both pollen and fermented starch have been utilized in Sri Lanka, India, Japan, Central America, Australia, and central Africa as male aphrodisiacs and in intoxicating beverages at ceremonial events.In Limpopo, South Africa, our fieldwork revealed that widespread damage to Encephalartos populations is caused by extraction for traditional ritual purposes as well as for recreational drug use.In...
The classical psychedelic drugs, including psilocybin, lysergic acid diethylamide and mescaline, were used extensively in psychiatry before they were placed in Schedule I of the UN Convention on Drugs in 1967. Experimentation and clinical trials undertaken prior to legal sanction suggest that they are not helpful for those with established psychotic disorders and should be avoided in those...
BACKGROUND: Novel psychoactive substances (NPS) can be classified based on their safety for use into low-risk and high-risk. High-risk NPS can be either lethal or poisonous. Fatalities can be either pharmacological or behavioural-induced, including suicide and homicide.MATERIALS & METHODS: Observational analysis, including retrospective, were implemented across; Google Trends, PubMed/MedLine...
PurposeIn contemporary phenomenology, Dieter Lohmar has suggested that the new task of phenomenological research is to analyze the “alternative representational systems” of fantasy. In line with this program, we propose that psychedelic experience could also be suitable subject to this project subsumed under the wider category of fantasy activity. The aim of this paper is to show that...
People have been familiar with substances we now call “mind-altering,” “hallucinogenic,” or “psychedelic” “drugs” since ancient times. These drugs are the natural products of a variety of plants and belong, from a chemical viewpoint, in the class of organic compounds called “alkaloids.” From a medical viewpoint, the most familiar and most important alkaloids are apomorphine, atropine, cocaine,...
Herbs That Madden, Herbs That Cure: A History of Hallucinogenic Plant Use in Colonial Mexico," considers the development of the hybrid culture of hallucinogen consumption that developed in New Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Indigenous, European, African, and Asian peoples participated in the unsanctioned divinatory and medicinal use of psychoactive plants such as peyote,...
Human beings have used chemicals to alter their experience of life since the beginning of time: peyote, magic mushrooms, Scotch, marijuana, cocaine, nicotine, caffeine, heroin, red wine. The list of chemicals used by human beings for the purpose of feeling different is very long. It is only metaphoric—and a profoundly dangerous and ill-chosen metaphor—to call these “medications that treat the...
ABSTRACT While the growth of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and its underlying construct, psychological flexibility, has been supported by numerous studies, it has received little attention from sociocultural disciplines. With the aim of considering the transdiagnostic Psychological Flexibility Model from a cultural perspective and from an interdisciplinary approach combining both Psychology...
The studies on Witkacy’s oeuvre Narcotics (Narkotyki, 1932) exist without any specific status, as if reduced to a research element ancillary to other “more serious” creative areas of its author. The above is especially astonishing since they belong to a specific literary genre which was started with De Quincy’s Confessions of an Opium Eater (1821) and became really successful in the 19th and...
Psychoactive plants contain chemicals that presumably evolved as allelochemicals but target certain neuronal receptors when consumed by humans, altering perception, emotion and cognition. These plants have been used since ancient times as medicines and in the context of religious rituals for their various psychoactive effects (e.g., as hallucinogens, stimulants, sedatives). The ubiquity of...