Is That a Real Reality, or Did You Make It Up Yourself?

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"Any musical innovation is full of danger to the whole
State, and ought to be prohibited. So Damon tells me, and I can quite believe
him; he says that when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State
always change with them."
— Plato, Republic IV.


"I saw my dreams come true; I saw America
changed by music."
— Harry Smith. [1]

 

When we were young first-year students in a music college in
nowhere zen New Jersey, we were
made to take certain classes designed to tune up our basic skills. One such
class, "Rhythmics," took fifteen weeks to ensure that we could perform on sight
a set of exercises from a snare drum rudiments book. (A teacher's lot is not a
happy one.) As luck would have it, our rhythmics teacher was Joel Thome, a
composer and conductor of great vision and awe-inspiring dedication. Joel took
rhythm, and music in all its aspects, very seriously. He said that if we
weren't practicing our instruments for at least five hours a day, we were
wasting our time. He lectured spontaneously on the ontology of the now. He
covered the blackboards with lists of books that we were to read, and
recordings and scores that we were to study. He told me that a Baroque lute
duet that I was then practicing was of world-historical importance. But the
thing he said that has stuck with me the most was that music was going to save
the world.

The idea that music can transform reality predates by many
millennia the category "music" as we know it. Before art was understood as a
phenomenon in itself apart from its ritual application (a relatively recent and
culturally specific development), what we now call music was indistinguishable
from magic. There is a wonderful, intoxicating romance that runs from
Pythagorean harmonics through Platonic musical ethos to Boethius's codification
of Greek tunings, then into the Renaissance cosmologies that prefigured modern
astrophysics, on the idea that a change of music is a change of consciousness,
culture, and even physical reality. And it's not just an old fantasy, a lot of
serious thought and investigation has gone into it. For present purposes, I'd
like to sketch a few lines that touch upon music and cultural change.

I began to understand the power of music to work change
when, at the age of seven, I stood onstage at the Labour Club talent show in my
Lancashire home town, opened my mouth and sang a song,
and the feeling in the room changed. The same thing happened a decade later in
my American high school where in the space of three minutes I went from an
immigrant misfit to something else entirely, purely on the power of song and
the voice that I had inherited from my father, who'd had a reputation in the
Manchester pubs as a good turn. Music,
it seems, worked a shift in the various social mileux in which I found myself,
and this sense of music as a kind of subtle magic expanded to encompass larger
and larger contexts as time went on. Many wonderful music teachers contributed
to this, and then a particular watershed moment came when another magician from
a different field of music came to the college and I was asked to accompany him
in performance.

Subsequently, over the course of two decades, I performed
internationally with Allen Ginsberg in every imaginable type of venue, and
through him I met and worked with other socially-conscious artists — those
whom Amiri Baraka calls "culture workers" —
whose work had played a part in the twentieth-century cultural shift
that we now link back to "the sixties," but whose roots really go back through
centuries of social change in which the arts played a role.

All of the artists with whom I worked, from the
internationally famous to the virtually unknown, had in some way embraced the
ancient idea that music held the power of transformation. Their politics, however were not those of
Plato. He favored oligarchy over democracy, and as can be seen from the above
epigraph, advocated that the government ban new forms of music (by which he
meant all of the arts) as a threat to the state. As my band mate in the Fugs
Tuli Kupferberg paraphrased it, "when the mode of the music changes, the walls
of the city shake." If our culture, as seems to be the case, has in some ways
preserved Plato's sense of musical affect, the mid-twentieth-century push
against the oligarchical tendencies in the state could be expected to champion new
modes of music toward what Ginsberg called "democratization in the arts." [2]

Do new forms of artistic activity point to deep
transformations in society? A lot of serious thought has gone into exploring
this question, and much of it occurred in the mid-twentieth century, when
social scientists began to look closely at the relationship between particular
forms of performance practice and the larger social forms in which they take
place.

When computers first became widely available for social
science research, anthropologists began compiling databases through which
various culturally-specific customs and practices could be sorted and compared.
It became possible to see broad patterns of relationship, on a global sale,
between economic activities, religious practices, social norms, and forms of
art.

In the 1960s, musicologist Alan Lomax developed a research
program for applying these methods to song (Cantometrics) and dance
(Choreometrics). He concluded, perhaps not surprisingly, that the favored song
and dance forms of a particular group tend to reflect the major economic
activities of the group. For example, in societies where the majority of the
food supply is provided by the solo male hunter, the favored dance and music
forms tend to feature the solo male, and where much of the food is provided by
women working in groups to gather or garden, show biz tends to
favor female choral song and group dance that looks like horticultural labor
(bending, dipping, reaching, etc.).

This may seem rather obvious, but Lomax extended his
conclusions to a level of detail relating, for example, the sound quality of
the singing voice to customs regarding sex. He believed that a tight-throated
vocal sound is heard in societies where sex is strictly regulated and largely unavailable
outside of marriage, and that an open-throated sound is heard where sex is more
readily available. (On this view, the sound of Gregorian chant would seem to support centuries of gossip about the
secret life of Christian monastics.) Lomax's work has been criticized as
biased, too selective of facts, and too sweeping, but relating art form to
social form is not easily dismissed. It has been the case, for example, that U.S.
country folk accustomed to manual farm labor in coordinated teams of men and
women under the direction of a single male supervisor tended to go in for
square dance.

Other theorists extended this relating of musical practice
to socio-economic practice beyond Lomax's interest in what he called
"traditional cultures" to include modern societies. Ortiz Walton, for example,
pointed out that during the era when the U.S. economy was based on large-scale
manufacturing, the most prestigious form of musical ensemble consisted of a
large group of musicians organized into departments (sections), each one with a
supervisor (first chair), all led by a single manager-in-chief (conductor), and
realizing a plan (score) provided by a designer (composer). He also pointed out
that the workers in this musical ensemble punched a time clock and belonged to
a union.

More recently, Jazz historian Ted Gioia has connected the
emergence of "free jazz" in the 1960s to the "freedom riders," "freedom
schools," and larger freedom movement brought on by the civil rights activism
of the same period — a breaking of old boundaries and the empowering of a
multitude of voices exemplified on the bandstand by ensembles unconstrained by
a composer, a song form, an arrangement or prescribed tonal framework, and the
whole taking place without regard to the large recording corporations that have
just caught on to the last wave of cool and want you to play be those rules.

So it seems that art forms tell us about how our society is
organized, and new emergences in the arts can speak to us about changes in
larger social structures, but they can
also instruct us about the changing nature of our sense of self. Literary
theorist Paul Oppenheimer has written that the invention of the sonnet in the
13th century – a form of poem tending to topics of personal reflection and
meant to be read silently to oneself when verse had been spoken or sung aloud
since ancient times – heralded the "birth of the modern mind." But which came
first, the new poem or the new person? Is art merely illustrative of cultural
conditions, or does it play a role in motivating cultural shift?

The anthropologist and performance theorist Victor Turner
noted that music is universally associated with heightened states of
consciousness, what he calls communitas,
a feeling of oneness that both affirms and erases everyday boundaries,
which is invoked in "liminality" (from limen, threshold). Liminality refers to
being between states, or in a transitional phase. In a medical context, it can
refer to being between life and death. For anthropologists, it indicates the
in-between state an initiate experiences in a rite of passage from one social
status or existential level to another.
In the context of performance theory, it is a space of indeterminacy and
flux opened up in, for example, mass-participatory music/dance performance,
where cultural shift can occur.

In a performance, tension is generated between normal
reality and the impulse toward threshold. Music/dance is the repetition of the
impulse to push boundaries, and is a generative agency of what we call culture
and a presentation of the potential for the shift which is cultural change. The
blurring of boundaries in participatory performance generates a collective in
which the individual is de-centered, rendered into something larger or less
fixed than her conventional social role. In the music/dance, the assumptions by
which we are regulated are, if only intermittently, suspended. This state, says
Turner, "is almost everywhere held to be sacred or ‘holy,' possibly because it
transgresses or dissolves the norms that govern structure and institutionalized
relationships and is accompanied by experiences of unprecedented potency." [3]

Turner based his research in settings where a whole village
might participate in a music and dance event, but his observations could be
applied to many contexts.

I experienced this sense of reality shift most potently at
various alternative rock venues in Europe and America
in the ‘80s and ‘90s. It happened at my first ever show with the hardcore band
False Prophets at CBGBs. Having come from a more formal performance world, I
was at first put off by the people sitting on the stage, in what I thought of
as "my" space, seemingly unaware that musicians might need some room in which
to work. But twenty seconds into the
first number, all at once a wave went through the crowd and all of space
exploded into what folklorist-alchemist Harry Smith (a regular at our early
shows) later called "the most ecstatic dance I ever witnessed." I remember
thinking at that first show, "this is what music is for."

Later, when my tours with the band yielded a
book-in-progress that led to graduate studies in ethnomusicology, I discovered
that Turner had accurately described the feeling I had experienced in the punk
clubs, the sense of being in-between, neither inside of nor outside of myself,
in a place where individual identities are not lost in undifferentiated
wholeness, but rather seem to phase in and out. This sense of a flux of
personal boundary is not anxiety producing. It is ecstatic, and as Turner notes,
uniquely powerful. It is an electrical charge punctuated by the stunning visual
effect of flashing colored lights and wild motion in a dense mass of bodies,
rendering what I can only describe as a living, swirling, psychedelic
impressionist landscape — Monet's
garden at Giverny waving wildly in the real world and constituted in (by, as)
incredibly powerful sound.

I also found in my studies that our experience of the
anarchist collectives, particularly in Europe, that
hosted many of our shows, seemed to reflect the scholarly literature on musical
style reflecting social style. Among people who valued and practiced this music
and dance, community business tended to be conducted in non-hierarchical group
settings, what the organizers at the Flora Squat in Hamburg
called "hard-core breakfast."

Clearly, here was a style of music whose practitioners were
committed to radical social shift.

Economist Jacques Attali has described one of the more
radical theories of music and cultural change.
He argues that when social shift is about to occur, it shows up first in
the music. The more a particular style of music is prophetic of change, the
more it will be regarded not as music, but as noise. Upon reading Attali, I
reflected how, when the Beatles first broke on the radio in my home town, 30
miles from Liverpool, my parents (along with many elders and critics of the
day) said, "that's not music, that's noise." Then, after the civil rights
movement and the ‘60s counterculture produced advances in civil liberties and
new demands for greater democratization of society, rock became the soundtrack
of the mainstream, and today, the Beatles' music seems tuneful, benign, and not
so far removed from the jazz-inspired songs of the previous generation.

If we accept that music enables change by challenging norms,
we can also see a connection between music and language that helps to give
poetry its prophethood of change.

In the late 1960s at a conference, the
linguist Roman Jakobson was asked: what makes a verbal message into a work of
art? His answer is instructive.

First, Jakobson described what he called six functions that
are present in all verbal communications. Most of our communications feature
the denotive function, where the emphasis is on the speaker and a simple
message, such as, "I'd like you to be at that meeting on Wednesday." Also common is the conative function,
which delivers more or less the same information, but emphasizes the hearer,
"Please be there." There will also be an emotive function, which will dominate
when the hearer thinks, "Woah, what was that about? It sure wasn't about that
Wednesday meeting." The phatic function dominates when the communication is
really about contact rather than content, as when Judy and I talk about the
Wednesday meeting just so we can interact, but the denotive content is not at all important. Our talk might as well be about the man in
the moon. The metalingual function dominates when the conversation is about the
conversation, "What did you mean when you said . . . .?" And somewhere, usually
buried under all this complex message mix, there is the sense that one is
getting a message. This is the poetic function.

The poetic function doesn't dominate very often. We're
usually too busy trying to do the ordinary business of everyday communication
to be concerned about "Oh my God, I'm getting a communication." Ordinary speech
tends to play down the poetic. But language art, Jakobson says, is
distinguished from other types of speech by its emphasis on the poetic.

Jakobson associates this function with musical affects,
pointing out that the impact of a simple phrase may be boosted by poetic
constituents such as rhyme and rhythm, as in the slogan "I like Ike" or Julius
Caesar's "Veni vidi, vici." But the poetic function doesn't just make a message
memorable, it also works a split. It gives you a message and at the same time
tells you that it is giving you a message. In effect, you're getting two
messages. With "I like Ike," you're getting a simple message — "this guy voted
for Eisenhower," and you are getting the more troubling message that words,
what linguists call "signs," are strange things. The poetic function makes
language appear strange.

At a certain level of emphasis on the poetic, the speaker
and the hearer seem strange too. Writers such as James Joyce and Gertrude Stein
made a point of repeatedly pushing this button. It is simply not possible to
read Finnegan's Wake or The Making of Americans and get lost in the story. The
story is hard to track, or may be non-existent, because the language is more
like music than speech. When the means
of delivering the message calls attention to itself apart from what it appears
to be saying, the listener can experience a sense of instability. When
linguistic meaning goes into flux, it can invoke a liminal state.

Julia Kristeva, a linguist
and psychoanalyst who has built on Jakobson's work, has written that music pluralizes
meaning, and that poetic language is therefore threatening to conventional
categories of self and state. What we commonly call the self, or the "I," or
"the subject" is, according to Kristeva, a
subject-in-language. "I" she says, "is quite literally the subject of a
sentence."

We learn to organize our world according to pre-existing categories,
such as those described by personal pronouns ( I, you, he, she, etc.), that are
built in to language. "I" is not a constant
or particularly stable thing, rather it is instantiated at each thought or
utterance of "I." It is a product of repetition, a kind of insistence on a
certain category of meaning which is given by our culture. Music can invoke a
condition prior to speech, before our enculturation into the "I" and its macroscosmic partner, the state. The poetic
function troubles the conventional categories of self and state, and so is an agent for change.

"Poetic language . . . is an unsettling process — when not
an outright destruction — of the identity of the meaning and speaking subject.
. . . On that account, it accompanies crises within social structures and
institutions — the moments of their mutation, evolution, revolution, or
disarray."[4]

Another theorist linking art with a sense of strangeness and
potential for change was Theodor Adorno, for whom art's revolutionary potential
lies in its sense of being artificial and incomplete. The totalitarian impulse wants to portray its
view of the world as real and complete — indisputable and immutable, all
settled and sewed up. Conservatives are "realists." Liberals are "sadly deluded
idealists." Systems that favor the rightist mindset are portrayed as natural
and correct, something to be conserved, not changed.

Art destabilizes this
sense of certainty and fixity by saying, in effect, "Look at me, I'm an
invented reality, I'm arbitrary, artificial, completely made up." By doing
this, art hints that maybe the rest of our reality is arbitrary and made up
too. And if reality is a made thing, then it can be made differently. Adorno's
metaphor for art's incompleteness was Penelope's tapestry, which she wove all
day and picked apart all night — the never-completed task she used as an
excuse to put off her suitors. Art is never complete. The poem and the painting
can be experienced a thousand times, differently each time. In this sense, art
instantiates flux. This is why fascists try to control it or kill it.

As an artist, I take apart reality. It's not so much that
the artist proposes an alternative reality, but rather that the abstract
categories "I" and "reality" continually deconstruct in art. This doesn't mean
that I don't take out the garbage, or feed "my" cat, or love "my" wife and
child, and what some would call "my country." It means that I believe that the
state of humanity is necessarily and always liminal. We are and always have
been in transition, and the reality of change is visible and audible in the
changing modes in which we have expressed our various concepts of self and
society at various places and times.

If the world is to be "saved," it will happen in the
realization of the necessity of change on all fronts, a shift from a
paradoxical model that claims to be conservative while acting destructive, to
one that recognizes that conservation can only occur in change. This is what
music has to teach us. This is what Joel meant when he said that music would
save the world.

 

NOTES

1. In 1991, Harry
Smith was given the Chairman's Certificate at the Grammy Awards ceremony. The
presenter of the award noted that Smith's 1952 Folkways Records edition, The
Anthology of American Folk Music, had inspired a generation of musicians, and
that Harry had demonstrated a lifelong commitment to the idea that music can be
a vehicle for social change.

2. Personal
communication, 1993.

3. Victor Turner,
From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing
Arts Journal Publications, 1982), p. 128.

4. Julia Kristeva,
"From One Identity to an Other" in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (New
York: Columbia
University Press, 1980), pp. 130; 124-25.

Image couresy of Creative Commons license.

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How Much Does LSD Cost? When shopping around for that magical psychedelic substance, there can be many uncertainties when new to buying LSD. You may be wondering how much does LSD cost? In this article, we will discuss what to expect when purchasing LSD on the black market, what forms LSD is sold in, and the standard breakdown of buying LSD in quantity.   Navy Use of LSD on the Dark Web The dark web is increasingly popular for purchasing illegal substances. The US Navy has now noticed this trend with their staff. Read to learn more.   Having Sex on LSD: What You Need to Know Can you have sex on LSD? Read our guide to learn everything about sex on acid, from lowered inhibitions to LSD users quotes on sex while tripping.   A Drug That Switches off an LSD Trip A pharmaceutical company is developing an “off-switch” drug for an LSD trip, in the case that a bad trip can happen. Some would say there is no such thing.   Queen of Hearts: An Interview with Liz Elliot on Tim Leary and LSD The history of psychedelia, particularly the British experience, has been almost totally written by men. Of the women involved, especially those who were in the thick of it, little has been written either by or about them. A notable exception is Liz Elliot.   LSD Guide: Effects, Common Uses, Safety LSD, Lysergic acid diethylamide, or just acid is one of the most important psychedelics ever discovered. What did history teach us?   Microdosing LSD & Common Dosage Explained Microdosing, though imperceivable, is showing to have many health benefits–here is everything you want to know about microdosing LSD.   LSD Resources Curious to learn more about LSD? This guide includes comprehensive LSD resources containing books, studies and more.   LSD as a Spiritual Aid There is common consent that the evolution of mankind is paralleled by the increase and expansion of consciousness. From the described process of how consciousness originates and develops, it becomes evident that its growth depends on its faculty of perception. Therefore every means of improving this faculty should be used.   Legendary LSD Blotter Art: A Hidden Craftsmanship Have you ever heard of LSD blotter art? Explore the trippy world of LSD art and some of the top artists of LSD blotter art.   LSD and Exercise: Does it Work? LSD and exercise? Learn why high-performing athletes are taking hits of LSD to improve their overall potential.   Jan Bastiaans Treated Holocaust Survivors with LSD Dutch psychiatrist, Jan Bastiaans administered LSD-assisted therapy to survivors of the Holocaust. A true war hero and pioneer of psychedelic-therapy.   LSD and Spiritual Awakening I give thanks for LSD, which provided the opening that led me to India in 1971 and brought me to Neem Karoli Baba, known as Maharajji. Maharajji is described by the Indians as a “knower of hearts.”   How LSD is Made: Everything You Need to Know Ever wonder how to make LSD? Read our guide to learn everything you need to know about the procedures of how LSD is made.   How to Store LSD: Best Practices Learn the best way to store LSD, including the proper temperature and conditions to maximize how long LSD lasts when stored.   Bicycle Day: The Discovery of LSD Every year on April 19th, psychonauts join forces to celebrate Bicycle Day. Learn about the famous day when Albert Hoffman first discovered the effects of LSD.   Cary Grant: A Hollywood Legend On LSD Cary Grant was a famous actor during the 1930’s-60’s But did you know Grant experimented with LSD? Read our guide to learn more.   Albert Hofmann: LSD — My Problem Child Learn about Albert Hofmann and his discovery of LSD, along with the story of Bicycle Day and why it marks a historic milestone.   Babies are High: What Does LSD Do To Your Brain What do LSD and babies have in common? Researchers at the Imperial College in London discover that an adult’s brain on LSD looks like a baby’s brain.   1P LSD: Effects, Benefits, Safety Explained 1P LSD is an analogue of LSD and homologue of ALD-25. Here is everything you want to know about 1P LSD and how it compares to LSD.   Francis Crick, DNA & LSD Type ‘Francis Crick LSD’ into Google, and the result will be 30,000 links. Many sites claim that Crick (one of the two men responsible for discovering the structure of DNA), was either under the influence of LSD at the time of his revelation or used the drug to help with his thought processes during his research. Is this true?   What Happens If You Overdose on LSD? A recent article presented three individuals who overdosed on LSD. Though the experience was unpleasant, the outcomes were remarkably positive.

The Ayahuasca Experience
Ayahuasca is both a medicine and a visionary aid. You can employ ayahuasca for physical, mental, emotional and spiritual repair, and you can engage with the power of ayahuasca for deeper insight and realization. If you consider attainment of knowledge in the broadest perspective, you can say that at all times, ayahuasca heals.

 

Trippy Talk: Meet Ayahuasca with Sitaramaya Sita and PlantTeachers
Sitaramaya Sita is a spiritual herbalist, pusangera, and plant wisdom practitioner formally trained in the Shipibo ayahuasca tradition.

 

The Therapeutic Value of Ayahuasca
My best description of the impact of ayahuasca is that it’s a rocket boost to psychospiritual growth and unfolding, my professional specialty during my thirty-five years of private practice.

 

Microdosing Ayahuasca: Common Dosage Explained
What is ayahuasca made of and what is considered a microdose? Explore insights with an experienced Peruvian brewmaster and learn more about this practice.

 

Ayahuasca Makes Neuron Babies in Your Brain
Researchers from Beckley/Sant Pau Research Program have shared the latest findings in their study on the effects of ayahuasca on neurogenesis.

 

The Fatimiya Sufi Order and Ayahuasca
In this interview, the founder of the Fatimiya Sufi Order,  N. Wahid Azal, discusses the history and uses of plant medicines in Islamic and pre-Islamic mystery schools.

 

Consideration Ayahuasca for Treatment of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
Research indicates that ayahuasca mimics mechanisms of currently accepted treatments for PTSD. In order to understand the implications of ayahuasca treatment, we need to understand how PTSD develops.

 

Brainwaves on Ayahuasca: A Waking Dream State
In a study researchers shared discoveries showing ingredients found in Ayahuasca impact the brainwaves causing a “waking dream” state.

 

Cannabis and Ayahuasca: Mixing Entheogenic Plants
Cannabis and Ayahuasca: most people believe they shouldn’t be mixed. Read this personal experience peppered with thoughts from a pro cannabis Peruvian Shaman.

 

Ayahuasca Retreat 101: Everything You Need to Know to Brave the Brew
Ayahuasca has been known to be a powerful medicinal substance for millennia. However, until recently, it was only found in the jungle. Word of its deeply healing and cleansing properties has begun to spread across the world as many modern, Western individuals are seeking spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical well-being. More ayahuasca retreat centers are emerging in the Amazon and worldwide to meet the demand.

 

Ayahuasca Helps with Grief
A new study published in psychopharmacology found that ayahuasca helped those suffering from the loss of a loved one up to a year after treatment.

 

Ayahuasca Benefits: Clinical Improvements for Six Months
Ayahuasca benefits can last six months according to studies. Read here to learn about the clinical improvements from drinking the brew.

 

Ayahuasca Culture: Indigenous, Western, And The Future
Ayahuasca has been use for generations in the Amazon. With the rise of retreats and the brew leaving the rainforest how is ayahuasca culture changing?

 

Ayahuasca Guide: Effects, Common Uses, Safety
The Amazonian brew, Ayahuasca has a long history and wide use. Read our guide to learn all about the tea from its beginnings up to modern-day interest.

 

Ayahuasca and the Godhead: An Interview with Wahid Azal of the Fatimiya Sufi Order
Wahid Azal, a Sufi mystic of The Fatimiya Sufi Order and an Islamic scholar, talks about entheogens, Sufism, mythology, and metaphysics.

 

Ayahuasca and the Feminine: Women’s Roles, Healing, Retreats, and More
Ayahuasca is lovingly called “grandmother” or “mother” by many. Just how feminine is the brew? Read to learn all about women and ayahuasca.

What Is the Standard of Care for Ketamine Treatments?
Ketamine therapy is on the rise in light of its powerful results for treatment-resistant depression. But, what is the current standard of care for ketamine? Read to find out.

What Is Dissociation and How Does Ketamine Create It?
Dissociation can take on multiple forms. So, what is dissociation like and how does ketamine create it? Read to find out.

Having Sex on Ketamine: Getting Physical on a Dissociative
Curious about what it could feel like to have sex on a dissociate? Find out all the answers in our guide to sex on ketamine.

Special K: The Party Drug
Special K refers to Ketamine when used recreationally. Learn the trends as well as safety information around this substance.

Kitty Flipping: When Ketamine and Molly Meet
What is it, what does it feel like, and how long does it last? Read to explore the mechanics of kitty flipping.

Ketamine vs. Esketamine: 3 Important Differences Explained
Ketamine and esketamine are used to treat depression. But what’s the difference between them? Read to learn which one is right for you: ketamine vs. esketamine.

Guide to Ketamine Treatments: Understanding the New Approach
Ketamine is becoming more popular as more people are seeing its benefits. Is ketamine a fit? Read our guide for all you need to know about ketamine treatments.

Ketamine Treatment for Eating Disorders
Ketamine is becoming a promising treatment for various mental health conditions. Read to learn how individuals can use ketamine treatment for eating disorders.

Ketamine Resources, Studies, and Trusted Information
Curious to learn more about ketamine? This guide includes comprehensive ketamine resources containing books, studies and more.

Ketamine Guide: Effects, Common Uses, Safety
Our ultimate guide to ketamine has everything you need to know about this “dissociative anesthetic” and how it is being studied for depression treatment.

Ketamine for Depression: A Mental Health Breakthrough
While antidepressants work for some, many others find no relief. Read to learn about the therapeutic uses of ketamine for depression.

Ketamine for Addiction: Treatments Offering Hope
New treatments are offering hope to individuals suffering from addiction diseases. Read to learn how ketamine for addiction is providing breakthrough results.

Microdosing Ketamine & Common Dosages Explained
Microdosing, though imperceivable, is showing to have many health benefits–here is everything you want to know about microdosing ketamine.

How to Ease a Ketamine Comedown
Knowing what to expect when you come down from ketamine can help integrate the experience to gain as much value as possible.

How to Store Ketamine: Best Practices
Learn the best ways how to store ketamine, including the proper temperature and conditions to maximize how long ketamine lasts when stored.

How To Buy Ketamine: Is There Legal Ketamine Online?
Learn exactly where it’s legal to buy ketamine, and if it’s possible to purchase legal ketamine on the internet.

How Long Does Ketamine Stay in Your System?
How long does ketamine stay in your system? Are there lasting effects on your body? Read to discover the answers!

How Ketamine is Made: Everything You Need to Know
Ever wonder how to make Ketamine? Read our guide to learn everything you need to know about the procedures of how Ketamine is made.

Colorado on Ketamine: First Responders Waiver Programs
Fallout continues after Elijah McClain. Despite opposing recommendations from some city council, Colorado State Health panel recommends the continued use of ketamine by medics for those demonstrating “excited delirium” or “extreme agitation”.

Types of Ketamine: Learn the Differences & Uses for Each
Learn about the different types of ketamine and what they are used for—and what type might be right for you. Read now to find out!

Kitty Flipping: When Ketamine and Molly Meet
What is it, what does it feel like, and how long does it last? Read to explore the mechanics of kitty flipping.

MDMA & Ecstasy Guide: Effects, Common Uses, Safety
Our ultimate guide to MDMA has everything you want to know about Ecstasy from how it was developed in 1912 to why it’s being studied today.

How To Get the Most out of Taking MDMA as a Couple
Taking MDMA as a couple can lead to exciting experiences. Read here to learn how to get the most of of this love drug in your relationship.

Common MDMA Dosage & Microdosing Explained
Microdosing, though imperceivable, is showing to have many health benefits–here is everything you want to know about microdosing MDMA.

Having Sex on MDMA: What You Need to Know
MDMA is known as the love drug… Read our guide to learn all about sex on MDMA and why it is beginning to makes its way into couple’s therapy.

How MDMA is Made: Common Procedures Explained
Ever wonder how to make MDMA? Read our guide to learn everything you need to know about the procedures of how MDMA is made.

Hippie Flipping: When Shrooms and Molly Meet
What is it, what does it feel like, and how long does it last? Explore the mechanics of hippie flipping and how to safely experiment.

How Cocaine is Made: Common Procedures Explained
Ever wonder how to make cocaine? Read our guide to learn everything you need to know about the procedures of how cocaine is made.

A Christmas Sweater with Santa and Cocaine
This week, Walmart came under fire for a “Let it Snow” Christmas sweater depicting Santa with lines of cocaine. Columbia is not merry about it.

Ultimate Cocaine Guide: Effects, Common Uses, Safety
This guide covers what you need to know about Cocaine, including common effects and uses, legality, safety precautions and top trends today.

NEWS: An FDA-Approved Cocaine Nasal Spray
The FDA approved a cocaine nasal spray called Numbrino, which has raised suspicions that the pharmaceutical company, Lannett Company Inc., paid off the FDA..

The Ultimate Guide to Cannabis Bioavailability
What is bioavailability and how can it affect the overall efficacy of a psychedelic substance? Read to learn more.

Cannabis Research Explains Sociability Behaviors
New research by Dr. Giovanni Marsicano shows social behavioral changes occur as a result of less energy available to the neurons. Read here to learn more.

The Cannabis Shaman
If recreational and medical use of marijuana is becoming accepted, can the spiritual use as well? Experiential journalist Rak Razam interviews Hamilton Souther, founder of the 420 Cannabis Shamanism movement…

Cannabis Guide: Effects, Common Uses, Safety
Our ultimate guide to Cannabis has everything you want to know about this popular substances that has psychedelic properties.

Cannabis and Ayahuasca: Mixing Entheogenic Plants
Cannabis and Ayahuasca: most people believe they shouldn’t be mixed. Read this personal experience peppered with thoughts from a procannabis Peruvian Shaman.

CBD-Rich Cannabis Versus Single-Molecule CBD
A ground-breaking study has documented the superior therapeutic properties of whole plant Cannabis extract as compared to synthetic cannabidiol (CBD), challenging the medical-industrial complex’s notion that “crude” botanical preparations are less effective than single-molecule compounds.

Cannabis Has Always Been a Medicine
Modern science has already confirmed the efficacy of cannabis for most uses described in the ancient medical texts, but prohibitionists still claim that medical cannabis is “just a ruse.”

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