by Jean-Louis Gassée

I made a belated discovery: Besides designing silicon chips and writing code, Valley people very actively use psychedelics for life improvement. Today, we look at four books that guided me into their world.

Having landed in Cupertino in 1985, it’s taken me more than three decades to discover what lurks under silicon chips: psychedelic mushrooms.

The revelation started two years ago with NPR’s Terry Gross interview with Michael Pollan for his book How to Change Your Mind, best summarized by Wikipedia [as always, edits and emphasis mine]:

[…] a book about the history and future of psychedelic drugs. Pollan argues that psilocybin and LSD are not drugs that make people crazy, which he calls the biggest misconception people have about psychedelics, but rather drugs that can help a person become “more sane” by, for example, eliminating a fear of death.

Pollan is a journalist, an author, a professor of Literature at Harvard and of Journalism at Berkeley where he resides. His considerable output covers, inter alia, food and, most recently, an audiobook titled Caffeine. The podcast of the highly engaging dialogue between the author and the irreplaceable Terry Gross can be found here.

In How to Change Your Mind, whose 600+ pages I read at a gallop, Pollan chronicles the early history of psychedelics, and vividly describes the technical, neurochemical aspects of their action on the mind. He then turns personal as he recounts his own three trips with LSD, psilocybin, and the smoked venom of a Sonoran Desert toad containing a substance known as 5-MeO-DMT. The book ends with psychotherapeutic and spiritual discussions of addiction, depression, and the last stretch of life. Because of my age (76) and hematological issues the book resonated for me.

Current legislation makes it illegal to engage in such experiments, at least in the US. As a result, Pollan had to disguise names and locations, but I got the clear impression he didn’t have to go to the other side of the world for his trips. So I started to ask my Palo Alto and Woodside breakfast companions what they knew of psychedelics.

I ought to have asked earlier. Without exception, they either had what attorneys call personal knowledge, or knew someone who had. Several offered contacts, guidance or more. When I protested they should have enlightened me earlier, one replied he knew of my caution with alcohol stemming from my father’s bad history with the substance. True, it took me until age 55 to accept that I wasn’t destined to becoming an alcoholic. Then I remembered how, years ago, my fear of substances led me to dismiss a suggestion to try ecstasy a.k.a. MDMA for therapeutic purposes.

What transpired from these conversations was that a significant number of Valley people engage in consumption of psychedelics, sometimes for entertainment, especially the MDMA empathogen, or for self-improvement with mushrooms that contains the psilocybin entheogen, or a combination.

My interest in the matter wasn’t lost on Amazon. Its hypervigilant recommendation engine pointed me to another book titled Consciousness Medicine. As I quickly found out, the book’s author, Françoise Bourzat, actively promotes the therapeutic and spiritual benefits of psilocybe cubensis mushrooms, as can be seen on her website featuring talks and other works — including a blurb from Michael Pollan. Reading her very thorough book, which starts with a vivid account of her early life, I found out she was local but had to take clients outside of the country, in the Mazatec area of Mexico mostly, where consuming magic mushrooms is respected.

From there, Amazon directed me to what I know now is a classic: James Fadiman’s The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide. This is yet another substantial book that covers the post-WWII explorations at Stanford and other institutions that were brought to a halt by our spastic government in 1966. Research today is tightly controlled at Johns Hopkins and Stanford. Fadiman, another local, also mentions the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelics Studies (MAPS) and the Heffter Research Institute. I’ll conclude the reference to his book with two sentences that spoke to me:

“What I learned from my own research is that psychedelics take your life experience and compost it, so that something new can grow. If you don’t have much to compost, you may not get much out of it.”

There is much more to read, of course; trust Jeff Bezos’ recommendation engine. For example, you might find A Really Good Day by Ayelet Waldman an interesting introduction into a practice mentioned by several of my breakfast companions: microdosing, taking something like a tenth of a “normal” dose of a psychedelic at about three-day intervals. As I’m told, and Waldman confirms, microdosing seems to work in subtle, beneficial ways. (Waldman, who also used MDMA with her husband, tells us it’s the complete opposite of sex: the first time is the best. MDMA-curious should plan accordingly.)

All this leaves me wondering why our laws regard non-addictive, neurologically and often spiritually beneficial substances the way they treat cocaine or opioids — noting how our Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) stood aside while pill mills dealt more than 76 billion opioid doses.

But perhaps there is hope.

About a quarter century ago, at another Il Fornaio breakfast, I harangued a former Apple CFO, arguing that the war on drugs was and would stay a losing one. In particular, I wanted our college son to be able to buy cannabis without fear of knives or gendarmes, and with confidence in a clean product. No way, said the gentleman, a distinguished member of the Democrat establishment, our political system can’t deal with such a move. Well, decades later, this old square walked into San Jose’s Caliva and bought cannabis edibles after receiving pleasant and competent advice, just like in a chic wine store. Sadly, neither THC nor CBD do much for me. For the time being, I’ll stick to Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Diplomatico Venezuelan rum, or many of the elegant ethanol-based substances I’ve learned to use in moderation.

As for psychedelics such as magic mushrooms, I would have to lean on my fluency with other Romance languages and, like Françoise Bourzat, go to friendlier locales. But help might be on the way. Last year, Oakland’s municipality passed an ordinance in effect giving space to mushroom consumers. The road to legal cannabis consumption in California and other states was paved with small careful steps. Let’s hope we see a legalization path for the psychedelics that Valley people seem to study and consume with such alacrity.

Addendum: Because I was otherwise detoured last week, I failed to observe Bicycle Day, the anniversary of LSD inventor Albert Hofmann’s memorable April 19th, 1943 bicycle trip after he ingested his first dose of the psychedelic. John Horgan’s story behind the story in Scientific American, Tripping in LSD’s Birthplace: A Story for “Bicycle Day”, is well worth the…trip.

— JLG@mondaynote.com