Abstract The term “corporadelic” signifies “manifesting corporate structures, ethos, or logic within the context of the psychedelic landscape.” It points to a relatively novel phenomena in the history of psychedelics: the appropriation of these psychoactive agents by for-profit corporations and the integration of psychedelic use into corporate setting. Set and setting is a fundamental concept...
Abstract Indigenous people have been stewards of sacred plant medicines for millennia. Many of these sacred medicines—such as tobacco, cedar, sage, sweetgrass, and more recently the ayahuasca admixture and psilocybin-containing fungi—have been commercialized via their entry into the global capitalist economy. In this article, we offer readers an introduction to Indigenous gift logic as an...
Abstract Much has been written in the academic and popular press on the positive consequences of psychedelic-induced mental states. Following the disappearance of psychedelic research from the public eye between the 1970s and early 2000s, a second wave of psychedelic research is gaining increasing interest from private sector actors looking to explore commercial opportunities. The...
Abstract The resurgence of mainstream psychedelic research has spurred a capitalist interest in patenting to exclude competitors from producing, using, or selling psychedelic technology. Some exploit the patenting process to monopolize well-established psychedelic knowledge with overly broad claims. If patent examiners find evidence, known as “prior art,” showing that what is claimed is known,...
The medicalization and commercialization of psychedelics stand to profit by drawing distinction and distance between their project and the contentious history of underground psychedelic use and culture. This serves at least two functions. First, by jettisoning countercultural baggage, psychedelic advocates signal a nonthreatening stance toward the power structures that enact and maintain the...
Abstract In 1967, a synthetic psychedelic drug, nicknamed STP, escaped from the archives of Dow Chemical and flooded the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. The resulting public health crisis can be seen as a case study in how new unsanctioned psychoactive substances become legible to society through the efforts of different actors. STP was interpreted by young hip doctors,...
Abstract This article analyzes how and why Timothy Leary established a psychedelic research center in Zihuatanejo, Mexico in the summers of 1962 and 1963. We analyze the reaction Mexican authorities and academics had to this event, the part the press played in public portrayal, the rise of psychedelic drug tourism, and the effect this center had on the local community and wider counterculture....
In 1986, American scientist and entrepreneur Loren Miller received Plant Patent No. 5, 751 on a “novel” strain of the ayahuasca plant, which he named “Da Vine.” Indigenous tribes and healers had been using ayahuasca for hundreds of years before it was brought into Western culture. Miller’s accepted claim to novelty, however, was founded on this particular strain’s color and medicinal...
Patrick Wayne Barber, Psychedelic Revolutionaries: LSD and the Birth of Hallucinogenic Research. Regina: University of Regina Press, 2018; 384 pp; ISBN: 9780889774209; paper; $34.95. It seems a little odd to write this, but the history of psychedelic science in Saskatchewan is by now well-worn
Cynthia Carson Bisbee, Paul Bisbee, Erika Dyck, Patrick Farrell, James Sexton, and James W. Spark, eds., Psychedelic Prophets: The Letters of Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018; 728 pp; 10 b&w images; ISBN: 9780773555068; cloth;