Politics

Marijuana wins big on election night

“[The President] said that passage of the legalization measures on Tuesday could make the current federal approach to the drug “untenable.” Voters in California, Massachusetts and Nevada approved recreational marijuana initiatives Tuesday night, and several other states passed medical marijuana provisions, in what is turning out to be the biggest electoral victory for marijuana reform…

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Biography/Memoir

Former UO pre-med student gets jail and probation for dealing LSD, psychedelic mushrooms

“Lane County Circuit Judge Mustafa Kasubhai said during… sentencing hearing that he ­regretted not being able to ­impose a harsher sentence.” …had applied to medical school before the incident but eventually withdrew from the U of O, four classes short of obtaining his human physiology degree… “He knows that he’s not going to become a…

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Spirituality

The existential medicine

“Ultimately, his friends and daughter—entering college by this time—convinced him that he needed to address his mental wellbeing. He tried counseling, but it didn’t improve his outlook. Neither did antidepressants. After several screening and counseling visits, Martin found himself sitting on a couch in a converted medical office/living room on Hopkins’ Bayview campus.” Meanwhile, early…

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Psychology

LSD-induced entropic brain activity predicts subsequent personality change

“Personality is known to be relatively stable throughout adulthood. Nevertheless, it has been shown that major life events with high personal significance, including experiences engendered by psychedelic drugs, can have an enduring impact on some core facets of personality.” Overall, LSD had a pronounced global effect on brain entropy, increasing it in both sensory and…

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Biography/Memoir

Algorithmic reduction of psychedelic states

“Every…psychedelic researcher has a pet theory of what these compounds are really doing in one’s mind. Many of these folk theories about the effects of psychedelics involve ontologies that currently have little scientific support (such as souls, thought fields, spirit worlds, archetypes, alien conspiracies, and so on).” Although we cannot rule out explanations of this…

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