Ayahuasca News

BY HENRIK DAHL 1966, Tim Scully lived with and built sound equipment for the Grateful Dead. He is also known as the sidekick of Owsley "Bear" Stanley, perhaps the most well-known manufacturer of LSD in the 1960s. The two set up a lab in Point Richmond, California, and started making acid together. They parted company…

BY HENRIK DAHL since the Sixties, journalists and historians have tried to give an accurate description of the Merry Pranksters. Some have got it right, but many have failed – focusing on simplified myths of Dionysian decadence. In this article, I'm trying to straighten out some of the misunderstandings about the group. Who better to…

BY HENRIK DAHL Whenever Sweden is discussed in books, the media or in conversation, very rarely is anything said of its psychedelic culture. Yet if one takes a deeper look one will actually find a mycelium of scientists, artists, writers, hippies and freethinkers who were at some point shaped by psychedelics. What follows here is…

BY HENRIK DAHL The following long-form interview is the first extended Q&A with Harvard and UCLA drug policy researcher turned writer William Leonard Pickard dedicated to the topic of altered states of consciousness. Published on the anniversary of Swiss scientist Albert Hofmann’s discovery of the psychedelic properties of LSD on 16 April 1943, this rare…

BY WILLIAM LEONARD PICKARD Presented on the 75th anniversary of the discovery of LSD's psychedelic properties, this article contains an excerpt from The Rose of Paracelsus: On Secrets & Sacraments by former Harvard and UCLA researcher William Leonard Pickard. The excerpt, which was selected by the imprisoned author himself, is taken from the chapter "Edelweiss." Also…

Benjamin De Loenen, founder of ICEERS, speaks to us about the importance of having a balanced and considered discussion about plant medicines like ayahuasca and ibogaine.

I’m not half of two things or made up of fractions. I am made up of whole things, things that are things unto themselves.

‍‌Researchers discover trees have a “heartbeat,” it’s just so slow we’ve never noticed before Until now, scientists thought water moved through trees by osmosis, in a somewhat continuous manner. Now they’ve discovered the trunks and branches of trees are actually contracting and expanding to “pump” water up from the roots …

I have a huge belief in the importance of bees, not just for their honey, which is a healing and delicious food,

Out of the 6,000 kilograms of cannabis that had been documented and stored there, only 5,460 kilos were found.

It doesn't really matter if you're brand-new to the psychedelic community or a highly-experienced psychonaut with hundreds of trips under your belt—it can be challenging to find out about all the various websites out there dedicated to psychedelics and drug culture. That's why I decided to put tog

BY WILLIAM "SKIP" COSTLEY Editor's Note The following story is an account of the early days of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, an organisation founded by a group of idealists who were using LSD as a religious sacrament. But they were soon dealing acid and marijuana in large quantities, and in a 1972 article Rolling…

BY HENRIK DAHL was January 2003 and I was making research on The Merry Pranksters and in particular the so called Acid Tests they were staging. I decided to get in touch with Owsley Stanley aka Bear, a legend in the counterculture movement of the 1960s. Owsley built sound equipment for the Grateful Dead. At…

BY HENRIK DAHL January 2003, I was making research on The Merry Pranksters and especially their Acid Tests, and decided to get in touch with legendary counterculture icon Owsley "Bear" Stanley, thinking he would know a lot about the group's activities. After all, it was at the Acid Tests that he first met the Grateful…

BY ROGER KEEN In their activities and writings in the late 1940s and ’50s the Beat writers – principally Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg – prefigured and influenced the Psychedelic Movement, which came into flowering a generation later. When those epoch-making cultural changes got underway in the ’60s, the Beats were naturally looked…

BY HENRIK DAHL the LSD counterculture era of the 1960s, psychedelics became intertwined with left-wing politics. Anti-war protests, communal living, and a greater awareness of race, gender and class equality were a few of the ideological characteristics of the counterculture. The hippie lifestyle of the 1960s is also associated with a strong emphasis on personal…

BY HENRIK DAHL Symbols – symbols everywhere. All along my journey they flashed forth the apocalypse of utterly unimagined truths. – Fitz Hugh Ludlow art typically contains a number of recurring motifs. Examples include circles, spirals, eyes, concentric shapes, grids, landscapes, nudity, long hair, skeletons and mushrooms. Other common motifs are various kinds of non-human…

Charlotte Caldwell says she and her epileptic son Billy are effectively in exile due to ‘horrendous’ drugs policy

Demise of nine out of 13 of the ancient landmarks linked to climate change by researchers

Trees and other greenery make up 80% of all biomass

Preliminary research suggests that psilocybin-based treatment can improve emotional processing in depressed patients. The new findings are reported in th