Jaden Smith was on hand at the five-day Psychedelic Science 2023 conference hosted by the nonprofit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). He was talking psychedelics and his mom. Jada Pinkett Smith, wife of Will, mother of Jaden and Willow, was the first to introduce them to the whole fam.
“I think it was my mom, actually, that was really the first one to make that step for the family,” he said, according to USA Today. “It was just her for a really, really long time, and then eventually it just trickled and evolved and everybody found it in their own ways.”
This is of course what Reagan meant when he said trickle down. Let the history books show it.
The science increasingly backs up the effectiveness of psychedelics when treating the various downsides of being alive, stuck as we are in the same mortal coil from dust to dust, but it’s also a little funny that this conference tapped Jaden Smith to speak. In his very few years on earth, he’s presented as an actual sentient magic mushroom, and remains a man of merely 24 years old. It seems just as possible that he grew up.
In conversation, though, he’s said that the Smith family has strategically used psychedelics to address familial issues. He and his siblings, Willow and Trey, do psychedelics together after a fight and then make up post-trip. “It will actually help us to open up our minds to get out of the old ways of thinking that got us into lots of these arguments, and open it up so that it just releases and makes room for you to work it out and massage it out until it’s completely gone,” Jaden said.
A lot of these substances are illegal. The federal government shunted some psychedelics, like psilocybin, into the Schedule I classification, which are drugs considered to have no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. Over the years, many scientists have gotten special permissions to study them, and in recent years, the Food and Drug Administration has granted some substances, including MDMA and psilocybin-assisted therapies, “breakthrough therapy,” allowing the work to continue at pace.
What’s the over-under on the entire Smith family being in one of these studies? I don’t know, but it seems high.
