Listening to Ayahuasca: New Hope for Depression, Addiction, PTSD, and Anxiety offers something immeasurably valuable in the field of psychedelic discourse: a sane, responsible, well-informed voice in a chorus replete with fevered egos and third-hand hearsay. [ read more ]
To be clear, I am casting no aspersions as to the extent of Gorman’s genuine expertise with the technique. I respect that he learned it straight from the source, and have no reason to doubt his ability to administer sapo skillfully to himself or others. What I do feel compelled to question is his ability to make meaningful statements about why or how the relevant phenomena function the way they do. This review may seem surprisingly harsh so far, but I’m going to argue such harshness is fair. [ read more ]
The book is both a consideration of general topics in psychedelic-influenced language studies, as well as an account of the author’s own “outrageous twelve year adventure” of largely solitary psychedelic exploration, inspired in large part by her experiments with Glide, a visual language system she developed in the course of her researches. Slattery’s personal journey is both remarkable and inspirational. [ read more ]
What stands out in the pharmacology and toxicology studies presented in Novel Psychoactive Substances is more the negative space of what isn’t there than the positive space of what is. [ read more ]
The Manual of Psychedelic Support includes everything one would need to start a new psychedelic care organization from the ground up, or to fine-tune and improve the practices of an established group. [ read more ]
Fadiman and his collaborators are to be congratulated for having put together such a handsome, helpful and comprehensive collection of important information. It’s hard to imagine a better introduction to responsible psychedelic use, or a better signpost pointing towards its future horizons. The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide is an indispensable resource that surely belongs on every tripper’s shelf. [ read more ]
BodyWorld, written and illustrated by Dash Shaw, is a remarkable graphic novel and one of the best works of drug fiction in recent years. The comic is set in a mildly dystopian sci-fi future. It’s 2060 and there’s been a second American civil war. The surviving large cities are polluted hives, but out in the “experimental” woodland town of Boney Borough things seem peaceful, if insipid. Peaceful that is until the arrival of protagonist Paul Panther, a hardboiled “outsider” ethno-botanist posing as a visiting professor at the local high school while investigating reports of a hitherto unknown plant with psychedelic properties. [ read more ]
Hearing voices. Seeing fantastic plays of light and color. Feeling the body transformed in impossible ways. Encounters with phantom entities. Temporary relocations of self and subjectivity. For some, experiences such as these are to be found at the bottom of a shaman’s gourd or within the crystalline lattices of the latest research chemical. For others, however, experiences like the ones above are not the result of any deliberate intervention but instead are a spontaneous consequence of the simple fact that our experience of reality is the product of our brains, and our brains are capable of being disturbed or disrupted in any number of ways. [ read more ]
Don’t let the leopard-print short-shorts fool you! Four-part comic book miniseries Flex Mentallo: Man of Muscle Mystery (reprinted at long last in a handsome hardcover “deluxe” edition) is one of the most sophisticated representations of a drug trip ever written or drawn. [...] At the same time in an alternate reality, an unnamed rock singer is dying of a drug overdose in the rain. He’s taken everything in the house, including quite a bit of LSD, and he’s talking on a mobile phone to the unseen voice on the other end of a suicide prevention hotline. All he wants to talk about are comic books. [ read more ]
Once again, it’s the interaction between the writing and the illustration that provides such a lush and unique means of expressing the psychedelic experience. To bring the world of Rogan Gosh to life, artist Brendan McCarthy mined his own childhood obsession with the Amar Chitra Katha tradition of Indian comic books—cross-wiring that with the electric offspring of punk-rock pop art to produce a lurching, spiral play of hyper-color lotuses, sitar-rayguns, corridors of endless uncertainty, ashrams of the absolute, and the dead-end sprawl of South London. [ read more ]