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What Does Psychedelic Medicine Owe the Underground?
November 6, 2024 @ 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
$10
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Wednesday, November 6th, 2024 from 12:00-1:30pm PDT
With Joanna Kempner, Tehseen Noorani, and Nicolas Langlitz.
This upcoming forum will examine the compelling case of the Clusterbusters, a group of ordinary individuals debilitated by excruciating cluster headaches who developed their own treatment using home-grown psilocybin mushrooms. The forum will explore how such mutual-aid networks address the needs of patients overlooked by for-profit healthcare models and traditional drug development. It will also consider the role psychedelics play in alleviating the emotional and psychological suffering that often accompanies chronic pain. Speakers will discuss critical questions around how these decentralized, patient-led approaches to psychedelic therapy might serve as models for broader healthcare transformation. In addition, the forum will explore the ethics of “naturalistic research” or “cyberbotany” (where academics collect experiential data from online psychedelic communities), as well as the moral considerations of developing and distributing psychedelics within the underground, while resisting commodification in a capitalist system. The discussion will feature Joanna Kempner, author of “Psychedelic Outlaws” and an award-winning sociologist of science, medicine, and inequality; Tehseen Noorani, a critical social scientist with interests in the phenomenology, epistemology, and therapeutic potential of psychedelic and ‘psychotic’ experiences; and Nicolas Langlitz, a medical doctor by training, as well as an anthropologist and historian of science and medicine. Join us for this thought-provoking dialogue on what the aboveground might owe the underground?
