By Faena Aleph
One woman shared some of the secrets of Mexican indigenous ritual with the world.
Read on www.faena.com
CLEAR ALL
As Western medicine brings psychedelics into mainstream use, a growing movement is innovating new business models grounded in reciprocity and inclusion.
1
The FDA is helping to speed up the process of researching and approving psilocybin, a hallucinogenic substance in magic mushrooms, to treat major depressive disorder (MDD).
Like most people of color in the United States, psychotherapist and researcher Monnica Williams has experienced myriad forms of racism. Early in her career, understanding its effects on her mind and body motivated her to help clients address their own racial trauma in therapy.
The first randomized controlled trial to compare the illicit psychedelic psilocybin with a conventional selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressant found that the former improved symptoms of depression just as well on an established metric—and had fewer side effects.
While we can now begin to glimpse an end to the drug war, it is much harder to envision what the drug peace will look like. How will we fold these powerful substances into our society and our lives so as to minimize their risks and use them most constructively?
Not long ago The New York Times carried a dispatch from Mexico telling about the descent of hippies on Huautla de Jimenez in quest of the “sacred mushrooms.” With the dispatch appeared a photo of a priestess of the rite, Maria Sabina.
María Sabina was well-respected in the village as a healer and shaman. She’d been consuming psilocybin mushrooms regularly since she was seven years old, and had performed the velada mushroom ceremony for over 30 years before Wasson arrived.
No one disputes that decades ago local Indians were unfairly deprived of hundreds of thousands of acres that were guaranteed to them in perpetuity by solemn treaty; yet no one can agree about what should be done to correct that injustice today.
4
The following is a version of an interview I held over several days in September 2006 with my mother, Doña Julia Julieta Casimiro, one of the most distinguished representatives of the traditions of the thousand-year-old Mazatec culture, which is centered in the northern mountains of the state of...
Now, as a handful of patients and more recently doctors and therapists have been granted exemptions to use psilocybin, the nation’s federal health agency is considering making changes to existing policies that could open the door to much more than magic mushrooms.