Before we get started this week, a Facebook acquaintance of mine, Ian McDowell, will be speaking at this week’s Crescent Rotary meeting. He just won some press awards for his coverage of the hogtying death of Marcus Smith. That’s me on the left, leaning on a bookcase in the back of the crowd for his book launch event at Scuppernong a few Fridays ago.
He’ll have copies of that book available tomorrow at The Terrace, but his reading will be from some of his fiction, most of which is in the fine old Halloween tradition of spooky stuff and dark humor.
I have a new article out in the September / October issue of ParABnormal Magazine.
It is called “Psychedelics and the Paranormal,” based in part on this scientific paper.
Nayak SM, Singh M, Yaden DB, Griffiths RR. Belief changes associated with psychedelic use. Journal of Psychopharmacology. 2023;37(1):80-92. doi:10.1177/02698811221131989
I actually got to meet H David Blalock at last summer’s Congregate 9, at a panel on working with publishers of different sizes and flavors. They included self-publishing on Amazon, but when I asked about Substack from the audience they had no idea what I was talking about. I may propose a Substack session next time.
I’m curious:
I also found out a couple of weeks ago that the senior author on that paper and many others, Roland Griffiths, has metastatic colon cancer and has become the subject of a minor media circus based on the irony that he’s now a patient. Which is not at all ironic. It happens to all of us. All we have to do is wait.
Now that he’s dying, and therefore insulated from criticism, he’s also willing to talk about his own use of these powerful substances:
There's such a prohibition against psychedelic use that I thought it would undermine my credibility as an investigator if I became a psychedelic proponent. But eventually, curiosity got the better of me.
So I have subsequently had not a lot, but some experiences with different compounds. It has dovetailed in a very interesting way with what I've learned from meditation. My own sense is that meditation is the tried-and-true way to investigate the nature of mind, and (taking) psychedelics is, in some respects, meditation on steroids.
So, I did have a significant experience after my diagnosis. It was with LSD, and I went into it as an opportunity to dialog with the cancer.
That phrase “dialog with cancer,” reminds me of a story (I think by Robert Silverberg, but don’t quote me on that) where a rich patient puts himself into a hypnotic trance where he can visualize his condition as a video game, and he flies a spaceship through his bloodstream, zapping the cancer cells like evil versions of the soot sprites from Miyazaki’s films.
I’m pretty sure that’s not what Dr. Griffiths had in mind, but my brain works by fairly random processes of association. And since Robert Silverberg has written a lot of short stories, I have little hope of dredging the title up from the Internet before my family wakes up and demands their lazy Sunday morning bagels.
Update: Roland Griffiths died two weeks ago, and the media shifted its attention again, coming not to bury Dr. Griffiths, but to praise him;
"He was about 50 years old when he plunged into this area, and he had already established himself as a careful, methodical, meticulous investigator, the kind of researcher whose work was unimpeachable," Potash says. "This is what the field needed, as skeptics would be unlikely to trust the work of anyone less rigorous and objective. The other key was that Roland was sure of himself, and unflappable. He knew that all that mattered was what the data told him."
Links to much of that coverage is collected at the university’s memorial website.
Vaya con seta, Doc.