45: Medical Psychedelics – Soma for the masses?

Image: Andy Thomas Are psychedelics and entheogens medicines and/or spiritual tools for consciousness expansion? Can they be culture jammed by Big Pharma into commodified weapons of mass control, a soma for the masses? Find out the answers as experiential journalist Rak Razam moderates a panel discussion at Entheogenesis Australis, Melbourne, Dec 2010, starring MAPS President Rick Doblin (Medical Association of Psychedelic Studies), Steven Bright, Australian psychologist and addictions researcher, Jasen, a practitioner using Ibogaine to break addiction and Dr. Anna Kokavec, a psychologist from La Trobe University. As Western culture is increasingly over-medicated, will psychedelics simply get commodified as they are absorbed? Will there be an arms race for psychedelics as they are patented and become part of medical "fashion"? How will the financial underpinnings of the medical industry affect medical psychedelics and the business they are entering? As John Halpern's Entheogen Corporation ™ has shown with its exclusive global patent for Bromo-LSD, a non-psychedelic with "broad growth opportunities", corporations are now intending to make money for investors through the patenting of psychedelics. Is this the Brave New World that Aldous Huxley predicted – Soma from the corporations? Can the free market regulate the mind? Find out in this provoking discussion on the market dynamics of medical psychedelics…   This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.