Last Week in Psychedelic Sundays

satorid (67)in #psychedelics • 4 years ago

The potential significance of LSD and other psychedelics for psychiatry and psychology was comparable to the value the microscope has for biology or the telescope has for astronomy.
— Stanislav Grof

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:

Everything’s Canceled: How the Psychedelic Community is Coping

We’re all grieving, whether we’re aware of it or not. We grieve for the dead, the sick, our social lives, our careers, our communities. “Within the psychedelic space, there’s been a lot of conversation about how this time has mimicked being in a global ayahuasca ceremony. Nobody knows what’s on the other side of it,” says Jennifer Sodini, the founder of an online platform called Evolve + Ascend. “The one thing in an ayahuasca ceremony, of many, that’s so important is practicing the divine art of surrender. The more you struggle with something the harder it gets. The more you surrender, the more you get clarity.” Sodini describes the concept of hiraeth, which she describes as a homesickness for something that doesn’t even exist.

Social Isolation Turns the World Inside Out. That’s Why Shamans Do It.

How unusual it is for us to do nothing. COVID-19 has thrown a wrench in the cogs of our civilization, bringing nearly every aspect of life as we know it to a grinding halt. Perhaps for the first time, our industrialized culture is steadily broadcasted the simple, clear, almost eerie order to isolate.

How Psychedelic Drugs Can Help Us Overcome Crisis

Integrating insights from experiences with psychedelic drugs can then serve us in mitigating our own personal responses to difficult life events, such as the the COVID-19 crisis whose consequences we are all currently facing. In light of the harrowing wave of this pandemic which is taking a global toll on economy, well-being, and existence itself, we wanted to take a look at how we can invoke the lessons from our psychedelic journeys to fight the stress, fear, and suffering we are undergoing at this moment.

Psychedelic Cannabis: Using the Plant for Healing Trauma

“What we’re learning about psychedelics,” Dr. Clements explains, “is that they have a peculiar ability to help people restore normal functioning in the PNS/SNS balance.”
Similarly, Dr. Clements believes cannabis is a highly-underestimated modality that can evoke healing experiences on par with more traditional psychedelics. “We minimized the power of cannabis,” she says. “We called it a ‘weed.’ We didn’t understand its healing power, and we’re finding our way back now.”

Ketamine is being tested as a treatment for coronavirus in new study

Researchers at Beaumont Hospital in Michigan have begun a study which hopes to identify two common drugs that can be used to help in treating COVID-19 patients.

There are 3 Types of Ketamine—Which One Works Best?

If the ketamine molecule could somehow be tweaked chemically, however, a pharmaceutical company could patent it as a new drug, dress it up with a catchy brand name, and charge top dollar for it. That’s exactly what Janssen Pharmaceuticals, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, has done with Spravato, their S-ketamine (esketamine) nasal spray. After spending millions of dollars on studies and clinical trials demonstrating the efficacy of their new formulation, Janssen was able to secure FDA approval for the drug on March 5, 2019. This came on the heels of the FDA already having granted Fast Track and Breakthrough Therapy Designation to Janssen for S-ketamine as a remedy for treatment resistant depression (TRD) in patients concurrently taking oral antidepressant medication.”

MDMA-Assisted Therapy for PTSD Will Likely Become a Legal Service in 2023

Federally-approved clinical MDMA trials are now in their final phase, and preliminary results are so promising that it's almost certain the feds will legalize this novel treatment.

House Approves Marijuana Banking, Again, As Part Of Coronavirus Bill

The House approved a coronavirus relief package on Friday that includes provisions that would protect banks that service state-legal marijuana businesses from being penalized by federal regulators. The vote was 208 to 199.

Oklahoma OKs Weed Delivery and Medical Marijuana Sales for Out-of-State Visitors

Most states with legal medical or recreational cannabis have played it safe by establishing a lot of restrictions around who can access the plant. But Oklahoma, the Cowboy Capital, is blazing its own trail.

POLITICSFederal Judge Orders Ohio To Let Marijuana Decriminalization Campaigns Collect Signatures Electronically

A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that activists seeking to place marijuana decriminalization measures on local ballots across Ohio can collect signatures electronically after they were forced to suspend in-person gathering due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Could COVID-19 Be the Catalyst for the Federal Government to Legalize Marijuana?

According to data as of May 14, as many as 36.5 million people in the U.S. have applied for unemployment benefits over the past two months. The COVID-19 pandemic has hit many industries hard and while many employees will go back to work, some jobs will be lost forever. And the longer it takes for people to find jobs again, the longer it will take for the economy to get back to where it was before the pandemic hit. That's where legalizing marijuana could give the economy a shot in the arm to get it going again.

Nebraska And Montana Marijuana Activists Resume Ballot Signature Gathering Amid Coronavirus

Campaigns to legalize recreational marijuana in Montana and medical cannabis in Nebraska are back in action after temporary suspensions due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Videos and photos posted by Nebraskans for Medical Marijuana and New Approach Montana show canvassers collecting signatures for the proposed ballot initiatives this week, using new safety protocols to prevent the spread of the virus:

Poll Indicates America’s Growing Acceptance Of Psilocybin Mushrooms

A survey released Wednesday from research conducted by Green Horizons, a research firm focused on cannabis, showed that 38 percent of adults in the country believe that psilocybin mushrooms should be legal under at least some circumstances. Another 25 percent believe shrooms should be legal under limited circumstances, be it for medical or religious reasons, while 13 percent think they should be legalized outright.

Expanded Access to the Art of Integration

What does integration look like? Medicine work, in its totality, is 1% what happens in ceremony and 99% what we do with it afterward. Integration is that 99%.

Experiencing the Impossible on DMT

During my first profound experience with DMT, I was perhaps most struck by this certainty of feeling that what I was witnessing was impossible, law-defying. The geometry and objects in this space were transforming themselves in impossible ways, like a hyper-dimensional Rubix cube. It was as if I was suddenly able to perceive 4D objects, like a tesseract, is if they were 3D objects. I could also describe it as like visiting a world based on Escher’s drawings of impossible objects, spaces, and architecture; however, everything made perfect sense, in that activity was occurring in this impossible realm in a reified manner. There was an orderliness and novel lawfulness occurring, I just had no reference point to recognise it or understand it. Yet despite there appearing to be a concreteness and realness to the events unfolding, I was still utterly astonished at what I judged to be objects breaking the laws of physics as I knew it. Additionally imposing was the apparent lack of causality, the breakdown of cause and effect that I was familiar with, so that there were occurrences and activities that were manifesting without me being able to delineate an antecedent event leading to a subsequent event.

Legendary ethnobotanist Wade Davis weaves stories of ritual, ayahuasca, and cosmology from decades of visits to Northwest Amazonia: