New year, new website, new journal article, new resolutions...

Plus a tragic ketamine-related death in the world of AI, and new papers shed light on MK Ultra

Happy new year and welcome back to Ecstatic Integration. It’s going to be a busy year, hopefully a happy and productive one. I’m getting married this year, in fact, I’m getting married this week - just the legal ceremony this week in Costa Rica before we do the whole church wedding thing in the UK later this year.

On the workside of things, The Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project has just launched a new website. The aim is for this website to be an important resource for people in post-psychedelic crises who need access to evidence-based information, encouraging stories, and contacts to therapists and peer support groups. We shamelessly copied the website of Cheetah House, an NGO that supports people who experience meditation adverse events and which inspires our work on psychedelic adverse events – like them we have created pages dedicated to the most common sorts of symptoms, what they’re like and what helps people cope with them.

We also have a section called Stories of Recovery where I’ll upload interviews with people who have been through ‘dark nights of the soul’ and come out the other side. I’ve uploaded two already and have another three to upload soon - these stories fascinate me. I did an interview with a lady who took ibogaine and suddenly experienced what it was like to be her mother and lose her mother when she was a teenager in the 1960s. It had all kind of after-effects, one of them being she can no longer listen to music from the 60s!

If you head to the ‘events’ page, you’ll see two upcoming events – on Monday January 13 I’m speaking about post-psychedelic difficulties at the Institute for Psychedelic Therapy (online), then on Tuesday January 21 I’m hosting four of the best journalists covering psychedelics to discuss the pressures and peculiarities of the psychedelic beat, and how the media shapes the public’s psychedelic expectations.

It is weird writing regularly about psychedelics, I can tell you. You’re either an out-and-out psychedelic cheerleader, like Joe Rogan or Hamilton Morris, or if you’re not, then you’re at risk of being seen as part of the ‘conspiracy to derail psychedelic medicine’ (the title of a new interview with Morris). Yes you guessed it, I am apparently part of this ‘conspiracy’, along with Nese Devenot, Olivia Goldhill, Shayla Love and Katharine MacLean…Great company.

If you head to the Research page of the website, you’ll find our latest offering – a paper by Joseph Holcomb Adams and myself on ‘Guruism and Cultic Social Dynamics in Psychedelic Organisations’. It was published in a special edition of Current Topics in Behavioural Neuroscience dedicated to psychedelic harm reduction. It defines guruism and cultic social dynamics, suggests the ways psychedelics can amplify these processes to varying degrees, and then suggests some ways to safeguard against unhealthy cultiness (yes, there could arguably be something like non-toxic cultiness).

After the paywall, a tragic tale of ketamine-related death in the AI community; an ayahuasca exorcism goes wrong, Joe Rogan heads to the church of Ibogaine, and new CIA secrets published on MK Ultra.