5 Questions for Aaron Orsini

In his early 20s, Aaron Orsini was diagnosed with autism. He began experimenting with psilocybin and LSD a few years later, and noticed differences in the way he and his friends responded to the drugs. In particular, he noted that the same dosages seemed to affect him less than his non-autistic friends. He felt psychedelics improved his quality of life and helped him better understand how his own mind worked.

In 2020, Orsini started the Autistic Psychedelic Community, an online group that hosts a weekly peer support and discussion group on Zoom, connecting hundreds of attendees. Orsini has written two books on neurodiversity and psychedelics, a topic few have explored through narrative or research. Orsini has compiled the existing research on psychedelics’ effects on social behavior, social anxiety, or other behaviors related to autism spectrum disorder, and is working with researchers at the University College London on a qualitative survey to understand autistic adults’ use of psychedelics. The Microdose spoke with him about the Autistic Psychedelic Community, and the future of autism and psychedelic research. 

How did you get the idea for the Autistic Psychedelic community? 

It all really started because I couldn't find anything on the internet about the experience of psychedelics and autism beyond a handful of Reddit posts. But to me, this had a lightning-strike level of importance. I was blown away that my introspective awareness, my proprioception, and my general awareness all increased. I became eager to try to understand that, so I wrote the book to be like, “Anyone else?” It took me eight years to be like, “What the hell was that?” I spent a lot of time wandering in a desert of confusion. I was trying to save somebody else time. 

I did some talks, radio spots, and other appearances, and I started to get more messages from other autistic people interested in psychedelics. At first it was one every couple of days. Then it was a couple every week. Now I get a couple every day. New people come to the Zoom meeting we host every Sunday, and that's been a huge place of learning from one another. About 1,800 people have come through that meeting space, and I've had the pleasure of meeting and talking with and just hearing their stories. All that knowledge has helped me contextualize a lot of the things I've experienced, too.

What’s a typical meeting like?

The format is really simple. It's inspired by a model that's been around for some time: an integration circle. It's a place for people to learn and meet people, so it's intentionally open ended. We do it at the same time each week, intentionally chosen: 11am California time which is 2pm Eastern, and 8pm London time. We have people that come from Kenya, South America, Israel — people who are even more of a minority in their own country because of the lack of diagnostic tools in some places. They're only finding mirrors of themselves and their experiences online. 

When meetings begin, we go over simple agreements to make sure everyone stays safe — that we don’t get shut down for breaking drug laws. We just talk about ideas. We give people a couple of minutes to introduce themselves, and then from there, it opens up for anyone with a particular question or if they want to talk about an experience they had. Sometimes it's parents asking questions: “My adult child with autism wants to do psychedelics — is this a good idea?” Or sometimes it's people who have been around psychedelics their whole lives, but have never been in a space that’s all autistics. For a lot of us, that's the case: very few of us ever were in a room full of autistic people before this meeting. That’s hard to find. There's still stigma in many places in the world, even greater than the stigma surrounding psychedelics. For me, the stigma surrounding autism has been more of an impact on my life than telling people I've used psychedelics. 

So, we just meet every week for about two hours. More recently, when the meeting ends, I'll pass off hosting privileges to someone else, and people will hang in that room for another couple of hours. During the pandemic, that’s been people’s time to really connect. We also have chat channels where people stay connected in between meetings, and sometimes, people run their own meetings. The group is getting to a place now where it's basically a decentralized entity, where we just pass off responsibilities to other people. I don't own autism and psychedelics. It belongs to everybody, and everybody's been building this group with me.

There has never been a more exciting – or bewildering – time in the world of psychedelics. Don’t miss a beat.

While psychedelics have been decriminalized or deprioritized by law enforcement as a prosecutorial offense in some U.S. cities, they’re still illegal and can be difficult to source. That leaves many people — including people in the autism community, it sounds like — to navigate psychedelic use on their own. How do you think about balancing the potential risks of self-medication with the benefits?

It's important to be safe, so I'm not evangelizing psychedelics, or telling everyone they should do it. But if people are willing to understand and take on the risks, and they'd like that ability, then they should have it. When I was presented with the opportunity to try LSD, I was actively suicidal. It's easy to focus on the potential harms of bringing increased access to psychedelics and the inevitability of harms that come from increased access to any medication. But that’s not a reason to prevent it from being an option for people who are consenting and understanding the risks of drugs like LSD, psilocybin and MDMA.

I want to get involved in Oregon, and show how psilocybin centers there can incorporate autistic clients. As you may know, Oregon is not requiring a diagnosis to receive treatment. It’s an opportunity for people who want to receive legal and regulated medicine. That's great news for people in my community who don't want to put themselves through the needless danger and risks of navigating illicit drug use. I was lucky enough to have people I trusted when I first tried psychedelics, but it'd be nice if we could expand the options for people to safely engage with these tools. 

In the intersection of autism and psychedelics, some treatments put forth the possibility of “curing” autism. I know that in the autism community, some folks bristle at the idea of being “cured” of a part of themselves — I’ve also seen people refer to curing autism as a type of eugenics. How do you think about the intersection of autism and psychedelics?

It's such a complicated thing. You'll see that language in, say, discussions of clinical trials: “This is a tragedy. We're here to solve this tragedy.” It’s a marketing tool. For certain families, for certain individuals, any of these conditions can be tragic. I sympathize with family members and parents who are managing presentations of autism that are debilitating to the entire family. But also, families can be debilitated by a broader system that lacks social safety nets for these types of conditions. 

I also sympathize with the people who feel that they have been painted with this wide brush: that if someone has any sort of disorderly state that isn't causing any harm to themselves or others, the automatic response should be to make them not that way. That's a belief structure we should investigate. There are certain tools available now: for example, I work a lot on the internet as an independent freelancer scheduling my own work, and that allows me to flourish in new ways. These new ways of living can be much more sustainable treatment options than tranquilizing somebody to make them calm, and repeatedly trying to ingrain behavior that might be working against a person’s natural mode. 

What psychedelics have the most promise for, in my view, is to help elevate the quality of life of the individuals and of their family members, and to bring about effects that other treatments might not necessarily do. For example, it can help re-assign agency to the individual. Many autistics are very prone to distrusting their own capabilities, their own decision making, their own interpretation of the world, and there can be a deep distrust that develops, which can be just as debilitating as a visible, physical impairment. Psychedelics give us the ability to rethink that, to understand the origins of why we hesitate or why we fear what we fear. MDMA, for example, can be an excellent teacher about the roots of our own  sensitivity to rejection, as well as other everyday trauma. It’s important to remember that autistic people are just people: we can also develop other conditions, and those conditions need to be treated. 

There's so much research about how to prevent autism from happening. There are well-meaning philanthropists who would like to help autistic populations or families of these individuals, but so much of their funding goes towards prevention instead of research that could elucidate what will make quality of life better for autistic individuals. 

What do we know about psychedelics and autism, and where would you like to see that work go?

There's been one academic review paper that could be a roadmap for using serotonergic psychedelics, specifically like LSD or psilocybin, for treatment. But that's all theoretical, because presently, in scientific spaces, autism would be considered a contraindication for these drugs. Even that is not fully understood; we have so much more to learn. 

It also seems like autistics may need more of a substance in order to induce the same effects, based on subjective microdosing reports that Dr. [James] Fadiman received. It also might be the case that autistics have more gastrointestinal issues as a result. And in urine tests of autistics given DMT, they’ve come out with more DMT present. [Editor’s note: Researchers are not sure why this occurs, but some believe it might be physical evidence that people with autism metabolize the neurotransmitter serotonin differently.] We don't fully understand DMT, or any of this stuff; we’re just making guesses at this point. I've heard lots of wacky theories. None of these things are by any means real science; it's all a bunch of anecdotes. 

Right now, I'm participating in research as a coauthor for a research article, a qualitative survey at University College London. That qualitative survey will inform future clinical work. But in the meantime, the Autistic Psychedelic community is a couple thousand people sharing about what has worked well for them, talking to each other and helping each other live better lives. I think there will always be people coming together to help each other outside of traditional medical frameworks. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.