Can Taking Psychedelics Change Your Political Beliefs? It’s Complicated.

Will taking psychedelics turn you into a liberal hippie?

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“Turn on, tune in, and drop out.” Timothy Leary, the psychologist-turned-psychedelics-advocate spoke these words to 30,000 hippies gathered in Golden Gate Park in 1967. The now-iconic phrase became the motto of the counterculture movement of the 1960s and ‘70s.

The movement represented an anti-establishment, New Left way of thinking, and psychedelics such as LSD became entangled with this belief system. Were these substances responsible for such an extreme political alignment? Do psychedelics really have the power to shift political beliefs?

Psychedelics Open Minds

The last decade has seen an explosion of interest into psychedelics. One pioneering study that may illuminate how psychedelics could have an effect on belief systems was conducted in 2011. Researchers from Johns Hopkins University tested the effects of a high dose of psilocybin, the psychoactive component in magic mushrooms, on 52 willing participants. All of these people had never been exposed to the effects of psychedelic substances before this experiment.

The researchers found that many of the participants went through one of the quintessential…