The Harvard Undergraduate Psychedelic Club hosted a series of trippy, serious, and deeply fascinating events for their first annual Psychedelic Week from March 30 to April 4. A beat reporter was on the scene.
This is not, however, a traditional news piece, since the reporter was involved with the organization. The inescapable entanglement between subject and storyteller was a key launchpad for the ‘New Journalism’ of the 1960s and ’70s. Writers like Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Truman Capote, and Hunter S. Thompson leaned into subjectivity, blending creative literary craft with traditionally ‘objective’ journalistic inquiry. They understood that, in some sense, all news is a forum piece. As Harvard’s alternative newspaper, the Harvard Independent is the best home on campus for such journalistic experimentation—fitting, since it was founded in the same revolutionary era.
It’s no coincidence that this stylistic evolution, exploring a wider and deeper view of human intersubjectivity, coincided with the first psychedelic revolution. One of the most essential novels of that time is Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” his New Journalistic story of how Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters brought acid to America. And of course, Hunter S. Thompson would later take New Journalism to its extreme in the drug-fueled ‘gonzo journalism’ of his infamous “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” This piece I’m writing on Psychedelic Week, however, is more in the vein of Wolfe, who was sober; he did not drink the Kool-Aid. Besides the feeling we get from that unique Harvard cocktail of sleeplessness and Fogbuster coffee—admittedly, a heck of a drug—this writer, too, was sober.
I helped launch Psychedelic Week with a drop-in collaborative poetry party-slash-workshop. Collaborative poetry makes poetry social and accessible for everyone; you riff line for line, freestyling with partners, and co-create a piece of easy art that lives forever. It’s like finger-painting with language. After each short round, I bring the group together in a circle to read and dig our new poems like a trusty camp counselor of poetry. Forged in the cultural bonfires of Burning Man, Skooliepalooza, and VibeCamp, collaborative poetry embraces the social nature of language; it’s a metamodern transcendence of the death of the author.
If you want to try it yourself, you can add lines in daopoetry, an app developed by a man whose real name, given by his parents, is Laser Nite—we co-created it while crashing his couch in Venice Beach.
Collaborative poetry is an inherently psychedelic activity. Both poetry and human consciousness are exercises in bounded-yet-free association. Psychedelics expand the possibility space for dialectical interaction, allowing neurons who’ve never met to bump into one another; poetry puts words, images, and ideas together in new combinations, producing genuinely unique experiences of the universe. Each line is a unique interaction, a novel phenomenology, a fresh ontological proposition—it resonates with unities and particularities across the universe like a strike upon a tuning fork.
By tapping into the creative power of social play, even first-time poets can easily write dozens of genuinely interesting poems in a short amount of time. Despite the hype around AI, human “prompt engineering” still pushes the frontiers of intelligence. A single human brain operates its tokens and context windows millions of times more energy-efficiently than current AI models. Put those brains together, and the possibilities are infinitely psychedelic.
The rest of Psychedelic Week was just as mind-expanding, focused on cutting-edge scholarship on psychedelic neuroscience, psychedelic history, and psychedelic culture. Sponsored by the Mahindra Humanities Center’s “Psychedelics in Society and Culture” initiative, the week featured public talks on diverse intellectual topics by experts and researchers from the Harvard Divinity School, MIT, Oxford, and beyond: “Psychedelics and Aesthetics” by Tristan Angieri; “The Current and Future Landscape of Psychedelic Research” by Kenneth Shinozuka; “Cognitive Liberty and the Psychedelic Humanities” by Osiris Gonzalez Romero; “Psychedelic Chaplaincy: Ketamine and Spiritual Care for Treatment-Resistant Depression” by Tara Deonath and Paula Ortiz; “Spiritual and Cosmological Frames as Contexts for Psychedelic Integration” by Nicholas Collura; and “Singing as Plants: Sonic Agency in Shipibo-style Ayahuasca Ceremonies” by Michelle Bentsman.
The Psychedelics Club does not do drugs; it studies them.
To my subjective mind, the week’s most compelling lecture was the sweeping and intensive overview of cutting-edge psychedelic neuroscience by Dr. Kenneth Shinozuka ’20. Shinozuka co-founded the Psychedelics Club as the ‘Harvard Science of Psychedelics Club’ in 2019 during our junior year, along with two of our friends—Andrew Zuckerman ’21-’23 and J.J. Andrade ’19, who also both attended Psychedelic Week. After graduation, Shinozuka spent the last few years running the Oxford Psychedelic Society and earning his doctorate, studying the neuroscience of psychedelics with field leaders like Robin Carhartt-Harris and Morten Kringlebach.
Shinozuka expertly walked us through his recent meta-analyses comparing research on psilocybin, LSD, and DMT while effortlessly working the crowd, cracking jokes, and helping us understand complex data. The intensity of his prodigious research was immediately apparent. At one point, he casually mentioned, “If you want, you can scan the QR code on this slide to read these eight other papers I wrote for The American Journal of Therapeutics as a side project while working on this recent meta-analysis.” Then—boom—next slide: a picture of Shinozuka at Oxford hanging out smiling with Yamanawa elders.
Then we segue right into his current post-doc work at Stanford with Veterans Affairs, where he’s investigating the incredible power of ibogaine to treat PTSD, depression, anxiety, and addiction. Ibogaine, derived from the West African iboga plant, is especially effective at treating opioid addiction; during the electric Q&A, Shinozuka confessed a tantalizing hope that ibogaine could play a key role in solving the fentanyl crisis. After looking into Shinozuka’s scientific history, Psychedelics Club member Lauren Howard ’27 aptly summarized the group’s reaction to the return of our co-founder: “Bro’s cracked.”
Psychedelic science is a uniquely promising field brimming with potential—no comparable realm of research was simply illegal to pursue for over 60 years. As a result, we are now living through a second psychedelic revolution; there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit to explore, with profound implications for mental health and neuroscience. Concurrently, important dialogues about psychedelic history, philosophy, and culture have reemerged. After all, the first psychedelic revolution failed in important ways, as books like Wolfe’s “Kool-Aid,” Don Lattin’s “The Harvard Psychedelic Club,” and Michael Pollan’s “How to Change Your Mind” attest; Timothy Leary and his friends at Harvard in the ’60s had some wrong ideas about how to integrate psychedelics into society, and prohibition was the sad result.
In consciously cultivating a healthy psychedelic culture that can fully unlock the potential of these miracle chemicals, we must learn from the mistakes and successes of the past—we must especially include indigenous psychedelic wisdoms developed in diverse cultures over thousands of years, wisdoms which settlers have dismissed in the past at their peril.
As a compelling example of the live intellectual debates at stake, Shinozuka confessed that he “strongly disagreed” with philosopher Osiris Romero’s argument about cognitive liberty and unmediated public access to psychedelics. Shinozuka’s research has tempered his earlier views, and he now believes that society should primarily interface with these dangerously powerful substances through intentional “containers,” such as the medical container of a well-trained psychedelic therapist or the ritual container of indigenous ceremonies.
While the liberal democrat in me dreams of everyone having public access to these liberating experiences if they so choose, we also need to value the wisdom of experts as we cautiously learn together how these unbelievable chemicals can allow our minds to change. Good environmental and social containers are crucial in shaping the flow of change when we’re in states of high neural entropy. By setting our containers with intention, we can more easily wind our streams of consciousness towards wider mouths of the sea.
Imagine that the self is a fire and the environment is fuel, as the wood of a campfire both contains and sustains a continually burning dialectic. Liberal democracy, too, requires a container—a nation, or some other community—within whose structures and rituals the generative process of communication can take place. Freedom is achieved through boundaries.
A core theme of the week was “emplacement,” a term used by speaker Tristan Angieri while they moved through slides of Sonoran Desert art representing the Colorado River toad, Bufo alvarius, which secretes 5-MeO-DMT. Since the 1960s, “set and setting” have been the key words of advice for psychedelic preparation for good reason; by dampening the brain’s default mode network and encouraging engagement with the world through fresh eyes, psychedelics show us just how powerfully our consciousness is shaped by our environment.
Our minds are inextricable sponges and mirrors, and objectivity is only ever approached through intersubjectivity. Thus, “emplaced” psychedelic use—especially through the use of natural psychedelics in the environment within which they evolved, and through ritual containers developed by people in that environment—can be much more informative than “displaced” use. This poses problems for a Western medical paradigm devoted to fluorescent-white rooms and therapist couches.
Michelle Bentsman’s talk on ayahuasca ceremonies was a fitting conclusion to the speaker series, returning us to psychedelics’ religious origins. Bentsman studies the essential context-shaping role played by ceremonial ayahuasca songs, called Ikaros, with the Shipibo tribe in the Peruvian Amazon—as lushly emplaced as it gets.
Ayahuasca is often referred to as the grandmother of psychedelics. It’s a brew made of the chacruna leaf (containing DMT) and the ayahuasca vine (containing an MAOI inhibitor, which allows the body to delay its processing of DMT). If one were to, say, smoke pure DMT on a couch in LA, one might have a very fast but potent vision of textured colors patterned by hyperbolic geometry, as described in the Qualia Research Institute’s shockingly famous 2019 Harvard presentation on “The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences.” But the ayahuasca vine allows one to sit with the DMT for hours, to really explore and process its full potential for insight and healing.
In my fallible, contingent, and sincerest opinion, ayahuasca is the greatest medicine grown on Earth.
Bentsman is correct that sound is essential to the experience; the beautiful ikaros sung by Shipibo elders engendered ceremonial feelings I hadn’t felt in a long time. Even Bentsman’s own voice, just talking, resonated—which is to say it shared a vibe with me, a vine-echo voice. I walked around the rest of the evening with a sense of peace and confidence in alwaysness, speaking with a slower, lower voice from deep in my living chest.
The talk ended with a more radical argument: that the plants themselves have agency. Imagining a living, intersubjective, animistic environment takes emplacement to a whole new level. I’m inclined to believe her; those who have sat with the medicine often share similar impressions. It feels as though ayahuasca wants to heal us.
I remember feeling it move through my body, this loving grandmother looking through every nook and cranny, as if it were searching for where I needed healing the most. When an ayahuasca experience clears a block between your throat and your heart, or shows you a vision of a white owl spirit sharing its eyes and wings, you might be inclined to believe it expresses a degree of agency. But even if we do not believe this, and that the experience is simply a projection of ourselves, the fact that it feels like another agency is itself information with profound implications for the nature of our minds.
Psychedelic Week ended with some fun. There was an open mic at WHRB where people shared music, standup, and poetry. Then, on Friday, comedian Shane Mauss hosted a psychedelic panel discussion between some of our speakers and Harvard neuroscience professor Florian Engert. Rich philosophical debates on the nature of consciousness ensued, particularly between the scientific materialist Engert and the idealist philosopher Romero. While we never settled whether the mind is the brain, the panel ended with a shared hope that this intellectual discourse around psychedelics can help pursue a unification between these two opposing ways of understanding consciousness.
The final event was a pure standup comedy show, featuring comedians Opey Olagbaju, Biniam Bizuneh, and Mauss. Olagbaju was widely regarded as the biggest hit of the night. And, at the end of the day, is there anything more psychedelic than laughing with your friends?
Psychedelic Week represented the culmination of the Harvard Undergraduate Psychedelics Club’s growth into a mature organization. Under the leadership of co-presidents Katie Dorry ’27 and Chase Bourbon ’27 (who wrote “The Controversy of Altered Consciousness” for the Independent in February), the club has quintupled in active membership just since I returned this past fall. The group is one-third artists, one-third neuroscientists, one-third others; this balance is paralleled by the co-presidents themselves, and symbolized by the group’s key events: the semesterly Psychedelic Art Show, and now Psychedelic Week.
The club is a space on campus for students interested in history and culture, politics and programming, writing and philosophy. The only common denominator is curiosity, that essence of human intelligence, what psychologists call “openness to experience.” Unlike most of the Big Five personality traits, openness, which is connected deeply to creativity, can be increased long-term by a single psychedelic session.
The intellectual dialogues around psychedelics connect to every discipline, just as psychedelics connect neural activity across regions of the brain that rarely interact. I encourage you to join us in pursuing the interdisciplinary frontiers of consciousness with an open mind.
Harvard has played a key role in the progress of psychedelic studies for 60 years, but the next 60 years will be both far trippier and far more serious. When the first generation of the Psychedelics Club left campus in March 2020 as the world shut down, we didn’t know if the club would survive. But it has. This new generation is larger, more diverse, and more dedicated than ever; its leaders are young, and they have years to solidify a self-perpetuating legacy. The founders had an idea, but the new generation has built a genuinely functional institution that can live for decades. It makes me smile to see the seeds planted in 2019 growing into such strong vines, climbing up Harvard’s brick walls toward the light.
Aidan Fitsimons ’20-’25 (aidan_fitzsimons@college.harvard.edu) is excited to finish school and return to his school bus.