Important announcement

Help me with an important study we just launched

Cate Hall, more on her below

Dear all,

Please take five minutes to help me with an important study that CPEP, Maastricht University, Greenwich University and ICEERS have just launched. It’s about psychedelic healing and harm. It’s a 5-minute anonymous survey which you can take here. If you have any psychedelic groups you could share it with, I’d really appreciate it.

As a thank-you, anyone who completes the survey gets a free invite to Founders Club next Saturday the 24th at 5pm UK time, where the topic is AI-spirituality, AI-triggered mystical experiences, when / if that can blend into AI-psychosis, and the parallels with psychedelic experiences. We’ll have a special guest, an expert in the topic.

So just fill in the survey and then message me, and I’ll add you for next Saturday.

I have 18,000 subscribers. If 1,000 of you fill in this survey, it would make me very happy and will help us create a great study, which I will then tell you the results of in a few months.

Thanks!

Here’s some other stuff I am thinking about:

• Nitrous addiction / spiritual emergency

Former Supreme Court advocate turned professional poker player Cate Hall (pictured above) describes how she became addicted to nitrous oxide when she became convinced it was a hotline to God.

• Nena Woollworth, high society shaman

Nena Woollworth of the famous East Coast Woollworth family describes, for Town and Country Magazine, how she went from addiction to shamanism, training with an underground shaman in the US and then becoming an independent shaman to the rich and famous. Anyone familiar with her work? I would like to interview her.

• Cosmic loneliness in challenging trips / spiritual emergencies

One of the tarot cards you can draw in mystical / psychedelic experiences is a feeling of absolute, existential, cosmic separation and loneliness. It’s truly horrible, if you’ve ever experienced it, and can leave people seriously traumatized for weeks / months / years. It’s like the polar opposite of the feeling of blissful union with the All. People wonder - is this the cosmic truth of the human condition, is this what is real? Perhaps all suffering emerges from a feeling of separation, disconnection and loneliness - if so, this is extreme suffering, even a sort of hell experience. But people come back from it, thankfully. Anyway, here are some accounts of this experience from Reddit. Have you ever experienced this state?

• Guruism event recording

Thanks to the 130 people who signed up for the Guruism in Psychedelics event. Here is the recording. Another very understudied but important topic.

• Last question

As psychedelics probably get FDA-approved this year, the big question I’m asking myself is this - FDA approval is going to massively boost demand, which, because of costs and bottlenecks in supply, will be met in the underground. How can the underground be made safer? Public education, better support for those in post-psychedelic crises, better watch-dogs for bad actors in the field...? I think a lot of the solution could be local - there should be dedicated harm reduction organisations in each state, trying to actually reduce harm in the undergound, not promote psychedelics (these are not the same things, though harm reduction does seem to mean ‘drug promotion’ a lot of the time in practice). What are your thoughts? Showtime is approaching for psychedelics in the US, millions of newbies are going to wander into the dark woods of the underground, how can we try to reduce harm?

Don’t forget the survey! Thanks!