Bad Trips
A Warning Regarding the Use of Psychedelics
Recent experiments in pharmacology have attempted to create a psychedelic substance that retains the alleged benefits of psychedelics—anti-depressant, spiritual insight, renewed curiosity, acceptance of mortality—but without the gross side effects—existential terror, emotional chasms, feeling like you’re dying, the whole world melting into terrible colors; in short, the drug without the trip. Providing a psychedelic experience, less the experience part, this trip-free psychedelic would be like desert mysticism without the desert, or like an airplane that is designed not to fly (the other name for this kind of psychedelic substance is microdosing: is it a placebo? Who can tell!). As McKenna likes to say, the only danger is if you take too little. That pharmacology would even attempt such a fool’s errand is a testimony to what the “psychedelic renaissance” really thinks of this stuff, and, more to the point, true psychedelic experience is not marketable. Certain psychedelic diehards (probably Mckenna) will argue that there are no bad trips; I remain unconvinced on this point. One kind of bad trip is bad due to external circumstance, like doing too much acid at the policeman’s ball, for example; another kind of bad trip exhumes a heretofore unknown catastrophe from your psyche that may be difficult, if not impossible, to process in the light of day. Some people have not had bad trips—not yet anyways. Nevertheless, it will be argued that psychedelic experience (like mystical experience) remains profound and mind-altering, precisely because it cannot be processed or integrated back into work-a-day life. At one point in history the task of bearing the unbearable was given to the shaman. Psychedelics allow you to become your own shaman. Keeping the set and setting tight can limit the psychic backdraft, but because these drugs absolve boundaries—both inside and outside—you can’t know the limit until you’re way past it.
