The Magic of Mushrooms

With its emphasis on set and setting—what Grob calls “the critical extra-pharmacological variables”—psychedelic therapy was also a little too close to shamanism for comfort. For so-called shrinks not entirely secure in their identity as scientists (the slang is short for “headshrinkers,” conjuring images of witch doctors in loincloths), this was pe

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“The Johns Hopkins experiment shows—proves—that under controlled, experimental conditions, psilocybin can occasion genuine mystical experiences. It uses science, which modernity trusts, to undermine modernity’s secularism. In doing so, it offers hope of nothing less than a re-sacralization of the natural and social world, a spiritual revival that i

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Psychedelic therapies seem to be changing this

What’s happening: In the 1970s, psychedelics were criminalized, effectively ending research into therapeutic uses. More recently, regulators have eased restrictions on psychedelic research, fast-tracking clinical studies and legitimizing the space.

solve problems. “We said, ‘You may come to this study, and we’ll give you the most creative day of your life. But you have to have a problem which obsesses you that you have been working on for a couple of months and that you’ve failed [to solve].’ . . . We wanted them to have . . . an emotional ‘money in the game.’ [We gave] them psychedelics and

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Proper guidance, in conjunction with the correct set and setting, is needed for the success of these therapies