Enter Wavy Gravy and the Hog Farmers, swooping in from their New Mexico commune to provide security for the event. Over the next three days, at trip tents and in the wet grass, the Hog Farmers practiced a radical new approach. Rather than arrest or medicate people having difficult drug experiences, they simply talked to them—distracted them, soothed them, gently reeled them back to earth. To the Thorazine crowd, it must've seemed like chatting someone out of cancer.
According to the Journal of Emergency Medical Services, some 797 trippers were treated that weekend. Woodstock became a template for psychedelic harm reduction. In the years that followed, at concerts and gatherings and in 4 million Dead parking lots, “talking someone down” became standard operating procedure. Compared to previous approaches, it was so humane that nobody gave much thought to where it fell short.
Start peeling back the evolution of tripsitting and pretty soon you're looking at larger shifts. Where once the benefits of these substances were relegated to some questionably spiritual plane, emerging research has shown measurable—and often remarkable—therapeutic benefits. As the value of a psychedelic journey came to be reassessed, so too was the impulse to curtail an unpleasant one.
Forty-three years after Woodstock, at Burning Man, a cardboard yurt appeared on the sun-baked Playa. Inside the structure—shady, fabric-draped, benches here and there—psychedelic harm-reduction history was lurching forward again, with the first official iteration of Zendo Project.
To the untrained eye, the volunteers sitting with distraught Burners were delivering a familiar form of harm reduction—a safe, nonjudgmental alternative to whatever the cops or medical tent would offer. But Zendo, an initiative of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), a research and advocacy nonprofit, didn't want to talk these trippers down. Central to its mission was a respect for the journey, however challenging. To quote one of Zendo's guiding pillars, “Difficult is not necessarily bad.”
At this point, maybe you've noticed my labored avoidance of the phrase “bad trip.” Those words have fallen out of favor in psychedelic circles, as research shows that even the most challenging journeys can lead to positive outcomes. Minor semantic shift, fairly radical idea.
Kelley O'Donnell is the director of clinical training at the NYU Langone Center for Psychedelic Medicine. As she characterized the new thinking to me: Achieving those positive outcomes means leaning into the experience, pleasant or otherwise.
Otherwise can come in many forms, per the Zendo training manual, from reliving traumas to identifying with the victimization of others throughout history. Some merge with nature and experience pollution or the death of a species acutely. Many just think they've lost their minds. Through active listening and a gentle reassurance that the experience will pass, the idea is to calm the trippers enough that they might be able to explore those nightmares. Rather than talk them down, talk them through.
Like the guy who just wanted to run.
“He would run, and then drop to the ground and not move. Then he'd leap up and exclaim, ‘I'm alive.’ Again and again he did this,” says Chelsea Rose Pires, Zendo's executive director. “Finally we were able to explore what was going on, and he was able to talk about his childhood and his fear of dying.”
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