Are psychedelics wasted on the young?

Hi there,

Michael Pollan once wrote that psychedelics might be "wasted on the young" - borrowing from Carl Jung's idea that it's people in middle age, not the young, who most need what he called an "experience of the numinous" to make sense of the second half of life.

There's something to that. In your teens and twenties and even thirties, life is often loud enough to drown out the harder questions psychedelics can raise. The things you haven't dealt with - grief, identity, the roles you inherited, the expectations you absorbed - can be quietly deferred. But at some point, usually somewhere around midlife, the deferral stops working. The questions are still there.

Which might be why these substances (and practices) are increasingly finding their people among those with a chunk of life behind them. Our own Martha Allitt went down this rabbit hole recently, and the result - A Metamorphosis Through Time - is well worth a read. It features therapist and author Heather Lee, who has spent years guiding older women through psychedelic retreats and sees this stage of life as a tremendous opening.

This month, Heather joins us live for Tripping at Menopause & Beyond - an online talk and Q&A on 24 March, exploring how women aged 50 and beyond are using psychedelics to heal, redefine identity, and shed shame and inherited roles.

Also coming up:

This Saturday: The Evolving Psychedelic Ecosystem is a free half-day online gathering featuring Rick Doblin and Rosalind Watts on where the psychedelic movement has come from and where it's headed next.
16 March, Bristol: Darren Le Baron returns fresh from three months among the San Bushmen, Zulu, and Himba to share his latest findings in Psychedelics in Africa: The Untold Story Revisited.
28 March, Hastings: A full-day Psychedelic Symposium spanning science, ancestral traditions, politics, sexuality, and more. A rich one.
14 April, online: Michael Pollan himself joins us for A Journey into Consciousness, a live discussion around his new book exploring the mysteries of the mind.
From 31 March, online: Holding Space is an 8-week course for psychedelic practitioners looking to deepen the most overlooked skill in the field.

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