In an interview on Drugs

Finally, Cleansing The Doors of Perception. 

This is different from all the rest. Huston Smith deals with a class of drugs that we don’t normally discuss much in the course of thinking about drug policy, and that’s the hallucinogens or psychedelics. And he talks about benefit and not cost. His claim is that some people using psychedelics have extremely profound experiences, not distinguishable from a spontaneous spiritual-religious experience, and that if we had a social order that allowed more people to do that then we would be happier and better. 

Does he give examples? 

Oh yes, and some historical analysis as well. The book is really a collection of essays written over a long period of time. He claims, for example, that kykeon, a drink that was at the heart of the Eleusinian Mysteries, the centre of Greco-Roman culture for a thousand years, was a hallucinogen. The followers went through a period of purification and then through a secret ceremony, which we don’t know much about, but it looks as if the potion they drank was a hallucinogen. It was regarded as a rebirth, and the Eleusinian initiates called themselves ‘the twice-born’, so when you see the bumper sticker that says ‘Born Again Pagan’, that’s them. 

Do you agree? I think of people who have taken a lot of acid as completely brain-fried. 

Well, people who took a lot of acid… I think it was Alan Watts who said: ‘When you get the message, hang up the phone.’ These people who took it a lot probably didn’t get it right the first time. Most conditions under which psychedelics are taken aren’t very conducive to any sort of insight. But in a recent experiment at Johns Hopkins, they gave people a little bit of psycho-spiritual preparation and then a big dose of psilocybin, the active agent in mushrooms, and about two-thirds of them had a full-on mystical, spiritual experience. 

So it’s the brainwashing prior to taking the drugs rather than the drugs? 

Not exactly brainwashing. It’s just a few hour-long sessions with a psychologist. There’s no doubt that the wisdom is not the drugs, but the fact that you can fairly reliably produce something that people spend their whole lives in monasteries trying to get to, seems to me a pretty exciting result. 

It makes it sound quite inviting. Have you ever taken it? 

Not a question I answer. If you do what I do, which is write about drug policy, you’ve got a choice between admitting that you’re talking about stuff of which you have no experience or admitting that you are a law-breaker and a bad citizen. So, given those alternatives, I prefer a discreet silence. 

The thing about this book is that it is not written by some whacked-out hippie. Here we have one of the most prominent scholars of comparative religion in the world saying: ‘What sometimes happens to people under psychedelics is what’s at the root of all the world’s religions.’ That moment of seeing yourself at one with the universe is where all the religions start – at the burning bush, on the road to Damascus, under the bodhi tree. And that experience is available on a quite democratic basis, according to Smith, and he wants us to pay attention to that very astounding fact.

I’m going to go out and get me some. 

Until fairly recently you could have. It’s only a few years ago that fresh magic mushrooms were banned in Britain. 

Actually, I find the whole thing terrifying. I have enough problems clinging on to sanity as it is. 

Right. Anybody sane who thinks about doing this stuff wants to do it with preparation and with a guide. It’s not something you do alone.