Salvador Roquet

Salvador Roquet was born in 1920 in Tierra Blanca, Veracruz. He trained in medicine and public health, earning a master's degree in public health with a specialization in malariology and later specializing in neurology at the Hospital Gea González. From 1951 to 1955 he directed Mexico's national campaigns against malaria and tuberculosis. After a political setback he turned to psychiatry and to the therapeutic use of altered states of consciousness.¹1Janine Rodiles, "Psicoterapia prohibida del doctor Roquet," Liberaddictus, November 1, 1996, https://www.liberaddictus.org/varios/334-psicoterapia-prohibida-del-doctor-roquet.html.

In the 1960s Roquet founded the Instituto de Psicosíntesis in Mexico City, where he used LSD, psilocybin and psilocybin mushrooms, mescaline and peyote, and datura in psychotherapy. He also directed the Albert Schweitzer Cultural Organization, which ran a school for his patients' children, and set up a hospital in the mountains of Oaxaca.² He drew on Mazatec mushroom ceremonies and took part in them with the curandera María Sabina in Huautla de Jiménez. Historians have since questioned how he used Indigenous practice in his clinic.³2Alberto Villoldo, "An Introduction to the Psychedelic Psychotherapy of Salvador Roquet," Journal of Humanistic Psychology 17, no. 4 (1977): 45–58, https://doi.org/10.1177/002216787701700406.3Alexander S. Dawson, "Salvador Roquet, María Sabina, and the Trouble with Jipis," Hispanic American Historical Review 95, no. 1 (2015): 103–133, at 104.

Roquet's sessions were long and deliberately overwhelming. Patients took psychedelics in a group, usually starting at night, while he played music, films, and images meant to provoke strong emotions; ketamine was given to ease the end of the session. He described the method in Los alucinógenos de la concepción indígena a una nueva psicoterapia (1981), written with Pierre Louis Favreau.⁴ As Abraham Sussman later described Roquet's view, beneath the conscious mind lay a "roaring river of instinct and feeling" that modern life suppressed.⁵ Critics called him "a master of bad trips."⁶4Philip E. Wolfson, "Psychedelic Experiential Pharmacology: Pioneering Clinical Explorations with Salvador Roquet: An Interview with Richard Yensen," International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 33, no. 2 (2014): 160–174, https://doi.org/10.24972/ijts.2014.33.2.160.5Abraham Sussman, quoted in Olivia Goldhill, "What a Bad Trip Can Teach You," The Cut, December 8, 2021.6Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD (New York: Grove Press, 1985).

A typical course of treatment began with a group session of about 22 hours under psychedelics. About eight days later the group met for an eight-hour session without drugs to discuss what had happened, and patients then had weekly individual interviews and sat in on other groups' sessions.⁷ In the fall of 1972 Roquet demonstrated his group method at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, a U.S. government-funded institution, as American restrictions on psychedelic research were tightening.⁸7Salvador Roquet and Pierre Louis Favreau, Los alucinógenos de la concepción indígena a una nueva psicoterapia (Mexico City: Ediciones Prisma, 1981), 66; Alexander Macmillan, "The 'Convivial' Psychotherapy Process of Dr. Salvador Roquet" (PhD diss., University of Massachusetts Amherst, 1987).8Emily Witt, "Ketamine Therapy Is Going Mainstream. Are We Ready?," The New Yorker, December 29, 2021.

In 1974 Mexico raised penalties for possessing LSD, peyote, and psilocybin mushrooms. On November 21, 1974, police raided Roquet's clinic and arrested about 25 patients, doctors, and staff; Roquet and his associates Pierre Louis Favreau and Rubén Ocaña Soler were detained the next morning. The authorities charged him with drug trafficking, citing the fees he collected, and with "moral turpitude" over films found at the clinic, and the attorney general's office called him a charlatan.⁹ A press campaign against him peaked in Tiempo magazine four days after the arrest.¹⁰ The patients were soon released, but Roquet and Favreau spent several weeks in prison. Former patients organized in his defense and American psychiatrists testified for him; the charges were eventually dropped, and the institute reopened using light and sound without drugs.¹¹ Roquet later said that about 90 percent of people in these drug-free sessions reacted much as drugged patients had.¹²9Dawson, "Salvador Roquet, María Sabina, and the Trouble with Jipis," 122.10Alexander S. Dawson, The Peyote Effect: From the Inquisition to the War on Drugs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), 121–133.11Walter Houston Clark, "Bad Trips May Be the Best Trips," Fate, April 1976.12Stanley Krippner, "Salvador Roquet Remembered: An Innovative Psychedelic Therapist in 1960s Mexico," Chacruna Institute, March 1, 2017, https://chacruna.net/salvador-roquet-remembered/.

Roquet also worked with Mexico's secret police, the Dirección Federal de Seguridad, using his methods on detained student activists; he defended this in court as a way to make "better citizens." Alexander Dawson argues that this relationship protected his practice from government interference until 1974.¹³ Patients' testimonies, including those of Angélica Parragot Gronillet and a woman identified as Rosa María, describe recoveries from depression and drug dependence.¹⁴ Roquet continued to run drug-free "convivial" sessions until his death in 1995.¹⁵13Dawson, "Salvador Roquet, María Sabina, and the Trouble with Jipis," 123–124.14Dawson, "Salvador Roquet, María Sabina, and the Trouble with Jipis," 125–126.15Krippner, "Salvador Roquet Remembered."