Why did it take psychedelics so long to become popular?

Some lessons from history and archaeology

Here’s a chart for you:

Source: Daniel de Visé, “‘Magic’ mushroom use by young adults has nearly doubled in three years," The Hill, 06/19/2023.

In other words, the share of Americans aged 19 to 30 who have used a psychedelic in the past year is now a little over 8%. What’s striking about this is not just the number itself, but the rate of increase. The percentage has more than doubled since 2015. 

Meanwhile, last month a poll of 1,500 registered voters (conducted by UC Berkeley’s new Center for the Science of Psychedelics) found that 61% now support “creating a regulated legal framework for the therapeutic use of psychedelics.”

Importantly, this rapid change in attitudes is not just a U.S. phenomenon. It’s visible around the world, from Ukraine to Jamaica, and from Brazil to Gabon.

With boosters of psychedelic therapy now including leaders in both the Democratic and Republican parties as well as sports stars, psychedelic substances are no longer confined to a single cultural category, as they were in the 1950s (when they were largely the domain of psychiatrists and spooks) or 1960s (when they became mired in Nixonian cultural polarization).

In other words, psychedelics are popular in a way that they’ve never been before. Even the famously drug-averse Joe Biden is apparently newly open-minded on the topic.

All of which prompts me to ask: why did it take so long?

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As the historian David Courtwright notes in his book Forces of Habit, the past five centuries have been profoundly shaped by the rise of several drugs which have one big thing in common: they became global commodities during the early modern period.

Take coffee, for instance, which first enters the historical record in 15th century Arabia, then swiftly pushes into the Ottoman Empire and Europe before becoming a global obsession by the 18th century.

Tobacco, another major early modern drug, was widespread throughout the Western Hemisphere before the Columbian Exchange, but did not reach consumers in Asia, Africa and Europe until around 1520 — a shift in consumption patterns with consequences which are still being felt today.

Or witness the saga of the coca leaf. The stimulating coca plant, which is native to the Andes, was harder to transplant into new regions than tobacco or coffee. Also, the leaves lost potency when shipped long distances. This all changed in 1860, when a German chemist hit upon a new wave of extracting the cocaine from coca leaves. Within two decades, things had gotten pretty wild — from cocaine toothdrops targeted at infants (!) to young Lucien Freud’s “Über Coca” to no less a personage than the Pope endorsing Vin Mariani, the coca-infused wine which, in turn, inspired the inventor of Coca-Cola to enter the cocaine-dealing business himself.

Given this, why didn’t peyote, ayahuasca, or psilocybin mushrooms follow suit? Why wasn’t there a global vogue for eating San Pedro cacti or tripping on morning glory seeds in the same era when global consumers embraced so many other novel drugs?

In 2021, I published an academic article called “The Failed Globalization of Psychedelic Drugs in the Early Modern World” which dug into this question. It’s free to read at The Historical Journal here.

To summarize a key point from it: one easy answer is that psychedelic substances are famously mentally destabilizing. The appeal of alcohol or even opiates, such an argument might go, is universally apparent: they make you feel good. By contrast, psychedelics are often associated in popular consciousness with deeply unpleasant bad trips.

A typical 20th century depiction of a bad psychedelic trip, complete with circus music and noxious colors: Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in The Trip (dir. Robert Corman, 1967).

Naturally, a substance with such properties would not become as globally popular as, say, coffee, tobacco, coca, or opium.

But there are several problems with this argument:

1. Early modern commenters on tobacco also fixated on its dangerous properties, its ability to provoke hallucinations, and even its supposedly demonic origin. Likewise, coffee was attacked as a pernicious intoxicant in print throughout the early modern era (see the “Women’s Petition Against Coffee” of 1674 for one hilarious example). Drug experiences are so profoundly shaped by cultural and individual expectation that it is almost impossible to make safe assumptions about how a drug was experienced in different times and places.

2. Of course, a potent psychedelic like psilocybin mushrooms, taken in large doses, really can be highly unpleasant. Yet as Paracelsus said, “the dose makes the poison.” After all, very large doses of caffeine can be deeply dysphoric, too. If you don’t believe me, just check out the Erowid trip reports for caffeine, which feature such classic entries as "Becoming Insane," "Hell,” “My Ordeal,” “Always Use a Spoon,” and “Dear God, Please Spare Me Tonight.” There’s nothing inherent about psychedelics that require one to use them in heroic doses. Conceivably, early modern people could’ve been microdosing peyote along with their hot chocolate, tea, and other newfangled drugs of the era.

3. And finally, clearly people really do like psychedelics. A lot. If you don’t believe me, scroll back up to that chart which shows that, among people in their 20s, psychedelics now number among the most popular recreational drugs of any kind — at 8%, they’re up there with cigarettes.

So why, then?

I believe the “inward-facing” nature of psychedelics — not just as a subjective experience, but in terms of how they operate in society — may be part of the answer.

When I argue that psychedelics are “inward-facing,” I don’t mean that they are always used in private contexts. In fact, psychedelics in the premodern world were often used in very public ways to assert political or religious power. For instance, Aztec lords and religious leaders would consume psilocybin mushrooms in elaborate public ceremonies.

But let’s keep in mind the dynamics of ritual, which demarcates the sacred and the profane, the chosen few and the excluded masses. Whereas tobacco, coffee, or tea tend to assume the role of drugs of sociability — something offered and used in everyday contexts — psychedelics were drugs of difference, substances taken to mark special occasions or to distinguish one group (the Aztec priests or nobles on the platform) from another (the crowd beneath them).

There is interesting evidence from archaeology on this front. Take, for instance the finding that two different cultures of psychedelic use existed simultaneously in the area around Cuzco, Peru in the 600 to 1000 CE period. Political and religious elites from the Wari culture, which was in the process of colonizing the region at this time, performed public ceremonies involving the consumption of chicha (an alcoholic fermented corn drink) which was likely combined with the powdered seeds of the Anadenanthera plant (which, like ayahuasca, contains DMT). The author of the article linked above, Véronique Bélisle, finds that the local people who the Wari ruled used psychedelics in a distinctly different way — even though they were consuming the same plant, DMT-bearing Anadenanthera.

A Wari chicha cup of alabaster and inlaid shell, circa 700-1000 CE, Central Peruvian highlands, via Sotheby’s.

Bélisle writes:

In the case presented here, both the people of Ak’awillay and the Wari consumed hallucinogens, but the contexts of ingestion were so different that they reflect fundamentally different bases for religious authority.

She speculates that non-elite locals of the region saw the psychedelic experience as a form of “esoteric knowledge.” This made it, in a sense, untranslatable across the cultural and social barriers dividing locals from Wari invaders. It is a striking fact given that these were two relatively similar cultures of the pre-Columbian Andes — not to mention two cultures which both used the same psychedelic substance to begin with.

One of the earliest European accounts of ayahuasca was written by a 17th century Jesuit priest, one Padre Lucero, who lived among the Yameo people in the Peruvian Amazon. It points to a similar theme of psychedelics as “drugs of difference.”

Here’s a translation of the original primary source, which was written in 17th-century Spanish:

It's a shame, indeed, that many of [the Yameos] also assign the name of the Devil to the Spanish God, and some even to the missionary who teaches them. Perhaps it's because the Evil One, in order to instill horror in those who might bring them to a rational and Christian life, has allowed himself to be seen by them in such dress and figure… For divination, they drink the juice of either the floripondio blanco [angel’s trumpets, i.e. Brugmansia], which they also call campana [bell] due to its shape, or a vine commonly called ayahuasca, both very effective in depriving one of their senses and even life if taken in excess. They also use the latter sometimes to cure themselves of habitual diseases, mainly headaches. So, the one who wants to divine drinks it with certain ceremonies and, while deprived of his senses, lies down mouth down so as not to choke from the strength of the herb. They remain like this for many hours, and sometimes even two or three days, until the drug has run its course and the drunkenness ends. Once it has passed, they reflect on what the imagination presented.¹

Lucero next writes that sometimes “the whole village gathers” and “everyone drinks.” Even in this sociable context, though, “it does not have the same virtue for everyone, but only for some of the most authorized prophets and diviners.”

Here, again, we see the motif of psychedelics as somehow inward-facing, as drugs of difference. There is seemingly always a built-in distinction between them. The “whole village” might use ayahuasca, but it’s only the “authorized” experts who benefit from its full “virtue.”

This brings us up to the present. As I wrote in The Washington Post last month, as psychedelics move toward public acceptance, there will be increasing pressure to assign specific groups (whether they are psychiatrists or ritual practitioners) as the “insiders” who possess the requisite wisdom.

Carving out a new social role for various kinds of psychedelic experts is very likely a good thing. Psychedelics really do carry very real risks along with their potential rewards. They ought to be used with proper screening, full knowledge of potential downsides, and a safety net in place to catch those who suffer psychological harms.

But I do worry that one of the great reoccurring motifs of psychedelics throughout history — their role as elite differentiators — might reassert itself now. It would be a shame if we allowed these fascinating substances to be restricted only to a single social role, whether that role is “sacrament used in spiritual retreats” or “pharmaceutical prescribed by doctors.”

Psychedelics, for whatever reason, are both one of the oldest categories of drugs used by humans, and among the most recent to become widely popular. This makes them a fascinating case study of how the social and cultural role of drugs might evolve in the 2020s and beyond.

Let’s let them find their own unique path into the future, rather than trying to force them into ill-fitting categories from the failed experiments of the past.

Weekly links

• The persistence of the Saturday Evening Post (Columbia Journalism Review). I thought this was an interesting number: “The Post was founded in 1821 and printed in the former office of Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette, which had ceased publication. Cyrus H.K. Curtis bought the Post in 1897, when circulation had stalled at two thousand readers.” This Substack currently has ~880 readers. It would be interesting to look more into how the economics and readership of 19th century periodicals compare to 21st century newsletters.

• List of hallucinogenic plants in Chinese herbals (Wikipedia).

Primary source of the week

With Lt. Ja[me]s Hamilton conduct experiment on T[ruth] Drug—Volunteer as subject—knock myself out cold with 1 gram Cig—5:30 pm…Dinner at Chinatown 7:30 pm.

— from the May 24, 1943 diary entry of George Hunter White, a narcotics cop who was enlisted by the OSS during World War II (and, later, the CIA as part of the MKULTRA program) to test cannabis, mescaline, LSD and other substances on unwitting civilians. My forthcoming book Tripping on Utopia is the first to make full use of White’s diaries, which were recently digitized by Stanford University.

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1. Letter from Padre Juan Lorenzo Lucero, S.J., to the Duque de la Palata, Viceroy of Peru, received November 20, 1681, and transcribed and printed in the "Noticias Auténticas del Famoso Río Marañon," Boletín de la Real Sociedad Geográfica, Tomo XXVIII (Madrid, 1889). Here is the Spanish text that I’ve translated, beginning at the bottom of the page with “Más comun es la noticia que tienen todos del Demonio.” Like other early modern Christian missionaries, Lucero cannot conceive of a source of the visions and insights offered by ayahuasca that is not demonic in origin. He also misleading describes the ayahuasca experience as “drunkenness” [borrachera]. But reading his account against the grain yields some interesting finds. For instance, even Lucero is forced to admit that this supposedly demonic intoxication is also used “to cure… habitual diseases.”