…ending silence around psychedelic…
Unlike community and underground settings with their implicit ethos of personal responsibility, reputational accountability, and “buyer beware,” drugs sold as medical treatments and administered by experts strip people of protective caution.
What’s new in the “psychedelic renaissance” is that, at a time when other medications have lost their momentum, pharma and the mental health industry are moving in on the underground market in search of money and power. And to do it they are rebranding psychedelic drugs as, well, not really drugs at all, but psychiatric treatments. In order to position therapists and doctors at the center of this new gold rush, they have to gloss over the fact that psychedelics – as weird, unpredictable, mind-shaking and life-altering as they can be – are still the same underground marketed drugs… One of the great ironies of today’s interest in psychedelics is that drugs celebrated for illuminating the spiritual and aesthetic mysteries of the human mind have instead fueled a burgeoning brain research industry based on the crudest of mechanistic determinism. In their zeal to credit psychedelics with tantalizing promises of new potentials, today’s wide-eyed psychedelic advocates have gone all-in on neuroscience determinism, as if the explanatory gap of the hard problem of consciousness – how mind arises from body – were already solved. Psychologist William James’ warnings about “medical materialism” are today more apt than ever…
Original Article (Mad in America):
Ending the silence around psychedelic therapy abuse
Artwork Fair Use: Madness network news cover showing some members of the sit-in in Gov. Brown’s office in 1976
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