Posts tagged "LSD"
New short film, Debbie and Doug Drop Acid in the Desert A poignant journey with trippy characters -- including Larry King?!
A very trippy new short film comes out today, and you can watch it for free! Here’s how the filmmakers describe it on the film’s website: Debbie and Doug (Angela Gulner and Zack Gold) are desperate to re-ignite the fire of their once passionate marriage, but their future is uncertain. About to hit rock bottom, they enlist the help of an alternative therapist (Maria Bamford) who claims that the only way to save their relationship from impending death is to take acid in Joshua Tree. When they accidentally take ‘ way, way, way too much’ of this prescribed...
A Long Time Ago When the Sky Kissed Me Back An Excerpt of 'Love in the Time of Trump' by Mike Millard
This story of unexpected samadhi is excerpted from Mike Millard’s new book, Love in the Time of Trump: A jagged memoir of the psychedelic ‘60s, today’s politics and religion. School was out on that beautiful San Francisco spring day with protest in the air. Sagittarius dropped by to see if I wanted to go tripping around. His battered blue Monza convertible was running again and he had the top down. Sagittarius was a bit of a head case, but he was an old friend of Vernon’s and I knew him well enough to be fairly comfortable around him....
The Loop Trip How Two Kids on Acid Stumbled onto the Theory of Everything
When I was around twenty years old, I was living in a little apartment on Pearl Street, in Boulder, Colorado, with my good friend Jim. We were both guys who had an affectionate, on-again-off-again relationship with LSD, and during this time we were both on again. We were tripping all the time. Often, we would develop themes, inside references, ongoing philosophical explorations that would carry over from trip to trip. One day, we were sitting around waiting for our doses to kick in and decided to put on the Steely Dan album, Aja. (Steely Dan is hugely underrated...
Acid Drops: An Interview with Andy Roberts Author, Speaker, and Historian of British LSD Culture
Andy Roberts is an historian of Britain’s LSD psychedelic culture and author of Acid Drops: Adventures in Psychedelia, as well as Albion Dreaming: A Social History of LSD in Britain. He first fell down the rabbit hole in 1972 and has been exploring the labyrinth of passages ever since. His views on the psychedelic experience are (basically) – You take a psychedelic and you get high. What happens after that is largely the result of dosage, set and setting. Andy, thanks very much for joining me, I’m looking forward to hearing more about your book. Acid Drops is...
Microdosing LSD: Smart Drug or Placebo?
This guest post is by Marlene Rupp, whose fantastic writings and illustrations appear at Sapiensoup.com. Microdosing LSD promises to act like a mix of Adderall and Prozac but without the side effects. Sounds too good to be true; is it? Some swear by microdosing while others call it a placebo effect. We researched the scientific explanations why microdosing might actually work, the risks involved and evaluated the evidence as of today. Here is what we found. Microdosing gained currency in Silicon Valley in late 2015 and is spreading like wildfire across the rest of the world. Software developers...
My Share of Sacramental LSD Wiccans Celebrate a Lunar Eclipse
My first experience with taking LSD in a ritual context took place in 1980 in a Wiccan community in Northern California. But the event, an observance of the eclipse of the full moon, was by no means my first experience with psychedelics. For the previous 14 years, I had used such psychedelics as LSD and psilocybin as part of a spiritual practice, often during the four years when it seemed to elevate my marriage into a cosmic union; and less often after my 1970 divorce, when I attempted — with very limited success — to reach acid light...
New Study: Psychedelics Really Do Produce a Higher State of Consciousness
Trippers, researchers, and abstainers alike have casually referred to the psychedelic experience as an “expanded” state of mind for many years. Even the terminology of being “high” implies a somehow raised form of consciousness. Now, for the first time ever, researchers have found neurological evidence to support that view. In a study conducted at the University of Sussex and Imperial College, London, scientists discovered that psychedelics like LSD, psilocybin, and even the dissociative ketamine all produce a “higher” state of consciousness. But what does that mean? Previous research has shown that measures of “neural signal diversity” in the brain change...
Scientists are crowd-funding the first ever LSD brain imaging study
Dr. David Nutt and Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, the researchers who blew your mind with a landmark psilocybin study in 2013, are at it again. This time they’re examining the effects of LSD on the brain, and they want your help. The active research phase has already been conducted — 20 volunteers were dosed and scanned, producing the world’s first images of brains on LSD. Now the researchers must analyze the raw data before they can publish the results. To fund this final phase of the study, the scientists have launched a crowd-funding campaign on Walacea.com in partnership with the Beckley Foundation. Within the first 24 hours,...
Incredibly Trippy Portraits of Famous Psychonauts by Nicolás Rosenfeld
Nicolás Rosenfeld has produced an incredible series of portraits of famous psychonauts, from Carlos Castañeda and John C Lilly to Syd Barrett and Nick Sand. His artworks are intricate, intensely colored, and overflowing with peyote buttons, ether vapors, and cubensis stalks. Check them out below, and see even more at his website! Carlos Castañeda became famous as the author of a series of books, starting with The Teachings of Don Juan in 1968, supposedly relating his training in shamanism by a Yaqui sorcerer. The books include experiences with several drugs, including peyote, jimsonweed, and mushrooms. Though they were considered true-to-life anthropological...
My Interview with Rick Doblin, Psychedelic Pioneer Founder of MAPS Discusses MDMA Therapy, a Crazy Personal LSD Trip, and More
I recently had the good fortune of meeting my psychedelic hero, Rick Doblin, the founder and president of the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies. What’s more, he graciously agreed to an on-camera interview. I asked him about the origins of MAPS, the Russian ban of methadone in Crimean addiction clinics, New Zealand’s new regulatory framework for legal highs, MAPS’ recent partnership with the military to research MDMA as a treatment for PTSD, and much more. My favorite part is when Rick tells the story of taking LSD on his twenty-first birthday. He heard a siren and became convinced that the Russians were...
Session Games People Play: A Manual for the Use of LSD
This document was first published as a pamphlet in 1967, shortly after possession of LSD was made illegal in the USA, by Lisa Bieberman. It is a guide for first-time experimenters with LSD, though anyone who uses psychedelics is sure to benefit from reading it. For more on author Lisa Bieberman, visit Erowid. Not much has changed in fifty years — I agree with almost all of her advice, but have amended it with a few of my own comments [in italicized brackets]. Contents Introduction So You’re Going to Take LSD Session Games Get Me Out of This This...
One Last LSD Trip The Beautiful Death of Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley was known for his incredible books and essays, among them The Doors of Perception, a 1954 book discussing his experiences with mescaline, and Island, a novel about a utopian society. In Island, the citizens inhabit a constant state of acceptance thanks to meditation and a psychedelic agent they call “moksha medicine.” A character describes moksha as “the reality reliever, the truth-and-beauty pill,” allowing users to “catch a glimpse of the world as it looks to someone who has been liberated from his bondage to the ego.” Huxley was an elder statesman of the psychedelic movement, one who advocated the intelligent and cautious use of...