"Illegal" Drugs

 

TRIPPING

Psychodelics

• On one hand, the medicalization of psychedelics is paralleled by the expansion of institutional research and private investment as these new treatments move toward federal rescheduling and, eventually, the market. 
• On the other hand, the above-ground revival mirrors another one happening underground, in legal gray zones and the global tourist circuit: the popularization of indigenous ceremonial healing (with psilocybin-active mushrooms, ayahuasca, iboga, peyote and san pedro cacti, and the toad secretions of bufotenin) among otherwise modern people from urban centers.
• A semantic drift reflects the currency of such practices; what were once “psychedelics” are now often referred to, even outside of these traditional contexts, as “entheogens” (meaning “god-generating”), “plant medicine,” or simply “medicine.” 
• As mind-manifesting, god-generating, divinatory, curative, and unstable forces, these substances sit at the confluence of a number of topics pertinent to anthropology today: challenges to the practical, conceptual, and legal categories of modern medicine and subjectivity (such as the meaning of healing); spiritual legacies of colonialism and extractive capitalism and the contemporary politics of authenticity, appropriation, and recuperation; and critical departures from modern naturalism.

Psychodelics and Addiction

• self-described “addicts” leave the United States (or in Lorraine’s case, Canada) to receive treatment with a substance called ibogaine.
• a naturally occurring psychoactive substance found in several plant species, although it is most associated with a shrub native to West Central Africa called Tabernanthe iboga. 
• It is used for “addiction interruption,” as a way to reduce or eliminate cravings for opiates, alcohol, and other drugs. 
• Anthony, Bret, and Lorraine traveled to Mexico because drug treatment centers have been established across the country to cater to a mainly U.S. clientele looking for ibogaine treatment. 
• This is because ibogaine, which is a psychedelic substance, has been illegal in the United States since 1967 and currently resides in a legal “gray zone” in Mexico as an unregulated substance (neither legal or illegal).
• By analyzing how and why people seek out and receive this treatment in a foreign country, research also draws critical attention to the often overlooked and understudied role of medical travel in the provision and pursuit of this psychedelic-based treatment.
• The complexity of this kind of venture is compounded by the fact that undergoing drug treatment is generally very physically and emotionally taxing. 
• Scholarship on medical travel has focused on patients primarily as consumers making market-based decisions (Kangas 2010), but this is insufficient for understanding psychedelic-based drug treatment. 
• Among the complicated factors that bring people to Mexico’s ibogaine centers are 
• dissatisfaction with mainstream treatment modalities, 
• attraction to “alternative” medicine, and 
• exhaustion of the available treatment options in the United States. 
• The transnational medical journey to “get clean” is often characterized by pain, fear, uncertainty, and hope, corporeal and affective experiences that add another dimension to our understanding of medical travel.

Dimitri Migianis

• Dimitri Mugianis facilitates the “We Are the Medicine” circle at New York Harm Reduction Educators, incorporating ceremony and ritual with active drug users and homeless people. 
• Mugianis was once considered the face of underground ibogaine use. 
• He facilitated over five hundred detoxes using ibogaine illegally, for which he was arrested and convicted by the Drug Enforcement Agency. 
• He studied healing from the Bwiti in Gabon (Africa)

Maria Sabina and Magic Mushrooms

• She was an Indigenous Mazatec woman. She lived in the imagination of Mexican hippies and jipitecas as a champion of magic mushrooms absent these tradions.         -----In the same way, in the contemporary psychedelic revival, mushrooms are seen as removed from specific places and from their original environments (their multispecies kin network).                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  People will meet visitors and point out how they and/or their preferred mushrooms providers are related to her through kinship—this is especially convincing if they also happen to live in María Sabina’s old neighborhood, El Fortín. This kinship claim could be interpreted as a marketing strategy that Huautecos use to validate the mushroom experience they are selling to tourists.                                                         

  ---Looking at the history of Huautla it is clear that politics and mushrooms have been intertwined for centuries—including the removal of hippies by the Mexican military in 1969. 

• The call to re-territorialize indigenous knowledge is also a call to re-politicize the local. The re-territorialization of María Sabina and Huautla offers the possibility to think about the current psychedelic revival in political terms that go beyond the decriminalization and the popularization of hallucinogenic substances in select cities in the global north.

The Movement to decriminalized Psychedelichics

The movement to decriminalize psychedelics is grounded in political critiques of the health care system, the pharmaceutical industry, and drug policy, and the ills of industrial modernity more broadly—settler colonialism, capitalist exploitation, ecological destruction, and so on. 

• Supporters stress the accessibility of foraged and homegrown psychedelics and their traditional consumption in precolonial cultures. And it is true, as naturally occurring organisms, these psilocybin production processes—i.e., the mushrooms themselves—cannot be copyrighted.
• The naturalness of psychedelic mushrooms is counterposed to their medicalized and synthesized analogs. 
• Such rhetoric often mobilizes a familiar conflation of naturalness, indigeneity, and ecological redemption while attempting to align present-day consumption practices with premodern ones.
• The actual history and culture of psilocybin mushrooms in the United States is one that departs from and complicates this popular discourse of naturalness, and contemporary techniques for growing mushrooms, now being taught widely in this wake of decriminalization, are products of that history. 
• Since the 1970s, driven by a desire to cultivate and forage psilocybin-active mushrooms, psychedelic enthusiasts developed a unique technoscientific practice, fostering several not-quite-wild, not-quite-domesticated species across the American landscape. 
• Psilocybin mushrooms were first cultivated indoors beginning in the mid-1970s. Although psilocybin and psilocin were criminalized in 1970, 
• in most states the possession of spores and mycelia of psilocybin-active species remained legal. 
• An underground industry of mail-order Psilocybe spores sprouted up; would-be psychonauts simply had to learn to cultivate mushrooms from spores.  
• During this same period, amateur mycologists in North America began practicing a form of guerrilla wild-crafting of native psilocybin-species across rural, urban, and periurban landscapes. 
• The Mushroom Cultivator, the first in-depth cultivation manual for a general audience, Jeff Chilton and Paul Stamets (1983) describe a method they call “Natural Culture”—essentially outdoor wild-crafting—that forgoes the quest for a totally controlled environment (as in the case of indoor cultivation) and instead enlists multiple (“natural” or “entropic”) forces to create a conducive environment (Chilton and Stamets 1983). 
• The phrase playfully evokes both mycological terminology and “natural lifestyles” of the era but its resonance with later multispecies theorists could not be more apt.

These methods instilled the concept of a human–fungal “alliance” that is pervasive among DIY mycologists today. 

• The modern nature-culture binary acts as cover for guerrilla inoculators: was it the person or the fungus that created that mushroom patch? 
• In the context of American psychedelia, the popular discourse of naturalness (coupled with “entheogens”) is often meant to invoke a kind of prelapsarian spiritual relationship with nonhuman life. 

Ayuhuasca and Spirituality

• Many urban Brazilian healers overtly repudiate the terms hallucinogenic or psychedelic to refer to ayahuasca in favor of the term enteogênico (entheogenic), thus marking the distinction between the neuro or visionary aspects of the brew and its embodied and somatic effects. 
• This correction has to do with a range of factors stemming from legal questions or the association that “psychedelic” holds for some people with synthetic “drugs” like LSD or MDMA contra a plant medicine. 
• Several people explicitly pointed to the fact that the term enteogênico points inward, to the experiential body in its sacred dimension, in contrast with the mind or psyche centered term psychedelic.
• It has become utterly banal to state that psychedelic experiences are modulated by their “set and setting.” 
• This is to say that the ritual framing of the experience is fundamental to its effect. In this sense my point here is not that ayahuasca “is” any one thing, but rather to point to how the settings in which some urban neo-ayahuasqueiro groups are actively (re)framing ayahuasca rituals are carving out a more embodied experience against previous settings that might enhance a more “neuro” one. 
• In this sense, making it a more “bodily” experience is an explicit ritual choice. 
• Here, the objective is to cultivate modes of attention and presence that locate the potentiality of the experience in and through bodies. This emphasis on embodiment—in its most visceral expression—is intended to counter-balance and undo, for the Western, urban publics attending such spaces, the dissociation between mind and body.