Voices Of Esalen

Today our episode centers on a talk given at Esalen in 1985 by Dr. Andrew Weil. Dr. Weil is a prominent figure and a trailblazer in the field of integrative medicine, which combines conventional medical practices with alternative and complementary therapies such as herbal medicine, acupuncture, and mind-body techniques. (All of this of course used to be rather fringe; Esalen in the 1980’s, was a bit fringe, too. Nowadays, things like acupuncture and herbal medicine raise nary an eyebrow, and Esalen, to be honest, is pretty darn mainstream too.) On this date in 1985, Dr. Weil speaks about various drugs and psychedelics, as well as the cultural attitudes attached to them. Weil to this point had had a curious relationship to psychedelics: in the early 1960s, while a student at Harvard, he observed the infamous Harvard Psilocybin experiments conducted by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, and then reported on them in the Harvard Crimson, ultimately leading to the academic downfall and subsequent dismissal of Lear