Andy Mitchell (Bodley Head)
DESCRIBING your psychedelic trip to other people is notoriously dull. Poet or not, there will always be a gap between the raw experience of LSD or magic mushrooms, and a second-hand metaphor.
So it was with hesitation that I picked up neuropsychologist Andy Mitchell鈥檚 book Ten Trips: The new reality of psychedelics, detailing his personal journey. In a few months, Mitchell spends several hundred hours taking 10 drugs as 鈥渁 douchey forty-nine-year-old psychedelic virgin鈥�.
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But his honesty about his recent personal traumas, and about the risks of psychedelics running alongside the highs and the revelations, make him a thoughtful guide.
US citizens appear to be warming to psychedelics, and therapies using them are close to being legalised or decriminalised in more states. Meanwhile, investors are cashing in. And even though many psychedelics originated with Indigenous peoples, they rarely benefit and are often excluded.
Then there is the touchy issue that some psychedelic therapies used to treat depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and addiction haven鈥檛 proven as impressive in , not to mention the small but significant () cases of bad trips. If and how to meld psychedelic therapy with Western society is still up for grabs.
As a sceptic, Mitchell takes this in his stride. Psychedelic science, he writes, can veer towards 鈥渆vangelical optimism鈥�. But he hopes that embracing the nuances of psychedelic trips will help us 鈥渢hink better about these drugs, and maybe with them too鈥�.
Mitchell starts in a London kitchen with a 鈥渟hallow鈥� ketamine trip, and ends taking wachuma with a shaman in the Colombian Amazon. On the way, magic mushrooms bring him to tears at the sight of a trash can, while ayahuasca sees him tormented by eels.
This isn鈥檛 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but it doesn鈥檛 need to be. Some of Mitchell鈥檚 clearest insights occur when his reports are interwoven with armchair philosophy and new theories about how psychedelics work. Science can only have one view of psychedelics, but, as virtual-reality pioneer Jaron Lanier tells Mitchell, objective science entails 鈥渁 collapse of experience itself鈥�. Ten Trips is a powerful reminder that psychedelics can鈥檛 be made sense of entirely within a framework of chemical interactions in the brain. We need to view them as something potent, to be respected.
