Shamanic Graffiti: An Alternative History of the Psychedelic Brain (Unabridged‪)‬

Humans spend two trillion each year on psychoactive drugs. Antidepressant and antipsychotic prescriptions increased 50 times since 1985, while Americans on disability for mental health has tripled. How can we have it so wrong?

Our relationship to psychoactives may go back 70,000 years ago, when the cognitive revolution inspired new worlds of shared internal representations, including gods, goddesses, and tribal mythologies. Could psilocybin mushrooms be the trigger?

After years of trauma and mood disorder, along with numerous antidepressants, I was switched to one called desipramine a few days prior to taking mushrooms before a party. I was told it would make me laugh and see the walls breathe. Instead, the witches brew of the two chemicals propelled me into my own unconscious; a snake pit of trauma, despair, rage, and existential anguish. After all, the CIA used to dose unwitting people with hallucinogenic drugs. The events of that night would reverberate for decades. It was only when I was mentored by the late Frank Ogden (Dr. Tomorrow), and he showed me the archive of the thousand patients at Hollywood Hospital’s LSD clinic that I would begin to find some answers. But how could LSD be a weapon, an effective tool for psychotherapy and a sacrament capable of facilitating peak mystical experiences? Just what happened at the world's longest running psychedelic clinic, and what did it have to do with the CIA, brainwashing, and a small house party I went to on mushrooms? Shamanic Graffiti is a mystery story that stretches to the origins of culture, consciousness, all the way to the front lines of a drug war, and a society on the brink of transformation.