Psychedelics devotees are racing biotech entrepreneurs to turn 5-MeO-DMT into a pharmaceutical.
Beckley Park, a country estate in Oxfordshire, lies at the end of a narrow drive that winds through pastures and farmland, flanked, for the last several hundred feet, by squat concrete mushrooms. The house, an austere brick building with three gabled towers, partially encircled by the remnants of three ancient concentric moats, was built in the 16th century as a hunting lodge for British aristocrats. From the front, it resembles “a fairy-tale castle,” as House & Garden magazine once noted, but from the side it is curiously narrow, only one room deep, and looks as though it might topple over. Around it, enormous hedges and topiaries crowd together, towering over visitors’ heads in dreamlike forms: hallucinogenic spirals, a bear, a tilted top hat.
I arrived on a gloomy morning last June. The owner of the estate was Lady Amanda Feilding, a countess in her 80s, who was often described in the international press as “the hidden hand behind the psychedelic renaissance.” With an unusual devotion to LSD, she’d spent decades orchestrating the revival of legitimate psychedelic science. She was also notorious for her advocacy of trepanation, an ancient surgical procedure in which holes are drilled into one’s skull, once thought to release evil spirits and relieve pressure from brain swelling. In 1970, influenced by a Dutch lover who believed, dubiously, that such holes induce a permanent high, Feilding was filmed boring into her own forehead with a dentist’s drill while on acid, smiling exultantly as blood streamed down her face. She later ran for Parliament twice — in 1979 and 1983 — on the platform that trepanation be made freely available on the National Health Service.
This sounds like a fun trip.
