Another speaker, Neşe Devent, a senior writing teacher at Johns Hopkins University, told an accident in which a therapist pointed out a patient “while their anguish intensified to the point of shouting, mention:” Go away. Your hands allose. NXIVM, the notorious pyramidal scheme for sex trafficking.
When the hearing concluded, after about eight exhausting hours of testimonies, Lubecky went up to the balcony of his apartment in Washington, DC, inhaled, and shouted, “Fuck!” He was sure that the accounts of Buisson and Devent would condemn the possibility of approval of the treatment. Here, he believed, if it were a medical innovation that could save thousands of lives, and had been torpedoed not by his usual opponents, such as the police or opponents of the legalization of the drug, but by factions in the war of the same psychedelic community. Or, as he described them, “a pile of fucking hippies who did it.”
Photography: Tonje Thhesen
Up to quite recent, The “psychedelic space” was a small and somewhat parish collection of academics, research chemists and recreational launchers, all freely connected to the underground drugs or to the vestigial counterculture of the 60s. So, in 2018, the author Michael Pollan published How to change your mind His best -selling report of the “psychedelic Renaissance” and has contributed to spreading drugs such as LSD, MDMA, Psilocibinal and Mestermine.
The meetings of the community passed the basements of the church and the dance halls of Holiday Inn and moved to the centers of convention in glass and steel that swarm with pharmaceutical sellers and venture capitalists. Many in the anticopitalist psychedelic scene, Neşe Devenot told me that it was like Sauron’s evil eye of Sauron The Lord of the Rings He had shot in their direction.
Devent, who uses them pronouns, took the LSD for the first time as a serial number at the Bard. It was “the deepest experience of my life,” they said. Until then, they had been finished shy and suffered from intrusive thoughts on death. But under the influence of the LSD, Devenot says: “The purpose and fear that I associated with death have disappeared”. They fell with the community of researchers and enthusiasts in which Doblin was considered a pioneer. “Before this field became financed,” Devenot said to me, “it was a domain for many strange and misfit … people looking for community and meaning and connection”.
In 2018, Devenot joined a defense group called Psychposia, which was founded to support the reform of drug policy. The group started working diligently to conduct political research and railway against the company capture of Psychedelia. A Psymosia co -founder named Brian Normand told me he finds the incursion of the Silicon Valley and Big Pharma in Psychedelia “Incredibly in bad taste”. With open letters, articles, academic documents, podcasts and voluminous posts on social media, Psychposia draws attention to the abusive practitioners of psychedelic therapy and right -wing uses and abuses of compounds that express mental, among other topics. At the beginning, Psychposia and maps worked together. But a few years after the maps turned from the arm for profit, the alliance chipped.