Brian Pace

Brian teaches Psychedelic Studies in the Department of Plant Pathology and is an Affiliate Scholar of the Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education (CPDRE) in the College of Social Work at The Ohio State University. Trained as an evolutionary ecologist, he specialized in phytochemistry, ethnobotany, and ecophysiology. He is the Politics and Ecology Editor at Psymposia, a 501c3 watchdog of the emerging psychedelics industry, and the co-organizer of the interdisciplinary psychedelics conference, Psychedemia. His research has examined how psychedelic experiences interact with ideology and the socio-political context of the so-called psychedelic renaissance. It has been featured in VICE, translated into French and Italian, and covered internationally. A former US Borlaug Global Food Security Fellow, Brian did his field work in Southern Mexico, the US midwestern prairie, and the Ecuadorian Amazon. For more than a decade, Brian worked on agroecology and climate change. Along the way, he has taught several original university courses on cannabis and psychedelics. Hypothesis: Counterexamples abound of those with psychedelic experience expressing views explicitly opposed to egalitarianism and liberal politics.Findings: This talk is an intervention in this discourse, highlighting the numerous contemporary and historical cases where the use of psychedelics failed to reduce authoritarian tendencies in users, even preceding or facilitating their adoption of them. We demonstrate that psychedelics can catalyze change in political or religious belief—but not in a consistent directional sense on the axes of authoritarianism-egalitarianism or conservatism-liberalism.Conclusions: We propose that many experiences—including psychedelics—can challenge and radically shift a person’s worldview, and that extrapharmacological factors influence the character of change in ideology or political belief—if any. We draw from both present and historical accounts to show that psychedelics are non-specific amplifiers of consciousness and thus “politically pluripotent.” Contrary to the results of recent studies, we show that conservative, hierarchy-based ideologies can incorporate psychedelic experiences of interconnection, as expressed by thought leaders like Jordan Peterson, corporadelic actors, and members of several neo-Nazi organizations.