Nomad Codes

loaded, you don’t have to be afraid.’”
    To ensure that folks give psychedelics a proper shake, McKenna has always recommended what he famously calls “the heroic dose.” Chew five grams of mushrooms, lie down in darkness and silence, and you’ll realize “every man can be a Magellan in his own mind.” There now exists a considerable community of people who have taken his advice. They are united in a belief that it’s a trip worth taking, but endlessly divided on how, or whether, to tell the world about it.
    Though most trippers are highly secretive about their activities, one part of the scene is starting to poke its nose above ground. The last decade has seen the first resurgence of official psychedelic research since the early ’60s. Much of this work has been supported by MAPS, whose web site and journal is devoted to the dry, methodical language of protocols, statistics, and action studies. Though the National Institute on Drug Abuse continues to politicize the process with its war on drugs, the MAPS strategy has been surprisingly successful. “Now we can get FDA permission for various studies, and the regulatory system is pretty well open toward rigorously designed protocols,” says Doblin. “The big limiting factor is the shortage of serious researchers and scientists willing to point their careers in this direction. There’s still a lot of stigma attached to it.”
    Organizations like MAPS and the Heffter Institute emphasize the scientific and therapeutic side of the equation. “It’s about as close as you can get to mainstream cultural values,” says Doblin, who contrasts this approach with the hippies of the late ’60s. “The idea then was that these substances were so liberating that we needed to create a countercultural movement, one inherently at odds with society. The fundamental distinction today is between those people who still have that view and those who recognize that we have to feed this stuff back into the major culture.”
    McKenna straddles this divide. He believes that psychedelics should be more fully integrated into society, through art, design, and pharmacology. But despite his love of science—he calls Scientific American the most psychedelic publication that crosses his desk—McKenna is ultimately a romantic, and romantics rarely shape mainstream values these days. Though he’s no kook, talk of Timewaves and galactic mushroom teachers speaking a transcendental language may not be what the psychedelic movement needs as it gropes toward legitimacy. As Earth, who runs the Erowid web site, explains, “One of the primary criticisms of psychedelic users is that they’re loopy as hell, and it can certainly be said that Terence McKenna’s ideas are, at their best, controversial and, at their worst, confused and delusional.”
    Today, the psychedelic community has ripened to a point where it may no longer need a charismatic leader. In a sense, this was McKenna’s goal. Because if Aldous Huxley was an aristocrat of psychedelics, and Leary was a populist demagogue, then McKenna is a crunchy libertarian. So it is perhaps fitting that, for the moment, McKenna is the last of his line, that no new harlequin hero waits in the wings. What does remain, however, is a network making sure that psychedelics remain an option, covert or otherwise.
    “In the end, all McKenna is asking anyone to do is to become a shaman, to journey to the numinous, and draw their own conclusions,” says Mark Pesce. Even if the invisible landscapes one discovers hold no more reality than dreams or virtual worlds, the trip itself forces a direct confrontation with just how weird life is. And how deeply, profoundly weird dying may prove to be as well.
    Which means that McKenna is probably as prepared as anyone can be for the final journey into the dark. As he points out, “Taking shamanic drugs and spending your life studying esoteric philosophy is basically a meditation on death.” McKenna calls death the black hole of biology. “Once you go over that event horizon, no messages can be passed back. It represents a limit case in the thermodynamics of information. You just can’t hand messages back over that threshold. So get yourself pointed right, do not your mantras bungle, and that’s about it. When you’re actually dead, all bets are off. The best answer I’ve gotten yet is out of Don DeLillo’s Underworld , where the nun discovers that when you die you become your web site.”
    Like many