Author Archive
Mirror City, a trippy kaleidoscopic time-lapse of cityscapes
Mirror City is a short time-lapse film showing five American cities like you’ve never seen them before. Filmmaker Michael Shainblum took footage of urban landscapes and reflected it at different angles to create the mind-bending kaleidoscopic journey below. Some shots are mirrored only 2 or 4 times, but others show 8 or even 16 reflections of a cityscape at once. Filmmaker Michael Shainblum describes the video on the Vimeo page: When I first started Mirror City, I wanted to create a video that was completely out of the norm. I wanted to showcase something unique and artistic, which takes...
Shrooms for Five: My First Psychedelic Experience
It is a wet February night, and we are gathered at Lee and Dan’s suburban apartment. There are five of us — our hosts, plus Alex, Jason, and me. We have a larger group of friends, but the rest of the crew is not into “serious” drugs. The five of us jokingly call ourselves the “Psychonautic Subcommittee” ever since we tried MDMA for the first time together last fall. [pullquoteleft]Absolute euphoria floods through me, as though each moment of existence is a triumph.[/pullquoteleft]Tonight, it’s time to explore a new psychedelic frontier. We each grind an eighth of an...
New Zealand’s synthetic drug law goes into effect
New Zealand’s synthetic drug bill, called the Psychoactive Substances Act, became law today after passing Parliament last week in an almost unanimous vote. It is aimed at establishing a regulated market for legal highs, and ending the cat-and-mouse game of prohibition in which new chemicals crop up as soon as existing ones are banned. This law is the first of its kind, and (arguably) represents a step forward in intelligent drug policy. I say “arguably” because the intent of the law is to crack down on “legal highs” by requiring them to complete rigorous testing (at an estimated...
A Treatise on Psychedelics Part 2/3: The Mystical Experience
This guest post by Martijn Schirp continues from Part 1, discussing the Interdisciplinary Conference on Psychedelic Research that he attended. It was originally published on higHExistence.com. If we recognize the plant as an autonomous power which enters in order to put roots and flowers in us, then we distance ourselves by several degrees from the skewed perspective which imagines that spirit (Geist) is the monopoly of human beings and doesn’t exist outside of them. A new world-picture has to follow the planetary leveling; that is the task which the next century will take up. –Ernst Jünger, The Plant as Autonomous Power. Where are the...
Visionary collages by Eugenia Loli
Eugenia Loli’s collages remind me very much of psychedelic exploration. The canny juxtapositions, spacey visuals, and surreal portraits of humanity all speak directly to my subconscious, which loves to throw around this kind of imagery when I’m dreaming or in a mystical state. These psychedelic qualities are no accident. In the artist’s words: I’m intrigued by DMT’s ability to make people more spiritual, and bring them closer to their true nature and potential. Some of my art tries to capture just that, rather than simply describe a trip. I’m not into making representational art, so I capture the...
The Chain of Destruction and the persecution of drug users
It’s almost Independence Day in America, and millions of people will celebrate this weekend with backyard cookouts, fireworks, and time with family and friends. But please take a minute to consider the people in America and abroad whose freedoms have been revoked because they committed the non-violent crime of drug possession. The War on Drugs is a war on people, most especially poor people and minorities. It the modern version of a witch hunt. Eugene Jackecki’s documentary The House I Live In discusses the American War on Drugs with refreshing candor. This seven-minute segment covers the “chain of destruction” which occurs...
Tierra Vida: An Ayahuasca Journey
There have been a flurry of ayahuasca documentaries lately, but I think this one takes the cake. In 2012, Alex Ward lived out of a backpack for 8 months, participated in over forty shamanic ceremonies, and went exploring “far beyond the veil of reality with Ayahuasca.” A freelance artist and filmmaker, Alex was originally looking for artistic inspiration to spur his creative pursuits. But as he puts it, “I got a little more than I bargained for.” Lucky for us, he made a short (26 min) video testimonial about the experience and what he learned from it. Check it...
Three psychedelic Kickstarter campaigns fully funded
Another sign of the times: three different Kickstarter campaigns relating to psychedelics have recently been funded! Alex Grey’s Entheon art temple, web magazine Reality Sandwich 2.0, and the film Neurons to Nirvana have all exceeded their fundraising goals in the last couple weeks. The first is Entheon, the brainchild of visionary artist Alex Grey. The Entheon campaign made over USD $200,000, far exceeding the original goal of USD $125,000 and making it the second most funded art project in Kickstarter history. So what is Entheon? According to the Kickstarter page: For over 30 years, the art of Alex...
A Treatise on Psychedelics Part 1/3: The Stigma
This guest post by Martijn Schirp was originally published on higHExistence.com and is reproduced here with permission. Martijn is the co-founder of higHExistence, a travel junkie, a meditation practitioner, and a yoga lover. He is a student of philosophy, passionate about science, and immensely fascinated by consciousness. The true student of science neglects nothing and despises nothing that may widen and deepen his knowledge of nature, and if he is wise as well as learned he will hesitate before he applies the term “impossible” to any facts which are widely believed and have been repeatedly observed by men...
Beckley Foundation: “Drugs prohibition is starting to crumble”
Amanda Feilding, director of the Beckley Foundation, has written a very encouraging article titled “At last, the edifice of drugs prohibition is starting to crumble.” The Beckley Foundation is a non-profit organization that promotes drug policy reform and works to advance the scientific understanding of consciousness. Amanda Feilding and her colleagues have been on the front lines of drug policy and research since the organization’s inception in 1998. She describes the Foundation’s perspective: The Beckley Foundation has always advocated an evidence-based, health-oriented, harm-reducing, cost-effective approach that respects human rights. The mark of a successful drug policy should not be the...
Ego, Fear, and the War on Drug Users
“Over one’s mind and over one’s body, the individual is sovereign.” —John Stuart Mill From the point of view of psychedelic enthusiasts, the prohibitionist stance is farcically weak. The moral imperative could not be more obvious: stop jailing non-violent consciousness explorers and give us back our tax dollars. But let’s consider how we got here to begin with. I don’t want to talk about Nixon and the Controlled Substance Act, or the DEA, or how America has exported its neurotic drug policy to the rest of the world. I won’t even present data revealing how ineffective and dehumanizing...
Low dose psychedelics increase neurogenesis, help mice unlearn fear
A new study of mice published in Experimental Brain Research shows that low doses (but not high doses) of psychedelics increase the rate of neuron creation in the hippocampus, and help the mice to rapidly unlearn conditioned fear responses. From the abstract (paragraph breaks added for readability): Drugs that modulate serotonin (5-HT) synaptic concentrations impact neurogenesis and hippocampal (HPC)-dependent learning. The primary objective is to determine the extent to which psilocybin (PSOP) modulates neurogenesis and thereby affects acquisition and extinction of HPC-dependent trace fear conditioning. PSOP, the 5-HT2A agonist 25I-NBMeO and the 5-HT2A/Cantagonist ketanserin were administered via an acute intraperitoneal injection...