Prior to MDMA being banned internationally in 1987, it was showing promise as a pharmacological adjunct to psychotherapy. In the past decade, there has been significant global growth in clinical trials of MDMA that have shown MDMA-assisted psychotherapy can be effective in treating treatment-resistant posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), alcohol use disorder, and social anxiety among ...

As we go through rites of passage, initiations, plant medicine inductions, we are strengthening our capacity and crafting the vessel of our being. In this way we are capable of holding finer and finer nectar. Vision, wisdom, resilience, power, all has a home in which to reside. Every culture has somewhere in its lineage rites ...

'Deep Ecology' (and the power of ethnobotanical plants) I have worked for worldwide rainforests since 1979. Although many of our efforts succeeded, for every forest saved 100 have disappeared. Clearly, you can’t save the planet one forest at a time. One green Earth or a bowl of dust.  Without a profound change of consciousness, we ...

The principles for psychedelic support (otherwise known as ‘trip sitting’) that are promoted by international groups like MAPS Zendo Project and Kosmicare Association, as well as Australia’s DanceWize program, focus on set and setting. Psychedelic support in music event settings is different from psychedelic assisted psychotherapy (PAP) in many ways. For example, with PAP a ...

Large doses of psychedelic drugs like LSD/DMT/Psilocybin are well-known to produce enduring changes in creativity, mood and cognition in users. More recently, it has been claimed that regular, small “microdoses” of psychedelics at sub-perceptual levels can produce similar effects. While some survey data supports this claim the limited laboratory-based research conducted so far has not ...

What is strychnine and why do people seem to believe that it is in so many different plants and drugs? Has that ever been true? If so, why, when and where? Keeper Trout takes a fun spin through the wacky world of drug deceptions, real and imaginary, in hopes of setting some rumours to rest ...

This talk explores VR scenarios designed to promote movement through phases of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, and discusses a novel protocol that utilizes unique features of VR as the moderator of the psychedelic journey. The protocol was developed by Enosis Therapeutics- focussed on combining new world technology with old-world wisdom. The unique therapeutic approach of treatment that ...

Storytelling has played a central role in the creation and transmission of ethnobotanical knowledge throughout time. Entheogenic plants have rich histories of social, cultural, and medicinal applications and have tended to feature prominently in the cosmologies, pharmacopeias, and epics of the cultures (and subcultures) that have used them. However, these stories are not static. As ...

Psychedelics have moved to the forefront of global mainstream consciousness and research continues to show their efficacy and promise in treating trauma, depression, anxiety and a variety of other conditions. However, despite this focus and excitement, psychedelic research – and the movement more broadly - has a long history of excluding marginalised communities, and dismissing ...

Friday 31st January 2020 was a momentous day in the history of psychedelic research in Australia, as the clinical team of St Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne’s landmark trial of psilocybin-assisted therapy for anxiety and depression associated with terminal illness treated their first participant in their first drug-therapy session. That day marked just over two years after ...