Rachael is a writer and environmental consultant who advises nonprofits and foundations on climate change. With an expertise in tropical forests, Rachael has conducted fieldwork in the Brazilian and Ecuadorian Amazon, Borneo, Uganda and elsewhere. After almost a decade in climate policy, Rachael has turned her attention to the spiritual implications of our current ecological crises. Rachael stumbled into psychedelics as a participant in a psilocybin clinical trial for major depression. Her writing excavates the potential risks, rewards, and societal implications of medicalizing and commercializing mysticism. Her work interrogates the intersection of the mystical and the moral, and envisions the role of non-ordinary states of consciousness in current and future forms of religion. Rachael explores these themes as a Junior Fellow at Harvard University's Center for the Study of World Religions.
March 27, 2018
A candid talk with Arturo Lua Castillo, named Outstanding Student Organizer of 2018 by Students for Sensible Drug Policy.
March 28, 2018
I first discovered the potential psychedelics have for treating stuttering during an experience with psilocybin mushrooms.
April 3, 2018
Renaming adverse effects of psychedelic drugs as “challenging experiences” minimizes, almost trivializes, their negative effects.
April 12, 2018
As a teenager, I was taking ten milligrams of Ritalin daily. Later, I grew to love the way these pills made it easier for me not to eat.
April 17, 2018
I came to a working hypothesis: at the center of the mystical experience is awe, wherein one is in the presence of something so great, so large, that it requires they completely reorder their mental structures - completely change the way they view reality.
April 20, 2018
When two men entered a party in Uneeda Nichols’ home in Washington, D.C. in August 2017 with a couple hundred dollars in cash, they were greeted as cannabis enthusiasts. No one realized they were undercover cops.
April 25, 2018
Why researchers like Alan Kooi Davis — the newest addition to the Johns Hopkins psychedelic research team — decide to devote their careers to studying psychedelics.
May 7, 2018
We need new drugs. The opioid epidemic gripping the United States has brought into public awareness a problem that has bedeviled the world of medical science for decades: is it possible to have a truly powerful painkiller that is not addictive?
May 15, 2018
Think of a glass of water: under normal circumstances you might think ‘I drink water when I’m thirsty’. But when consuming a psychedelic substance you might think ’water is the essence of life’.
May 17, 2018
Vincent Horn of Meditate.io talks about psychedelics and meditation.