Last Week in Psychedelic Sundays

"Psychedelic experience is only a glimpse of genuine mystical insight, but a glimpse which can be matured and deepened by the various ways of meditation in which drugs are no longer necessary or useful. If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen..." -Alan Watts

In this post, I will share with you some of what I found on my neverending journey through the psychedelic digital jungle of interesting articles, podcasts, and studies that I have found:

Psychedelics Activists Unveil Measure To Legalize Plant Medicine Healing Ceremonies In Oakland

Decriminalize Nature (DN), the group behind the ordinance, submitted it last week to Councilmember Noel Gallo (D), who previously sponsored the organization’s now-enacted measure to deprioritize enforcement of laws against certain plants and fungi such as psilocybin mushrooms and ayahuasca.

Psychedelics are making a wild comeback – let’s not eff it up

The revolution Leary was talking about has seemingly returned full circle. These days you can’t go online without reading about another celebrity lending his name (it’s mostly men) to the promise of an exploding market in mind-altering drugs promising a cure for everything from depression to PTSD and addiction. Everyone seems to be looking for an angle on the next big thing.

II AYA: Open Letter from the Indigenous People of Acre, Brazil

THE II WORLD AYAHUASCA CONFERENCE was held in the city of Rio Branco, Acre from 17th – 21st October 2016, the main objective of which was: “to promote a space for dialogue, sharing and learning, synergy and collaboration, while respecting the cultural diversity of the traditions of Ayahuasca”.

What is LSA? The Trippy Story Behind the Morning Glory

LSA is found most commonly in the seeds of morning glory, a climbing vine with bright blue or purple trumpet-shaped flowers, as well as in the seeds of the Hawaiian baby woodrose, or elephant creeper, a similar vine that’s native to India. A certain variety of highly psychoactive morning glory seeds are known to indigenous people in Mexico as ololiuhqui, and reportedly, Hawaiian baby woodrose has long associations with Ayurvedic medicine and can be used to treat rheumatism and neurological disorders.

How to Lemon Tek: A Complete Guide for Mushroom People

This method of consuming magic mushrooms can shorten a trip’s duration and decrease nausea, but can also make the whole experience more intense.

The Bitter Side of Ayahuasca

The missing piece in today’s dialogue around the rampant popularity of plant medicines such as ayahuasca and other hallucinatory rituals in the Western world is one simple word: greed.

Profitdelic: A New Psychedelic Conference Trend

Perhaps it’s no surprise that as psychedelics have become more mainstream, we’ve seen more conferences being created. The number of psychedelic conferences has been steadily growing over the last ten years, each one making a valuable contribution and becoming a welcome addition to the global community. However, in the last 6–12 months, we’ve seen a sudden and disconcerting rise of new startup psychedelic conferences. At first glance, these events almost look like the ones we know and trust. However, scratch just beneath the surface and you’ll start to see the signs of profit-driven enterprises with little regard for the values or ethics this movement was built on. These might be better described as “profitdelic conferences”. To understand how different these are in ethos and feel to what we’ve seen before, we can take a deeper look at what was driving the early psychedelic conferences.

Psychedelic Assisted Psychotherapy and Experiential Efficacy

In a recent article in Frontiers in Pharmacology, E.E. Schenberg described a significant crisis facing psychiatry: innovation in psychiatric drug development is in decline while mental illness increasingly contributes to the global disease burden. According to Schenberg and others, the halt in psychiatric drug innovation is intertwined with a larger “paradigmatic crisis” in psychiatry, in which brain-based explanations of mental illness along with discrete categorical diagnostics no longer spur innovation in therapeutics, i.e., the development of psychiatric drugs with unique mechanisms of action.

The Psychedelic Explorer’s Mindset

A good explorer is open to possibilities of experience. When an explorer goes into a new territory or land, they need to remain open minded, letting go of pre-judgments or expectations, if they really want to learn about the landscape, terrain, peoples or culture. Having a fixed idea of what something should be or look like limits the possibility and potential to see it in other ways. This limits the potential for what can be learned in an experience.

Selecting Music for Psychedelic Therapy

One of the large differences between recreational and therapeutic psychedelic use is the focus of the experience. While psychedelics can be used in a wide variety of ways that we might consider recreational, using them in a therapeutic context has one key feature- namely that the psychedelic journeyer has the full attention and attuned nervous system of the therapist with them through the experience. This situation allows the psychonaut to go to places internally that they may not have gone without the benefit and psychological safety of being held in another’s mind. As such, people are coming to know their own depth of being in a new way. I would encourage you, dear therapist, to play things for them that will help them go deeper into their experience. You are helping someone have an experience of themselves within a psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy session.

Meet Viridia, the ATAI unit exploring ayahuasca-based treatments for mental illness

“Why DMT? DMT is a short-acting psychedelic,” Glenn Short, the early development lead at ATAI and CEO of Viridia, told Fierce Biotech. “The reason why it is short-acting is because it is rapidly metabolized by enzymes called oxidases.”

Psilocybin & OCD: Can psychedelics treat obsessive compulsive disorder?

A new review from neuroethicist Eddie Jacobs, and published in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies, is suggesting psilocybin may have great potential as a treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Jacobs, from King’s College London and the University of Oxford, says it is surprising how little focus has been on the therapeutic potential of psilocybin in treating OCD, and he points to a number of new clinical trials that are finally exploring this promising treatment.

60-Plus Psychedelic Clinical Trials Listed on Online Directory

As the number of psychedelic clinical trials increases at a steep pace, it can be difficult for prospective volunteers to find one that’s best suited for them. Psychedelic Support, an online global network of healthcare providers working with psychedelic-assisted therapies, has been developing a solution to address this challenge. In 2018, they began publishing an extensive directory of clinical trials conducted by institutions like the Beckley Foundation, The Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), and Heffter Research Institute.

Medical Psychedelics Working Group to campaign for drug rescheduling

The Medical Psychedelics Working Group has now been launched in the UK to campaign for the rescheduling of all psychedelic drugs for research and medical purposes.

The Second Pandemic: Is Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy the Answer to the Mental Health Crisis Caused by COVID-19?

“We found that over 60 percent of the participants no longer had PTSD after just three sessions of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy,” says Brad Burge, the director of strategic communications at MAPS. “We also found that those benefits persisted and people actually tended to continue getting better over the next year without any further treatments.”