Abortion, Plants, & Whispered Networks of Botanical Knowledge
The famous Supreme Court of the United States decision Roe v. Wade (1973) is a landmark in abortion rights, enshrining legal access to elective...
Redwing Keyssar: Nurse, Midwife to the Dying, Ceremonialist
There is a reason we call it Mother Earth. Nature teaches us. It nurtures. It nourishes. It protects. All that is born, comes from...
A Historian’s Reflection on Music and Psychedelics
I will never forget the moment music transported me out of my own body.
I was eleven years old, performing the fourth movement of Handel’s...
How Music Therapists Helped Build Psychedelic Therapy
By the late 1950s, music’s vital contribution to psychedelic therapy was well-established. A brief mention of music seems almost obligatory in a central strain...
“Please Write Up Your Work!”: Laura Archera Huxley as a Psychedelic...
“If a person doesn’t do something either useful or beautiful, then one doesn’t have any right to take the oxygen of people and the...
Another Aspect of Reality: Maria Nys Huxley’s Influence on Psychedelic History
Aldous Huxley’s 1954 classic The Doors of Perception is one of the most famous texts in the history of psychedelics. In this book, Aldous...
Kin Spruijt: A Psychedelic Nurse in a Dutch Psychiatric Clinic
Since at least the 1840s psychiatrists have administered psychedelics to treat their patients. From the 1950s onwards this happened with an increasing appreciation of...
The Cost of Omission: Dr. Valentina Wasson and Getting Our Stories...
Stop us if you’ve heard this one: ambitious, brave, and pioneering white man travels to Mexico in the 1950s and is invited to a...
Heroines of Mescaline
In 1905, several women (and one man), detained at a psychiatric institution in Breslau, now Poland, were administered extracts of the Peyote cactus intravenously....
‘Sorted’ for Es? Women and Ecstasy in 1990s Britain
Growing up in Britain in the mid ‘90s, the name, and image, of Leah Betts featured prominently in my drugs education. Black billboards across...
