Last Week in Psychedelic Sundays

“Three hundred and fifty years ago, Shulgin notes, the Church proclaimed, “The earth is the center of the universe, and anyone who says otherwise is a heretic.” Today, the government proclaims, “All drugs that can expand consciousness are without medical or social justification, and anyone who uses them is a criminal.” In Galileo’s time, the authorities said, “We do not need to actually look through that mysterious contraption.” Now the government says, “There is no need to actually taste those mysterious compounds.” In the past, the Church said, “How dare you claim that the earth is not the center of the universe?” Today the government says, “How dare you to claim that an understanding of God is to be found in a white powder?”(DANIEL PINCHBECK)

Psychedelics help to accelerate a maturation process, where we can see that we’re not operating within silos. Instead, we’re operating as part of a larger collective and part of a larger community. Thanks to the revival of psychedelic science, we’ve (re)discovered that psychedelic therapy can benefit sufferers of severely debilitating conditions where current treatments fail. We’ve started to develop an understanding of what psychedelics do to the brain, and how psychedelics can have such transformative power…

For those who follow my work, it will be no surprise that the topic I research the most is Psychedelics. In this post, I will share with you some of the hidden gems of my recent journey through the psychedelic digital jungle of interesting articles, podcast, and studies that I have found.

---

Oregon May Vote in 2020 to Legalize Psychedelic Mushrooms in Therapy

The ballot initiative would make it legal for licensed people to produce, administer, and possess psilocybin mushrooms. It would also reduce criminal penalties for possessing it. Psilocybin is a Schedule I drug, defined as one with no medical use and the high potential for abuse. Possession of psilocybin mushrooms is a felony.

Healing the Empire and Elevating the Underground: A Conversation with Rick Doblin

Eventually what we want to do is bring the underground above ground. These substances shouldn’t be illegal in the first place. I think the best example of this effect you’re talking about can be seen with ayahuasca. We have legal ayahuasca churches in the United States, the UDV and Santo Daime, and then there’s a massive number of ayahuasca circles all throughout the US that are not technically part of those churches. Yet they seem to be going on with very minimal police repression. I think there are two reasons for that: one is that a lot of the participants are white, affluent, politically connected people, but the other reason is that we’re in the midst of a vast opiate epidemic. Last year more Americans died of drug abuse than died in the entire Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Welcome to the trip of your life: the rise of underground LSD guides

Some Americans searching for alternative paths to healing have turned to psychedelics. But how does one forge a career as a guide when the substances are illegal?

Safety Guidelines for Guides, Psychedelic Integration Practitioners, and Other Leaders

This is a riff on the safety guidelines recently released by Chacruna. I have tons of respect for Chacruna, but I wanted to tweak the guidelines. I’m a white dude with plenty of power and privilege, and I know plenty of other people who fit the same description. What would safety guidelines look like for us, the people most statistically likely to create a lack of safety? How can men, who participate in psychedelic community as members or leaders hold themselves to a standard that promotes safety for the people that really need it? How can we model ethical behavior for the next generation of men who will enter this work in the future? This is what I’ve come up with, in one quick run through. I’m aware that there is some biting humor here, some of it’s brusque, but you’re men, you can take it.

---

The Future and Science of Psychedelics

The Renaissance in Psychedelic Research

Five US Sites Are Now Enrolling Patients for MDMA Clinical Trials

On Thursday, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), a nonprofit focused on researching the medical benefits of psychedelics and marijuana, announced it was ready to begin recruiting volunteers for Phase 3 clinical trials to test whether MDMA, a drug commonly known as ecstasy, could be an effective treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

MDMA helping with PTSD and Autism

MDMA (Methylene-Dioxy-n-Methyl Amphetamine) also called MD, Ecstasy, Molly, Beans, Love Sweet, Xtc,… is a psychoactive product of the amphetamine family, but also close to mescaline. It is sold primarily as ecstasy in the form of pills, but it is also found in the form of crystals.
It has stimulating effects, empathogenic results in those who use it: “increased sensitivity to emotions, self-awareness and give you a sense of intimacy”., classified as narcotic. Its use as a recreational drug start in the 1990s, and it came with the rise of electronic music, a small companion of many revellers who praise its ability to annihilate inhibitions and dance beyond the subwoofers rhythm.

Study Finds Microdosing with Psilocybin Truffles Enhances Creativity

Recently published in the journal Psychopharmacology, the study set out to discover whether and how microdosing with psilocybin truffles can affect one’s thought process, and found that while microdosing has the potential to help us see ideas or bridge connections that we otherwise might not, it probably won’t make us smarter overall—at least using conventional metrics.

---

LSD Changes Something About The Way You Perceive Time

This flexibility in perceiving time is only enhanced when psychedelic drugs enter the mix. A review from 1964 on hallucinogens reveals how long we’ve been playing with the dials of time—speeding it up, and slowing it down—through drugs. One account from 1913 on mescaline intoxication said that mescaline made a person feel like “the immediate future was rushing on at chaotic speed, and the time was boundless.”

Going Out on a High: the Doctor Advocating LSD for the Dying

“I think it was Confucius who said that the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their correct name,” says Dr. Ira Byock, 67, founder and chief medical director at the Providence St. Joseph Health Institute for Human Caring in Torrance, California. “So to be perfectly grammatically correct and to be absolutely legit, let’s focus on the adverbs and the adjectives, since what we’re really talking about is Dying Well.”

Indigenous Ayahuasca: What Can We Learn?

The purpose and source of spiritual and divinatory content, where the majority of the power of the brew comes from, lies in the vine itself. Chakruna (“mixture”), as its name suggests, is just one of the myriad plants that the indigenous peoples combined with ayahuasca, and it happened to cause intense and interesting effects, which would originally be employed quite rarely by indigenous societies, but grew in popularity exponentially with the influx of foreign travelers exploring the Amazon basin.

Psyched up: a visionary therapy or a trip into the unknown

"I felt like I was being broken down to nothing. There was a visual representation, I guess, of blackness. People talk about their childhood coming back to them in a dreamlike state, but I didn't really have that. I felt like I was being thrown out into the universe and then falling back down and rebuilding.
"I'd had experience with different psychedelics but the intensity of this was a whole other level."

Psychedelic Retreats And The Future Of Mental Health: A Review

To get a glimpse of what the economy might look like when the average American can access psychedelic-assisted therapeutic services with the swipe of a credit card, I recently spent a weekend at a completely legal retreat in the Netherlands, where high-dose ‘shrooms are combined with talk therapy, group recreation and walks in the woods, hosted by the Europe-based non-profit, the Psychedelic Society.