At the heart of North America’s “renaissance” in psychedelics "is a vast new supply of funding” from big-money interests, says a top Canadian researcher at Harvard Medical School who spoke at a major Vancouver conference

As a teenager I read Aldous Huxley’s legendary book The Doors of Perception.

The respected English philosopher explored psychedelic drugs as a mind-expanding entry into mystical experiences. The book inspired the name of Jim Morrison’s rock band, The Doors.

It was the hippie era, with all its chaotic chasing of new experiences. It led to this far too young teen trying LSD on two occasions, on my own. The first could almost, but not quite, be called a “good trip.” The second was a panic-filled “bad trip.” I never tried psychedelics again.

I stick with that decision, despite increasingly enthusiastic hype about psychedelics and other hallucinatory drugs from some mainstream media as well as from U.S. President Donald Trump, with his radical executive order last year to speed up reviews of psychedelics for mental-health treatments, especially for veterans.

Unlike many, I’ll also keep away from hallucinogens despite the appearance in B.C. and Ontario of 75 shops marketing psychedelic compounds, such as psilocybin, also known as magic mushroom. Selling such products, often promoted as “euphorics,” happens to be illegal in Canada. But B.C. and Ontario officials appear to look the other way.

Dozens of experiments are now going on into psychedelics, particularly at Johns Hopkins University. Meanwhile, a growing number of people, almost one-in-10 Canadians and Americans, now ingest hallucinogenics as a lifestyle choice, with the proportion doubling among young adults.

Two high-profile Canadian researchers, however, are among the informed skeptics, cautioning the new studies aren’t revealing as clearly positive results as advocates and the giant pharmaceutical industry are claiming.

Daniel Myron, a physician and researcher at the University of Ottawa, has found that Canadians who visited emergency departments after using hallucinogens were at a substantially higher risk of being diagnosed with schizophrenia, though the study didn’t establish a causal relationship.

And Harvard medical school’s Bertha Madras, who grew up in Canada, says a significant proportion of those who use hallucinogens experience serious dysphoria, anxiety or fear.

Madras, a neurobiologist who has invented brain imagery technology and advised the White House, spoke last week in Vancouver, addressing hundreds of physicians, psychiatrists, pharmacists, psychologists, nurses and others at the University of B.C.-organized Pacific Psychopharmacology Conference.

A veteran researcher of psychedelics, Madras studied the notorious LSD tests conducted in the early 1960s by Dr. Ewan Cameron at McGill University in Montreal. With support from the CIA, Cameron used psychedelics to “erase” and “reprogram” bad memories of people who were mentally suffering. His methods ruined the lives of most of his subjects.

While Madras readily acknowledges that most contemporary researchers are using more ethical experiments to see how psychedelics can rewire the brain, in an interview with Postmedia News she described numerous pitfalls.

Since pharmaceutical companies and corporate investors are spending “billions and billions and billions of dollars” on advancing psychedelic use, Madras said these corporations are often eager to advocate psychedelics for depression, trauma, anxiety, addiction, chronic disease and end-of-life stress — as well as potentially for “recreational” purposes.

Researchers, and the media, often fail to acknowledge the ambiguity of experimental results, she said: “Frightening effects are inherent to hallucinogenic pharmacology because they destabilize sensory processing and sense of self.”

Many red flags appear in experimental methodology, she said, including chronically small and therefore misleading sample sizes, as well as homogeneity of test subjects (generally white, highly educated and pro-psychedelic use).

Subjects also most often receive extensive therapy (including hand-holding) during their six- to eight-hour psychedelic experiences, Madras said. They typically listen to relaxing music, from Vivaldi to Paul Horn, potentially skewing outcomes.

“I would love,” she said, “to have the time to listen to this beautiful music for an entire day.”

It’s no surprise, Madras said, that some experiments with hallucinogens are coming up with favourable short-term results for a portion of subjects, particularly since people with mental-health vulnerabilities are rarely allowed to participate. The few times they are, she said, a high proportion have experienced devastating reactions.

Psychedelics, such as LSD, mescaline, psilocybin and DMT (ayahuasca), as well as hallucinogens such as ketamine and MDMA (ecstasy), have an extremely powerful impact on the brain, she said.

While some, like Aldous Huxley, advanced psychedelics’ ability to help people “fuse with the universe,” Madras said it’s important to recognize they dissolve the ego, decrease the boundary between the self and the world, and distort thoughts and perceptions. She cited the horrifying 2023 case of a deluded Alaska Airlines pilot who tried to shut down a plane’s engines after taking psilocybin.

The problem remains, Madras said, that most people ingest psychedelics in unregulated, or semi-regulated, situations. Of those, 15-to-30 per cent have “bad trips,” experiencing feelings such as fear and paranoia. Up to one-in-20, she said, succumb to psychosis, suicidality or continuing hallucinations.

“The media is complicit in this. Media hype (of psychedelics) is associated with more investment, more use and greater risks,” Madras said. She pointed to dozens of optimistic media headlines, including The New York Times’s: “How psychedelic trips can heal depression, anxiety.”

Praising the University of Ottawa’s Myron as a “treasure” for his high-quality research into psychedelics, Madras said Canadian research shows almost three-of-10 residents of Metro Vancouver live within a 10-minute walk of an illegal magic-mushroom storefront.

Calling for more objective analysis of North America’s “renaissance” in psychedelics, Madras said, “this isn’t a fascinating shift in clinical science or medical care, it’s a shift in politics, in industry and profits. What is at the heart of this is a vast new supply of funding.”