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restructuring but, exactly as it appears, something that faded over time. This looks a lot like nutritional supplementation that gets used by the body and then needs to be re-consumed. In fact, the results are similar to a study where violent criminals were given essential fatty acid (EFAs) supplements. They calmed down just because they had a better diet. This led to the idea that criminality may be related to nutritional deficiencies.23 The effect faded over time because they maintained the same nutritional deficiencies that led to criminal behaviour in the first place. Likewise, pigs supplemented with EFAs had more monoamines (dopamine and serotonin-like chemicals including tryptamines and phenethylamines) in the frontal cortex.24 So having more EFAs in your diet creates more of these neurotransmitters. It may just be more nutritionally sound, in a crisis situation, to take the monoamines (most psychedelics) in the first place and then supplement with improved diet.

So there is this relationship between diet, neurotransmitters and psychedelics, which are involved in the way the body regulates and builds itself even though it just seems, on the surface, that psychedelics are working in a psychological way. Another good example of this interleaving is ibogaine addiction therapy. One gets a powerful psychedelic and introspective experience, it also blocks your biological craving for opiates and other drugs and on top of that it seems to allow near instantaneous habit formation or a brain reset.25 Ibogaine seems to work on illness and disease simultaneously through introspective and chemical pathway effects.

Beyond the simple reductionism of chemistry and nutrition, a useful tool for looking at the interface between illness and disease is salutogenesis;26,27 the causes of good health. Typically in biomedicine we focus on pathogenesis; the causes of poor health such as viruses, poor diet, bacteria, etc. A focus on pathogenesis leads to addressing biological problems at the expense of social, meaning rich aspects of being sick. The ultimate goal of the pathogenic model is to reverse the biological insult and then the job is done. However, it does not spend much effort and attention to bringing the person above the baseline of health. Salutogenic forces are those that will bring us above the baseline and

therefore give us a buffer zone where we can withstand biological insults without getting sick. In short the focus of biomedicine is on avoiding sickness instead of enhancing health.

The key to salutogenesis is related to illness. Feeling as if one is part of a larger whole and that there is purpose to ones life appears to be related to lower incidence of heart attack, fewer sick days from work, and lower mortality in general.28 This experience has been dubbed sense of coherence and underlies the maintenance of good health just as pathogens, or agents of disease, are associated with poor health.29,30

If we look at the ayahuasca research I mentioned above,12 salutogenesis is invoked and ayahuasca is described as a generalized resistance resource that addresses psychosocial stressors.12 p192 In fact, users of ayahuasca have been found to be more stable and resilient psychologically than controls in sustained psychological testing.9 Psilocybin has also been found to have strong salutogenic qualities through its inducing classic mystical experiences.31,32 A classic mystical experience includes, among other aspects, union with God, the source, everything, or a deep sense of being part of ecology that leaves individuals with a sense of purpose and belonging. The overlaps with sense of coherence are obvious. Psychedelics, it would seem, increase sense of coherence on top of enhancing neurotransmitters and thus reducing their nutritional costs, especially in poor diet and high stress situations.

Sense of coherence may be a strong force for combatting illness, but there are social forces related to psychedelic use that can subvert it. Schizmogenesis is the origin of rifts between members of the same community.33 These rifts develop in a variety of ways, and in traditional tribal level societies they often lead to the splitting of a community into two. However in modern state-level society this is not possible; where do we locate Britain II? Because of the inability to create autonomous communities people get caught in a double bind; a damned if you do, damned if you dont situation. With regard to psychedelics, the schizmogenic forces take the form of information manipulation.

In the case of psychedelic medicines, biological citizenship is a schizmogenic force. Scientific research, as discussed above, shows that

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psychedelics are among the safest psychoactive substances a person can take.34 Most users of these substances know this. However, in terms of being a member of the global community, these substances are anti-social (for example, see how the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs as discussed in Feilding, this volume, has led to the prevention of access to medicines in the third world in order to stop the scourge of psychoactive recreation). Media aligned with mainstream society (which is a large majority of available media) supports this political and moral stance; psychedelics are said to cause you to jump out of windows or go permanently insane. This information war leads those who are aware of the scientific material and who have personal experience to question the integrity of those in power who berate them with apocryphal or sensationalised stories of drug use. Those in mainstream society never question the high levels of information saturation, or propaganda, of the media and thus think the drug community is irrational and falsely justifying their use; they are good citizens of a moralistic regime. This is classic schizmogenesis; both sides see the worst in, and cant trust any communications from the other; on this or any topic. The double bind that develops is that one must hide their use from the mainstream and either quit that which they find salutogenic to the detriment of their health or live a life of criminality. These stressors, in turn, can cause negative health effects that subvert the salutogenic potentials of these substances. The fact that people find strong healing effects in such unsupported environments seems to me a minor miracle. This may also explain why it is in shamanic contexts that psychedelic healing is most dramatic; the negative schizmogenic forces are simply not of the same force in the jungles of Peru.

By looking at multiple threads of information a programme of study emerges. The biological effects of psychedelics, with regards to health, are woefully understudied. If it is true that we have evolved in relation to psychedelics and that our bodies have learned to use them productively over millennia, the nutritional possibilities of psychedelics should be better understood. Perhaps psychedelics could be incorporated as a tonic to quickly bring ones monoamine health to a functioning level,

which can then be supplemented by improved diet. With a sophisticated understanding of illness and disease as well as salutogenesis, a series of studies could be made with psychedelics to assess the specifics of the articulations of these two different threads of poor health. These insights could hold the secret for bringing public health above a level where the most basic of health insults make us sick. Finally, the nature of political and moral aspects of self-medication are thrown into stark contrast with psychedelics. Biological citizenship gives us the perspective from which to address the human rights aspects of banning potential medicines on moral grounds. The political need to legislate against substances that for the length of human existence have provided healing, spiritual insight and, yes, even recreation, leads to conflicts in society that need not be. Understanding the schizmogenic forces surrounding as politically charged a topic as the sin of psychedelics will help us understand more subtle sources of social rifts and may even be a catalyst for broader community healing.

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