennifer D. Oliva and Taleed El-Sabawi, “The ‘New’ Drug War,” Virginia Law Review 110 (2024): 1103-1168. See also Diana L. Ahmad, “Opium Smoking, Anti-Chinese Attitudes, and the American Medical Community, 1850-1890,” American Nineteenth Century History 1, no. 2 (2000): 53-68; and Isaac Campos, “Mexicans and the Origins of Marijuana Prohibition in the United States: A Reassessment,” The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs 32 (2018): 6-37.
5. Additional statement submitted by Harry J. Anslinger, 1937 Marihuana Tax Act hearings. The quoted words come from a September 4, 1936 letter to the Bureau of Narcotics by Floyd K. Baskette, city editor of the Alamosa Daily Courier, which Anslinger entered into the record.
6. Michaela Barber, John Gardner and Adrian Carter, “History, Hype, and Responsible Psychedelic Medicine: A Qualitative Study of Psychedelic Researchers,” Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 22 (2025): 327-343.
7. Matthew Oram, “Trials of Psychedelic Therapy,” Johns Hopkins University Press, October 4, 2018.
8. 21 U.S.C. § 812, schedules of controlled substances.
9. Brian S. Barnett et al., “Practical considerations in the establishment of psychedelic research programs,” Psychopharmacology 242 (2025): 27-43.
10. Adam Michael Stewart and Allan V. Kalueff, “Controlled substances and innovation of biomedicine: a preclinical perspective,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 14 (2013): 877.

Some of the historical framing in this piece draws on Kyle Buller, Joe Moore and Lenny Gibson, “A Cultural History of Psychedelics in the US,” in Philosophy and Psychedelics: Frameworks for Exceptional Experience (2022).

Perspective. Kevin Cranford is communications and engagement manager at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). The views expressed are his own.

Having a kid is the most psychedelic thing I have ever done. You meet this newborn person who cannot do much of anything, then watch as they learn to move, talk, make jokes, push your buttons and develop a personality you could never have predicted. I have had plenty of mind-expanding experiences in my life, but nothing prepared me for watching a human being become himself in real time.

I’m a Black 40-year-old father of two boys, Kevin and Noah. For many years, psychedelics have played a role in how I explore and understand myself. I began noticing that some of the habits I practiced around psychedelic experiences, including slowing down, tolerating uncertainty and paying closer attention to my own reactions, were changing the way I responded to my children.

Parenting is also brutally stressful. In a 2023 national survey conducted for the American Psychological Association, 48% of parents with children younger than 18 said their stress was completely overwhelming on most days, compared with 26% of other adults. Forty-one percent said that on most days they were so stressed they could not function, compared with 20% of other adults. The U.S. surgeon general later highlighted those findings in an advisory on parents’ mental health and well-being.

Some days I’ve lived inside those numbers. I just need to get out the door, and one of my kids is having trouble tying his shoe. I am thinking about where we need to be, how late we are and the dozen other things I need to do. He is thinking about the problem directly in front of him. He cannot tie his shoe.

I have learned to stop, take a breath and remind myself that I am dealing with a child. Then I go help him tie his shoe. Psychedelics and meditation have helped me practice that pause. It reminds me of one of my first mushroom experiences, long before most people were talking about set and setting. A friend in our group started having a hard time, fixating on the art and wallpaper in one room of the house. Getting angry at him for not pulling himself together on our schedule would not have helped. We got him out of that room, stayed calm and talked him through it until he settled. When my boys were babies and had their share of crying fits and tantrums, I leaned on the same lessons. Stay calm. Talk them through it where you can. Sometimes just move them to a different room.

Parenthood asks that of me constantly. Spaghetti falls on the floor. A room takes forever to clean. Somebody gets upset over something that seems insignificant to an adult. That’s not to say I don’t get frustrated (I do!), but I have become better at asking myself whether what just happened is really an emergency or worth getting upset about. Usually, the crisis in front of me is not really a crisis.

Research suggests that a parent’s ability to regulate their own emotions can shape how they respond to their children’s emotions. A 2024 systematic review published in Psychological Bulletin found that stronger parental self-regulation was generally associated with more supportive responses to children’s emotions. So the more I practice regulating myself, the better I get at responding to my kids when they can’t regulate themselves.

But paying attention isn’t always about managing a difficult moment. I love my phone as much as anyone, and there are moments when I have to tell myself to put it down and tap into my kids and family around me. They are only going to be this age once. Being present sounds obvious, but in the middle of work, errands and everything else competing for attention, it is a practice I’m mindful of.

Children also have an uncanny ability to show you parts of yourself you thought you had figured out or had forgotten about. I see some of my own shyness in my son, and sometimes my instinct is to push him through it. Then I have to ask what I was like at his age. I have actually called my parents to ask. As adults, we sometimes forget what our personalities were like as children. Understanding him sometimes requires remembering the kid I used to be and accepting that he does not have to move through the world exactly the way I do or would like him to.

That remembering can also be joyful. Psychedelic experiences have sometimes helped me reconnect with a more playful part of myself, the part that can be silly, draw, color, laugh uncontrollably and stop taking everything so seriously. On one mushroom trip with friends, the sidewalks looked like they were made of gold. A walk that normally takes five minutes took half an hour because we kept stopping to ooh and ahh at the shimmering pavement. I think about that walk a lot now. A five-minute walk with a child can take half an hour, because they are seeing things for the first time and have their own oohs and ahhs. Children already live closer to that world. Being able to meet them there has helped me connect with them on their terms instead of always asking them to enter mine.

For a lot of men, vulnerability is something we were taught to manage privately, if we acknowledged it at all. I grew up around familiar messages about boys and emotions. Toughen up. Get up. You’re fine.

Fatherhood has made me reconsider those instincts. When my son gets hurt, I try to get down to his level and ask what hurts, how badly it hurts and what he needs from me. When your child is scared or overwhelmed, you cannot always fix the problem. Sometimes your job is to stay with them while they experience it.

My wife has also helped me understand this more clearly. I would come home and tell her stories about patiently supporting a friend who was going through something difficult. She eventually asked why I sometimes struggled to offer our children the same patience.

That question stayed with me. I would give a friend space and would not yell at him because he was overwhelmed. Why was it sometimes harder to offer my children the same grace?

For me, being there also means creating things my children can count on. Before school starts, we camp in the backyard. We go to Myrtle Beach in the summer. They are simple traditions, but I want my kids to have memories connected to being together.

I do not think psychedelics by themselves make someone a better parent, but for me, they have sometimes created space to see myself more clearly, including how I react, where I lose patience and where my behavior does not line up with the father I want to be. An experience can give you something to examine, but insight is only a starting point. The work still has to happen afterward, through therapy, conversations with my wife, my parents and other fathers, and the choices I make in everyday life.

Fatherhood and the continued integration of psychedelic experiences have also changed how I see my own parents. I feel closer to them now than I have in many years. That’s in part because now, as a parent myself, I have a deeper understanding of them as people. My dad used to tell me that being a father was a thankless job, and I probably rolled my eyes. Now that I am older, looking back at who my father was at my age, 40, I understand him differently. I’m able to forgive him and give him grace in ways I couldn’t before having children of my own. He was a person working with the tools he had, just as I am.

Fatherhood gives me opportunities every day to see where I still have work to do. Sometimes it is something big, and sometimes it is a kid who cannot tie his shoe when I am already late. The practice is noticing what is happening in me before I make it his problem.

If you are a father carrying something you do not want to hand to your children, start by noticing it. Talk about it. Find a therapist, a friend, another father or a community where you can be honest. Fathers need that kind of village, too. We need places where we can talk about what we are carrying, instead of assuming we are supposed to figure it all out alone.

My children do not need me to have everything figured out. They need me to keep paying attention.