Psychedelics - Past, Present and Future
Mark Haden
MARK HADEN - Psychedelic Researcher, University of British Columbia
Psychedelics are all about connections: connections to self, connections to others, connections to family, connections to spirit, and connections to meaning and purpose to life.
Summary
- The term psychedelic, meaning "mind manifesting," is the scientific standard, overcoming decades of research suppression caused by 1960s counterculture backlash and media propaganda. - A modern psychedelic renaissance is validating substances like psilocybin and MDMA as effective tools for treating depression, substance use disorders, and end-of-life anxiety. - MDMA-assisted psychotherapy has shown an approximate 68% effectiveness rate in clinical trials for PTSD, offering a paradigm shift compared to traditional, less effective treatments. - Studies suggest psychedelics increase brain connectivity and may protect against recidivism and suicidality, exhibiting low toxicity and almost no potential for physical dependency. - Future legalization models suggest a public health approach involving licensed psychedelic supervisors for clinical sessions and a certification process for supervised personal use.
Article
The Psychedelic Renaissance: Past, Present And Future Of Clinical Research And Therapy
At Biohacker Summit 2018 Toronto, Mark Haden Argued That Psychedelics Had Returned From The Scientific Wilderness, Carrying With Them A Challenge To Psychiatry, Public Health And The Culture That Once Buried Them
In a wide ranging presentation at **Biohacker Summit 2018 Toronto**, held in **Toronto, Canada**, **Mark Haden** offered a portrait of psychedelics not as relics of counterculture, but as instruments of renewed clinical seriousness. His talk, **“Psychedelics - Past, Present and Future,”** unfolded as both historical reckoning and policy manifesto, tracing how substances once driven to the margins were re-entering medicine through data, discipline and a growing body of international research.
The central claim was stark. What had been dismissed for decades under the shadow of panic, propaganda and prohibition was now being reconsidered as one of the most promising frontiers in mental health treatment. “Researchers around the globe are becoming once again excited by the potential that psychedelics offer for healing and mysticism, helping us as human beings live better lives,” Haden said.
The Battle Over Language Was Also A Battle Over Meaning
Haden began where many political struggles begin: with vocabulary. The language around psychedelics, he suggested, had never been neutral. Early terms such as “psychomimetic” framed these substances as imitations of psychosis. “Hallucinogen” reduced them to distortion and spectacle. “Psychedelic,” by contrast, had endured because it was the most accurate, meaning “mind manifesting.”
That distinction mattered. Names shape public fear, scientific legitimacy and the kinds of questions researchers are permitted to ask. Haden’s point was not merely semantic. It was that the modern renaissance depended, in part, on recovering a language capable of describing these compounds without automatically condemning them.
He also invoked the broader family of terms around the field, including “empathogen” and “entheogen,” but made clear that in research settings “psychedelic” had emerged as the standard. For a field long trapped under cultural baggage, the restoration of precise language was itself a form of reopening.
The Long Shadow Of Criminalisation Still Hung Over The Science
If the naming of psychedelics had been contested, their legal treatment had been harsher still. Haden situated their criminalisation in the cultural backlash of the 1960s, when substances long used in indigenous ceremonial and healing settings became entangled with anti-establishment rebellion. In his telling, this was the moment psychedelics ceased to be seen as tools and became symbols, and symbols are often punished more fiercely than evidence warrants.
He recalled the era’s lurid media myths and official fear campaigns, describing a climate in which not only use but inquiry became contaminated. Research, he argued, was not simply interrupted. It was actively suppressed.
To make the scale of that suppression vivid, Haden reached for a historical analogy. “Psychedelics are to the study of the mind what the telescope is to astronomy and the microscope is to biology,” he said, framing the prohibition on research as an act of civilisational self-blinding. Whether or not one accepted the sweep of the comparison, the point landed: a society that criminalises inquiry risks confusing moral panic with truth.
A New Respectability Had Begun To Form
What followed was the case for the so-called psychedelic renaissance, and Haden described it as no fringe revival. He pointed to a decade in which major publications and universities had begun treating psychedelic research not as a curiosity, but as an emerging medical field. From reports on psilocybin and end-of-life anxiety to growing coverage of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, the drift of the media had changed. What was once unprintable had become discussable. What was discussable had become fundable. And what was fundable had become measurable.
For Haden, legitimacy did not arrive through enthusiasm alone. It came through institutions. Clinical trials, peer reviewed journals and university research centres had returned psychedelics to a place where claims could be tested rather than merely proclaimed.
That shift, he suggested, marked a deeper cultural turn. After decades in which the subject was largely abandoned to myth, medicine had started asking again what these substances actually did.
Three Families Of Psychedelics, Three Distinct Therapeutic Possibilities
Haden divided the psychedelic field into three broad categories. First came the classical psychedelics: **LSD, psilocybin, mescaline and DMT**, including ayahuasca’s active component. These, he argued, were especially associated with spirituality, ego disorientation and access to otherwise submerged psychic material.
“Classical psychedelics are unconscious amplifiers that make the boundary between your conscious and unconscious mind more permeable, giving you access to things you do not normally have access to,” he said. It was one of the talk’s defining formulations: psychedelics not as escapism, but as intensified access.
That mechanism, in his account, explained their promise in treating **depression, alcohol dependence, tobacco addiction, end-of-life anxiety and other substance use disorders**. By loosening rigid beliefs and established patterns of selfhood, they could create the conditions for psychological transition.
The second category was **empathogens or entactogens**, most notably **MDMA**, along with related compounds such as MDA. These, Haden said, were less about ego dissolution than about reduced fear, increased trust and the ability to revisit trauma without being overwhelmed by it.
The third category gathered substances such as **ibogaine, ketamine, 2C-B and salvia**, each occupying a more varied therapeutic terrain but increasingly studied for conditions including depression, addiction and detoxification support.
The Most Striking Claim Concerned PTSD
The most forceful segment of Haden’s presentation focused on **MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for post-traumatic stress disorder**. Here the rhetoric of renaissance gave way to numbers.
Conventional trauma treatment, he argued, often relied on methods such as flooding or prolonged exposure, asking patients to revisit traumatic memories until emotional desensitisation slowly occurred. These treatments could be gruelling, with high dropout rates and modest outcomes.
Against that background, the results from MDMA-assisted psychotherapy appeared extraordinary. Haden cited data from **Phase III clinical trials** and earlier replicated studies indicating that the treatment achieved roughly **67 to 68 per cent effectiveness** for PTSD, a figure far above what he described as the success rates of conventional approaches.
“MDMA assisted psychotherapy reduces fear and allows you to access the unconscious tape loop of trauma to rework it,” he said.
The phrase “tape loop” captured his broader theory of trauma: a repetitive, buried internal replay that patients often cannot safely approach because it is sealed behind fear. MDMA, in this model, did not erase memory. It altered the emotional conditions under which memory could be revisited.
Haden spoke not only as a commentator but as a participant in this work, referencing the Vancouver site involved in MAPS-linked clinical research. His account of severe trauma cases that later stabilised into functionality was delivered as testimony to what the numbers suggested: that this was not incremental improvement, but a possible paradigm shift.
Mysticism, Meaning And The Strange Persistence Of Benefit
If MDMA represented the strongest case for trauma therapy, Haden used **psilocybin and ayahuasca** to argue for a broader remapping of mental health. He pointed to studies on smoking cessation, alcoholism, depression and anxiety, but reserved particular fascination for research into mystical experience.
One of the more arresting observations from that literature, he noted, was that the personal and spiritual significance participants attributed to a high-dose psilocybin experience did not diminish over time. It often deepened. Months later, some rated the experience as even more meaningful than they had shortly after it occurred.
For medicine, this posed an unusual challenge. Most treatments are judged by whether effects fade slowly enough to justify use. Here, Haden suggested, there were interventions whose interpreted value could intensify long after administration. That did not make them immune to critique. But it did complicate any simple dismissal of them as chemically induced aberrations.
Psychedelics As Tools Of Connection
Running through the presentation was a single idea: connection. Haden returned to it repeatedly, as mechanism, metaphor and promise.
Psychedelics, he said, could increase connection to self, to others, to community, to spirit and to meaning. He linked this not only to subjective accounts, but to emerging neuroscience suggesting increased **brain connectivity** after psilocybin administration. Distinct neural regions, usually operating in more bounded patterns, appeared to communicate more broadly.
From this came one of his more expansive public claims: that psychedelic use in observational studies had been associated with lower **recidivism** and lower **suicidality**. These findings, he suggested, did not prove simple causation, but they reinforced the possibility that psychedelics might operate as protective factors in the wider social world, not only under laboratory conditions.
Legalisation, He Suggested, Should Follow Public Health Rather Than Commercial Chaos
If the first half of Haden’s talk was about evidence, the second half was about governance. He argued that legalisation, when it came, should not replicate the worst habits of prohibition or the reckless freedoms of an unregulated market. Instead, it should be built as a **public health framework**.
His proposed model centred on the creation of licensed **psychedelic supervisors**, trained professionals responsible for screening, dosage, setting, safety and post-session care. In this system, supervision would not be ornamental. It would be the core safety architecture.
The rationale was straightforward. Psychedelics, Haden argued, had **low toxicity** and **almost no physical dependency potential**. Their risks lay primarily in behaviour, context and vulnerability. Regulation, then, should focus on managing those conditions rather than treating the substances as if they resembled highly addictive drugs.
He also proposed a second pathway: a certification model for supervised personal use, aimed at those who did not seek clinical therapy but wanted structured, educated access outside underground settings. It was an attempt to imagine regulation beyond the binary of medical gatekeeping or illicit improvisation.
The Future, In His Vision, Was Clinical But Not Cold
Haden’s closing vision was concrete. He anticipated a future of **specialised psychedelic psychotherapy clinics**, likely beginning with **ketamine** because of its existing legal medical status, and later incorporating other compounds as they cleared the clinical trial process. Such clinics, he suggested, could eventually serve patients seeking treatment for trauma, depression, addiction and spiritual crisis alike.
This was not presented as utopia. It was presented as infrastructure.
There were difficult questions, including youth access, cultural traditions and the ethics of supervision. Haden acknowledged these complexities and drew on models ranging from indigenous practice to British Columbia’s “mature minor” doctrine in healthcare. But his broader argument remained consistent: if psychedelics were returning, they needed institutions worthy of the power they seemed to hold.
He ended with a line that captured both the caution and the ambition of the moment: “One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a long time.”
At **Biohacker Summit 2018 Toronto**, Mark Haden’s case was that the shore had already been left behind. The old certainties, forged in panic and sustained by silence, were giving way to something more demanding. Not faith, exactly. Not yet consensus. But evidence enough to ask whether one of modern medicine’s most neglected territories had begun, at last, to open.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2018 Toronto