Psychedelic drugs were once considered ‘revolutionary rocket fuel’, but could they be life-changing medicines?

The cover and title of Rich Haridy’s Trip Reports are reminiscent of a poster for a psychedelic rock band or a 1960s “happening”. They immediately suggest the book’s leanings.

Trip Reports is a fascinating read at times. It’s written by a self-confessed “psychonaut” – someone with an avid and sometimes evangelical interest in powerful, strange and often unpredictable mind-altering substances.

Haridy, a Melbourne-based journalist, takes a deep dive into the science of psychedelic medicine and developments in Australia. He examines the properties of various drugs, such as LSD and “magic mushrooms”, and considers how they might help humanity. He wants to know whether psychedelic drugs, including MDMA – widely known as “ecstasy” – can help with conditions such as depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Review: Trip Reports: Stories from an Australian Psychedelic Renaissance – Rich Haridy (NewSouth)

Along the way, Haridy considers many questions. Could micro-dosing be useful? Can – and should – the weirdness and unpredictability of psychedelics be separated from their potentially healing properties? Can they address social problems, such as loneliness and isolation?

Haridy doesn’t dwell on his own drug experiences, but there is raw honesty as he recounts his struggles with poor mental health, including hospitalisation. His experiences suggest the need for better psychiatric treatment.

But can psychedelics help? Haridy quotes one person describing an LSD trip as the “most important, moving, deepest thing I’ve ever done”. Yet the Beatles’ George Harrison, after many such trips, concluded that LSD “was like any addiction”.

An LSD trip can be sublime and life-changing; it can also be terrifying.

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Positive effects

Although psychedelic research is often associated with Europe and the United States, Haridy notes that “Australia has occupied a strangely central position in psychedelic science over the past 70 years.”

Psychedelics were widely used in the anti-war counterculture of the 1960s, when hordes of young people began to, as psychologist Timothy Leary put it, “turn on, tune in and drop out”. Governments were alarmed, and responded by outlawing psychedelics – and even research into them.

Australia was one of the last countries to stop research in the 1970s, and one of the first to restart the legal use of psychedelics as a medicine in 2024. “Last out, first in,” writes Haridy.

He surveys a wide range of evidence. This includes a woman who participated in Australian trials of psychedelics as medicines in the 1970s; her experiences were “vivid, life-changing and incredibly lucid”.

The group therapy aspect of her treatment was crucial. This mainly involved “self-work” that was tough and painful, as she worked through “deeply suppressed” childhood trauma, some of it sexual. But she found the treatment “really did work”; it was “deeply valuable” and ultimately “marvellous”. She claimed it “stabilised my life. I’m not frightened of anything now. […] I take each day as it comes, conscious of the beauty around me.”

This is an important lesson when so many people are mired in gloomy pessimism and apathy due to ongoing wars and intensifying global warming, living in fear of a cataclysmic future. Psychedelic therapy, according to Haridy, “changes your mind so profoundly that every other day-to-day problem seems almost irrelevant”.

Haridy examines research that explored the effects of psychedelics on terminally ill patients experiencing angst and terror about death. This, he claims, had “great results”, reducing anxiety and depression. It didn’t just dampen symptoms – that can be done with sedatives. “What was transformational,” writes Haridy,

was that fear of death reduced; demoralisation reduced. […] Spiritual wellbeing [and] quality of life went up, and perspective shifted. How they faced mortality was extraordinary.

Haridy records that researchers have found MDMA can have “profound pro-social effects”, such as “euphoria, happiness, connection to others, empathy”. People trying the psychedelic brew known as ayahuasca have reported going from severe depression to “throwing their medications in the river and feeling incredible”. There were, Haridy claims, “dramatic life-transformative therapeutic benefits” and a “broader enhancement of wellbeing, of self-perception and self-efficacy”, which were “pretty sustained”, though ayahuasca has also been found to have some significant negative effects.

Some of the historical examples Haridy uses could have been better chosen, however. Linking psychedelics with Aztec human sacrifice – “the ultimate trip!” – is a bizarre choice.

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Some big downsides

All is not entirely rosy, however. Haridy describes a session on mushrooms in 2024 during which one woman died, and others experienced paralysis, the inability to speak or stand, and difficulty breathing. It was, one of them said, “kinda scary”.

DMT – a drug similar to psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms – took people to “another place” that contained strange beings – elves, insects or aliens – some of which seemed malevolent. Participants were sure they were really in a detailed “tangible space” or “alien realm”. It’s hard to see any therapeutic aspects to this “hallucinatory circus”, as Haridy calls it.

Another problem is that psychedelics are deeply dissociative. They may be useful medicines for some, but they can also leave participants “questioning everything they thought was true and real about existence”.

As Haridy writes, “these drugs work because they change your mind, but they’re also unpredictable and dangerous because they change your mind”. This can have profound personal implications – for example, if a life-long believer decides they no longer believe in a god. People may require ongoing help to readjust.

Researchers have stressed that the drugs augment psychotherapy; they are “tools not treatments”. As with anaesthetics used in surgery, the psychedelics merely assist with the broader treatments of mental illness.

The combination of psychedelics and psychotherapy is a particularly murky area. Haridy writes that some psychotherapy relies on the belief that “repressed childhood trauma underlies almost all psychological and physical maladies”, which is debatable. Methods of psychotherapy, he observes, can be “wildly diverse” and they are “not tested for safety and efficacy, only the drugs are”; the belief in people having “inner healing intelligence” is “not empirically supported”.

Some participants who have undergone such treatments have reported “extraordinary liberation and healing”, feeling “a weight release” and “profoundly meaningful experiences”. Haridy claims there “seems little doubt of the healing power in unearthing traumatic memories during MDMA therapy”. Other participants, however, brought up “memories” of rapes and satanic rituals which may never have happened.

Nazis, the CIA and the 1960s revolution

During the second world war, the Nazis tested Mescaline on prisoners in the Dachau concentration camp. On learning of this, the US military conduced their own tests on mescaline as a potential truth drug from 1947 to 1953.

The CIA would later test LSD on unsuspecting patrons in bars. An expedition to gather the first samples of magic mushrooms for westerners was also surreptitiously funded by the CIA, which was, as Haridy writes, “looking for any way to get ahead of the Soviets, and developing unique mind-controlling drugs was one strategy”. (It proved to be “not at all helpful”.)

But the use of psychedelics among the general population really took off in the 1960s, when, as Haridy puts it, “taking LSD became an act of political defiance”. For some, it was “revolutionary rocket fuel” at a time of widespread protests and cultural transformation: the drug, Haridy argues, “bonded, and boosted, powerful activist groups”.

He cites the belief of philosopher Herbert Marcuse that there is “a policeman inside all our heads. He must be destroyed.” But Haridy is incorrect when he suggests Marcuse was a fan of violent revolution. Marcuse advised against it as tactically unwise; he believed civil disobedience and educational work were preferable.

American groups like the Black Panthers and Weather Underground adopted violent postures, but their tactics were counter-productive, undoing the patient movement-building of groups like the Students for Democratic Society (SDS). The Black Panthers achieved far more with their free breakfast program for poor black children.

It’s also inaccurate to say that 1960s protests were ineffective or stopped occurring. SDS, the Yippies and hippies, with their nonviolent, imaginative, humorous, artistic and clever tactics, were much bigger movements and more representative of the social and cultural shifts of those tumultuous times.

Yes, there was violent repression by the state, but, in the long run, widespread protest led to many successes, such as the withdrawal of Western forces from Vietnam and the birth of Greenpeace.

Complementing the protest movements of the 1960s was an aspect of introspection (which continues today with groups like Rising Tide). Marcuse urged students and activists to work inside schools, universities and cultural groups to awaken people’s political consciousness and change society from the inside.

For many, psychedelics were a shortcut for achieving this. For others, “teach-ins”, group therapy, meditation, yoga, eastern philosophies and forming countercultural communities were preferable. These may have been harder work, but they avoided the bad trips and “acid casualties” that were common in the era.

“The altered state of consciousness,” Haridy concedes, “doesn’t necessarily need to be generated by a drug.”

Can psychedelics make mental health worse?

A 2013 study by Norwegian researchers suggested the use of psychedelics was “not associated with a higher rate of mental health problems”.

But a recent American study at the Massachusetts General Hospital found that psychedelics can have strong downsides for some people. The researchers found they can provoke “intense fear, emotional distress, paranoia, confusion, or the fear of losing control, particularly in uncontrolled or unsupervised settings”, as well as suicidal thoughts, psychosis and manic episodes.

The study also reported that individuals can experience “agitation, and restlessness or attempt to escape from their situation when they become distressed or disorientated”.

Some people, the researchers found, may have “persistent problems with emotional regulation [and] destabilisation” or experience “lingering anxiety, depression, or intrusive recollections”; others may engage in “impulsive and unsafe behaviours”, especially on high doses or if they are simultaneously using other drugs, such as cannabis or have a predisposition to a psychiatric condition.

These problems are not explored in any depth in Trip Reports.

Haridy does, however, reflect on whether it might be possible to draw psychedelic medicine “out of pharmaceutical systems and re-situate it in community spaces”. He draws attention to one such space in the United Kingdom, which connects needy people with appropriate support from among 400 groups, including help with finances, exercise, writing, singing and so on. It’s had stunning results, including a drop in hospitalisation and health-care costs to the community. Haridy believes psychedelic therapies might be effective in such a setting.

Trip Reports is a valuable resource for anyone interested in psychedelics and mental health. It translates concepts from biochemistry, botany, psychology and sociology into lucid prose.

Many people who have tried psychedelics, observes Haridy, feel a “deep need to share their profound experiences”, but struggle because they feel they are “going to sound crazy”. One strength of Trip Reports is that it demystifies psychedelic experiences, making it easier for people to talk openly about them.

Modern life is highly digital and virtual. Ideological divides are broadened by political, economic and technological forces. Haridy believes that reconnecting with others, rather than just “finding our true selves”, is essential. Psychedelics may “fuel connection”, he concludes, but the connections are the most important thing, “not the drugs”.

Marty Branagan sailed on the Greenpeace yacht Vega and briefly fundraised for Greenpeace in the 1980s. He is a volunteer trainer in nonviolent direct action with Rising Tide.