An unmissable lineup centers diverse perspectives and experiential offerings  On April 27 and 28 at San Francisco’s Brava Theatre, Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines will host its unmissable spring conference: Psychedelic Culture. This year’s theme is Cultivating Roots for Cultural Change. Registration is still open for the event, taking place at the historic Brava Theatre Center (2781 24th St.) in San Francisco’s vibrant Mission District. Register now for your seat; limited spots remain. With deep ties to many of the psychedelic space’s culture keepers and groundbreaking ..read more

Wednesday, April 17th, 2024 from 12:00-1:30pm PST Register for this event here. Christine Diindiisi McCleave, enrolled citizen of the Turtle Mountain Ojibwe Nation, is a doctoral student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Indigenous Studies program with a focus on Indigenous Knowledge Systems of entheogenic plant medicines for healing. Her master’s thesis on Native American spirituality and Christianity and the spectrum of Native spiritual practices today, including Peyote religion, led her to become CEO of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition where she helpe ..read more

Onno Nol truly believed in “the Message”: use of LSD was the panacea to solve the world’s problems. In 1964 Nol, an idealistic student of first medicine and later physics, started to recruit investors from the Amsterdam beatnik and drug scene to build his own underground laboratory. Three months later Nol’s lab produced a bottle containing 40,000 dosage units of LSD. (He did not make it solid enough to crystallize it.) The liquid LSD was dripped on sugar cubes with the use of a pipette. These LSD cubes were made available in bars and other locations in Amsterdam where the alternative youth an ..read more

“Monogamy is necessary for truly committed love.” Take a moment and notice how that statement lands in your body. Do you expand? Do you clench? Now, try this one: “Monogamy is possessive and cruel.” Can you sense how your body responds now? In my work as a psychotherapist, I have found few opinions that feel as personal or divisive as those around monogamy and polyamory. I hold a mindset that different arrangements work better for different people, and what works best may change over the course of one’s life. However, I also observe that institutions of power put monogamy on a pedestal in the ..read more

In the middle of the 20th century, the invention and availability of new psychedelic drugs, and the growing cultural discourse around them, coincided with those of television, videotape, and computing. The technologies of psychedelics and electronics grew up together, and those using or thinking about one often implicated the other. When Sony and other Japanese manufacturers developed new portable videotape recorders in the late 1960s, for example, new communities of artists and tinkerers emerged around them first in the United States and Canada, then in Europe, Asia, North Africa, and Latin ..read more

Ruffell SG, Gandy S, Tsang W, Lopez R, O’Rourke N, Akhtar A, Netzband N, Hollingdale J, Perkins D, Sarris J (2024) Participation in an indigenous Amazonian-led ayahuasca retreat associated with increases in nature relatedness – a pilot study. Drug Science, Policy and Law, 10. doi:10.1177/20503245241235100 Study Rationale Anecdotal and qualitative accounts of ayahuasca experiences often feature a strong phenomenological component of nature, with nature-based content and themes commonly described, and traditional Amazonian shamanic practice is also deeply rooted in nature. Ayahuasca has also bee ..read more

Psychiatrists in the 1950s and 1960s who used LSD as an adjunct to psychotherapy were faced with the challenge of interpreting the mystical-like experiences that the drug often produced. For several groups, the experiences of unity, bliss, and transcendence generated by LSD were the key to its therapeutic potential. For others, the purported mystical dimension of the LSD experience awkwardly blurred the boundaries between rigorous scientific investigation and spirituality. My chapter in Expanding Mindscapes explores how the challenge of drug-induced mystical experience was navigated in a Chri ..read more

Healing the traumas faced by Black queer individuals requires a multifaceted, culturally responsive approach. For Black queer people, Afri- can Diasporic spiritual systems offer a welcoming, affirming community and set of practices that celebrate their identities. As psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy continues to show promise as an effective approach to heal- ing psychological trauma, integrating psychedelic medicine with African Diasporic spirituality supports ancestral practices that are ingrained in the spirits of Black queer people. A BRIEF DISCLAIMER This chapter will focus on Black Amer ..read more

The results of the first LSD-25 experiments administered to humans with the aim of investigating its effects on the psyche were published in 1947. Its author, University of Zurich Psychiatry Professor Werner Stoll (1915–1995), was the son of Arthur Stoll, director of Sandoz Laboratories in Basel and where Albert Hofmann first synthesized LSD in 1938. By virtue of the symptoms which accompanied its consumption, Stoll characterized LSD as a phantasticum, following the classification suggested in 1924 by German chemist Louis Lewin to describe drugs which modify sensory perceptions, bring about h ..read more

Introduction Psychoactive plant use research has gained much attention in the Americas—but what of Africa? The classic literature on the subject such as Plants of the Gods by Schultes and Hoffman, states that Africa is poor in psychoactive plants. Having been born and raised in South Africa, this did not make sense to me as there are such rich cultural traditions and botanical diversity in the region. Reasons given to explain this supposed disparity between the Old and New World use of psychoactive plants were that the hunter gatherer societies of the New World Americas revered and significant ..read more