stories
The Walls Come Tumbling Down My First MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy Session
This story by Andy Gold first appeared in the MAPS Bulletin, Winter 2016 edition. I went for my first MDMA-assisted psychotherapy session on November 30, 2015, the Monday after Thanksgiving. Was it really a coincidence that the colonoscopy which found a malignant tumor in my colon some years earlier had also taken place on the Monday after Thanksgiving? I think not. Full circle, indeed. I arrived at the site in Marin County, Calif., where the session was to take place, at 9:30 in the morning. One of the study requirements is that you do the sessions while fasting. Someone also...
Psilocybin Healing How Mushrooms Cured an Artist's Depression and Anxiety
While traveling in Italy and Greece in 2006 I developed a sinus infection that got so bad that once back in the US it ruptured the lining of my sinuses and allowed a strep infection to travel unchecked into my brain and spinal column. Bacterial meningitis ravaged my brain as a 107° fever raged out of control. I spent a week in the hospital unconscious and on life support before my folks whisked me off to their farm for lots of rest and lots of organic food from their gardens. Years of challenging recovery led to more and...
Underwater Tripping 5 Hours at the Bottom of a Minnesotan Lake
Today’s guest post is by Alex Beyman, an author, diving enthusiast, and psychonaut. His story of tripping at the bottom of a Minnesota Lake was originally posted to Reddit’s /r/drugs forum. Note: This is not a how-to guide. I do not condone irresponsible diving. I urge readers not to try diving without scuba certification and an understanding of the risks diving entails, especially where DIY gear is concerned. If you’re not careful it’s easy to kill yourself, so don’t try anything similar until you’re certified to dive conventionally. A few years ago I developed an obsessive interest in...
A 1914 Trip Report of Psilocybin Mushrooms from Science Magazine
In the treasure troves of Erowid I found a very old experience report for psilocybin mushrooms — a ‘trip report’ from long before that term was coined. It predates mycologist R. Gordon Wasson’s groundbreaking article, Seeking the Magic Mushroom — which exposed psilocybin mushrooms to a much wider audience in 1957 — by over forty years. It is as funny as it is historically interesting, so I am taking the liberty of re-posting it. Erowid Note: The following report is from the September 18, 1914 issue of Science magazine, generously contributed to Erowid by archivist Michael Horowitz, as a silvered, heavily-aged copy...
All the Butterflies A Monumental Shrooms Trip from 'Thank Earth You'
Thank Earth You is a memoir by Armand Daigle about his transformation from cubicle slave to a free-spirited creative force. In last week’s chapter, he embarked on a camping trip with three good friends — his wolf pack — and downed a heady brew of psilocybin mushrooms. This week we share the next chapter, All the Butterflies, in which the mushrooms take effect! Armand calls it “the most important campfire in my twenty-eight years of existence.” If you like what you read, you can buy Thank Earth You here. On our late afternoon descent, a phalanx of purples, dreams, triangles, oranges, and jellyfish races above...
Power-up Pelt A Story of Campfire Tripping from 'Thank Earth You'
Thank Earth You is a terrific memoir by Armand Daigle about his transformation from cubicle slave to a free-spirited creative force. Central to the story are two profound psychedelic experiences, one with mushrooms on a camping trip, and the other a traditional ayahuasca ceremony. I interviewed Armand last week, and today we’re sharing a chapter of his memoir for free. In this chapter, Power-up Pelt, you get to know Armand’s wolf pack while witnessing the early stages of the mushroom trip that stretched his consciousness and changed his life. You can buy Thank Earth You here. The four of us are holding hands in a circle—one hand...
Interview: Armand Daigle, Author of Psychedelic Memoir ‘Thank Earth You’
Fed up with his 9-to-5 engineering job, Armand Daigle quit, joined a fledgling media production company, and wrote a memoir called Thank Earth You about his personal transformation. His story contains two incredible psychedelic experiences, one with mushrooms and one with ayahuasca, which propelled him to continue in his new direction. Armand has a way of revealing both the deeply personal and deeply psychedelic in a compelling, readable, and very funny way. Anyone who has questioned the rat race and the trappings of modern culture will relate. I’ll be publishing two full chapters from Thank Earth You in the coming weeks. In the meantime, here’s...
How a Banker Introduced ‘Magic Mushrooms’ to the West
In 1955, banker and amateur mycologist R. Gordon Wasson traveled to Mexico with a friend, where they became “the first white men in recorded history to eat the divine mushrooms.” Seeking the Magic Mushroom, published two years later in Life magazine, introduced psilocybin mushrooms to the West. Wasson wrote about his personal experience eating the mushrooms, and their ceremonial use by the Mazatec people as a healing agent. The essay came at a perfect time, exposing a whole generation of young people to a natural, non-toxic, and easily grown psychedelic agent that had long been overlooked in the West. Wasson’s...
Just a Wee Bit More About DMT, by Nick Sand
Nick Sand is one of the most prolific and well-known underground chemists in history. Along with Tim Scully, Nick Sand was responsible for producing over 3 million hits of Orange Sunshine, a brand of LSD that was renowned for its purity in the Sixties. Sand has a particular fondness for DMT. In fact, it was a DMT vision quest in the 60s that convinced Sand to dedicate his life to producing and distributing entheogens. He was the first underground chemist to synthesize DMT rather than extracting it from natural sources, and the first person to discover that the DMT...
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...
Life Versus Entropy Tripping on Fractals, God, and the Mystery of Existence
Setting: Early morning at a lakeside cabin in the woods of Vermont. Chemical lens: 25I-NBOMe, a research chemical with effects resembling LSD. (25I-NBOMe is a very new chemical, its safety profile is largely unknown, and lethal overdoses have been reported. Consuming 25I-NBOMe or other research chemicals is risky and I do not recommend it.) I walk outside as dawn arrives. Fog rolls across the lake and wraps the trees in a gauzy shroud. The silence is punctuated only by the chatter of birds and my own footsteps. My breathing takes its cue from the lake, gentle and unhurried. Where...
My Story, “Fireworks,” Featured in Psypress UK 2014
My previously unpublished tale, Fireworks, is featured in the latest edition of psychedelic magazine Psypress UK. You can get a copy for just £5 plus shipping (in the US, it comes out to $17 total, but it’s well worth it). Other featured writers include Dale Bewan, author of Dropping Acid, Ross Heaven, author of several books on shamanism, and Neil M. Goldsmith, author of Psychedelic Healing. Plus ten other submissions with titles like Myco-metaphysics, The Dogmatist’s Debacle, and Reigniting Awe. And check out the cover art by Jeremy Beswick on the right. Intrigued? So am I — I can’t wait for my copy to arrive in the mail! My...