Psychedelic Press Blog

The Psychedelic Press is excited to be joining the global psychedelic community in Prague for Beyond Psychedelics 2018. Researcher from the National Institute of Mental Health (and founding member of Beyond Psychedelics) Rita Kočárová introduces the ideas underpinning the event: an exploration of beauty and diversity in psychedelic community. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- You can feel it in the air: many people say that we are experiencing a Psychedelic Renaissance. But, I think that our current situation more closely resembles a psychedelic chaos: there are no universally-accepted standards, no rules, and thousands of different ways of approaching psychedelics. The Beyond Psychedelics team are...

Abstract The fields of psychology and psychopharmacology have developed along surprisingly divergent historical trajectories, given their shared clinical endpoint. The subsequent schism between drug and psychotherapeutic treatments is artificial, and exaggerated by continued ignorance on both sides of the debate. In fact, such distinctions are relatively contemporary. There exists a rich history of shared psychotherapeutic-drug assisted clinical practices in pre-history and non-Western cultures using the psychedelic (hallucinogenic) drugs. These practices were re-invented in the 1950s and 1960s in Western medicine and are now enjoying a renaissance in contemporary research. It is postulated in this article that further development of psychedelic...

There is an abundance of good news. After forty plus years of research being denied, what Charles Grob kindly called, “a lull,” psychedelic science is back. Excellent research results appear in the top peer-reviewed journals. The popular science press, as well as the general media, favorably covers the findings. In fact, it is difficult to find a thoughtful negative article about psychedelics anywhere. Governments hover on the edge of funding and hundreds of graduate students in religious studies, social work, psychology, biochemistry, neuroscience and psychiatry intend to go into psychedelic research.       Major research groups in the US and the UK...

Documentary film-maker David Graham Scott, whose work includes the award-winning Detox or Die and Iboga Nights, which has had a huge impact on the harm-reduction and addiction communities, takes us on a tour of his work and the personal struggles that helped frame them. This article originally appeared in the Psychedelic Press journal Volume XVI. It’s only recently that I’ve fully acknowledged the underlying issues that led me into the dark subculture of opiate use. A longstanding problem with depression and anxiety broke any confidence I had, and I felt myself becoming increasingly alienated from the world around me. After...