Daniel Pinchbeck and the New Psychedelic Elite

It's midnight on a Sunday night, and Daniel Pinchbeck, a pop psychedelic author, is smoking a cigarette on the couch of a dramatically sparse apartment in Manhattan's East Village. An Austin Powers-like character with buckteeth, tangled hair and a pinched, nasal delivery, Pinchbeck, 40, does not exude cool, but he is well-known in New York as a philosopher and proponent of drugs not available at your corner dealer, which has made him quite popular indeed. It's been a busy weekend: Saturday afternoon with Sting at the Edvard Munch show at the Museum of Modern Art, Saturday night at a downtown rock show with Moby, and this evening visiting a bunch of people on dimethyltryptamine, considered the most potent hallucinogen on the planet. DMT, a harrowing seven-minute trip that feels like seven centuries, is Direct Mystical Transmission, says Pinchbeck — Drastic Magical Transport. It is "the doorway you can step through to greet the beings who run the cosmic candy store," he has written. Smoking a bowl of it, he adds, tastes like "a shard of lawn furniture."

Now everyone is quiet. In the living room, a rich, bearded Greek who has come to New York to experiment with psychedelics far from the prying eyes of his family kicks back in a La-Z-Boy. "You should come to this full solar eclipse in Turkey next week," he exhorts Pinchbeck. "If you're tripping, the energy gets ripped out of you during the eclipse and then comes rushing back a thousand times stronger." He cocks his head. "Lots of Israelis are coming to the festival, though — that makes it a terrorist target for sure."

Pinchbeck chuckles and walks over to a futon covered with a bright orange quilt on which a slim brunette is lying facedown. He pats her head with long, slow strokes. She groans. "People are becoming more and more cognitive that something is going on in our world that is not explicable by any of the maps and matrixes we have," he says later, taking his glasses off and cleaning them with a small blue hankie. Wars in the Middle East, peak oil, the extinction of the species — something is wrong on our planet. Pinchbeck thinks the answer may lie in the potential of psychedelics to transmit a new consciousness at the moment of our peril. "Our culture wholeheartedly endorses drugs like Ambien and Prozac, while repressing natural substances such as mushrooms that are sacred to indigenous cultures," he says. "The system is in free fall, and we need to go beyond our ideological constraints to find ways of dealing with the situation."

He pops his glasses back on without missing a beat.

The past few years have been good ones for the psychedelic community. The first study of psychedelics at Harvard University since Timothy Leary was kicked out in 1963 began last year, on the effects of MDMA in treating cancer patients for anxiety. Last month, Johns Hopkins medical-school researchers published the results of a major, six-year research project on the effects of psilocybin mushrooms, in which more than sixty percent of the participants reported positive changes in their attitude and behavior after taking the drug, even calling it one of the five best experiences of their lives (a couple of participants disagreed, likening it to "being in a war"). Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, who discovered LSD in 1943 after absorbing a compound meant to induce childbirth into his fingertips, celebrated his 100th birthday in January, and Sasha Shulgin, the Bay Area scientist who resynthesized Ecstasy in the late Sixties, continues to invent new MDMA-inspired compounds. The last week of this month is the annual festival Burning Man, which Pinchbeck calls a "fulcrum for the evolution of consciousness on the planet" — a psychedelic swap meet between America's 25,000 least conventional people, clad in Mad Max-inspired costumes as they wildly carry out pagan rituals on the endless expanse of a Nevada prehistoric lake bed that they call "home."

"The times have been darkening recently because of President Bush's idiocy, and some are realizing the potential of psychedelics to wake up humanity," says Alex Grey, the psychedelic artist whose work is featured on Tool's 10,000 Days album and who is a friend of Pinchbeck's. "As we come closer to a kind of apocalyptic culture, psychedelics give us an opportunity to look through a lens into our own mind and reflect where we want to steer our future."