Toronto: Last month, Donald Trump signed yet another executive order. This one was to accelerate research and regulatory review for psychedelic drugs aimed at serious mental illness, particularly in relation to treatment-resistant conditions. Response to the ED has been widely seen as progressive. It appears that the US, once the chief architect of 'war on drugs', is now preparing to rehabilitate the very substances it spent half a century criminalising.
In India, this elicits a sense of deja vu. Long before psilocybin entered clinical trials at Johns Hopkins University, or ketamine clinics appeared in Manhattan, Rig Veda had already offered one of civilisation's oldest surviving articulations of sacred, altered consciousness: 'We have drunk soma and become immortal; we have attained the light, the gods discovered' (Rigveda 8.48.3).
There has been much academic debate about what 'soma' actually was. Scholars have proposed ephedra, Amanita muscaria, Syrian rue, cannabis preparations, or perhaps some now-lost ritual compound. But irrespective of whether soma was pharmacologically psychedelic in the modern sense, its function as sacramental alteration of consciousness was unambiguous. Soma was not entertainment but ritual - not to be treated as escape from reality but as access to a deeper one.
Modern psychedelic discourse often begins with chemistry. Ancient Indian thought began with an exploration of ontology. The modern West tends to ask what a substance does to the brain. Indian philosophical traditions, from Upanishads to Vedanta, Buddhism and Tantra, often ask whether ordinary waking consciousness is itself a kind of partial perception.
Indian epistemological traditions are not interested merely in altered states, but in whether the self we take for granted is itself provisional. And though modern interest in psychedelics is largely rooted in pharmacology, much of the vocabulary surrounding the psychedelic experience - from ego dissolution and non-duality, to the instability of selfhood and perceptual unveiling - resonates deeply with precisely this civilisational inheritance.
The word 'psychedelic' - mind-manifesting - was coined in 1956 by Humphry Osmond, a British psychiatrist working in Canada. So, how did a civilisation that once ritualised altered consciousness become so bureaucratically anxious about it? The answer lies, as it so often does, in paperwork.
The British, contrary to modern assumptions, did not begin with blanket prohibition. Indian Hemp Drugs Commission of 1893-94 was one of the largest drug inquiries ever conducted. But it leaned strongly against total prohibition, finding moderate cannabis use far less socially destructive than moral panic suggested. Regulation, taxation and control were preferred to criminal hysteria.
Even after Independence, cannabis retained cultural legitimacy. Bhang remained ordinary. Ganja and charas existed within social and ritual life, and had not yet collapsed into the same moral category as hard narcotics. The real rupture came through international diplomacy.
UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs in 1961, shaped heavily by postwar prohibitionist logic and US drug policy influence, pushed toward a global flattening of distinction. A ritual intoxicant became a narcotic threat. India actively resisted. GoI insisted that cannabis leaves should be exempted from any provisions whatsoever, arguing they were 'far less harmful than alcohol' and used widely by Indians. A subsequent compromise allowed a long transition period.
But by 1985, under Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, India moved decisively into the prohibitionist legal framework. Older distinctions did not disappear entirely. For instance, bhang still occupies an established legal and cultural position. But, somehow, the broader perception changed. Psychedelics and narcotics entered the same bureaucratic vocabulary.
Now, the US, having helped lead prohibition, is preparing to lead medical rehabilitation. Psychedelics are moving from counterculture to therapeutic infrastructure: clinical trials, psychiatric protocols, trauma treatment, veteran care, end-of-life medicine, IP battles and the slow construction of a major wellness ecosystem.
This rehabilitation is underwritten by the exciting premise that under controlled conditions, entheogenic substances may help loosen rigid psychic structures, restore neuroplasticity and interrupt the suffering produced by an over-fortified sense of self.
At this pivotal moment in the West's relationship with psychedelics, India needs to ask whether it wishes to be a mere consumer of, or a global leader shaping, that future. This is not an argument for drug tourism or spiritual kitsch. If India is to avoid importing the very cognitive frameworks it once helped articulate, then it must reclaim leadership in this field. Three strategic initiatives can establish its position:
National Institute for Study of Consciousness Establish a serious multidisciplinary centre dedicated to rigorous inquiry into altered states, drawing on classical Indian ontological frameworks, from Vedanta to Buddhist phenomenology, while integrating them with contemporary neuroscience, cognitive psychology, psychiatry and AI-driven models of cognition.
Active sovereign role in therapeutic development India's premier medical and psychiatric institutions must be mobilised to lead clinical trials and develop indigenous psychedelic-assisted therapies.
Progressive, culturally-fluent legal framework India must move beyond borrowed prohibitionist panic embedded in the 1985 NDPS regime. It needs regulation that preserves medical safety and ethical rigour, while recognising that entheogens are not merely scheduled narcotics but potentially legitimate tools for psychiatric healing and consciousness exploration.
India produced one of the earliest, and most sophisticated, philosophical frameworks for thinking about consciousness itself. It's also home to a globally-recognised pharma manufacturing infrastructure that exports drugs across the world. If the next frontier is not merely curing the body but rethinking experiential dimensions of the mind, then India should not arrive late to its own inheritance.
