Notes from a Psychedelic Science Conference in Denver

Denver was on a ‘psychedelic fire’ with colours swaying in every garden. Last month, the city hosted Psychedelic Science 2023, the world’s biggest psychedelic conference and over 12,000 people congregated at the Colorado Convention Centre for three days to peek into the frontiers of the psychedelic movement. From the who’s who of the psychedelic world to top scientists and medical researchers, community leaders and policymakers, hundreds of sessions and lectures were on offer. Denver for three days was to become the Mecca of psychedelia.

I arrived a day early, and by evening, my serotonin levels were high. A film about the legendary scientist Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin , inventor of MDMA+ (commonly known as ecstasy), features his wife Ann, who narrates their story and their experiments with molecules.

“It’s all about love, and drugs are only catalysts,” Ann Shulgin says in the movie. I was truly moved to see the journey of the Shulgin family, their tryst, and the challenges they faced. More than 50 years after its invention, today Americans are accepting MDMA-assisted therapy and rediscovering the value of MDMA. It was good to see the transformation.

After the movie, I spoke with Paul Daley, who established the Shulgin Institute near Berkeley to develop newer and better compounds. The good news is that there will be new compounds by the end of the year, which will be safer and offer more therapeutic healing.

I found Wendy Tucker, Ann’s daughter and also in charge of the Shulgin Foundation. I asked her about Sasha and Ann, and their legacy, especially as most people in the world can’t even use MDMA therapeutically. “Sasha was a scientist. His life was exploring tools for the mind. He was ahead of his time, the time it is going to take for the world to catch up to the research and molecules to be used as they should be; it is going to take time. His concern was not that MDMA should be legal right away, and the legacy we are trying to protect is the legacy that in 100 years’ time, people are going to look back and say OMG (Oh My God!) look at what these people did,” Wendy said.

We talked more about the drug treaty, cartels, and monopolies being created in the psychedelic world too. The only hope Wendy sees is that people finally get access to “clean and safe molecules”. There is a silver lining here too.

The next day was the big opening ceremony, and Belleco Theatre was packed with 5,000 people when Rick Doblin walked on stage in his all-white suit. “The future is psychedelic,” he proudly declared and went on to quote Herman Hesse and his experiments in psychedelic advocacy, including updates on psilocybin, MDMA, and Ketamine therapy. By mid-2024 Americans through the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) are likely to get approvals for some of these novel therapies.

Colorado governor and the man leading the psychedelic renaissance, Jared Polis, also addressed the gathering. But the show stealer was former Texas governor and Republican Rick Perry. Notwithstanding his political stance, he impressed people with his endorsement of the use of psychedelics in the treatment of PTSD, depression, and anxiety, especially among veterans. He broke through the conventional war on drugs and praised alternative treatments.

After listening to politicians, I headed to exhibitions. I moved to the upper floors of the exhibition area. The place resembled a sugar mountain with exhibitors handing out free gummies and chocolates and magic potions for all. I filled my bag with chocolates and gummies before sitting through neurologist Andrew Hubermann talking about his psychedelic experience. It was a bit dry as a speech, however, and the takeaways from the talk were psychedelics help your “neurons regenerate and increase brain elasticity”. But the really interesting comment Hubermann made was regarding the mind: “These are states of mind that can be accessed using these substances.”

After the talk, I then headed to hear about Native Americans on the Peyote church in America.

Three ‘Indians’ were sitting on the panel, talking about the final conquest of the American empire, and their sacred peyote. The native people had closely guarded the sacred peyote ceremony, but apart from climate change, mining, etc., now White America was without consent appropriating this sacred plant for recreation. The native panel was distrustful of the white man’s psychedelic renaissance and distrustful of corporate America leading this psychedelic revival with synthetic substitutes.

Having heard about the dark side of the psychedelic movement, I sampled the chocolate in my bag and headed to hear the world-renowned mycologist Paul Stamet’s talk. By the time I sat, my dopamine, serotonin, glutamate and GABA levels were all shooting up and Stamets on stage was showing us how ancient Egyptians used mushrooms.

“The mushrooms speak and I listen. Although we (white people) haven’t done anything in the past to deserve the sacred plant medicines, we must act in a way that we get the respect and love of people around us in the future,” Stamets killed the racism in one sentence. Next, he took the audience on a video mushroom hunt. “Psilocybin mushrooms build bridges,” was his next big statement. He gave a 50 minutes presentation talking about various new scientific discoveries and ended by saying that the world should take a two-eye approach. One eye on modern technology and the other eye on indigenous wisdom and traditions, and we need to integrate them both.

My normal mind was awakening as I stepped into the next session on sleep, dreams, and psychedelics. The speaker was Sidarta Ribeiro, a neuroscientist from Brazil. He, using brain mapping and sleep analysis on rats, concluded a relationship between dreams and psychedelic states. The discovery was surprising: although the rat’s mind was going into sleep mode and showing patterns of sleep at the mind level, the animal was very awake. The psychedelic trip was a REM-like state, he concluded.

But I was sleepy by then and ended day one with a trip to the deep space area within the exhibition.

Day two began with Dennis McKenna talking about the need to create a digital AI-backed herbarium to conserve traditional plant knowledge. After that, I went to the science stage and heard cutting-edge psychedelic research using human brain organoids and how they positively respond to psychedelics. After the science session, I moved towards religion and saw Baptist Christian, Rabbi and Islamic scholars discuss psychedelics in their religion. From the story of Job to the story of the cave in Islamic texts, the psychedelic was sacred within the semitic religions it seems.

The next stop was Buddhism and psychedelics, and mind you, this was a Western version of Buddhism so quite different from our Indian Buddha. Westerners were trying to create a psychedelic experience with a Buddhist flavour.

Now as the night descended, I was at a table with Iranians holding soma, the plant Hindus hold sacred, in my hand. It was a divine feeling. We were having dinner with Dennis McKenna and then I moved to another psychedelic venue Meow Wolf to explore the dark underbelly of American psychedelia. My guide was an American legend, Deborah Snyder. At some point during the trip to Meow Wolf, I asked her if she has envisioned this kind of psychedelia. Her answer was no. She is one of the pioneers of the movement and helped shape the psychedelic wave. “There are parts here and there, but we had never imagined it like this,” she said. I couldn’t resist asking about the overt mechanical darkness of the place. Deborah looked at me and said, “Yes, it was quite dark here.”

Now it was the final day, most of us had had a long night and were depleted. But the conference went on. Unwillingly, I dragged myself to the Asian meet-up, where Chinese, Indian, Japanese and other Asians were trying to talk about psychedelics and friendship. There was no hate between Indians and Pakistanis or Chinese. We sat together and talked about love and togetherness. People were creating psychedelic ceremony songs in Chinese and Hindi. It was too cool to be true.

The biggest crowd-puller was the next session on Sex and Psychedelics. It had three women discussing the pleasures and pain of psychedelia. Two of them were former sex workers, who opened up to the crowd and spoke about how psychedelics helped them to heal their soul and bodies. It was remarkable courage and honesty. They also warned against the dangers of excessive use and the importance of consent and risk assessment.

Soon, it was time for the last session – Lessons from the cannabis industry. One of the speakers was the grandfather of the American cannabis industry Steve DeAngelo. He warned against the dangers of corporations controlling cannabis and potentially the psychedelic space. After the conference, I asked him about monopolies and cartels funded by American capital and regulated by the US-backed international convention.

He smiled and said, “Hopefully American finance and corporations won’t control the global cannabis sector. And as for the drug treaty, there is a novel interpretation of the drug treaty. Countries like India can legalise if they want. They can even opt out of the treaty if they want too.”

The conference had ended and it got me thinking. Could there be a shift in thinking and broadening of horizons in countries like India that have closed down the conversation under international pressure? As the US and other countries embrace these sacred plants, could there be a small chance that we embrace the psychedelic renaissance?