Everyone and their dog is at it with the mushroom edibles these days. It’s not like you have to be a Timothy Leary or Hunter S. Thompson character anymore to show up to the festival with a trippy chocolate bar tucked among the perishables and the underwear. And that’s the thing about mushies: They’re ready to be used, in whichever way and for whatever activity. You can even microdose those bad boys.  Let’s be frank for a sec: Actual magic mushrooms taste a bit fucked. Like, incredibly bad at times. Tea’s also an option, but are you really going to be carrying a thermos into the rave ..read more

In March 2017, a terrorist drove a car into pedestrians in central London, killing four pedestrians and injuring countless others. He then stabbed a police officer to death before being shot dead by armed police, in what has come to be known as the 2017 Westminster attack. PC Paul Haylock was among the first on the scene that day. When he arrived, casualties were still trapped beneath the vehicle – which had crashed into the security fence outside the Houses of Parliament – and there were fears that it could be rigged with explosives. Haylock – a constable who joined the Metropolitan Police in ..read more

“Cops and raids can’t keep us down,” reads a sign outside of the Coca Leaf Cafe and Medicinal Mushroom Dispensary in downtown Vancouver, Canada. In November last year, the emporium – which sells not just Bolivian coca (from which cocaine derives) and hallucinogenic mushrooms, but all manner of psychedelics – was raided by the police for the first time since opening in 2020, along with two other dispensaries under the same ownership. Thousands of dollars in cash and drugs worth tens of thousands were seized. Owner Dana Larsen was arrested and held in custody for seven hours, but he reopened the ..read more

We’ve published a hell of a lot of words about drugs this year. Our writers have ventured deep into the history of drug culture, gone on therapeutic retreats, interviewed world-leading experts, and uncovered the stories behind trends, crazes, crimes and moral panics. From the recreational to the therapeutic, from the heroic to the micro, and from the cartels to the nightclubs, we’ve covered it all. Below you’ll find a list of what we feel are 17 of the best things we’ve written around drugs this year. So get some tabs open, flex your bookmarks, or save them to your Pocket app. Or, if the prosp ..read more

Ketamine’s therapeutic glow-up is going from strength to strength. A Columbia University study, published in the scientific journal Cell Reports, has found that repeated use over an extended period leads to widespread structural changes in the brain’s dopamine system. Dopamine, in case you fell asleep in high school biology, is a neurotransmitter that affects things like how we feel pleasure and how we think. Biologists and biomedical engineers at Columbia used high-resolution imaging to map the brains of mice given doses of ketamine over one, five and 10 days. The structural changes were ..read more

When Hamas militants went on a vicious rampage in early October and killed more than 1,200 people, Israel retaliated with overwhelming force. Gaza was pummelled with air strikes and invaded by land, with over 11,000 Palestinians killed. Despite the recent announcement of a four-day ceasefire, it is hard to imagine a peaceful end to the war and the longstanding divisions. But, under the radar and in recent years, some Israelis and Palestinians have found themselves in psychedelic ceremonies where they have drunk ayahuasca together, forging deep bonds that have been documented by researchers. So ..read more

Elon Musk does it, Gwyneth Paltrow does it, Joe Rogan does it – even suburban mums do it before the school run. It’s no secret that microdosing has exploded in popularity in recent years. Since Rolling Stone hailed LSD microdosing as “the hot new business trip” in 2015, microdosing has seemingly gone from a fringe hobby for Burning Man attendees, to something like a mainstream lifestyle “hack”. A lot of public attention has focused on microdosing LSD, with people like Amanda Feilding – known as the “first lady of LSD” – declaring “microdosing just adds a little sparkle”. But now, more and more ..read more

Like the endless mycelial networks that thread through our planet’s ecosystems, magic mushrooms are now thoroughly entangled in 21st century culture.  Shrooms—defined by their main psychedelic compound, psilocybin—are the new weed, and the act of taking consistent, sub-perceptible doses of them (microdosing) is now a common way to dip your toes in psychedelic waters. Meanwhile, the benefits of embarking on a full-dose mushroom journey is fast becoming a hot topic among therapists, researchers, and laymen alike, as anecdotal and scientific evidence increasingly suggest that psilocybin can ..read more

Self-aware iron orbs, creatures with swappable Lego-like limbs, and “machine elves” consisting of interlacing geometric patterns—these are just a few the inexplicable beings reported by people who have taken N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT), the potent psychedelic that lets users visit other realities for five minutes at a time. That people would see weird stuff when they trip is not exactly surprising, but what is remarkable is the regularity with which some of these strange characters appear. Now, a veteran psychedelic researcher associated with the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic ..read more

Hopping goblins made of shifting shapes, clown dimensions replete with impossible jesters, and recurrent purple cosmic girlfriends—these are just some of the mysterious motifs that occur more than coincidence should allow when taking N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT), the ultra-powerful psychedelic that allows users to seemingly travel to the outer reaches of the cosmos and beyond. One of the most fascinating things about DMT is that many trips follow a specific pattern and many users experience similar realms. Amateur psychonauts—cosmic cartographers, if you will—have been "mapping" the "DMT realm ..read more