Psychedelics
Story Stream
Psychedelics Go Mainstream, Kind Of February 26, 2025
Since psychedelic drugs were made illegal in 1970, they have occupied a small, relatively stable corner in Western culture. Roughly 1% of Americans used psychedelic drugs in any given year. Many of them were students or occasional ravers. And then th...
The Great American Acid Trip November 22, 2024
In 1966, the poet Allen Ginsberg offered a remedy for America’s broken soul: If everyone tried LSD, he said, we would discover “some ray of glory or vastness beyond our conditioned social selves, beyond our government, beyond America even, that will ...
No Expectations November 21, 2024
When I read Emily Witt’s new memoir, Health and Safety, earlier this year, the sections I found the most striking weren’t the ones featuring big ideas about psychedelic drugs, Brooklyn’s underground party culture or Witt’s own second thoughts about j...
Americans Just Said No to Drugs November 13, 2024
Kamala Harris’s decisive loss may have grabbed the headlines, but there was another big loser in this election: drugs.In Florida, voters failed to approve a constitutional amendment that would have legalized recreational marijuana, defying both expec...
Is the Femininomenon Still Happening? November 11, 2024
Scrolling through the 2025 Grammy nominations this morning, I encountered the expected candidates: Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter, Charli XCX. At the very least, I recognized the names of almost every artist listed; I laughed seeing Khruang...
The Middle-Class Women Who Are Tripping Balls October 22, 2024
Picture the platonic ideal of the millennial woman, and you’re probably thinking of someone like Rachel.At 42, she has enviably unblemished skin and a nose piercing—nostril, not septum—in which she sports a delicate gold hoop. She’s been married for ...
Ayahuasca Offers a Uniquely Powerful Psychedelic Purge October 11, 2024
When people ask me about taking ayahuasca, they really only want to know one thing: Did it make me throw up? So let’s get that detail out of the way first: Yes it did....
How MDMA Highs Can Declutter Your Hoarded Brain September 10, 2024
If you’ve ever seen one of those “hoarder” shows on television, you’re ready to take MDMA. You know the shows I mean, right? There’s a person who has collected crap for years—decades, sometimes—and their house is piled so high with old newspapers and...
People Are Trying Mushrooms and Meeting God August 19, 2024
The first time Stephanie Brinkerhoff tried psilocybin, she was a Mormon mother of three and desperate for help. She was struggling with migraines and chronic fatigue, and the antidepressants she had been on for years weren’t working, she felt. After ...
How I Learned to Love Mushrooms August 16, 2024
“The only way I can finish a writing assignment on time,” a screenwriter friend told me recently, “is if I steal some Adderall from my kid.”We were talking about the trouble we have getting things done, feeling inspired, being able to focus. I told h...
A Drug Against War June 14, 2024
Looming on a cliffside in Big Sur, framed by the Pacific Ocean and California’s windy Highway 1, the Esalen Institute has long stood as the wooly nerve center of the philosophical, psychological, and pseudospiritual American tendency dubbed “the huma...
Turn on, Tune in, Write Code June 06, 2024
In the summer of 1930, the anthropologist Margaret Mead and her second husband and fellow anthropologist, Reo Fortune, made their way to the Omaha Reservation in northeastern Nebraska. At age 28, Mead had already gained renown for her ethnographic st...
