Between 1952 and 1964, the UK's Powick Psychiatric Hospital served as a center of LSD-assisted therapy. Ronald Sandison stood at the center of this activity, publishing papers in psychiatric journals and presenting at conferences, which temporarily brought the UK to the center of therapeutic LSD use. Wendy Kline explains why things changed in the mid-1960s.

Timothy Vilgiate looks at how the story of Voacanga africana is an example of how Western psychedelia co-opts Indigenous culture in order to create fictional "primitive others" that they can utilize for their own agendas. The idea of Voacanga africana as a ceremonial psychedelic ultimately serves less to reflect of African realities, and more to appeal to Western ideas of psychedelics as primordial elements of human mystical experience and spiritual life.

Magaly Tornay looks at early practices of meaning-making around LSD in the clinic, a crucial site for negotiating the normal & pathological. Tornay argues that the case of Switzerland is particularly notable in the history of LSD because the drug first found its way into psychiatry through personal connections.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous bad trip took place in February 1935, but is it accurate to call it a bad trip when this language didn't exist yet? Gautier Dassonneville shows that Sartre's story fits into a distinct moment in French psycho-philosophy.

Our new Chacruna series will highlight the global history of psychedelics. It will highlight some of the dynamic ways that historic traditions, cultures, and research spaces have contributed to the field of psychedelics, as well as raise questions about whose knowledge and expertise has been centered through time.

Glauber Loures de Assis addresses the issue of conspirituality within the psychedelic renaissance and shows how these Western ideas have had an impact on the Global South. He offers ways to move forward that address these issues. He emphasizes the need to counter conspirituality's individualism in order to build a supportive and reciprocal psychedelic community going forward.

Starting with Mexico's first National Pharmacopeia in 1846, Nidia Olvera-Hernández traces the long history of peyote in Mexico. She shows how scientific studies throughout the twentieth-century eventually led to prohibition in 1971.

At a Chacruna retreat in Brazil, Marcelo Leite and other team members took part in a feitio ayahuasca ritual at a Santo Daime church. Leite describes the steps of the ceremony and his experience.

What happens when traditional knowledge is incorporated into the classroom? At the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil, two Guarani shamans were given the opportunity to be lecturers as part of the Transversal Training Program in Traditional Knowledge.

Brazilian religions with Indigenous and African roots such as Catimbó and Jurema Sagrada, centered around the sacred plant jurema-preta (Mimosa tenuiflora), have survived in the Northeastern region, in spite of repression by Catholic institutions and the police. In recent decades, they also became a point of interest for neoshamans in urban contexts.