Listen to a reading of this article: ❖ "Money has begun flowing into companies intending to monetize psychedelic therapy as new research has increasingly shown that blowing one’s mind can alter it for the better," reads a new article for the Los Angeles Times titled "Money is pouring into psychedelics. Meet the mystical hedge fund investor bankrolling the boom."
“Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.”
I was indeed fortunate to grow up in northern California in the 1970's.
Seems like they believe that such a thing as half-tripping exists. Once you realize that time is merely a construct of convenience, what else is there to discover?
Our political landscape is horrible enough sober; I'm trying to imagine viewing the same monkeyhouse while high. There's the chance it could be hilarious. There's also the chance it could trigger the ultimate bad trip.
We're getting closer to THX-1138-4EB all the time.
One thing to note: there were/are many people for whom ingesting psychedelics have been the tripping point (sorry for the pun!) for their mental illness to appear. My sister took psychedelics in the late '70s and was experiencing signs of schizophrenia shortly after. It's pretty sick, to me, to begin to hear the pharma corps now pushing the same drugs to alleviate mental illness. I don't buy it.
These a$$hole corporations have had decades to come up with alternate treatments. But, funny that mentally illness is always the last physical malady to receive funding even though our modern world's stressers have been increasing the number of people affected by it.
And finally, we can thank Reagan for decreasing funding, effectively throwing the mentally ill to the streets.
In Capitalism, BigBucks eventually ruins anything and everything, including the planet that hosts it. See Joel Kovel's The Enemy of Nature, a review at
My analysis overcomes the mystery and logical difficulty of attributing to "set and setting" the entire range of psychedelic effects. An intermediate neurological/psychological effect/operation provides the bridge between the simple and reproducible effect of psychedelic chemicals on the neuro-receptors, and the astounding array of changes in consciousness that so far have been thought of as "psychedelic effects".
None of the usual suspects - the official echelons of psychedelic research - pays any notice to the theory, for it threatens the accepted paradigms that guide and support current research including using psychedelics for therapy. One notable exception was Jim Fadiman, who wrote:
"Peter Webster has done the whole field a great service to finally, clearly and with technical accuracy - and with only the mildest sarcasm - expose the fundamental weakness of the current excitement about changes visible in the brain when using psychedelics.
"There's a Sufi story about a man looking for his key underneath the lamp-post. When a kindly stranger starts to look with him, he asked the man where he might've lost it. The man replies that he lost it several blocks away."
"Then why are we looking for it here?"
"Because there is more light here," the man answers.
"In a similar fashion, the fact that we can notice, measure, and display changes in the brain has taken us only very slightly closer to what is actually going on.
"Let’s face it: brain scans showing lots more color under psychedelics are delightful. That they are part of the picture is undeniable. What Webster makes clear is that they are, at best, a remarkably unimportant, if graphic, aspect of what many of us are trying to understand.
"Webster has made I, believe, an equally significant contribution by presenting a theory of salience that is more robust and is certainly more useful then the physiological materialistic brain models he so artfully dismantles. Certainly, as one aided by ingesting a psychedelic can be overwhelmed with the pleasure of seeing the natural world radiant and fully connected, reflecting on that inner experience as related to meaning seems more fruitful than determining what portions of the brain display more or less connectivity.
"I do not fault the neuroscientists for their discoveries, only for their extrapolations that are not justified by indirect physical measurements. Webster has returned our focus to the reality of the inner events, not their shadows on the cave wall."
Profit is the only motive for social change of any kind, positive or negative. If one is angry that corporations will come along and engage in any new breakthrough endeavor for humanity purely to make a dime off it, then one should not be angry at the corporations but rather at the fact that innovation is currently only spurred by profit. There is no 'hypocrisy' there because corporations don't owe us anything to begin with. Without them, we wouldn't have much of the conveniences or necessities of contemporary life. Socialism would fix this not so much by destroying corporations but rather by rationally organizing their drive for profit into an intentional force for societal transformation. The profit motive has been very useful historically, and the wealth of the modern age owes itself to it completely. It may stick around even after the transition to socialism. Really, though, corporations fill the vacuum that the working class has left wide open ever since 1848. So don't blame the corporations or the governments. They're doing what they're supposed to, i.e., crudely and incompletely do the job that the working class is historically supposed to do. Don't blame the workers, either, for at present they largely don't know or care about their historical role. Instead, blame the Left for not advancing this kind of analysis clearly and cogently. If corporations run amok, it is truly the Left's fault and no one else's. Let the corporations patent and market the psychodelics, fine. But urge the Left to rebuild itself and dialectically grasp both the wastefulness and potential of a globalized corporate economy - that is the only long-term fix.
Recall, LSD was a part of the psych-ops program. Brave New World, here we come! Never expanded my mind or anyone I knew, All hype and so is befitting it is still hype, like pot. CA is a two crop state now, and the crops are destroying the environment in N. CA. N. Ca is turning into a cesspool. No utopia there. I do not romanticize any of this.
The Police Chief of my home town Toronto was strongly behind the war on drugs. Incarcerating casual users while bonding with the bike gang that controlled the herd drugs. He became the corporate head of Medical Marijuana sales. Rotten.
Though there is a lot of good stuff here, I definitely take issue with the title as the "Psychedelic Renaissance " was long underway before any financial actors or corporate interests showed up. Many people on the research side of it were doctors and scientists who had their work shut down in the 60s and 70s and were looking for a path the revive it with cultural legitimacy that someone like Timothy Leary couldn't endanger. And basically for the most part of 20 users non-profit groups like MAPS, Heffter, and Usona laid the ground work with the motives of legalizing and normalizing psychedelic use by tackling trauma and mental illness.
When the work was near completion, and these nonprofits had driven MDMA and psilocybin close to legalization through a medical pathway, a bunch of venture capitalists and for-profits like Compass Pathways started trying to patent and control the rights to even basic things like "set" and setting, attempting the poses the legal psychedelic within the "wellness" industry. This is obvious quite ominous, though it mostly pertains to psilocybin at the moment.
Silicon Valley types believe a lot of hype and sooner or later will discover that psychedelics don't do what they thought, and can't be controlled. Some may be set up to make money out of offering psychedelic retreats etc. But to say that the "Psychedelic Renaissance " is Entirely about corporate greed erases 95% of the scientific work and individual donations over the last 20+ years. I've heard the term used as far back as 2010, when zero for-prpfit interest existed. Its like saying Machu Pichu is entirely about corporate greed because like everything else, has become commercialized with tourism. The threat to even things like psychedelics is real that capitalism gobbles up anything that is good and turns it into a commodity. Will this spoil them, or will the psychedelics themselves turn out to be the stronger actor?
“Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.”
I was indeed fortunate to grow up in northern California in the 1970's.
“Psychedelics are useful not for the hallucinations they provide but for the hallucinations they remove.”
Very well said.
Seems like they believe that such a thing as half-tripping exists. Once you realize that time is merely a construct of convenience, what else is there to discover?
Our political landscape is horrible enough sober; I'm trying to imagine viewing the same monkeyhouse while high. There's the chance it could be hilarious. There's also the chance it could trigger the ultimate bad trip.
We're getting closer to THX-1138-4EB all the time.
Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" comes true. SOMA is needed to pacify the populace.
One thing to note: there were/are many people for whom ingesting psychedelics have been the tripping point (sorry for the pun!) for their mental illness to appear. My sister took psychedelics in the late '70s and was experiencing signs of schizophrenia shortly after. It's pretty sick, to me, to begin to hear the pharma corps now pushing the same drugs to alleviate mental illness. I don't buy it.
These a$$hole corporations have had decades to come up with alternate treatments. But, funny that mentally illness is always the last physical malady to receive funding even though our modern world's stressers have been increasing the number of people affected by it.
And finally, we can thank Reagan for decreasing funding, effectively throwing the mentally ill to the streets.
What was the name of the drug used in Brave New World? Because they've found it.
In Capitalism, BigBucks eventually ruins anything and everything, including the planet that hosts it. See Joel Kovel's The Enemy of Nature, a review at
https://peterwebster.substack.com/p/the-enemy-of-nature
an excerpt at
http://www.psychedelic-library.org/THS/Kovel%20-%20The%20Enemy%20of%20Nature.pdf
And for a new view of how psychedelic drugs actually work
https://peterwebster.substack.com/p/psychedelic-elephant-part-1
and parts 2 and 3
Or download the entire essay at
http://www.psychedelic-library.org/Psychedelic_Elephant.pdf
My analysis overcomes the mystery and logical difficulty of attributing to "set and setting" the entire range of psychedelic effects. An intermediate neurological/psychological effect/operation provides the bridge between the simple and reproducible effect of psychedelic chemicals on the neuro-receptors, and the astounding array of changes in consciousness that so far have been thought of as "psychedelic effects".
None of the usual suspects - the official echelons of psychedelic research - pays any notice to the theory, for it threatens the accepted paradigms that guide and support current research including using psychedelics for therapy. One notable exception was Jim Fadiman, who wrote:
"Peter Webster has done the whole field a great service to finally, clearly and with technical accuracy - and with only the mildest sarcasm - expose the fundamental weakness of the current excitement about changes visible in the brain when using psychedelics.
"There's a Sufi story about a man looking for his key underneath the lamp-post. When a kindly stranger starts to look with him, he asked the man where he might've lost it. The man replies that he lost it several blocks away."
"Then why are we looking for it here?"
"Because there is more light here," the man answers.
"In a similar fashion, the fact that we can notice, measure, and display changes in the brain has taken us only very slightly closer to what is actually going on.
"Let’s face it: brain scans showing lots more color under psychedelics are delightful. That they are part of the picture is undeniable. What Webster makes clear is that they are, at best, a remarkably unimportant, if graphic, aspect of what many of us are trying to understand.
"Webster has made I, believe, an equally significant contribution by presenting a theory of salience that is more robust and is certainly more useful then the physiological materialistic brain models he so artfully dismantles. Certainly, as one aided by ingesting a psychedelic can be overwhelmed with the pleasure of seeing the natural world radiant and fully connected, reflecting on that inner experience as related to meaning seems more fruitful than determining what portions of the brain display more or less connectivity.
"I do not fault the neuroscientists for their discoveries, only for their extrapolations that are not justified by indirect physical measurements. Webster has returned our focus to the reality of the inner events, not their shadows on the cave wall."
Profit is the only motive for social change of any kind, positive or negative. If one is angry that corporations will come along and engage in any new breakthrough endeavor for humanity purely to make a dime off it, then one should not be angry at the corporations but rather at the fact that innovation is currently only spurred by profit. There is no 'hypocrisy' there because corporations don't owe us anything to begin with. Without them, we wouldn't have much of the conveniences or necessities of contemporary life. Socialism would fix this not so much by destroying corporations but rather by rationally organizing their drive for profit into an intentional force for societal transformation. The profit motive has been very useful historically, and the wealth of the modern age owes itself to it completely. It may stick around even after the transition to socialism. Really, though, corporations fill the vacuum that the working class has left wide open ever since 1848. So don't blame the corporations or the governments. They're doing what they're supposed to, i.e., crudely and incompletely do the job that the working class is historically supposed to do. Don't blame the workers, either, for at present they largely don't know or care about their historical role. Instead, blame the Left for not advancing this kind of analysis clearly and cogently. If corporations run amok, it is truly the Left's fault and no one else's. Let the corporations patent and market the psychodelics, fine. But urge the Left to rebuild itself and dialectically grasp both the wastefulness and potential of a globalized corporate economy - that is the only long-term fix.
Sheldon Kopp, the psychotherapist :
"It is not possible to know how much is just enough, until we have experienced how much is more than enough."
Recall, LSD was a part of the psych-ops program. Brave New World, here we come! Never expanded my mind or anyone I knew, All hype and so is befitting it is still hype, like pot. CA is a two crop state now, and the crops are destroying the environment in N. CA. N. Ca is turning into a cesspool. No utopia there. I do not romanticize any of this.
The Police Chief of my home town Toronto was strongly behind the war on drugs. Incarcerating casual users while bonding with the bike gang that controlled the herd drugs. He became the corporate head of Medical Marijuana sales. Rotten.
Though there is a lot of good stuff here, I definitely take issue with the title as the "Psychedelic Renaissance " was long underway before any financial actors or corporate interests showed up. Many people on the research side of it were doctors and scientists who had their work shut down in the 60s and 70s and were looking for a path the revive it with cultural legitimacy that someone like Timothy Leary couldn't endanger. And basically for the most part of 20 users non-profit groups like MAPS, Heffter, and Usona laid the ground work with the motives of legalizing and normalizing psychedelic use by tackling trauma and mental illness.
When the work was near completion, and these nonprofits had driven MDMA and psilocybin close to legalization through a medical pathway, a bunch of venture capitalists and for-profits like Compass Pathways started trying to patent and control the rights to even basic things like "set" and setting, attempting the poses the legal psychedelic within the "wellness" industry. This is obvious quite ominous, though it mostly pertains to psilocybin at the moment.
Silicon Valley types believe a lot of hype and sooner or later will discover that psychedelics don't do what they thought, and can't be controlled. Some may be set up to make money out of offering psychedelic retreats etc. But to say that the "Psychedelic Renaissance " is Entirely about corporate greed erases 95% of the scientific work and individual donations over the last 20+ years. I've heard the term used as far back as 2010, when zero for-prpfit interest existed. Its like saying Machu Pichu is entirely about corporate greed because like everything else, has become commercialized with tourism. The threat to even things like psychedelics is real that capitalism gobbles up anything that is good and turns it into a commodity. Will this spoil them, or will the psychedelics themselves turn out to be the stronger actor?