Psychedelic trips have played a part in mystical traditions for millennia, but their revival comes at a time when our old religions are endangered. The march of Reason and Evidence has left a gaping void; we are surrounded by a bubbling sea of Unreality. Television, billboards and newspapers first threatened the dam between dreams and waking consciousness; Twitter, Netflix and the smartphone, always there and nudging away, have blasted it asunder.

In place of structural changes, or indeed religious ones, the system defaults to plaster solutions, offering mere jolts of aliveness. The “altered states economy”, now generating as much as $4 trillion worldwide, offers a range of techniques to tap into the Real, or at least muffle the Unreal. There’s alcohol and disposable vape pens, video gaming and high-intensity sports, breathwork, meditation apps — and now, the legal psychedelic drug, perhaps the most significant launchpad to sacred states yet.

Medical authorities in Oregon are set to roll out psychedelic therapy this year, while many cities and states in the US have, to various extents, decriminalised the drugs. Meanwhile, Mexico is tapping into the market for psychedelic experiences still illegal in the US: the Guardian reported yesterday on clinics set up just over the border that offer courses of the powerful psychedelic ibogaine as treatment for trauma.

The faith we once put in transcendent states has been swiftly industrialised. A scan of the current psychedelic market reveals a strange mix of Big Pharma and young start-ups, such as ATAI, a Peter Thiel-funded firm. Its founder, Christian Angermayer, has been accused of manoeuvring to dominate the psychedelic market through zealous patenting strategies. He envisions his trials as perpetuations of mystical traditions from Ancient Greece. More than 2,000 years later, though, “profane illumination” is now under the microscope, dissected, refashioned as a tool. Only when validated in scientific, psychiatric discourse is it taken seriously. The industrial boom has happened in tandem with an enormous amount of research, much of it funded (with likely biasing effects) by profit-driven entities.

Whereas psychedelic culture used to be defined by its naive subjectivism — you have to take it to know what it’s like, man! — a kind of naive objectivism has taken its place. On a scale of one-to-five, the Mystical Experience Questionnaire asks trial participants, how would you “sense that [your psychedelic] experience cannot be described adequately in words”?

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Our grasping search for the Real is heading for more disturbing developments still. As documented by the scholars Maxim Tvorun-Dunn and Tehseen Noorani, efforts are underway to render “psychedelic medicine” continuous with growing suites of “digital therapeutics”. Some firms plan to substitute post-trip in-person therapy for an app. Other companies intend to track and harvest data from clients’ voyages, via wearable devices that “personalise” and “facilitate” the “clinical experience”.

The ketamine market in the United States offers a terrifying glimpse at this future of runaway capital. In some so-called “McKetamine” clinics, users are shuttled through a pricey yet cost-minimised production line of “profane illuminations”, with little after-support — despite serious risks of addiction, psychosis, and permanent visual disturbances. One such company, Peak, thankfully shut down its operations amid a backlash to its flagrant promotional strategy, which included online consultations lasting two minutes and promises to “cure depression forever”.

Such absurdly utopian rhetoric abounds among the proponents of psychedelics, who include many powerful people in the tech world. Certain transhumanist thinkers in Silicon Valley have called for more research into drugs that produce permanent bliss states without side effects; theirs is an “abolitionist” ideology that seeks to eliminate all conscious suffering from the universe. Meanwhile Elon Musk, who hints strongly at a taste for psychedelics like the aforementioned DMT, has expressed hopes of “extend[ing] the light of consciousness to the stars”, in tandem with technology: his Neuralink brain-machine interface is set to commence human trials in 2023.

This language goes beyond aspiration, or even idealism: it’s a simulated religion. Inconveniently, there are dangers in viewing our search for God as a technical problem — one that can be solved through human ingenuity. The current psychedelic landscape is greatly influenced by Carl Jung, whose acolyte Stanislav Grof administered LSD in more than 5,000 sessions in communist Czechoslovakia. Yet Jung was famously suspicious of what he called “the pure gifts of the Gods”, described and promoted by early “psychonauts” such as Osmond and Huxley. More than anything, Jung suggests, we ought to engage with the psyche on its own terms, as a mysterious and subterranean layer of reality that can’t necessarily be gauged in the terms of Reason that govern our everyday lives.

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Similarly, indigenous and mystical traditions have warned the West against conquistador exploration of ecstatic states for centuries. The Eastern Orthodox tradition, for instance, has a rich literature of prelest, a spiritual malaise in which the seeker of private mystical experiences becomes possessed, obsessed, deluded, or corrupted by egotism. It’s hard not to see a grain of truth in the old Christian warning against demons: a warning levied by various Iberian conquerors against peyote and ayahuasca centuries ago, and now being revived by religious communities alerted to the psychedelic trend.

Despite these warnings, there are growing communities of self-declared “psychonauts” heading deep into DMT space for hours before sharing their experiences on online messageboards. And people do often return from that space with entirely different metaphysical paradigms, with users convinced that the entities they saw were very Real. Yet in an era when the idea of evil has lost much of its cultural currency, it is curious that many report encountering entities that are exceptionally malicious — or, indeed, demonic. So wedded are we to the idea of Reason, we might laugh and pat the heads of these omens, or reduce them solely to psychic projections. But here we fall for a transhuman fallacy: that humans are in control of what’s real. No wonder: it’s easy to fall for that fallacy when you’re in an transcendent state, if it’s a state provoked by a drug humans made (and patented).

Part of the problem is the decline in “ecstatic literacy”: we just don’t know how to discuss or understand — or draw non-delusional conclusions — from “profane illumination”. While the proliferation of psychedelic products has changed the game by normalising such extraordinary experiences, we lack the language, the elders, the tradition that helps us make meaning of them.

Indeed, the ancient roots of psychedelic use, which might have guided their explosion, are in grave danger. In Peru, fully onboarded to the ayahuasca tourism trend, the influx of gringos has fuelled a rise in “pseudo-shamans” who adulterate their brews for extra kicks. Peyote and the bufo alvarius frog, whose venom contains the powerful compound 5-MeO-DMT, are now endangered, and the sustainability of ayahuasca reserves is now a “legitimate concern”. The price of ayahuasca has spiked as much as ten-fold. Where once its sale was fiercely guarded, it’s now touted in Coke bottles by impoverished rickshaw drivers who need extra cash.

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The emergence of the psychedelic industrial complex only accelerated the up-rooting that globalisation has been enabling for decades. Filament Health, a firm whose USP is to use “natural psychedelics”, made headlines recently for its creation of “ayahuasca in a pill”: an absurd peak for an industry long-trained in extracting, stripping and distilling the fruits of the natural world. Anthropologists observe that the whole “healing” paradigm predominant in ayahuasca tourism in Peru is an exotic distortion, with “shaman” itself described as a “made-up, Western category”.

“Start your own religion,” Timothy Leary told his followers in the Sixties. Many tried, although their operations would swiftly descend into power-sustained cults. There recently came allegations of a similar cultishness emerging in a corner of Silicon Valley, at the Centre for Applied Rationality and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute; one of the problems cited was frequent drug-enhanced “debugging” rituals. This is further evidence that attempts to wrench the numinous from its roots, then commodify it, are archetypally foolish — or, in the unfashionable language of religion, sacriligeous. While attempts are being made to draw psychedelics into existing traditions like Judaism and Christianity, it’s not clear how these religions can guide us through the epistemic and personal challenges of still relatively little-researched drugs that spur such swift ascents.

Little in life is really reducible to Damascene moments, but a trip at its best can unlodge something: cause us to remember something we forgot. Yet rather than set us free, the release offered by the psychedelic state — in the absence of any real programme or tradition, or “container” in the current language — seems to dissipate without leaving a meaningful trace. Even those who do experience relief from depression through psychedelics, for instance, reliably relapse after a few months.

Perhaps it is worth heeding what acclaimed psychonaut Aldous Huxley said, while lying on his deathbed in November 1963. He requested a dose of 125 micrograms of LSD to ease his passage to the afterlife, and while it’s said that his passage was uniquely peaceful, his final words are telling: “It is never enough. Never enough. Never enough of beauty. Never enough of love. Never enough of life.”

Her mother, Lyly Maughan, is sitting next to her best friend, Heather Savage, who is the foster mother to her daughters. The girls were aged one and two when Fri killed their father with a single stab wound. Fri’s three brothers and other family members are sitting together looking nervous in the public gallery. Their hope is that Fri will walk free today and be reunited with her children. She has not seen them since March 2020, when Covid prevented prison visits.

Fri was convicted of murder six and a half years ago and jailed for life. But she is back in court because that ruling was quashed after new evidence came to light, and a retrial ordered. Her lawyers are convinced that Fri has served her time and doesn’t pose a danger to anyone.

Her case is the perfect illustration of everything that’s wrong with the criminal justice system when it comes to domestic violence: a misunderstanding of coercive relationships, a misreading of abuse, victim blaming, excusing the perpetrator. And as recent research shows, failures by criminal justice agencies to provide protection to women almost always precedes domestic homicide, with women overwhelmingly the victims. So, this case comes back to trial at the perfect time to assess whether the domestic abuse bill has made a blind bit of difference to what happens in the courts and in women’s homes.

In a separate part of the public gallery sit the cousins and family members of the deceased, throwing hostile glances at Fri and her family. The police are also there, in case of any trouble between the two families from Toxteth.

Fri killed her partner, Kyle Farrell, during a violent row in which he had attempted to strangle her. She had been out visiting a friend and when she got back Kyle complained that she was later than he expected. A neighbour heard Fri screaming for help and, when they entered the house, saw “a lot of blood” and Kyle on the floor. In a panic, Fri told the neighbour a stranger must have come in and attacked him

The young couple, both 21 at the time, had known each other since school and had been in a relationship for five years. This fateful night was the climax of those five years of abuse. Kyle raped and attacked Fri on numerous occasions during their years together. Lyly often heard arguments between the couple, including one that ended with Kyle shouting that Fri should “go and get raped”.

Fri’s two daughters were born just ten months apart, the first when she was 19, the second 20. She had terminated several other pregnancies, telling Heather that they were a result of force and “not made of love”.  I knew something was going on,” says Lyly. “One time, she came over and her face was a terrible state, it was covered in bruises, but she gave excuse after excuse, saying one of the kids threw a bottle at her.”

However, she didn’t tell anyone in authority about the violence, in keeping with a largely unwritten code in the black community of Liverpool that you don’t “grass”.

She maintained that pretence when the police arrested her, assuming that Kyle would survive, and her children be removed if she made allegations of domestic abuse — something she had seen happen to many young women in her working-class community. It was only when she was told that Kyle had died, and the police said they believed she was a victim of domestic violence, that Fri eventually provided an accurate account of events.

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Despite that evidence, in May 2015, a jury in that same Liverpool court, and before that same judge, convicted Fri of Kyle’s murder. Her family was deeply unhappy. They felt the legal representation had failed to show the impact of the abuse Fri had suffered. So shortly after the conviction, Fri’s uncle contacted Justice for Women, which arranged a new legal team to explore grounds of appeal. Harriet Wistrich, the solicitor who had represented Sally Challen, took up the case. She was shocked to see that Fri’s previous legal team had failed to obtain any evidence exploring the impact of the history of domestic abuse on her mental health.

It takes a long time for victims of abuse to feel safe enough to talk about it to a psychiatrist. In particular, Fri was terrified of disclosing that she had been raped when she was 15 by a family friend. It was only after spending many months working with a counsellor specialising in domestic violence that Fri was able to open up.

The resulting psychiatric and psychological report set out the extent and nature of the sexual, physical and psychological abuse that Fri had suffered, concluding that Fri was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which made her hypervigilant in the face of further violence and may have caused her to lose control when threated with violence. The experts also noted that PTSD can cause “dissociation”, which may have explained why Fri could not remember stabbing Kyle, only the blood and panic afterwards.

Fri’s new lawyers also instructed a pathologist to closely examine mug-shot photographs of Fri taken by police shortly after her arrest for murder. The pathologist concluded that the visible bruise marks to her neck were probably caused by strangulation, consistent with Fri’s account of having been throttled prior to her grabbing a knife and stabbing Kyle. Had this evidence been disclosed by the police at the time of her original trial, Fri may not have ever been convicted of murder.

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Fri’s lawyers were convinced they had a solid case to appeal. But an application for permission to appeal was dismissed in February 2018. The application was then renewed before three judges, who noted that this was a “paradigm case of coercive control” and ordered the appeal to go ahead. The Crown Prosecution Service commissioned its own psychiatric and psychological evidence which agreed with the diagnosis of PTSD. However, the Crown opposed the appeal. The case eventually went to a full Court of Appeal hearing in December 2020, at which point the court quashed her murder conviction and ordered a retrial.

Fri’s lawyers wrote immediately to the CPS, indicating that Fri was willing to plead guilty to manslaughter, a lesser offence than murder. This was despite evidence supporting self-defence which, if successful at trial, would lead to a full acquittal. But the CPS rejected repeated requests to drop the murder charge. Eventually, the case was prepared for a retrial on murder to begin on 17 May.

On 18 May, the CPS agreed to accept a change of plea from guilty to manslaughter without intent. Fri readily agreed, fearing a hostile jury could reconvict her of murder despite the additional evidence. The case was adjourned for sentencing until 21 May.

I was there last week in Liverpool Crown Court last week to witness Mr Justice Dove sentence Fri for manslaughter, following a six-year battle for justice. There was, also, a separate offence to consider. Last year, when prisoners had been confined to their cells for 23-and-a-half hours a day during lockdown, Fri illicitly obtained a mobile phone to keep in touch with her children. She also removed a blade from her Bic razor, which she used to make picture frames for her girls.

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When sentencing, the judge told Fri to stand and addressed her sternly, more so than in other cases I have observed where the female defendant has been cleared of murder. Looking over at the row of family members of the deceased I wondered if the judge’s harsh tone was for their benefit.

He gave her 10 years for manslaughter, with an additional nine months for the possession of the illicit items and ordered the security staff standing either side of Fri to ‘take her down’. Instead of walking free, Fri had to go back inside for another six months. The maths is insanely complicated. But the point is, he could — he should, in Wistrich’s opinion­ —have chosen to let her go back to her family then.

The legal team was distraught, and everyone visibly upset that Fri was to have to go back to prison. Lyly was shocked that daughter had been “painted as the monster some of the media wrongly made her out to be. The judge didn’t say she had been strangled or mention that’s why she picked up the knife,” says Lyly, “so it sounded like she did it out of badness.”

Fri’s best friend was devastated. “He didn’t mention the strangling when he sentenced her.  The judge praised Kyle as a brilliant father, but he kicked her in the stomach when she was pregnant. Why not let her come home to her kids?”

Fri, though, was grateful: “I’m no longer a murderer. It’s now accepted that I never intended to kill Kyle and that means the world to me.”

Wistrich was appalled by the harshness of the sentence. A just result, she says, would have been a sentence of six to eight years which would have better reflected the nature of the crime and would have meant immediate release from custody. Ten years is excessively punitive. Especially when you compare that with the lenient five-year sentence given to Anthony Williams who fatally strangled his wife in 2020 claiming depression. Fri was found guilty of an even lesser type of manslaughter. Sure, we’ve got a new Domestic Abuse bill, but “this result makes me feel like we have gone backwards for women victims”, says Wistrich.

While Fri sits alone in her prison cell for twenty-three and a half hours a day, having not seen or held her children for over a year, her legal team, her friends, and her family console themselves with the fact that she is not dead, and that she was able to defend herself against the violence inflicted upon her unlike so many others.

But no one should die — not women nor men — because of domestic abuse. It should be stopped before it gets anywhere near that stage, or, better still, stopped from ever happening in the first place. As Jane Monckton Smith outlines in her brilliant book In Control: Dangerous Relationships and How They End in Murder, domestic violence can be stopped in the early stages if police and prosecutors do their jobs effectively.

Every three days, a woman dies at the hands of her violent former or current partner. Those deaths are preventable. And had Fri been properly protected, Kyle Farrell would be alive today.