The Contextual Adventures of Panama Red

Please join me for a brief digression from the world of psychedelia, if you will.

I'm going to talk about farming for a minute, and the function of this sojourn is to do in this column what farming often does for me: bring complex and somewhat esoteric ideas down to the ground and give them tangible form. In the world of ideas and emotions I'm generally immersed in, it's nice to just build a fence or fill a water tank.

On our farm, we raise beef cattle. I am sure that among the readership of a newsletter about psychedelic psychotherapy, I'm likely to find many vegetarians. Don't worry, as a former long-term vegetarian and lover of the earth and its animals, I respect your beliefs and commitment. I'm not going to touch the discussion of vegetarianism vs omnivorism, or what I refer to as "the dumbest debate on the internet" with a 10 foot pole. I'm just going to talk about cows in pasture. 

So, speaking of pasture: we utilize a practice called rotational grazing, or management intensive grazing. What that means is that every day or every other day, we use temporary electric fencing to move our cattle from one spot to another, so that they are constantly grazed over fresh, healthy grasses and legumes. They are fenced away from the grass that they just grazed, which will then have about 45 days to recover before being grazed again. This maximizes the yield in terms of grass and legumes, which means more freely growing feed for the cattle. 

This is basically a way to mimic nature. Large grazing animals are a part of every naturally occurring grassland on planet earth. They travel in herds, mow down everything in sight, and move on, seldom returning to the same spot until another season. Their bodies are adapted to this ecological niche, and the environment in which they exist is adapted to them. 

Since we have adopted this practice, we have watched our old farm, currently being rehabbed from decades of  overly-extractive farm practices, change dramatically. There are more birds- Bob White quail nesting in the grasses, a proliferation of red-winged blackbirds, and barn and tree swallows (my favorites) to name a few. Our organic ground is a welcome place for monarchs and other insects, as well as for our domestic honeybees. Unfortunately, as we've eschewed many chemical deworming agents and pesticides, we've seen a rise in flies. We are eagerly awaiting the arrival of dung beetles and greater numbers of swallows, natural pest control that we are hoping will create balance in the ecosystem. It is a work in progress. 

Central to this entire system is the premise of fit among all members of the ecosystem. Our function is to nudge the system in the direction we wish it to go, namely, the production of prolific forage, while maintaining a robust and resilient ecosystem. Every variable depends on every other variable, any one piece inseparable from the larger context.

By contrast, the current paradigmatic approach to raising beef cattle is to graze cattle for the first year or so of life and to then "finish" them by shipping them to gigantic feedlots, where they crowd in close quarters, eating grain and creating lakes of waste. This is, to be sure, a highly efficient system. If your goal is to get a steer as fat as possible as quickly as possible, this is the system for you. However, from another point of view, nothing about this makes any sense at all. Cows aren't adapted to grain, their rumens are evolved to ferment and break down starchy grass. When they eat corn, they are prone to bloat and illness. Because they are digestively taxed and packed into close quarters, they are highly vulnerable to disease. They are, as a matter of routine maintenance, kept on antibiotics. Hello superbacteria. 

Their waste, instead of fertilizing grasslands, is pooled into toxic lagoons. The feed that they consume is grain that was grown with chemically intensive agriculture in soil that is often highly erodible, a practice that sends megatons of valuable topsoil down the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico, along with copious fertilizer and herbicide waste. This is a system that has been completely decontextualized. In the name of efficiency and economy, we've created a system that is actively inhospitable to living things. 

This should be a familiar story. We humans are no more or less tied to our environmental and social contexts than are cattle, or any other species. The idea that humans have domesticated ourselves, and in so doing have created domestic environments that are ill suited to meet our own organismic needs, is not at all new, but it is very germane to our discussion of psychedelic assisted psychotherapy (see, we made it back around).

But now let's take the grim trip back into the feedlot. In the giant sea of mostly black angus cattle, standing over feed bunkers and covered in manure, we see a red one. He's named Panama. He's off on his own a bit, and wanders to an abandoned corner of the giant lot. He sees a single tuft of grass clinging tightly to a fencepost. He lowers his head to nibble it, and notices something odd. Sprouting from a pile of manure are a clump of moist looking drab colored shoots. Being a cow, he's very curious (trust me, they are extremely curious animals). He nuzzles the shoots with his snout and notices they smell earthy. He nibbles, and the freshness of the shoots are refreshing. He eats the entire clump.

About an hour later, our intrepid Panama Red is tripping his non-existent balls off (steers have been castrated). He wanders around the lot aimlessly, jostling against his tightly packed Angus cohorts. He finds an open spot and lays down. He closes his eyes, and is transported. He feels his awareness pull away, panning out like retracting a great zoom lens from far above. He sees the black square of fenced-in, crowded, muddy earth, but also surrounding fields and pastures. He collapses inwards and sees himself as a member of a giant herd of wildebeests, trampling the African savanna. He understands that the eight foot tall steel fencing might not be strong enough to hold them all...then some little elves, some colors and patterns, and sleep. 

FYI: If anyone knows Seth Rogan, I think this would be an excellent follow up animated cartoon to Sausage Party, and I'd love to make him a pitch.

Upon waking, everything is exactly the same. Far from instigating a revolution, he sees that his fellow inmates are...just cows. His red hide is nothing like that of a wildebeest, and the neighboring pastures are just as inaccessible to him as they were before he found those weird drab shoots. While the world around him seems a bit brighter at the moment, a whisper of melancholy sweeps in, and he knows that it won't last. 

The moral? Well, I suppose it is that industrial feedlots are inhumane and should be abolished, and if you enjoy beef you could support a radically different vision for agriculture by supporting a grass-finishing pastured cattle farm or ranch. BUT, more relevant to the stated aims of this newsletter, the moral is that it's impossible for our red friend to be well-adjusted to his situation, as his situation is contextually intolerable.  Sensitivity to context, before, during and after the psychedelic experience, is as important, if not more so, than the experience itself. 

As many wise and thoughtful commentators throughout time have pointed out, none more memorably than the great Bob Marley, "none but ourselves can free our mind." Human beings obviously have a good deal more agency than do cattle, and have a far greater ability to create change in their environment. Unlike our friend Panama, at least a portion of our own psychological imprisonment can be found within, through a thorny combination of psychological rigidity, avoidance and learned beliefs: our internal context. But not all. And the interplay between internal rigidity and circumstantial difficulty can create what I sometimes call "feedback loops from hell."

Perhaps psychedelic experiences offer the opportunity to arrest these feedback loops, to briefly "free our mind" from the stereotyped patterns of perception and behavior that keep us stuck, to experience a loosening of internal context and an expanded sense of possibility. If we have this opportunity, it is of the utmost importance that we seize it by immediately beginning to interact differently with our external context. If we don't begin to create feedback loops that create and reinforce a more supple and adaptable experience of life, the feedback loops from hell may reoccur.

This is a demoralizing possibility. It's also why, in the case of utilizing psychedelics for the treatment of people with persistent patterns of deep psychological suffering, ongoing psychological support is essential. In other contexts- religious, with healthy "seekers", or simply curious concert-goers, the need for ongoing support is not the same. But for people who NEED change in their lives, an unsupported and isolated psychedelic experience may be inadequate. 

When we consider the context of a person coming in for treatment with the dubious diagnosis of "treatment-resistant depression" there are a few factors to take into account. For one, the person is likely desperate. Treatment resistant depression refers to the kind of chronic, unremitting suffering that may at times drive a person to do damn near anything to make it stop. For another, if they are enrolled in, say, a psilocybin trial, they've likely read exuberant accounts in the press about the wonders of the new treatment. They're expecting something transformative.

Most data indicates that some participants will experience that! The fact that this is possible in a single event is truly remarkable. But, maybe they don't. Or perhaps they have an experience that is a bit more...complicated. Complicated, difficult-to-make sense-of experiences are not at all uncommon for users of psychedelics. In this case, the disappointment may be profound. The person may feel as though they've lost their one hope, their only shot at change. Or, even worse, they may, like Panama, sense that another world is absolutely possible- just not for them. 

In this case, we might expect a drastic worsening of a person's suffering in the aftermath of treatment as they may realize things won't change. Indeed, in a recent study of psilocybin for "treatment-resistant depression" by Compass Pathways, we have indications that this may be worth watching out for:

"There were 12 patients who reported treatment-emergent serious adverse events (TESAEs). These TESAEs included suicidal behaviour, intentional self-injury, and suicidal ideation, which are regularly observed in a treatment-resistant depression patient population, and which occurred more frequently in the 25mg group than in the 10mg or 1 mg groups."

It must be noted that there were not enough participants in the study to determine if this is statistical noise or a genuine signal. However, as we've discussed, a plausible mechanism exists that would create a signal such as this. We know that participants in the study were given only one dose, but we don't know what kind of psychological support they received and what sort of support it was. Such is the case when we depend on corporate press releases rather than peer reviewed papers, a science-by-corporation approach that is neither transparent nor prosocial.

We have scientific data, reams of cross-cultural historical data, and copious anecdotal reports and prolific, vibrant subcultures, all indicating that psychedelic drugs can be a tremendously important tool for humans to make sense of our world and adapt to our complicated existential situation. However, the manner in which we transition psychedelics out of the shadows and in to the main stream of the culture matters a great deal. 

When working with extraordinary suffering, extraordinary support is called for. This doesn’t necessarily mean that profound intervention within the medicine session itself is called for, but does mean that the process by which the person makes sense of their experience and allows it to inform their actions afterwards may matter a great deal. This is what psychotherapy does: help people make sense of their lives and shape their actions towards life-affirming values.

Psychedelics are contextual agents. They don’t create outcomes, they create possibilities. The containers we create for them and with which we hold them may go a long way towards determining the type of impact they have, both individually and as a collective species.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed it, please support me and this conversation by forwarding this to a friend, sharing to social media, liking the post, or commenting below. Bonus points if you identify, in the comments section, the reference that the name “Panama Red” was taken from…