Psychedelic Sea Change

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Oshan Jarow: People have studied the relationship between like psychedelics and QAnon stuff. It can reinforce any kind of belief. That’s why in the therapy world, they really insist on having a therapist present to help you guide the experience, right? If you think of psychedelics as deconstructing the mind, then there’s a question of reconstruction.

So that’s where really the context, the setting, and any ethical framework that might be happening or not happening within becomes really important. One of the reasons that people are very nervous about extricating psychedelics from their traditional frameworks in indigenous cultures for thousands and thousands of years, they’ve been used very specifically, very ceremonially.

As we like to do in the West, you know, we kind of pluck them out and decontextualize them.

Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, joined as always by Emma Varvaloucas, the executive director of The Progress Network. What Could Go Right? is our weekly podcast where we talk to various and sundry people about various and sundry issues, all of which united, we hope, by a tonality not of outrage, not of anxiety, not of fear, but instead by a tone and an approach that says, Hey, there’s a lot that is going wrong. What could go right? What could we do to shift the trajectory of our present to create a future that we want to live in, not a future that we fear we’re about to live in and whether that’s about politics or economics or international affairs or different countries or democracy or climate change or individual lives, these are all issues that are filled with high emotions.

Changing the tone around heated things seems vital. And one of the things, at least in my lifetime, which has been unbelievably heated, has been what do we do about these things we call drugs? Not the things we call pharmaceutical drugs, but these illegal substances that we have called drugs. made illegal and demonized as such, and yet people take them and consume them and seek them out in droves so that the efforts to make these things illegal has not only failed, at times it may have actually engendered a desire for the forbidden.

We’re at some level of sea change about how we approach these substances and we’re going to talk to someone today who is just writing about where we are in this particular journey around how we approach drugs and psychedelics. So, Emma, who are we going to talk to today?

Emma Varvaloucas: Today, we’re going to talk to Oshan Jarrow.

He’s a staff writer with Vox’s Future Perfect, where he writes about exactly what Zachary just described, everything from political economy questions to consciousness studies. And so we are going to talk to him about both things today and that’s all folks. I’m looking forward to the discussion. I hope it’s going to be a trip.

Zachary Karabell: Let’s do it. A trip. Good line. Good double entendre there.

Emma Varvaloucas: Fun. Yeah. Thank you so much. Oshan. Very happy to have you on the podcast. Welcome.

Oshan Jarow: Thank you.

Emma Varvaloucas: So we’re going to talk about expanding our consciousness today, about psychedelics and maybe some other topics, something that you’ve been writing about for years now.

So I wanted to ask you a pretty basic question to start off, which is what drew you to writing about psychedelics. And also, what is it about psychedelics that’s such an interesting frontier?

Oshan Jarow: Growing up, I had a father who was a professor of Asian religions, so very much focused on Indian religions, Buddhism, Hinduism.

He also was kind of well versed in the psychedelics world, so that was kind of in the water growing up.

Zachary Karabell: Well, hopefully not literally.

Oshan Jarow: No, not literally, although, you know, people in the 50s were trying to make the case. I think I went to college as a revolt against all that to study economics. I thought, I’ve seen all this New Age stuff.

It was really interesting. It kind of put consciousness on the map for me. It’s just this obviously interesting terrain, but I’d seen enough. And I said, I want to learn how the world really works. So I went to study economics and I learned there’s just as much fiction going on there, but it’s really interesting.

And then I wound up bouncing back and forth between these two poles. On one hand, the contemplative world, things like meditation and psychedelics. And on the other hand, more heterodox economic stuff. When I came out of college in late 2016, 17, 18, the research really started kicking off. So all of a sudden you had a kind of legitimate platform to talk about these topics that had been kind of on the fringes and tabooed otherwise. So I’d been writing about them in different forms for a while, from my personal blog to a podcast, and now with Vox, and there’s been a kind of growing scope and audience for it. So it’s been a really nice kind of convergence of, I was personally interested in these questions anyway, psychedelics were really interesting tools to, I think, to give you this kind of visceral experience that otherwise you might go via the meditation route, sometimes take a long time. And yeah, the research made it kind of something that a lot of more folks had appetite for, but there’s always, you know, things on the fringes.

I was really interested in what was remaining on the outside of the discourse that hadn’t quite made it in, you know, there’s a lot of interest in the medical aspect and therapeutics, but of course, psychedelics are profoundly weird and strange. And there’s a lot of different kind of areas that they might kind of be interesting to write about.

So I think I just got lucky and I was interested in this and converged with the rising research and I had an excuse to do it professionally.

Zachary Karabell: There are very few things that make me feel older than I feel. These conversations are one of those, but not for the reason that might be obvious in that, so like I grew up in a time in the seventies, eighties, where there was this next wave.

And already by then there had been an earlier wave, right? So if you think about Aldous Huxley and Shulgin and Timothy Leary and Richard Albert, who became Ram Dass, there had been a first wave of like, psychedelics as a pathway to both psychological health and or healing and or spiritual growth. And then there was a much more popular movement of that in the 70s and 80s.

And then there was a massive backlash against it. And there was a backlash against it in the 60s as well. There’s always been these waves. We talked to Maia Szalavitz who’s part of the Progress Network, writes a column for the New York Times on some of this stuff. I felt very passionately in the 90s, like this was one of America’s signal failures as an open society, meaning that a draconian criminalization of substances out of all proportion to individual choice struck me as one of the kind of, if not hypocritical, then blind spots of society and the way it could converge with the war on drugs as a criminal endeavor. And I thought, would it be great to write about this and write about this counter culturally?

And that moment, it just seemed completely hopeless to me. And there were people who were much braver than I was who were attempting to say, even then, hey, you know, wait a minute. And even more recently, you know, 15 years ago, Michael Pollan starts writing about some of this, and he gets very paranoid when he’s writing about it, that he’s gonna be raided by the FBI or the DEA simply for admitting his own individual, like, he writes about this, like he’s deleted his own files when writing his book, How to Change Your Mind, because he’s like, oh my god, I’m gonna get arrested.

I do find that the opening of people, literally and metaphorically, to all of this in our current moment a signal positive. And I mean that even if you’re radically opposed to the use of these things, because the allowance of it doesn’t mean that you yourself have to do any of this stuff. I guess my concern, which you’re beginning to see a little bit with legalized cannabis, and I wonder what you think about this, is that it’s a very sensitive, complicated issue.

And we just saw Portland move away from its more decriminalization because it did it in the middle of COVID. It backfired as a policy, mostly because of the timing. I’m just wondering, do you think society is really actually ready for all this?

Oshan Jarow: I have no idea. But it’s a really interesting question because for a long time, the route that even, you know, the most ardent psychedelic advocates were pushing or comfortable with was, we’re going to go the FDA approval route because that brings in a degree of prudence, it brings in controls, it keeps things tethered to data and helps us avoid, you know, the catastrophe of the late 60s happening again.

A lot of people are really scared of moving too quick, too imprudently and diving us back into prohibition and that’s a well founded fear. But then there’s, you know, folks who would criticize the medical model as the only way, you know, to bring these back in. So there, there’s been a pretty lively discourse.

And meanwhile, we’ve seen states like Oregon have already moved ahead with an adult use model where any adult 21 or above who can afford about $2,000 for a trip can go do so they don’t need a prescription. They have to do it within a regulated facility with a licensed facilitator but states are beginning to move forward on that front.

There was even a bill in California last year it didn’t get enough signatures to get on the ballot but the effort’s ongoing that would actually legalize the retail sale of psychedelics which is a whole other can of worms how you actually… should you commercialize these things? How do you avoid the excesses of that?

Like you said, we’ve seen with legal cannabis, there’s been a lot of criticism of kind of the excesses of commercialization with packaging kind of targeting towards younger people and trivializing these things that can be misused or lead to harm. If the question is, do I think society is ready in terms of, do I think we aren’t such that we should hold back access or supply?

No, I think it was a mistake to restrict them in the first place. That being said, you know, we can’t just go from zero to a hundred. We can’t go from these were outlawed to let’s sell them in every corner store. I think that’d be a recipe for disaster. So there was actually a report that came out a couple of weeks ago, which I thought was really interesting from a brand organization.

So longstanding think tank. And they wrote, I think it was about 160 page report on the question of how should we supply psychedelics or how can we supply psychedelics outside of clinical settings? Because as they noted, this is happening. We’ve already seen the bill in California and with cannabis, you had the first legalization of retail sale in 2014.

And 10 years later, we have 24 states that have followed suit. So it happens pretty quickly. Um, so the question of if we’re going to consider retail sale, how should we is actually a really diverse landscape as well. There’s a lot of ways to approach it. You can have government only suppliers, which would be kind of ironic given the government to outlaw them.

But this is how provinces in Canada do cannabis currently. It’s how a lot of states came out of alcohol prohibition. You can do kind of restricting retail sale licenses to non profits or for benefit corporations. That’s something that New York did for cannabis. They gave the first batch of cannabis licenses to either nonprofits or equity applicants, folks who had kind of previous criminal records in new cannabis, or you can go full on commercial sale and kind of do licenses for production and distribution.

New York actually has a bill for licensing consumers as well. So basically taking the way that we do driver’s licenses and adapting it for psychedelics such that to get your license to buy psychedelics, you’d have to go pass a test that might have a written component, might have an experiential component, kind of like parallel parking, but you do a guided trip, get a little permit and go buy your psychedelics.

Emma Varvaloucas: What’s really kind of interesting about that, right, is there’s so many questions that that opens, right? What would that test look like? I mean, I’m assuming they would probably screen for psychiatric conditions, which I’m sure would open up a whole nother can of worms about whether that’s legal to bar people from using these substances and so on and so forth.

What’s your take on the matter? What do you see as a promising route forward, particularly given the critique that I think has been around for a long time now about Oregon where yes, you can go do like a assisted psychedelic trip for like two grand. And I think that like anyone that I know who has ever done psychedelics is like, why would I shell out two grand, if I had two grand, you know, why would I shell that out? And most people don’t, right? Like most people are not going to put out that kind of money. So…

Oshan Jarow: They’re struggling to get customers actually in Oregon, which can get the comparable amount of mushrooms for 40 bucks elsewhere. They’re actually seeing a lot of kind of first timers, right?

Folks who’d be otherwise really nervous, don’t want to engage with the black market, want a guide. There’s a market for wealthy, psychedelically naive folks, which is good to have, but my take is that particularly with psychedelics, what we want is to box them in as little as possible. So psychedelics are almost defined by how responsive and fluid they are to context and setting to different use cases.

They can be incredibly effective medical treatments. They can be effective boosts to creative thinking. They can be used in religious contexts. They can be fun. You know, there’s so many different ways that they might be used. And so a lot of scholars have kind of struggled to pin down like what is a psychedelic?

The term itself isn’t pinned to any particular technical detail, any molecular component. It was actually composed in a bit of verse, you know, between Huxley and the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond. The thing that concerns me when I watch things happening is leaning on any one particular modality to the exclusion of others.

I think the supervised model is great, particularly for people who have the money and want to approach it that way. Psychedelic therapy is great for the people that it’s going to help. Decriminalization is really important for people who already have their established practices.

Religious exemptions are really important too. You have a lot of established churches who are just trying to continue on with their sacraments. You have new churches springing up trying to kind of like put together new forms. I think that’s really interesting. I think retail psychedelics speak to a gap that would remain in supply. There are going to be folks who can’t afford a supervised trip, there are going to be folks who don’t want to join a church, who won’t get a, you know, a prescription from their psychiatrist, and they should still be able to access psychedelics, but the question is how?

I think the important bit is building in that diversity such that you strike a balance between allowing for flexibility while also bringing in support and harm reduction that’s always going to become a priority. More important, the more scaled up supply goes.

Emma Varvaloucas: So I think the harm reduction question is actually really interesting because I’m going back again to this idea from New York about licensing people to take psychedelics, right? And on the one hand, normally what you’d want to screen out is people that are going to have a negative, intense negative reaction to this and usually the people that it happens to might have a predisposed psychiatric condition, something like that.

The people that really can gain the most I think from using psychedelics are also people with psychiatric conditions. Is there any like thought out there already about what the licensing would look like? Like what would you need to do to pass the test?

Oshan Jarow: Really interesting question. I was just reading the bill last week, cause I was also curious.

So they’re, a lot of it is not filled in. The degree to which they filled it in was basically to say, we’re going to have the department of health be responsible for the content of the permitting course. They didn’t tell us what the content would be. They also kind of specified who’s going to do the screening, but didn’t say what the screening actually criteria is going to be.

And you’re right. That’s hugely important because. It’s one thing to screen folks out in clinical trials where, you know, the incentive is you want to have positive outcomes, right? You want to make sure you don’t kind of kick off an episode. You want to make sure everyone is safe, but the research on psychosis and psychedelics is actually really interesting and it is nowhere near, I think, as definitive as the public perception is of, oh, if you have any background of bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, stay away.

And in general, that’s really good advice. But at the same time, researchers are kind of poking at that a bit and seeing it’s a little bit more nuanced than that. There are folks who have these conditions who have found benefits. So the question of who gets screened when you’re talking about public access and non clinical trials I think is incredibly unsettled.

And no, there wasn’t anything specified in the bill. I don’t really expect that New York bill to pass, but the fact that it was introduced is kind of giving a footing for that model, maybe call it the permitting model, to get a bit more foothold. I mean, prior to that, the most substantial mention of it was like Rick Doblin in a GQ interview saying something very flippantly about it. It’s introducing the question, but yeah, who do you screen, how do you screen is not specified. And I think that will be really important and tough to figure out. Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: And combined with the fact that things like bipolar disorder in particular, somewhat like ADHD has become. a much fuzzier category than it appears to be, right? You think someone’s like diagnosed with bipolar and that means something in a very binary, almost simplistic fashion, just like saying you’ve got pancreatic cancer, like that’s a thing, it’s in your pancreas, we know what it is.

But a lot of separate from what are just unequivocally evident psychiatric states of psychosis, there’s a lot of this that is more art than science. And certainly people who are in the science would admit that individually, even if they don’t admit it collectively. And that’s part of the problem here too, right?

We think that there’s a sort of a static thing called vulnerable populations and then a static thing called risk. Unfortunately, once you’ve made something illegal and you’ve scheduled it, the risk equation becomes you have to prove a lack of risk commensurate with what we think a lack of risk should be.

Whereas nobody says we shouldn’t drive, right? One of the riskiest things all of us do on a daily basis.

Oshan Jarow: I think we had 41, 000 deaths last year, car crashes.

Zachary Karabell: Yes, that’s gotten better with seatbelts and better cars and better technology. But in there too, right? We manage the risk. We don’t demand the elimination of it. I like your, you know, your focus on the state level because you’re right, a lot of the community of people who have been looking for legalization have done the medical FDA model. There was this, I guess, FDA panel a couple months ago, suddenly, I guess, reversed some of the course on MDMA ecstasy rescheduling, which had been widely expected to happen over the summer of 2024. I guess it still could happen, but this one panel of doctors strongly said, Oh, too much risk, too much problems, right?

I mean, first of all, do you have any read on that, given that you report all this? I’m kind of interested. Does that mean that that whole strategy has suddenly gone awry, or is this just one more hiccup?

Oshan Jarow: I wouldn’t paint it as definitively as that’s a dead end that we now have to reverse course. It was really surprising.

Prior to that June 4th advisory panel meeting, everyone was pretty confident when Lycos Therapeutics, formerly MAPS Public Benefit Corporation, submitted their new drug application to the FDA, they are granted priority review, which means they shorten the timeline to expect a decision in six months.

It also is an indication that the FDA saw that were this to be approved, it would represent a really significant gain over current treatments. So, folks read into that, read into all the research and said this is pretty much a sure deal.

Zachary Karabell: And just for people who may not have followed this as intensely, this was a multi year campaign to reschedule MDMA, popularly known as ecstasy, although they are not actually identically the same thing, but for all intents and purposes, to allow for therapeutic use, right?

Oshan Jarow: Yeah, it was, I mean, MDMA was added to the Controlled Substances Act in, I think it was, might’ve been passed in 1985 or 1986. And in 1986, Rick Doblin founded MAPS, which is the company that has, um, focused since 1986 on exactly this, getting MDMA approved by the FDA. Eventually, they coalesced around for PTSD treatment.

That came a little later. But yeah, everything looked to be smooth sailing. Then this organization, ICER, kind of independent scientists and researchers, put together a really critical review, both of the efficacy of the treatment and also the ethics around the kind of therapy component that leads into this June 4th FDA advisory meeting, which kind of sides with ICER.

They vote pretty definitively against in a non binding vote, you know, basically recommendation they made to the FDA to say, we don’t think that this is actually more effective or that the benefits outweigh the risks. And so the FDA is scheduled to give their decision by August 11th. And I don’t think it’s a done deal.

Usually the FDA follows their advisory committee recommendation. It’s pretty rare that they stray from that, but there’s a lot of nuance here. I mean, the FDA was in communication with MAPS for a long time about things like trial design, concerns like functional and blinding, or basically not being able to have effective placebo controls.

You tend to know when you’re on acid or mushrooms. Even if you give someone Ritalin, it’s pretty clear. So the FDA had been in conversation with them to a much greater degree of detail than it seemed like the advisory committee was really looped in on. And then there’s kind of these ethics questions around data, of the adverse events that might not have gone reported.

So there’s a lot of kind of open questions up in the air that hopefully are all being investigated right now. So it still could go either way with the MDMA treatment. And if the FDA does vote against it, we’re going to see another new drug application, whether it’s for MDMA or it’s psilocybin for depression or LSD for anxiety, they’re all coming down the pipeline.

It’ll just extend that timeline out a little farther, I imagine.

Emma Varvaloucas: Do you have a good sense of, like, what the emerging psychedelic research is given some of the questions that you raised just now about whether it’s even possible to have a, you know, placebo in a psychedelics trial? I’m curious about your sense of, like, where that is right now.

When I look at myself and some of the stuff that comes out, like, it strikes me as really funny. Like, There was something came out that was like, new research says that psychedelics may lead to mystical experiences, which to me kind of felt like new research says that birds might fly. And I know you just wrote an article about chronic pain.

So yeah, curious for you to paint us a general picture of what the psychedelic research space looks like right now.

Oshan Jarow: It’s kind of a fun dynamic. This happens a lot where you’ll get a new study that confirms something that was obvious to seemingly everyone in the world. And this happens with psychedelics too.

The research is still really helpful and important. The psychedelic research space, I think, is actually in a really interesting place. With regards to the whole placebo stuff, I mean, there is now a much larger conversation going on around to what degree are randomized controlled trials the, not just the gold standard of scientific research, but the exclusive kind of domain of what we consider as evidence.

Psychedelics make that pretty difficult. So you have a lot of historians who’ve been writing about, well, you know, RCTs only came around, I think it was the 1960s, they really got adopted as a new way of doing science. When they did, there was a lot of criticism. So it is pushing at some edges a little bit to kind of reconsider, you know, what counts as evidence.

Zachary Karabell: RCTs are?

Oshan Jarow: Randomized controlled trials. So, using placebos, basically. So, that whole domain is pretty interesting. The kind of broader world of psychedelic research, though, it’s really fanning out, right? So, you have a lot of medical and therapeutic research, and that’s ongoing. You mentioned that the chronic pain piece, which I think has been really almost permanently neglected, is finally getting some attention.

You had the NIH announced, I think just a couple months ago, a 22 million grant for clinical trials to study psychedelics as a treatment for chronic pain, things like cluster headaches, which are known as probably one of the most painful conditions in the human experience. We have almost no treatments and psilocybin is an incredibly effective treatment.

We’ve known this since at least 2006. I mean, 2006 is very often marked as kind of the, when the gong was run for the psychedelic renaissance, kind of kicked back off with Roland Griffiths at Hopkins had a paper on psilocybin and mystical experiences, but that same year, we actually had a paper on psilocybin as a treatment for cluster headache, and it just never got picked up.

That’s getting picked up and the therapy kind of lane is expanding, and that’s really exciting. At the same time, you have the Robin Carhart-Harris has been the figurehead of a more mechanistic exploration, not of how do we use these as treatments, but just what’s going on. How does this expand or contribute anything to our notion of psychology and these kinds of things?

That domain has really been expanding the question of what’s going on in the brain at the level of neurons, at the level of connectivity across different brain regions, at the level of neuro phenomenology. So actually taking people’s subjective reports of, I felt X, and trying to map that onto what’s happening in the brain and develop an account that weaves those two things together.

It’s pretty interesting. And I think the area that I’m most excited about these days is actually the psychedelic humanities. So you have, you know, you’ve always had anthropologists and historians kind of working on psychedelics, but they’ve generally been on the fringe. Past couple of years, and especially in the past six months, we’ve actually seen a lot of funding going towards explicitly the psychedelic humanities.

There’s a lab at the New School run by Nick Langlitz, who’s been working on this for a long time. But to me, that’s a really exciting prospect because once you start bringing in all these interdisciplinary scholars asking questions, not just of therapeutic efficacy, but questions of politics and power and mysticism and religion and language and urban environments.

Now we’re at what’s it like to trip in a city versus rural places, which on one hand, people who have experienced here, I think we have what we know, but on the other hand, there’s a lot of questions you can ask. So it’s really starting to fan out, which I think is a really good thing, kind of speaking to that diversity.

News Clip: It’s just the case that we have many mental health conditions in our society that are very prevalent, and our treatments are very limited for them, including PTSD and depression and anxiety and substance use disorders. And there’s evidence that psychedelic assisted therapy can be a helpful treatment for some of these disorders.

And so that’s where the research needs to be at this point, in terms of public health. And if it proves to be more effective than the treatments we have, then of course, we should incorporate those into medical care.

Zachary Karabell: One of the maybe odder aspects, and it’s acute in the United States right now, but it’s true in multiple other parts of the world.

This chaotic, almost dual track of nationalism and jingoism and rise of authoritarianism in multiple societies, juxtaposed to kind of a social opening up that points in completely different directions. And these two things seem to kind of exist in, in many ways in radical tension with each other, but also to an astonishing degree, it’s as if they’re occupying completely different universes of action.

And you’ve seen this in the United States. The reason why it’s particularly cute is, you know, you’ll see state acts that on the one hand, you think of somewhere like Oklahoma will do really extreme abortion restrictions on the one hand and the legalized cannabis on the other, or vote like, you know, 98 percent Republican, which has become, you know, in the United States, the locus of where you go for social conservatism, right? I mean, I’m not saying that pejoratively, that’s just observationally true. And then at the same time, pushing for decriminalization of all sorts of things. And I wonder if you’ve thought about that as like, what’s exactly going on here, where you can have these almost contradictory trends being articulated by a lot of the same people, although I’m sure there’s a demographic divide in terms of, you know, younger people supporting a lot of this versus older, but I’m just curious, given that you’re steeped in all this, what your thoughts are?

Oshan Jarow: Yeah, psychedelics are kind of baked in contradictions in many ways. It’s a bipartisan effort. That’s largely why PTSD was chosen as the first way to try to get this through the FDA. And you have these principles of cognitive liberty, for example, which can appeal to a whole wide swath of the political spectrum.

But the relationship between psychedelics and anti authoritarian versus authoritarian leanings is really, really interesting. Something I was just reading about the other day in the US, particularly with the sixties, psychedelics picked up this connotation of being against the establishment, right? A counter cultural kind of revolutionary thing.

There’s been a lot more research, for example, in the psychedelic humanities, you’re just as likely to have psychedelics kind of pushing people right than you are left. The association between psychedelics and some kind of utopian pro environmental stance really doesn’t seem to hold. It really is about context and setting.

So for example, if you look in another culture, if you go to Huichol in Mexico, there’s a peyote ceremony and there was an anthropologist who went down there and kind of documenting the ceremony. And one of the anecdotes that stuck with me is you had kind of an adolescent kind of rites of passage ritual, goes out solo, peyote journey, comes back and says, ah, it is just as my fathers told me, which is to say, kind of affirms the social structure, whereas we’re kind of used to this antagonism, which I found really interesting to just show how malleable the whole thing is, how it may or may not gel in with existing, you know, attitudes or social structures.

So, it’s really difficult to say, you know, do psychedelics make you this, do they make you that? I don’t think there’s something inherent in the substances that push you in either direction. It’s the way that they weave in with everything else going on, not just in the moment. You know, the idea of set and setting has been pretty well accepted in its local implementation.

So the question of what’s the decoration of the room? Are you inside? Are you outside? Are you listening to music? More recently, I think it’s Bruce Damer. He’s a biologist, he has kind of one of these theories of life that he recently said he came up with on ayahuasca, and it’s a pretty well received theory.

He’s trying to push set setting and setup. I think it is, he’s interested in psychedelics as kind of aids for innovation and scientific thinking. It all comes down to context. So if and as you scale up supply, I think we’re just going to see more of these strange contradictions and that could either be generative and lead to some really interesting conversations or it could cause a lot of friction.

Zachary Karabell: You use the word matrix in that, which made me think, it’s almost 25 years ago that the movie The Matrix came out, and part of what touched such a chord in that was, it’s a very psychedelic movie, as was the William Gibson book, insofar as it basically says there’s the reality you think you’re living in, and then there’s the actual reality, which is only discernible for X, Y, and Z types of people, and one of the promises of psychedelics was always, a la Huxley, right, that it would open the doors of perception, that you’d be able to see the world as it is, rather than the world as it was presented to you. But as you just said, that can cut in a lot of ways. I mean, that can become, you know, you can become a full throated Donald Trump supporter feeling like the world that you’re being told is the world is a false construct of elites, or it can lead to kind of radical anarchists, we shouldn’t have any hierarchies or it can lead you to just being a liberal.

I mean, it doesn’t, it doesn’t lead you in any one direction. I think that’s a really, really fascinating and important observation.

Emma Varvaloucas: I was just going to add to that. That reminds me a lot of the research that has come out around mystical experiences in different religious traditions, right? Like if you’re a Hindu, you’re not going to have a mystical experience that resembles that of a Tibetan Buddhist.

And if you’re a Tibetan Buddhist, you’re not going to have a mystical experience that, you know, resembles that of a Christian. When Zachary was talking, I just had this like, really intense mental image of somebody with like really traditional, rigid, gender role views tripping on psychedelics and seeing like an image of a woman as a homemaker, like shining as a god.

I’ve never thought of that as a possibility before. Like, so you’re telling us that could happen though, right?

Oshan Jarow: Totally. People have studied the relationship between like psychedelics and QAnon stuff, you know, and just reinforcing, it can reinforce any kind of belief. That’s why in the therapy world, they really insist on having a therapist present to help you guide the experience, right?

If you think of psychedelics as deconstructing the mind, there’s a very small argument that deconstruction might have intrinsic value, but then there’s a question of reconstruction. So that’s where really the context, the setting, and any ethical, you know, framework that that might be happening or not happening within becomes really important.

One of the reasons that people are very nervous about extricating psychedelics from their traditional frameworks and indigenous cultures for thousands and thousands of years, they’ve been used very specifically, very ceremonially, in a way that is very explicitly meshed in with these ethical frameworks.

And as we like to do in the West, you know, we’ve kind of plucked them out and decontextualized them. Same thing with meditation. It raises a lot of questions that we’re not particularly good at answering yet, I don’t think, and especially with psychedelics too. And when you talk about earlier, we were talking about the permitting model.

Anyone can go take their test. And eventually by their psychedelics. That’s going to kind of even further pull them out of their original context. I’m not against pulling them out of context or developing new context. I think that’s really interesting and fascinating cultural work that we have to do.

But yeah, these can push you in any direction. So to think that it’s about the psychedelics alone, I think is to miss the point.

Emma Varvaloucas: I do feel like we kind of just accidentally steel man the case for like, not mainstreaming retail sale of psychedelics though. And that made me want to ask you if you could imagine Because right now, like, the cultural context that we’re building for psychedelics has just been therapeutic, right? It’s like, it’s a therapy oriented thing.

Could you imagine something different where it’s embedded somewhere else in an American cultural context?

Oshan Jarow: I was just reading, um, Ido Hartogsohn’s book. He’s a STS scholar, science technology, society studies. The book is called The American Trip, and it’s about set and setting viewed through the lens of, you know, the 50s, 60s U. S. And an argument he makes is, you know, a lot of people are concerned that we might plunge back into what happened in the 60s. And in some ways, that’s not possible because that culture doesn’t exist anymore. You know, things are different. Now we can fall into some panic.

Do I think it is possible to have a different cultural container? Absolutely. It’s going to be a project that needs a lot of different avenues at once. Another reason that I’m excited about the psychedelic humanities, because we’re coming out of the lab to ask a lot of these questions explicitly about what’s the link between psychedelics and politics. And you’ve had a lot of papers coming out that are essentially arguing that the same point we’ve been saying, psychedelics can push you in any direction.

So if you’re someone who cares very passionately about climate change, and you also happen to be interested in psychedelics, that’s a question of institution building of like how, you know, you might enlist one to support the other. So yeah, I think it’s possible. I think it leans a lot on public education.

We have, I think, readily available ideas of what it looks like. What is responsible use for something like alcohol, for example? A lot of people know more or less responsible users. It doesn’t mean they follow them, right? We get all kinds of counter examples. But the question is like, how do you build that model that becomes publicly available for everyone to know the kind of general guidelines. And that’s, you know, books are really important. Podcasts can help. Certainly if you do talk about retail sales, there’s a question of just immediate, like pamphlet material. When you get your permit, what does it come with? Little booklet? What kind of resources does it support you to? It’s a question of research too. I mean, the research on the risks of psychedelics has lagged way, way behind. The research on why they give you mystical experiences, why everything, including tree bark, looks like the most fascinating thing in the world.

Most of the funding has been private and those funders are going to be more interested in researching positive stuff than understanding depersonalization or derealization or things can linger for a year or two afterwards. Jules Evans has been doing a lot of great work on this. So it’s about balancing the research too, which again, I think as the government gets on board, we’re going to see more of that.

You know, as the NIH funds more and more studies, I would like to think that we’re going to see a bit of a balancing out in terms of the research and therefore the things that trickle out through the media and so on. So yeah, I think it’s possible to build another kind of container that offers a bit more support as the support scales up, as use scales up, but it’s going to be a lot of work.

Zachary Karabell: So I wonder for you, because you also write a lot about political economy, working economy, how did these various threads connect for you? You did a piece a few weeks ago on we should extend unemployment insurance to people who quit their jobs, not just to people who are fired. But I’m wondering when you think about like your own passions and how they align, is there a connective tissue there between these issues or are you, like many of us, you have a few things you’re passionate about, there’s a requirement that they actually are connected, like you can, you can like baseball and you can like gardening. It doesn’t mean that the two are united by anything other than the fact that they’re reflections of one’s passions.

Oshan Jarow: Yeah. I actually, I think about this a lot and I’ve kind of oscillated back and forth. I think especially kind of right after I got outta college and I was kind of doing the meditation circuit in India for a while and I was reading a lot of heterodox economics, you know, Frankfurt School and everyone, I was really interested in the connection between kind of social and contemplative sciences, so the way that society is structured kind of lends itself towards particular patterns of experience that kind of make their way into people’s phenomenology, into their, the way that they experience themselves in the world.

And I think there’s a lot of interesting and compelling, but ultimately really abstract and heady writing on this that has kind of, remained on the fringes and I’m not sure it’ll ever come in. And then I kind of counter myself and I’m not sure it’s necessary to make the connection. You can argue for each, you know, on their own ground or engage with each on their own terms and they can just be separate domains, but ultimately I am really interested in the connection.

I think the thing that brings me to want to write about various economic policies, I write a lot about guaranteed income, worker power, economic democracy, so on. My interest in those things really goes only in so far as they can kind of empower folks to, I’ll put it in Amartya Sen’s terms, to live lives that they have reason to value, to expand the scope of lives that are available to folks.

So if you look at something like stress, stress, I think is a really clear connective tissue between the two. If you are a meditator and you do a lot of meditation, you begin to see the way that stress kind of permeates through your own experience, right? This is something that makes you kind of rigidly clench on to particular mental habits.

This is something we have a lot of psychedelic research on too. Carhart-Harris has this paper on canalization where he talks about what a lot of psychopathology can be understood as is basically building deeper and deeper ruts into, you know, habits that might have served you at one point in your life, but they no longer serve you and yet you can’t get rid of them, right?

So there’s this really kind of permeating stressful process. And a really powerful way to alleviate stress at scale is to improve people’s economic circumstances, particularly at the lowest rungs, right? If you’re in poverty, you are unduly stressed relative to other people. We have all kinds of research on this.

So if you think about economic policy as a lever to reduce stress in people’s lives, I think it kind of brings a bit of the connection together. You do see more explicit attempts. You have socially engaged Buddhists. You have, you know, who was it? Bernie Glassman, a Zen monk who had a, ran a bakery in New York City.

You have a lot of figureheads of American Buddhism who’ve done a lot of work here. And I think that’s really wonderful. But I think for me, if I were to kind of track the moment that I came back into economics is because I was doing, you know, just another meditation retreat. And we were all talking about how we wanted to commit the Bodhisattva vow and that tradition is, you know, you commit yourself to the liberation of all sentient beings. Okay. It’s pretty grandiose. But I just kept thinking to myself, if we really want to do that, getting everyone access to healthcare would be a really good start. Now probably go a little farther than trying to get everyone to meditate.

I think we can get more people, you know, to like come out of poverty than we can to take up a daily meditation practice. And we can try both. But on the same hand, not, you know, not everyone has to meditate. That’s not like a thing that should be imposed on everyone. You either meditate or you live a stressful life.

So I saw economics as a more scalable and flexible way to try to engage in some of the same, I think, normative and ethical directions that I saw in the contemplative world.

Emma Varvaloucas: It’s so funny you say that. It’s such a practical and grounded response. I’m doing an article right now about sort of disappointing research in the mindfulness research realm about mindfulness’s effects on kids.

And what’s funny to me is when you talk to people in that realm, they’re very much so in the vein that you just described, which is, Well if we could just get everyone in the world to meditate, like everything would be great. And what’s really kind of funny about the recent research about teaching kids to meditate and to be mindful is that they’re like, We don’t want to.

There is no interest, you know. Um, and, you know, if you add that to the economic arguments that you’re making, certainly if you are, you know, living paycheck to paycheck or working one or two or three jobs.

Oshan Jarow: Add a meditation practice on top of that. Yeah.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. Like who has time for that? I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how time factors into the economy of it all, because I really love what you had to say about time ownership.

How much that affects your lived experience. Everyone I know, like my cohort, like my friends around me, like we’re all obsessed with like getting our time back. It’s just like the number one conversation that we have.

Oshan Jarow: Yeah. Just in economic terms, I think this is one of the most interesting stories. For about a hundred years, right, 1830 through to about 1930, there was really kind of bipartisan cross cultural agreement that the point of economic growth is to deliver us more freedom and control over our time, right?

So the way that would cash out is you have rising leisure time for all. And then you had a labor movement that eventually, when it got a bit of power, it secured shorter working weeks, secured weekends, things like that. You had a bit of motion on that front. In the 1930s, kind of, you know, tail end of the Great Depression, you have this really interesting moment where there’s a bill that passes the Senate, the Black-Connery Bill, that would have implemented federally a 30 hour working week.

So it would have dropped the overtime pay threshold down to 30 hours. And Roosevelt gets elected, he signals his support, he gets into office, and winds up kind of changing his tune on this, and winds up going the New Deal route, which pursues full time, full employment for all, that became his mantra, at which point you get this kind of cultural turn away from the idea of being able to cash in economic growth, as more control over your time.

It’s not necessarily shorter and shorter working weeks. It’s actually something I wrote about this recently, but I don’t think the right move is to say reduce the working week from 40 hours to 32 to whatever. Some people are going to want to work. What you really want is people to have the power to kind of decide for themselves, you know, the shape of their lives.

If you look at the dynamic between ownership over one’s time, I think that’s another place that you really kind of get to this question of what kinds of lives are you free to live? What patterns of experience generally populate themselves throughout your day to day life? And if you’re spending the majority of your waking hours, say 40, you know, 40 hours a week, engaged in practices that have to be circumscribed by the qualification of getting return on the labor market. You can only do things for what you’re going to get paid because that’s how you get the resources you need to survive. That’s a limiting factor and that’s fine. Humans have always had to figure out how to make their deal with nature and keep the metabolism going of resources in and out.

But it’s a really curious fact to me that we entirely lost this notion of free time as kind of the measure of freedom. Mike Konczal has a great book on this. I think it’s something like time was the universal measure of freedom. Benjamin Honeycutt’s a historian who’s looked at this too. Then you get this transition to higher wages being the kind of, you know, siren call of the labor movement.

Well, we’re fine with 40 hours a week, but we want to be paid more. To a degree I think you’re starting to see a bit of a turn on that, right? That this sense of, folks are more interested in having a bit more control over their time and cashing in economic progress as the option for more leisure time.

It’s really fraught though. Like the four day work week movement, for example, has got a lot of traction, but I also think you kind of see its weakness because they’re trying to appeal to employers. Employers are only going to be on board so far. It’s not appealing to worker power because the labor movement remains incredibly decimated relative to where it used to be.

So, yeah, I think that this notion of time and freedom and control over your time as a measure of progress was one that really appealed to me as someone who was interested in the question of having the freedom to explore one’s mind and the shape of life that you might have reason to value. And I’d love to see it come back, you know, so that’s something I’ve tried to use an excuse to write about more.

And we’ll see, you know, just the kind of like psychedelics, I think it’s all very uncertain, but it’s an exciting moment on that front too. So we’ll see.

Zachary Karabell: So if we’re having this conversation in five years, given that no one, not even on a really deep and profound psychedelic trip, has a crystal ball into the future, although it clearly can feel that way at times, what do you think we’re saying about all this in five years?

Oshan Jarow: The psychedelics or time, or both?

Zachary Karabell: Well, I mean, just all of it. Do you think this is a temporal shift, pun intended, that is about to happen? Or are we basically going to just be messily fighting, figuring all this out for the rest of our lives?

Oshan Jarow: I am sure that we’ll be messily figuring something out for the rest of our lives.

That, about that, I have no doubt. In five years, I imagine that we’ll have some kind of psychedelic therapy approved. And in practice, we’ll be getting prescriptions for some of the big conditions, PTSD, depression, anxiety. Hopefully we’ll see chronic pain kind of pushing through on that lens as well. At the rate that state legislation is moving, I would also expect we’ll have more states joining Oregon’s adult use model.

If medical goes through, it’s going to trigger rescheduling by the DEA of psychedelic substances, which is going to make it a lot easier for a lot of states to move forward in different directions. So I think we’ll see a lot of activity in five years, whether it leans towards states allocating funding for research versus states scaling up, you know, adult use models or supply, I don’t know. Um, I think a lot of people are going to watch what happens in Oregon, what happens in Colorado to see, Hey, is that a good idea? And like you mentioned, their decriminalization bill, there’s been a lot of trying to figure out why things didn’t go well. It’s a whole other domain.

So I don’t know, but again, I think the research is going to keep fanning out. I do think supply is going to go up one way or another, even if we have no motion on the legal front, there’s going to be black markets that with all this interest in media attention are going to be scaling up as well, which is another argument to consider legalization, right?

Because in the black market, you have a lot of fentanyl making its way into the drug supply. You have a lot of back to context when you’re engaging with psychedelics in a black market. That’s a whole other dynamic that is making its way into your experience that can push you towards a negative. That’s not ideal. On the economics front, I don’t know. You know, politics is obviously the only certain seems to be that the weirdness of everything is accelerating.

The instability and then the unknowns are mounting and mounting, so who knows? But it really does seem, you know, a lot of folks in the kind of progressive corner have been saying for a couple of years now that there’s a fundamental shift underway, that worker power is becoming a thing we’re seeing support for in the White House.

It’s reason for optimism, but we’ll have to see how things play out.

Emma Varvaloucas: Even J. D. Vance is on board.

Zachary Karabell: Oshan, it’s been a real pleasure having this conversation with you. This topic, particularly about psychedelics, is certainly of interest to the members of The Progress Network. We’ve had a few podcasts that have touched on this.

Clearly, this is something that fascinates society, often for the negative, right? Psychedelic use fascinates society in the 80s, 90s, or in the 60s, mostly as a boogeyman and a demon of all the things that we need to contain, control, and prevent, but one way or the other, human nature will out and will find a way to manifest and express itself, even with other human natures attempting to prevent that.

So, I find some of this development surprising and refreshing. I don’t think I would have thought 30 years ago that we would be where we are now, culturally relative to all this. And I sort of tell myself that, and I’m going to want to end with this coda, that when people become certain that we are in a cultural groove and moment that is going to be lasting, when people say things about a political moment or a economic one, this is going to be set for a generation.

It’s just worth remembering that, like Ernest Hemingway said about bankruptcy, it happens gradually and then it happens quickly. That cultural change can erupt really suddenly, and in ways that surprise us, and that we should be, I think, mindful of just how fluid our culture is. And this is one of the more profound ways in which, at least in my lifetime, American culture has been fluid.

You know, that and like, gay marriage, which also seemed impossible in 1990, and then ubiquitously accepted now. So I took a certain amount of hope from that. You know, granted, change can also happen negatively. So it goes both ways. I think the work you’re doing is fascinating. I think that you found a kind of a heterodox voice in a homogenized world is, is to be lauded.

And I think everyone should check out your work. And I want to thank you for the conversation.

Oshan Jarow: Yeah. Thanks for having me. It was an absolute pleasure. And your podcast overall, I think the folks you’ve had on, I’ve got the chance to listen to some folks and it’s been a resource for me as well. So I’m really honored to be here.

Emma Varvaloucas: Oh, that’s so nice to hear it. Thank you so much, Oshan.

Zachary Karabell: So Emma, you’ve had the intersection of interest in these issues, plus your own background in Buddhism and meditation. Do you feel that’s all of the part? Meaning these are different facets of the same stone. And are you surprised by some of the changes that have occurred?

It would have seemed 10 years ago that even that the meditation, that spiritual front, would have been the one that was spreading more ubiquitously culturally, and it seems like that’s been somewhat overtaken by the move into psychedelics.

Emma Varvaloucas: I’m really surprised that, yeah, it has kind of like moved out of hippie culture and sort of like alt culture the way that it has.

And the mechanism by which it’s done that is very interesting. Like Oshan mentioned, it’s bipartisan legislation across the United States, mainly because of PTSD. So in a million years, I, I feel like somebody living through the 60s and 70s would not have predicted that. There’s something a little bit tragically poetic about it.

To answer your first question, it’s a really interesting debate. If you are a truly religious Buddhist, there’s really a lot of people in the Buddhist world that would say to you, yes, psychedelics is a part of this. It’s a part of my Buddhist practice. It’s a part of my meditation practice. But from a traditional perspective, I think that they would look at psychedelic use more like, you helicopter to the top of a mountain. That’s going to be a vastly different takeaway and experience than climbing up it. There’s no substitute for genuine spiritual practice and what the effect that psychedelics may have if instituted on a completely mainstream level, given what Oshan said about your cultural setup of your experiences and your astronomies and your mind playing a predominant role, like that question, I think it really, really deserves a more thorough look than maybe some of the advocates have really given it.

Zachary Karabell: One of the less prominent critiques comes out of exactly what you just said of the traditional Buddhist one, which is, particularly in Western society, the rush toward use of psychedelics as a insta enlightenment, or the promise thereof, you go for a trip, this is particularly true, I think, for people who’ve done ayahuasca, and everything changes instantly.

And some of that’s embedded in particularly Western society. There’s the Saul/Paul on the road to Damascus, the flash of light where you’re suddenly overcome, and everything changes, and there’s a degree to which people want that with psychedelics, right? They want the one trip to be utterly transformative, and then the work is done, right?

You’re on the other side, and you are in this place. And certainly those who have been practitioners of either meditation or any spiritual practice or any religious practice have always emphasized the work. The Buddhist chop wood and carry water, the daily practice of confession. It’s like, there’s no insta here.

This is a life practice. And I think there is a critique of the consumerist aspect of psychedelics is, You buy it, you get it, you’re done. Why would you go to Oregon and spend $2,000? Because you’re basically spending $2,000 to obtain enlightenment. Like, I put my money in, I should, you know, I should get something out of it.

I should be in a different place on the other side of this. And that is problematic, to say the least. Although it doesn’t really bother me at kind of a legal moral level. Like, who cares? I feel like people should be able to spend money to live a misguided process just like they should be able to go on a Disney cruise.

I think both are a waste of time, but it doesn’t matter illegally.

Emma Varvaloucas: No, I agree with you. I think yeah. Yeah.

No, I’m totally with you. I mean, I, I’m recording this in Holland right now and everyone knows. The Netherlands, excuse me. Famously psychedelics are legal here. You can microdose shrooms to your heart’s content and it’s funny how that works out here right like it’s not like you see people all over the place microdosing their heads off, not that you could really microdose your head off. I’ve seen the benefit with people right like the people around me that i know that have taken done that have microdosed like I’ve really really really seen that be useful so I’m definitely like on the, like the pro mainstreaming psychedelic side. I’m totally willing to put aside my buddhist critique hat for that because not everyone also needs to pursue enlightenment.

Like, that’s, that’s an individual decision. That’s a religious decision, right? And could just be, like you said, like, it might just, it might help people for chronic pain. It might help them with PTSD, or they might just have, like, a really great Thursday afternoon.

Zachary Karabell: Just saying.

Emma Varvaloucas: Or a scary Thursday afternoon, depending, I guess.

Zachary Karabell: So my final thought, as I couldn’t help but picturing government efficiency programs leading to a combination of licensing. And so, you know, Oshan talked about like a driver’s test, you’d get some sort of credentializing. And then I thought, what if you combine the driver’s test with the psychedelic credentializing so that you had to, you had to parallel park while tripping.

And I figure like, if you can parallel park while tripping, chances are good, like you’re really good at parallel parking and pretty competent tripping. So as a licensing requirement, maybe there’s something to be said for it. I don’t expect that to be converged anytime soon, but maybe, maybe they should be.

Just a thought that came out of the conversation. Useless Ideas 101 at the end of our podcast. We hope you take those for what they’re worth. We want to thank you for listening in whatever psychological and psychedelic state this podcast finds you in. We’re interested about your thoughts. Clearly, we have shown our stripes as being relatively, maybe not even relatively, maybe just absolutely pro a greater legalization envelope, whether or not that means anyone should rush off and do these things is a whole other personal choice. And I hope you have enjoyed the conversation. Let us know what you think. Check out theprogressnetwork.org. Sign up for the newsletter, What Could Go Right?, and we will be back with you next week, same bat time, same bat channel, and with another conversation. So thanks for listening. Thanks, Emma.

Emma Varvaloucas: Thanks, Zachary. And thanks everyone.

Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right is produced by the Podglomerate, executive produced by Jeff Umbro, marketing by the Podglomerate. To find out more about What Could Go Right, the Progress Network, or to subscribe to the What Could Go Right newsletter, visit theprogressnetwork.org. Thanks for listening.