' The logic by which this taboo operates is illustrated in paradigmatic
form by the discursive regime of the New York Times Magazine article,
"How Psychedelic Drugs Can Help Patients Face Death." As indicated by
the title, the key medical breakthrough attributed to psychedelics in
the article is their ability to aid certain individuals in establishing a
modified relationship to death. Elsewhere, a leading psychiatric
researcher claims that psychedelic substances, taken under favorable
conditions, have the power to "alleviate or even eliminate" fear of
death, and "to positively transform the experience of dying," in those
who receive them.
Patients approaching the end-stages of a terminal illness have been the principal subjects of research in this area, and the New York Times Magazine
article focuses almost exclusively on such cases, reporting their
results as the latest achievements of cutting-edge medical science.
However, far from being confined to any narrow clinical context, the
relation to death is a problem that must be faced by all civilized human
beings. Indeed, this problem, rooted in the modern-historical
conception of death as the absolute negation of the existence of the
separate self, is one of the fundamental sources of the suffering and
alienation inherent in civilized life. It is not only the sudden
awareness of mortality brought on by extreme illness, but the
unbearable, irresolvable consciousness of death inscribed in all
lapsarian worldviews, that calls for our attention. And yet the New York Times Magazine
article excludes the possibility that psychedelics could be utilized by
independent experimenters to break through the pain and fear encoded in
the modern consciousness of death. On the contrary, the author assumes
from the outset that such transformative effects of psychedelics do not
actually manifest beyond the boundaries of institutional and clinical
studies -- an assumption which many readers of this journal will
recognize as patently false. '
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