Can Psychedelics Really Get You Sober?

[Editor’s Note: Welcome to Please Trip Responsibly, a series of OpEds exploring areas in which the psychedelic community (and the burgeoning industry growing around it) can do better at becoming a unified front. We’ve inherited both wisdom and wreckage from cannabis, and there are plenty of lessons we’d be fools not to integrate. These essays dig into everything from the false promises of psychedelics as a one-size-fits-all cure for addiction, to the dangers of overconsumption in public, to the corporate vultures circling our culture. Altogether, they offer a reminder that the future of psychedelics isn’t inevitable, despite us all acting like it is. It’s something we have to shape with care, foresight, and accountability. Whether we like it or not, we’re all in this together, so let’s be smart, bold, and above all, let’s trip responsibly.]

Addiction is a death sentence. It’s a progressive and debilitating disease that lies, cheats, steals, and kills indiscriminately. My name is Patrick, and I am an addict. 

We are here today because the relationship between psychedelics and addiction recovery is deeply misunderstood. Misunderstandings can kill people when it comes to addiction. I’ve just about had it with this nonsense-ridden, pseudo-science advertising to every junkie from here to Manhattan that psychedelics can get them off drugs.

Let’s back up a bit before I really start to lecture my fellow rabbit-hole spelunkers. I’m not here to drug-shame. I love psychedelics like our president loves spray tans. Lucy is one of my dearest friends and closest confidants. Mushrooms restored my memory after a decade of serious benzo abuse when I couldn’t remember my own name. Psychedelics are wonderful tools, the full scope of which we can’t possibly understand yet, and that is exactly why no one among us should have the gall to preach that all you have to do to get off drugs is *drumroll* take more fucking drugs.

I need to illustrate the harsh reality here because it truly is life or death. Nixon’s drug war has caused irreparable damage to generations of Americans who made it through the Vietnam, Korean, and Iraq wars, 9/11, the 2008 financial crash, and COVID-19, only for them to face a new kind of slaughter. And the name of the murderer is fentanyl. Now, just as the feds are finally starting to scratch their reptilian chins and say, “Hey, on second thought, some of these drugs might actually be helpful to people,” many have taken it upon themselves to play poor man’s rehab counselor (I’m looking at you, sobriety coaches and overzealous psychedelic evangelists) and are feeding vulnerable people harmful information about psychedelics and addiction that may or may not be true. I implore you all to please get. your. shit. together.

A Brief But Potent History Lesson

To really understand this issue, we have to go back to 1935 in Akron, Ohio, when Bill W. met Doctor Bob and co-founded Alcoholics Anonymous. I am the furthest thing from a big book thumper, but it’s important to understand that before AA, there was absolutely no viable treatment for alcohol abuse (please bear in mind that no one really did drugs at the time except for shit like morphine and other opiates, like laudanum). Alcoholics were collectively considered to be hopeless cases and were usually shown the door or diagnosed with wet brain and committed to the asylum. As someone who was 51-50’d in 2017, I can assure you that psych wards are terrifying places, and they were 100 times worse in the early 1900s (Google Walter Freeman and his absolutely prolific lobotomy run in the 1950s). Suffice it to say, if you were a drunk before AA was founded, you were basically doomed. 

Fast forward through the 60’s. Americans of all shapes, sizes, and colors watched their friends get involuntarily shipped off to die in Vietnam. MLK Jr., Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, and both Kennedys all took a bullet to the head. Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, and the Students for a Democratic Society were involuntarily roped in with the Yippie movement spearheaded by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, who were passing out daisies to soldiers and trying to levitate the Pentagon with chanting, love, and lots of LSD. They all got the holy hell beat out of them by the Chicago P.D. at the Democratic National Convention of 1968. Timothy Leary was passing out acid to his students and the general public, and the CIA was facilitating it to everybody through all types of convincing undercover informants (which, we should all currently still be wary of, by the way). Woodstock shook the very foundation of the Earth we walk on, Haight-Ashbury was alive and well, and for a minute there, it really seemed like the tide might shift in our favor. Maybe, just maybe, the powers that be would stop trying to kill our friends, and we’d all trip our faces off around the fire singing Kumbaya.

Alas, the wave crested and ebbed. By 1971, Richard “Antichrist” Nixon let havoc ensue by implementing one of the most damaging public policy decisions in American history: the drug war. He declared drug abuse “public enemy number one,” turning the counterculture into a convenient scapegoat. Anyone who dared to “open their mind” or speak out against Vietnam suddenly found themselves criminalized, as Nixon’s administration weaponized drug laws to silence dissent and cage the very people who dared to imagine a better society and world. Between Nixon and the Reagans, our community has been set up — doomed, if you will — to spend decades upon decades looking over our shoulders and watching our friends die because it benefited the men in charge (and paved the way for for-profit prisons, but that’s a column for a different day).

60-some-odd years later, we have about 1,000 new drugs to contend with, made in dirty underground labs and trafficked across borders in one (or more) buttholes. Almost 100 years after the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous, the program is still widely considered the only viable treatment for addiction, with an abysmal success rate that still beats rehab, therapy, and incarceration without breaking a sweat. But it still doesn’t work anywhere near well enough to counter the massive slough of people with addiction created by the drug war.

Save Us, King Acid

Enter the new world of psychedelic therapy. Some psychedelic drugs show great promise in treating addiction, especially ibogaine. I’ve seen plenty of studies that suggest immense potential. I personally know people who have put heroin down after one good dance with ibogaine, plenty of others who stopped drinking after a good mushroom trip. Hell, I quit smoking after eating a couple of eighths right before finding out I was going to be a father. Even Bill W. famously tried LSD “in sobriety.” But let me be very clear: We don’t know anything about how, why, and for whom psychedelics work as a treatment for addiction.

There have been very few large-scale psychedelic clinical trials on addiction, especially in the U.S., because the government doesn’t (want to) fund them, and, not for nothing, there is an embarrassing lack of addiction research in general. We don’t know anything about what causes it or how to treat it, so we sure as hell can’t willy nilly start dosing people with mind-melting substances and expect them to sober up. It’s that kind of logic that’s gonna make the feds pull back every inch of rope we’ve forced them to give us. 

But that sure hasn’t stopped people from trying! Some of the least qualified among us are telling anybody who will listen that psychedelics saved them from addiction; still, they consume mushrooms or acid or mescaline every day and can’t get through a conversation without using words like “ethereal,” “cali sober,” or "manifestation.” Not only are you putting vulnerable people in danger by force-feeding them information that could ultimately get them killed, but this type of rhetoric also makes the whole community look like irresponsible baboons who spend all day sniffing ketamine and jumping from drum circle to drum circle, never presenting any actual solutions to anything.

You Can’t Kill What You Can’t See

The sad reality is, addiction is complicated. People can get addicted to anything, even psychedelics (though it is uncommon). Nobody has a magic pill to fix addiction for everybody because getting sober is not one size fits all. God knows if they did have sobriety pills, I’d take two with my breakfast like vitamins every fucking day. For me, the only solution was complete, sustained sobriety from everything, including my beloved plant medicines, but that doesn’t work for everybody. Addiction is a spectrum, and psychedelics are one of many potential tools that might be useful in treating it, but there are far too many unknowns to be presenting them as a cure-all this early in the game. Not only is it completely misleading, but it also actively damages our chances at decriminalization when the feds see a bunch of people unscientifically and unprofessionally broadcasting: “Hey, are you getting high on ‘hard drugs’ all the time? Try getting high on something else!”

As such, I encourage all my fellow advocates in the space who just want to trip in peace to please stop thinking you’re helping the situation by presenting psychedelics as treatments for every ailment under the sun. Frankly, the only argument we should need to take them is “they’re overwhelmingly safe for most people.” Don’t make the same mistake cannabis did by relying on this weird, quasi-medical — but also very recreational — logic. Psychedelics are their own thing entirely, and they could very well be incredibly useful for a whole plethora of issues plaguing the U.S., including addiction. But until we have considerably more research to back it up, playing doctor makes us look like quacks. In other words, we have to be careful and strategic with how we deliver controversial messaging.

I’m not telling anyone to stop experimenting or to not share helpful information about psychedelics, but please be informed of what you’re talking about before you go public with it. And above all, I beg of you, stop putting addicts in more danger. I’ve seen far too many people replace hard(er) drugs with psychedelics only to take them every day and eventually return to their drug of choice. Any recommendation that an addict should take psychedelics should come with massive caveats: Only in a controlled setting with a professional, only when traditional recovery treatments have failed (meaning they should have tried other forms of treatment), and only at the lowest frequency you find effective. 

I want psychedelics to have a safe and legal home for Americans, so please understand my comments come from love. Hell, they could very well be a safe and effective treatment for addiction, but I want the research to show that, and I want everybody to understand that if we don’t let the process play out, we won’t have a seat at the table, and Pfizer will be making all the decisions for us. I guarantee you that outcome will not make anybody happy. Please be the example so we can move forward in a way that works for everyone. I love you, and please trip responsibly. 

💌 If you loved this email, forward it to a psychonaut in your life.

Editorial Process

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