There are, I think, a number of interesting currents to this discussion.
First:
dmtlunatic said:
I used to go to conferences in the late 90's: but after a few one just realizes that the same old people are repeating the same old stuff; with the same old requests for funding, and speculation about how the big breakthrough in psychedelic medicine is just around the corner. In short: it is just like any other conference scene known to those who have been involved in academia.
"Just like any other conference ..." To some extent, I think this is a Good Thing(TM), in terms of reaching respectability for that particular subset of our work, which is clinical in nature or has the capacity to become so. You are certainly right that we have for quite some time now been told that there is a breakthrough "just around the corner," some of this as you again rightly point out is tied to fund-raising and some of it is just (perhaps blind) optimism, but I'd argue that there actually
has been substantive change for the better in the past few years.
I'd look at the work being done by Roland Griffiths and his team at Johns Hopkins as a particular example of this kind of work being done right. Their studies are rather modest in a way, their claims not especially grandiose, but nonetheless very important. The study on psilocybin and externally observed personality change was particularly ground-breaking, especially as that personality change (as observed by the subject's significant others) was correlated to the subject having had a "mystical experience." Now, the psychedelic enthusiast may be saying "of course ... nothing new under the sun," but to see that rigorously demonstrated is an impressive and an important thing.
This brings me to the next point:
dmtlunatic said:
I'm reminded of a quote by some philosopher or other:
Even when all the possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched.
In the case of psychedelics this is only amplified to laughable levels, to me - as someone who uses psychedelics and also knows about receptor subtypes. If someone can say "serotonin 2a and 2c sub-receptors" after a large dose of acid, and thinks that that explains anything at all, then they are living in a very dull world indeed! And now the roll call (or a more interesting discussion; however you see fit).
So, we read Griffiths et al., we have this thing called a "mystical experience," and it's correlated with substantive changes, and with potential clinical utility at that. Do we know any better what a "mystical experience" is? No, I'd argue we certainly do not. This is a question of theology or, at the very least, metaphysics. It's not a pharmacological question or a clinical question, at least as far as mainstream clinical concerns go--although spirituality is an important and under-appreciated clinical concern, I'm actually part of a multi-site study where we run groups with our SPMI patients addressing their spiritual needs. It's a very cool thing, but I digress.
In any event, as touching on psychedelics, you have a diverse group of pharmacological agents which can engender this very particular and yet largely impossible to quantify category of subjective experience, what the Hopkins group calls a "psilocybin induced mystical experience" and what I usually call "the ineffable." And then you the deplorable legal and societal position in which these drugs find themselves, largely due to the excesses of the last generation of their enthusiasts. And you have the enthusiasts, many of whom are brought to their enthusiasm by having experienced what these drugs can do in their own lives, and viewing that as a great positive. Some of them are coming at it from a (no pun intended) more sober place, as medical or psychological or pharmacological professionals who have an interest in the drugs as drugs or as avenues for exploring neurochemistry and psychology and consciousness, or for clinical use for a variety of indications, most of which suggest themselves from the subjective experience of people who are illicitly experimenting with the drugs. And there is a not-insignificant overlap between those two groups.
But the psychedelic enthusiast may be going on his own lived experience to say that psychedelics are important to him, and that is a different thing than science. This is a subjective personal judgment that doesn't need or want proof, but wants to further it's own goals. Sometimes a sort of evangelicalism crops up here, whether it's wanting to "turn on the world" or just an assurance that psychedelics are a boon to society. I'd argue that this is dangerous, and that it's certainly not going to succeed in today's world -- the way for psychedelics to gain a sort of foot-hold of acceptance in society is not to repeat the mistakes of the Leary era -- which is happening before our eyes, particularly in the ayahuasca scene; one need go no further than some of the more popular websites on that topic to find abundant evidence of this.
(Parenthetically, an organization like MAPS occupies a sort of curious middle ground here. Their approach is definitely more evangelistic but their methods are more scientific. I respect MAPS, and I think their work with MDMA and PTSD is well-founded and important, I like Rick, and I'm a donor, but some of their approach makes me a little uneasy. The rave-party fundraisers I find a little unsettling and their alliances with various groups as well -- the latter is a criticism I could also vent at many psychedelic conferences, and as far as their work goes, I must say that listening to MAPS speak about MDMA is probably in a category with listening to a Janssen rep speak about Risperdal -- which is not to accuse anyone of wrongdoing, but just to point out that they have a dog in the fight.)
So what purpose do scientific research, and research conferences serve? A venue for propagating information, a place for like-minded people to meet up, so on and so forth. But the "psychedelic community" (a term I use with some trepidation) is sometimes operating at cross-purposes, which I think is the real genesis of the present discussion. There are a lot of different currents going on. And it seems here that two of these currents each seem to manifest a great deal of discomfort in the other having "appropriated" their area of interest. That I think is natural enough because what these two groups are doing (and there are really more than two, it's safe to say) is really rather categorically different. This is a tension that's visible in the programs of most of these conferences, a tension between the more "hard science" kind of work, like what's going on at Hopkins, and the "softer" material. I spent this past Saturday at the Psychedemia conference, and Griffiths et al. shared the stage with a young woman who was talking about psychedelics in relation to feminism and "queer theory" (I'm not kidding. I wish I was. Although if memory serves she was involved in setting the conference up, so perhaps I've no room to criticize the choice of programming, and I'm definitely thankful that that conference & others like it exist ... just I would consider stuff like that a liability.)
So on the one hand, you have a focus on the biochemical aspect of things, and on rigorous clinical or pre-clinical trials. This excites me because it involves using a framework that, given the social and political realities that we are operating in, is for all intents and purposes universal and absolutely necessary for psychedelics to in any way "move forward." As a clinician I have a particular interest in "moving forward" to clinical use and I envision possibilities of using various and sundry of these tools to help my patients with very real issues that they face. As you say, this is a dream that has been in people's minds since psychedelics became illegal (and before, but at that point the situation was rather different.) But I think we are seeing real progress along the way.
Personally I'd locate the most significant of that progress at Johns Hopkins (not to denigrate the work of others, but just to reemphasize I think that they're doing it right in a way that has not been done before), because of the nature of the work that they're doing, particularly how they neither discount the ineffable aspects of psychedelics nor get caught up in the morass of inscrutable, masturbatory navel-gazing that has waylaid so many travelers down that route. And I think that it is this decision not to engage in the ineffable stuff that offends some people for whom it is a treasured and valued thing, but the very nature of the beast, that which makes it so appealing to people, makes it not amenable to scientific study, and frankly dangerous. Over-involvement with these sorts of questions which treat the exegesis of the specific content of the psychedelic experience has given us a rogue's gallery of intellectual clinical cases like Leary, endearing cranks like McKenna, and shameless charlatans like Pinchbeck. None of this kind of work helps the cause of psychedelics, reasonably defined. But I guess the question does boil down to what is the "cause" of psychedelics. Like any tools, they are morally neutral, but they are particularly powerful and dangerous tools because they are so unique, because the thing that they do is unlike other drugs and also rather unlike most other modes of human experience, and yet closely resembles some other modes of human experience (e.g., religion) for which it would be dangerous to mistake the transient effects of a drug.
I firmly believe that psychedelics have potential clinical utility and potential personal utility, and that these two things are not necessarily identical. At the same time I think that the approach that many people take to psychedelics personally is wrongheaded and dangerous, but on points of drug policy I'm firmly libertarian and don't believe that it's something that ought to be regulated. This is the cause of drug law reform, and has really nothing to do with the research that is going on in "academic psychedelic research," as the title of the new thread has it. So for those people who's use is more strictly personal, perhaps that's not the avenue that they ought to be looking at, although as a matter of harm reduction I think it's important that they pay attention to some of the material that's generated thereby.
Overall, I think it's clear that there are several different tendencies that go on in the "scene" that are allied loosely by a shared interest in a set of drugs, and I think that especially as each of these tendencies goes it's own way, it may be time for them to diverge more significantly, because of the sorts of tensions that have come up in this thread. Not necessarily with animosity, although hopefully with respectful and constructive criticism, but I do think that there is a point here. Conferences and organizations and the like can't be all things to all people, although recently it seems that they try to (the noticeable two-track approach that most of these events seem to take is a case in point.) I'm not sure what form this divergence would take, but I think it may be something that is inevitably going to come up in the future, and that we should perhaps be thinking more about.
And I enjoy reading all of the different perspectives. 
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