This past Father’s Day, my daughter Yael and I did psychedelics and we loved it.
Well kind of.
We went to the Royal Ontario Museum to see its new Exhibit called “Psychedelics: Art. Culture. Science”.
If you’ve followed me for a while, you know I usually write about law, psychology and ethics. So a blog on magic mushrooms and LSD is, admittedly, a bit of a departure. But bear with me as I explain how genuinely captivated I was by what I discovered – enough that I wanted to break from the usual programming and share what I learned.
The exhibition treats a heavily stigmatized topic with a level of rigour and nuance I wasn’t expecting. The premise of the exhibit, in the curators’ own words, is to challenge long-held narratives around psychedelics and present a balanced, research-driven look at their cultural, historical, and scientific significance.
Through artwork, botanical specimens, historical objects, and a few genuinely immersive multimedia installations, it walks visitors through a subject that’s spent the better part of a century buried under taboo.
Here’s what stuck with me.
The exhibit opens with some basic taxonomy, which I appreciated, because the term “psychedelic” gets thrown around pretty loosely.
[Deadheads can stop reading now as I’m pretty sure you already know this]
There are 4 classic psychedelics, and they all act on the brain in a similar way:
1. Psilocybin – found in certain mushroom species (aka magic mushrooms)
2. LSD – synthesized from a fungus that grows on rye (popularly known as acid)
3. Mescaline – found in peyote and cactus
4. DMT – the active compound in Ayahuasca
Substances like MDMA, Ibogaine, and Ketamine get grouped into the broader psychedelic conversation, but the exhibit notes their classification is genuinely contested among researchers, since they affect the brain through different mechanisms than the classic four.
The next concept was mind-blowing (no pun intended).
The concept of “Set and Setting” describes a person’s baseline mindset and expectations going in (Set), combined with their physical and social environment (Setting) is the single biggest predictor of how a psychedelic experience unfolds.
The exhibit lays out 3 settings where psychedelics have historically been used:
1. Clinical
2. Religious
3. Recreational
The clinical and religious contexts share something in common that the unregulated recreational setting typically lacks – structure and trained support. The exhibit is fairly direct about this: taking these substances recreationally, without a guide, carries far more risk than the same substance taken in a supportive, structured context.
As someone who writes about law and psychology, this tracks with a broader truth that shows up everywhere – context shapes outcome, almost as much as the substance or intervention itself. Think how many of our family law and estates law matters spiral out of control into much higher levels of conflict, litigation, and horrific outcomes because our clients enter our office with their own “Set and Setting” when they sign our retainer agreement to begin the ride.
In our cases, most of our clients begin with a “Set and Setting” that is unrealistic, yet we cannot (or choose to not) change their thinking, state of mind or attitude. Trying to change the mind of a client hell-bent on getting custody of the children, life-long spousal support or the matrimonial home sold to them is as easy as convincing Justice Myers that hallucinated cases carry some precedential authority. These clients may benefit from psychedelics.
Let me explain how.
You see, according to neuroscientists revealed at the ROM exhibit, neurons are covered in receptors that exchange chemical messages involved in mood, thinking and state of mind. Psychedelics all activate the same receptors as Serotonin – our body’s natural chemical messenger. By activating the Serotonin receptor, these compounds trigger signaling cascades that prompt neurons to grow new connections, or strengthen existing ones that had gone quiet.
In simple terms, psychedelics change our mood, thinking and state of mind.
What lawyer can accomplish that in under 1 minute with a client?
Now for the Canadian angle (another psychedelic discovery)
In the 1950s, in a small-town Canadian hospital called Weyburn Mental Hospital in Saskatchewan, doctors were using LSD to treat substance use disorders and depression. These physicians were at the forefront of psychedelic research – doing work that, decades later, would essentially be rediscovered by the current wave of psychedelic-assisted therapy research.
That all came to an abrupt halt. In 1969, both Canada and the US had criminalized LSD, and the research stopped almost overnight. The criminalization of a promising clinical treatment in 1969 wasn’t a scientific decision; it was a political and cultural one, and it cost decades of research that’s only now being picked back up.
This ROM exhibit was so intriguing. I didn’t expect that our little native land, Canada, was a groundbreaker in psychedelics. We have historically demonstrated global leadership with abortions and freedom of choice, same sex marriage laws, Sunday shopping, the legalization of cannabis and, most recently, the new tort of family violence. But who knew that we were also leaders in psychedelic-assisted therapy.
This ROM exhibit – Psychedelics: Art. Culture. Science – is a case study in how taboo, policy, and science interact.
The exhibit ends December 6.
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