Considerations on the Construction, Timing, and Consequences of the Psychedelic Renaissance

Abstract

Institutionally supported studies on psychedelic use are growing tremendously in the United States, leading US mass media outlets to declare a psychedelic renaissance. Interestingly, national survey data also indicate increases in nonmedical psychedelic use. Largely due to the reinstatement of system-supported psychedelic experiments, the dominant cultural narrative of psychedelic use today contrasts sharply with that of the late 1960s when psychedelic possession and consumption underwent staunch criminalization efforts. This interpretative essay interrogates the revitalization of psychedelic science in the United States by raising questions and hypothesizations about the construction, timing, and consequences of the so-called second wave of psychedelic science. In doing so, I highlight the media's framing of a psychedelic renaissance, the timing of institutionally supported psychedelic science research as it relates to the national opiate crisis, and subsequent increases in nonmedical psychedelic ingestion among the general US public and specific marginalized groups. In clarifying the latter, I argue that institutional cynicism may explain why clinically oriented psychedelic science has and often continues to ignore marginalized populations. In doing so, criminalization efforts against their nonmedical (i.e., self-directed) psychedelic users are reinforced as is the medicalization–criminalization divide.