Latest Research

J. Christian Greer, CSWR, Psychedelic Intersections: 2024 Conference Anthology

J. Christian Greer articulates a history of psychedelic communities without relying upon the poorly understood label “counterculture.” The counterculture falsely categorizes psychedelic communities as monolithic and united in their opposition to mainstream society. To counter this, Greer argues that the term “psychedelicism” better captures the complexity and cultural centrality of psychedelic-using communities.

Jeffrey Breau, CSWR, Psychedelic Intersections: 2024 Conference Anthology

Jeffrey Breau explores the role that intention-setting rituals play in psychedelic settings, drawing from ethnographic research at the annual Burning Man gathering in Black Rock City, Nevada. He argues that intention-setting is best understood as a “rite of sacralization,” a practice meant to symbolically mark a psychedelic trip as special and sacred.

Michelle Lhooq, CSWR, Psychedelic Intersections: 2024 Conference Anthology

Michelle Lhooq draws from her experience as a rave organizer and journalist to deploy the concept of “cringe” as an analytical tool to identify outdated tropes in the dance music scene. In an essay that is equally practical and philosophical, Lhooq argues that cringe is a corrective to the co-optation of ecstasy and transcendence by capitalist interests and shares her attempts to reinvigorate the psychedelic rave space in light of this.

Tarryl Janik, CSWR, Psychedelic Intersections: 2024 Conference Anthology

Tarryl Janik draws on his ethnography of Soul Quest, a Florida-based entheogenic church, to document how the organization attempted to navigate myriad legal and regulatory requirements. In complying with the government’s demands, Janik argues that Soul Quest undermined its religious sincerity case, ultimately leading to the church’s dissolution.

Allison Hoots, CSWR, Psychedelic Intersections: 2024 Conference Anthology

As an attorney for psychedelic organizations, Allison Hoots provides a detailed review of the case law that informs the structure and existence of modern psychedelic churches in the U.S. She concludes by arguing that the law fails to account for modern religious practice and aligns too closely with Protestant conceptions of true religiosity. As psychedelics remain federally illegal, religious communities in the US that incorporate such drugs into their practice must try to operate outside the awareness of the government or maneuver through the DEA’s religious exemption process.

Brad Stoddard, CSWR, Psychedelic Intersections: 2024 Conference Anthology

Brad Stoddard shows how the underground is, in fact, created and maintained by government policy. As a result, psychedelic churches operating illegally must, at the same time, conform their beliefs and practices to the will of the state.

Julián Sánchez González, CSWR, Psychedelic Intersections: 2024 Conference Anthology

Julián Sánchez González examines the proximity of cultural production to cultural appropriation at the 1975 “First World Congress of Sorcery” (Primero Congreso Mundial de Brujería) in Bogotá, Colombia. Sánchez González analyzes the intermixing of politics, race, and cosmologies that took place there in terms of “spiritual promiscuity,” highlighting such cultural convergences as simultaneously deviant, generative, and sacred.

Candace Oglesby and Yvan Beaussant, CSWR, Psychedelic Intersections: 2024 Conference Anthology

Candace Oglesby and Yvan Beaussant presents a qualitative study of the experiences of BIPOC therapists who are familiar with or have practiced psychedelic-assisted therapy. They enumerate the barriers BIPOC therapists face to their involvement in psychedelic-assisted therapy, and they gesture to the central role that social justice must play in therapy for BIPOC therapists, psychedelic or otherwise.

Moana Meadow, CSWR, Psychedelic Intersections: 2024 Conference Anthology

Moana Meadow’s essay demonstrates how the Berkeley Psychedelic Facilitation Certificate Program trains psychedelic facilitators through a relational and culturally sensitive approach.

Victoria Litman, CSWR, Psychedelic Intersections: 2024 Conference Anthology

Victoria Litman, the Petrie-Flom Center Fellow in Psychedelic Law and Spirituality, argues that the current regulatory model’s exclusion of chaplains as psychedelic facilitators undermines the efficacy of psychedelic care. Her essay details the role that chaplains can and should play in psychedelic treatments and makes a forceful case for updating the policy surrounding both clinical and non-clinical psychedelic use to allow for trained chaplains to serve as facilitators.

Franklin King, CSWR, Psychedelic Intersections: 2024 Conference Anthology

Franklin King draws from his experience as a Mass General Hospital psychiatrist to explore the hidden narratives often underlying conversations about psychedelics. King argues that revealing these narratives is necessary to understand disagreements about psychedelic treatment and the ways that psychedelics become metonyms for larger philosophical and ideological agendas. This, in turn, will allow psychedelic researchers and advocates to free themselves from the flawed assumption that psychedelics alone will change the world.

Sharday Mosurinjohn, CSWR, Psychedelic Intersections: 2024 Conference Anthology

Sharday Mosurinjohn interrogates and critiques a biomedical approach to “bad trips.” From this critique, Mosurinjohn proposes a theodicy grounded in animist philosophy as an alternative approach to difficult psychedelic experiences and, specifically, difficult entity encounters.

Alex Gearin, CSWR, Psychedelic Intersections: 2024 Conference Anthology

Alex Gearin provides an ethnographic account of “atmospherics,” the affective and perceptual elements of a setting, in Indigenous-led ayahuasca ceremonies in Peru and “neoshamanic” ceremonies in Australia. Gearin argues that “atmospherics” accounts for a far more active role of the environment in which one takes a psychedelic than what has become known simply as “setting,” as in “set and setting.”

Finnian Moore-Gerety, CSWR, Psychedelic Intersections: 2024 Conference Anthology

Finnian Moore Gerety traces the enduring interest in the authentic botanical identity of soma in the Vedic texts of the Hindu tradition. Moore Gerety argues that speculation on soma’s identity tracks with the drug fashions of the era in which thinkers speculated about soma’s botanical identity. He proposes a shift in focus away from certainty about soma’s botanical identity and towards the ritual and scripture pertaining to soma.

Anna Sierka, CSWR, Psychedelic Intersections: 2024 Conference Anthology

Anna Sierka analyzes medieval Kabbalistic texts that illuminate the role of a potentially psychedelic plant—the “marking nut”— in Jewish mysticism. Using the marking nut as a primary example, Sierka argues that these texts can be divided into an exoteric tradition and an esoteric tradition. Texts in the exoteric tradition share the identity of the marking nut and related sacred plants in order to highlight their capacities for healing. Conversely, texts in the esoteric tradition hide the identity and role of these plant assistants to direct the reader away from any specific plant and toward the sacred knowledge obtained vis-à-vis these plants.

Geoffrey Smith, CSWR, Psychedelic Intersections: 2024 Conference Anthology

Geoffrey Smith tracks the research and correspondence of the Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, John Marco Allegro, that led to his provocative conclusion that the New Testament gospel accounts are encoded texts disguising the truth that Jesus Christ and his apostles were not historical persons, but in fact psychoactive mushrooms. Smith concludes that Allegro’s mushroom hypothesis was informed by many trends in twentieth-century mycological study, alongside a desire to discredit Christianity from its inception.

Luis Eduardo Luna and Jeffrey Breau, CSWR, Psychedelic Intersections: 2024 Conference Anthology

Drawing from Luis Eduardo Luna’s keynote address at the 2024 “Psychedelic Intersections” conference, this interview essay explores Luna’s research on ayahuasca since the 1970s, his study of Indigenous cosmology and healing in South America, and his own spiritual development alongside these sacred plants.