“I don’t think that people should be criminalized or looked upon differently because they are required to take something that can make them feel this much better,” said a 54-year-old patient currently using psilocybin mushrooms. The initiative would make the use and possession of psilocybin mushrooms by adults 21 and older the lowest law-enforcement priority…
Several times during my stay in the [ayahuasca drinking] community, different men took me aside and confided that they knew of nearby gold deposits that they would be willing to show me. They said this as if to test my interest. I would reply with indifference to these propositions, much to my interlocutors’ surprise. A…
The pulse of dance-club music plays like a jungle beat, as thumping bass notes flirt with flashing lights, liquor and ecstasy of the pharmaceutical kind. Miles and miles away, a little-known multi-billion dollar battle is playing out in the remote wilderness of Cambodia There is a growing, and perhaps just as deadly, price being paid…
During Prohibition, drinkers never knew what they would get when they set out to slake their thirst. Bootleggers often sold products adulterated with industrial alcohol and other toxins. Some 10,000 people were fatally poisoned before America gave up this grand experiment in suppressing vice. Fentanyl was just the beginning. The latest additive is carfentanil, a…
Within the first three months of her visit to the Peruvian jungle, [she] had “some highly questionable and sexually inappropriate incidents” with one of them. She realized that “the shamans were not enlightened beings but normal men—some abusing their powers as healers.” Sex with a shaman while under this influence, or even within a certain…
Now, physicians have a level of “assurance” that if they prescribe Epidiolex [GW Pharmaceutical’s CBD], they’re giving patients a federally-sanctioned, standardized form of medication, the CEO said. “We think it’s’ really important to distinguish between what is medicine and what is not.” “They know exactly what is in it, they understand the dosing, they understand its…
There is not one universal psychedelic experience that people from all cultures reliably and predictably have … even with the same substance, different cultures frame psychedelic experiences in different ways, leading to different experiencesDifferent cultures, then, create different psychedelic experiences, different ontological realities. But the hope of the psychedelic renaissance is that, by conducting the most…
The evidence is that, contrary to many warnings, ending the war on drugs does not lead to a spike in use. In Portugal, which decriminalized all drugs in 2001, fewer young people use drugs than in Britain, where they are still illegal. The overall use in Portugal has remained roughly stable. More importantly, the harms from drug use —…
Psychedelics are, or can be at least, a doorway to a land of wonder and revelation. I’m not confident that in the hands of the medical bureaucracy and the commercial establishment they will stay unblemished. The deeper genius of psychedelics is their ability to totally undermine materialism and comfortable categories by blasting us into ridiculously…
Kratom users had the lowest likelihood of reporting negative experiences, followed by users of marijuana and oxycodone. Heroin users reported five bad experiences for every good one. For cocaine users, the ratio was seven to one. Ten percent of users reported problems with withdrawal after non-use, while close to 11 percent reported using kratom as a substitute…
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