The speaker was Marcus Luttrell, a former Navy SEAL in favor of using psychedelic drugs to treat American military veterans with serious mental health issues.
The place: President Trump’s Oval Office where he had just signed executive order fast-tracking research into the therapeutic benefits of LSD, Ecstasy, psilocybin, and other powerful hallucinogens. “We’re taking this…decisive step,” the President said, “to confront one of the most urgent public health challenges facing our nation; the mental health crisis.”
Declared W. Bryan Hubbard, another outspoken advocate for just such a step: “Federal prohibition of psychedelic medicine in America is over.”
I have often written of my own long-ago encounters with these organic transformers of inner space. Believe me, they ran the gamut from a delightful afternoon communing with spirits in an old Vermont graveyard to a somewhat more challenging morning surfing the waves of Huntington Beach, California.
That last one, unfortunately, culminated in an uncomfortable confrontation with an innocent young woman who, for some mysterious reason, aroused my bone-rattling ire. It also forever ended my psychedelic experiments for a far clearer reason, namely my gut-wrenching fear.
Recently, however, I met another American here in the Philippines whose past psychedelic experiences were more positive and productive than mine. Meet Christopher Blackburn, precisely the sort of military veteran at whom Trump’s order is aimed. Blackburn, now 65, spent four years during the Cold War of the 1980s serving as a US Navy machinist’s mate aboard a submarine in the Pacific. Its assignment: tracking, analyzing, and keeping tabs on potentially threatening Soviet vessels.
“We were a fast attack-type submarine,” he recalls. “We just carried a lot of torpedoes and chased Soviets all the time.”
All of which was fine and good until he got out of the service and couldn’t hold a job. Not to mention becoming an alcoholic, suffering many automobile accidents, and getting arrested for assault. Eventually, the former submariner received a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) and was awarded a full disability pension. He also began taking various antidepressants, which offered some relief for a time.
Until they didn’t.
And that’s when Blackburn decided to try psychedelics. But with few exceptions, they were illegal in the United States. So he made himself one of those exceptions by joining the Oklevueha Native American Church, a Utah-based organization religiously exempt from the aforementioned legal restrictions. And, sure enough, it did the trick.
“Basically, you go into another universe,” is how he describes sitting blindfolded around a campfire in the woods while under the influence of magic mushrooms. “I felt like I was communing with space aliens who were reaching into me and fixing all my organs. I’d feel long tentacled fingers go inside and then pull out, repairing all kinds of damage. And seven hours later, all the PTSD symptoms would be gone.”
Which is probably something like what early Native Americans felt practicing their religious rituals after ingesting peyote or ayahuasca, a psychoactive plant brew from the Amazon traditionally used in the indigenous spiritual and healing ceremonies of Peru, Brazil, Columbia, and Ecuador. Minus only the lingering trauma of having spent years in a submarine full of explosives.
Blackburn doesn’t use psychedelic drugs anymore, he says, because he’s found something far more effective: a loving Filipino wife and three beautiful children with whom he lives in the house they built in Surigao City.
“I don’t need the mushrooms here,” he says, and somehow, I believe him.
Not everyone, of course, can find all that. And so, with Trump’s endorsement, the traditionally slow wheels of medical research will hopefully move faster. “These developments mark a meaningful shift in the federal government’s approach to psychedelic policy and drug development,” the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies declared in a statement following the President’s order. “Today’s Executive Order reflects growing recognition that modern mental health challenges demand new approaches.”
To which I can only bellow “yeah!”.
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David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist, author, and radio broadcaster with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao. His latest book is Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.
