Erika Dyck is a professor at the University of Saskatchewan who studies the history of psychedelics with a special interest in the legacy of Humphry Osmond, the British-born psychiatrist who coined the term pyschedelic, gave Aldous Huxley his first dose of mescaline, and conducted pathbreaking work using LSD to help alcoholics stop drinking. Among Osmond's best-known patients was Bill W., the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Reason sat down with Dyck at the MAPS Psychedelic Science 2023 conference held in Denver this June, where a reported 13,000 people gathered to talk about all aspects of today's psychedelic renaissance. We talked about why drugs such as MDMA, psilocybin, and LSD are making a comeback; how tensions are rising between indigenous people and medical practitioners; and whether prohibitionists have finally lost the war on drugs.
“…my experience, my experience is… you go, talk to kindergarten kids or first grade kids… you find a class full of science enthusiasts and they ask deep questions… What is a dream? Why do we have toes? Why is the moon round? What's the birthday of the world? Why is grass green?... These are profound important questions they just bubble right out of them... You go and talk to 12th grade students and there's none of that, they've become leaden and incurious… Something terrible has happened between kindergarten and 12th grade and that's not just puberty…”
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