PSYCHEDELIC FLASHBACK: NEW GURUS TOUT DRUGS

'60s Counterculture Gives Way To Researchers Who Eye Notorious Drugs As Way
To Tune In, Not Out.

Ken Kesey, the 1960s drug culture figure who died Nov. 10, might have
been amused by the latest twists in the long, strange legacy of the
psychedelic era.

Talk about karma: Eight days before his death, the Food and Drug
Administration approved a pilot study of the club drug Ecstasy for
patients with post-traumatic stress disorder. And FDA-approved trials
of another psychedelic drug, psilocybin, as a treatment for
obsessive-compulsive disorder, are scheduled to begin at the
University of Arizona in January. The studies mark the first
therapeutic trials of psychedelic drugs in the United States since the
1970s.

They also mark the passing of the torch from countercultural renegades
like Kesey and Timothy Leary to dutiful surfers of the bureaucracy
like Rick Doblin, president of the Multidisciplinary Association for
Psychedelic Studies, a nonprofit organization that conceived the two
new studies. The group also is involved in overseas studies of two
other psychedelic drugs, ibogaine and ketamine, to treat heroin
addiction, depression and anxiety. Doblin said: "What's different
between now and then is that we're not self-selecting ourselves out as
the counterculture. Part of my mission is to bury the ghost of Timothy
Leary."

This mild mission carries the psychedelic lamp a long way from Kesey,
who said the purpose of taking the drugs was "to learn the conditioned
responses of people and then to prank them." The clinical trials, in
comparison, pursue a resolutely sober approach to intoxication: an
acoustic Kool-Aid acid test. Instead of offering escape from the dull
workaday world, the drugs are now being tested as a means to help
people get back in.

Even so, today's researchers continue to face official resistance. The
National Institute on Drug Abuse, an office of the National Institutes
of Health, opposes medical testing of psychedelics, citing evidence
that the drugs can cause brain damage and memory loss. And even
medical cover may provide limited protection from the law. Just a
month before the FDA approved the Ecstasy study, drug agents in
California, where voters have passed initiatives allowing the medical
use of marijuana, raided a West Hollywood cannabis club, seizing
medical records and 400 marijuana plants.

Yet psychedelia and alternative consciousness have long since seeped
into the mainstream, from the celestial seasonings of Deepak Chopra to
the disorienting swirl of music videos. Once a transgression, the
dayglo rainbow is now as often a bore. Never mind wresting the
psychedelic experience from the counterculture; it already has a booth
at the mall.