Tag Archives: psychedelics

O n Dec. 21, 1967 — the winter solstice, when the sun’s annual perambulations through the zodiac had reached their most southerly point — light was dimming on the Summer of Love. In an unassuming pad at 69 La Espiral St. in Orinda, California, just east of Berkeley, a half …

The first time Stephanie Brinkerhoff tried psilocybin, she was a Mormon mother of three and desperate for help. She was struggling with migraines and chronic fatigue, and the antidepressants she had been on for years weren’t working, she felt. After listening to a series of podcasts about psychedelics, and learning …

U pstate New York has been the birthplace of many Great Awakenings. In the 1820s, religious fervor so swept the region it became known as “the burned-over district.” In the 1960s, Timothy Leary’s commune in Millbrook became ground control for the East Coast psychedelic movement. “By the time we got …

“Welcome to the psychedelic twenties.” This is how Rick Doblin, founder and president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), greeted a packed crowd on the opening morning of Psychedelic Science 2023 in Denver last week, dressed in a loose white suit befitting a guru. Billed as the largest-ever …

On Wednesday afternoon in Denver, four-time NFL MVP Aaron Rodgers sat down for a conversation with author and podcaster Aubrey Marcus at Psychedelic Science 2023, a conference on the applications of drugs including psilocybin, ketamine, and MDMA that has drawn over 12,000 attendees. In this particular event, titled “How Psychedelics …

Psychedelic-assisted therapies show such promise for intractable mental health conditions like depression, PTSD and addiction that they’ve won bipartisan political support. Prominent researchers and mental health professionals “are starting to wake up to what shamans have been saying for years,” Vittoria D’Alessio writes at Horizon. “Psychoactive substances have immense therapeutic …

In the past four years, four statesand 15 U.S. cities have legalized or decriminalized psychedelics or reduced the enforcement of laws regarding them. Research into therapeutic uses for psilocybin, LSD, MDMA and other psychedelics is expanding for the treatment of conditions ranging from PTSD to anorexia. A major funder of …

As I traverse the psychedelic conference circuit, the internecine feud that I’ve discussed in past posts is only growing. Take the Wonderland Miami conference. My team and I had a great experience there last November. I had never been to a show with “big psychedelic” corporate sponsors before, but it …

I n 2016, a 19-year-old Lil Yachty emerged as a fresh-faced, red-haired maverick eagerly planting Generation Z’s flag in hip-hop. Songs like “Minnesota” intrigued many, but rap traditionalists denigrated him as a “mumble rapper” — an upstart who, they claimed, was insulting the essence of hip-hop one warbled vocal run …

Last year, Maxo took a trip that changed his outlook. It was an ayahuasca ritual, which his mother had recommended as a way of unpacking the intergenerational trauma that forms a backdrop to his music. After drinking the psychoactive and entheogenic brew, Maxo grounded himself in order to begin the …