The downstairs loo at Beckley Park — the country pile of the Feilding family and home to the psychedelic research nonprofit The Beckley Foundation — is, I realise, a good primer for what’s to come. I’m about to have lunch with pioneering drug campaigner Amanda Feilding, 81, and her youngest son Cosmo Feilding-Mellen, 39; between them they run two of the three arms of the Beckley psychedelics empire. Amanda is head of the Foundation which for years has sponsored cutting-edge and exploratory research into psychedelic compounds while Cosmo is CEO of Beckley Psytech, a pharmaceutical company developing novel psychedelic therapies to treat mental ill health (the third arm of the empire, Beckley Waves, is a start-up incubator for the psychedelics industry and headed up by Feilding's oldest son, Rock Feilding-Mellen).
On the walls of the loo there are pictures of Amanda with her beloved Birdie, a pigeon she raised from a fledgling (“we were twin souls,” she tells me at one point, “a pair of lovers, completely inseparable”), alongside a framed genealogy of the Feilding family (they’re descended from Charles II). There’s a stack of New Scientist magazines and a bookshelf which features a mix of drug textbooks (‘Basic Pharmacology: Understanding Drug Actions and Reactions’; ‘Hofmann's Elixir: LSD and the New Eleusis’), books on the nature of consciousness, anthropologies of ancient or mystical religions and a well-thumbed ‘Collected Works of Nietzsche’. (The soap, in case you’re wondering, is from Neil’s Yard).
Feilding is Countess of Wemyss and March and Beckley Park, set on the edge of Oxfordshire fenland, amid fantastically manicured grounds, has been her family’s home for centuries. “I’ll open a window for you,” says Feilding-Mellen, “everyone’s too polite to tell mum that they’re slowly suffocating.” Smoke from the vast flagstone fireplace lingers in the air of the dining room, though if anything it adds to the magic of the house — the Tudor hunting lodge has, over the centuries, hosted everyone from the Black Prince to Aldous Huxley. “I’m rather used to the smoke, you see,” says Feilding.
For years Feilding has operated at the cutting edge of drug research, a lone voice calling for legal reform, in the face of indifference and often ridicule. Now, as the tide slowly begins to turn on psychedelics, as many of her theories about the therapeutic benefits of drugs like psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) and LSD are proven to have merit, she is finally being recognised as a visionary. “I realised in the late 60s,” says Feilding, “that the only way to overcome the taboo, and try to stop this mad war on drugs — which I firmly believe causes more damage than it stops — was using the very best science. Of course it’s really only in the last five years that we’ve felt a shift in attitudes — but nowadays these things can happen quickly, with the internet.” This week's episode of The Standard's Brave New World podcast interrogates this shift in attitudes. Our proprietor, Evgeny Lebedev, speaks to Amanda Feilding and other pioneers about their work in the field of psychedelics and the traction around their latest experiments.
There’s an understanding within the psychedelic science community that researchers never openly discuss personal use — but many of the ideas for the initial clinical trials in the field came from Feilding herself, based on her own experimentation with LSD, which started in the 1960s, under less than ideal circumstances. In fact, early on in her life, she was dosed with the potent drug against her will by an acquaintance. The amount — pure liquid LSD was poured into Feilding's coffee — would have been many thousands of times greater than any person should or would normally ever take. “It was very disturbing. I can still feel it — it's like cutting a path through the jungle; once you've had that trauma, it's opened up, it cuts its passage through the brain forever.” Afterwards, Feilding retreated to Beckley Park and lived in a hut on the grounds for two months. “But then I did recover - and I met my first great love, Bart.” The Dutch medical student was already deep into his own experimentations with the drug. “I had the choice of going ahead with the love affair and taking LSD every day, in big doses, or not [being with him]. So I took the LSD.”
I had the choice of going ahead with the love affair and taking LSD every day, in big doses, or not being with him. So I took the LSD
It was an instructive period, Feilding tells me — and one which would go on to inform much of her later assumptions about psychedelics. “For instance, I was a slight depressive and always noted that psychedelics lifted me out of my depressions. I wanted to investigate this — to understand why.” Feilding started The Beckley Foundation in 1998 and over the years has raised millions in funding to support clinical trials. In 2008, alongside drug scientist David Nutt, she co-founded the psychedelic research programme at Imperial College London. Since then the Foundation has gone on to support many of the headline-making clinical trials which have underpinned the psychedelic renaissance, including ones at John Hopkins University in the USA – led by Bill Richards, also on this week's Brave New World episode – and Maastricht University in the Netherlands. “I was never good at maths and English and formal things like that but I’m very good at spotting patterns,” says Feilding, “and over the years I’ve followed that ability, which has proven to be quite useful.” She laments that her part in this nascent field is often minimised; “I’m finding that it’s rather easy to write women out of history,” she says, “but this really is my life’s work.”
Beckley Psytech was founded in 2019 with the idea of capitalising on the findings that the Foundation has helped to spearhead. “For us it was like, okay The Beckley Foundation and others have contributed amazing science, but it's been mainly academic,” says Feilding-Mellen. “How can we take the next step, which is to develop these things as medicines?”
Whether this transition from promising academia to viable healthcare solutions will come off remains to be seen. “Drug development happens to be very expensive,” says Feilding-Mellen. Like many companies in the psychedelic space, Beckley Psytech has had to become comfortable operating at a loss — though this year they received a cash injection when the Peter Thiel-backed psychedelic company Atai Life Sciences bought a 35.5 per cent stake in the business for $50m. It’s a difficult proposition for many investors because psychedelics are still banned substances in most countries making them hard to research, let alone roll out to vulnerable patients. And even with regulatory support, psychedelic mental healthcare is a time and labour intensive process — for depression, for instance, a patient being treated with psilocybin might require supervised drug treatments lasting hours at a time plus weeks of therapy. The manpower alone represents a hit to profit margins when compared to something like an SSRI — just a pill, taken daily, at home. Last year Beckley Psytech initiated a Phase IIb trial of a compound called 5-MeO-DMT (famously found in the secretions of the Sonoran Desert toad). It's known to be one of the most potent and fast acting psychedelics. After promising results from initial trials the hope is that 5-MeO-DMT will be a quicker and easier drug to work with. As Feilding-Mellen explains: “the question is, can we show that a shorter time in clinic, with a shorter duration psychedelic experience, is as effective and as safe as the first generation [LSD, psilocybin, MDMA] drugs are? If we can, then that becomes, in our view, a much more cost effective and accessible medicine.” The company has developed a 5-MeO-DMT nasal spray and are focusing specifically on the treatment of depression. “With our Phase IIb trial we’re recruiting 225 people, across six countries — so it’s an exciting time for the company.”
Can we show that a shorter time in clinic, with a shorter duration psychedelic experience, is as effective and as safe as the first generation drugs, like LSD, psilocybin, MDMA are? If we can, then that becomes, in our view, a much more cost effective and accessible medicine
One of the most interesting questions to have come out of the psychedelic renaissance is about the nature of consciousness itself — who and what our thoughts actually are. It’s the question that Feilding has been asking, she tells me, since her earliest childhood at Beckley Park. Her father, who she “adored completely” and describes as a “violent tempered, very eccentric individual, charming and mercurial”, was a painter who never made any money. “It was a funny upbringing, very cultured, very educated. My father’s parents were bosom friends of William and Henry James. Aldous Huxley actually came here, when he was a student, and sat talking with my grandmother all night.” The author and philosopher — who wrote the dystopian classic Brave New World, to which our podcast owes its title — based his first novel, Crome Yellow, at Beckley. “So they were kind of intellectual, but we never had money for heating or hot water or any of those normal luxuries. My father adored beauty, so any money he could lay his hands on, he’d buy beautiful things.” A passion for Buddhism began during that spartan childhood, she explains, and at 16 became the reason that she decided to leave school with £25 to her name and travel to Sri Lanka to find her godfather, Bertie Moore, who was living as a Buddhist monk. “I never did find him,” she says. “Although I got as far as Syria and lived with Bedouin chieftains for a while.”
By the time Cosmo was born in 1985 both his parents — his father is author Joe Mellen — were involved in the campaign against drug prohibition. “When I was young it was always quite embarrassing because at that age you just want to be normal — and your parents being loud advocates of psychedelics and being trepanned, it was kind of like ‘can’t you be a bit more normal, please?’ When I was 13 or 14, a drug education person came to do a workshop at my school. And we had to fill in this form where one of the questions was, ‘when you think of drugs, what do you think of?’ All my friends wrote ‘Cosmo’s mum’.” Trepanation has been an interest of Feilding’s since the 1960s. The practice of drilling a hole in the skull is one of the oldest medical procedures known to man (according to the journal Surgical Neurology International between 5 and 10 per cent of all skulls found from the Neolithic period — between 12,000 and 4,000 years ago — have been trepanned), and there are various theories about why it might prove beneficial to mental and physical health. In 1970, testing a theory that Feilding still believes in today, she trepanned herself and made a film about her experience called Heartbeat in the Brain. When it was first screened in New York, audience members fainted in the aisles; “they ‘fell like ripe plums’ one newspaper said,” laughs Feilding. In the film, Feilding cuts away her fringe to expose her hairline, tapes sunglasses to her head to stop blood pouring into her eyes, then with a small surgical drill begins to bore a hole into her skull, careful not to drill too far and into the brain. “Well skiing is terrifying,” she says when I ask if she wasn’t scared. “I should say, I’m not at all in favour of self-trepanation, it’s not a good thing to do and it should be carried out by professionals. On the other hand, it was like a test of self control.”
She’s been in talks with researchers at both Cornell and Stanford universities, about conducting a formal study to understand the benefits of the practice. “I’ve had three partners in my life; Bart Hughes, who I met after he’d recently trepanned himself, then Joe, Cosmo’s father, who trepanned himself while we were together, and then Jamie [Charteris, father of model and DJ, Lady Mary Charteris], my current husband — we got someone in Egypt to trepan him. I did notice subtle differences in them, it’s a slight relaxing of the neurotic characteristics that we all have.” She felt a difference in herself too, afterwards; “when I did it to myself, I noticed my dreams changed. I always used to have terrible, anxious dreams about Birdie, my pigeon, getting killed and they sort of stopped.” The skin heals over the hole, which was only ever tiny, Cosmo says. “The problem with discussing all of this is not that I’m ashamed of it — because I’m not at all — but I’m afraid that it sounds too ‘way out’. I'm afraid that it can put people off because they’re like ‘this person sounds like a looney’. And I can see why. But that’s not the case at all.”
In recent years, Feilding-Mellen has come to appreciate his upbringing though, it sounds like it did take some of the illicit joy out of trying psychedelics. “It definitely meant that it wasn't like an exciting act of rebellion; and you know, as a teenager, rebellion against one’s parents is often something that is quite attractive. It's like, if you want to put kids off taking drugs, tell them that their parents take drugs, it probably made us more sensible.”
Feilding agrees: “With bringing up the children, we just told the truth as we knew it about these compounds… And I was always a compulsive worker, they could see that when we took it, we also worked. They could see that we were serious people… anyway, now I feel that my children are completely unlikely to go for toxic drugs, which are dangerous, because they've been educated against them.”
The next frontier for the Foundation, says Feilding, is Alzheimer’s disease. Beckley are sponsoring a clinical study into how microdoses of LSD might improve the lives of sufferers. In the long term, when trials have concluded, she hopes to found a number of Beckley-branded care homes where patients have access to daily microdosing protocols in beautiful environments. “But that’s all a way off at the moment,” she says. “A dream — although, I suppose at one point, all of this was a dream.”
