Only through explicating every taboo we hold can we arrive at social mores, and ultimately legal structures, that honor the diversity of human desires and experiences and stop penalizing people for behavior that does no harm to anyone else. In essence, our refusal to acknowledge taboos and the weak basis on which they rest prevents meaningful social, cultural, and political change. [ read more ]
The Manual of Psychedelic Support includes everything one would need to start a new psychedelic care organization from the ground up, or to fine-tune and improve the practices of an established group. [ read more ]
In Dreamland, the culprits are pharmaceutical corporations, doctors, and decentralized Mexican drug retailers. The story really is one of capitalism run amok. While the book tells a compelling story of how profits were pursued, it doesn’t tell us exactly why demand skyrocketed, though it makes a few suggestions. [ read more ]
This comprehensive narrative charts the psychedelics’ (mostly LSD) fall from grace after a “Midcentury fascination with LSD and the mystical, mind-expanding ‘psychedelic’ experience…” (Siff, Introduction). [ read more ]
The choice of the name “Nexus” is meaningful, as that was a common name for 2C-B in the 1990s. Though most people won’t catch this association, and will instead understand “Nexus” to imply connectivity (indeed, the same reason 2C-B was given this slang name originally), the effects of the fictional Nexus are not unlike amplified versions of the empathogenic and psychedelic effects of a phenethylamine like 2C-B. [ read more ]
Fadiman and his collaborators are to be congratulated for having put together such a handsome, helpful and comprehensive collection of important information. It’s hard to imagine a better introduction to responsible psychedelic use, or a better signpost pointing towards its future horizons. The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide is an indispensable resource that surely belongs on every tripper’s shelf. [ read more ]
BodyWorld, written and illustrated by Dash Shaw, is a remarkable graphic novel and one of the best works of drug fiction in recent years. The comic is set in a mildly dystopian sci-fi future. It’s 2060 and there’s been a second American civil war. The surviving large cities are polluted hives, but out in the “experimental” woodland town of Boney Borough things seem peaceful, if insipid. Peaceful that is until the arrival of protagonist Paul Panther, a hardboiled “outsider” ethno-botanist posing as a visiting professor at the local high school while investigating reports of a hitherto unknown plant with psychedelic properties. [ read more ]
The pseudonymous “Dale Bevan” has written a self-published guide for those interested in taking LSD for the first time. It is written in a very thoughtful manner, and, to it’s credit, does not necessarily act as a cheerleading ‘info-mercial’ for use of the substance. What we are given here is a fairly balanced overview of LSD in terms of it’s history, chemistry, and the author’s own experiences with it. [ read more ]
Hearing voices. Seeing fantastic plays of light and color. Feeling the body transformed in impossible ways. Encounters with phantom entities. Temporary relocations of self and subjectivity. For some, experiences such as these are to be found at the bottom of a shaman’s gourd or within the crystalline lattices of the latest research chemical. For others, however, experiences like the ones above are not the result of any deliberate intervention but instead are a spontaneous consequence of the simple fact that our experience of reality is the product of our brains, and our brains are capable of being disturbed or disrupted in any number of ways. [ read more ]
Downing smokes some really outlandish “rumored-to-get-you-high” substances—such as spider webs, toothpaste, and butterfly wings—all with a very humorous but still investigatory attitude. He even tests out the noxious concept of “jenkem”, one of the most obvious practical jokes on the Internet, which involves smelling bottled fecal fumes! And I don’t think that it’s too much of a spoiler of the book to reveal that Downing does NOT take battery acid to get high (phew!), although he certainly publishes a ton of Internet literature on this idea. [ read more ]