Scientific researchers who author papers must disclose any financial conflicts of interest when publishing their studies — like if they’re employed by companies that might profit from the subject matter being investigated. Psychedelic researchers, however, are not required to admit whether they have altered their minds or tripped on the drugs they are studying. But should they be?
“We’ve got a paper on challenging psychedelic experiences in review currently where the journal editor has asked us to disclose our own personal use of psychedelics,” says Dr. David Luke, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Greenwich.
His team of 10 co-authors decided to only divulge how many of them have had psychedelic experiences, as a means to retain anonymity. “Turns out all 11 of the authors had had psychedelic experiences, so that kind of automatically de-anonymizes us all,” Luke says. “The main concerns are around stigma and the sense that colleagues will think you’ve lost your objectivity if you happen to have taken the substances in question. I hope we can begin to transcend that.”
Back in the 1960s, Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychologist who implored students to “turn on, tune in, and drop out,” appeared to get a little too high on his own supply. The backlash helped spark the war on drugs, stifling research and deterring scientists from embracing psychedelics for decades.
Even if psychedelics do shift our consciousness, scientists don’t disclose whether the medications or vaccines they study have given them great benefits.
READ: Roland Griffiths, Beloved Psychedelic Researcher, Dies at 77
In a recent paper, 86 % of drug researchers reported drug use, and 11% said they had disclosed it in their papers. Of the 669 researchers interviewed, just over half said they had taken psychedelics — though that number is likely higher among those specializing in psychedelic research.
Luke maintains that taking psychedelics at high doses should not be a prerequisite for studying psychedelics, though he is concerned that if a scientist is effectively facilitating a psychedelic journey without having experienced one themselves, then there could be greater risks. “Psychedelic research is psychonautic science, to a large extent,” he claims.
A group of “psychedelically naive” neuroscientists recently discussed conducting a study putting naive participants through fMRI brain imaging shortly after taking ayahuasca, which often brings about an intense, nauseating experience, Luke says. “Luckily a colleague of mine who had had some experience said, ‘You can’t give people ayahuasca for the first time and put them in an fMRI scanner.’”
He also believes that those who have had psychedelic experiences derive beneficial insights into both the subjective psychological experience and the phenomenology of the experience.
But Manoj Doss, PhD, a cognitive neuropsychopharmacologist at the University of Texas in Austin, told VICE that the often very meaningful subjective experiences scientists have gained from their trips can bias psychedelic research.
“The experience these drugs produce seems to give the impression that one is gaining insight into the architecture of the brain/mind, perhaps leading to nearly every psychedelic researcher claiming that these drugs will teach us something about consciousness or cognition more broadly,” he said. “Instead, what all the research has taught us is about the effects of drugs on the mind, not some underlying principle we did not already know about the mind.”
Luke, however, points to a number of occasions in which scientists taking psychedelics themselves potentially accelerated scientific discoveries. Albert Hofmann may have taken longer to isolate and identify psilocybin and psilocin from magic mushrooms had he and his lab assistants not taken them themselves, Luke claims. His firsthand experiences likely allowed him to connect specific effects with the compounds he was isolating, and Hofmann then took synthetic psilocybin to help confirm what he had isolated.
“The same goes for mescaline and Arthur Hefta, and indeed Stephen Szára and his discovery of the psychoactive properties of DMT,” Luke says. There was also the famous case in which Wade Davis and Andrew Weil were able to confirm that smoking the secretions of the bufo alvarius toad produces an intense psychedelic experience, after smoking it themselves.
This provoked a mini uproar at the time, back in 1992, and the two most prestigious journals – Nature and Science – refused to publish the paper, while the Wall Street Journal published a screeching front page article accusing the scientists of fomenting a new drug craze.
“I think the kind of inspiration which comes from an experience makes for the best kind of science,” Weil said in his defense.
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