My psychedelic (article) journey

A failed attempt at a professional article leads to asking, “What is the point?”

So here’s what I should have told them. Lawyers, especially at large firms, should be interested in this. If survey answers can be believed (and shouldn’t be doubled, like how your doctor does with the amount you admit to drinking every week) a solid quarter of them should be the target audience, the killer app. You all, as editors of legal publications for those lawyers, must have some familiarity? (Perhaps it’s why you work for legal publishing instead of as a practicing lawyer.)

The American Bar Association reports alarming levels of depression, addiction, severe anxiety, and suicidal thoughts among both law students and practicing lawyers, along with a fear of disclosure and discovery. Even the “successful” members of the profession are depicted by experts as “insecure overachievers” who are “driven by a profound sense of their own inadequacy.” Ask around and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, nicotine, cannabis, Adderall, nightguards, Xanax, Ambien, ketamine, and muscle relaxers, to name but a few, are commonplace, as are migraines, cluster headaches, insomnia, digestive problems, and the like. And at home, there is an obsession with microbrews, whiskeys, and wine that looks like obvious dependency trying to masquerade as sophisticated taste. Last but not least, there’s the cognitive dissonance. So many lawyers have world-class educations, deep familiarity with the best that’s ever been written by civilization’s seekers. And now they read arbitration agreements, the Federal Register, and interrogatories.

If there were a breakthrough in mental health treatment, and if part of the effectiveness came from transcending the current self to make sense of how all of one’s selves over the years might fit together or evaporate to permit something new, and if that treatment were legal and normalized and wouldn’t be professional self-immolation, your readers should want to hear about that. Though given their psychological profile and professional culture, they might not admit it. And your readers could afford the treatment, whether it’s ever covered by insurance. They really are the perfect audience.

I even asked a leading chatbot using a lawyer like what the ABA report describes:

Prompt

Answer

Something like all that is what I should have said when I was asked why the readers of publications for large firm lawyers should be interested in my article about the changing regulation of psychedelics. And, of course, the article itself should have made that point. Indeed, that probably should have been the main point.

But I didn’t say any of that. It didn’t even occur to me to say any of that until months later. So I say it now, up front, and try to understand how we ever figure out what the point is. And what stands in the way of finding and saying it.

Has this ever happened to you?

You get a legal writing assignment, or you give one to yourself, and you don’t lack for things to write about. There are a bunch of facts and procedural history. You can recount that. There are a bunch of cases. You can even apply them; some things seem pretty similar, others aren’t. And you can show how, on balance, the law sort of leans more one way, and so, well, there you have it.

After more than a decade of doing CLEs on legal writing, in the last several years I have settled upon three imperatives: (1) get to the point at every level of the document (the whole thing, sections, paragraphs, sentences), (2) be conversational, staying away from words that you would not say out loud in actual conversation, and (3) care about presentation and show that you care by making it look nice, cool, reader-friendly, and without mistakes and oddities.

But before all that, you need a point to get to, to write conversationally about, and to present in a pretty package. And hopefully the point is something a little better than, here’s the usual stuff and there you have it. Ideally, it really ties the room together. Really fits right in there. The point is perfect for the time, place, and case.

How does one figure out a real point?

Frequently, after writing the mindless blather, the point just emerges. Discussion of cases routinely presents the problem in miniature.

The writer makes the single best point about some case at the end of discussing the case. The beginning of the discussion is stuff about the case, probably drafted while the writer was reading the case on-line, essentially live-blogging the writer’s own education about the case. By the end of the paragraph, the writer figures out a point, and there it sits.

For the editor, those paragraphs are easily fixed. The last sentence of the paragraph (the point) becomes the first sentence. Thus, a draft paragraph begins “In [case name, cite]” and is followed by three sentences of irrelevant crap about where and when things occurred and the names of people and products. Then comes quotations from the opinion setting up recitation of the holding, followed by (finally) glorious recounting of something relevant. (Though not uncommonly the best quotation from the opinion appears in a parenthetical after a cite.)

That sad, ubiquitous paragraph is mercifully revised to say something at the beginning like: “This Circuit has already decided a remarkably similar case and established the rule that controls here.” So the original writer needs to learn to be a self-editor and transform the blather into paragraphs that start with the point. And the problem in miniature can be true of sections and the whole brief, which leads people to offer the sensible advice to leave the writing of introductions until last, once you have a clue and even a point. Writing those introductions well has never been more important because readers have never been so attention-challenged.

But sometimes the point is not so magically revealed, or maybe you realize later it should have been something else. I have experienced this in moot courts preparing for oral argument: “I wish we had written the brief differently.” That can happen for lots of reasons. Writing the brief, there can be too much drinking of the Kool-Aid among the team closest to the issues. The brief is literally written by people who know and care far more about the matter than anyone who will decide the case. The passage of time and some new readers may change perspectives, as will the case team’s own time away.

And don’t underestimate the ability of our minds to continue working through issues unconsciously. Cruciverbalists know all about this. Sometimes the stubborn puzzle is routed the next morning. The unconscious mind seems to have kept working at it.

So time, outside perspectives, sleep―all of those can help find the point, though high-pressure law practice may not afford any of them before a filing.

But my psychedelic (article) journey went deeper than just time and perspective. I wasn’t being honest about my own analysis. I was trying to mush things together that I thought someone else might want to hear and would find acceptable within the norms of the profession. I was only writing about what I liked at the margin, though that marginal stuff may have been my undoing.

My pointless article about psychedelic regulation

I found it all interesting―the new research on psychedelics and what it might tell us about the mind. I read the Michael Pollan books, listened to Sam Harris, watched what Netflix had available. I even went to SXSW and attended panels on psychedelics and artificial intelligence. It felt like something big was happening, something worth being in on as a lawyer or just a human being.

As it happened around this time, I learned two judges I know were on panels that issued decisions concerning the regulation of psilocybin by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the DEA’s denial of a religious exemption for ayahuasca. And there was (and still is) a lot of buzz in the press about FDA approval of psychedelic therapy, Oregon’s experiment with psilocybin therapy, and the DEA’s rescheduling of marijuana, the rationale for which would have to apply to psychedelics as well. I know a thing or two about administrative law. I could evaluate pending issues and potential judicial review. I thought I could say interesting legal things about all this, and having written something, maybe then I could appear as some sort of lawyer with expertise, someone who could be consulted for burgeoning business.

I wrote it up, in a mode that I thought typical but a little more playful than the usual stuff. Lots of changes afoot. The DEA can’t just keep going with delay and Schedule I business-as-usual on some of these compounds, and they know it. The studies are too compelling. The potential harm is not worthy of Schedule I. The need out there is too great. The political coalition―especially veterans with PTSD and those who support them―is too formidable. This cuts across red-state, blue-state tribalism. It even has a fascinating religious component (out on a limb I went from the norm), and the Supreme Court’s free exercise jurisprudence is evolving. The studies support the occurrence and life-changing power of a “religious experience” (or “mystical” experience, as the standard questionnaire calls it) brought on by these compounds, and people have rights related to the practice of religion (way out on a limb). In this vein, I was captivated by The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name by Brian C. Muraresku. (And it was more than notable to me that Brian was a former big law firm lawyer.)

The response of legal publications was essentially: Why would our readers be interested in this? Which seemed like a polite way of saying: you’ve got a bunch of stuff in here about mystical experiences that’s weird. There were legal-culturally-acceptable answers to the polite question: patents, trade secrets, regulatory challenges, legislative proposals, insurance issues, emerging company finance, lawsuits by people who have bad experiences or injuries, and so forth. Millions of dollars are pouring in, people will be taking new, powerful drugs. There will be lawyers.

But stepping back, it was personal. I’m a lawyer and a philosophy major, with more than passing experience with the mental health challenges in the profession. I found it intriguing, just like Brian Muraresku likely did when he went down the rabbit hole at his firm. I also found it hopeful at a personal level, and I thought others might, too. But we don’t talk about it. I literally had someone in authority ask me if I was doing OK because I had written an article about psychedelics. And maybe there were several others who thought the same but didn’t ask. Maybe that’s what the editors wondered.

So what’s the point?

We filter, consciously and unconsciously. We have personas, just like the one I gave to the chatbot because I wanted it to answer like a top-notch mental health professional and not The Dude. But filters and personas can prevent us from figuring out the point and communicating it. They send us down the safe, familiar paths. They have us answer “fine” when asked in the workplace “How’re you doing?” They have us say “patents” (like “plastics”) when asked about an interest in psychedelic therapy.

Actual candor is powerful, dangerous stuff. Prevailing legal culture still is not too keen on candor in certain situations. Courts are told that cases are distinguishable, not that their body of case law is an irreconcilable, frigging mess that they should be embarrassed about. And the value of mystical experiences―financial, psychological, or otherwise―is like bringing a pet marmot to the office.

I set off writing blather-ish stuff without even thinking twice: make it about regulatory agencies, the Supreme Court, breakthrough treatments worthy of investment, and so forth. But those weren’t the reasons I got interested, and the real reasons seeped through enough to make it baffling and strange.

A writer hopes to connect with a reader. But to hit upon something that might interest the reader, maybe we should get clear on what actually caught our attention. If I write a bunch of stuff that isn’t what grabbed me, why should I expect someone else to be interested in it? Don’t get me wrong, as I wrote previously, I’m all about the importance of the reader. But to give readers some credit, they frequently know when a writer’s enthusiasm is real, when the writer really believes in what’s being said, when the writer is trying to be candid. Candor can be powerful in that way. It can show vulnerability. It can build trust. If being that candid is not the marmot in the tub.

I told you up front what I think my main point should have been―weird, vulnerable, out-of-the-norm as that may have been. Whether that would have succeeded, I don’t know. But at least it would have been the truth. The answer to: why exactly are you telling me this? Which is the right stuff. An authentic point. An honest attempt to tie the room together.

And there you have it.

If you do want to learn more about studies and the evolving use and regulation of psychedelics and psychedelic treatment, I strongly recommend Psychedelic Alpha and the repository of articles that UC Berkeley has put together, along with the authors and commentators already mentioned.