Bringing Boomers Up to Speed on Psychedelic Policy
A Conversation with Drug Policy Expert Ethan Nadelmann
Back in the 1980s, when I was in my mid-20s, I traded in my hippie persona and slipped into adult life. I got married, raised kids, built a career. And like so many of my peers, I let pot and drugs fall by the wayside.
By my late fifties, I’d gone through endless hours of therapy, taken up meditation, launched my kids and left the marriage. Like one act closing in a life-long drama, the curtain went down - and rose again.
The arc of my story-line - with endless variations – has played out in the lives of millions of boomers. Now, as we enter older age, with remarkable synchronicity, psychedelics are coming back to meet us. This time, however, we are eminently better prepared to explore the opportunities they offer for healing, growth and joy.
We may not have given much thought to psychedelics over the decades. But there were those, like Ethan Nadelmann, who never stopped paying attention. And for those of us looking to make sense of the new psychedelic landscape, that makes him a valuable resource.
Born in 1957, Ethan has spent his career advocating for drug policy grounded in science, compassion, health and human rights. He is an author, educator, founder of the world’s leading drug policy reform organization, the Drug Policy Alliance, and host of the podcast PSYCHOACTIVE. He and his colleagues have led dozens of successful campaigns to legalize marijuana, reduce incarceration of drug law offenders, treat drug use and addiction as health and not crime issues, and otherwise promote alternatives to the war on drugs.
I reached out to Ethan because of his unusually informed, up-close-and-personal perspective on psychedelics going back to the early 80s. I asked him to fill in some of the main points that older adults who are just returning to the scene might have missed.
What do you think paved the way for the return of psychedelics after the crash and burn of the 70s?
Psychedelics are certainly enjoying a broader cultural legitimacy now than ever before. And there are a number of reasons for that.
First, starting in the 1990s, there was a small but growing number of pioneering researchers - people like Charlie Grob, Rick Strassman and later on, Roland Griffiths and Steve Ross – who were willing to step out and work in this field, despite the stigma and an almost complete absence of government funding. At this point, there are now hundreds of talented scientists working in the field, not just in the US but around the world. The incredible findings they’ve produced related to mental health treatments have been picked up by the media and really captured the public’s imagination.
Then there’s Rick Doblin. When he started MAPS [the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Sciences] in 1986, he had a vision of getting MDMA approved for medical use. But he was also committed to a broader vision of drug policy reform around psychedelics and their use in other contexts. When MDMA got rejected last year by the FDA, he took a lot of flak, but I still think he deserves monumental credit.
Third was the publication of Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind, which was such an incredibly influential crossover book. Because of Pollan’s reputation in other areas, people who might not necessarily be interested in psychedelics were willing to read a book about them because it was written by him. The only other book I can think of that was so widely read by people who had never been interested in drug policy was Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.
Fourth is the growing public voice of veterans – especially those from the Special Forces –who are using psychedelics for treating PTSD and other conditions. Vets have a special place in American society, and the fact that they are finding these monumental transformations in various settings and with various types of psychedelics, has also contributed to their legitimacy.
That led to a fifth factor, which was the support of politicians, including many prominent Republicans, from former Texas Governor Rick Perry to Congressman Jack Bergman of Michigan. This has turned into a remarkable area of bipartisanship, with right-wing Republicans and left-wing Democrats co-sponsoring bills that would advance research on, and access to, psychedelics – at the federal and state levels.
Then, there is the investment side. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been poured into university research centers, mainly from philanthropic funds but also from investors – sometimes wearing both hats. Harvard, Yale, Columbia, NYU, UC Berkeley, UCSF, and dozens of other top universities all have research programs. Harvard alone has three different psychedelic research centers. There’s a lot of legitimacy coming from that.
There are also the private investors who are putting in funding for commercial drug development. They deserve some credit even though, when the profit motive gets involved, it often distorts the nature of the research. That can mean that once a drug is approved, it could be so expensive that it would be inaccessible to the people who could really benefit from it. There’s also been abuse of the patent process by some investors, and that has not been productive for research…
Lastly are the activists, although their impact has been both positive and negative. On the one hand, there's been an irresponsible kind of extremism which led some activists to oppose the very important ballot initiatives in Oregon and Colorado [initiatives that mandated the creation of state-legal psilocybin programs]. On the other hand, activists played a huge role in making these changes happen, both in local laws and even more importantly at the state level, first in Oregon in 2020, in Colorado in 2022 and most recently, through the legislative process in New Mexico [a medical psilocybin program to be implemented in 2027], and hopefully in other states soon to come…
I've just laid out eight different major factors, and I could probably come up with a few more as well.
One thing that hasn’t changed is that psychedelics continue to be classified as highly dangerous controlled substances with no medical utility. This is just absurd. That categorization was originally made for political reasons, despite abundant scientific evidence to the contrary then, and even more now. And yet, there is some movement, with both psilocybin and MDMA coming up for FDA approval, and more state initiatives opening up access to psychedelics…
What do you see drawing boomers to psychedelics at this point in life?
I believe that psychedelics can be an essential part of healthy aging. Over the course of our lives, we tend to make compromises – to settle. And most people get increasingly scared of stirring things up as they get older. A healthy dose of psychedelics can stir up the emotional, psychological and even intellectual sediment in ways that can be profoundly valuable as one ages.
I actually think that people should commit to doing psychedelics at least once a year in older age, for as long as they are physically able to do so. It has this renewing energy.
As more people have these experiences, they start to become part of normal conversation with friends, family and colleagues. That kind of informal spreading is what we saw helping advance support for marijuana legalization and the gay rights movements.
We’re living in an age where a significant number of Americans are healthier and living longer than in the past. There’s a lot of life left in us, and we want to make the most of it.