Daniel Miller never expected to become a psychedelics advocate, but the former Ivy League-educated lawyer started the Psychedelic Society of Brooklyn last year to help change cultural and political attitudes towards LSD.
“The psychedelic experience has the potential to help a lot of people,” said Daniel Miller, founder of the Psychedelic Society of Brooklyn. I met him back in January at the Hell Phone Bar in Bushwick. The 33-year-old was dressed conservatively in a blue polo and jeans, looking more like the developer of some app than a nascent leader in the drug legalization movement. Subtlety, it was only his hat that highlighted his passion for mind-altering substances—the cap featured the image of a unicorn in front of a rainbow.
“[LSD] helped me quit smoking, but that’s a secondary effect of my experience,” he told me. “Mostly, it helped me be a happier person.”
The hallucinogenic drug proselytizer was at the bar to support an event co-hosted by his group. The Psychedelic Society of Brooklyn’s mission is to provide better education and encourage a “community-wide conversation that indirectly changes cultural and political attitudes towards psychedelics, thus shaping the inevitable post-prohibition world.” To do that, Miller and his organization host a variety of events like the one I attended.
Like every Psychedelic Society meeting, the room was a psychedelic safe space. Under the bar’s dimmed lights, roughly 100 people packed tables and stood in front of a small stage as they talked openly about their experiences with drugs. A computer programmer in his late twenties shared LSD advice with a middle-aged lawyer (“200 micrograms will really open your mind”). Miller made the rounds to speak one-on-one with his group’s members. And Martin Dockery, a professional storyteller, took the stage to recount the tale of an acid trip he had on a bicycle in Basel, Switzerland, where Albert Hoffman first invented LSD. The crowd, silent throughout the performance, burst into roaring applause at the end.
Miller never expected to become a psychedelics advocate. Son of Aaron David Miller, an American diplomat to the Middle East, Daniel studied physics at Princeton and law at Georgetown University. He then began a promising career as the associate policy director for the Ohio Business Roundtable, a trade organization “comprised of the CEOs of the state’s largest and most influential business enterprises,” according to their website.
But Miller said he felt worn down by his competitive, goal-oriented attitude. “I was just really, really unhappy,” Miller told me. “I was smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, and I was unhealthy.”
After working for three years after law school, Miller quit his job in August 2014 at the age of 31 and looked for the next step. That’s when a friend convinced him to take his first hit of LSD.
“The LSD experience gave me a core sense of how to view the world. It wasn’t us versus them, I felt I was part of a larger whole, like I was connected with others,” Miller told me. “I didn’t feel like I was trying to win all the time—and that had been a driving philosophy for a long time.”
On top of realizing that drugs can inspire personal growth and deep introspection, he realized something was wrong with the way psychedelics are prohibited and stigmatized in society. “When I had that experience [with LSD], I thought to myself, Wow, that drug changed my life and it’s illegal ? I’ve been told my entire life it’s dangerous; it’s as bad as heroin,” Miller fumed to me. “That’s an injustice.”