(By Guest Contributor Skye Hawthorne of Drug Cultures Podcast)

Recently, I came across a tweet from a well-informed and successful psychotherapist: “Extreme political views of any kind are a sign of inner disharmony.” However you feel about the sentiment, it’s one that is becoming increasingly common within a space that used to be inherently revolutionary: the community of people who either use, support, or study hallucinogenic drugs.

This is an expected side effect of building a coalition of psychedelic enthusiasts and advocates that straddles the political spectrum. The project of building this coalition was - is - necessary for overcoming stigma and ending the drug war, which for decades has had the kind of inertia that only a mobilized, intelligent, and bipartisan push could hope to overcome. Compounds like LSD, once seen by scientists and psychotherapists as the next mental health breakthrough, have for decades been tarred by association with the radical, left-wing flower power psychedelia of the 1960s counterculture. Research ground to a halt. Scientists and academics, afraid for their reputations and daunted by the difficulty of researching a schedule I substance, did not want to touch them with a ten foot pole. Only in the last two decades has this begun to crack, with decidedly different communities stepping forward to extoll the benefits of psychedelics. Terminal cancer patients with end-of-life anxiety. People with intractable clinical depression. Veterans with PTSD or traumatic brain injury.

The act of building this coalition is nothing short of revolutionary. It takes real guts for established scientists and politicians to put their reputations on the line and stick their necks out to study and advocate for psychedelics. Yet here’s the tragic irony: the radical act of building this coalition has created a class of psychonauts who see politics as something to be abandoned, and radicalism of any kind as a symptom of the unenlightened mind.

So where did this psychedelic centrism come from? Was it always around, and is only now being elevated in the discourse? Or is it a byproduct of a changed world - the same drugs, taken by different people with a different upbringing?

Fundamentally, the 1960s counterculture was a reaction to a cultural hegemony. Psychedelics did not cause these seismic shifts, merely amplified them. America in the 1950s had unprecedented levels of post-war material wealth and a comparatively robust social safety net (for those who were allowed to fully participate in the economy). And yet, what it had in material abundance, it lacked in spiritual well-being. The era was deeply repressive; our social structures held women captive in unhappy marriages, locked Black people out of the economy and civil society, forced gay people deep into the closet, and blacklisted anyone with the intellectual curiosity to dabble in anti-capitalism. The 1960s were a scream of rebellion against the unholy marriage of capitalism, militarism, and social conservatism; the drugs were simply a catalyst. Those who took these substances underwent a profound change in mental state, looked around, and saw a world of squares: closed-minded, consuming a standard-issue mass media diet and shunning any diversity of worldview. From this vantage point, embracing political radicalism was the logical next step, and it manifested in many ways. Some hippies channeled their psychedelic revelations into groundbreaking art, others joined the civil rights movement, protested the vietnam war, or set up anarchist mutual aid networks in Golden Gate Park.

The iconic Summer of Love hippie nexus in Golden Gate Park, June 1967

In 2025, we see a vastly different landscape of political discourse. This is a reflection of domestic political trends here in America. Partisan sorting has led to a country that is deeply fractured in its politics by region. Sure, there were always massive geographic differences in values; half the country used to allow slavery, and the white supremacist moral and economic logic that sanctioned this atrocity has reverberated through generations. But only in the last few decades do we see this manifested in calcified voting patterns, in presidential elections where only half a dozen states are up for grabs. Depending on where you are born, you will be exposed to a dramatically different media ecosystem that is intricately tied to whichever party has a lock on your state’s politics.

The polarization of discourse in 2025, however, is driven by more than just American electoral politics. It’s a global phenomenon fueled by the attention economy. I’m hardly the first person, or even the hundredth, to comment on how the drive for “clicks”, for engagement and for ad dollars, has pushed political discourse that was once considered extreme or beyond the pale into the mainstream. If you take a psychedelic drug and have the (common) experience of questioning everything, you will likely come to question the economic interests of news and social media companies that profit off our sustained political outrage. Under the influence of psychedelics, just as in the 1960s, you might find yourself with a suddenly clear-eyed view of the cultural landscape and media ecosystem. But instead of the hegemony of the spiritually bankrupt 1950s consumer monoculture, you may instead see a world in which content creators and distributors, desperately trying to capitalize on your attention, have forced you and everybody else into political silos, feeding us a slough of custom-tailored rage-bait. Psychedelics, outside of a controlled cultural container, will promote reactionary thought of all stripes, and in this hyper-polarized world, positioning yourself as above the fray is reactionary.

Taking all of this in mind, it’s easy to see the appeal of categorically rejecting extremism of any kind. It has the same rebellious allure of a boycott, a revolutionary “fuck you” to the algorithm. The only problem is that…it isn’t actually revolutionary. It just looks and feels that way. For every corporation profiting off our rage, there are dozens profiting off of violent or exploitative practices that should enrage us.

Psychedelics amplify our innate pattern recognition skills to an insane degree. It’s part of why they can be so therapeutically valuable for addicts; they help us recognize and escape unhealthy behavior and thought patterns. But there’s a shadow side of this characteristic. Psychedelics have a penchant for making people think they understand everything, when in fact they are missing the forest for the trees. Several years ago, I watched a close friend experience LSD for the first time. As the drugs kicked in, I saw him look around with awe at the world around him, repeating over and over again, “it’s all the same thing”. He spent the next few hours pointing out how fractals appear in the trees around us and the neurons within us. How consciousness and quantum physics were one and the same. But psychedelic pattern recognition, at the end of the day, has limited utility. I’ve seen too many psychedelic enthusiasts apply these revelations to politics, treating all governments and power structures as equally evil, equally illegitimate, as if they’re all doing the exact same things. Recognizing that similar patterns of authoritarianism can manifest in vastly different societies throughout thousands of years of human history, of course, is incredibly important. And if psychedelics help you unlearn whatever propaganda you’ve internalized from your own government or media diet, then more power to you. But I want to scream this at the top of my lungs sometimes: not everything is the same. Especially when it comes to politics. Some things are categorically different. Even if the patterns of social control look the same, that does not imply a moral equivalence.

The worst offenders here are probably the psychedelic libertarians. Don’t get me wrong, it’s easy to see the pipeline from taking psychedelics to becoming a libertarian. Under the radically altered headspace that a drug like LSD can induce, it might seem absurd that any person, or group of people, should have the authority to control or coerce you, and certainly absurd that they can lock you away. Yet too often, these people return from their trips with only their libertarianism and nothing else. “All forms of authoritarianism are equally evil,” they’ll sometimes say. I’ve seen this contention repeatedly, and I find it most odious when used to make a false equivalence between fascism and communism. The argument, as you’ll hear it from psychedelic centrists, is that both communist and fascist governments mobilize the violent apparatus of the state against individuals exercising their liberty. And it’s true that communist and fascist governments suppress dissent and implement their ideologies through violence. But I’ll say it again: their ideologies are different.

Fascists take their nationalist fervor and direct it at a minority scapegoat with no political power. The core idea of fascism is that if you whip up enough hatred towards a minority group, then their labor can be exploited, their resources plundered and distributed to whoever is deemed more deserving. In the most extreme cases, such as the Nazi genocide of the Jews, the scapegoats are slaughtered wholesale. Of those who managed to survive this holocaust, the majority were liberated by the communist USSR.

Communists also rely on mass mobilization of the majority against a minority. But in most communist societies , the minority is not a racial or ethnic group, but rather an economic class. To make an equivalence between fascism and communism is to say that hating Black people and hating your landlord are the same thing. It’s like saying anti-semitism and hating your boss are the same thing, or that factory owners who ship your job overseas are morally equivalent to the immigrant laborer who comes to your country looking for a better life. Fascism takes peoples’ anger at a system and blames it on your neighbor, someone who looks different or worships differently or speaks a different language, and uses the threat of state violence to force them into subjugation. Communism takes that same anger and blames it on those people who have the most economic power, on landlords and bosses and robber barons.

I’m not saying you have to be a communist. Communist countries are not without corruption, cruelty, and large-scale mechanized violence. What I am saying is that psychedelic drugs, particularly the “classic psychedelics” like LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, and ayahuasca, can induce a profound state of love for all of humanity, and beyond that, a deep sense of interconnectedness between all living beings. This is a state of mind that is inherently radical. It doesn’t matter if you’re taking mushrooms because you hear they help with cluster headaches or dropping acid because you hear a low dose can make you more productive at work – take too much of either one, and you’ll have the profound realizations whether you want them or not. Yet our society no longer treats these substances as the potentially radicalizing tools that they are. If you’ve never taken one of these drugs and all you know about them comes from The Joe Rogan Experience or Huberman Lab, you may see psilocybin as just another supplement, another thing to add to your stack in order to be a more productive, optimized version of yourself. If that’s what you want, go for it. There are a million different reasons to use drugs, or to abstain altogether. But I’m less interested in the fact that mushrooms increase visual acuity than I am in their ability to increase empathy for my fellow human beings. When I look at my country and the world around me, I see ballooning wealth inequality, renters and workers getting fleeced, our social and economic rights being stripped away, and an empire that would rather facilitate genocide than provide a safety net for my own neighbors. If extreme political views of any kind are a sign of inner disharmony, then perhaps inner disharmony is a sign of outer disharmony. But in this disharmony, I see more than just despair. I also see the opportunity to engage in a righteous, meaningful, and fulfilling struggle to protect the people I love, and protect those I don’t know as well. After all, we’re all part of the same interconnected tapestry.

When I think of the platonic ideal of a politically engaged psychonaut, I often think of my communist friend who used to take multiple tabs of acid and immediately join large Zoom meetings with other leftists. One time I asked him how and why he did it, as spending even a second on Zoom seemed like a psychotic activity to enjoy on LSD. “Acid clarifies my mission,” he responded. “It makes me want to talk to people, to hop on a call and tell people they should organize their workplace. It makes me want to knock on doors and tell people they should organize their apartment buildings and demand better living conditions from their landlord.” And that stuck with me. If you take a psychedelic, you should open your mind to the possibility that it will clarify your mission. If you believe in God (as the majority of human beings do) you probably believe that you were put here for a reason. It could be engaging politically: running for office, organizing in your community, joining a union. It could be engaging creatively; I promise you, AI isn’t going to take away your ability to draw a pretty picture or write a sci-fi novel. And honestly, your mission may just be to fire up the grill, knock on your neighbor’s door, and invite him over for burgers and beers. In our hyper-polarized, terminally online, and deeply isolated world, that’s as radical an act as anything.

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