Author Archive
Big Sur, CA
Esalen Institute — Psychedelic Integration Workshop
San Francisco, CA
Wisdom 2.0
West Lafayette, IN
Purdue University
St. Louis, MO
Washington University
Vancouver, BC
University of British Columbia
San Francisco, CA
The Integrative Mental Health Conference
Santa Barbara, CA
UC Santa Barbara Arts & Lectures
A Renaissance in the Forbidden Science of Psychedelics
After decades of being forbidden by law for recreation or research, psychedelics are legally enjoying a renaissance in the scientific community as a potential way of treating a wide variety of ailments including PTSD, treatment-resistant depression, OCD, anxiety, and dependence on alcohol and nicotine.
Michael Pollan on the Science and Sublimity of Psychedelics
Michael Pollan has long been fascinated by nature and the ways we connect and clash with it, with decades of writing covering food, farming, cooking, and architecture. Pollan’s latest fascination? Our widespread and ancient desire to use nature to change our consciousness.
Brimming with X
In his new book How To Change Your Mind: The new science of psychedelics, Michael Pollan sets out the twentieth-century history of the use of “psychedelic” substances with clarity, insight and humour. He does his fieldwork – with appropriate trepidation. He goes mushroom hunting. He consumes four different psychedelic tryptamines under suitably controlled conditions – LSD, psilocybin, ayahuasca (active ingredient N, N-dimethyltryptamine, sc DMT), and, with shattering results, 5-MeO-DMT, the smoked venom of the Sonoran Desert toad Incilius alvarius – and tells us, as well as he can, what happens. He ends with two chapters laying out the latest neuroscientific speculations and describing the extraordinarily fruitful renaissance of the use of psychedelics in psychotherapy in the 1990s. 