Here's a brief review I wrote up of the LSD symposium. I'll post it here, although clearly no-one's going to read it:
Basel '06
The LSD symposium – at turns intelligent and inspiring, at others self-congratulatory, self-absorbed and frustrating.
The conference centre was a nice, clear spacious building, and the conference itself was very well organised. Simultaneous translation between English and German was provided via wireless headsets, and was generally was of a pretty high quality (on the English side at least!), although as Iso said, they did lose something. A couple of people I spoke to wondered why the whole conference hadn’t been in English, which is the de facto language in the Swiss business and academic communities, apparently. There was a nice “forum” area, where less official talks were given, and provided a good place to mingle and discuss with others.
Structure was two “panorama” sessions, and three concurrent sessions per day. The panorama sessions involved six speakers talking for about 15 minutes, on a rough theme. Sometimes these themes didn’t hang to well, and as the titles and areas of the talks had been chosen by the organisers rather than the speakers, they quite often strayed from the topic. Most of the speakers were talking at other points of the weekend, which meant that quite a few of these talks were just cut down versions of their main talks.
There were a lot of participants – I heard quoted figures from 1500-2000 attendees, with all the pros and cons that apply.
The focus of the conference covered two areas, I guess – celebrating the past, Albert’s birthday, and the history of LSD, and looking to the future to what will happen to psychedelic’s place in society. The talks focused on the history of LSD were obviously of a very different nature. I missed most of these, not really wishing to re-tread 60s-70s history and cultural appraisement. I did see Robert Forte’s excellent talk on Leary though, more of which later.
Because of the nature of the conference, being partly a celebration of Albert Hofmann’s birthday, and his discovery, the atmosphere was very positive, and quite self-congratulatory at times. For some parts of the conference, this was entirely appropriate, and often moving, especially during Albert’s addresses and interview. There was a great deal of love for the man, still very sharp at 100. Also, at times, it felt that the speakers were preaching to the choir, somewhat, as evidenced by the continuous outbursts of applause.
I don’t want to sound to cynical, because a lot of the time I was joining in with the applause, and there were a lot of things said worth applauding. It was just when every five minutes, the talks were broken up by clapping at statements about how bad prohibition is, and how great LSD is, it started to grate. Especially when the points delivered were controversial and could do with some debate, if not outright criticism.
Which brings me onto the lack of a forum for debate. Aside from the panel discussions, none of the presentations had any time afterwards for questions and debate. This was further emphasised in my mind by Lucius Werthmuller’s comments at the closing session, that it was great to see that none of the presenters had any egos, that there were no disagreements between them. Well yes, that is good in some ways, but in a conference that was at least in part focused on some fairly academic issues, debate and critique should be a vital and important force. I know for a fact that not all the speakers would agree, and I would imagine have some quite harsh things to say to each other. So perhaps suggesting that they were all in agreement does disservice to the “movement” as a whole?
The study of psychedelics, via science, philosophy, psychology, desperately needs to be accepted within academia, if people are going to take it seriously and encourage a change in general attitudes. This isn’t going to happen if psychedelics are associated with an un-rigorous, dated, “new-age” or hippy viewpoints, which in extreme circumstances are very foolish and occasionally dangerous. The fact of grouping everything together, the hippies with the scientists, may look great from one perspective, but it may end up doing more harm than good. However, I’m not totally enamoured with wholesale control of psychedelics via mainstream science, as you’ll see below.
Over the course of the weekend, two trends emerged, which in the main coincided with a US-European split.
The first, US centred trend focused on pharmacology and neuroscience as methods, and its immediate aims are to re-habilitate LSD (and the rest…) into western science, and produce them as prescription drugs.
The European side of things, and this goes up to an including Albert Hofmann, preferred to look more at the spiritual/therapeutic method of use, and in some cases argued against the idea of psychedelics as prescription drugs.
Where the conference fell down I think was when speakers were presenting LSD or drugs in general in the context of another field – philosophy, psychology, anthropology etc. (with the exception of neuroscience/pharmacology). If these talks had been presented at a conference on consciousness studies, evolutionary biology or whatever, they would have been laughed out. And this is the problem. A lot of people at the conference feel like they have something to say about the mind, or consciousness, or spirituality (in fact, at the end of the conference Lucius suggested putting on another conference that would focus on consciousness, to rapturous applause).
I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with looking at the non-material side of psychedelics, in fact it should be encouraged. Reducing psychedelics to merely pharmaceuticals or tools of western materialist science would be denying a lot of what makes them special. However, if you are going to look at these topics, you should do so with rigour, and in the context of other fields. We have thousands of years of thought - philosophy, theology, politics, and cultural studies to draw on. Most of the ideas that the hippy element (for want of a better word) thinks are new, god-given inspirations that no one has ever thought of before have been discussed and debated and argued over hundreds of years ago…
I would imagine that in a couple of years time, a body like MAPS, or some other organization, will set up a conference on scientific psychedelic study, to distance itself from the flakier elements, and thus gain a better reputation within the scientific community (this happened in the field of consciousness studies a while ago).
